Less with the haw-haw

This is really sad: Molly Ivins, having lost her battle with breast cancer, has died.

If you haven't picked up Shrub or Bushwhacked, you really should. The introduction to Bushwhacked is priceless. Paraphrasing from memory: "Our first book, "Shrub", was all about how Dubya ruined Texas. We published it well before the 2000 election. Now all we can say is, if you'd listened to us the first time, we wouldn't be here again!"

Haw. And might I add, Haw!

via Battlepanda:

They may be unlikely competitors, but McDonald's is giving Starbucks a run for its money when it comes to coffee.

According to a report published in Consumer Reports magazine, McDonald's serves up a better cup of joe than the mega coffee chain.

Testers compared a medium cup of black coffee from McDonald's, Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks. They found the best cup of java under the golden arches.

The magazine said McDonald's coffee was "decent and moderately strong" while the coffee from Starbucks "was strong, but burnt."

Take that, former employer of mine!

It was a bizarre experience, working there. I'm not partial to coffee in general, and I loathe Starbucks in particular, but I worked there for over a year. Huh.

Slow posting day

No good reason. But I have to say, this sloppy thinking bugs me every time, even when (via Olaf) it's by Rick Mercer:

You end by saying you personally cannot envision that peace can ever be paved with military offensives. May I suggest to you that in many instances in history peace has been achieved exactly that way.

The gates of Auschwitz were not opened with peace talks. Holland was not liberated by peacekeepers and fascism was not defeated with a deft pen. Time and time again men and women in uniform have laid down their lives in just causes and in an effort to free others from oppression.

Ah, the gates of Auschwitz. Opened by the Red Army, and thenceforth the people of Poland lived happily in freedom and liberty forever. Oh, wait, they didn't. They lived under foreign occupation for 50 years.

Pity when a little detail ruins an already-bad line of reasoning.

My post about the President being "Commander in Chief" was about semantic differences, this is another one. Military offensives can achieve victory, sometimes. (Sometimes they get defeat, too.) But the way we achieved lasting peace in Western Europe and Japan was not simply by destroying the Nazis -- it was by putting the pieces of Europe back together again, deliberately, and competently. That is to say, yes, Mr. Mercer, fascism was destroyed in Europe, and hasn't returned, because of many deft pens working over decades. It's not like we killed every German to wear a swastika on their arms. And yes, it's a good thing we didn't.

Nobody who's read this blog regularly will doubt that I take great pride in Canada's role in World War II, and Mercer is absolutely correct earlier in this piece -- the prof he's excoriating deserves Mercer's scorn.

The military force of the Allies did a great thing by destroying our enemies, I truly believe that. But to say that our soldiers didn't win the peace that followed is also perfectly correct. And Mercer should have the sense to look up some of the soldiers-turned-politicians who made a lasting peace possible. Start with men like Marshall and Eisenhower.

I wonder why it is we're so quick to laud the military for things it didn't do. Probably because we can't seem to fathom that politicians can do things right.

Ideological incoherence

Libertarians for forcible confiscation and redistribution of property. Who knew? Apparently, when the President excercises unconstitutional powers to seize people's property and engages in collective punishment, David Boaz of the CATO Institute is just peachy with it.

Seriously, to call the destruction of the slave trade (which, let's remember, took the world's largest and most destructive war until WWI) a "libertarian" triumph means that libertarianism is exactly what any serious person always thought it was -- a bad joke. "Liberal", maybe, but in no possible coherent fashion can the end of slavery be called "the most important libertarian accomplishment in history."

Just so we're clear, I'm totally cool with the unreasonable seizures and unconstitutional powers in the case of the Civil War. (See the Emancipation Proclamation.) But then I'm a dirty Commie.

Debate topic

Would Canadians be more concerned about climate change and global warming if they understood the likely results include much greater snowfall during the winter?

In other news, guess what I spent an hour doing today?

The end of an era

Floppy disks are finally going the way of the dodo.

After 36 years and billions of sales, the floppy disk is to join the video player, cassette deck and film camera on technology's scrapheap.

The 9cm piece of plastic will no longer be available from Britain's biggest computer retailer.

PC World announced last night it would stop selling the disks when stocks ran out.

The thing that finally killed them, I'd wager, is portable cheap flash drives. A CD-ROM is a ridiculous container for a Word document, but a flashdrive works just fine.

What's this?

I don't know, it seems kind of weird for Congress to be asking the Attorney General what powers the President believes Congress has when it comes to making war. Also, rough to type and re-read.

On the other hand, this is a nice antidote to the Unitary Executive Theory favoured by Cheney:

Of course, the Constitution reserves to the Congress the power to “declare war” in Article I, section 8. In addition to the so-called power of the purse, the Constitution provides a number of specific powers to Congress. In particular, the Constitution provides that Congress shall have the power to “provide for the common Defence,” “to define and punish . . . Offenses against the Law of Nations,” “to make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water,” “to raise and support Armies,” “to provide and maintain a Navy,” “to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces,” “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union . . . and repel Invasions,” “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States,” and “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States or in any Department or Officer thereof.”

Contrast these extensive provisions and powers with that of the President, who is designated the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”

On a related note, it's worth pointing out that, per the Constitution, the United States has no "Commander in Chief." Look at it right there -- the President is Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy. Hell, an ultra-literal reading of the Constitution would imply an Air Force officer has no CinC. (Somebody call Scalia!)

A semantic difference, but an important one. An American citizen -- one not wearing the uniform of the armed services -- has no commander. That's why we call them citizens, after all.

This kills me:

Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order.

You read that right: Eisenhower, aka "Supreme Allied Commander, European Theatre" refused to return salutes as a civilian leader. And rightly so.

Bremer on the stand

Paul Bremer will testify before Congress. Woot. After 'em, boys.

One question though. Why is he being invited instead of subpoenaed? And another question: will he be forced to testify under oath?

It shouldn't matter -- lying to Congress is illegal, under oath or not -- but we'll see.

What will Jack get?

CTV is reporting that:

The Conservatives appear ready to agree to short-term targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a cap on emissions from industrial polluters, tougher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, and possibly cuts in subsidies for the oil industry.

Layton has asked for changes in those areas of the bill, in exchange for the support of his party's 29-member caucus.

If the NDP can really bring a bill that contains substantial progress on those fronts, then not only should the NDP be supporting it on its merits alone, the Liberals and the BQ should be too.

I have to see the final product before I come down on this issue one way or another, but if the Cons are ready to agree to a hard cap on industrial emissions and tougher fuel-efficiency standards, that alone would be worth supporting.

Cantarell down 25%

Jeebus. Earlier this year, the Mexican government announced it's largest oil field, Cantarell, had peaked and was in decline. The worse news is that it's happening faster than expected, and may even accelerate:

The virtual collapse at Cantarell — the world's second-biggest oil field in terms of output at the start of last year — is unfolding much faster than projections from Mexico's state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Cantarell's daily output fell to 1.5 million barrels in December compared to 1.99 million barrels in January, according to figures from the Mexican Energy Ministry.

Cantarell's problems are not Cantarell's alone. The entire global oil industry is facing this problem: new technology is so good at extracting oil at high speed that the collapse comes quickly, and without warning. (The North Sea is another good example, or Burgan in Kuwait.) It's data like this that makes me pessimistic about Peak Oil -- I'm betting, like Ken Deffeyes, that we'll never see our May, 2005 production levels again.

A temporary seasonal decline in oil prices really shouldn't blind us to the problems we face.

Two scoops of Murder!!! -- part of a balanced breakfast

Well, killing at least.

You see, we have mice. And not the pet kind. And while we bought the humane traps, I'm left with a dilemma. The mouse can be released to the wild, thereby learning that he can get a meal left out for him at our place. Or he can be killed, which will if nothing else mean one less vermin in our house.

Better yet, the collective effect of killing mice is hoped to have a deterrent effect -- with luck, the mouse community will see our house as a kind of black hole, or maybe Guantanamo.

(Yes, I'm endorsing an argument about mice that I don't endorse about humans. Your point?)

So to me, the choice would be clear even if I didn't detest mice. Which I do. If you sell me a humane trap, you're selling me a bug, not a feature. I want these bastards dead.

Me: The Dick Cheney to the Global War on Mice.

Fun with the Internets

Some people are finding this blog by Googling the phrases "pissing" or "tentacle rape."

Which, when you consider the competition...

(Explanations here and here, I think.)

Please, please, please let my mother not be reading this.

Even better: Some are finding this blog with the phrase "bizarre headlines". There's some meta-bizarreness going on here.

When has an Asian textbook ever been controversial, after all?

Way to go, Taiwan. Japan had that whole "uselessly inflammatory school texts" market cornered, and you've managed to move in.

Taiwan has revised its high-school history textbooks to show that Taiwan is an independent country and not part of China, media reports said Monday.

The China Times said that on the education ministry's order, the title of the national history textbook for high-school - to be used after the winter vacation - has been changed from 'National History' to 'China History'.

In this textbook, terms like 'our country,' 'this country' and 'the mainland' have been changed to 'China' to indicate that Taiwan is not part of China, the daily said.

Now the difference between Japan and Taiwan I suppose is that while Japan's troublesome texts are basically apologist screeds for Japanese imperialism, there's an obvious and clear case to make that Taiwan is, de facto, a different country from China.

Still, inflammatory and unhelpful.

God help us

So Gen. Jack Keane had already abandoned the "surge" idea, and now Fred Kagan -- co-author of this plan -- is saying this:

This is not our plan. The White House is not briefing our plan.

Thus begins the Incompetence Dodge, pt. II: Because the surge wasn't executed in every detail that it's proponents demanded, they are therefore blameless.

Well, no. The Iron Law of the Bush Administration: any idea they touch turns to shit. If the idea is already a shitty one, well, it gets worse from here...

Anybody, anywhere, at any time who suggests a course of action for the Bush administration needs to take this in to account. If you don't, you're at fault as much as the Bush people are. Can we at least all agree on this in 2007, for the love of God?

ATMs, Continued

Olaf read my post about the whole ATM-surcharge dealy and cruelly pointed out that I didn't actually, y'know, say whether I supported the NDP proposal. Nice of Olaf to give me the benefit of the doubt and not assume I'm a monkey on a string. (I will, however, perform a dance for bananas.) The short version is, yes, I do.

First things first. Either you think what's happening now is a problem or you don't. People are being forced, for a lack of options in their area, to use third-party ATMs that charge additional fees on top of their own banks charges. Like I said, either you think this is a problem or you don't. A reasonable argument could be made that nobody's putting a gun to people's heads and forcing them to use these things, but an equally reasonable argument is that people can't always plan ahead and when you need cash, you need it. I come down on the "yes, this is a problem", and more than that I believe this problem (unlike sundry others) is actually worth the Feds stepping in on.

The biggest reason is that this is a problem the feds created, in part. The wave of bank mergers during the 1990s allowed the consolidation of the industry and the shutting of now-redundant branches. Even in Toronto, the distance I had to travel between my "home branch" went from being 10 minutes to almost an hour (both by foot, for reference sake) because my branch got shut down during this period. This consolidation was a result of the mergers the Feds encouraged, not just allowed. When I was living in Ottawa, there was simply no convenient access to my own banks' ATMs on campus. By fourth year, the ATM I was using regularly near home had also been switched to a third-party ATM.

Now, my situation was hardly dire, but I was also living in the two biggest cities in Ontario. I can only imagine what the process has been like across the country. People are being forced to pay more than they had before because of a policy the Federal government actively pursued. It may seem minor, but once again anything that's an annoyance to me is probably a cause of serious anxiety for someone closer to poverty's edge.

In the comments thread below, I mentioned that Bell (a government protected-monopoly) is forced to allow the non-discriminatory use of its lines to third parties, without charging their customers extra fees. Given that banks these days are more networks than vaults (if you get my meaning) that may be a useful analogy. But there's one that I think is better: cable television.

In Canada, and across the US, it's common practice for governments to demand certain performance guarantees from cable television companies. For example, you might allow a company to build a new network, but only on condition that they build in the middle- and lower-class areas of a city, not just the richest. Does this raise the overall cost of the service? Marginally. But it makes sure that companies cannot abandon the low-profit parts of the market.

(I frequently use Communications Policy analogies because it's what I know best.)

Could a similar principle work with banks? I think it certainly could. ATMs, after all, are dramatically less expensive than operating in-person bank branches. Insisting that banks spend a small portion of their Crown-chartered profits to maintain decent service networks for the working class is hardly unreasonable, especially since they were all making plenty of money before the mergers that caused this whole problem.

Another possibility would be to make debit transactions zero-cost for the consumer and the business owner, thus eliminating the need for ATMs in large part. Either way, the government has some leeway for solving this problem.

Death Cults

The chaos and violence in Iraq is so bad, it's literally apocalyptic -- Shias are bombing their own temples in an attempt to bring back the Hidden Imam. Via Ackerman, who writes:

Somehow I don't think this will come up in Admiral Fallon's nomination hearing tomorrow. We don't need Petraeus in Iraq, we need Buffy the motherfucking Vampire Slayer.

Somehow, I don't think even she'd be up for it.

Climate Change: The New Gold Rush

Now that all the ice up north is melting, we can get at more of the precious, precious oil. Which will cause the ice to melt faster, which will let us get at even more oil... Good work, everybody.

On a related note, I'm with the skeptics on that CTV poll that says Canadians are willing to sacrifice for the environment. If that were true we wouldn't be in this mess.

Or, let me take the optimistic outlook: Canadians are willing to sacrifice for the environment, but for most Canadians sacrifice isn't a viable option. A person who can only afford a used Civic as conveyance isn't able to spring for a Prius. A person who can't afford the rent in a major urban centre may reasonably choose to live in the 'burbs. (They're simply wrong on that count, btw. Factoring in car costs, it's almost always cheaper to live downtown. If you already need/want a car, then the calculus changes...)

That said, the poll does contain some good news for leftier types like me who support strong measures by the Feds to intervene in the economy. To take just one example, the government needs to take strong measures to a) stop sprawl, and b) densify the least-dense areas. You could continue to add condo towers to the downtown cores around Canada, but the marginal improvement in people per km2 isn't much. Add corner stores, and sidewalks for God's sake, to suburban developments and you'd be much better off.

Land use patterns are one of the least-covered but most important aspects of environmentalism. In Canada, I suspect many people assume that because this country is so friggin huge land isn't a problem. The fact is, there's Canada, and then there's "Canada", the place that people actually live. "Canada" is, what, 1/10 the size of Canada, and so land-use patterns are actually incredibly important.

Cue the freakout

"Taliban Ham" Karzai is proposing negotiating with the Taliban. Shocking, I know, that he would hate his own people so much, and wish death on Canadian soldiers like that.

Mythbusting

So I see the Republicans are once again beating the drums about Iran, and this time they're resorting to that old standby:

I would say is that the Commander-in-Chief in the United States... has to understand the information that he is given, the the vast — that the vast majority of which the American public do not have

You see, "it's classified." You don't know what they know, so your beliefs that:

1) Iran doesn't have the bomb.
2) Iran isn't getting the bomb anytime soon.
3) Therefore, there's no reason to bomb Iran for having The Bomb.

simply don't count.

Here's the thing. This is never true. Ever. The vast, vast majority of intelligence gathering is open-source, as in available through public documents or media. If I had a staff of thousands, I could probably do at least as good a job as the CIA.

Ah, but you say, "what about the Cuban missile crisis?" It's true that I don't have access to U2 or SR71 spyplanes (if only...) and thus cannot match the capabilities of the US Government when it comes to reconnaissance. But note what JFK actually did: he gathered clear, unequivocal evidence of what the USSR was doing in Cuba, and shared it with the world at the famous UN meeting. Meanwhile, proving that the second time really is farce, Colin Powell's presentation at the UN pre-Iraq was debunked whole hours after he finished speaking. Debunked, I hasten to add, by open sources.

So, very slowly children: If the government says it knows something you don't, and refuses to tell you what it is, the government is lying. Here endeth the lesson.

When blinkered arguments attack

Olaf on Jack Layton's proposal for ATM fees:

Simply, it's a private business, and it's not up to Jack Layton to decide what is or isn't a fair price to charge for the service they provide. No one is forced to incur the catastrophic injustice of a $1.50 user fee; you can take money out at your own bank's machine, keep your money in a bank that doesn't charge user fees, or even in a box under your bed, for all I care. I know Jack would love to personally decide what is or isn't a fair price for all private goods and services, but, tragically, we can't send him back in time to the miraculous economic and social triumph of the Soviet Union...

1) Once, just fucking once, I'd looooooove to see a Conservative engage an NDP proposal without the bogeyman of the Soviet Union. I mean, I could spend a day educating the Blogging Tories about how Social Democrats were historically just as opposed to Lenin as the rest of society (mainly because we were first in front of the firing squads) but the reality is it doesn't matter -- we're "left", ergo we must all yearn for the days of GOSPLAN and the Gulag Archipelago. Clearly.

(Note to Olaf: I've never compared Stephen Harper to Hitler, because aside from anything else it's innacurate and offensive. Try returning the courtesy.)

The sad thing is, Olaf really isn't the worst offender. He's making a joke, but his brethren see that argument as holy writ.

2) For clear social and historical reasons, banking has always, always, always been heavily regulated. There's a little thing called "usury", not to mention margin calls, fractional reserve rules, and the entire edifice of central banking that keeps the economy going. Banks are simply not allowed to charge too little interest or too much. And here's the kicker -- bankers love it that way. They get unchallenged power over money and the economy in exchange for some rules that they should probably have come up with on their own.

Meanwhile, the whole idea that the government has no role in prices is absurd. The government keeps tinkering with things like taxes, investment rules, competition law, in order to keep prices low for consumers. (In theory.) Why? Because consumers are also voters, and they like low prices. Savvy politicians do this thing called "pandering", and it's no surprise that Flaherty says he's taking this ATM thing seriously.

So how about this, people: if you think a tiny, teeny-weeny, fraction-of-a-percent change in the way banks do business is going to cause the collapse of capitalism in Canada, make your case in detail. Otherwise, stop embarrassing yourselves.

Yet another book for the list

Dammit... I'm just finishing up on my Vietnam history binge, I've got friends demanding I read Vernor Vinge's books, and now I obviously have to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. He has a fantastic essay on the western diet and the evils therein in the NYT Magazine this week. READ READ READ.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

I especially like this part at the end:

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

HMCS Ottawa is heading home

It's been in the Persian Gulf for five months now, and it's heading back to the west coast. I'll be breathing a little easier. Whatever Bush is gonna pull with Iran, Canadian sailors won't be in (as much) danger.

Why Presidents should be precise

(Cross-posted at Ezra's)

Bush on Tuesday, about the Iranian menace:

Many are known to take direction from the regime in Iran, which is funding and arming terrorists like Hezbollah -- a group second only to al Qaeda in the American lives it has taken.

