Gee, 10% off the gross reduces Microsoft profit by... 10%?:)
Surely there is a provision to deprive the naughty party of all its ill-gotten gain? The framers may not have had the profit margins of the software industry in mind -- these aren't widgets.
Probably the EU allows a private right of action, class action, something?
As already written, I share your concern over unjustified invasions of privacy, but the problem has been with us for a long time, long before the RIAA or music recording existed. Indeed, it was of the primary things that pissed off the revolutionaries, especially the "general warrant" that let troops search as they pleased for fun and harassment.
Incidentally, subpoenas and search warrants are very different things, which different levels of proof and procedural safeguards. A subpoena provides the opportunity to be heard in opposition, to "quash" the demand for evidence. Furnishing false information for civil subpoenas would open the industry to some staggering class action lawsuits; that would be making an example of someone! A criminal subpoena (from a prosecutor) also provides an opportunity to be heard. A warrant is a relatively big deal to obtain, and its abuse is a civil rights violation.
I don't believe things like subpoenas and search warrants are "safe" -- the Starr investigation revealed the unchecked power of grand jury subpoenas -- just that there are supposed to be safeguards and accountability, mechanisms that we have to stand up for no matter what the law at stake concerns. In a way the subpoena is the more frightening for its power to force you to fess up whatever the questioner desires. But these are fundamental questions about democracy that are far broader than copyright squabbles.
Just prepping discussion of Patriot II: The Civil Libertarian's Nightmare.:)
Corporate tension between making profits one way (ISP) versus another (DMCA) (who's Mr. Hyde?)
How big companies try to spin things to avoid blame ("we had to squeal")
Personally, I think the burden of proof for the subpoena is the whole bananna. Note that once the RIAA has your name, is still must make its case you broke the rules. They'll maybe get part of that by suckering you into downloading directly from decoy computers. The hard part will be getting you for nickle-and-dime offenses. More likely, they'll look for the folks who host thousands of titles on P2P. And perhaps they should.
I don't really have a problem with copyright in the abstract, unlike many here, but do with the basic privacy issue in careless attempts at enforcement. Can weirdoes (e.g., Capitol Records:) get my name and address from an ISP on a whim? Just on grounds of personal safety, let alone privacy, this is not a good trend. (We're not in the phone book, never have been, for example, but the internet has the number anyway... enough exposure already.) I'm among those who doesn't want strangers flipping through any data about me without a convincing reason. This whoke binge of law enforcement, civil and criminal, could make for some really lousy precedent, such as we're seeing already in the jurisdiction battles over libel.
Perhaps the simplest fix is a method of IP obfuscation. But anonymizing makes legitimate enforcement of far more compelling laws (kiddie porn, stalking, etc.) will become more difficult -- yet another side-effect of this whole enterprise.
Nice to see some positive mention of Salon, though. They did some interesting journalism a while ago, and I wonder if those days are long gone.
And that old rabble-rouser opposed ratifying the Constitution butterly. A very independent-minded guy.
The other example mentioned, Thomas Jefferson, is an even more complex character, given his shifting views aas he contributed far more material to our culture than Mr. Henry's one classic line. On slavery, he wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." His relationship with Sally Hemings, still not entirely resolved, adds to the mix. (Speaking of complex icons, I felt a little sheepish when I realized the White House and Congress were built with slave labor. Of course.)
Metaphors are nice, but... I'm not suggesting God is going to weigh in on copyright enforcement, and if anyone wants to dies over it, well, I'll be sure to read about it. To exaggerate the debate is to trivialize it.:)
I just checked, and marijuana (from the hemp plant) apparently was cultivated thousands of years ago in central asia (yes, China), then made its way west to Europe. It was imported (alien species!) to the New World very around 1600, as the hemp provided valuable fiber. I saw the stuff growing wild many feet tall in Asia, which was kind of startling. The varieties grown for drug use has been refined to have many times the THC of the wild variety. The US prohibits growing low-THC hemp for the idiotic reason that it makes law enforcement look bad. Soem argue it does have economic value.
Don't ask me to connect pot and natural selection....
Sickle cell is oh-so-nasty, and even the heterozygotes show some mild symptoms. Yes, I learned the same thing sickle cell and malaria. Only a fraction (8-45% by region) of Africans have the trait, so probably people with it simply survive somewhat more often. I guess it was a glitch at some point that helped, but was not do-or-die essential to survival.
Most species are going to have predators pleased to greet them, as most plants and animals are edible. What's important is the edge, a relative rather than absolute advantage over native species.
A couple of examples are kudzu and zebra mussels -- they don't complain about much. Our local favorite is the Asian "tiger" mosquito. But there are serious bad effects from monoculture -- one disease can destroy everything in its path. Think Windows desktops and a nasty virus.
Nature will tend to reach an equilibrium, or oscillate wildly, or the newcomers either exterminate the old, or vice versa. There are equatios for estimating equilibrium. Only in a really catastrophic situation does shortage of food supply rein in the invader. But evolution, as opposed to natural selection, is slow, so an alien species can easily exterminate native species before they have a chance to develop defenses, even to the point of suicide. Hawaii is suffering significant losses of species diversity because of newcomers. It takes thousands or millions of years for a new species to develop, yet perhaps the blink of an eye to perish.
I hate seeing natural selection described as some sort of moral quest for the "best," when it's just a way of explaining natural phenomena (I'm not saying you're doing that, but lots of people do). Darwin didn't judge was was "best," just tried to predict which species would do better under given circumstances. Nature doesn't care about the outcome, or become improved as a result. Species diversity is often the preferable situation.
Maybe I'm being clueless, but I'm hazy on your relevance to "devil's weed," slang for pot (which does grow quite nicely in the wild).
I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.
When Apple first promoted SCSI, it was a very novel deal. PC's lagged considerably, esp. when you could get a Mac with serial (Appletalk) and SCSI built-in. Once they had SCSI, I guess was cheaper to string the hard drive into rather than add IDE? I kinda wished they jammed a parallel port and RS-232 in there, too, but that's greedy.
Also, why does IDE not do external devices?
I'll note that SCSI was hardly ideal, esp. in its earliest form. The chain could onlt be very short, and ordering the devices plus termination were a bit of black magic to get it to work. God forbid you pull a cable with the power on. Plus the SCSI cables were *expensive*.
Does anyone else remember "analysts" making fun of Apple for going to USB and Firewire?
GM has been looking to spin off DirecTV for years now. They want to pare down to a core business (cars), that's why they sold the satellite division of Hughes. They were at first reluctant to let go of the rest, though many of us (I'm a stockholder) think the division wouild do much better on its own. It's certainly not doing well with GM; the stock has fallen for 2-3 years now. GM has appeared indecisive -- a problem with big automobile companies and another reason to pare down.
