Curiouser and Curiouser! on politics

Why can't life imitate art a little better?

Sun, 30 Jun 2002 20:54:39 +0100

I've just been watching The West Wing and enjoying it immensely, I'm completely immersed. Then it's over and the realisation dawns that instead of President Bartlett you guys have the Shrub. Jeez what a come down...

ID cards? Orwell would be proud...

Wed, 03 Jul 2002 21:42:54 +0100

British ID cards to revolutionise crime. But not in the way the gov wants... [The Register]

» Once again the government I voted for is doing the Orwellian thing.

Some highlights (courtesy of Copernic Summarizer)

Home Secretary David Blunkett announced the start of a six month consultation in Parliament today on plans by the government to introduce "entitlement cards" (that's ID cards to you and me).

Lobby group Privacy International reckons the proposal for a national identity card has little to do with the government's stated objectives of reducing the threat of crime, terrorism and illegal immigration.

Its real purpose is part of a broader objective outlined in the Cabinet Office report "Privacy & Data Sharing" to create a new administrative basis for the linkage of government databases and information systems.

But worse, the government's ID card plan could backfire and become a tool for criminal syndicates, according to Privacy International which argues that a national ID card- whether voluntary or mandatory - will compound problems of illegal immigration, fraud and identity theft.

According to Simon Davies, Privacy International's Director, criminals now have access to technology almost as sophisticated at that used by governments so that "even the most highly secure cards are available as blanks weeks after their introduction.

Some more of our freedoms to be sold in the name of fighting crime. Are they just tilting at windmills or is this really sinister?

We can fight this!

All the President's Enrons

Sun, 07 Jul 2002 21:58:05 +0100

13. "great column" (4.2 points). All the President's Enrons ... lambastes [( blogdex : recent )]

» But Bush will keep smiling and somehow it's all alright...

More from the shrub

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:09:36 +0100

Lou Dobbs downgrades President Bush. And so do I. [Salon.com]

» President George. W. Shrub makes me feel better every day about our own lousy stinking government (which I voted for - won't make that mistake again!)

Good quotations (among other things)

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 19:43:35 +0100

JR Mooneyham. Lots of counter-intuitive long-view thinking here. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

» Lots of stuff here, I especially enjoyed the quotations which I reproduce here because the lessons of these quotes are just as valid & urgent for us in the UK & Europe.

"...the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

-- Hermann Goering, Hitler's chosen successor for ruling Nazi Germany during World War II; quote from the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1946
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
-- Theodore Roosevelt, US Republican president, 1918

"Preventative war ... I don't believe in such a thing, and frankly I wouldn't even listen seriously to anyone that came in and talked about such a thing."
-- Dwight Eisenhower, US Republican president and Allied military chief in World War II , 1954

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

-- Benjamin Franklin, one of America's most important founding fathers, 1,759 AD

Citizen spies reporting for duty

Tue, 16 Jul 2002 18:25:18 +0100

1. US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies - smh.com.au (53.8 points). US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies [( blogdex : recent )]

» I think this is a fantastic idea. Everybody living withing a mile and a half of a senator, congressman, local polician, law enforcement officer, or corporate chief should sign up today. Then immediately start a whispering campaign against their neighbour.

Heck I wish they'd bring it in over here in the UK.

Where do I sign up!?!

Bush sits on his hands while Egypt unfairly jails a democracy advocate

Tue, 06 Aug 2002 11:40:58 +0100

6. "Bush's Shame" (8.3 points). new york times ... big bunch of phonies [( blogdex : recent )]

» Excellent piece, worth going through the free NYT sign-up to read.

"This ties in with a larger concern that human rights activists share toward America today --- a concern that post-9/11 America is not interested anymore in law and order, just order, and it's not interested in peace and quiet, but just quiet."

This sounds right on the money, and yet I wonder what proportion of American's care about the shifting views of non-Americans towards their country.

My hopes aren't high.

This just in, Shrub and friends dirtier than expected

Tue, 06 Aug 2002 20:51:50 +0100

19. The Consortium (7.4 points). Do you remember 1968? [( blogdex : recent )]

» Dear god you elected this guy president?

Well actually, no, you probably didn't. But enough of you did that he slimed his way in anyhow.

Is this national news in the US? Or even page 4? I'd really like to know...

open standards, not open source

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:14:13 +0100

O'Reilly questions free-SW regs. Politics, yuck [The Register]

» Legislate to mandate open standards for e-government, not open source. Sounds reasonable to me.

Ban driving and talking

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:22:29 +0100

UK to ban driving and talking. The scourge of the mobile phone [The Register]

» I was actually under the impression that it was already illegal to use a hand-held mobile phone whilst on the move. I know i've always felt guilty the few times I've done it. I'm pretty good about using the hands-free but have forgotten it a couple of times. I'd be in favour of this kind of legislation.

Don't think, it's not worth it...

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 00:08:12 +0100

Bush to Arab world: Drop dead. Driven by right-wing ideologues and his own zeal, President Bush has taken Ariel Sharon's side in the Middle East even while plotting a war with Iraq. Foreign policy experts say that's a dangerous combination. [Salon.com]

» Shrub: n. a small bush. But who knew how small. (interestingly the German derivation is schrubben meaning "coarse, uneven" How eerily accurate!)

This administration makes plankton look smart. But you can't blame Bush. He's just the zealous little sock puppet that his lords & masters have been dreaming of having in the White House since Reagan used to nod off in meetings.

You guys should, however, be fucking ransacking the offices of your news organizations for letting you vote for this idiot. Oh and all the unelected, unaccountable and plain dodgy stooges he's brought with him.

By contrast my voting for Blair seems almost rational (well the first time does anyway, I'm not sure how you can excuse me the second time around).

Ah, I feel my bile duct draining. Thank you & goodnight.

I don't trust your president either

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 22:49:56 +0100

"The bottom line is I don't trust this president and his advisors". Not every Democrat has caved to Bush's martial fervor. Rep. Pete Stark makes it stunningly clear why he's voting against the Iraq war resolution. [Salon.com]

» Man, he nailed it.

Who are they kidding?

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 12:54:47 +0000

Monday: "Secure Beneath The Watchful Eyes". This official London Transport "Secure Beneath The Watchful Eyes" poster handily beats the USPTO's Homeland Security eye/keyhole graphic for spine-tingling ... [istori/log]

» My first thought when I saw the poster was that it would not have looked out of place outside Dr. Goebbels ministry.

I'd like to be amazed at how quickly we've adapted/succumbed to the surveillance state. I'm persuing my MP about these issues, I'd like to think that others are too but I wonder. I also wonder if it will do any good. I took a look at the issues page on my MP's site, hardly inspirational...

More bureaucracy? Yeah that'll work.

Wed, 20 Nov 2002 10:57:38 +0000

Tories push for UK security chief. A new cabinet post of head of homeland security should be created to provide a clear focus against terrorism in the UK¸ say the Tories. [BBC News | UK]

» Why is this necessary? Why is terrorism not adequately represented by either the home office (MI5) or the department of defence (MI6)? What does having one extra bureaucrat achieve?

You are whose ID you steal

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 11:07:13 +0000

Information Awareness.

Here is a good joke. This Thanksgiving, be thankful that the government is cracking down on identity fraud. At least, that is what the Washington Post would have you believe. If you read into the details, you'll find that:

This article should have been an indictment of how the government has failed to protect the voters from identity fraud, and instead protects only the banks and government bureaucrats. In fact, the government is completely impotent to prevent similar and ongoing fraud -- the problems with identity security across the entire economic infrastructure are so systemic and deep that it will take work on many fronts to patch them all. The paper should just say, "Government surrenders in war on identity fraud. Three poor people jailed; 30,000 screwed. You're next and there's nothing you can do about it. Government war against people who copy lame Courtney Love music progressing nicely."

[Better Living Through Software]

» Time to start lobbying your MP/Senator/what-have-you.

Which reminds me, I owe my MP a list of sites where they can form their own opinion about the RIPA. Mine is a little too dependent upon Home Office rhetoric for my liking. Does anyone have any they would recommend?

How do you mice feel?

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 10:18:59 +0000

Kiss it goodbye. With industry henchmen in complete control of Washington, the Clean Air Act, wilderness preserves and environmental enforcement are all endangered species. [Salon.com]

America is turning into a gigantic socio-economic laboratory. Has there ever before been a country so close to rule by corporation? If Bush manages to get another term it will really give him and his buddies a chance to insinuate themselves, it will also give them a mandate to disassemble more and more of the American state. Who knows where this will lead? Fascinating.

[Note: It required a real effort of will to unindent my comment and format it like this, without the little chevron]

Howard and Bush: two ugly peas in a pod

Sun, 01 Dec 2002 14:06:34 +0000

Australia ready to strike abroad. Prime Minister John Howard causes outrage by saying he would launch pre-emptive action against terrorists in neigbouring countries. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Depressing, depressing.

Looks like the terrorists have figured out that "divide and conquer" still works. They provoke Australia into throwing their weight around in the area and fuel the fire even further.

Instead of fighting to improve the power of the UN to deal with these issues the push is to weaken the UN and make unilateral action the de facto response to an indication of threat.

Oh well, of course Australia will obviously live up to the high standards of evidence set by the UK and the USA so no worries.