Well, my first question is "what's a group?" Because I'm pretty sure Nazi Germany took more American lives than al-Qaeda or Hezbollah. The Viet Cong were regularly called terrorists for their tactics, and the Tet Offensive alone killed more US soldiers than Hezbollah ever has. Are we talking about Lebanese Hezbollah (believed responsible for the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing,) Saudi Hezbollah (responsible for Khobar Towers) or are we conflating the two?

Then of course there's the issue that the majority of the casualties from Hezbollah's two major attacks were uniformed personnel stationed overseas (the US Marines in Lebanon were in a war zone, no less) while the majority of the dead from al-Qaeda's attacks have been US civilians.

You may or may not think one or any of those details is relevant, much less important. But in one hyphenated sentence, Bush managed to gloss over more than two decades of history and deliberately obscured the reality of US and Middle East relations. To me, this particular case is more annoying than alarming, but the intent is clear -- to try and lasso Hezbollah, Iran and al-Qaeda together and pave the rhetorical way forward for attacks on Iran.

SOTU: Energy

(Cross-posted at Ezra's)

Shorter me: Meh. Nuthin new here.

This is the brief, relevant passage from Bush's address Tuesday. I've cut some out, but this is all the specifics:

It's in our vital interest to diversify America's energy supply -- the way forward is through technology. We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power. (Applause.) We need to press on with battery research for plug-in and hybrid vehicles, and expand the use of clean diesel vehicles and biodiesel fuel. (Applause.) We must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol -- (applause) -- using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes.

We made a lot of progress, thanks to good policies here in Washington and the strong response of the market. And now even more dramatic advances are within reach. Tonight, I ask Congress to join me in pursuing a great goal. Let us build on the work we've done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years. (Applause.) When we do that we will have cut our total imports by the equivalent of three-quarters of all the oil we now import from the Middle East.

To reach this goal, we must increase the supply of alternative fuels, by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 -- and that is nearly five times the current target. (Applause.) At the same time, we need to reform and modernize fuel economy standards for cars the way we did for light trucks -- and conserve up to 8.5 billion more gallons of gasoline by 2017.

Achieving these ambitious goals will dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but it's not going to eliminate it. And so as we continue to diversify our fuel supply, we must step up domestic oil production in environmentally sensitive ways. (Applause.) And to further protect America against severe disruptions to our oil supply, I ask Congress to double the current capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Applause.)

Not really anything different from previous Bush speeches, but not a lot to object to here either -- aside from the fantasy of clean coal.

Plug-in hybrids: I'm a big, big fan. Probably the single most important change Americans could make to their transportation and electrical infrastructure, in terms of reducing oil use. A large, population-wide shift to mass transit would be better, but is unlikely in the near term.

Biofuels: As they currently stand, not really more sustainable than fossil fuels. Palm biodiesel and corn ethanol are extremely destructive, and don't really help as much with carbon emissions as some people think. The benefits on corn ethanol in particular are so marginal that it's impossible to say for sure that there's any benefit at all. That said, there are plenty of better options for producing ethanol and biodiesel (gasification and algae, respectively) that

Improving CAFE standards: A no-brainer. Fuel efficiency has, in fact, improved dramatically over the last 20 years, though most people wouldn't know it -- the advancements have all gone to making bigger trucks accelerate faster, not improving mileage. Even just halting the growth in the average weight of American cars, much less reversing the trend, would do wonders.

Expanding the SPR: I guess I'm agnostic on this count. If America manages to actually reduce petroleum consumption, there will be less need for the SPR, not more. So this seems to contradict Bush's previous statements (imagine that!) but I think people may be comforted by the ability of the US govt to flood the market when necessary.

As for the stuff I disliked in this speech, the heavy emphasis on coal in Bush's speeches and his policies continues to baffle me. Nobody's demonstrated that sequestration is safe or cheap. The "gold standard" of quote-unquote clean coal is the Integrated Gasification and Carbon Capture plant, where the coal is gasified, burned in a high-efficiency turbine, and the CO2 is stored underground. The problem with this is that sequestration of gaseous CO2 is a really, really iffy proposition. You don't know whether it will stay down there, and even if it does, it might poison groundwater.

And yes, I continue to believe that the high cost alone deserves to keep nuclear out of our plans for the foreseeable future.

Overall, it's gratifying to see the good ideas surrounding energy policy (plug-ins, biofuels, etc.) become so commonly-held that not even George W. Bush can deny them, but I'd prefer if he'd leave out the bad stuff.

Signs my Girlfriend has never been to a strip club

My Girlfriend: That must suck for strippers, if somebody tips them with loonies and toonies.

[Note to American readers: That's our quaint term for $1 and $2 coins.]

Me: If you're tipping with loonies and toonies, that doesn't suck for the strippers. You just suck, period.

Lessons Unlearned, cont.

Dafna Linzer in the WaPo today:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran's influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort....

Senior administration officials said the policy is based on the theory that Tehran will back down from its nuclear ambitions if the United States hits it hard in Iraq and elsewhere, creating a sense of vulnerability among Iranian leaders.

The Rostow Thesis, 1964:

The first of several inquiries into the feasibility of going big in Vietnam began in January 1964. This was a high-level interagency, supersecret evaluation of a thesis championed by Walt Rostow, at the time head of State's Policy Planning Staff, that systematic US bombing of the DRV would "convince the North Vietnamese that it was in their economic self-interest to desist from aggression in South Vietnam."

The Rostow Thesis was, of course, wrong. The North was willing to endure a lot more punishment than the US could mete out. More importantly for our situation today, the North didn't simply back down from US escalation, it escalated in turn.

I wonder why this possibility seems to evade the Administration so. One theory is the experience of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. The inattentive observer could look at the use of force in Bosnia and Kosovo and say that the Serbs knuckled under to US force without escalating against the US in turn. But of course, the Serbs lacked the ability to escalate against the US in any real way -- ground forces weren't introduced in to either Bosnia or Kosovo until after the fighting stopped. Meanwhile, neither side in the Yugoslav wars showed any real hesitancy to fire on Blue Helmets.

Today, Iran has a number of possible avenues to escalate in turn against the United States -- Iraq and Afghanistan being just the two obvious possibilities. Even worse (from the US point of view) when the North Vietnamese escalated, the US Army had plenty of capacity to escalate, too -- which is why US combat troops went from 180,000 to almost 600,000 from 1965 to 1969. The Iranians have a major capacity to escalate on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the US Army and Marines have basically no slack manpower to match.

It's important not to make too much of the Iraq/Vietnam comparisons, but it is the most recent example of this kind of poor thinking I can think of.

Read it, punk. Dead or alive, you're learning with me.

If you're studying Roman history at UCLA, you can take a course with Peter Weller, aka Robocop.

It’s hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai’s lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. “They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,” he says with a laugh. The 450-page course reader tells them otherwise. Those who stay get a view into Weller’s two worlds. For example, his class at Syracuse on Hollywood and the Roman Empire requires watching toga-and-sandal epics (Ben Hur and The Last Temptation of Christ among them) and reading primary-source Roman authors in an attempt to reconcile big-screen Rome with the real thing.

Why it's dangerous for rulers to believe they're divinely inspired

via The Vanity Press, this is really the perfect summation of the Bush years:

Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq.

"He's tried this two times — it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.' "

Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, " 'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

I don't know about you, but when I hear that I think of Czar Nicholas II. When the Kaiser (his cousin) asked if he understood the risks of war with Japan he responded that there would be no war, "because I do not yet wish it." Shortly thereafter, the Japanese attacked. Oops.

Run Al Run

Rolling Stone says Al Gore is the best-positioned to win the Dems nomination in 2008. It would probably help if he, y'know, announced sometime. But keep hope alive!

Prime Minister Harper fails high school chemistry

OTTAWA (CP) - Canada won't follow the Bush administration's lead in setting hard targets for reducing oil consumption, but will instead impose tougher emissions standards on the auto sector and other industries, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Just in case that isn't clear, Mr. Harper is indeed now more retrograde on the environment than President Bush:

Harper said he is considering imposing targets on industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.

The PM would like to believe that it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions without actually oxidizing less carbon. This is simply not possible. (Sequestration, a much-touted option for reducing CO2 emissions, is thus far either vaporware or more expensive than solar or wind.) Any high school chemistry student could correct the error in this logic, but apparently such wisdom isn't available to the Conservative caucus.

Just so we're clear, no, there's no comparison between carbon (a fundamental part of hydrocarbon fuels) and something like sulphur, which we have succesfully reduced our emissions of. You burn a hyrdocarbon, you oxidize hydrogen to water and carbon to CO2. The only way to reduce fossil-carbon emissions is to reduce our use of fossil-carbon sources. This means either efficiency or conservation.

The other aspect of Harper's denialism is equally illogical:

"President Bush's speech . . . when he talked about these things was really talking about it in the context primarily of energy security and the United States shortage of energy and their dependence on foreign supplies of energy," Harper said perching forward as he sat in his sun-filled Parliament Hill office.

"That's not a problem here. Canada is an emerging world energy superpower. We have an abundance of all forms of energy. We're an exporter of virtually all forms of energy."

Okay. Let's say for argument's sake that Canada's oil exports are so profitable to Canadians that, even accounting for the environmental and social ills it causes, we should encourage further development for export to the US. Doesn't it therefore follow that Canadians could use less and export more?

Think of it this way: It's almost always cheaper to not use a barrel of oil, than to use one. This means not using a barrel of oil domestically, and exporting that barrel instead, pays off twice. So yes, even if you're only interest is in promoting Canada's economy growth (environment be damned!) it still makes perfect sense to pursue all reasonable means to reduce Canada's oil consumption.

And that's not even considering the very real problems and dangers associated with relying on diminishing natural gas supplies for the tar sands. Note to Albertans: you can either keep exporting oil, or maintain the province's ban on nuclear power. Not both. What happens when Albertans are forced to choose between nuclear reactors and less oil production? I dunno, but I suspect the Green Party will elect it's first MP in Alberta. Mark me down on that prediction, someone.

Worse than I thought

Regulars know that I'm no fan of airpower triumphalists. I'm a big sloppy geek for aircraft, sure. But since the dawn of powered flight various douchebags have been promising that airpower alone will win a war. It never happens.

Douchebag of the week, apparently, is now-former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. via Galloping Beaver, Haaretz reports:

A senior officer in the Israel Defense Forces General Staff said yesterday that during last summer's war, the option of a large-scale ground operation in southern Lebanon was not seriously discussed by the General Staff or by the political establishment until July 27, more than two weeks after the war broke out....

This isn't to say that ground troops weren't part of the early plan, but that Halutz seems to have believed -- along with the rest of the Israeli leadership -- that Hezbollah could be routed with airpower playing the lead role, and a small ground force basically mopping up. That didn't work out so well.

Ground forces aren't meant for every operation, sure, but when fighting a popular movement, they're essentially the smartest weapons you've got. To put it simply, the consequences when a rifleman misses are much, much less problematic than when an F-15 pilot does.

Priorities

Jonah Goldberg:

Alas, in DC we are forced to sport "Taxation without Representation." Don't get me started on how this gets priorities exactly backward. DC Statehooders think it's horrible that we are taxed without a representative in Congress. Fair enough. But. come on, who among us wouldn't trade their congressman's vote in exchange for exemption from federal taxes?

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: I don't need democracy, I'm rich and white!

Lies are part of the package

The most recent Radio Open Source show dealt with the future of the all-volunteer Army in the United States. One interesting thing to note is the assertion by one guest that, even at the beginning of the professional armed forces in the 1970s, it was assumed that for any long-term fight the United States would bring back conscription. But the most common lament of all the guests was the divide between the armed forces -- which are engaged in one of the bloodiest fights of the last 60 years, easily -- and the broader American nation, which is barely engaged at all.

Or, as Ralph Peters quoted one General: "An army at war, a nation at Wal-Mart."

This is a really clear example of the unavoidable conflict between imperialism and democracy. However you want to gussy it up, Iraq II is pretty clearly an imperial war. Whether you, like Henry Kissinger, think the point was to control the precious, precious oil or whether it was really all about deterring Iran (how's that goin'?) or whether, again like Henry Kissinger, you simply think it was all about humiliating the darkies, it's clear that Iraq was part and parcel of the imperial project.

The problem is that America is a democracy, if a poorly-functioning one. And the American people are generally opposed to the kinds of wars that empires need to fight. This requires that Washington -- which really, really likes those same kinds of wars -- pursue one of two strategies: Hide or Lie. Hide is easy enough: keep the war out of the papers, as with US advisers in Vietnam for many years. That way, when the "enemy" finally attacks the US in some public way (Tonkin) the American people have no idea that they've been at war for years, and thus see this as an unprovoked attack. And yes, Bush had a plan like that on tap for Iraq.

But "Hide" doesn't always work, and couldn't possibly have worked with Iraq, so there's the flat-out lies. Such as, "Iraq will only cost a couple billion", calling Shinseki's troop estimates "wildly off the mark", and claiming that the troops would be coming home within months. The specific lies aren't really that important -- the lies are really always the same.

America isn't mobilized for war in any major fashion, and certainly not in the way the guests on Lydon's show would like to see. But no matter how clearly they advocate it, it's not going to happen. At this point, the American people want out of Iraq, and mobilizing the kind of force needed for Iraq would require taxes, lots of them, and possibly conscription if the Army can't raise it's numbers voluntarily.

Moreover, America was never going to mobilize for war properly. Why? Because to fight any major war effectively would have required substantial sacrifices, in terms of taxes or manpower. But these kinds of wars -- the preventive ones that don't involve direct threats to the country -- can only be sold to wealthy, democratic populations on the assumption of low-cost fighting. Hence the lying.

But those same lies make it impossible to win the war later, if you need to get the people to support escalating their involvement. (And escalation is no guarantee of success, anyway.) It's not just the Americans -- it's hard to imagine any population, gulled in to believing in a cheap war, would then support costly measures to win an unpopular war. And these wars inevitably become unpopular, not just in democracies. Nixon was only able escalate the air war in Vietnam because, at the same time, he was withdrawing the bulk of US ground forces.

The lesson for us here today? Don't hide or lie your way in to war. You can lie your way in, but generally you can't lie your way out of a war.

If you've got a moment...

There's a sick child in Ottawa who could use a smile.

Children with cancer: the biggest single reason I'm an atheist.

Cheney

via TPM, this interview with Dick Cheney is indeed, as Marshall puts it, a "doozy." There's a lot of boilerplate bullshit (it is Dick Cheney, after all) but let's single out some of the biggest nuggets of bovine excrement:

Q: How worried are you of this nightmare scenario, that the U.S. is building up this Shiite-dominated Iraqi government with an enormous amount of military equipment, sophisticated training, and then in the end, they're going to turn against the United States?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Wolf, that's not going to happen.

What, because history never repeats itself, ever? That's just an incredibly stupid statement. On the other hand, Cheney does seem to recognize there's a difference between Persian and Arab Shia, which is a level of insight I hadn't expected from the man. Later on:

out of Afghanistan, because we walked away and ignored it, we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in East Africa, and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.

Now you might have been able to do that before 9/11. But after 9/11, we learned that we have a vested interest in what happens on the ground in the Middle East.

You're kidding, right? The US didn't have interests "on the ground" in the Middle East before 9/11? Like US support for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the rest of the Gulf states just sort of materialized out of the ether on September 12, 2001? Not only is this historically illiterate, it's dangerous: for Cheney to believe this is for him to ignore the fundamental nature of Islamic grievance. They hate the US because of the attention the US has paid to the region, not in spite of it.

Q: What was the biggest mistake you made?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Oh, I think in terms of mistakes, I think we underestimated the extent to which 30 years of Saddam's rule had really hammered the population, especially the Shia population, into submissiveness. It was very hard for them to stand up and take responsibility in part because anybody who had done that in the past had had their heads chopped off.

How out of touch with reality can you be, really. The US is mired in an insurgency in Iraq, fueled by nationalism and Islamist rage. Iraqis are killing US soldiers on a daily basis. But to Cheney, the populace is too "submissive", they won't stand up against their enemies. Memo to the Vice-President: The Iraqis are standing up against their enemies. You're the enemy. Pray you never find yourself alone in the slums of Sadr City.

Wednesday Science Blogging

Scientists in Britain are reporting that Flora, a Komodo dragon, has given birth to five sons, without having been fertilized by a male Komodo. That's right, the Virgin Flora has given birth to five Messiahs!

The process is called Parthenogenesis (for "virgin birth") and can only produce male offspring in Komodos because of their chromosome structure. Because the mother only has one chromosome in her ova, the children can only be double-chromosomed, in this case "ZZ" offspring, or male. Were parthenogenesis possible in humans, it could only produce females for the same reasons -- XX results in girls, and YY will not produce offspring.

Which brings me to one of David Brin's better books, Glory Season. It's about a young woman born on a planet where women make up 75% of the population due to the genetic engineering of the founding colonists. Women reproduce almost exclusively parthenogenically, with the occasional sexual reproduction to keep the gene pool flowing. Men have, through similar genetic trickery, been bred to be much calmer and less violent. This is all context, though -- the story itself is well-written and makes it clear that Brin sees this kind of world as neither dystopia nor utopia, but just another place.

In other science news, physicists have finally devised a falsifiable test for string theory. One of the contenders for the "grand unified theory" of physics, string theory has fallen out of favour because it's been impossible to test in a lab. That may now be changing.

He added, "If the test does not find what the theory predicts about W boson scattering, it would be evidence that one of string theory’s key mathematical assumptions is violated. In other words, string theory—as articulated in its current form—would be proven impossible."

"If the bounds are satisfied, we would still not know that string theory is correct," said Distler. "But, if the bounds are violated, we would know that string theory, as it is currently understood, could not be correct. At the very least, the theory would have to be reshaped in a highly nontrivial way."

Perfect timing

Veronica Mars ends, I go to Robot Chicken on Teletoon. RC ends, and the Democratic response to Bush begins.

Ahh, Sen. Jim Webb eases my pain.

Not watching the State of the Union

Two reasons.

1) Reading the speech is infintely preferable to listening to the President mangle the English language.

2) Veronica Mars is on.

Global warming: Getting worse

The IPCC -- the gold standard for climate change science -- is getting gloomier.

Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that:

· 12 of the past 13 years were the warmest since records began;

· ocean temperatures have risen at least three kilometres beneath the surface;

· glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres;

· sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year;

· cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent....

To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6C. The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3C hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

Past assessments by the IPCC have suggested such scenarios are 'likely' to occur this century. Its latest report... is far more robust and confident. Now the panel writes of changes as 'extremely likely' and 'almost certain'.