Bummer the Echostar thing didn't fly. I think that honestly would have been good for consumers. It was the rural customers without cable alternative that were the primary snag, though you'd think something could have been worked out. I don't like the idea of one company owning both cable and satellite businesses.
Some time ago, Rupert's News Corp wanted to buy GM (the whole thing!) as a way to get to DirecTV. The price wasn't right IIRC.
That doesn't mean any old buyer is a good idea... depending on whether one wants to stay with the company longterm. I hope they don't screw their subscriber base that has taken so long to build. Murdoch does have a rep for greed.
What did the article author mean by "government monopolies"? I missed the gov't element here.
Almost all my email woes are due to some stranger named "Johnny" who opted-in to a mail-me-crap list about three years ago.
I got a tolerable amount of messages to "Johnny" for a couple of years. Naturally unsubscribe requests got nowhere. Then, perhaps with the declining economy, it exploded. That address and "Johnny" are probably burned on some CD somewhere.
I get almost no spam otherwise. It's all to Johnny. (I tried to track him down, but he'd lost his job. For a while I had the system fowarding copies of his spam to him. Hmm.)
I did get a form of blind spam to me as adminstrator@[mydomain] and billing_contact@[mydomain]. It was the usual porn and getrichquick stuff. So that all gets blackholed alog with johnny. At least my spam is easy-to-identify, but I figure someday someone's gonna squeal. I've gotten a spam or two thanks ot a company I did business with and which went bankrupt. I know I didn't opt-in to anything there, because I never do. Thanks guys. Who do I complain to?
I've noticed that the really good outfits seem to send a confirmation email that you have to reply to make it official. They could keep your reply with headers, and the authentication email could travel with a list if it is sold. I wish they wouldn't sell or share lists anyway, because it makes unsubscribing essentially impossible unless you can go after the publisher of the list -- I imagine those guys are especially slippery.
Anyway it's the merchant's decision whether to take the risk of bogus 3rd party opt-in. Perhaps they should be allowed one good-faith query email?
Then there's the approach I prefer -- universal opt-in or at least opt-out that would cover solicitations of any sort. (Maybe nonprofit newsletters that many of us subscribe to can be held to a laxer standard?)
Realistically, the crooks aren't even going to go to the trouble of defending themselves with anything more than a form response.
There are a lot of details to work out but PLEASE DO SOMETHING!
The most important Q, if gov't help is going to mean anything.
Enforcement is currently a state problem, for the dozen or so states that have antispam laws. Even if they can establish jurisdiction, they have to locate the offender. An asst. attorney general I chatted with in Washington state described an almost comic crusade to get ONE spammer who set up under a different corporate name every week. They used three private investigators to track him (successfully), suggesting to me their investigatory resources were limited. Anyway, they couldn't afford to do this with everyone, and this one example was located in-state!
I was surprised the author didn't really talk about state laws at all. They're kind of the laboratories for the eventual federal effort, and state law/enforcement will be complementary.
Once there is a law on the books the "cyber" aspect of it is only as issue for tracking. Postal mail and telephone calls have "no physical boundaries," too, and actually it is the crossing of state lines taht is an obvious source of federal jurisdiction. The rest is standard law enforcement. The FTC, which the author briefly visited, was busy enough with outright fraud, where it already has jurisdiction, just as it does over fraudulent TV ads and newspaper ads and product labeling and so on. I can say that I've seen some very good work by the FTC, even leading to jail terms for the guys who just won't give up. (The jail term I saw was for criminal contempt of court.)
I think they're going to need to provide a private enforcement action, as with the fax law. The gov't resources would still be needed to track down and prosecute the really tough ones, such as the WA case I described. We already have some relevant experience from the anti-junk fax law.
Recognizing spam -- good Q. I don't have any trouble recognizing 99% of it. For teh false positives, it should be possibly to allow the merchant to provide evidence of opt-in, and if enough complaints are tallied there would be further action.
I own a domain and so can give each site a different email address (foo@mydomain, bar@mydomain, fum@mydomain, etc.) so that I can tell if they squeal. I get the NYT's very nice daily headline summaries, so they certainly know how to reach me. In eight years I have not seen even one spam with the nytimes email. I wish I could say the same of others....
Granted there is always the risk that they could be hacked, as their main page was some time agi, but what's life without risk?:)
That's different, though, in that the votes are verifiable by name. With swapping among minority-party voters you could get some interesting Prisoner's Dilemma issues.
This goes on in the courts, too, BTW, up to the Supremes. Judges will curry favor with each other by abandoning their weaker preferences in return for help later with their stronger ones.
I'm leery of absentee ballots because they could lead to serious abuses. We complain about money in politics NOW, well... If the vote swapping is honor code, then I'm OK with it; but I would prefer that the ultimate vote remain in confidence. Nope, I don't know how to do it with voting-by-mail -- which will in time dominate I think -- but we *will* soon enough see a major vote-buying or vote-coercion (by a union, your boss, your party, etc.) scandal.
Some folks have even defending vote-buying as rational. Not me.
FWIW, I was never entirely sure how I felt about THE Gulf War (not yet ready to call it the first Gulf War:) -- in terms of methods, I think the carnage was far more than necessary, and that we killed the wrong people, tens of thousands of conscripts as opposed to Republican Guard and, of course, the command. But like everyone I realized that once we'd let the snake out of the bag we had to do something about it. I think oil was a secondary motive, and "saving the Kuwaiti people" a distant third. (Odd fact, for all our talk about human rights, secular Iraq grants women more freedom than any other Arab state -- the ones that are our allies or at least neutrals.
So there was some botching before, during, and after the war, which we need to understand or we'll do it again. I'll give Bush the slack that 9.9 out of 10 dictators would've had a coup under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn't we get behind the Kurds? Why did we let him fly his gunships? We muttered something about not being able to tell who the bad guys were (!). Whatever.
I have to emphasize there is little or no evidence that the Israel had anything to do with 9/11, any more than Saddam did. The reason cited by Al Queda was the stationing of our troops in their holy land, in cahoots with the weak Saudi rulers. The Israel/Palestine pretext appeared after the fact. Now, if maintaining a presence in the Gulf is a good idea, we'll take our lumps. But the terrorist attacks, however unjustly, are part of the price. People all over the place hate us, but well-financed, educated, fanatical ones are rare. 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi, not to mention you-know-who and his staunchest supporters.
Do we change our policy because of the attacks? God no! Ironically the terrorists box us in! Would we bother with all those troops if we'd toppled Saddam in the first place? Maybe. I guess we should recall that we did flee Lebanon after the Marines were killed, but then oil wasn't at stake, or national honor; still it did make it look like bloodying our nose would work, and that was the theory behind Saddam's disastrous choices in the war, and the 9/11 attacks (though the latter, granted, were blind hatred, the Al Queda heirarchy would like to dispose of the House of Saud -- not inconceivable).