Calling all conservatives

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 20:35:40 +0000

Common Collective Sense. Britt Blaser suggests , "If you're as sick and tired of being sick and tired as I am, we should ... [istori/log]

Okay I call myself a liberal which I hold to mean:

Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

Here are some of my views:

I believe very firmly in the freedom and privacy of individuals - especially under the threat of terrorism.
I am concerned about Saddam Hussein yet still believe that a UK/US war on Iraq is a bad idea (especially if it's all about oil).
I am in favour of European integration and the UK adopting the Euro.
I am worried about rising crime but do not think filling jails with young men is the answer.
I am worried about my health and how to pay for all the medical treatment I am bound to require (if I live long enough).
I wonder if we are on the edge of an ecological disaster and we keep building roads.

Are there any people out there who do not see themselves as a liberal who can find themselves in agreement with one or two of these points and would care to discuss some of the others? Or suggest some of their own?

Euro arrest warrant under fire

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 15:06:10 +0000

Euro arrest warrant under fire. The proposed European arrest warrant could see Britons sent for trial abroad for things which are not offences in the UK, opponents claim. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

I've no problem, in principle, with the idea of a European arrest warrant provided that it goes hand in hand with significant legal reform and harmonization across the union and an emphasis on tackling the problems of identity theft. This is of particular significance when you consider how the union is to expand to, potentially, include countries like Turkey.

Portland will be the template

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 10:30:28 +0000

back in the .... It was twenty years ago that I visited my first communist country. In 1982, I trekked through most of Eastern Europe, and a bit of the Soviet Union. I can still remember well the terror at the border to East Germany, when guards searched every inch of my bags before letting me pass. They even forced me to remove my shoes! (The last time that happened to me was, well, I guess SFO.) A Russian woman on the train told me: "Don't worry. As long as you stay on the path, you're fine. It's only people who slip off the path who fall into the abyss." "The abyss." I was reminded of that story on my last trip to a communist country. My wife and I just returned from China. The reminder, however, was not the behavior of the Chinese border guards. Indeed, getting through customs and onto a plane there is like it was in the US 20 years ago -- relaxed, respectful, easy, and you even get to keep your shoes. I was reminded instead by the Portland airport story that has been popped in blog space. Stay on the path, and you're safe. Slip, and you're in the abyss. People -- on both the left and right -- boil in this space about what's happening outside. Yet outside blog space, there is just more of the same. The Times writes about Democratic hopefuls rallying to attack Bush for not making America safe enough. Wonderful. Who ever wins in 2004, we can be assured of more petty fascism to keep America safe. Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this "war"? Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental. If we must detain Arabs, must we do so inhumanely? If we must frisk every air traveler, can't we at least build in checks to the system to assure that it is not abused? If we must fight to defend America, can it at least be America that we defend? I'm all with Dave that this space will be the space for political action in the future. If only the future comes soon enough. [Lessig Blog]

The Portland airport story is indeed a frightening example of the witches brew of petty beauracracy and police state powers. It's a reminder that we shouldn't have given guns to people with small minds and it's frightening precisely because we can all put ourselves in that situation and know it might easily have been us.

This anti-terrorism kick is all about state power. As corporations rob the state of it's social & commercial powers what has it left to do except flex it's muscles and remind us whose in charge?

Now I don't really know what kind of man Mr. Bush is, but I have my suspicions based on the evidence (mainly reporting) available to me. I think he is an ambitious, clever, devious, ignorant and mean spirited individual. He is used to privilege and influence helping him to get his way.

According to dictionary.com:

fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

War against Peace

Tue, 07 Jan 2003 09:36:27 +0000

I've recently begun reading articles from the site LewRockwell.com. I don't remember how I came across the site, nor what drew me to it. But, as someone who regards himself as an uneducated libertarian, I found something that drew me in.

I certainly don't agree with every piece I've read on the site or even with everything said in a piece I broadly agree with. But I find it interesting and stimulating. Today I read "The War Against Life" by a gentleman called Butler Shaffer. Here is a taster:

It is interesting to observe so many Americans trying to find "meaning" in the Bush administrations war against an endless parade of "enemies." From Afghanistan to Iraq to North Korea, the state continues to concoct "threats" for the consumption of a public that is neither empirically nor analytically demanding. The media are quick to play their assigned roles, providing state-generated "information" and self-styled "experts" to convince the rest of us that everything the White House tells us is "just so," and that anyone who dissents from or even questions the states purposes or policies is likely an apologist for terrorism!

and a summary:

From Afghanistan to Iraq to North Korea, the state continues to concoct "threats" for the consumption of a public that is neither empirically nor analytically demanding.
The state's ability to gull most of its citizens into an acceptance of politically defined reality has been made possible by one of the few successful state institutions: the government school system.
Contrary to those who look upon government schools as failures, I have long regarded them as shining accomplishments for state purposes: to produce herd-oriented men and women incapable of making independent judgments, and who are thus prepared to submit to external authorities for direction in their lives.
While the bald eagle does represent the predatory nature of the state, I believe it is time to adopt a national symbol that more accurately reflects the mindset of most Americans: the parrot!
Much of the explanation, I suspect, is to be found in our sense of fear: both of ourselves and others.
That question was the subject of inquiry for a book, published in 1967, titled Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.
We must understand all of politics -- no matter in what nation it is practiced -- as a system that wars against the very nature of life.

Don't shoot me

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 11:39:20 +0000

Gun crime soars by 35%. Offences involving firearms rose to more than 27 every day on average in England and Wales, Home Office statistics show. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

Okay this is really scary. More than 27 firearms offences a day?

I'm tempted to say that I'm in favour of minimum 5 year sentences for possession of an unlicensed firearm. It's just that I don't think it will work. It won't do anything to modify the behaviour of the offender (given the way the prison system operates I think it's far more likely to harden them in their behaviour) and I don't think it will make the streets any safer.

Why don't I think that? Because I think that for every one you send down another will spring up. It's is/becoming a cultural thing. I also don't think that prison works as a deterrent for the sort of people who enjoy carrying guns and shooting people.

What has been done to these people that they think this is the way to live?

The Home Office are at it again

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:46:10 +0000

Make your stand now

Paul Makepeace at Ecademy:

Take a stand on UK ID cards [Paul Makepeace]. Once again the UK govt is trying to foist a national ID system on the Brits. Stand.org.uk has prepared a piece to enable people to review the govt docs, and send an email to Those In Charge. There isn't a lot of time left. If you're going to do this, do it now. It's worth noting that this kind of protest killed off the RIP bill, so it works. It's very easy - read the page -- lively, short and entertainingly informative -- then click on the relevant checkboxes in Step 1, edit the form they present, and then off it goes. You must edit the box as it contains instructions that would look particularly stupid if sent. Here's what I hastily threw together, Dear Sir/Madam, I was dismayed recently to learn about the Government's proposals for Entitlement Cards (aka ID cards). [Ecademy: user blogs]

Is restriction of liberty hardwired into politicians?

[Dangerous thinking]

Here we go again.

Part of the problem is that MP's are, by and large, horribly ill-informed about IT issues. Couple this with a need to be seen to be doing something and you have a nasty situation where any loud voice is likely to receive widespread support.

My own MP gets most of her information from the Home Office. She's a Labour MP so I guess she feels she can trust them. This is bad. Of course my own guilty secret is that I was supposed to be sending them information about where they kind find other opinions about RIP. I could have thrown in some stuff about identity cards too. I still should.

In the meantime it's off to the Stand.

The price of freedom

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:31:46 +0000

Comain.

So I just learned that this is the first political poster released under a Creative Commons license. Good poster too. Gets CC licensing in front of more folks, especially politicos.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

The poster and the idea are good. I'm definitely in favour of banning political campaign contributions and financing such things via the state. It won't waste as much money as people think, because we don't have to give them much. This will force politicians off the TV, where advertising is expensive, and onto the road where they might actually be forced to meet the people they are claiming to represent. In particular, if a man is to be president of the United States, then let him walk (or drive) some good proportion of it on his way there.

Now I don't believe that just banning contributions will stop the corruption, it's too well entrenched, but it will redress the balance somewhat and that's still a good thing.

Another way forward is to do something about the revolving door between business and government. The UK government is littered with hapless execs who have taken a couple of years out from their boardroom careers to milk some opportunities out of government for them & their business chums. Is it any different in America?

I agree that government, if it is to be efficient, needs a knowledge of business methods and good practice. You'll get no argument from me there. But public service should be about "serving the public" and not "helping one's self," and "lining the pockets of one's friends."

Here is my proposal, make of it what you will:

I would like to see the formation of a full-time corruption monitoring agency. It should be state funded with oversight by the Public Accounts Committee. The agency should be headed by a senior judge who serves a 3 year term and should be elected by the public (from a free list) and not appointed by politicians.

Other full-time members of the agency should be drawn from all walks of life including pensioners, business, the press, the judiciary, the police, and members of parliament. There should be strict controls in place to limit the power of interest, i.e. members of one industry shielding their friends. Important investigations should have oversight by a jury, drawn at random from the public.

The agency should have oversight over all aspects of government business and that includes the prime ministers office, the department of defence and the foreign office. It should have the power to call anyone to answer, from me right up to the Prime Minister, with refusal carrying the same weight as refusing to appear at the house of commons.

Decisions about whether a report is made public or not should be made by the full investigating committee (including the jury if there is one) with the default being that publishing is in the public interest. The agency should provide access via the web to all materials that are not held to be secret and the head of the agency should publish an annual report.