Good luck everyone.

Wonder what Canada's New Government will say?

Because insurgents are like bears, I guess

Joe emails in this video about a Canadian inventor who's built a new suit of body armor he's trying to sell to the US and Canada. Inspired -- in his own words -- by everything from Robocop to Halo, I'd be defrocked from the Nerd Conspiracy if I didn't let out a little squeal of glee. But, there's some obvious problems with this suit.

First, the mundane problems. Obviously, I haven't worn the helmet, but I'm suspicious that you could build a full-head helmet that doesn't also limit the soldiers' vision. On top of that, the helmet necessitates two cooling fans, which any modern computer user will tell you is noisy. Noise that close to the head, inside the helmet, is a recipe for a soldier who is at best distracted, at worst can't hear an approaching Toyota 4x4. Finally the suit has LED lights all over, and unless there's a lot of user control, it's destined to give away a soldiers position at night.

More importantly, it's basically the embodiment of the current US doctrine with its soldiers -- protect them so thoroughly that you lose the war. Counter-insurgency thought is that your soldiers need to know the populace, need to live with them, need to befriend them. How friendly does this look to you?



That's what I thought. He looks like a Cylon. And not one of the hot ones.

There are certain aspects to this suit that are neat and will probably be adapted to future equipment for the Army (the helmet-mounted laser designator is a great idea, for a number of reasons) but this build really, really needs to be re-thought.

You can see the video here, or read an article about it here.

Time to learn from mistakes

MJ Rosenberg has a great post on the probably-doomed peace talks between Israel and Syria:

Sadat was primarily interested in the formerly-Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and, particularly, in regaining the east bank of the Suez Canal so he could re-open the canal to international shipping. As for Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and the Palestinian issue, that was for negotiating about later.

Israel took note of Sadat's stated willingness to talk. Prime Minister Golda Meir acknowledged that Sadat was "the first Egyptian leader to say he was ready to make peace." But she was not interested in negotiating with Sadat over Sinai, not in 1971. As Meir said later: "We never had it so good." Israel had security and the territories. Who cared what Sadat offered or withheld?

So when Sadat said that in return for an Israeli pullback of 2-3 miles from the east bank of the canal he would begin negotiations toward a full peace, the Israeli government said "no."...

The war cost Israel 3,000 young lives - all of whom would likely have been spared if Israel had taken up Egypt 's offer. In the end, Israel got peace with Egypt but at the price of surrendering not a mere 2-3 miles of the Sinai, but every last inch of it. And thousands of lost sons, fathers, and brothers. (It is worth noting that the pro-Israel community’s backing of Israel’s resistance to Nixon’s “pressure” contributed to the worst disaster in Israel’s history–a demonstration that unthinking and uncritical “support” is, in fact, anything but).

It's difficult to overstate the importance of, bluntly, racism in Israeli thinking at this point in history. After the immense success of the 1967 war, Israeli military and civilian leaders regularly spoke of the Arab nations as having been so thoroughly humiliated that they wouldn't dare attack Israel for a generation or more.

So even when Arab spies flew in to Tel Aviv with the documents proving an attack was coming the government ignored it, simply believing the documents were forgeries. And Israel came as close as it's ever been to national destruction. This was totally avoidable, and even more tragic considering it was totally unnecessary, as Rosenberg notes.

So the short version is that if Syria is really offering peace, the Israeli government would be insane not to take the opportunity.

"There is no way to win a war that is not in your interests."

You read slactivist. You read it NOW.

The Secret Government

via A Tiny Revolution, this fantastic documentary by Bill Moyers dates from the end of the Reagan Administration. If you can spare 90 minutes, you'll get to see classic craziness from Ollie North, whose existence outside of a jail cell continues to mystify me. Also, John Kerry makes a guest appearance.

One thing I don't think Americans have really grappled with is that so long as America is a world power, with interests from pole to pole and from Ghana to Midway, it is inevitably going to have dictators-in-waiting like Reagan or Bush. If you've got overseas interests, you've got threats.



Or follow this link.

Cheers to Stéphane

So Socialist French Presidential candidate Ségolène Royale said she supports Quebec freedom and sovereignty. The leader of the oppposition has the right response, and it sounds an awful lot like the one Mike Pearson gave to a puffed-up Generalissimo 40 years ago:

"The problem with her declaration is that we are free. We have been free longer than the French because we had responsible government while they were still in the midst of debating empires and revolutions. So Canada is a pioneer of freedom and always will be."

via Popular Doctrine.

Shiny Shiny Shiny

I want one.

Read the article here.

Hear, hear

Matthew Yglesias on abortion:

That legal abortion encourages premarital sex is feature, not a bug.

Meanwhile, Lizardbreath writes about the abortion she had once:

I've mentioned here before that I've had an abortion; I don't know how clear it was that it wasn't a particularly sympathetic abortion. In spring 1995, I'd just started having sex with a new boyfriend. We were using condoms until I could get on the pill, and either one of us screwed something up, or there was a leak, or something happened, and I got pregnant. I had an abortion as early as I was able to schedule it, didn't find it a particularly upsetting experience... and haven't regretted it since then.

I'm sure someone will pop in and tell me why, exactly, LB is to be abominated. But until then, I really think this is key:

Continuing that pregnancy wouldn't have been an epic tragedy for me; any proposal for abortion rights that requires abortion to be permissible only when the only alternative would be starving on the streets would leave me right outside.

But man, did I not want to be pregnant. I did not want to be locked into a minimum eighteen-year relationship with someone I'd been dating for a couple of months. I did not want to be responsible forever for someone who didn't exist yet. I didn't want to be physically pregnant. I had no idea of where I was going professionally -- I was a temp receptionist, thinking about maybe taking the LSATs -- or of how I would support myself or a child, and had no idea of how I'd find my way into a career with a new baby. The only thing being able to get an abortion did for me was give me some control over the course of the entire rest of my life.

Forced pregnancy strips women of control, of their rights, and yes of their lives. (A woman is more likely to die in pregnancy than from an abortion.) I don't know why any man would want to do that to a woman he knows, much less women he loves.

And I'm absolutely baffled that some women continue to wish it on each other.

Actually, that's worse

Rob at LGM:

It's also important to note how politically convenient it is for the US government to blame instability on Iran. If Iranians are causing the mischief, then it's easier to a) manufacture a reason for hostile action, and b) explain away the utter failure of the United States to quell the insurgency or win the support of the populace.

I think Steve Gilliard was the first person I read who pointed out the flaw in this logic: the Iraqi-Arab tribal structure is notoriously suspicious of outsiders, and immensely conscious of who outsiders are.

So, if Syrians and Iranians are coming, in large numbers, to Iraq and starting shit (IEDs, decapitations, whatnot) that's a problem. But the fact that a) the Iraqis must know who they are, and b) are abetting their activities by silence or active participation, is much, much, much worse. If the Arab Shia in Iraq are willing to work with the Persian Shia of Iran, that's a sign of just how much the Americans are hated by the Iraqis not a sign of poor border control.

The situation in Afghanistan is a bit different, because the Pakistan/Afghan border runs straight through Pashtun lands -- the problems in the south are largely fueled by Pashtun solidarity, if I'm reading accurately.

We'll see about that!

I've been demoted! And stuck with latrine duty, no less.

General McClelland, probably drunk again, seems to have forgotten the first two rules of the army:

1) Never piss off your Sergeants.

2) When making an enemy, limit the amount of feces, urine, and other foul substances they have on hand, er, at their disposal.

Oh, and by the way, the NDP "Army"? As much as we'd all like to think we're these guys:



I think, deep down, we know we're really more like these guys:



At least, I know I am...

Fantasy-land

So I finished reading Fiasco by Tom Ricks last night, and I really should take back some of the mean things I said about him over the summer. It really is an excellent book, and you should all read it.

But I was struck by the ending of Ricks' book -- he explores what the likely scenarios are in Iraq, and his "nightmare" scenario (the worst of the worst, presumably) is the establishment of a Muslim Caliphate in Iraq.

Funny. I really, really don't understand why I'm supposed to find this outcome terrifying.

The first thing to say is that re-establishing the Caliphate is something Bin Laden seems to want, so on those grounds alone it's probably a bad idea we should try to avoid. The second thing to say is that, in any likely combination of events, the re-establishment of the Caliphate is not going to happen. The existing governments of Muslim states are extremely well-armed and unimpressed with the idea of reviving a true, pan-Muslim Caliphate. (This hasn't stopped many national leaders from proclaiming themselves the new Caliph.)

What I really don't get is how a Caliphate is supposed to be big and scary in a way that, say, a nuclear-armed Pakistan, Iran, or possibly Saudi Arabia isn't. Threat of terrorism? Check and check. Nuclear proliferation? Big, big check.

There does seem to be this fantasy that a Caliph could emerge, unite the Arab/Muslim world, and suddenly we're fighting at the gates of Vienna all over again. This idea is so lunatic it really only deserves one answer: any nation stupid enough to engage NATO in a land war is going to get exactly the carnage it deserves.

Meanwhile, I've met a few (very moderate) Muslims who yearn wistfully for the era of Muslim unity that the Caliphate represents to them, so it's not like you have to be crazy to want it.

Moreover, Ricks himself quotes a soldier earlier in his book who points out the obvious: The US already has two wars on its hands. It would be nice if people would stop fantasizing about enemies in the future and start using the brainpower to fight the wars they've got.

The better half

via ThinkProgress:

Asked by Cherie Blair what Americans thought of her husband, McAuliffe responded that "most people think you're a lap-dog for President Bush." Cherie Blair then elbowed her husband and said "See, Tony, I told you so."

A shocking use of, y'know, data

MisterBryans' has some numbers:

Digital music sales increased a whopping 122% last year in Canada while overall music sales increased just under 10%.

On the other hand, overall album sales decreased by almost 5%.

Worthwhile knowing, because the CRIA claims we need to undo electronic fair use rights because music sales are slipping. In particular, they've claimed that the slow adoption of e-music services is directly attributable to Canada's "lax" copyright laws.

One wonders, with a double-digit increase in overall music sales and a triple-digit increase in online music sales, who we're really protecting, and from what.

I won't normally ask you to read Macleans

But there's two... noteworthy bits in today. First, Paul Wells points out the obvious: Our Prime Minister is a lying sack of something foul when it comes to his position on Iraq. Short version: He was for it before it polled badly.

Secondly: This is alarming. Apparently, I'm not a "good Canadian" in Washington, DC's eyes. But that's not really surprising...

"I was struck back in 2003 after doing a briefing with some people in the Administration. It had been a rough year. We were getting ready to go to Iraq. Canada-US relations were somewhat strained by that. At the end of the briefing -- which had been a little bit grim -- about how Canada and the US could work together better in this war on terror that we were facing, the person I was was briefing paused and said to me, 'Chris, where are all the good Canadians?' When he said that it broke a little bit of my heart, because I'm an American but I love the Canadians. I think what he meant by that was 'Where are the Canadians of World War I and World War II, that people understood to be... even when Europeans didn't, those allies we had come to count on.' Well, I have good news. Our speaker today is one of the good Canadians..."

The speaker today was Stockwell Day.

I guess Mr. Sands thinks that you're only a "good Canadian" if you obey. I wonder what he thinks of 70% of his fellow countrymen? Where are the good Americans?

Update: The Vanity Press points out the obvious: America was able to "count on" Canada during WWI and WWII because we were, uh, already fighting the war before the Americans got off their asses.

Still, the post-2003 cesspool that is American foreign policy does make you yearn for the days of American isolationism -- if you could get it without the anti-semitism, of course.

I heart Keith Olbermann, cont.

Adam sends this in, saying "it makes me wonder where the rest of
the media have been for the last four years."

No kidding.

China blows stuff up.... IN SPACE!

The New York Times has a good take on this:

In late August, President Bush authorized a new national space policy that ignored calls for a global prohibition on such tests. The policy said the United States would “preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space” and “dissuade or deter others from either impeding those rights or developing capabilities intended to do so.” It declared the United States would “deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to U.S. national interests.”

The Chinese test “could be a shot across the bow,” said Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs. “For several years, the Russians and Chinese have been trying to push a treaty to ban space weapons. The concept of exhibiting a hard-power capability to bring somebody to the negotiating table is a classic cold war technique.”

Of course it is. The Chinese are rapidly gaining the ability to, if not mirror, then deter certain US policies. The Americans claim the right to deny space to their adversaries, so the Chinese do the obvious -- show they can play rough, too.

A commenter at FPSpace says this was more impressive than some commentary realizes -- the ability to hit a satellite by a direct launch speaks to a much "smarter" missile than previously suspected.

Up next: Toads from the sky, rivers of blood

Bush: More unpopular than Cheney.

I didn't think that was possible.

"If we aren't guaranteed monopoly profits, we aren't interested."

Scott's got a pair of good posts about the totally-unsurprising fact that the pharmaceutical industry is totally uninterested in developing and testing a drug that they aren't guaranteed a patent on. Which, when you understand the industry that we've built, is totally understandable on their part -- aside from being soulless and evil, that is.

Here's a question for those better-informed than me. It's my understanding that human testing is, by far, the most time- and money-intensive part of drug development. We also know that the results of human trials are often fudged or hidden outright when they indicate problems with the drugs.

So why not simply have the government take over the human testing -- not the research or manufacturing, at least not initially (insert conspiratorial Marxist laugh here) -- for drug developers? You socialize the risk in the most expensive part of their operation, but in exchange you require the government be allowed to independently verify all of Big Pharma's claims about any drug. The public then has the chance to get early warnings on any problems.

It also lets you face situations like this: the government can, if it chooses, pursue the occasional drug that the private market won't.

Input, anyone?

Nerd moment

For my money, Star Trek VI is by far the best movie the series has produced, ever. Aside from being by far the superior script and directing of all the movies, I'm not sure how you can possibly top the multi-layered Cold War references. Most especially Christopher Plummer as a Klingon channeling Adlai Stevenson yelling to Kirk, "Don't wait for the translation, answer me now!"

You could put that movie on every Sunday on Space, and I'd watch it every Sunday.

Honorable mention: Chekov in Star Trek IV, asking in faux-Russian accent "where are the nuclear wessels" to passersby in Reagan-drenched America. Yes.

But remember everyone, Arabs Persians only understand force

Thinkprogress:

"An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was turned down by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003," Lawrence Wilkerson, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told BBC last night. "We thought it was a very propitious moment to (strike the deal)," Wilkerson said, "But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the vice president’s office, the old mantra of ‘We don’t talk to evil’…reasserted itself."

Love this dynamic. Our enemies are always trying to negotiate with us, help us even, we tell them to go fuck themselves, and then we wonder why they view us with suspicion and hostility.

Just so everybody's clear: Cheney ensured Iran's continuing support for Hamas and Hezbollah, but Jimmy Carter's the anti-semite.

Asimov. Huh.

If you say so, Internet. I was never wild about the Foundation series though. Tragically, I think that picture is an accurate depiction of what I'll look like later in life.

(via The Vanity Press.)

I am: Isaac Asimov One of the most prolific writers in history, on any imaginable subject. Cared little for art but created lasting and memorable tales.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I read polls

Thanks to Wilson61 in comments for pointing this out:

Do you support Canada’s troops presently in Afghanistan?
Yes: 63 %
No: 37 %

And that's about as good as it gets for Afghanistan support. almost 4 out of 10 Canadians answer no to the question "do you support Canada's troops presently in Afghanistan?", which is roughly like answering that you dislike puppies, or ice cream. But it gets worse:

Do you support Parliament’s decision to extend the mission in Afghanistan until 2009?
Yes: 57 %
No: 43 %

Do you agree or disagree with NDP leader Jack Layton’s position that resources In Afghanistan should be reconstituted and redirected so that more resources are allocated for reconstruction and less on conflict?
Agree: 47 %
Disagree: 53 %

So at best we have a bare majority of support for this war, but the obvious conclusion is that Canada is profoundly divided over it. This question, howwever, is my favourite. Despite 6 months or so of every informed voice (and many more uninformed voices) clamoring for NATO to send more troops to Afghanistan, the Canadian people are unequivocal in their response:

The United States is considering more troops to Iraq, should Canada send more troops to Afghanistan?
Yes: 26 %
No: 74 %

So 3 out of 4 Canadians are opposed to sending more troops, which is convenient because I don't know where we'd find them anyway. Meanwhile, there's quite clearly some overlap of the people who believe that our troops should stay in Afghanistan, fighting this war, but should under no circumstances be offered Canadian reinforcements. Meanwhile, a sizeable chunk of Canadians continue to believe that this would all be won and over if our other NATO allies would ante up. I am, as always, unconvinced.

The very simple question remains for people who support this war: If we aren't willing to send more troops (and we clearly aren't), and our allies aren't (equally clear) but everyone agrees this is doomed to failure without said troops, what the hell are we doing there? Who will we blame when this goes balls-up on us?

I'm sure the Tories will say it was all the NDP's fault by simply raising the issue for debate, but think about that for a second: our Afghanistan policy drifted in obscure autopilot well after the last election. Prime Minister Harper pushed, hard, to make himself the "military" Prime Minister in a way that neither Chrétien or Martin ever did. And the moment he did that -- the moment the Prime Minister brought this issue in to the limelight, and the moment Canadians gave it serious thought -- the support started dropping. This was never a role our troops had broad, strong public support for, which is why it shouldn't have happened. But then, I'm a wild-eyed crazy person who believes in things like the will of the people.

The funny thing is, I think this poll is probably being very charitable for Conservatives. I haven't seen other polls ask the "sending more troops question", but the numbers in this poll may very well be as good as it gets.

Furrows in the water

David Bell on the world's first guerilla war:

The decision to escalate in Iraq reminds me of a series of letters I read a few years ago in the French military archives, from the French commanding general in Pamplona, Spain, in the years 1810-11. All right, it may not seem like an exactly obvious connection. But the war fought in Spain against Napoleon between 1808 and 1814 was a classic case of insurgency, seen by many historians as the first great modern example of the phenomenon. In fact, the word "guerrilla" was first popularized during the conflict (it comes from the Spanish for "little war")....

The letters from the French commander, Honoré-Charles Reille, are eloquent about the frustrations of fighting an insurgent force, and eerily reminiscent of our own current quagmire. Again and again, Reille complained of attacks from men his troops could not even see, who approached and fired, then quickly melted back into the countryside. He worried that the French could not move about except in large detachments, lest guerrilla bands pick them off (lacking "improvised explosive devices," a favorite tactic was attacks by hundreds of guerrillas at once on small and isolated French units). He blamed the insurgency on religious fanaticism, in this case of Catholic Spaniards who had missed out on Enlightenment and French Revolutionary anti-clericalism....