Page isn't with the Tribune? I used to like his columns occasionally.
Bully for him not letting the other guy frame the debate. (Wouldn't it be fascinating if we could snap our fingers and abolish either problem? But we can't, just as we don't have to choose, and anyway that choice would not be particularly meaningful -- it would be like someone coming to you and taking one of your children away -- you choose which.) That's what someone tried to do here by injecting "everything." BTW, from firsthand experience I'll share that racism is doing just fine, it's just quieter these days.
Here, too, we can pursue more than one objective at a time, it's a question of priorities. And I think we have those priorities wrong. Fight teen pregnancy or build a moon base? Is this a trick question? NASA's budget is now $14 billion (plus deficits). That's real money, even these days.
As for whether NASA's work is all worthwhile AND economical, I wouldn't go to NASA's site at all (though yes, I have often). I rely on any number of articles by scientists upset over the diversion and waste of funds on manned spaceflight. Here is an example forwarded to me by a good friend, who is also an aero/astronatical engineer, which discussed ISS and manned flight generally from a scientist's perspective. It should be thought-provoking.
Go to NASA's site and read everything you can about unmanned projects. Now if you had to pick manned or (ten times as much) unmanned flight (with no loss of life), which would you choose?:) Of course the choice is not so stark: it's about priorities.
Again, I favor space exploration and scientific inquiry, but am cool to manned, which we do not need yet. In fact it is because I am eager for us to push the boundaries of science that I am against manned spaceflight at this time. It cost far too much and benefits us little -- and kills people.
The human mind and spirit can solve virtually any problem but can we fight past human greed, envy, and pettiness to implement the solution?
Yes. How's that for a faith-based solution?
The thing with DDT is that it's a tool for reducing infection, but it would not eradicate the malaria itself. You can still get infected outdoors. And mosquitoes develop resistance. Regardless, I could just pick another infectious disease like sleeping sickness or river blindness and so on. For some illnesses we do have treatments, but if they're not getting to the people who need them, what difference does that make.
Not to be invidious, but Bush II is making me like Bush I a lot more.
I was not enthralled with the Gulf War -- we wouldn't admit we sorta brought it upon ourselves by dancing with the devil in the first place, though of course we did have to clean up and make the world safe for filthy-rich monarchies. I also felt our participation was somewhat humiliating -- remember how the troops were forbidden from having Christmas trees? And after we remarkably escape with astonishingly few casualties (even the generals were surprised), we pay a longterm price in 9-11. Regardless, I respected the work Bush put into developing a coalition, working with the UN, providing Hussein with appropriate warnings, and then following through. In a class by itself was getting the Israelis to stay out even when bombarded -- they won't do that this time, no way. Bush I was clearly skilled in foreign policy and would have had a second term if he'd clued in to the domestic front that Americans cared about a whole lot more. (It was his to lose and, well, he lost it.)
So, what's with his son? His unilateralism goes back a bit farther than I remembered -- at the outset he said he wasn't even going to seek authorization from Congress! Whichever way the Constitution cuts on waging war, this arrogation of power is disturbing. Nixon acted similarly in bombing the tar out of Cambodia, Reagan['s underlings] in doing business with Iran and Nicaragua, and so on. It's happened a lot and the results have generally been ugly. Heck, there's even the chance someone outside the White House inner circle actually has some good ideas! Of necessity rather than revelaton, I see Bush coming around; but I thought him a better politician than to paint himself in a corner like that. I keep hoping he's just playing bad cop or something like it, but I have my doubts. He's the kind of guy who says what he thinks. Yes, a nice contrast to his predecessor! But whereas Clinton told people what they wanted to hear, Bush is telling them to mind their own business. In both cases, the President just goes ahead and does what they want.
Phew. Well, I'm still working this out. I was pretty appalled by the Congress's spinelessness with their war resolution; I think they're (1) afraid to be seen as wimps after 9-11 and (2) eager to pass the buck to Bush who, of course, is entirely willing to take it.
Pro-war Americans are running about 50+%... but a lot of them don't realize this is unrelated to Osama. Many more don't realize it has very little to do with our oil supply (did you know we buy the largest share of Iraqi oil under the oil-for-food thing? yet it's a tiny percentage of our consumption).
Korea -- interesting problem. I remember the riots, they went on for years. After being kicked around by the Japanese for all those years it must be hard to get your bearings. Then you get chopped in half by the chess-playing superpowers and used as pawns for years. It is such a shame the North Koreans have this psychopath for a leader; anyone else and they probably would have behaved like that basket of Eastern European countries, eager to import democracy and export debt (East Germany got a great deal). Kim Jong Il was once said to be "charitably described as strange." The Koreans may be ambivalent about us now -- we are the country people love to hate, except for pop culture and blue jeans -- but if he starts credibly threatening to plaster Seoul they warm up in a jiffy. They know well enough from naval skirmishes and random midget subs what they're dealing with.
A friend described his military service in Korea in glowing terms. He loved the people there. But he also described a significant cultural divide, and discomfort with feeling like an occupied country. Can you imagine German or Japanese troops on our soil? Or, sacre bleu, French?
Well, ah, I'm just filling up the server with gibberish. Later.:)
Funny, I stumbled on the same paragraph but for different reasons.
I agree with the author that little hard science is being done on the shuttle or ISS that can't be handled with automation; this recommends cutting funding, yet the author turns around and proposes spending money to put man in space for its own sake -- what happened to the interest in science? Science aimed at keeping man is space is unnecessary if having man is space is unnecessary.
I find, "Such an adventure would resonate with a world beset by wars and woes" deadly condescending. You know what would resonate with the world? Getting rid of some of those "wars and woes." Think a cure for AIDS, or even malaria. New infrastructure for transportation and commerce. Or universal drinkable water, not to mention food. Or a thousand other challenges that we can do, with enough money and labor and, yes, science/technology, and which we really should tidy up before we reach for the stars -- by "reach" I mean pursue projects that are about entertainment more than science or commerce.
The thing is, we really do care about helping mankind more than distracting it, if the problem is in front of us (e.g., Nobel Peace Prize winner Doctors Without Borders). Space travel only wins when everything in the abstract.
Apollo stands as one of mankind's greatest achievements. There's no need to one-up it, and there's no need to live in space. We haven't conquered living on Earth.
Is this sort of thing an incremental step towards federal legislation (the only decisive approach IMHO), or will it delay it? Is there a downside to almost-there legislation?
Clearly legislative solutions are going to happen. People are angry, and even politicians must get junk mail that their staff complain about. What I'm perplexed about is why the federal junk fax law was passed so (relatively) quickly and (relatively) easily. Surely the interest groups are more or less the same.