As a final protection this agency should not be directly controlled by parliament. In particular, changes to it's constitution and it's funding should be ratified by public referendum.

All this will cost many millions of pounds to set-up properly but, in the long term, I think it will be worth it.

The price of freedom is never free.

sssipping cocktails on your government-subsidized yachts

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:47:18 +0000

The Snake is Back

Disclaimer: I, Pesky the Rat, hereby register my absolute disgust at my agent Susan the Human's insistance that I allow Janet the Snake space on my weblog for "balance". This ungrateful, slithering future fashion accessory has dirtied my page far too much in the past, and I am horrified she is to be allowed back for another go. I simply ask that you think no less of me for this transgression.

Janet the Snake,
SuperSexy Reptile Pundit,
defends tax cuts for the rich

Hello there my dear little readersss, Janet the Snake here, at your ssservice, ready to dish it out faster than that puny little rat can take it. Ssso today's topic is: why are those little rodents so upset about tax cuts for the rich? What on earth isss their problem?

I've got two words for all you whiny little lemmings out there: Food Chain.

Rich people, of which I am one, thanks to my bessstselling book, "Slander: Rodent Lies about Animals that Eat Rodents", are rich because we deserve to be. Because we have worked hard for what we have, unlike the unwashed minor mammilian massssssses who sspend their days thinking about poetry and eating granola barss. We are at the top of the food chain because we have big, shiny fangs and we aren't afraid to use them.

I mean, let's look at my dear friend, Georgie, out there in the White Houssse. Georgie's family has basically gotten themselves where they are today through a long series of deliciously sneaky business deals, not all of them entirely legal. That's the sort of initiative that gets you ahead in thisss world, let me tell you. If the rest of you weren't smart enough to track down the right loopholes, why should I have to pay for it? After all, I'm going to eat you in the end, anyway, ssso why does it really matter?

96% of the taxesss in this country are paid by the richest half of Americans. The ressst of you, clearly, no longer have any incentive to work. You prefer to lounge about in the lap of luxury, taking home hundreds of dollarsss--hundreds! a month in unemployment or welfare, sssipping cocktails on your government-subsidized yachts while the rest of us toil away, counting our dividend checks, dutifully sorting through our trust-fund money, looking for ways to enrich thisss great country of ourss.

You have forgotten your place, rodentsss. You have forgotten that asss ssoon as you are born into this world, your purpossse is to feed usss. If you are allowed a week on this glorious planet, it is a gift from ussss. We give more generously to some than others, but make no missstake, the clock belongs to usss.

[Pesky the Rat]

I am NOT a terrorist. Please don't treat me like one!

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 20:58:16 +0000

This is a copy of a letter I have faxed to my MP this evening (using the excellent FaxYourMP service). It is in response to a piece today in The Register about the UK government forcing ISP's to keep a log of every page visited and every e-mail sent by anyone using the net in the UK. Another bonehead scheme to stop terrorists.

Don't get me wrong. I want to see an end to terrorism but who really believes this is where the solution lies?

So from a technical perspective where does it get us?

Keeping a log of all pages browsed: I guess that the terrorists and I will start using anonymous surfing services hosted in countries that don't have this kind of legislation. You have to pay, but that's okay the terrorists will probably be using stolen credit cards anyway. Maybe it will be your credit card?
Scanning my email headers: I and the terrorists will use non-local ISP's to forward our mail and we'll find ways of encrypting it. The terrorists will probably also use anonymous remailers to hide their identities.

Still think this will work?

Okay so how do you stop terrorists? Maybe we should take a lesson from Israel's no-nonsense PM Ariel Sharon? Then again, maybe not. Maybe we should try something radical: Maybe we should actually figure out what it is these people want, and give it to them.

We in the West keep saying the Israeli's should offer the Palestinians "land for peace." Isn't that dealing with terrorists? And if it is, so what? Are their grievances not legitimate (even if their methods are to be abhored). If you take away all hope don't you create a situation in which people do not value their lives but are angry enough to join armed struggle?

If we want peace with the world we need to find a way to give these people what they want. Take away the motivation to blow themselves up and us with them.

Just a thought.

Government snooping doubles in under 2 years

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 17:23:31 +0000

Bugging warrants double under Labour. I spy with my all-encompassing eye [The Register]

Why aren't more people bothered by this?

Are there only a few of us who think the government shouldn't have such an easy time of it snooping on it's citizens? Where is the oversight? Where is the regulation?

Who cares right?

Pearls before swine

Thu, 30 Jan 2003 21:27:56 +0000

In These Times | Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

"Based on what youve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bushs policies and the impending war in Iraq? Kurt Vonnegut::That they are nonsense."

[Brain Off]

If you like Vonnegut it's worth reading the whole interview. Heck, it's worth it even if you don't like Vonnegut! Just shut up and go read the damn thing!

Don't ask questions. Do what you're told.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 19:49:28 +0000

Cheney's Energy Task Force: Why We'll Never Know Who Was on It. The Hill: GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit. The controversy with Cheney came to a head in December after U.S.... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

The insanity of the state

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 08:49:55 +0000

Another stimulating piece by Butler Shafer (my summary, the whole article is better):

And now we find Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and George Bush being referred to as "madmen" by one faction or another, depending upon which side of the battlefield you are on.

Confining our focus on the demented state of mind of tyrants and war-lovers is to overlook the more important consideration: the insanity of the state itself. After pointing out to my students how FDR manipulated the Japanese into an attack on Pearl Harbor in order to get America into World War II, I often hear the response "our government wouldnt do that!"

The courts, a branch of the state, have provided a fairly consistent expansion of the allegedly "limited" powers granted to the state, and a restrictive definition of the "rights" it was the announced purpose of this scheme to "protect."

If the state enjoys a monopoly on the use of force, and there is no device or principle that can restrain the scope of such authority, what would we expect government officials to do with such power? Much what we would expect a group of children to do if a bowl of candy was placed before them: grab as much of it as they can!

It should be evident to any thoughtful person that politics mobilizes the most vicious, socially destructive attitudes and practices known to mankind. The state represents the "dark side" of the human character, and so we are disinclined to stare it in the face, out of a fear that we might see something of ourselves reflected back.

If the United States has created chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, we will go to war with Iraq for allegedly trying to acquire such weapons for themselves. America will condemn North Korea for having nuclear missiles, even though the United States is the only country in history that has actually used such weapons against civilian populations!

No matter how strong or deserving the criticism of any foreign regime, statists can never allow the censure to rise to the level of an attack upon the idea of the state itself.

And so it is that the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, Pol Pots, and other tyrants, must be marginalized and isolated as aberrations of an otherwise wondrous system. What better way of accomplishing such state-saving ends than to declare them to be "madmen," "crazed lunatics" who managed to get into power by some untoward means?

In the language of "chaos" theory, the state becomes an "attractor" for the kinds of people who are disposed to use violence and intimidation against others; people who are willing to exploit the sociopathic nature of all political systems.

[From LewRockwell.com]

Do more harm than good?

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 12:04:03 +0000

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success," to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

F.A. Hayek via Lew Rockwell

Good words to think on.

Goodbye President Blair

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 13:54:01 +0000

Cabinet 'rock solid' on Iraq. Tony Blair will not be diverted from disarming Iraq by the biggest rebellion of his premiership, says Downing Street. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

What's frightening is the religious zeal with which this campaign is being waged. We are not offered evidence but asked to believe. But we don't, and he would do well to realise that.

Buddy can you spare a cruise missile?

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 08:17:35 +0000

Brown 'to pledge' more war cash. Chancellor Gordon Brown is expected to say on Tuesday that he is prepared to set aside even more money for a possible war in Iraq. [BBC News | UK | UK Edition]

I'm glad to know that, in the midst of a growing depression, our government has made provision for all the arms dealers and arms manufacturers to weather the storm.

Shit on a stick

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 21:23:29 +0000

A fantastic article by Matt Taibbi about how the White House press core and the mainstream media no longer serve a useful function. (My spin in italics).

Here are my highlights, but read the whole thing:

After watching George W. Bush's press conference last Thursday night, I'm more convinced than ever: The entire White House press corps should be herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic.
Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list.
In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush's behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.
In his best moments Bush was deranged and uncommunicative, and in his worst moments, which were most of the press conference, he was swaying side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, at times slurring his words and seemingly clinging for dear life to the verbal oases of phrases like "total disarmament," "regime change," and "mass destruction."
Moments later, the camera angle of the conference shifted to a side shot, revealing a ring of potted plants around the presidential podium.
It would be hard to imagine an image that more perfectly describes American political journalism today: George Bush, surrounded by a row of potted plants, in turn surrounded by the White House press corps.
This was just Bush's eighth press conference since taking office, and each one of them has been a travesty.
But the White House press corps' idea of "taking a shot" is David Sanger asking Bush what he thinks of British foreign minister Jack Straw saying that regime change was not necessarily a war goal.
And then meekly sitting his ass back down when Bush ignores the question.
They can't write what they think, and can't ask real questions.
What the hell are they doing there?

What indeed?

You are about to go to war. A war which the secretary general of the UN has stated publicly could be an illegal act. And the best your ace reporter can do is ask Shrub "How is your faith holding together?" Shit!

Have any of you guys looked at Afghanistan lately?