"Unfortunately," he wrote, "in this region as in many others of Spain, our influence extends only as far as the range of our cannon [...] The Spanish say quite rightly that our troops are plowing furrows in the water."

EEStor news

via Clean Break, news about my favourite vaporware:

EEStor, Inc. has completed the initial milestone of certifying purification, concentration, and stability of all of its key production chemicals notably the attainment of 99.9994% purity of its barium nitrate powder.

The independent 3rd party chemical analysis was completed by Southwest Research Institute, Inc. located in San Antonio, Texas under contract with EEStor, Inc.

With these milestones completed, EEStor, Inc. is now in the process of producing on its automated production line, composition-modified barium titanate powders and is moving toward completing its next major milestone of powder certification....

The first commercial application of the EESU is intended to be used in electric vehicles under a technology agreement with ZENN Motors Company. EEStor, Inc. remains on track to begin shipping production 15 kilowatt-hour Electrical Energy Storage Units (EESU) to ZENN Motor Company in 2007 for use in their electric vehicles. The production EESU for ZENN Motor Company will function to specification in operating environments as sever as negative 20 to plus 65 degrees Celsius, will weigh less than 100 pounds, and will have ability to be recharged in a matter of minutes.

I've written about EEStor plenty before now. The product is supposed to be a capacitor with a much, much higher storage rating than previously available. If we can pack 15-20 kwh in to a car for a weight penalty of about 100 lbs, that's incredible. More importantly from the perspective of plug-in hybrids, capacitors don't face the same short lifespans that batteries do -- charge-discharge cycles can run in to the hundreds of thousands, instead of the thousands. It's certainly possible that the capacitors would outlast the car.

Long battery lifespans, and lower-cost batteries, are crucial if plug-in hybrids are going to play any role in helping expand the potential for storing renewable energy.

On a related note, it may have been a very good idea for GM to not announce who would be supplying the batteries for their Volt PHEV. If I were a struggling car maker who was still sitting on a hefty pile of cash, I'd pay through the nose to license EEStor's technology.

Other blogdom pissing matches

So the Other big kerfuffle at the moment seems to be between the 1960s "Dude, our protests totally worked" leftists and the later generation of "Dude, they totally fucking didn't" leftists. See Jon Schwarz' list of links here.

You know why I don't consider myself a radical? In short, because of idiocy like this "defense" of 1960s activism, and how it led to the 1980s:

When the Reagan administration tested the waters for direct US military intervention in El Salvador in 1981 with its "White Paper," opposition to this proposed move was immediate, as activists ranging from college kids to churchgoers to suburban dwellers staged sit-ins, organized street actions, wrote letters to politicians and newspapers, signed public petitions, and essentially raised such a degree of hell that the Reagan gang backed off, preferring to go clandestine instead.

Wow. Really impressive guys. You raised such a ruckus when Reagan proposed killing lots of people that Reagan eventually... killed lots of people anyway. But he had to hide it a bit! Victory at last!

And it's people like this that modern activists are supposed to take advice from?

Look, I have pretty low expectations for the Dems -- "sanity" is about all I'm hoping for at the moment. But check it out -- in the middle of a war, "sanity" is of paramount importance. Literally. People are dying, in numbers beyond counting, and if the Dems can even keep the killing from getting worse, than yes, they get my vote.

Iggy being sidelined?

Me likee... I'm not sure, but reading this from CTV, it looks like Dion is giving Ignatieff as low-profile a role in the new caucus as he can manage. Maybe I'm misreading things, but "Chair of a caucus committee on foreign policy" doesn't sound like Iggy will be getting a lot of microphone time, especially when Bill Graham will remain foreign policy critic in the front bench.

The funny thing is that, if you were willing to basically "forget" everything Ignatieff wrote after, oh, late 2001 or so, he'd be a perfect pick for Justice critic.

That is officially the nicest thing I'll ever say about Michael Ignatieff. Take note.

Haw friggin haw

Americans scare me when they talk like this. Fortunately, they also seem incredibly stupid:

Here's a hypothetical that while not completely analogous, is instructive. Let's say tomorrow, right-wing extremists take over Canada. The Canadian parliament is forced to regroup in Saskatchewan. Deposed Prime Minister Stephen Harper - no longer in power, but recognized by the United States - asks us to intervene and kick out the government in Ontario. We would be justified, legally, in doing so.

The idea of right-wing extremists evicting Harper is so funny I just needed to post this. This is one of the clearest examples of the problems with writing for the Internet. Change one word in this paragraph -- "right" to "left" -- and it no longer looks ridiculous (though still worrisome.) The writer clearly knows Canada is out there, somewhere, but had just enough time to look up who the PM of Canada was before he posted.

And as a side note, whenever an American writes theoreticals about invading Canada (always justified of course) I always picture them licking their lips. But maybe that's just me.

This is your media, people

Enough to drive a person the shrill, ranting insanity.

David Carr, writer for the New York Times media section (!!!), writes:

But at some point, ratings (which print journalists, unlike their television counterparts, have never had to contend with) will start to impinge on news judgment. “You can bemoan the crass decision-making driving by ratings, but you can’t really avoid the fact that page views are increasingly the coin of the realm,” said Jim Warren, co-managing editor of The Chicago Tribune.

Buh... snuh... I...

I'm sorry, my brains just exploded all over my monitor. Give me a moment to wipe up.

...

Alright. Let's go very slowly here. The New York Times media writer -- occupying some of the most valuable print real estate in God's creation -- says print journalists "have never had to contend with" ratings.

Let's see what history has to teach us about some of the earliest newspaper publishers in the United States.

In 1882... [he] purchased the New York World, a newspaper that had been losing $40,000 a year, for $346,000 from Jay Gould... shifted its focus to human-interest stories, scandal, and sensationalism. In 1885, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but resigned after a few months' service; it seemed that politics were not his cup of tea. In 1887, he recruited the famous investigative journalist Nellie Bly. In 1895 the World introduced the immensely popular The Yellow Kid comic by Richard F. Outcault, the first newspaper comic printed with color... circulation grew from 15,000 to 600,000, making it the largest newspaper in the country.

In 1895, William Randolph Hearst purchased the rival New York Journal, which led to a circulation war. This competition with Hearst, particularly the coverage before and during the Spanish-American War, linked [his] name with yellow journalism.

So at the very dawn of American newspaper journalism, "circulation" -- what are today known as ratings -- drove journalism. There's really no reason (especially for anyone alive and conscious during the Lewinsky "scandal") to think matters have changed.

By the way, the man cited in the above passage? An obscure publisher -- no reason a New York Times writer should know him, really -- named Joseph Pulitzer.

It might be too much to ask the media to understand basic military affairs, or complex economics, or any number of things. But surely we can at least expect the media to understand, y'know, the media?

No? Anyone? Okay...

And suddenly, I'm six years old again

Is it bad that I really want to see the new Ninja Turtles movie?

Okay, maybe it does matter after all

Okay, one good reason for people to still be debating who war more correct than who about Iraq: unless we actually grapple with some of the basic reasons Iraq went wrong, we are likely to make the same mistakes over and over again. Today's example comes from Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post. After many unflattering comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, Kaiser concludes:

What's the lesson to be learned? Modesty. Before initiating a war of choice -- and Vietnam and Iraq both qualify -- define the goal with honesty and precision, then analyze what means will be needed to achieve it. Be certain you really understand the society you propose to transform. And never gamble that the political solution to such an adventure will somehow materialize after the military operation has begun. Without a plausible political plan and strong local support at the outset, military operations alone are unlikely to produce success.

If this is what the liberal hawks think went wrong with Iraq -- Bush didn't study enough? -- then we are truly doomed. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz thought they had studies the goal with honesty and precision, as Kaiser wishes. It just turns out they were wrong. Why? Because they were, in this context, revolutionaries. They ignored any and all historical data or judgment, because they believed it was irrelevant to this endeavour.

Moreover, the kind of knowledge Kaiser wants governments to have before they engage in "wars of choice" is not reliably available. How exact do you think US knowledge of Iraqi tribal structures was pre-2003? How good do you think it is today? My bet is not very, or not nearly enough. Kaiser's editor gave his column the header "Trapped by Hubris, again" but it's clear Kaiser doesn't understand what the Hubris was.

Hubris isn't when you consciously act in the absence of knowledge. That's just plain old dumb. Hubris is acting with certainty when your knowledge is flawed, or non-existent. Kaiser's answer to the hubris of Iraq is "be more certain", but that's just a recipe for further disasters. The right answer to hubris is humility, not more certainty. Start from the position that yes, you will fuck up, and yes, your knowledge is bound to be incomplete. Most importantly, governments need to understand that some tasks are simply beyond them, even the most powerful ones.

The lesson of Iraq (or Vietnam) is not "be smarter, then invade". It's "be smarter, don't invade."

Why are we still talking about this?

So we're back to this: Atrios, Kevin Drum, and others are having a little spat over whether the left in general, and lefty blogs in particular, really deserve credit for being "right" about the war. Kevin in particular asks whether the left blogs were really "right" about the war if they opposed the war for the wrong reasons. The "wrong" reasons, to Kevin, is to have opposed this war simply because it was an unnecessary, preventive war. Sez Drum:

The fact that Iraq is a clusterfuck doesn't demonstrate that preemptive war is wrong any more than WWII demonstrated that wars using Sherman tanks are right. It's the wrong unit of analysis.

I'm not sure what the point in having this debate is. On the one side, you've got the people who predicted this war would be a disaster. This includes not just the left, but many conservatives and military leaders. Did every single pundit get every single facet of this disaster right? I certainly didn't -- I expected the fall of Baghdad to be a bloodier affair, and was surprised at the initial light casualties of the invasion. Nevertheless, I was fantastically more correct about this war than, say, George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld.

Crucially, I expected the Iraqis to resist a foreign occupying army that didn't understand or respect them, and for that resistance to eventually turn violent. That's all you needed to know beforehand. Invading armies are resisted by the invaded. I don't know why this is so difficult to understand. This doesn't make me a rocket scientist, it makes me someone who didn't sign up for the Iraq Lobotomy Drive of 2003.

I'm not the icon of anti-war opinion in 2003, of course. The more appropriate unit of analysis is the opinion of anti-war sentiment in general. The people who believed US forces faced a long occupation of a hostile populace were correct, and totally different from the people who believed that the US would be greeted as liberators. Here, a rational society would privilege the opinions and perspectives of the anti-war people, because (duh) they have been proven correct by events.

On the other side, you've got the Bush administration and it's water-carriers (too many of whom are nominally on "the left") who have been absolutely wrong about absolutely everything since this war began. I'm seriously worried about the day that Bush declares that the sun rises in the east. Why? Because on that day the Earth's rotation will clearly reverse itself, as "the Bush Administration is wrong about everything" seems to be a physical law of the universe.

Given that Martin Luther King day just passed, let me pose a question: MLK was notoriously sexist, refusing to grant women a serious role in his organization. On the issue of gender equality, MLK was clearly wrong. Does that narrow failure mean that his movement was wrong, and should be ignored? That they deserve no credit for dismantling the US apartheid system? Does a failure to be correct in every detail mean that he can be safely ignored by history?

Well, if you're a liberal hawk, yes, that's exactly what it means.

Funny you should mention that...

If you caught the Daily Show tonight, you saw a brief discussion of the view George McLellan (traveller and mediocre Civil War General) had of the Middle East. McLellan was quoted as saying that America's biggest fault in the Mideast is that they always see it as a mirror of America. Until Americans understand that the Middle East is different from America, and the people there are different from Americans, then America will continue to make mistake after mistake.

Stewart responded by asking if there was any chance that Dick Cheney and others could ever have met McLellan.

Funny you should mention that...

During the run-up to the Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf was under immense pressure to start the invasion of Kuwait early, before all of his forces had arrived in theatre. At one point, Colin Powell personally called Stormin' Norman and said that he was being loudly compared -- by civilians in the Bush administration -- to George McLellan (for his mediocrity, not for his nuanced views on the Middle East.)

Coincidentally, none other than Dick Cheney would later give Schwarzkopf a Christmas present: Ken Burns' documentary on the US Civil War. Schwarzkopf pretty clearly took it as an insult, and believed that Cheney was the mysterious person naming him "Mclellan".

It gets even better, of course. Cheney -- who never saw a disastrous misadventure he couldn't support -- was responsible for strongly pushing what was called "the Western Excursion". Theoretically the US would land the 82nd airborne in the far west of Iraq, far from support or resupply, and... the 82nd would win the war somehow.

It's a mystery to me why Cheney was ever seen as a realist.

Reading Fiasco

Tom Ricks' book really is as good as people say. You should read it. I'd offer to lend my copy out, except I'm borrowing it from the library.

One interesting point that Ricks mentions is that there is a generational transition going on within the US Army -- the generation of men who directly experienced Vietnam is retiring, and the generation of men who began their careers post-Vietnam are now in levels of high command. To Ricks, this is important because it means the current commanders -- and crucially, the commanders who botched the early Iraq War -- have an inflated sense of America's power. They have, after all, only seen America succeed at war -- Panama, Kuwait, Bosnia, etc. Ricks also sees this as leading to America's hubris-laden invasion of Iraq.

Color me unconvinced. First of all, the military officer most responsible for the Iraq invasion plan is Tommy Franks. He served in Vietnam as an artillery officer commissioned in 1967. His immediate predecessor at CENTCOM, and fiercest uniformed critic of his invasion, was Tony Zinni. He also served in Vietnam, commissioned in... 1965. Seems to me that's an awfully slim "generational" gap.

The simpler, though less attractive for a historical study, to simply say that a) Tommy Franks wasn't fit to devise a war plan of this complexity and scope, and b) even if he was, he wasn't the man pulling the strings. Don Rumsfeld would not allow a competent invasion to have occurred, because he didn't believe in the things that would have made the invasion competent (500k troops, counter-insurgency, de-emphasizing technology, etc.)

That's not to say that the people who dreamed up this nightmare weren't overly impressed by the events of Panama, Kuwait, etc. Obviously, people like David Frum, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neocon gang saw victories like Gulf War '91 and incorrectly saw an "easy" win. But Ricks doesn't make a strong case that the Army has institutionally begun to forget the lessons of Vietnam.

Post-update: It occurs that maybe the Franks/Zinni comparison is inadequate for my argument. Zinni, after all, is a Marine while Franks is US Army. Zinni's predecessor, one J.H. Binford Peay III (seriously) is Army, and has also criticized the invasion plan, though he primarily blames Rumsfled (of course).

I am clearly a racist

...so say the neocons. Still at work, apparently. This makes me laugh:

I can understand--though not appreciate--Americans who don't want to see Americans dying in Iraq because they value American lives more highly than they do Iraqi ones.

Now, I don't actually believe that American lives are more worthy than Iraqis -- I believe the US should leave Iraq because, relative to continuing the status quo, fewer people on both sides will die. But there is someone who should absolutely act on the principle that American lives are more valuable to him than Iraqi lives, and also has the capacity to affect a major change in Iraqi affairs.

That would be George W. Bush. His official role is President of the United States of America. He holds no political role in Iraq, and can claim no mandate to represent them. His role as Commander-in-Chief (he likes it when you call him that) is meant specifically to protect and defends Americans. Bush has no rightful role as defender of the world's poor or huddled masses. His job in fact requires that he see American lives as more important than other, non-American lives. There's nothing wrong with that, in the grand scheme of things. However, considering that keeping US soldiers in Iraq will accomplish nothing other than more dead Americans, it's clear the same principle requires that he pull US troops out of Iraq, immediately.

But remember everyone, Arabs only understand force

So Syria was attempting to negotiate a peace deal with Israel, until Olmert walked away over the summer. The deal-breaking condition for Olmert? That the negotiations go public.

Um, okay.

No wonder Netanyahu's leading in the polls again. I don't know what the hell is up here. Damascus and Jerusalem are both denying this report, for what it's worth. I'm not sure I believe them -- there's been rumours since before Sharon took office of negotiations between Syria and Israel.

Might as well legislate against gravity

So with the news that Canada is going to bring in our own version of the DMCA, and that the Democrats in the Senate are bringing in a "rescue legacy radio act", it might be time to revisit the problems with legally protecting digital rights management (DRM) technologies.

DRM can be any number of things, but the most basic aspect of it is restricting the function of a computer or electronic device. DVDs are encrypted to prevent them from being copied. iTunes only lets you burn a song a certain number of times. And so on. These restrictions may be reasonable or not, but they are unquestionably a crippling of your computer. A computer, after all, is fundamentally nothing more than a machine to copy bits. It is only a "good" computer in so far as it copies bits quickly and accurately.

Here's the problem, though: DRM can never work. Because the architecture of computers has been open for so long -- since the beginnings of the personal computer industry, really -- it's dead easy for software and hardware hackers to reverse any DRM scheme. The encryption scheme AACS, which was supposed to protect hi-definition DVDs from piracy, has been breached. It's only a matter of time until it is effectively useless. And your average consumer doesn't need to know how to unzip any particular DRM scheme: they just need to know where to find the liberated files on the Internet. This is what's called the "break once, infringe anywhere" or "one smart cow" problem: All it takes is one smart cow to open the gate. And there are millions of smart cows on the Internet.

Surely, if nothing else, the last decade of experience has shown that increasing the legislative protections for DRM don't, in fact, stop copyright infringement.

There is absolutely no technical fix to digital copyright infringement, a fact which was grasped years ago by no less than Microsoft's own employees (Word document link.) Indeed, DRM serves as the most effective inducement towards copyright infringement, because DRM-wrapped goods are substantially lower-quality than non-DRMed goods. If I download an MP3 and the label has decided to prevent me from, say, recording it to CD or making a ring tone out of it, then I've pretty much wasted my money -- downloading the same music illegally simply offers more freedom, and therefore a better product.

So if it can't work, and if might even in fact induce copyright infringement, why are the movie studios and music labels so crazy for DRM? Because this isn't about "piracy". Read it again, and understand: This isn't about piracy. What is it about? In short, it's about undoing Betamax. I said above that the last decade shows that DMCA-style laws don't work at protecting copyright. What the DMCA was really, really good at was stopping challenges to the movie industry's business model.

One of the particularly odd questions you sometimes hear or read in tech news discussions is why there isn't a game-changing device for video, the way there was the iPod for audio. It's a silly question -- for the largest market in the world, ripping a DVD is illegal. Making a machine to rip DVDs is illegal. Selling a machine to rip DVDs is illegal. This hasn't stopped electronics firms from doing some sneaky things (like adding VGA ins to new TVs, or putting DivX support on new DVD players) but it's nevertheless stifled innovation in the personal electronics sector for no good use.

Aside from preventing challenges to the movie industry's business model, the other purpose of DRM is to create new business models. As Ken Fisher puts it:

Access control technologies such as DRM create "scarcity" where there is immeasurable abundance, that is, in a world of digital reproduction. The early years saw tech such as CSS tapped to prevent the copying of DVDs, but DRM has become much more than that....