Oh, I almost forgot: Die spammers, die. My spam % has hit about 60, through no fault of my own (some idiot managed to "opt-in" my email address for his; now that the address is burned into some commercial CD-ROM I'm hosed). Because teh geomatrically expanding junk email reduces the email technology to uselessness, I will not accept any solution short of opt-in only.
Diplomacy is not necessary, but it's a good idea. I don't see the price, except for some sort of pride issue we seem to have going that we should be able to act unilaterally at the drop of a hat, whether on global warming, ABM's, or global thermonuclear war. I don't suggest we made mistakes on any of these (the last being hypothetical:), but I think you can't expect allies to be allies for long if you expect the relationship to flow but one way.
I also think the unethusiastic countries, which is all of them save the UK and some diddly republics that have their hands out for aid (didn't you laugh when you heard them trumpet that we'd gotten Slovakian troops on board?), have a point. Even if we don't listen to them -- and we already have, some -- we will show respect for diplomacy; else the future for multilateral action when we DO need them is bleak. Also, obviously without a military of its own the UN is honored in the breach, but we did basically found the damn thing and should give the concept the chance it couldn't have had during the Cold War.
Saddam Hussein needs to be flushed one way or the other, I don't suggest forgetting about him. Rarely is a problem country so closely identified with one man. But that doesn't mean the solution is self-evident. Really, I have never quite figured out why we dropped the ball within spitting distance of Baghdad. Perhaps we underestimated his (amazing) resilience, perhaps we buckled to our Arab allies. But look where we are now.
The current stance of our government appears to be that we can substitute military authority for moral authority, and technically we can. It's laughable to think we need France's military support, but perhaps we do need consensus, and if it can be had on the cheap -- patience and a couple of concessions -- then get it. One way or the other, we need not denigrate them as "old Europe" -- whatever that means.
North Korea worries me plenty, especially because they have so little going for them aside from a nasty weapon and extortion. Iraq has oil, a lot of it (ever wonder why Hussein doesn't just kick back and get rich? pass around the money and everyone will love and fear him). And I hate to be a nag (no, I love it), but where the HELL is Osama?
I think he probably does have some poison gas, as I implied above. I know that in the previous round of inspection a lot of gas and the means to produce gas were destroyed. I'd be more interested to learn he was producing gas than that he has gas. Also, such intelligence implies he has gas but is not proof. Note that he might also lie with the expectation of interception. In any event, I deny that a little gas is a reason to panic, and I have a lot of questions left before the bombing begins.
The resolution says he can't have these things, but it doesn't say we must then attack. If it had, we wouldn't have started the inspections in the first place. I think we must attack out of some sense of necessity, after other means are at an impasse. Note that we DID resume inspections even if they proved wanting; Hussein is not entirely inflexible.
I need no convincing that Hussein is a son of a bitch whom the world would be better without. But I also know war is no magic bullet: we would kill a lot of conscripts and civilians before reaching him, certainly we did last time. Only recently has Bush entertained the thought of exile for Hussein. Only recently has Bush even conceded the need to make a case for war to the American people and to our allies. I think we whiners are having a salutory effect, and even if this does end up war the results will be better.
Like many others I am curious why Iraq became an urgent issue when it did, and why North Korea is being softpedaled when they're either close to having of have nuclear weapons -- something I fear a whole more than chemical weapons because even if they are not used or sold to 3rd parties, they will spark an Asian arms race. So much for nonproliferation, and that scares me plenty. If I would ever endorse preemptive invasion, it would be to stop a nut from developing nukes.
I hope this it an least a teensy bit persuasive. I try to avoid talking avoid politics here b/c it tends to get preachy, and my only interest is to be at provoke even a little re-evaluation. Why preach to the converted? Plus I learn things, too.
Anyways, I don't doubt for a second he has these weapons.
I DO doubt it, and more importantly I've heard many experts doubt it as well. I don't doubt that Hussein would like to have some, but sees the next best thing as haing us *think* he does, short of war. Now, he may have some poison gas, but that's NOT a "weapon of mass destruction," it's a nasty localized weapon we've had for over a century and is no more complex to cook up a loony cult in Japan might manage. It's actually not even a very good weapon, and would be hard to use in a terroristic fashion without leaving Hussein's fingerprints.
Hussein wants many things and power is paramount. Keeping his neighbors nervous is useful, even as he belatedly tried to forge links with them. At his essence, he's a ruthless bastard, but not irrational once you acknowledge his egomania furnishes the goal. He doesn't want to die.
If there are weapons, I want to know what they are, how many, where, whether they're leftovers or still in production. President Bush has proven none of this, and also failed to link him to bin Laden (theoretically this is all a response to 9/11). Then I want to know exactly why an invasion is the only option. It's not, and Bush is gradually acknowledging as much as support erodes. The inspectors reported destroying or neutralizing many of Hussein's assets; this approach can work, or at least delay Hussein so much that one of his enemies FINALLY gets around to assassinating him.
I confess I have no confidence in Bush, who like his hawk allies never went to war, and who doesn't listen to his generals about when to resort to war. Generals are not the most dovish people, and Colin Powell certainly was not on the last trip to Baghdad (OK, we didn't quite make it there, just a stone's throw away). The French actually are looking to Powell with admiration, and least until he recently has become more hawkish. I think Powell is a politician and is cutting back to the right to maintain his influence now that he's won on his basic point. War may still happen, but it should be the *last* option.
The realpolitik cost of war is not just American lives and material, not just the Iraqi civilian losses, but also a loss to our international prestige and a huge step in the direction of proving we're the anti-Muslim bully our enemies claim. Al Quaeda appears to have been motivated largely by the relatively benign offense of U.S. in Saudi Arabia. Add to this that Israel will not be passive as it was last time, and... well, it just gets worse and worse. I also haven't heard Bush's plans for post-war Iraq. Have you heard even one opposition leader named (I know, most are dead, but that doesn't help either). Post-war Iraq could chaos or famine or both, and we would be the ones expected to fix it. We have a lot of self-interested reasons to go slow.
I won't be so cyncial as to suggest Pres. Bush is motivated to distract the public from the economy and the 9/11 fizzle, but ask why the hell we don't yet have an independent commission to study 9/11? You know we'll get one for Columbia far sooner, as we did for Challenger, JFK, etc. I don't expect them to figure everything out, but to establish a record and ask some of the hard questions this rather secretive administration will never ask of itself. (I *know* they'll howl "national security," but that's a term that must be proven -- surely they can find someone neutral and trustworthy. An interesting facet of the "illegal enemy combatant" is that no one is allowed to question whether the person is an illegal enemy combatant, and we're not even at war, yet.)
Uh, you probably guessed I'm not Bush 2004, but I don't have a great alternative either. Better we figure out what we can do with the government we have.
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Gee, 10% off the gross reduces Microsoft profit by ... 10%? :)
Surely there is a provision to deprive the naughty party of all its ill-gotten gain? The framers may not have had the profit margins of the software industry in mind -- these aren't widgets.