It's not Iraq you should be torching.

Robin Cook resigns

Tue, 18 Mar 2003 11:41:30 +0000

Resignation.

Robin Cook's 11-minute resignation speech in the British Parliament says it all - highly recommended. [www.gulker.com]

I wish the US had the same tradition of resignation as other nations. When its acceptable for someone to give up their job in the name of principles or shame it makes the institution stronger. Without such traditions we all put on a facade of solidarity, forget how we got here (misbegotten chads) and feed a tyranny of majority. Its expected that Tony Blair will loose several others in the coming days.

John Brady Kiesling's resignation from the state department was more than admirable for a person of conscious. He acted against the grain of tradition. A protest unaccepted by his institutions, a voice needed and one that will cost him personally. We yield to the Hobbsian Leviathan so quickly.

"Let them hate so long as they fear."

Lucius Accius (170 BC - 86 BC), believed to be a favorite saying of the notorious Emperor Caligula.

[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

I've just read the text of the Cook speech and it is a good one. A lot of people do not like Robin Cook but I would hope that they would see past that and read his words, summarized here:

I have chosen to address the House first on why I cannot support a war without international agreement or domestic support.
I applaud the heroic efforts that the prime minister has made in trying to secure a second resolution.
Now that those attempts have failed, we cannot pretend that getting a second resolution was of no importance.
France has been at the receiving end of bucket loads of commentary in recent days.
Germany wants more time for inspections; Russia wants more time for inspections; indeed, at no time have we signed up even the minimum necessary to carry a second resolution.
The reality is that Britain is being asked to embark on a war without agreement in any of the international bodies of which we are a leading partner - not NATO, not the European Union and, now, not the Security Council.
The US can afford to go it alone, but Britain is not a superpower.
The legal basis for our action in Kosovo was the need to respond to an urgent and compelling humanitarian crisis.
Our difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the international community nor the British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling reason for this military action in Iraq.
The threshold for war should always be high.
I hope that Saddam, even now, will quit Baghdad and avert war, but it is false to argue that only those who support war support our troops.
Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam's medium and long-range missiles programmes.
We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.
Only a couple of weeks ago, Hans Blix told the Security Council that the key remaining disarmament tasks could be completed within months.
Yet it is more than 30 years since resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.
We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.
Nor is our credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.
I welcome the strong personal commitment that the prime minister has given to middle east peace, but Britain's positive role in the middle east does not redress the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.

Home of the brave certainly...

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:59:21 +0000

"Shut your mouth". As radio giants censor antiwar musicians, TV networks bully pro-peace actors, and Attorney General John Ashcroft prepares a new assault on civil liberties, a climate of intimidation creeps over America. [Salon.com]

Life would be much easier if everything was black and white.

Polical leaders of my generation

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 21:12:52 +0100

I was watching a program about Michael Foot the former Labour leader who turned 90 recently. What caught my interest about the interview was that, even at 90, he was still passionate about his ideals and about the politicians who influenced them.

It set me to thinking, where are the politicians who influence me? Where are the political voices that would move me to action? And in particular where are the political leaders of my generation?

I think it's a very sad thing that I can think of no politican who moves me.

At a cross-roads

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 08:00:40 +0000

There is definitely no way I am voting Labour next time around. I cannot, in good conscience, vote for this party and it's leader. Whilst I have been disappointed by Labours delivery of policies and it's abondonement of government reform I am most perturbed by recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq. I accept that some response to the events of 9/11 was required but what has transpired is not it. I did not give Blair/Labour a mandate for the actions they have taken, nor do I support those actions.

As a child of the Thatcher years I still bitterly resent the conservative party: Listening to Michael Howard & co., they have not changed. Asylum island? Might as well be next to cloud cuckoo land. I hope Britain has not become so frightened and narrow minded as to hand our government over to such people.

Of the mainstream parties that leaves only the Liberal Democrats. I guess I am going to have to take them more seriously and learn whether they are a party I could join. I am interested to see how they are engaging with people, what use they are making of weblogs, and how they are encouraging community around their policies. I guess I'm looking to see whether they are awake to what is happening in the US right now with Dean and others.

Anyone know any active lib dems?

I respectfully disagree

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 15:26:49 +0000

The Nation on Ro. The Nation has a great piece on Ro Khanna's race for Congress. [Lessig Blog]

I enjoyed watched the video clips of Ro in action at the debates. It's refreshing to see someone offer respect whilst still disagreeing on an intelligent point.

No interest

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 12:20:46 +0000

President Bush: Don't use my husband as your mascot. A 9/11 widow's open letter to Bush about his new ad campaign. [Salon.com]

I'm trying not to post about US politics these days. It's not my country and I'm afraid I come across as whiny, preachy, and repetitive.

Nevertheless what I've seen about the recent Bush 9/11 based campaigning is pretty gross and utterly contemptible. I'm not sure if he's actually wrapped himself in the flag yet but it can only be a matter ot time.

I find it depressing to consider that a large chunk of America is probably going to willingly swallow this horse pill, that they seem to think it's in their best interest to have Bush in charge.

The same argument could be applied here, there, and everywhere. I certainly don't think Blair == Bush, but I can't, in conscience, vote for Blairs Labour party. I'll have to come up with another option.

I'm looking for a movement that asks people to consider what is in their own long term best interests. I feel sure that if more people were to consider this we could begin to make some progress.

New Bush: Now 20% more loathsome than other brands

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:47:40 +0000

Going negative. He's the father of the modern attack ad, and he's behind the Bush campaign's new wave of anti-Kerry spots. Alex Castellanos is known as vicious, irresponsible -- and effective. [Salon.com]

It seems that the words repulsive and Bush are to be forever intertwined for me...

"I don't remember"

Sat, 27 Mar 2004 09:47:10 +0000

Thought provoking piece, from the Future of Freedom Foundation, about the use of "I don't remember" as a way of avoiding the truth (good or bad) and about how it is being used now by members of the Bush administration.

Bush Spending $10M on Campaign Ads in 12 days

Sun, 25 Apr 2004 20:35:04 +0100

This is crazy. Spending $10 million in 12 days! Planning to spend $180 million on advertising!! Kerry doing similar!!! It's crazy!!!!

Think what could have been done with that money if put to a purpose other than trying to out sleaze your opponent. I guess the advertisers and media companies, at least, are happy.

And what will it be next time around? How long before you'll need to raise $1bn in order to have a credible chance of becoming president? You in the US are already in the situation of having two rich, well connected, ex-Yale boys duking it out. Heck if Bush gets a second term it wouldn't surprise me if he privatizes the white house and sells it to his pals.

I propose an alternative strategy:

Ban all paid political advertising of all kinds from all broadcast media.
Ban all financial donations.
Ban all paid political activity

From then on anyone wanting to be president has to raise a grass-roots movement to support them. Supporters cannot contribute dollars, they volunteer their time or they contribute their voice in support of their candidate. Likely people will only do this for someone they believe in quite strongly which should weed out all future members of the Bush family (any idea when Jeb plans to run?)

The current system just plays into the hands of the wealthy and well connected and, whilst my suggestions surely has many flaws, at least it would remove the financial advantage the current crop of bastards has over everyone else. Sure it would be difficult to get your message heard, but at least everyone would be in more or less the same boat.

Lead me not into disaster

Tue, 25 May 2004 08:14:51 +0100

"Dangerous rhetoric" [Salon.com]

One the quotes I especially liked from that piece was:

Conservative columnist George F. Will: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts."

Why are politicians so incapable of admitting error? It's going to lead us into disaster after disaster. This, blind, "no turning back!", "damn the torpedos full steam ahead!" mentality is so full of shit and I'm sick of it.

A long ramble about law & terrorism

Wed, 23 Jun 2004 09:17:53 +0100

My thoughts this morning were triggered by a piece about the dissolution of attorney-client privilege in the US.

Faced with the threat of being declared uncooperative, KPMG announced that it would pay its employees legal fees only if they waived the attorney-client privilege and "cooperated" with the investigation. Invariably, "cooperation" requires self-incrimination and negotiation of a guilty plea. By making it impossible for a defendant to defend, the government never has to have a real case.

I think I've said before that I don't trust my government. It's not that I think the government is actively hostile towards me, but that I think it has no regard for my life, liberty, or prosperity whilst persuing its own agenda. The state, as an entity, is becoming more important than the individuals it's supposed to serve. I think that the way my government has acquiesced to America's actions in Guantanamo Bay clearly demonstrates that.

There may be trouble ahead
But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

So what is my fear? My fear is to wake up one day in a fascist country. Fascism places the state foremost. The country does not serve the citizen; the citizen serves the country. Fascism does not recognize the idea of the independence of the common man. Now I am not suggesting that the US or UK is a fascist country now or that it's just around the corner. What I am suggesting is that the legal system is a good barometer for detecting this sort of change and I see stormy weather ahead.

In the last 12 months I've read a lot about how the American legal system is, and has been, deteriorating. About the ways that "Department of Justice" (sic) with the complicity of the rest of the government has made the USA into a prosecutors paradise. A prime example is the use of the RICO legislation. Passed in the 1970 the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act was intended to destroy the Mafia. And for about a decade it was used for that purpose. However by the 1990's prosecutors were using RICO against individuals, businesses, political protest groups, and terrorist organizations. Because so-called Mafiosos were considered to be murderous and ruthless, RICO was created to be equally ruthless. Those accused under RICO could find their assets seized and be unable to pay for their defence. Used this way RICO is the prosecutorial equivalent of the Hydrogen bomb.