To create new, desirable product markets (e.g., movies for portable digital devices), the studios have turned to DRM (and the law) to create the scarcity (illegality of ripping DVDs) needed to both create the need for it and sustain it. Rather than admit that this is what they're doing, they trot out bogus studies claiming that this is all caused by piracy. It's the classic nannying scheme: "Because some of you can't be trusted, everyone has to be treated this way." But everybody knows that this nanny is in it for her own interests.

Now, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this will create incentives, efficiencies, whatever. I honestly can't say -- though I'm deeply skeptical. But it's quite clear that we're having a debate of lies. The studios claim this technology is necessary to stop piracy. (Doubly false: piracy is not harming them nearly as much as they claim, and these techniques are irrelevant to that problem anyway.) If we are going to repeat the decade-long mistake of American law and try, Canute-like, to sweep back the ocean of digital technology, we might as well have an honest debate about it.

If the music labels want to enclose the digital commons -- to strip us of fair use rights that we previously held under law -- then they ought to at least make an honest argument for it.

In the meantime, write your MP and tell them what you think about this.

Say what?

On September 10 1956, Guy Mollet, the then French prime minister, came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between the two countries with his British counterpart, Sir Anthony Eden, according to declassified papers from the National Archives, uncovered by the BBC.

A British cabinet paper from the period reads: "When the French prime minister, Monsieur Mollet, was recently in London, he raised with the prime minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France."...

"The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

· That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
· That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty

Um, okay. I'm thinking that maybe Guy Mollet didn't have his finger on the pulse of the French nation. Just a thought.

24 must stop

Gah. I'm watching this show, and it's really driving me mad. In the first 4 hours of the season, they've managed to use both of the most counter-productive clichés of the Bush era:

• The "decapitation" myth: See, all we have to do is find the big boss, kill him, and then all terrorists will lay down their arms. It's like Mario Bros. Except Osama Bin Laden is Bowser. And instead of fire flowers, we use JDAMs.
  
  
• The "terrorists club" myth: All terrorists are in league with each other, and share the same goals. So if one main leader changes his policy (or is killed, see #1) then we'll have "peace". I swear to God, one of the characters actually said "this could finally bring peace" because one dude was willing to give up his car-bombing ways.

Consider what we know about terrorism. If Bin Laden announced tomorrow that he was converting to Buddhism and that all Muslims should donate to B'nai B'rith, what exactly do you think the effect on global terrorism would be that day? Exactly zero. The next day, there would be one less terrorist because Bin Laden's own people would have killed him. The End.

I'm not a big believer in the idea that TV must strictly adhere to reality, but for the love of all that's holy we've been at this for years now. Can we eventually have a mature treatment of these issues? Cuz y'know, it's not like terrorism is relevant to modern culture in any way shape of form.

Instead, we get Rupert Murdoch airing snuff porn. Gah.

AAAH!, cont.

Went out for a bit, came back, still angry about Bush. Here's a basic lesson in Iraqi politics, circa 2007:

On the one side, you've got the American Armed Forces. Whatever their long-term plans are, they involve American troops stationed in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Then, you've got the Iraqi people. They want the Americans gone. Like, yesterday.

In a September poll conducted by the University of Maryland, 78% of Iraqis feel that the U.S. military is provoking more conflict than it is preventing. To make matters worse, 71%, which includes 74% Shiites, and 91% Sunnis, want the U.S. out of Iraq within a year or less. Last, but not least, 61% of Iraqis favor attacks on U.S. troops.

Both camps are heavily armed. And what do we call it, children, when two armed groups have mutually exclusive political objectives, and try to resolve them by resorting to violence?

That, children, is what we call a "war".

Whether Bush likes it or not, he has put the united states at war against, not "for", the Iraqi people.

The American policy in Iraq won't fail because of Iraqi "ingratitude" or "laziness".

The American policy in Iraq will fail because the Iraqis have an achievable goal (an American-free Iraq) and the Americans don't.

If, four years in to this mess, Bush still doesn't understand this, he is truly damned.

AAAH!

Bush on 60 Minutes last night:

PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?

BUSH: That we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?

That Bush would even ask the question speaks volumes. Somewhere in his brain, he honestly thinks the Iraqis are to blame for the state of things. What a sadist.

This is the problem with all of the "yes, but"s I get whenever I state that America needs to leave Iraq, now. Inevitably, very well-meaning and thoughtful people write that there must be something we can do. There isn't. Why? Because barring impeachment, Bush will continue to be Commander-in-Chief until January 2009. He will continue to make the already-horrible in to the barely-imaginable because he doesn't exist in the same reality as the rest of us. In his world, the surge will work, the Generals are defeatists, and if the Iraqis would just behave everything would go smoothly.

Meanwhile, via Paul Wells, one of the co-authors of the escalation in Iraq is disavowing Bush's execution of it. Incompetence dodgers, activate!

Bush = Homer

The American, not the Greek. Heard on the Simpsons this evening (probably a rerun):

"But Lisa, if it turns out I can do this, then all those past lies become true!"

Hence, 20k more troops to Iraq.

War games are useful, if you actually pay attention

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

With all the talk of escalating against Iran lately, it might be worth remembering that the last major war game the Pentagon conducted with Iran as the enemy was Millenium Challenge, where the "Red" [mock-Iranian] forces were commanded by Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper. How did that go for the "Blue" [mock-US] forces?

From Wikipedia:

In the early days of the exercise, Red, commanded by retired Marine Corps general Paul K. Van Riper, launched a massive salvo of cruise missiles, overwhelming the Blue forces electronic sensors, destroying thirteen warships. Soon after that offensive, another significant portion of Blue's navy was "sunk" by an armada of small Red boats carrying out both conventional and suicide attacks, able to engage Blue forces due to Blue's inability to detect them as well as expected.

For those who don't recall, the Pentagon responded to this direct challenge to their preconceived notions by essentially calling a do-over. Now, I don't think the US Navy is going to be sunk. But that's not the real lesson of Millenium Challenge. What's the real lesson? Let me turn that over to the Lt. Gen. himself:

What I saw in this particular exercise and the results from it were very similar to what I saw as a young second lieutenant back in the 1960s, when we were taught the systems engineering techniques that Mr. [Robert] McNamara [Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson] had implemented in the American military. We took those systems, which had good if not great utility in the acquisition of weapon systems, to the battlefield, where they were totally inappropriate. The computers in Saigon said we were winning the war, while out there in the rice paddies we knew damn well we weren't winning the war. That's where we went astray, and I see these new concepts potentially being equally as ill-informed and equally dangerous.

The "concepts" that Van Riper is talking about are the broad concepts of "transformation" and how information technologies were, according to the geniuses at OSD, changing the fundamental nature of warfare. Van Riper is a very vocal critic of those ideas, the kind of solider who quotes Clausewitz and other military theorists and believes that the fundamental nature of war never changes. (No surprise: in this debate, I'm far closer to Van Riper than, say, Rumsfeld.) If the worst fears about recent personnel changes in the military are correct -- that it's a prelude for an air war against Iran -- than I fear the ideas of "transformation" are going to be tested again against Iran.

In which case, the McNamara comparison is going to be more apt than Van Riper knew when he made it: McNamara's (and more importantly) Walt Rostow's ideas were also tested in war games prior to the escalation of the Vietnam War. A pair of war games in 1964 (SIGMA I and SIGMA II) tested the ideas that North Vietnam could be deterred by aerial bombing or by American land forces. How did that go? From H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty (p. 156):

The game's results raised troubling questions about the viability of the Rostow thesis. After initiating a bombing campaign, the United States confronted "the question of what to do since escalation of the war into NVN [North Vietnam] had failed to achieve desired results in SVN [South Vietnam], and the enemy appeared to be raising the ante toward major ground warfare." The American "team", however, remained "anxious to continue trying to force the DRV out of the war through air attack." Lincoln noted that once open hostilities began, consideration of "possible alternative strategies such as to negotiate" was minimal and the United States "followed through with escalation of pressures against North Vietnam to include wiping out all all DRV industrial targets" and the mining of North Vietnamese ports. The bombing, however, had minimal effect and actually stiffened North Vietnamese determination, as the Viet Cong used existing stockpiles and civilian support to sustain the insurgency in the South. General Wheeler seemed particularly impressed by the game's findings that the Viet Cong's low demand for supplies, coupled with the agrarian nature of North Vietnam's society, made the enemy resistant to the use of air power.

Or, from those hippies at the CIA:

Like the SIGMA I war game played earlier in 1964, however, SIGMA II and its depressing outcome had no apparent dampening effect on senior decisionmakers' certainty that the way to save South Vietnam was to bomb the North and employ US combat forces in the South. Strategists continued their contingency planning toward those ends as if the outcome of SIGMA II (plus SIGMA I and Robert Johnson's earlier NSC working group study) had not occurred. The realism of SIGMA II would, however, get an early confirmation: the officer playing the role of the President committed a US Marine expeditionary force to South Vietnam's defense on 26 February l965 of the game's calendar. President Johnson did send just such a Marine force on the actual date of 8 March 1965, only 10 days later than in the war game. According to Walt Elder, McCone's former Special Assistant, the DCI participated in only one session of Sigma II because he "hated all war games"; on this one occasion he went out of "innate snobbery, when he learned that the other seniors would be there."

Ah, the best and the brightest.

I don't know what the future holds for America in the Gulf. I really, really hope that Bush isn't about to launch an air war against Iran -- the potential for disaster is simply too high. If I were a religious person, I'd be about ready to pray right now. But we won't be able to say we -- or they -- weren't warned. But, we aren't able to say that about Iraq, either.

The best summary of American foreign policy, ever.

Spencer Ackerman, on the disproportionate size of the US military:

The security threats that we face as a nation have to do primarily with our position as the predominant global superpower. ... If Italy decides tomorrow that it wants to take up America's global commitments, it will find that it needs a vastly larger military to avert the disasters that hegemony tempts.

...The issue has more to do with being the global equivalent of 50 Cent -- a mercurial, violent paranoiac possessing undeniable greatness, intensely loyal to a select few, merciless to most others and determined to remain on top of the heap by any means necessary. We get ours the ski mask way. As a result, we had better stay strapped.

America is the most powerful nation in the world. Therefore, America is feared. Therefore, America is hated. Therefore, America needs to defend itself. Therefore, America is the most powerful nation in the world.

What's so hard to understand?

I'm feeling lazy today

So this will be the second post (indirectly) from the comments section: Uncorrected Proofs has a post up about eliminating the state-funded separate Catholic school board in Ontario, something I've written about (well, alluded to) before positively. But the real comedy, as always, comes from the hate mail. Since it mentions "people like" UC, I'm calling a jump-in:

People like you disgust me.

What? I showered this morning. As far as you know.

You defend the rights of women to kill babies,

But only with deli slicers!

the rights of homosexuals to marry,

Don't forget divorce! I'm crazy for divorce!

the rights of doctors to murder terminally-ill patients,

Do they make adult-sized deli slicers?

the rights of businesses to sell pornography,

It's not a right. It's an obligation.

and the rights of people to smoke pot,

Well, only when they're too young for crystal meth.

but you won't support the rights of Catholics to have our own system of education.

Because as we all know, if you've had the right to government subsidies once, you're entitled to government subsidies forever. I can't wait to try that at the welfare office.

To turn the snark off, the issue isn't whether Catholics are "allowed" to their own separate school system (why not?) but rather whether the state has a role in organizing and financing it. In the 19th century, this was a peacemaking gesture between Ontario and Quebec. In the 21st century, it's a historical relic. I'm not opposed to keeping historical relics around, if they aren't doing serious harm. I'd need to be shown some more evidence that the Catholic board is actually a negative influence in Ontario before I'd really get behind reforming it, but I'm certainly open to the idea.

Tonkin, cont.

Jon Schwarz reminds us that the "stage an incident to start a war" was also part of the rough draft for Iraq.

From the comment bag

• General blogroll policy: If you link to me on your blogroll, let me know, I'm happy to reciprocate. So Dead Issue gets added, as soon as I can get to the template editor...
  
  If you've already linked to me and you're not on the roll, just drop a note in comments or email me.


• From Sven, this link to a review of Victor Davis Hanson's screed about the Peloponnesian War made me laugh. Especially this bit:

  Some of the other mistakes are on a whole different scale. Take the title, A War Like No Other. If Hanson believes that the Peloponnesian War was really so unique, why does he spend his first chapters making far-fetched connections between that war and every other war in history? If he wanted his title to reflect what he actually argues, Hanson should have called this book A War Like Nearly Every Other, Especially Iraq.

What always gets me is the North American conception of the Peloponnesian War always sees America as Athens. Now, there are some definite similarities, but it's unclear to me why an American would see this as a good thing. What's the laudatory aspect of Athenian history? The way it turned a defensive alliance in to a vehicle for imperial power and enriching one city? The poorly thought out strategies of Pericles which brought Athens to war without a means to win? Maybe the most eerily prescient part of Thucydides is when Pericles tells the liberals in Athens -- who were arguing that Athens should take a softer line with the subject cities -- that while democracy was all well and good for Athens, the world had to be ruled as a tyranny. Athens, Pericles said, couldn't afford to let go of the empire once they had it, because the cities who'd once been Athens' subjects would turn around and destroy Athens.

I think every single conqueror in history has probably just repeated Pericles. But again, why would an American (other than crazy old Victor Hanson) ever see this as a good thing, something worth emulating?

We've already lost

Matthew Yglesias:

Goldberg notes that "Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake--thirty five per cent." Peter Beinart cites a similar poll to likewise make the point that liberals have become crazed peaceniks. Goldberg would, however, do well to provide some analysis of the substantive question. ... After all, to a remarkable degree the administration managed not to accomplish its objectives.

The primary reason why Afghanistan is in anyone's national interest, post-9/11, is to try and keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda from re-establishing a safe haven in Central Asia. Well, um, too late -- the treaty the Taliban signed with the Pakistani government gives them safe haven inside Pakistan's borders. This isn't just bad, it's substantially worse than what we had pre-9/11. After all, invading or attacking Afghanistan was always an option -- invading Pakistan will never be. (It's a nuclear power, ya dig?)

Does this mean the only reason to stay in Afghanistan is gone? No, but the main "national interest" argument has disappeared. What we're left with now is essentially a war to keep Pakistan from returning Afghanistan to it's decade-long status as proxy state for Islamabad, or basically a peacekeeping mission to keep the Pashtun insurgency bottled up in the south while a government in the north -- with no legitimacy among the ethnic majority in Afghanistan -- tries to solidify its control. Let's just say I don't like our odds.

Brave New World

Most Macleans content -- except of course for Paul Wells' blog -- makes me either yawn or yell, but there's an interesting article on the ethics of reproductive technologies.

Advances in genetic screening have made it possible to "weed out" the disorder early in pregnancies, or even in advance of them. On Saturday, the National Post reported that the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada will soon follow the American lead by recommending that all pregnant women be screened for fetal abnormalities, including Down's...

University of Toronto philosophy professor Joseph Boyle was less sure. "Information as such is a good thing, particularly if there's some kind of good use for it," he responded. "But other than having an abortion if the child is discovered to have Down's, what good is that information going to be?"...

Parents of those with Down's have reacted angrily, as well. "I'm not sure what it is about our children that society abhors," Val Surbey wrote in a letter to the Post. "I can't understand what it is that he has done that is so horrible that society is looking to eliminate others like him."

I'm pretty open to these technologies, myself. If the parents want to abort a fetus with a crippling disability, I don't see that as an issue. But I'm also for a person -- or yes, their legal guardians in concert with medical opinion -- being allowed to choose euthanasia.

Basically, I don't see any way for us to avoid these kinds of selective abortions -- the technology for scans are proliferating, and abortion is and should remain legal, and that's pretty much all she wrote. The issue of banning this kind of abortion is, if anything, more clear than terminating a "normal" pregnancy. If a woman doesn't want to bring a disorder-free child to term, what right does the state have to force a disabled child on her?

People talk about "designer babies" or scenarios out of Gattaca. That's over-complicating things. Here we have two very simple technologies -- prenatal screenings and abortions -- and both have a legitimate place in our medical toolbox. But the idea of deliberately using them in concert seems to give people the willies.

Maybe this puts me on the Libertarian side of an issue, for once. I just don't see the pressing need to forbid this kind of stuff.

Why people should read a frickin book every once in a while

Tim at Balloon Juice:

Convinced that the student revolution left Iran’s oil fields undefended, Saddam Hussein tried and failed to make a quick grab for the border provinces. After some skirmishing Hussein essentially pulled back and hoped that the Mullahs would let bygones be bygones. They didn’t. Iran sent everything it had after Iraq, with or without equipment and training, over and over again....

Anyhow, just a random thought on a Thursday afternoon. I’m sure that Iran will prove perfectly pliable to American intimidation, especially if we throw in a bombing raid or two. If that doesn’t work, well, bygones.

Rob at MyBlahg:

All that remains is the casus belli to whip the warhawks into another war fever; which for America can either come in the form of a justifiable one such as Pearl Harbour or a bogus one such as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Ah, Tonkin. It's now well-established that the Tonkin gulf was, at best, a collossal fuckup by the US Navy, and at worst a deliberate falsification (though the evidence for deliberate lies is pretty thin these days.) What's less understood is that, in fact, the US had been launching covert attacks from US naval assets against North Vietnam for years before the Tonkin Gulf incident. So the North Vietnamese had plenty of reasons to assume the Maddox was hostile in 1964.

Back in the US, where the public and most of Congress had been kept ignorant of the CIA and Pentagon's work in Indochina, the Tonkin Gulf was seen as an unprovoked attack -- it was nothing of the sort. Meanwhile in the present, there's been constant rumours that the US has covert forces in Iran since last summer.