Probably the EU allows a private right of action, class action, something?
As already written, I share your concern over unjustified invasions of privacy, but the problem has been with us for a long time, long before the RIAA or music recording existed. Indeed, it was of the primary things that pissed off the revolutionaries, especially the "general warrant" that let troops search as they pleased for fun and harassment.
:)
Incidentally, subpoenas and search warrants are very different things, which different levels of proof and procedural safeguards. A subpoena provides the opportunity to be heard in opposition, to "quash" the demand for evidence. Furnishing false information for civil subpoenas would open the industry to some staggering class action lawsuits; that would be making an example of someone! A criminal subpoena (from a prosecutor) also provides an opportunity to be heard. A warrant is a relatively big deal to obtain, and its abuse is a civil rights violation.
I don't believe things like subpoenas and search warrants are "safe" -- the Starr investigation revealed the unchecked power of grand jury subpoenas -- just that there are supposed to be safeguards and accountability, mechanisms that we have to stand up for no matter what the law at stake concerns. In a way the subpoena is the more frightening for its power to force you to fess up whatever the questioner desires. But these are fundamental questions about democracy that are far broader than copyright squabbles.
Just prepping discussion of Patriot II: The Civil Libertarian's Nightmare.
Personally, I think the burden of proof for the subpoena is the whole bananna. Note that once the RIAA has your name, is still must make its case you broke the rules. They'll maybe get part of that by suckering you into downloading directly from decoy computers. The hard part will be getting you for nickle-and-dime offenses. More likely, they'll look for the folks who host thousands of titles on P2P. And perhaps they should.
I don't really have a problem with copyright in the abstract, unlike many here, but do with the basic privacy issue in careless attempts at enforcement. Can weirdoes (e.g., Capitol Records
Perhaps the simplest fix is a method of IP obfuscation. But anonymizing makes legitimate enforcement of far more compelling laws (kiddie porn, stalking, etc.) will become more difficult -- yet another side-effect of this whole enterprise.
Nice to see some positive mention of Salon, though. They did some interesting journalism a while ago, and I wonder if those days are long gone.
And that old rabble-rouser opposed ratifying the Constitution butterly. A very independent-minded guy.
... I'm not suggesting God is going to weigh in on copyright enforcement, and if anyone wants to dies over it, well, I'll be sure to read about it. To exaggerate the debate is to trivialize it. :)
The other example mentioned, Thomas Jefferson, is an even more complex character, given his shifting views aas he contributed far more material to our culture than Mr. Henry's one classic line. On slavery, he wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." His relationship with Sally Hemings, still not entirely resolved, adds to the mix. (Speaking of complex icons, I felt a little sheepish when I realized the White House and Congress were built with slave labor. Of course.)
Metaphors are nice, but
You're right, and I do recall Darwin's racist streak. However, I also remember it as something engrafted on the basic theory, and relatively isolated.
I just checked, and marijuana (from the hemp plant) apparently was cultivated thousands of years ago in central asia (yes, China), then made its way west to Europe. It was imported (alien species!) to the New World very around 1600, as the hemp provided valuable fiber. I saw the stuff growing wild many feet tall in Asia, which was kind of startling. The varieties grown for drug use has been refined to have many times the THC of the wild variety. The US prohibits growing low-THC hemp for the idiotic reason that it makes law enforcement look bad. Soem argue it does have economic value.
Don't ask me to connect pot and natural selection....
Sickle cell is oh-so-nasty, and even the heterozygotes show some mild symptoms. Yes, I learned the same thing sickle cell and malaria. Only a fraction (8-45% by region) of Africans have the trait, so probably people with it simply survive somewhat more often. I guess it was a glitch at some point that helped, but was not do-or-die essential to survival.
Most species are going to have predators pleased to greet them, as most plants and animals are edible. What's important is the edge, a relative rather than absolute advantage over native species.
A couple of examples are kudzu and zebra mussels -- they don't complain about much. Our local favorite is the Asian "tiger" mosquito. But there are serious bad effects from monoculture -- one disease can destroy everything in its path. Think Windows desktops and a nasty virus.
Nature will tend to reach an equilibrium, or oscillate wildly, or the newcomers either exterminate the old, or vice versa. There are equatios for estimating equilibrium. Only in a really catastrophic situation does shortage of food supply rein in the invader. But evolution, as opposed to natural selection, is slow, so an alien species can easily exterminate native species before they have a chance to develop defenses, even to the point of suicide. Hawaii is suffering significant losses of species diversity because of newcomers. It takes thousands or millions of years for a new species to develop, yet perhaps the blink of an eye to perish.
I hate seeing natural selection described as some sort of moral quest for the "best," when it's just a way of explaining natural phenomena (I'm not saying you're doing that, but lots of people do). Darwin didn't judge was was "best," just tried to predict which species would do better under given circumstances. Nature doesn't care about the outcome, or become improved as a result. Species diversity is often the preferable situation.
Maybe I'm being clueless, but I'm hazy on your relevance to "devil's weed," slang for pot (which does grow quite nicely in the wild).
I'm a longtime Mac user who was envious of IDE HD drives for years, then Apple abruptly switched. IRC there are certainly advantage to a SCSI HD, but omitting the on-drive controller saves $$$.
When Apple first promoted SCSI, it was a very novel deal. PC's lagged considerably, esp. when you could get a Mac with serial (Appletalk) and SCSI built-in. Once they had SCSI, I guess was cheaper to string the hard drive into rather than add IDE? I kinda wished they jammed a parallel port and RS-232 in there, too, but that's greedy.
Also, why does IDE not do external devices?
I'll note that SCSI was hardly ideal, esp. in its earliest form. The chain could onlt be very short, and ordering the devices plus termination were a bit of black magic to get it to work. God forbid you pull a cable with the power on. Plus the SCSI cables were *expensive*.
Does anyone else remember "analysts" making fun of Apple for going to USB and Firewire?
GM has been looking to spin off DirecTV for years now. They want to pare down to a core business (cars), that's why they sold the satellite division of Hughes. They were at first reluctant to let go of the rest, though many of us (I'm a stockholder) think the division wouild do much better on its own. It's certainly not doing well with GM; the stock has fallen for 2-3 years now. GM has appeared indecisive -- a problem with big automobile companies and another reason to pare down.
... depending on whether one wants to stay with the company longterm. I hope they don't screw their subscriber base that has taken so long to build. Murdoch does have a rep for greed.
Bummer the Echostar thing didn't fly. I think that honestly would have been good for consumers. It was the rural customers without cable alternative that were the primary snag, though you'd think something could have been worked out. I don't like the idea of one company owning both cable and satellite businesses.
Some time ago, Rupert's News Corp wanted to buy GM (the whole thing!) as a way to get to DirecTV. The price wasn't right IIRC.