There may be teardrops to shed
So while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

What concerns me is how, in both the US and the UK, the "War on Terror" is being used to hand more power, with less accountability, to the state. "The law is too soft" is the constant refrain from government ministers seeking new, and ever more draconian, powers. Powers which, sooner or later, get pointed at the rest of us. Meanwhile the state continues to act in a way that seems almost calculated to extend the threat of terrorism forever. But anyone who suggests that terrorism is the new communism (i.e. the most direct way of funnelling money to people in the arms industry) must, of course, be parnaoid.

I think there needs to ba full debate about what it means to be a citizen in our society. A debate which spells out the freedoms and protections we enjoy and attempts to understand how those can be balanced with the responsibilites we bear. That includes responsibility for the actions of the state. I believe that a sane outcome would be a re-establishment of fairness in law and a severe curtailment of the power of the state to meddle in the affairs of others. Maybe if we poked less sticks in their hives, we would annoy less hornets.

What do you do when you're fed up with the lot of them?

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 11:08:11 +0100

Only two days into the election campaign and already I would like to see Dr. John Reid bound in a sack and thrown in the river and Michael Howard endlessly forced to watch his own speeches from 1993-1997. In short, I'm sick and tired of the whole sorry bunch.

For this reason I would like to offer two proposals which I hope the British people will take to their hearts. The second builds upon the first as you will see.

I would like to see a change to the voting system. At the moment voters may vote for the candidate of their choice. I would like to see an additional option whereby the voter may vote against the candidate of their choice instead. Each vote against cancels out one vote for any given candidate, so that a candidate with 500 votes for and 500 votes against will end up with no votes!. I would have no hesitation in voting against Siobhain McDonagh Tony's Handpuppet in my area.
Following on from the first change I'd like to see us fail to elect any MP's at all. I would like us to try an experiment. 4 years with no government at all. Let's get all the snouts out of the trough, pack 'em off home and see what happens.

So, who's with me?!?

Guy Fawkes had it right

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 22:15:57 +0100

Tonight Channel 4 news announced the contents of the full text of the Attorney Generals original advice to Blair on March 7th 2003 on the legal case for war in Iraq.

There has been much speculation about this advice, fuelled by Blairs refusal to publish it. Once you know what it says you can see why he has been hell bent on trying to avoid it going public (at least before the election.)

The decision to go to war was made by the cabinet and rubber stamped by parliament based upon a summary of the Attorney Generals advice presented on March 17th 2003.

According to dictionary.com a summary :

Presents the substance in a condensed form

The full-text is loaded with equivocation and doubts. What is evident is that the legal case was certainly not clear cut. How the summary manages to lose this substance is a good question. It's somewhat like the way the intelligence dossier on WMD in Iraq lost all of it's uncertainties and caveats. I wonder if they are perhaps related?

I wasn't intending to to vote Labour before this. Long ago I had enough. When a Labour canvasser came by recently I hope I made my position clear. At volume I ranged over Ms. McDonagh's support of Blair in Iraq, support of the Blair/Bush over British Guantanamo detainee's, and her seeming lack of concern over the possibility of an attack on Iran.

I'm sure she has done good work for the community. I'm grateful for that and I hope our next MP will do likewise. However on matters of principle I cannot agree with her slavish support of Blair and his righteous warfare policies.

I haven't decided whether to vote Liberal (I don't really want a Liberal government) or to spoil my ballot.

I think Guy Fawkes had the right idea.

It is better to be ignorant than misinformed

Thu, 05 May 2005 08:33:26 +0100

Charley Reese holds these truths to be self-evident...

Serve the public good

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 11:45:41 +0100

I was doing a silly political test I came across via Dave Winers blog, I come out Libertarian but if you've read this blog any length of time you'd probably expect that by now. That's not why I'm writing this.

At the end of the questions they ask you for a law you would enact, no matter how stupid or Draconian. I thought about this for a minute and came up with the following:

Every year 2% of the governing class, selected publically and at random, would be either: thrown in jail for a year on trumped up charges, made to teach high-school (in an inner city) for a year, forced to be a janitor in a public hospital for a year, made to serve in the front-line infantry for a year, or made redundant and blacklisted for a year.

Serving one of these would not preclude you from being choosen again in the future although perhaps not in successive years.

If you want to be a public servant then you must be willing to prove it by going there first.

Uncomfortable history

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:30:20 +0000

I just read a piece talking about the forgotten legacy of Britains empire:

When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way" {2}. The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.

Now the question arises for me, as I imagine it did for the generations of Germans growing up in the shadow of the 1939-1945 conflict, how I should react to this?

Since the contention of the article is that Europeans (and in particular the British) ignore a history of genocide it seems that ignoring it is not an option. At the same time I can't take any responsibility for it. I did not counsel Lord Lytton in 1876.

What I can do is to acknowledge that the British have no moral imperative derived from a glorius history of bringing enlightenment to the world. We ran an empire and it's an ugly business.

These are just two examples of at least twenty such atrocities overseen and organised by the British government or British colonial settlers: they include, for example, the Tasmanian genocide, the use of collective punishment in Malaya, the bombing of villages in Oman, the dirty war in North Yemen, the evacuation of Diego Garcia. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I'm talking about. Max Hastings, in the Guardian today, laments our "relative lack of interest in Stalin and Mao's crimes". {8} But at least we are aware that they happened.

That's why I side so vehemently against our involvement with the American efforts to build some kind of empire in the middle east. We have no business there. We're creating an ugly mess that it will take years to clean up after we are finally kicked out.

The problem is that it isn't _us_ that are making the decisions. As Michael S. Rozeff points out:

The higher-ups or rulers who have power produce the big crises and wars. Their subjects, few of whom benefit from them, do not. The masses are not irrelevant, but their impact on major events is secondary. The Iranian people are not making the decisions about nuclear power. They are not issuing threats, and neither are the American and European peoples.

Rulers are men accustomed to gaining and using power. This implies they possess an above average dose of certain characteristics. Benign philosopher-kings don’t become rulers. Those who rule tend to be overly aggressive, rapacious, hard-nosed, opportunistic, pragmatic, cruel, violent, and manipulative. Even if these tendencies are not abundantly present, their power allows freer reign to their worse instincts. Rulers are hawks, not doves. Their number includes more than its share of troublemakers.

Rozeff maintains that those greedy for power live in a rarified atmosphere that sustains and feeds their delusions allowing them to gamble with the lives of the rest of us. That sounds about right to me. What bothers me is the number of people that seem to want to go along with it.

Rozeff suggests it is a failure of culture if the mores of the ruling classes seem into the mind of the people:

If and when the average person begins to go in for contests that are like those the rulers play, it will signal a deterioration in society’s ethical standards. If and when they accept and admire those who win by underhanded tactics, it means that middle-class values are losing ground and the values exhibited by rulers are gaining ground. This is perhaps happening. It has been said that on Survivor "lying, cheating, backstabbing, double-crossing, and betraying happen all the time. Its an accepted part of the game." The question is how accepted these behaviors become among the viewers, or whether they still condemn the villains.

We should look not just to a change of government but to a change of governance for the answer. Successive governments have proved that changing the puppet doesn't fix the problem we have to change the hand inside the puppet too.

Talk about double standards

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:11:53 +0000

So Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo got raked over the coals by representatives of the U.S. congress yesterday:

"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace," Lantos said at the hearing. "I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."

Is this the same congress that still slumbers soundly while Bush & co. march their jackboots over the US constitution, Iraq, and who knows what next?

Is it time to can unrepresentative democracy?

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 12:21:34 +0000

Just been reading a story from Ed Fosters Gripe Log about a proposed new act in the US (H.R. 4127, the Data Accountability and Trust Act) that is intended to override state laws on disclosure of privacy violations (e.g. ChoicePoint, CardSystems, and the newly brewing scandal). The key attribute of the US DATA law:

Rather than emulating California's privacy law, the DATA act would preempt SB 1386 and similar privacy laws enacted in other states. It would also essentially leave it up to the company that suffers the data breach to decide if the risk is great enough to warrant disclosure to the public.

Leave it up to the company. Right... I guess it's fitting that, a year ago today, I wrote about the ChoicePoint scandal. How likely is it that we would have heard anything about that if US DATA had been on the books. How can any responsible person think this is a good idea? I don't think they can. I think the only way this could happen is because government is corrupt and politicians collude with business to further their own political and/or financial ambitions.

In the short-term it is cheaper for companies to ~~bribe~~ lobby those few policians who can bend the laws to their advantage than it is to put their houses in order. And the short term is all most CEO's care about these days. Who cares about the long term?

This is yet another inditement of the system of representative democracy. A system whose heyday is long past and, if it ever was representative, is no longer so today. Indeed I find the very idea of representative democracy ridicuolous. How can one person even attempt to represent thousands of others on a range of issues? And, criticially, why should it be necessary?

I can imagine how in days past, where education was rare and communications slow and unreliable, our system of government may have seemed viable. But I wonder whether representative democracy was seen as the best way forward, or whether those conditions simply made it easier for the better educated, richer, men to grab power and create a system of patronage to keep themselves and their friends wealthy and powerful,

Whatever the true origin people need not be uneducated today and communications have reached the point where nobody should lack for information on any subject. What is required today is discernment, judgement, and a willingness to question.