And, also via Robert, this at Glenn Greenwald's place makes me feel like I'm not paranoid enough:

• Israel's Prime Minister "accidentally" ending decades of nuclear ambiguity by unambiguously acknowledging Israel's nuclear arsenal;


• New Defense Secretary Robert Gates's extraordinary departure -- the very same week -- from long-standing protocol by explicitly describing Israel as a nuclear power;


• The arrest by the U.S. military of senior Iranian military officials in Iraq;


• The announced build-up of forces in the Persian Gulf back in December, the purpose of which -- according to Bush officials -- "is to make clear that the focus on ground troops in Iraq has not made it impossible for the United States and its allies to maintain a military watch on Iran" (UPDATE: As well as this incident revealing the placement of a nuclear-powered submarine in the Straits of Hormuz);


• The leaking by the Israeli military that Israel was developing plans for an attack on Iran using small-grade, limited tactical nuclear weapons. Though the leak was done in such a way as to create plausible deniability as to its significance -- the leak was to a discredited newspaper and leaks that a country has "planned" for a certain type of attack are commonplace and do not mean they are actually going to attack -- the leak was nonetheless deliberate and caused the phrases "Israeli nuclear attack" and "Iran" to be placed into the public dialogue, at exactly the time that tensions have been deliberately heightened between the U.S./Israel and Iran -- the purpose of which is almost certainly not a planned nuclear attack by Israel on Iran, but a ratchering up of the war rhetoric;


• Increasingly explicit advocacy by neoconservatives in the U.S. for a war with Iran, as reflected by the recent Washington Post Op-Ed by Joe Lieberman in which he really did declare that the U.S. is already at war with Iran ("While we are naturally focused on Iraq, a larger war is emerging. On one side are extremists and terrorists led and sponsored by Iran");


• in the later stages of 2006, the President's most prominent neoconservative supporters becoming increasingly explicit about their advocacy of war with Iran;


• The transparent and deliberate use by the President throughout the last several months of 2006 of highly threatening and accusatory language towards Iran that is identical in content and tone to the language he used towards Iraq in the months immediately preceding the U.S. invasion -- often verbatim identical.

Scary Times

I can only remember one time that felt like this: when Nixon was in the last weeks of his Presidency, and people -- including the then-Secretary of Defense-- got worried that Nixon might try to start a war to distract the country from his troubles, or even stage some sort of coup. People in DC even began to speculate as to what military forces could be assembled as a counterweight in the event that Nixon, rumored to be drunk and unstable, chose to subvert the Constitution.

According to reports published after Nixon resigned, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger even went as far to tell some of the highest-ranking military officers to inform him if any 'extraordinary orders' went out from the White House and to refrain from carrying out any orders which came from the White House outside the normal military channels.

This meshes well with that interview I quoted yesterday with Chris Hedges, talking about how suddenly the status quo can disintegrate. People don't really appreciate how close America came to something much, much worse than Watergate already was.

Sony: Doomed.

Sorry, but if this is true, Sony is insane:

German Heise has interviewed Joone the founder of Digital Playgrounds at the AVN 2007 show in Las Vegas. Joone says actually said last year he is committed to Blu-ray. Now they announced four HD DVD titles in the United States. In the interview Joone says he was forced to use HD DVD, because no Blu-ray disc manufacturer would make his discs, because Sony was against it and they would loose their license.

If Sony is making no-porn a condition of getting a Blu-Ray license, they're going to die on the market. This is so bizarre, it really beggars the mind. That's why I keep using the word "if". I really can't understand why you would do this. It'd be like if Apple announced none of it's computers would access Internet porn.

I heart Chuck Hagel

The Good Republican:

To ask our young men and women to sacrifice their lives to be put in the middle of a civil war is wrong.

It’s, first of all, in my opinion, morally wrong. It’s tactically, strategically, militarily wrong.

[Snip]

When you were engaging Chairman Biden on this issue on the specific question of, Will our troops go into Iran or Syria in pursuit, based on what the president said last night?, you cannot sit here today — not because you’re dishonest or you don’t understand — but no one in our government can sit here today and tell Americans that we won’t engage the Iranians and the Syrians cross-border.

Some of us remember 1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our government lied to the American people and said, We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia, in fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee.

So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the president is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous. As a matter of fact, I have to say, Madam Secretary, that I think this speech given last night by this president represents the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam — if it’s carried out.

I will resist it.

Hagel's been a good guy for a while now, but what's shocking to me is that the poll numbers really haven't changed. I had kind of assumed that as the drumbeat of escalation really got going, we'd see a shift in public support. I guess Bush really has lost that magic touch he once had. I understood that was possible, but really, I didn't expect it.

Kevin Drum says it so I don't have to

Basically, Bush declared war on Iran, Syria, the Shia, the Sunni, and maybe the Sun yesterday night.

But I'm sure it will all turn out all right. No worries.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Without necessarily endorsing a book I haven't read -- but want to -- I found this interview with Chris Hedges about his upcoming book American Fascists fascinating, especially this bit:

People have a very hard time believing the status quo of their existence, or the world around them, can ever change. There's a kind of psychological inability to accept how fragile open societies are. When I was in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, at the start of the war, I would meet with incredibly well-educated, multilingual Kosovar Albanian friends in the cafes. I would tell them that in the countryside there were armed groups of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who I'd met, and they would insist that the Kosovo Liberation Army didn't exist, that it was just a creation of the Serb police to justify repression.

You saw the same thing in the cafe society in Sarajevo on the eve of the war in Bosnia. Radovan Karadzic or even Milosevic were buffoonish figures to most Yugoslavs, and were therefore, especially among the educated elite, never taken seriously. There was a kind of blindness caused by their intellectual snobbery, their inability to understand what was happening. I think we have the same experience here. Those of us in New York, Boston, San Francisco or some of these urban pockets don't understand how radically changed our country is, don't understand the appeal of these buffoonish figures to tens of millions of Americans.

People forget that places like Lebanon, Argentina, or even Yugoslavia were once places of peace, order, and stability -- even prosperity, of a sort. But democratic societies aren't that hard to break, provided that you don't pay attention to what your leaders are saying.

I think the vast majority of followers have no idea. There's an earnestness to many of the believers. I had the same experience you did -- I went in there prepared to really dislike these people and most of them just broke my heart. They're well meaning. Unfortunately, they're being manipulated and herded into a movement that's extremely dangerous. If these extreme elements actually manage to achieve power, they will horrify [their followers] in many ways. But that's true with all revolutionary movements.

The core of this movement is tiny, but you only need a tiny, disciplined, well-funded and well-organized group, and then you count on the sympathy of 80 million to 100 million evangelicals. And that's enough.

As repellent as it is to believe, most Nazis -- even early members, in some cases, but certainly later on -- were decent enough people. They believed Hitler had a good plan for Germany, and convinced themselves that he didn't really mean what he said sometimes. Most of all, Hitler delivered early on, with stability and then better living standards.

It's why I'm regularly horrified when people say about any leader "well he just says that because X", where X is "the media", "his base", etc.

Wrong, right out of the gate

Boy, I'd be a lot more optimistic about Iraq if I hadn't read the GOP talking points provided by Matt Yglesias:

Success is the only option in Iraq.

Swing and a miss. Defeat isn't just possible, at this point it's the likeliest outcome.

Iraq has a plan in place to enforce the rule of law equally, achieve security and bring stability to the country.

Yes, it's called the Mahdi Army. What?

The deployment of additional troops is to support Iraq’s new plan for stability.

So American soldiers will be taking orders from an Iraqi? Seems we should be talking about that, if true. If US troops won't be under Iraqi command, how are they part of the plan?

But here's the big one:

Our commitment in Iraq is not open-ended. To the extent the U.S. has offered support to Iraq, we are doing so because they have made a compelling case that they are stepping-up their commitment to equal application of the rule of law and achieving lasting security.

So what happens when the troops get there and nothing's gotten better? Do they go home? Saying it isn't "open-ended" doesn't just mean you set theoretical goals, it means that failure to reach those goals has consequences. What happens when Maliki doesn't make the cut? I don't believe that Bush is ready to pack up and go home yet.

Not Switching Yet

I'm intrigued by Apple's announcement of AppleTV. It looks like it will kind of, well, suck... at least at first. We'll see how it evolves. For now, you won't be able to download shows from iTunes straight to your ATV box, nor will you be able to use a USB stick for extra storage. It won't support ripped DVDs, nor DivX files.

But, via BoingBoing, this is the interesting bit...

The Apple TV device has HDMI and component outputs. As of the launch, it doesn't have the HDCP anti-copying technology.

As you might imagine, this is an issue to media companies and they aren't sure if they'll supply HD content. They want money but they want 'security'.

Consider that the Xbox 360 has video component HD out (no HDCP) and the Apple TV will have HDMI and component out (no HDCP).

Is the de facto standard now set by Apple & Microsoft?

Obviously both systems will be all DRMed up anyway (Fairplay and Playsforsure, we can assume) but HDCP is a truly nasty bit of technology. To see it be spurned by both Apple and MSFT makes my heart grow a size for these companies, if only a bit.

The other bit of speculation is that the hardware in the AppleTV box will be easy to port the open-source, free, MythTV software. That would give it the functionality it currently lacks, and might make me buy one after all.

Hypotheticals

Oh I wish I were this good a blogger:

Zengerle wants to lead us into a set of rhetorical questions intended to make us more thoughtful about withdrawal. To work, however, rhetorical questions shouldn't have obvious answers.

1. What are the consequences of America losing a war?
The same as the consequences of any other country losing a war, only far less so since the war was fought far away for reasons tangential to genuine US security interests.

2. What will it do to our position in the world?
The dreadful defeat will leave the US the most powerful country in the world.

This whole line of argument -- "people should be honest with the consequences of withdrawal from Iraq" -- leaves me gasping. If we'd been honest about the consequences of invading Iraq in the first place, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Moreover, the argument that "things will be worse if the US leaves Iraq" manages to be both dubious in accuracy and utility at the same time. First of all, it could simply be untrue -- without the US there, the Shia militias might achieve a rapid victory in the Civil War and establish some kind of order. Any order, at this point, would be preferable to the status quo.

I'm not saying this will happen, but you can't simply assert that the US presence is keeping things from spinning out of control. There's certainly no historical evidence for it -- we've arrived at the current war of all against all in Iraq with an extremely heft US presence, and it clearly hasn't stopped us from getting here.

Which leads to the second point: the current trajectory of things in Iraq is horrible, and getting worse. This, I repeat, with a hefty US presence. Even if you assume the US is having a marginal positive effect on affairs in that country (the reverse could be true) it is quite clearly not enough to change the direction things are headed. At best, Americans are lightly braking the bloodletting, not stopping it, nor even keeping it from accelerating.

So whatever horrible things are going to happen in Iraq will probably happen anyway, just on a different timetable depending on the US presence. Say, for example, that the end point in Iraq is some Bosnian ethnic division between Sunni, Shia, and Kurd. Is it worth 500 American lives, or 1,000, to make sure that this happens in 2009 instead of 2008?

I've been saying this since I started this blog -- the US does not control affairs in Iraq, and hasn't since at least the spring/summer of 2004.

Which means they should get out. The President has the authority to spend soldiers' lives, but only on the condition that the objectives are achievable and in the national interest of the United States. Iraq is neither, and Bush doesn't have the right to squander human beings simply to keep from being the guy who lost Iraq.

On manners

So my last post -- accusing Conservatives of wanting Canadian soldiers dead -- was intemeperate, even by my own standards. It is also exactly a mirror of the language slung at the NDP for the last year over Afghanistan, so any Conservatives who have a problem with this should look at the beam in their eyes before screaming to me.

But let's check the scorecard for "baseless accusations of perfidy" today...

* The name of Dinesh D'Sousa's upcoming presentation at the Heritage Foundation blaming liberal Americans for 9/11: "The Enemy at Home"

* Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson this morning on Sen. Ted Kennedy and other war opponents: “hostile enemies right here on the home front."

* Sean Hannity's newest Sunday show feature targeting liberals: "Enemy of the State."

Blaming the left for 9/11 began just hours after the Twin Towers fell that Tuesday morning. So don't expect any sympathy from me on this count -- I've spent the last five years being accused of hating freedom, being a racist, and wanting the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. All because I opposed (and continue to oppose) the war in Iraq and I've tried, and increasingly failed, to square my support for NATO's mission with the conclusion that we're increasingly likely to fail in Kandahar.

Even Olaf at The Prairie Wranglers, a blogger who I respect and whose writings I enjoy, has played this game with me (albeit more politely than some) and I get fucking sick of it.

This isn't a "you did it first" excuse (even though the right objectively did, in fact, do it first) but rather a bargain: When Blogging Tories STFU about "Taliban Jack", when calling Canadians "pro-Taliban" is seen by Tories as beyond the pale in reasonable company, when we can generally have a serious debate about foreign policy without the useless competition to see who's more patriotic/bloodthirsty than who, then you'll get my apology for the post immediately below. And not a second sooner.

Bush is going to get Canadians killed

Scott said it first, but it deserves repeating: The surge of US troops to Iraq is going to expose Canadian soldiers to even more risk at a time when the insurgents in Afghanistan are gearing up for a major mobilization.

But heaven forbid we actually object to US foreign policy. That just makes us crazy lefties and knee-jerk anti-Americans, right Tories?

Why do Tories want more dead Canadians?

Bush and my cynicism with the power of law

A little story for you: Back, many moons ago, in my first year of university, I was taking Intro to Political Science, where we learned that, according to Max Weber, there are three types of authority that governments rest on: Charismatic, Traditional, and Rational-legal. Weber's distinctions left me unimpressed. I made the argument to my professor that the distinction between "traditional" and "rational-legal" modes of authority sounded awfully artificial to me, especially when you consider the way we actually act in relation to the law. Specifically, Canadians and Americans tend to refer to their respective constitutions as holy writ, or as Bill Maher has said about the Bill of Rights: "They're called amendments, not commandments!"

Let me put it another way: It is, I believe, a misunderstanding to think there's a bright line separating Weber's "traditional" modes of authority (patriarchy, monarchy, feudalism) and a legal-rational framework. Any study of French feudalism or patriarchies from primary societies quickly discovers that there are extremely substantive legal frameworks woven in each. (Though Weber can be forgiven for being ignorant of historical and anthropological research that would occur after his death.) Bluntly put, said I to my professor, there's really not that much separating our "rational-legal" world from the "traditional" one, and any effort to distance ourselves really only serves to let us pat ourselves on the back.

My professor was as unimpressed with my arguments as I was with Weber's. George Bush, on the other hand, has made my argument feel even more correct to me. His signing statements are notorious now for subverting the law, there's an open debate whether Bush will even obey Congress should it try and restrict his war aims, and Marty Lederman says Bush is even less obedient to the law than Richard Nixon. You remember how that ended, right?

Let me give a more specific example. I've been talking a lot about Vietnam lately, and one of the things that went disastrously wrong in Vietnam was the marginalization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So in the 1980s, Congress passed a new law that was a direct reaction to the trauma of Vietnam, which added a whole bunch of statutory powers to the JCS and was supposed to prevent some new McNamara from marginalizing the Chiefs in the same way.

Well, now that the Rumsfeld era is finally over, we can say at least one thing for certain: the law didn't work. Rumsfeld found whole new ways to marginalize the JCS and silence opposition in the military. This pattern can be found over and over again in the Bush II period -- laws passed, laws ignored, Congress did nothing.

So today Ted Kennedy announced a bill forbidding the introduction of new troops in to Iraq. And I love him for it. But what happens if Bush simply ignores the law, or introduces a signing statment rendering it meaningless, or using any one of the tricks he's been using all along? What happens to the law when the man charged with protecting and executing the law renders it meaningless?

Pelosi has said that impeachment is off the table. I really, really hope there's a "for now" in that statement. Because if Bush disobeys a directive of Congress, there's really no other alternative.

All you need to know

...about the so-called "surge":

Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower -- at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.

Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.

And all you need to know about why it's happening:

One widespread, and plausible, theory is that the surge constitutes a last-ditch effort at success. The thinking goes like this: Maybe this will work; and if it doesn't work, the United States can cut its losses and pull back without making the retreat seem like too disastrous a debacle. "We gave it our all," the president could say; "don't blame us that it fell apart." And, since Kagan and other surge-advocates are saying the plan would take about two years to succeed or fail, the next president—not Bush—would be the one who orders, and takes all the heat for, the retreat.

I am not one who likens the Iraq war to Vietnam, but there is an eerie parallel to a memo that John McNaughton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's closest aide, sent to him on March 24, 1965, after it seemed clear that the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign was producing scant results. "The situation in Vietnam is bad and deteriorating," McNaughton wrote. The important aim now is to "avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor)." Therefore, it is essential "that the U.S. emerge as a 'good doctor.' We must have kept promises, been tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied, and hurt the enemy very badly."

Holy Crap! Richard Cohen writes something sensible!

Richard Cohen, last seen whining about how mean Stephen Colbert was to the President at a White House dinner, seems to have snapped out of it for now:

In Iowa, during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush answered a question about why he so ardently supported capital punishment. He offered a number of reasons, but one -- deterrence -- prompted me to raise my hand and ask a follow-up: But, sir, there is absolutely no evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent. To my astonishment, Bush conceded my point: "You're right. I can't prove it. But neither can the other side prove it's not."...

Ponder that answer for a while. What it means is not just that Bush embraced a famously irrational way of thinking -- the logical fallacy often called "proving a negative" -- but in this case he used it to overwhelm all evidence to the contrary.

Up against this kind of mentality, the rational man seeks comfort in fantasy. It was our fantasy that a new Iraqi government, formulated months ago, would so turn things around that Bush would begin a phased withdrawal. It was our fantasy that the November congressional elections would make a difference -- and that Bush would be forced, when he saw the clear sentiment of the American people, to reverse himself. It was our fantasy that the report of the Iraq Study Group would compel the president to rethink everything -- so vast was the panel's expertise, so sound its reasoning and so comforting its appropriately thinning hair. In fact, so wasted was its effort. The members were the mullers. Bush was the decider.

And so those who have decided otherwise -- a couple of four-stars, maybe the chief spook and all those awfully smart people throughout government and academia -- are ignored and/or are heading out the door. Bush listened to them when he agreed with them and refused to listen when he did not....

The execution of Saddam Hussein was Iraq in a nutshell.... It was sloppy, putrid with the stench of sectarian hatred and, as always, totally unnecessary. George Bush saw it differently by not, as is his custom, seeing it at all.

Trademark-infringing: VDH-bashing, or "What's Attic for 'stabbed in the back'?"

The guys at Lawyers, Guns, and Money won't mind extra scorn heaped on Victor Davis Hanson, I hope. If you listen to this episode of Radio Open Source (sometime venue for Ezra) you'll hear them debating the modern relevance of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. At one point, discussing the relevance of Thucydides to Iraq, Hanson says (at about 48:30):

...the text seems to suggest that Athens gave everything the commanders wanted in the field, and yet when he sums up he says that the greatest problem with the Athenian expedition to Sicily was the lack of support back home. Which people don't really want to uh, talk about much today.

That was a new one to me. I had to read various chunks of Thucydides for some classes in University, but never read the whole book cover to cover. My limited reading was that there was little doubt that the Sicilian expedition was pretty much a cockup from beginning to end. In any case, it's pretty easy to find the stuff about Syracuse -- the most crucial events are in the last two books, 7 and 8. So what the hell is Hanson talking about?