That doesn't mean any old buyer is a good idea
What did the article author mean by "government monopolies"? I missed the gov't element here.
It's a matter of time.
Almost all my email woes are due to some stranger named "Johnny" who opted-in to a mail-me-crap list about three years ago.
I got a tolerable amount of messages to "Johnny" for a couple of years. Naturally unsubscribe requests got nowhere. Then, perhaps with the declining economy, it exploded. That address and "Johnny" are probably burned on some CD somewhere.
I get almost no spam otherwise. It's all to Johnny. (I tried to track him down, but he'd lost his job. For a while I had the system fowarding copies of his spam to him. Hmm.)
I did get a form of blind spam to me as adminstrator@[mydomain] and billing_contact@[mydomain]. It was the usual porn and getrichquick stuff. So that all gets blackholed alog with johnny. At least my spam is easy-to-identify, but I figure someday someone's gonna squeal. I've gotten a spam or two thanks ot a company I did business with and which went bankrupt. I know I didn't opt-in to anything there, because I never do. Thanks guys. Who do I complain to?
I've noticed that the really good outfits seem to send a confirmation email that you have to reply to make it official. They could keep your reply with headers, and the authentication email could travel with a list if it is sold. I wish they wouldn't sell or share lists anyway, because it makes unsubscribing essentially impossible unless you can go after the publisher of the list -- I imagine those guys are especially slippery.
Anyway it's the merchant's decision whether to take the risk of bogus 3rd party opt-in. Perhaps they should be allowed one good-faith query email?
Then there's the approach I prefer -- universal opt-in or at least opt-out that would cover solicitations of any sort. (Maybe nonprofit newsletters that many of us subscribe to can be held to a laxer standard?)
Realistically, the crooks aren't even going to go to the trouble of defending themselves with anything more than a form response.
There are a lot of details to work out but PLEASE DO SOMETHING!
The most important Q, if gov't help is going to mean anything.
Enforcement is currently a state problem, for the dozen or so states that have antispam laws. Even if they can establish jurisdiction, they have to locate the offender. An asst. attorney general I chatted with in Washington state described an almost comic crusade to get ONE spammer who set up under a different corporate name every week. They used three private investigators to track him (successfully), suggesting to me their investigatory resources were limited. Anyway, they couldn't afford to do this with everyone, and this one example was located in-state!
I was surprised the author didn't really talk about state laws at all. They're kind of the laboratories for the eventual federal effort, and state law/enforcement will be complementary.
Once there is a law on the books the "cyber" aspect of it is only as issue for tracking. Postal mail and telephone calls have "no physical boundaries," too, and actually it is the crossing of state lines taht is an obvious source of federal jurisdiction. The rest is standard law enforcement. The FTC, which the author briefly visited, was busy enough with outright fraud, where it already has jurisdiction, just as it does over fraudulent TV ads and newspaper ads and product labeling and so on. I can say that I've seen some very good work by the FTC, even leading to jail terms for the guys who just won't give up. (The jail term I saw was for criminal contempt of court.)
I think they're going to need to provide a private enforcement action, as with the fax law. The gov't resources would still be needed to track down and prosecute the really tough ones, such as the WA case I described. We already have some relevant experience from the anti-junk fax law.
Recognizing spam -- good Q. I don't have any trouble recognizing 99% of it. For teh false positives, it should be possibly to allow the merchant to provide evidence of opt-in, and if enough complaints are tallied there would be further action.
I own a domain and so can give each site a different email address (foo@mydomain, bar@mydomain, fum@mydomain, etc.) so that I can tell if they squeal. I get the NYT's very nice daily headline summaries, so they certainly know how to reach me. In eight years I have not seen even one spam with the nytimes email. I wish I could say the same of others....
:)
Granted there is always the risk that they could be hacked, as their main page was some time agi, but what's life without risk?
Why assume that anyone anywhere will obey a US law?
It's about enforcement, and yes US law is enforceable, especially with the many countries that have or want beneficial relationships with the U.S.
Sure, lots of people will break the law, but without we wouldn't even have grounds to act against them.
That's different, though, in that the votes are verifiable by name. With swapping among minority-party voters you could get some interesting Prisoner's Dilemma issues.
This goes on in the courts, too, BTW, up to the Supremes. Judges will curry favor with each other by abandoning their weaker preferences in return for help later with their stronger ones.
I'm leery of absentee ballots because they could lead to serious abuses. We complain about money in politics NOW, well... If the vote swapping is honor code, then I'm OK with it; but I would prefer that the ultimate vote remain in confidence. Nope, I don't know how to do it with voting-by-mail -- which will in time dominate I think -- but we *will* soon enough see a major vote-buying or vote-coercion (by a union, your boss, your party, etc.) scandal.
Some folks have even defending vote-buying as rational. Not me.
FWIW, I was never entirely sure how I felt about THE Gulf War (not yet ready to call it the first Gulf War :) -- in terms of methods, I think the carnage was far more than necessary, and that we killed the wrong people, tens of thousands of conscripts as opposed to Republican Guard and, of course, the command. But like everyone I realized that once we'd let the snake out of the bag we had to do something about it. I think oil was a secondary motive, and "saving the Kuwaiti people" a distant third. (Odd fact, for all our talk about human rights, secular Iraq grants women more freedom than any other Arab state -- the ones that are our allies or at least neutrals.
So there was some botching before, during, and after the war, which we need to understand or we'll do it again. I'll give Bush the slack that 9.9 out of 10 dictators would've had a coup under the circumstances. On the other hand, why didn't we get behind the Kurds? Why did we let him fly his gunships? We muttered something about not being able to tell who the bad guys were (!). Whatever.
I have to emphasize there is little or no evidence that the Israel had anything to do with 9/11, any more than Saddam did. The reason cited by Al Queda was the stationing of our troops in their holy land, in cahoots with the weak Saudi rulers. The Israel/Palestine pretext appeared after the fact. Now, if maintaining a presence in the Gulf is a good idea, we'll take our lumps. But the terrorist attacks, however unjustly, are part of the price. People all over the place hate us, but well-financed, educated, fanatical ones are rare. 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi, not to mention you-know-who and his staunchest supporters.
Do we change our policy because of the attacks? God no! Ironically the terrorists box us in! Would we bother with all those troops if we'd toppled Saddam in the first place? Maybe. I guess we should recall that we did flee Lebanon after the Marines were killed, but then oil wasn't at stake, or national honor; still it did make it look like bloodying our nose would work, and that was the theory behind Saddam's disastrous choices in the war, and the 9/11 attacks (though the latter, granted, were blind hatred, the Al Queda heirarchy would like to dispose of the House of Saud -- not inconceivable).
Page isn't with the Tribune? I used to like his columns occasionally.
:) Of course the choice is not so stark: it's about priorities.