Yet we continue elect representatives to take part in a corrupt system of government, divesting ourselves of our own power and with it, seemingly, our responsibility for what these people do in our name. Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran? We didn't do it, our politicians did. But we conspire to make them what they are.

This is the terrorists message "There are no innocents." We may not have personally gone to Iraq and shot people but we conspired to make it possible. We just don't learn. "Hey, next time let's time let's vote for the guy on the left!"

I don't know what the answer is. I tend towards the idea that our democracy really should be "one man, one vote." That we should represent ourselves and our own interests. A pessimist might wonder about just how horrible such a world could be: mob rule writ large. But could we really live with it?

Exposure to the consequences of such a system would surely teach us sorely needed wisdom, wouldn't it? If we could survive the first years wouldn't we necessarily learn to take responsibility for our decisions? Wouldn't we gradually become a better and more enlightened people? Isn't this the kind of path we must follow if we are to have a future?

Or would you rather continue to be ruled?

Devolving power can only bring good?

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:06:41 +0000

According to an ICM poll 40% of British muslims would like to see Sharia law implemented in predominantly muslim areas of the UK.

Okay some comments first: 40% are in favour, 41% were against. So we could just say "opinion is fairly divided." Additionally, as a commenter at reddit points out:

As a complete non-expert, I'm curious whether "Sharia law" means the same thing to all UK Muslims. The (currently disputed) Wikipedia article makes it seem Sharia can legitimately mean many things.

In fact, if I asked a typical citizen in my own country (US) what the advantages of Anglo-American common law vs. European civil law were... well I wouldn't even know if I were asking a meaningful question. ;)

So opinion is fairly divided on the matter and we're not even sure what either side thinks they are being asked about. I take comfort from the fact that only 1% felt that the July 7th bombers were "right".

But let's assume for a moment that there is a muslim community in the UK who are predominantly in favour of Sharia law and there is some formulation of Sharia law that they can agree upon. Is there some particularly good reason why, if it only applies to their community, they shouldn't have it?

It seems to me that many of todays problems are about arbitrary boundaries and the restriction of choice. I was born in the UK, it didn't take much effort for me to be here. If you are born in Iran and want to come to the UK you probably have a boundary problem. We don't want to let you in. By what right do we make this decision? I'm not sure.

Also our boundaries lead us to form groups. We form emotional attachments to places. We become "of" a place when, in reality, it's just a label we associate with ourselves. However this grouping leads to divisive in-group/out-group thought patterns and to irrational and unnecessary hostility between groups of people who really shouldn't have anything to fight about.

If we could make boundaries more about choice than chance then a lot of the tensions in our societies might be reduced. If a strong majority of people in one place want to live by a set of common principles then they should be free to do so and those who disagree are free to leave and have somewhere to go. I guess it's this last bit that's hardest. Where do you go?

Still quite a lot of thinking to be done here...

Hobson don't live here any more

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:07:41 +0100

Dave Winer writes, about the West Wing:

I want to live in their world, not the one I actually live in.

I haven't seen the show in a few years but I'm pretty sure, from a political perspective, I would agree with him.

I was listening to the news in the car yesterday (about the only time I listen to mainstream news now) and there was an item about the Italian general election. Held about every 5 years, the people of Italy are getting to choose between:

Puppet A: Silvio Berlusconi
Puppet B: Romano Prodi

What a choice? Why would you want to choose either of these bozos?

More and more I consider the best choice to be "No!" I don't want your government any more. Looking forward to the next elections in Britain I am likely to have the choice of:

Puppet A: Gordon Brown (or, god help us, Alan Milburn)
Puppet B: David Cameron (assuming he isn't assassinated before then)

Why the hell would I want to elect either of these guys? What exactly is it that they're going to do beyond line the pockets of their friends with my taxes? What else do politicians ever do?

I think the world would benefit from a real breaking down of the existing and centralized structures of power into smaller, more meaningful, and more accountable units. Beyond tax and spend a huge amount of our money what the hell is it that central government does?

How on earth do we make these people accountable?

Somebody always wins

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:38:06 +0100

I was thinking about the Italian elections again and about the next general elections in the UK. My problem with our present system of elections is this:

No matter how few people vote, someone always wins.

Instead of counting an abstention as the "No" vote that it is, it just doesn't get counted at all. Only a politician could love a system like this.

How to make a bad situation worse

Wed, 10 May 2006 17:47:35 +0100

William Lind covers a report on the worsening situation in Afghanistan where government (i.e. US, UK, and Afghan army) control is diminishing in the south. The report suggests that this is because of the dual objectives being persued (apparently in no particular order):

Stop the insurgents
Eradicate opium production

For farming families with no other means of survival opium is a life-line and the insurgents play to this by supporting the farmers against the government. The division of military resources between these conflicting goals means that neither policy can be effectively enforced.

It seems to me that the answer is to legalize opium production and consumption (in Afghanistan, the UK, and the US) and treat it like any other product that has potentially negative side-effects (e.g. alcohol, paracetamol, Sky One). Slap a warning on the side and let people get on with their lives and the consequences of their choices.

At a stroke the Afghan government could support the farmers and cut off the support base of the insurgents. The farmers could get a fair price for their produce on the open market. And opium/heroin users can get a better product without being unfairly criminalized for their choices.

But governments don't do this sort of stuff because it means less meddling in other peoples lives not more. The idea that people don't need every aspect of their existence dictated to them by central government seems to be anathema to the raving bureaucrats we are saddled with.

Hear from your MP

Wed, 24 May 2006 09:58:04 +0100

I just signed up to Hear from my MP, Theresa May. It's a crazy idea but it just might work.

If you enter your details, we'll add you to a queue of other people in your constituency. When enough have signed up, your MP will get sent an email. It'll say "25 of your constituents would like to hear what you're up to. Hit reply to let them know". If they don't reply, nothing will happen, until your MP gets a further email which says there are now 50, then 75, 100, 150 — until it is nonsensical not to reply and start talking.

Apparently I am the 29th person to sign up which puts Maidenhead squarely in the middle of the league table and means we need to find 21 more people who want to sign up in order to get the next message sent to Theresa May.

I pity poor David Lepper, MP for Brighton & Hove, who has said he doesn't want to use the service and would rather his constituents read his Press Releases and Hansard entries. The poor man has the No.2 spot for sign-ups and I bet they'll keep coming.

An English MEP, an Italian MEP, and a French MEP walk into a bar

Sat, 27 May 2006 23:22:57 +0100

From Tao of Mac I hear that some wag of a Euro MP has suggested wait a second, I need to catch my breath from laughing so hard to fund the EU by... no, really, I'll be alright in a second... by taxing every SMS and Email sent. What a marvellous sense of humour. Bravo!

Pardon me? Not a joke? You're not serious...

My disgust for our leaders intensifies

Wed, 31 May 2006 08:50:00 +0100

GWB: America will fight the terrorists on every battlefront, and we will not rest until this threat to our country has been removed. (Applause.)

Washington Post: It was the home of 76-year-old Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. . . . [He] had used a wheelchair since diabetes forced a leg amputation years ago. . . . In the house with Ali and his 66-year-old wife, Khamisa Tuma Ali, were three of the middle-aged male members of their family, at least one daughter-in-law and four children – 4-year-old Abdullah, 8-year-old Iman, 5-year-old Abdul Rahman and 2-month-old Asia. Marines entered shooting, witnesses recalled. Most of the shots – in Ali's house and two others – were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor, physicians at Haditha's hospital said. A daughter-in-law, identified as Hibbah, escaped with Asia, survivors and neighbors said. Iman and Abdul Rahman were shot but survived. Four-year-old Abdullah, Ali and the rest died. Ali took nine rounds in the chest and abdomen, leaving his intestines spilling out of the exit wounds in his back, according to his death certificate.

GWB: [O]ur enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming the men and women who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our way of life. . . . [O]ur enemies believe that the innocent can be murdered to serve a political vision.

Washington Post: In Haditha, families of those killed keep an ear cocked to a foreign station, Radio Monte Carlo, waiting for any news of a trial of the Marines. "They are waiting for the sentence – although they are convinced that the sentence will be like one for someone who killed a dog in the United States," said Waleed Mohammed, a lawyer preparing a file for Iraqi courts and the United Nations, if the U.S. trial disappoints. "Because Iraqis have become like dogs in the eyes of Americans."

Via Robert Higgs

The rhetoric of US and UK politicians in relation to this phony war they have created just disgusts me now. I feel tainted by my association with them.

Dissenter

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:57:09 +0100

By the way, this is what the powerful – and their sycophants – always fail to understand: no genuine dissident is happy about dissenting. You dissent because you see injustice, crime, corruption and needless death being wrought by the power structures of your own society. You dissent because so many lies have been forced down your throat, and you just want to know the truth, as far as it can be known, you just want to speak the truth, whatever it may be. You dissent because of the reality that you see. And this is a painful thing; it's like watching a family member go bad, like learning your own father is a killer, that your mother is thief. No one wants to believe evil of their own country, their own society; but sometimes the very ideals that you were given by your society – a commitment to justice, to truth, the belief in the inherent worth and moral agency of every individual human being – compels you to confront the reality of the crimes and corruption of the leaders and institutions of that same society.