Crucially, Book 7 details the campaign in Sicily and the ensuing disaster for Athens, and not once mentions the domestic politics of Athens (though it does speak of the Spartan invasion of Athens, a common occurrence during the war.) After the troops arrive in Sicily, the next reference to domestic concerns in Athens comes at the beginning of Book 8, after the disastrous defeat in Sicily:

When the news was brought to Athens, for a long while they disbelieved even the most respectable of the soldiers...

Fox News is older than I thought!

When the conviction was forced upon them, they were angry with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition, just as if they had not themselves voted it....

Wait a minute. I think I see what's going on here...

and were enraged also with the reciters of oracles and soothsayers, and all other omen-mongers of the time who had encouraged them to hope that they should conquer Sicily. Already distressed at all points and in all quarters, after what had now happened, they were seized by a fear and consternation quite without example.

Ah. If this is what VDH means by his remarks above (and I honestly don't know where he's pulling that, this is just my best guess) then I'd say he's misreading Thucydides. But we knew that. I think it's safe to say what frightens VDH is not the prospect that we won't support our troops at home. Rather, what frightens him is that once American involvement in Iraq comes to its ignominious end, Americans will (like the Athenians in their day) turn on "the reciters of oracles and soothsayers, and all other omen-mongers" who got them in to this damn war. That would be you, Victor. Not that I think Hanson has anything to worry about -- if we've learned anything in the last few years, it's that punditry is a risk-free profession.

Even more bizarrely, earlier in the show (at about 32:00) Hanson engages in what I was always told was the cardinal sin for historians -- counterfactual argument. He briefly states a number of things that could have gone right for Athens, leading to victory: What if X had been a better leader, what if Y had been present, what if Z hadn't happened. I wonder what he thinks about the similarities between Alcibiades and Ahmed Chalabi (both men were the most ardent voices for war, and of dubious loyalty) or between Segesta and the Iraqi National Congress?

No Alternatives

via Atrios, this piece of snotty elitism from a reporter, in response to a demand for withdrawal from Iraq:

Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don't think so. The reason that many politicians are squeamish about hard and fast goals of any kind in Iraq is that there is no simple response or solution -- it would have emerged by now. A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications.

Exactly the same game that got us in to the war in the first place:

Step 1) The media dismisses any views counter to Washington's status quo.
2003: We need to invade!
2006: We need to stay!

Step 2) The media declares that there's "no alternative", because they haven't allowed any discussion.
2003: Saddam could have WMDs.
2006: "A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications."

Step 3) Disaster ensures. Whee.

Ignoring Newton's Third Law

So I finished reading Dereliction of Duty today. Fantastic reading, and I'll write more about it later. But for now I want to deal with one of the key misunderstandings that McMaster identifies in the thinking that lead to Vietnam.

By 1963, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert McNamara had come to the conclusion that war per se was obsolete, and all that was necessary was to signal to the enemy how high a price you were willing to pay to deter them. McNamara had obviously developed this view during the Crisis, and in that case it served him well -- war was averted, and America's aims were achieved.

The problem is that the USSR was willing to give up Cuban missiles, in exchange for a guarantee of Cuban safety and a withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. So not only was the sacrifice palatable to Khruschev, but there was something the US could offer that he was interested in. So when the Americans escalated the situation, Khruschev could still rationalize backing down -- Cuba was "protected" and Soviet security was improved by the removal of missiles from Turkey.

The problem with Vietnam was that a) no sacrifice of the North's aim was acceptable to them -- they saw national reunification as a matter of life and death -- and b) there was nothing the US could offer them as reward for compromise (because of A.) In this scenario, escalation had exactly the opposite effect on the North that it had on the USSR: rather than back down, the North escalated in step with the US, even though these escalations were far bloodier for the North than for the US.

Even at the close of the war, Nixon's extensive bombing campaigns only succeeded in bringing the North to agree to formalize the status quo, with Northern units still inside the South when the US left.

Which brings us to Iraq. It's almost too kind to describe this "surge" idea as a strategy, because I think it's clearly a political lifeline that Bush is grasping for to ride out the last of his tenure. Still, the insurgency's motivations aren't exactly mysterious: Yankee Go Home. And they're clearly willing to sacrifice a lot: suicide bombers exist, and have flourished in Iraq. Is there any compromise possible with these actors? No. Is there any incentive the US can give them for desisting? No. So what will an American escalation produce?

You got it -- an Iraqi escalation:

At the same time, the Mahdi Army in Sadr City has begun a conscription drive to expand its ranks. Every family with a male between the ages of 15 and 45 is being forced to relinquish him to the militia.

Escalation: designed to fail.

Things I did not know, cont.

Washington DC: Not actually built on a swamp.

Journalism Cliché watch

Olaf says:

Third: If you think any news sources is completely bias-free, you've got another thing coming.

True, which is why most of the journalists I've ever spoken with (and it's the family business, I've spoken with more than a few) don't use the word bias to discuss their professional conduct. They prefer "objectivity". It may sound like semantics, but it's possible for a journalist to concede that (as a human with an intact brain) they are indeed biased. Nevertheless, it's also possible for them to remain objective.

Another way to put it would be to say it's possible to be biased without being unfair or reporting untruths. If the Tories screw up and have a bad news day, it's not because the media hates them, it's because the government having a bad news day is what the media is supposed to cover. This remains true even if the media does, in fact, hate them.

As for the specifics of Liberal bloggers screaming about Pierre Bourque (who?) he seems to be Canada's answer to Matt Drudge, so I hereby intend to give one the amount of attention I pay to the other. Guess how much?

Meanwhile, Jenna Bush was drunkenly dragged from a club somewhere in DC

Prince William is beginning life as an army officer after arriving at the barracks of his new regiment.

William, who is second in line to the throne, will report for duty later for his first official day with the Household Cavalry.

The 24-year-old, who is joining the Blues and Royals regiment, will be based at Combermere Barracks, Windsor.

After his first year in the Army, the prince will turn his attention to constitutional affairs.

This process will be in anticipation of when he eventually accedes the throne.

By joining the Army, William is following in the footsteps of younger brother Harry.

Say this for the Europeans -- they do aristocracy right. It would be unthinkable for someone with William or even Harry's proximity to the throne to not serve, war or no.

Meanwhile, North Americans seem to allow our aristocrats to have all the wealth and power of old-school nobility without any, uh, nobility.

Woe unto the fans

Slactivist on the awkwardness that is cheering Philly against New Orleans:

I know, I know -- it's just a football game. But I also know this: New Orleans needs this. How do I know that? Because Philadelphia needs this too. And, since Philly wasn't nearly destroyed and then left to die, I'm guessing that New Orleans maybe needs this a little bit more.

Things I find amusing

1) When I put a post up at Ezra's, no matter how prominent the words "Posted by John" appear, someone always thinks it's Ezra writing. Sometimes many someones.

2) The number -- apparently limitless -- who think they might score a "gotcha" by asking whether I drive a Hybrid or something. For the record: Living in downtown Toronto, I own no car and feel no compunction to. I'm writing this by the light of a single CFL bulb. We've had freakishly mild weather, so the furnace isn't on. I think over the summer the A/C was on for all of 14 days, cumulative. I do eat more beef than is probably good for me, but Vicki and I have been making efforts to cut out the worst forms of meat. I love tofu, but when you live with Vicki, that's not optional.

(Some of these statements aren't my doing -- I live in the basement of a house, so heating/cooling decisions aren't up to me.)

I don't know why so many people assume that if I'm saying things like "people should drive less", I'm secretly just hoping there will be fewer people in the path of my Hummer.

Oh, SNAP

Paul Krugman:

But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush’s ego, suggesting that he might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group — Daddy’s men coming in to fix Junior’s mess, etc. — Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?

Lessons Unlearned

This story has been making the rounds a bit -- apparently, the Iraqi Parliament is about to vote on the new national Oil Law, and it's effectively a giveaway to the usual suspects.

(But remember children, the invasion of Iraq had NOTHING TO DO WITH OIL.)

It's important not to overstate the likelihood of these agreements actually lasting. A "30-year contract" isn't likely to last 30 years, and frankly I'd be surprised if they last 30 months. Based on the experience of the oil majors in Russia, I expect the story will go something like this:

• Negotiate sweetheart deals while the government is in no position to bargain.
• The government is in a cruddy position up to the moment it begins to regain effective control of its borders and people.
• The old deals are "renegotiated" as the reinvigorated government takes control.

Honestly, I don't think this law will last longer than it takes for one side to win the civil war post-US departure. Any company that stakes its profitability on these ventures is just throwing away money.

Then there's the other thing -- the frankly queasy sight of the American government pushing this law (though Washington's fingerprints are being laundered through the IMF and World Bank) on Iraq in the middle of a bloodletting. Maybe the Iraqi Parliament has other things it could pay attention to?

Strange Bedfellows

Me and the NRA.

Extra! Extra! GM announces car I might actually buy, some day

Put this in the good news category: GM has finally confirmed that, yes, it is planning a plug-in hybrid model - the Chevy Volt. Better still, they've actually exceeded my expectations in one area: I'd assumed the first PIHs on the market would have rather short all-electric ranges (20 miles or so.) GM says that the Volt will have an AER of about 40 miles, after which it will switch to the internal combustion engine. Incidentally, 40 miles is the US average daily two-way commute. Charging capability at workplaces would make it possible to live an almost gasoline-free life. If you're an ethanol buff, it's also flex-fuel capable, sipping anything from 100% gasoline to 85% ethanol.

It being a GM car, there's some concern whether this will actually make it off the show floor and in to people's garages -- GM hasn't yet announced a battery supplier, kinda an important aspect of the car. On the other hand, given the negative publicity from the recent documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? I'd be willing to bet that GM won't strangle this baby in the crib.

Let's see what Toyota and Honda do to raise the ante. For the first time in a while, I'm actually optimistic about the automobile industry.

Bad GOP idea for the week

Long ago, in a blog far far away, I used to write a lot more about energy issues. Haven't done that a lot lately, mostly because I figure a lot of it's already been said and I have no interest in repeating myself. (I suppose I could take requests...) But every once in a while something new pops up that piques my interest. Today, it's Jackson Diehl's weeks-old op-ed in the Washington Post (somehow I missed it on December 25th) ably deconstructed by Jerome a Paris here.

The short version is: A NATO response to the Russians charging market prices for their gas is probably a bad idea. The long version is below.

To crib some beginning points from Jerome, let's point out the basics:

• The Russians haven't charged usurious gas rates to their former satellites. They've brought their contract prices up to market levels. While this is an economic shock to the long-subsidized states of the former USSR and Warsaw Pact, this isn't (or shouldn't rightly be) a cause for alarm and sabre-rattling.


• The French and Germans are doing the least screaming about this, the British and Americans are doing the most. Is this because the Germans are surrender-monkeys, or because of the downturn in British and American domestic gas production?
  
  
• Russia simply cannot afford to "cut off" Europe's natural gas. Gas is more like electricity than oil -- it moves through pipelines, and it's not possible for Russia to simply find other customers to sell to. It's either Europe or nothing. (Russia is in the process of planning and building a Siberian pipeline to Japan and China, but that's nowhere near completion and will have limited uses anyway.) In any case, scaremongering over any kind of embargo is delusional.

Notwithstanding all this, Richard Lugar wants NATO to start working on a unified response to any kind of gas cutoff to member states.

Weakening Russia's hold over European energy supplies requires measures that would be costly and difficult, such as building new terminals for importing liquefied natural gas or new pipelines to carry oil and gas from Central Asia and the Caucasus to Europe.

Or, you know, using less gas. Which, if you're concerned about global warming, you should be doing anyway. Maybe I'm in a bad mood today, but this bit really got me:

That sounds daunting at a time when NATO has its hands full trying to fight a war in Afghanistan. But the energy threat goes to the alliance's historic purpose: defending democratic Europe from attack by the autocratic and belligerent power on its Eastern frontier.

Sure, but when NATO started the "autocratic and belligerent power on the Eastern frontier" was in Germany. The Clinton administration pushed those frontiers a hell of a long way further east. Like it or not, that move -- and the ensuing departure of former satellites from Russia's sphere of influence -- is what has brought us to this point in the game. Putin sees no need to subsidize Georgian or Ukrainian industries with cheap gas -- why should he? Is there something inherently evil with charging market prices for energy?

This is all extremely silly anyway. First off, to my knowledge the US as yet imports exactly zero natural gas from Russia, making this a purely European matter. That may change in the future with LNG terminals, but even if the US does begin importing from Russia, the simplest, fastest, and cheapest way for any country to reduce its vulnerability to natural gas shortages is to unplug some air conditioners in the summer. (Warmer winters are already taken care of.)

Talk of using an explicitly military alliance as a means of "dealing with" that uppity Russian is a recipe for disaster. And, incidentally, its exactly the kind of thinking that's got America hip-deep in the big sandy. Instead of going to the military drawer any time there's even a prospect of higher energy prices, let's please consider something as radical as consuming less.

The mysterious case of the perpetual-motion pork

No, not graft, actual pork. As in breakfast sausage.

Waking up this morning, I started making breakfast for Vicki. (Note to men: make your girlfriends breakfast. They'll be yours forever.) We have this rectangular teflon plug-in griddle that my mom got from Wal-Mart many years ago, and still works just fine. It's particularly well suited for making bacon, eggs, pancakes, and today I discovered it's excellent for breakfast sausage as well.

So I'm cooking the sausages and trying to cook them evenly, and as I move one sausage, it starts rolling across the griddle. It hits the far edge, bounces off and rolls to the other side. At which point, it bounces again, and keeps on rolling, and rolling, and rolling. This goes on for like a minute before I work up the nerve to intervene.

Vicki says she woke up to the sound of me muttering, and I can only assume I was subconsciously berating the sausage for defying the laws of physics. Now she's angry I didn't wake her up to come see.

We have a weird household.

(I assume the observed phenomenon has something to do with the lubricating effects of pork fat and the energy imparted by the griddle. Anyone else have a better explanation?)

Technology marches on

Ropeadope, a seven-year-strong record label... has announced that it is going 100% pure digital. Every release will be available on ropeadope.com in the MP3 format, as well as the major online music retailers...

I asked Ropeadope founder Andy Hurwitz why he's taking his label digital, and what he expects the pluses and minuses to be.

He responded,

"Why digital? It's funny, I almost feel like this is what they asked Rykodisc back in the '80's when they started going exclusively with CDs over vinyl. [Digital is] not just the future, it's the present, at least amongst our fans. We've seen our traditional sales plummet and our digital sales skyrocket. But on top of a purely economic decision, it's an amazing opportunity for us to find and expose tons of great music and fantastic artists.

"Advantages? We now make money on every single project from record one. We don't have to deal with returns and reserves, we can sign and release a new band in a matter of weeks, and it helps bring traffic to our website.

"Disadvantages? I'm really searching for some here. I guess the only disadvantage is the learning curve--folks are still trying to understand why we're doing this and how it works. But once we're up and running I think it will become obvious."

It will be interesting to see if other labels pick up on this. If that's not just PR talking -- if they really do make money on each track sold from day one -- that's not just better, that's revolutionary. Fantastic.

Yes, yes he is.

Why I love Wikipedia: At the end of new Environment Minister John Baird's entry (dunno how long it'll stay like this) we get this bit of "trivia":

He is gayer than Liberace's poodle.

And they say it's unreliable...

[Update, a bit later: It seems there are persistent rumours that Mr. Baird is, in fact, gay. Don't bother me none of course, but I'll state for record that when I wrote the above, the idea was to mock Wikipedia's... whimsical style, not Mr. Baird. Apologies to anyone who I inadvertently offended. Now, I continue to be left short by the idea of any person siding with a party that wants to strip same-sex couples (and individuals) of their rights, but that would be the case whether Baird is gay or straight.]

Two things jump out at me about John Baird's record:

• They call him "Mr. Fixit", but he seems more like the quintessential good soldier. Started out as a moderate in the earliest part of Harris' government here in Ontario, and swung right and saw his career advance. Backed Flaherty for leader and was beaten twice -- Eves and then Tory -- but the thing that never changes is his willingness to be a cooperative mouthpiece.
  
  
• He opposed banning same-sex marriage, and worked to pass it here in Ontario. That, at least, marks him as one of the "sane" Conservatives. So huzzah for that.

More substantially, he was Energy Minister during Ontario's disaster of an attempt at privatizing Hydro. Nobody seriously pretends that the fiasco was his fault -- it was directed from the Premier's office start to finish -- but we're still paying the price here in Ontario for the bastardized hybrid system we've got here.

Anyway, with Khan's defection this morning, the official count for the Tories+NDP is 154, meaning that even if the Libs and the BQ vote against the government, it's possible for the Tories to stay in power. In order to do that, however, Harper needs to deal with the NDP.

Funny thing is, I wouldn't be surprised if the environment came out ahead in this scenario -- it's well known that the right always has the ability to "go to China" on some issues in a way that the centre and left never can. If Harper is so inclined (read: if he thinks it can win him the election) he could push a much stronger environmental plan than the one on the books, and stronger even than the one Dion could get away with.

The Liberals would then pretend they meant to do the same during their 11 years in power but just, kind of, y'know, never got around to it. They would then proceed to savage the NDP for agreeing to a deal whether it was good or not. Except... what happens if the deal actually is good, good enough to draw the BQ on side? Then the Liberals are in a hell of a bind.

I'm not saying it can only happen this way, but I wouldn't be surprised. Harper needs something to put him ahead in the polls, and the Bloc and NDP both have a huge interest in damaging the Liberals any way they can. There's the strong chance in this scenario of electing a Harper majority next time out, however.

Promotions

So General Petraeus is being promoted to top General in Iraq. Good for him. If you don't know about this Petraeus fellow, the sentence-long description of him is "the one general to leave Iraq looking better than when he came in." After his first tour in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne division -- where he had some substantial successes under his belt -- he returned to the US to write the US Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine. Pretty much everyone has a high opinion of him -- see Spencer Ackerman and Juan Cole, for typical examples.

Which is what makes his promotion such a shame. If there's one officer that the US Army needs, it's men like Petraeus. But he's being promoted to preside over a funeral -- mourning the rotting corpse of US ambitions in Iraq. Any delusions that he can "turn things around" in Iraq would have been appropriate, oh, in August of 2003 or so. Now it's all fantasy.

One of the basic rules of war: Commanders matter (quite a lot) but they aren't miracle workers. You can do everything right and still lose.

The US will have to leave Iraq, will have to do it under Petraeus' tenure (almost certainly) and his career will bear the black mark for that failure, even if the failure isn't his. The military is not generally amenable to the "nobody else could have done better" argument, even when it's clearly true, so when disasters happen officers tend to be sacked.

One final thing to note is that at least part of Petraeus' success -- and here I don't want to take anything from the man -- is due to the fact that he was operating in some of the most heavily-Kurd areas of Iraq, where US presence is still popular. It doesn't diminish any of his successes to say that he had some advantages commanders in other locations didn't.