Bully for him not letting the other guy frame the debate. (Wouldn't it be fascinating if we could snap our fingers and abolish either problem? But we can't, just as we don't have to choose, and anyway that choice would not be particularly meaningful -- it would be like someone coming to you and taking one of your children away -- you choose which.) That's what someone tried to do here by injecting "everything." BTW, from firsthand experience I'll share that racism is doing just fine, it's just quieter these days.
Here, too, we can pursue more than one objective at a time, it's a question of priorities. And I think we have those priorities wrong. Fight teen pregnancy or build a moon base? Is this a trick question? NASA's budget is now $14 billion (plus deficits). That's real money, even these days.
As for whether NASA's work is all worthwhile AND economical, I wouldn't go to NASA's site at all (though yes, I have often). I rely on any number of articles by scientists upset over the diversion and waste of funds on manned spaceflight. Here is an example forwarded to me by a good friend, who is also an aero/astronatical engineer, which discussed ISS and manned flight generally from a scientist's perspective. It should be thought-provoking.
Go to NASA's site and read everything you can about unmanned projects. Now if you had to pick manned or (ten times as much) unmanned flight (with no loss of life), which would you choose?
Again, I favor space exploration and scientific inquiry, but am cool to manned, which we do not need yet. In fact it is because I am eager for us to push the boundaries of science that I am against manned spaceflight at this time. It cost far too much and benefits us little -- and kills people.
The human mind and spirit can solve virtually any problem but can we fight past human greed, envy, and pettiness to implement the solution?
Yes. How's that for a faith-based solution?
The thing with DDT is that it's a tool for reducing infection, but it would not eradicate the malaria itself. You can still get infected outdoors. And mosquitoes develop resistance. Regardless, I could just pick another infectious disease like sleeping sickness or river blindness and so on. For some illnesses we do have treatments, but if they're not getting to the people who need them, what difference does that make.
As for AIDS, whatever works. I don't care.
It can't be done.
;-)
Hey, that's what they said about going to the Moon.
There are no resources in space that we can't get here cheaper. And if there are, fine, that's a commercial justification for getting them.
It's not about perfection, but progress. We can make progress.
Not to be invidious, but Bush II is making me like Bush I a lot more.
... but a lot of them don't realize this is unrelated to Osama. Many more don't realize it has very little to do with our oil supply (did you know we buy the largest share of Iraqi oil under the oil-for-food thing? yet it's a tiny percentage of our consumption).
:)
I was not enthralled with the Gulf War -- we wouldn't admit we sorta brought it upon ourselves by dancing with the devil in the first place, though of course we did have to clean up and make the world safe for filthy-rich monarchies. I also felt our participation was somewhat humiliating -- remember how the troops were forbidden from having Christmas trees? And after we remarkably escape with astonishingly few casualties (even the generals were surprised), we pay a longterm price in 9-11. Regardless, I respected the work Bush put into developing a coalition, working with the UN, providing Hussein with appropriate warnings, and then following through. In a class by itself was getting the Israelis to stay out even when bombarded -- they won't do that this time, no way. Bush I was clearly skilled in foreign policy and would have had a second term if he'd clued in to the domestic front that Americans cared about a whole lot more. (It was his to lose and, well, he lost it.)
So, what's with his son? His unilateralism goes back a bit farther than I remembered -- at the outset he said he wasn't even going to seek authorization from Congress! Whichever way the Constitution cuts on waging war, this arrogation of power is disturbing. Nixon acted similarly in bombing the tar out of Cambodia, Reagan['s underlings] in doing business with Iran and Nicaragua, and so on. It's happened a lot and the results have generally been ugly. Heck, there's even the chance someone outside the White House inner circle actually has some good ideas! Of necessity rather than revelaton, I see Bush coming around; but I thought him a better politician than to paint himself in a corner like that. I keep hoping he's just playing bad cop or something like it, but I have my doubts. He's the kind of guy who says what he thinks. Yes, a nice contrast to his predecessor! But whereas Clinton told people what they wanted to hear, Bush is telling them to mind their own business. In both cases, the President just goes ahead and does what they want.
Phew. Well, I'm still working this out. I was pretty appalled by the Congress's spinelessness with their war resolution; I think they're (1) afraid to be seen as wimps after 9-11 and (2) eager to pass the buck to Bush who, of course, is entirely willing to take it.
Pro-war Americans are running about 50+%
Korea -- interesting problem. I remember the riots, they went on for years. After being kicked around by the Japanese for all those years it must be hard to get your bearings. Then you get chopped in half by the chess-playing superpowers and used as pawns for years. It is such a shame the North Koreans have this psychopath for a leader; anyone else and they probably would have behaved like that basket of Eastern European countries, eager to import democracy and export debt (East Germany got a great deal). Kim Jong Il was once said to be "charitably described as strange." The Koreans may be ambivalent about us now -- we are the country people love to hate, except for pop culture and blue jeans -- but if he starts credibly threatening to plaster Seoul they warm up in a jiffy. They know well enough from naval skirmishes and random midget subs what they're dealing with.
A friend described his military service in Korea in glowing terms. He loved the people there. But he also described a significant cultural divide, and discomfort with feeling like an occupied country. Can you imagine German or Japanese troops on our soil? Or, sacre bleu, French?
Well, ah, I'm just filling up the server with gibberish. Later.
Funny, I stumbled on the same paragraph but for different reasons.
I agree with the author that little hard science is being done on the shuttle or ISS that can't be handled with automation; this recommends cutting funding, yet the author turns around and proposes spending money to put man in space for its own sake -- what happened to the interest in science? Science aimed at keeping man is space is unnecessary if having man is space is unnecessary.
I find, "Such an adventure would resonate with a world beset by wars and woes" deadly condescending. You know what would resonate with the world? Getting rid of some of those "wars and woes." Think a cure for AIDS, or even malaria. New infrastructure for transportation and commerce. Or universal drinkable water, not to mention food. Or a thousand other challenges that we can do, with enough money and labor and, yes, science/technology, and which we really should tidy up before we reach for the stars -- by "reach" I mean pursue projects that are about entertainment more than science or commerce.
The thing is, we really do care about helping mankind more than distracting it, if the problem is in front of us (e.g., Nobel Peace Prize winner Doctors Without Borders). Space travel only wins when everything in the abstract.
Apollo stands as one of mankind's greatest achievements. There's no need to one-up it, and there's no need to live in space. We haven't conquered living on Earth.
Is this sort of thing an incremental step towards federal legislation (the only decisive approach IMHO), or will it delay it? Is there a downside to almost-there legislation?
Clearly legislative solutions are going to happen. People are angry, and even politicians must get junk mail that their staff complain about. What I'm perplexed about is why the federal junk fax law was passed so (relatively) quickly and (relatively) easily. Surely the interest groups are more or less the same.