It isn't fun; there's no pleasure in it. Especially if, with Dostoevsky, you believe that "each is responsible for all," that you yourself are implicated in every failure of humanity. Bob Dylan captured the essence of this kind of dissent well when he sang of the great iconoclast, Lenny Bruce:

He fought a war on a battlefield

Where every victory hurts.

Chris Floyd

Backfired

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:44:07 +0100

That's hardly surprising. How many times have we seen the US establishment back something to the hilt only to discover that the plot backfires by inspiring opposition? This is one of many problems of the US government. Its crackdowns usually end up working as advertisements (think of drugs, for example). All throughout Latin America, we've seen this happen with politics: US support is often the kiss of death. Especially in a country like Somalia, with so many factions, US backing is something to hide because it can only fire up the opposition. -- Via Lew Rockwell

This is a reference to the rise of Islamic militia in Somalia despite (and quite possibly because of) the CIA throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars of US tax payers money at secular warlords in aother bungled attempt to influence politics in that country.

Really the CIA seem quite hopeless at this stuff, you'd think with the all the practice they've had meddling in other countries they might show some skill at it by now.

Of course at this rate I don't think the $10bn that the Department for Homeland Security(sic) is currently wasting will be enough. I think more lobbyists are called for!

Naked

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 22:11:09 +0100

The business of politics laid bare.

Painful

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 10:32:15 +0100

The proposal has three simple steps. Step One is the easiest – abolish the position of CNO in the military. Step Two is the replacement of the CNO with the 2 Senators and 1 Congressional Representative of the deceased. Step Three is watching the ensuing riot. Imagine watching "my" senators, Hilary Clinton and Charles Schumer, along with some representative from New York, delivering the fateful news to a New York state resident who, you can bet your bottom buck, did not donate to any of their campaigns as keeping their financial heads above water was their primary preoccupation. After regaining composure, the next-of-kin might respond with several questions for the messengers like, "As my elected representatives in the Senate and Congress, why, if you don’t support this war, don’t you do something about it?" or "Since you are always so busy talking out of both sides of your mouth in an effort to win your next election, explain to me how I, my children and my country benefit from my husband’s death?" Or how about, "Ms. Clinton, why is your child not fighting in Iraq if this cause is so important?"

Mark G. Brennan talking about his idea for a new system for notifying the relatives of serving forces personnel that their loved one won't be coming home.

It seems only fair to me that this burden be born not by some random military officer but by the people who are actually culpable for the decision to send these people to their deaths.

Wakeup

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:35:14 +0100

If you live in the US you really need to wake up and smell the coffee right now:

Now, if you're a little confused as to why Congress would be so attracted to the idea of replacing effective state laws on identity theft with weak federal ones, then you just haven't been paying much attention to how your government works. It is of course the banks, databrokers, and other financial institutions whose indifferent security practices keep exposing our personal information that don't want to have to notify us when it happens. And it is of course the credit bureaus, credit card companies, etc. who don't want us to be able to freeze our credit files just because identity thieves might have our information. So we're talking about a lot of big companies with a lot of influence -- i.e., money -- that they can spread around our nation's capital. -- Ed Foster

All kinds of bad legislation gets passed by US law makers on a seemingly daily basis but this one looks set to cause misery on a new scale. And of course by making sure that nobody hears anything you can expect that misery to go on for a long time.

Turbulence

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:37:45 +0100

In the language of “chaos” theory, America – if not all of Western civilization – is in a state of turbulence of such intensity that efforts to restore order by recourse to traditional systems and policies will be to no avail. On the contrary, it is our insistence upon established practices that has led us to our plight; and only a fundamental, creative change in our thinking and behavior can extricate us from the destructive consequences of our prior assumptions. -- Via Butler Shafer

I started getting interested in complex systems by listening to David Snowden describe his work. The first time was almost 3 years ago to the day. I heard him again almost a year later and it reinforced his ideas and concepts.

Dave introduced me to the idea that some spaces are complex and in such spaces cause & effect is a retrospective coincidence so that the tools and techniques that used to yield results may cause unpredictable future effects. The challenge of complex spaces is that, when you're in them, they don't necessarily look any different to the knowable spaces we are comfortable with. (Dave also introduced me to the exploits of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin for which I am very grateful).

From that point onwards I got very interested in sense-making and, given my background and my fascination for blogging, I became very interested in topics and topic maps as a tool for understanding and representing things of interest. In a sense my topic map defines my world, or at least the subset of my world I choose to make public. What has always tripped me up is how poor are the tools we have to work with. My own efforts in addressing this situation, small as they were, have stumbled and failed.

Originally my interest in these things was purely theoretical but over the last 3 years my interest in politics and the nature of the world around me has blossomed and my interests in complexity, systems, sense-making, and reasoning have seemed more practical. I have gone from being an unthinking socialist to a thinking... for want of a better word libertarian. I hesitate when I use the term because I still understand so little of the philosophical underpinnings that define it.

What I do know is that many people who hear me talk about politics and life these days appear to think I am, at best, misguided and, at worst, delusional. I'm treating that as a good sign. For people who believe they are in an ordered space where the old answers remain true then anyone who acts like they believe they are in a complex space may appear to be out-of-step or irrational. Of course I cannot utterly dismiss the possibility that I am misguided or delusional but I see no way to address that other than to keep asking questions.

Recently (although not so recently as I would like) I started studying psychology. I found it to be a fascinating subject both from the perspective of personal discovery but also as a source of tools for thinking about human problems. Social psychology has many interesting things to teach us. From a political perspective one need only consider GroupThink and then look around.

Lately I have been thinking about my future and what I would like to do, if finances and personal situation permit. I am a generalist and aspire to be a PolyMath. I believe that much of interest lies at the interstices of the sciences and arts. I have expressed an interest in doing research and am looking for the right opportunity.

In the meantime I continue to self-educate as best I can. Right now I am honing up my logical argument skills and beginning to read about the very interesting area of Systems Theory. Systems Theory seems to be the ultimate polymath science that seeks always to unify, it's exciting.

The goal of all this effort, like most of my goal, is not yet directed to any specific purpose (not even a political one) but to providing myself, and hopefully others, with better tools to master life. In Gregory Benfords fantastic novels about human future (e.g. Great Sky River) he describes how humans have an enhanced sensorium and access to the aspects of the wisdom of their dead.

I see the shearing forces that act on our society, like the evolution of technology outstripping the pace of social change, and the increasing uncertainty and turbulence we face and cannot but believe that we need new and better tools if we are to survive. Right now I believe that my lifes work is in researching, developing, and using such tools.

Phew... This post went somwhere other than I where I was expecting and, despite being something of a ramble, wanted to be written. I think that reflects my growing uncertainties about my present and my future: my own personal turbulence.

Constitution

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:57:47 +0100

"Benjamin Franklin was shown the new American constitution, and he said, 'I don't like it, but I will vote for it because we need something right now. But this constitution in time will fail, as all such efforts do. And it will fail because of the corruption of the people, in a general sense.' And that is what it has come to now, exactly as Franklin predicted."

From an interview with Gore Vidal.

Somnolence

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 12:32:34 +0100

I thought I had linked to this 2004 piece by Martin Van Creveld (professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) before, when I first read it, but searching my archives I can find no trace. I'm making up for that by posting about it now as it strikes me, reading it today, that it's even more relevant than it was in 2004.

It describes Moshe Dayan's experiences (as a former Israeli commander, defence minister, and politician) reporting on the Vietnam war (in I think 1965) and contrasts it to the state of Iraq in 2004. In my opinion the two intervening years only make the comparisons more striking.

During the next few days his feeling that the Americans did not really know where they were going was reinforced. Everywhere he went he was received courteously enough. Everywhere he went the people he encountered were committed and extremely hard working. Intensely patriotic, they seemed proud of what they were doing and would not admit any errors. At one point he asked whether they had changed their methods since they first went to Vietnam and was told that they did not have to do so since everything worked much better than expected. Thereupon he noted that the US Military never made any mistakes; however, that comment he kept to himself. He was subjected to a flood of statistics – so and so many enemies killed, so and so many captured – meant to prove that the situation was well under control and that large parts of the territory of South Vietnam, as well as its population, were now safe against terrorist attack. As he noted, however, even a few elementary questions revealed that things were far from simple. Later he was to discover how right he had been in this; in the whole of South Vietnam there was not a single road that was really safe against the Viet Cong. Nor was there anything to prevent the enemy from returning even to those places that had been most thoroughly “cleansed” and “pacified.”

If you replace Vietnam with Iraq and Viet Cong. with insurgents (or freedom fighters -- your choice) this could have been written in the Times today. Later on it says:

Flying to Vietnam by way of Honolulu and Tokyo, Dayan summed up his impressions so far. Almost all of the Americans he had met were pleasant enough. None, however, could tell him how they were going to win the War. Most could not even give a convincing reason why the US had to be in Vietnam in the first place; at least one had said that, had President Johnson been presented with a way to get out, he would have jumped on it and withdrawn his troops. What really infuriated them was any attempt to question their motives. As far as they were concerned their cause was noble and just. The fact that the Communist States did what they could to support the Viet Cong and North Vietnam was bad but understandable. They were, however, puzzled by the attitude of their European allies. Those Europeans supposedly shared America’s liberal-democratic values. Still many of them were strongly critical. At a loss to explain the problem, the Americans attributed it to cowardice, envy, and the resentment that arose from Europe’s own recent failure in waging “Imperialist” war. He thought that, in ignoring the Europeans, the Americans were making a big mistake.