Um, no.

Jake Tapper of ABC News did the unthinkable -- asked Senators who voted for the Iraq War if they'd do so again. He finds that the Iraq War resolution would now be defeated, 57-43. Sure it would.

As useless as these kinds of speculation are, it's even more worthless when Salon.com writes the headline:

If senators could rewrite history, the war wouldn't have happened

I don't know how many times we have to go through this. Even at the time, the White House was very clear: If they'd lost the vote in 2002, they were going to claim the right to invade Iraq based on the resolution passed after 9/11. The same way Bush claimed that if they lost at the UN, they'd still claim the right to invade based on the resolutions passed in 1996.

If the Senators had done their duty and voted against Bush, there would still have been a war. Bush would simply have ignored them. What their votes would have contributed was ending the war more quickly once it became the disaster it has.

Monsters, monsters, monsters

Unconscionable. Jose Padilla -- American citizen, and probably innocent by the standards of western justice (which, pre-9/11, would've just meant "innocent") -- has been tortured and abused to such an extent that he's lost his mind. Literally driven to insanity by the cruelty of the Bush regime.

And now:

...there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, "the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person."

Step 1: Torture the victim until insanity sets in.

Step 2: Declare the person insane.

Step 3: Keep them locked up, medicated, and silenced for the rest of their lives.

As Digby notes, we've seen this before.

There's something horrible about watching a friend and ally adopting all the worst aspects of paranoid power. January 2009 can't come soon enough.

The good news yesterday was the beginning of real change in Congress. Even better news is that the Dems are apparently coming out against Bush's escalation in Iraq.

Haw friggin haw

You may remember -- or not -- a while back the Associated Press reported that 6 people were burned alive outside a mosque while the Iraqi Army sat by and watched. This would just be one punctuation of the general grotesquerie that is Iraq, except that the right-wing bloggers seized on this report, and specifically a source they claimed didn't exist named "Jamil Hussein", as an attempt to discredit the report (and reinforce the myth of the left-wing defeatist media.)

In one sense of course, it was always meaningless. It's not like you can fake the society-wide violence and destruction, even with the occasional planted story.

In any case, the Interior Ministry of Iraq today confirmed that yes, Jamil Hussein exists, and yes, he's an Iraqi soldier. And having been identified, he's now likely to be arrested and tried. Good work, right wingers!

The first time I've watched Leno in a long, long time

Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamura on Heroes) on Leno - talking about his first job as a coder for ILM, his switch to acting, and his childhood as a Japanese-American nerd.

Great entrance, especially if you remember this.

That's my girl

Vicki asks:

What would happen if you put Schrodinger's cat and Pavlov's dog together in the same room?

A brief, funny blog post. But when someone asks you that in the kitchen, it's impossible not to spend the next few hours with that question running through your mind. Does the dog both drool-and-not-drool until the bell is rung?

Tell me you're not still using IE

Brian Krebs at the Washington Post has a funny post: After looking at the number of security holes in IE and Firefox, combined with the number of days it took to patch them, Krebs has the total number of days for which each browser was "insecure".

Internet Explorer: 284 days, or just over nine months.

Firefox: Nine days.

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So despite the fact that HDTVs sold like hotcakes this Christmas, high-definition DVD players mostly languished on the shelves. That's serious - if either rival standard (HD-DVD/Blu-ray) had won out, the industry probably would have let things go on. But it's pretty clear now that standard war has stalemated, and it's harming sales. So we're seeing three responses, two legitimate and one not:

Dual-format drives: LG is set to unveil a dual-format that will be capable of playing both HD and Blu-ray DVDs. Once LG does, you can bet other brands will follow - there's already rumours of a Samsung model.

Dual-format discs: Warner Bros. is announcing a new format of disc that would contain both HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats, with the possibility of a later disc that would contain DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray all in one. Not only would this be a gift to consumers (although they'd probably end up paying more) but retailers would love it -- in the long term, it would reduce the number of formats on their shelves from 3 to 1.

Piracy: Arrr. Whatever method industry chooses, there's plenty of reasons not to buy either format, including a truly nasty level of DRM (potentially, you could buy a disc, put it in your player, and find it unable to play. Then try returning an opened DVD these days.) But what if you really, really, really want the pretty pretty pictures? Well, you take a look at backupHDDVD v1.0, released today. Apparently, the AACS encryption system that BR and HDDVD share can be circumvented, if not actually "cracked". Or something. I'm not entirely sure. In any case, no level of encryption stays bullet-proof for very long, especially for consumer goods.

Link-dump

Nuclear war: Bad for humans, good for global warming. Nuclear winter = cooling, war = less consumers for SUVs. It's practically a win-win!

Saudi Arabia and America: Turns out America exported it's own version of Jim Crow to Saudi Arabia when they first set up shop in the 1940s. But remember everyone, nothing America ever does in the past is relevant to the present.

700 Million middle-class Chinese consumers by 2020. Vaguely terrifying and exhilarating all at once. If we survive to 2030, I think we might actually make it after all on this crazy chunk of iron and silicon we call home.

The Market never fails. Never!

via Battlepanda, this is a fascinating story: Dallas Food Blog did a major 10-part series on some boutique brand of chocolate that's one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, in the world -- as much as $2,000 a pound. Turns out, the company (Noka) is buying commercially available chocolate, changing the ingredients not one whit, doing an amateurish job making the chocolates, and putting it in fancy boxes. The price reflects absolutely nothing of substance, and derives entirely from good PR.

I'm with BP on this one when she says:

Mark Thoma at the Economist's View, in particular, characterized the scandalously high prices charged by NoKa chocolates as a market failure. Well, if we count price anomalies caused by good advertising, branding and public relations as market failures, this really throws off the assumption that the market is essentially efficient.

Of course it does. The only consistent definition of a "market failure" seems to be "grossly unethical behaviour that even economists can't justify."

This is what bothers me about how we view a "market failure" -- it presumes that the default position is that the market will act efficiently, and that "failures" are the exception. (And here it's probable that I've simply been raised in a neoliberal environment for my entire life, and get cranky over things like this.) But the lesson of Keynes is that, in fact, the market naturally tends towards crisis. And the lesson of Stiglitz is that information asymmetries are everywhere, and that market failures are therefore inevitable. That is, market "failures" are part of the system. Hell, if you define unreasonably high prices as market failure then software, pharmaceuticals, and much of the media and fashion world exist in a permanent state of market failure. So how can it be a failure, if it's clearly what the market is built to do?

A rational society would recognize that there are many areas where business has no business, and would further recognize that some areas of the market need the strictest regulation. There are clearly a whole bunch of things that the market alone doesn't do well (like prevent abusive chocolatiers from fleecing their customers) because that's not what the market is designed to do. Indeed, the market is perfectly designed to produce unethical behaviour, and is only restrained by the moral sense of the actors involved, or the force of law. Only people who've drunk too deeply of Adam Smith's demon rum would believe otherwise.

Better examples abound -- look at the US medical insurance industry, which seems to exist for the sole purpose of not insuring people who need medicine. "Market failure"? No, because the market doesn't exist to properly and universally insure the sick. Calling it a market failure is like driving your Civic in to a lake and describing the inevitable disaster as an "automobile failure" -- it's not meant to do that, don't ask it to.

If you want universal coverage at fair prices, go to the state. If you want market insurance, accept more poor and dead people -- especially children and seniors. But don't, as a country, choose market insurance and whine about how it's not serving everybody. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves...

Now, I don't actually care a whole lot about some poor saps who got suckered in to paying exorbitant prices for mediocre chocolate. (Dymaxion World Shopping Tip: Chocolate is never more valuable than gold or platinum. DWST service is provided free, because I'm a dirty Commie.) But in my continuing battle to rehabilitate a direct government hand in the economy, I'll take any example that's reasonably interesting. Then I will make it boring.

Oh jeebus somebody smack him

Compassionate conservatism at its best, via Spencer Ackerman:

One of McCain's aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really "work out," Bush replied, "What do you mean?"

For the record: John McCain was tortured severely by the North Vietnamese during his imprisonment. His range of motion in his arms and legs is extremely limited -- something an observer can immediately see in his Daily Show appearances! -- and this makes things like push-ups or bench presses extremely difficult.

George W. Bush: Stupider, crueler, and more oblivious than you think, even when you already assume he's stupider, crueler, and more oblivious than you think.

Like getting socks on Christmas morning

...when what you wanted was a motorbike. Chris Hitchens:

The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.

How could it have come to this?

How, indeed? It's almost as if Hitchens has forgotten his role cheering this war, defending those prosecuting it in spite of Himalayan-scale incompetence. Now, they manage to lynch a guilty man -- I, too, thought it was impossible -- in such a way that one of the world's worst people ends up looking sympathetic to his own victims.

Hitchens no doubt thought his pretty little war would have a different climax. Problem is, he and his side spent the last 4 years agitating for this war, sliming the Democrats who called for competence, and denigrating anyone who called for a measure of Jus in Bello.

Hitchens, well, hitched his wagon to this train. It takes some real gall to wake up out of his bourbon-induced stupor, look around, and say "But it wasn't supposed to be like this! Why is a chimp driving this thing?"

And Hitch seems to have decided he's not so wild about the Iraqi democrats-to-be, after all:

The shabby, tawdry scene of Muqtada Sadr's riffraff taunting their defenseless former tyrant evokes exactly this quality of hysterical falsity and bravado. While Saddam Hussein was alive, they cringed. Now, they find their lost courage, and meanwhile take the drill and the razor blade and the blowtorch to their fellow Iraqis.

How could it have come to this? Who could possibly have predicted that toppling Hussein would unleash sectarian hatred? Why were those people ignored?

Oh, that's right. There were ignored because Christopher-goddam-Hitchens was on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News every other day.

For those problem alcoholics/climate change nerds

An interesting discussion about an apparently-common attempt to deny climate change facts: English vineyards. (Link is several months old, sadly. Bad me!)

Apparently, morons climate change denialists believe that:

a) There were vineyards in England during the medieval period, therefore it must have been warm.

b) There are no vineyards in England today, therefore it cannot be as warm now as it was back then.

c) It must therefore be "cooler" now than it was back in the golden bright days of English wine-making.

Problem: There are over 400 English vineyards in operation today, with one in Scotland.

Interesting....

We'll see how far this goes.

NEW YORK - As if its options woes weren't trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players.

The case, filed July 21, is over Apple's use of a copy-protection system that generally prevents iTunes music and video from playing on rival players. Likewise, songs purchased elsewhere aren't easily playable on iPods.

Cute phrasing - "aren't easily playable on iPods." A more accurate phrase would have been "not legally playable on iPods". To play another company's copy-protected songs on an iPod, you either need to a) defeat Apple's DRM software, or b) defeat the other companies'. Either act is illegal under American law, and until the courts rule otherwise, that means for home use too.

So the only reasonable tactic is to buy the CD (possibly DRMed as well!) or buy your tunes from eMusic.

Reason #MMMCCCXVIII why I'm glad to be Canadian

Retired Gen. John M. Shalikashvili:

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers....

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

I suppose at this point the classy thing for me to do would be lauding Gen. Shalikashvili for writing this op-ed in the NYT. But I can't help but think of the tens of thousands of lives that have been ruined because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now the good General thinks maybe those queers are all right after all, just because Uncle Sam needs some more bodies in Baghdad? Sorry, that's crap.

In the early Clinton years, we had a choice between two approaches. There was roughly the Clinton choice and the Shalikashvili choice: Clinton's civilian leadership said, essentially, screw the military (for now), they'll get used to gays, and meanwhile there's an issue of human rights to fix. The military said, essentially, no screw you, we ain't takin' no fags. Well, turns out the Clinton people were right - the military did get used to gays, but men like Shalikashvili still want to keep believing they were right to keep discriminating anyway.

Blech. Even if it's turning out for the better now, it's.... depressing.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turnin'

A small country with a legacy of colonialism. An ineffective government, with a civil war being abetted by foreign powers. An American President desperate not to withdraw America's forces from the scene, but convinced disaster awaits if America's prestige is allowed to falter. A general sense that the war may very well be unwinnable, but that the government needs to escalate forces anyway, to show that America did everything in it's power to avert disaster.

Iraq, 2007? Try South Vietnam, 1964.

Almost done Dereliction of Duty, and it makes me sick how little we've learned. The bubble that McNamara and others built around first Kennedy, then Johnson is a clone of the one Cheney and Rumsfeld built around Bush. But specifically the period of late 1964 to early 1965, as Johnson was debating how to respond to the Gulf of Tonkin and other North Vietnamese provocations. (Which themselves were responses to American attacks, but more on that later.) What most struck me was the position that some took - essentially, they argued that even if America ended up losing in Vietnam (remember, this is before the massive increases in men that were coming) it would be worth fighting to show that America wouldn't simply abandon its other allies.

Problem was, all these forces were being committed to Vietnam based on a theory that couldn't be falsified. The idea was that North Vietnam would eventually buckle if Washington simply showed how serious it was to defend the South. So when the North failed to buckle under, it wasn't evidence that the North viewed reunification as vital to it's national interests - it was seen as proof that Washington hadn't "communicated" its will effectively. So the US got put on the treadmill for an eventual force of over 500,000 men in Vietnam. And they still lost.

Two things to draw from this: One, you really do need an obvious negative result in any theory. But better still, don't waste human lives on a fucking theory. Two, it may very well be impossible to create a reputation contrary to your adversary's perception of you, especially if your adversary is actually correct. The North Vietnamese gambled correctly that America would not sustain a long, costly, losing war in Indochina. Washington gambled on some other outcome. Oops.

Saddam really cared about America, y'know?

Has to be seen to be believed: Saddam Hussein's note of condolence to President Reagan after the Challenger blew up.

At least now they'll both get to catch up. By the fire, if you get my meaning.

And as we all know, nothing bad ever happened in Iraq ever again.

So... Saddam Hussein is dead. When Bismarck said the Balkans weren't worth "the bones of a single Pomeranian Grenadier", he was apparently delusionally wrong. Pomeranian Grenadiers -- or Iowan Infantrymen -- are quite cheap, especially if you throw their bones away in far-away places and don't raise anyone's taxes. So cheap, in fact, that you can throw away 618,000 American bones (with the dead alone!) in the pursuit of a single Arab tyrant.

Remember, other Arab tyrants are on Dubya's hit list.

Nixon should have been hanged, cont.

Was at a family gathering, and talked a bit about Nixon. My father said, quoting him inexactly, that "as angry as I was then, Ford's pardon of Nixon was probably the right thing to do."

Oh, you couldn't frame a more perfect scene of generations at loggerheads -- politely, of course. I think my dad might have expected me to call him a sellout to the man, but I already called him a flag-burning hippy a few days earlier for impugning the majestic Canadian Goose. (The only time the word "majestic" will be used for that rodent of the sky, btw.) Still: Dude, what happened to you? You used to be cool.

My argument is simple: Nixon paid no meaningful price for his actions, so nobody's behaviour changed. Republicans continued to be criminals -- see Iran-Contra, the multiple felons of the Reagan-Bush administrations, and the continuing abuses today. Democrats continue to have to pick up the mess, and get blamed for the outcomes.

My father countered with the Church Commission, and the layers of oversight added during the Carter administration. Call me cynical, but a six-year interregnum between the fall of one attempted tyrant (Nixon) and the rise of his constitution-shredding heir (Reagan) isn't exactly a golden age of peace and justice. Hell, the English managed to go 11 years without a King, and we've got monarchy imprinted in our genes.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, let's ask ourselves why no German army has crossed the Rhine since 1945. Numerous reasons -- including 6 million Soviet soldiers on the wrong side of the Polish border! -- but surely one of the reasons that a Franco-German war is unthinkable today is because in Germany today, it is a crime punishable by imprisonment to deny Hitler's crimes. I'm not wild about those laws, but at it's root the law comes from society, and in this case society chose to silence lies. Consequently, two generations of Germans have been raised without being allowed a doubt of Nazi perfidy.

Pan right to the modern Republican Party, specifically Ford's pardon of Nixon. This is literally the antithesis of Germany's laws -- not only is it perfectly acceptable to argue that Nixon committed no crimes, by the conventions of modern writing, all we ever get to call Nixon is an alleged criminal. That his guilt is well-documented and a historical fact doesn't matter in modern debate. The Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys of today thrive on that ambiguity. Instead of being constrained by the bounds of taste, or in the German example the bounds of law, they argue that the White House that defiled the Constitution three times before a breakfast of tranquilizers and scotch was "patriotic" and "ambushed by the liberal media."

Was Ford's pardon of Nixon healing? Probably, in the same way a lobotomy is therapeutic. But it robbed Americans of their memory of how vile he was. Remembered accurately, Nixon would be recalled as the man who was so insane by 1974 his National Security Advisor told the military not to obey any of Nixon's orders without his concurrence. The rule of law in America was so imperiled it fell to men like Henry Kissinger to keep the President from bringing the US Army in to the streets of Washington during the Watergate endgame.

Finally, I'm highly skeptical of the argument that America couldn't withstand the stress of the criminal trial of an ex-President. The biggest piece of evidence here is the simple fact that Ford's pardon was probably the biggest hit in the polls and President has ever taken in the modern era -- Ford lost 20% in the polls, extremely rapidly. Without the pardon, Ford may very well have been re-elected. How can that possibly be squared with the idea that America is too fragile for accountability?

More than the law, more than the men (and occasional women) who hold office, what matters in politics is the stories that we tell ourselves. The Liberals will always have a hard time in Alberta because of the story - not the reality - of the NEP. The Southern US continues to live a lie about the Civil War, and American race relations continue to suffer because of it. Hell, look at our current situation: Because of the commonly-held stories about 9/11 (Hussein planned it!) Bush got away with murder for five years. There's always a certain amount of falsehoods to our histories, but an honest nation would try to get the big stuff factually correct.

Ford's pardon robbed America of even the chance of writing the proper ending to Nixon's story, and for that he earns his place beside the other Republican Presidents of the 20th century - where they weren't mediocre, they were positively evil.

Happy 2007, Everyone

A lot of the bloggers I've read seem to have had a miserable 2006, and are waiting for 2007 to pick up their moods. I don't see what all the complaints are about. I had a great year!

-Finally got my BA, allowing me to return home to Toronto,
-Where I now get to live with my girlfriend (being apart for 4 years -- even just the gap between Ottawa and Toronto -- sucked ass. Don't do it.)
-Everything else is pretty minor, all things considered. But I also had a short-term job in the summer that I really enjoyed and have now been unemployed for 4 months.

Leading to my New Years Resolution: Get a job before the last of my savings run out! Also, lose some weight.