Oh, I almost forgot: Die spammers, die. My spam % has hit about 60, through no fault of my own (some idiot managed to "opt-in" my email address for his; now that the address is burned into some commercial CD-ROM I'm hosed). Because teh geomatrically expanding junk email reduces the email technology to uselessness, I will not accept any solution short of opt-in only.
Diplomacy is not necessary, but it's a good idea. I don't see the price, except for some sort of pride issue we seem to have going that we should be able to act unilaterally at the drop of a hat, whether on global warming, ABM's, or global thermonuclear war. I don't suggest we made mistakes on any of these (the last being hypothetical :), but I think you can't expect allies to be allies for long if you expect the relationship to flow but one way.
I also think the unethusiastic countries, which is all of them save the UK and some diddly republics that have their hands out for aid (didn't you laugh when you heard them trumpet that we'd gotten Slovakian troops on board?), have a point. Even if we don't listen to them -- and we already have, some -- we will show respect for diplomacy; else the future for multilateral action when we DO need them is bleak. Also, obviously without a military of its own the UN is honored in the breach, but we did basically found the damn thing and should give the concept the chance it couldn't have had during the Cold War.
Saddam Hussein needs to be flushed one way or the other, I don't suggest forgetting about him. Rarely is a problem country so closely identified with one man. But that doesn't mean the solution is self-evident. Really, I have never quite figured out why we dropped the ball within spitting distance of Baghdad. Perhaps we underestimated his (amazing) resilience, perhaps we buckled to our Arab allies. But look where we are now.
The current stance of our government appears to be that we can substitute military authority for moral authority, and technically we can. It's laughable to think we need France's military support, but perhaps we do need consensus, and if it can be had on the cheap -- patience and a couple of concessions -- then get it. One way or the other, we need not denigrate them as "old Europe" -- whatever that means.
North Korea worries me plenty, especially because they have so little going for them aside from a nasty weapon and extortion. Iraq has oil, a lot of it (ever wonder why Hussein doesn't just kick back and get rich? pass around the money and everyone will love and fear him). And I hate to be a nag (no, I love it), but where the HELL is Osama?
I think he probably does have some poison gas, as I implied above. I know that in the previous round of inspection a lot of gas and the means to produce gas were destroyed. I'd be more interested to learn he was producing gas than that he has gas. Also, such intelligence implies he has gas but is not proof. Note that he might also lie with the expectation of interception. In any event, I deny that a little gas is a reason to panic, and I have a lot of questions left before the bombing begins.
The resolution says he can't have these things, but it doesn't say we must then attack. If it had, we wouldn't have started the inspections in the first place. I think we must attack out of some sense of necessity, after other means are at an impasse. Note that we DID resume inspections even if they proved wanting; Hussein is not entirely inflexible.
I need no convincing that Hussein is a son of a bitch whom the world would be better without. But I also know war is no magic bullet: we would kill a lot of conscripts and civilians before reaching him, certainly we did last time. Only recently has Bush entertained the thought of exile for Hussein. Only recently has Bush even conceded the need to make a case for war to the American people and to our allies. I think we whiners are having a salutory effect, and even if this does end up war the results will be better.
Like many others I am curious why Iraq became an urgent issue when it did, and why North Korea is being softpedaled when they're either close to having of have nuclear weapons -- something I fear a whole more than chemical weapons because even if they are not used or sold to 3rd parties, they will spark an Asian arms race. So much for nonproliferation, and that scares me plenty. If I would ever endorse preemptive invasion, it would be to stop a nut from developing nukes.
I hope this it an least a teensy bit persuasive. I try to avoid talking avoid politics here b/c it tends to get preachy, and my only interest is to be at provoke even a little re-evaluation. Why preach to the converted? Plus I learn things, too.
Anyways, I don't doubt for a second he has these weapons.
... well, it just gets worse and worse. I also haven't heard Bush's plans for post-war Iraq. Have you heard even one opposition leader named (I know, most are dead, but that doesn't help either). Post-war Iraq could chaos or famine or both, and we would be the ones expected to fix it. We have a lot of self-interested reasons to go slow.
:)
I DO doubt it, and more importantly I've heard many experts doubt it as well. I don't doubt that Hussein would like to have some, but sees the next best thing as haing us *think* he does, short of war. Now, he may have some poison gas, but that's NOT a "weapon of mass destruction," it's a nasty localized weapon we've had for over a century and is no more complex to cook up a loony cult in Japan might manage. It's actually not even a very good weapon, and would be hard to use in a terroristic fashion without leaving Hussein's fingerprints.
Hussein wants many things and power is paramount. Keeping his neighbors nervous is useful, even as he belatedly tried to forge links with them. At his essence, he's a ruthless bastard, but not irrational once you acknowledge his egomania furnishes the goal. He doesn't want to die.
If there are weapons, I want to know what they are, how many, where, whether they're leftovers or still in production. President Bush has proven none of this, and also failed to link him to bin Laden (theoretically this is all a response to 9/11). Then I want to know exactly why an invasion is the only option. It's not, and Bush is gradually acknowledging as much as support erodes. The inspectors reported destroying or neutralizing many of Hussein's assets; this approach can work, or at least delay Hussein so much that one of his enemies FINALLY gets around to assassinating him.
I confess I have no confidence in Bush, who like his hawk allies never went to war, and who doesn't listen to his generals about when to resort to war. Generals are not the most dovish people, and Colin Powell certainly was not on the last trip to Baghdad (OK, we didn't quite make it there, just a stone's throw away). The French actually are looking to Powell with admiration, and least until he recently has become more hawkish. I think Powell is a politician and is cutting back to the right to maintain his influence now that he's won on his basic point. War may still happen, but it should be the *last* option.
The realpolitik cost of war is not just American lives and material, not just the Iraqi civilian losses, but also a loss to our international prestige and a huge step in the direction of proving we're the anti-Muslim bully our enemies claim. Al Quaeda appears to have been motivated largely by the relatively benign offense of U.S. in Saudi Arabia. Add to this that Israel will not be passive as it was last time, and
I won't be so cyncial as to suggest Pres. Bush is motivated to distract the public from the economy and the 9/11 fizzle, but ask why the hell we don't yet have an independent commission to study 9/11? You know we'll get one for Columbia far sooner, as we did for Challenger, JFK, etc. I don't expect them to figure everything out, but to establish a record and ask some of the hard questions this rather secretive administration will never ask of itself. (I *know* they'll howl "national security," but that's a term that must be proven -- surely they can find someone neutral and trustworthy. An interesting facet of the "illegal enemy combatant" is that no one is allowed to question whether the person is an illegal enemy combatant, and we're not even at war, yet.)
Uh, you probably guessed I'm not Bush 2004, but I don't have a great alternative either. Better we figure out what we can do with the government we have.
*sigh*