How true. What we read about Iraq today tells us:

Most Americans are pleasnt
They don't know why they are there
They don't how to win
Their cause is "noble and just"
They are infuriated when you question their motives
They are puzzled by liberal, democratic, European states not supporting them
They explain this in terms of cowardice and envy

What is scary for me, as a 30 something, is realising just how long the Vietnam conflict went on. In my ignorance I imagined it was a few years in the late 60's and early 70's. According to Wikipedia however, it was fought between 1959 and 1975.

By the time America pulled out they had suffered over 58,000 dead and nearly 3 times as many wounded. Total deaths approximated 1.4 million soliders from both sides and over a million wounded. I'm not sure how to read the figures for civillian dead and wounded but it seems to be somewhere between 4 and 8 million total.

For the sake of argument lets call it about 8 million total dead and wounded. What did they die for? What was won? Was it a worthwhile sacrifice to win hearts & minds and establish democracy? Well as far as I can tell it wasn't worthwhile in Vietnam and I have no reason to believe it will be in Iraq either.

Back in Paris Niceault had told him the “battle for hearts and minds” would not work, given that that the Vietnamese had their own cultural traditions – as well as “immensely beautiful women” – and that “Californization” was the last thing they wanted.

...

the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.

I certainly hope that the next American administration is prepared to admit that Iraq was a mistake and should never have happened because this will allow them to change course and to leave. With us gone who knows what will happen but it will be in the hands of the Iraqi's. If it goes the worse for us well... that is the price we pay for meddling and, perhaps, learning that price will inform and teach us not to listen to our leaders when they bay for foreign wars.

But of course the next administration will hold to the line democracy at the point of a sword and we'll still be in this mire 10 years from now looking at casualty figures that rival the bloodbath in Vietnam. For those that question this I would remind you that the numbers in Vietnam were achieved even though the North Vietnamese had no effective means to strike at foreign homelands.

But of course I am crazy. I think the answer is not to fight harder and be more vicious but to bow out and leave them alone. I think our leaders (on both sides) should explain themselves before a war crimes tribunal and the evidence.

Neither will happen of course. Let the somnolence continue.

Summoned to Rome

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 11:55:38 +0100

On top of my previous reading I could have done without this piece by Chris Floyd:

Well, that didn't take long. Two weeks ago we wrote here that the "lockstep, lickspittle" U.S. Congress would scurry to give their approval to the dictatorial powers asserted by President George W. Bush after the Supreme Court struck down those claims in the Hamdan case earlier this month. And lo and behold, last week Republican Senator Arlen Specter introduced a bill that would not only confirm Bush's unrestrained, unconstitutional one-man rule – it would augment it, exalting the Dear Leader to even greater authoritarian heights.

A more slavish piece of work – and a more abject surrender of Congressional authority – can scarcely be imagined. And the implications are profound. Besides providing what amount to ex post facto cover for Bush's clearly criminal domestic surveillance programs, the measure is a stinging confirmation that there is no crime the Bushists can commit that the craven rubberstamps in Congress will not countenance. Aggressive war, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, "extrajudicial killing" (i.e., murder), monumental corruption, spying on citizens, megalomaniacal assertions of tyrannical power – it's all good for the corporate bagmen, gormless goobers and extremist cranks now polluting the chambers on Capitol Hill.

But the reverberations go even further. Specter's bill also represents a message from the American Establishment, giving its imprimatur to the codification of presidential dictatorship as the new form of government in the United States, replacing the constitutional republic established in 1789. The bill explicitly embraces the core of Bush's claim to authoritarian rule: that the president cannot be restrained by any law or court ruling in his arbitrary actions on any "matters pertaining" to national security – and of course it is the president who will decide, in secret, what pertains to national security and what does not.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, Specter's obsequious offering "bolsters the President's theories of unlimited executive power beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams." And Deadeye Dick has been dreaming of Oval Office tyranny since his days as an errand boy in the pay of Beltway crime boss Richard Nixon. As you recall, Nixon went down for a technicality – covering up a two-bit break-in –rather than for, say, murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Yet even that narrow avenue of redress has been closed off now. Obviously, Bush, like Nixon, was never going to be brought to justice for a war crime in which the entire Establishment was deeply complicit; but under the new dispensation, a renegade leader can no longer be removed even for a "lesser" infraction – like eviscerating the liberty of American citizens – because the president has been placed beyond the law. Whatever the Leader does is lawful and right, no matter what the legal statutes say.

You think this is an exaggeration? Not a whit. Bush's own top legal minions have asserted this royal prerogative in sworn testimony before Congress – after the Supreme Court decision in Hamdan. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Steve Bradbury told the Senate Judiciary Committee – chaired by none other than our old friend "Spineless" Specter – that "the president is always right" in his interpretation of judicial rulings. Even when, as in the case under discussion, Bush was publicly lying by stating that the Court's decision had approved the establishment of his concentration camp in Guantanamo, when of course the justices had not even addressed that issue. But who cares? After all, the "president is always right" – even when he lies, even when he breaks the law, even when he orders torture, even when he rapes a nation in an unprovoked war.

Continue reading...

I am a big fan of the 1976 mini-series I, Claudius. If it wavers somewhat from the excellent books by Robert Graves (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) I think that can be forgiven for Graves too has been critcised for playing fast and loose with the evidence in places and, well, it's just so good.

For those unfamiliar with them I can recommend all three. I've read the books twice and have watched the (approximately 10 hour long) mini-series probably yearly since about 1996. I just finished watching it again this week and it's as compelling to watch now as it was that first time.

The cast includes Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, George Baker, the excellent Sian Phillips, John Hurt, and Patrick Stewart (with hair no less), Stratford Johns, John Rhys-Davies, Bernard Hepton, Charles Kay, ... the list goes on and on. It's pretty much a who's-who's of British acting talent from the mid seventies. None of them have given better performances and the whole thing is so well put together (despite it's budget) that you always feel like you're right in among the intrigues.

I, Cladius plots the downfall of the Roman Republic ostensibly laid at the door of civil war but largely the result of the scheming machinations of the ruling family. The Senate hands supreme power to Augustus and names him "Emperor". Big mistake. During his reign the mechanism of government is increasingly the use of executive power and patronage. If August was, arguably, a benovelent dictator he nevertheless paved the way for his successors.

By the later part of the reign of Tiberius the Senate was no more than a rubber stamp for the Emperors whims. Roman politics becomes a cesspool and those who oppose the ruling family find themselves poisoned, banished, or executed on trumped up treason charges. The state is preserved, for the most part - the legions see to that - and the people are distracted enough.

Perhaps you can imagine then just how it strikes me to read of the craven way that the U.S. congress is kowtowing to Bush the Younger. Successive presidents have, following the ignoble example of Lincoln, asserted their authority over the constitution claiming that executive authority trumps all. Bush's "the Commander in Chief is above the law" routine is just the latest and most pernicious example. In complementary fashion a parade of ever more spineless congressmen and senators have conspired to make it possible. The Specter act is just the latest and most heinous example.

The secret prisons, the torture, the star chamber trials, the mass wiretapping, and the perversion of the courts. All this could come straight from the pages of Graves description of the later rule of Tiberius through his notorius (and ill-fated) commander of the guards, Alias Sejanus.

Sejanus: Sign it.
Gallus: What is it?
Sejanus: A confession.
Gallus: To what?
Sejanus: Your conspiracy with Drusus to subvert the armies of the Rhine. Sign it.
Gallus: You wrote it, you sign it.

Perhaps this is all fanciful thinking, a storm in a tea cup. Perhaps the heart of the U.S. republic beats as strong as it ever did. Perhaps Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and the rest wouldn't be up in arms, perhaps...

But the ill-wind blowing from ~~Rome~~Washington seems to me as ominous as it is foul smelling. Scratch the surface and look fingerprints of the Bush family and their friends all over the empire. Look how they thrive and tell me there is no Livia working hard for her Tiberius. Look at the cronies surrounding Bush, the troops stationed in new provinces, the money going to old friends. Look at all this and tell me all's well. Keep on saying it when Jeb or (lord help you all) Jenna get hold of the seal.

Cladius dreamed of restoring the republic by showing Rome what a sewer her government had become. He made the sewer before he died but was cheated of his republic:

The frogpool wanted a king,
Jove sent them Old King Log
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log
Violent disorders call for violent remedies
Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool
Let all the poisons lurking in the mud hatch out

It all makes one glad to live in the provinces.

Free Markets

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:59:27 +0100

To be absolutely clear about this, for the benefit of those critics and e-mailers who think that when libertarians refer to free markets they mean the existing socialist or mercantilistic political economies, I do not consider any regime, any State, or any economy in the world as now having free markets. Nor do I think that when a politician extols freedom or free markets and then signs a trade agreement or makes a World Bank loan that we are seeing free markets in action. I don’t think States are necessary to define property or enforce contracts or property rights, and I do not identify capitalism with States. For the sake of clarity, I state categorically that the actions of States are and must be in opposition to free markets. It cannot be otherwise since State actions invariably coerce individuals and move them away from their preferred agreements with one another. --- Michael Rozeff