I read on the Interesting People list that David McOwen, the guy from Georgia who was brought up on criminal charges for running a Distributed.net client, has been indicted. The case is utter and complete insanity … the district attorney who agreed to take it should be disbarred.

Somebody has gotten KDE 2.2.1 running under Windows using Cygwin. I’m not sure I understand why someone would do that, other than for the “because it’s there” factor.

How do you turn a terrorist into a regular old citizen? The PLO did it by getting the terrorists to start families. The English did it by showing them what they were missing out on by spending their lives in prison. Bruce Hoffman’s Atlantic article recounts these successful programs for reforming terrorists (link via Ken Layne). I’ve often told people that I think the way to put an end to many of the senseless civil wars and conflicts around the world is to figure out a way to get the participants into the good old middle class. Let’s face it, people with a house, a couple of cars, and a nice little family don’t have much interest in rioting in the streets, shooting at members of rival ethnic groups all day, or being a martyr for the cause.

I successfully followed up on this item from last year by not travelling for Thanksgiving this year.

McAfee denies working with the government to prevent their products from detecting FBI-created trojan horses like Magic Lantern.

Today, the New York Times has a story on Laili Helms, the self-appointed US envoy to the Taliban. She’s been working the United States on behalf of the Taliban for years, and is surprised to find that she has few friends now. (I first discovered her back in September when I saw a Village Voice article about her.) Even today, when it’s obvious that Osama bin Laden provided the military punch for the Taliban through his foreign troops, she makes excuses for them:

To this day, she argues that the Taliban were not in league with him but that their leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, was too proud and primitive to break tribal rules of hospitality or surrender to American demands.

“Everyone I talked to in the Taliban wanted to hand him over,” she said. “But Omar is an Afghan hillbilly who deals with the world at a tribal level, and the United States never really went down to his level.”

Yesterday I linked to an Economist article by Bjorn Lomborg in which he debunks (or, I should say, attempts to debunk) many commonly held beliefs among environmentalists. In it he challenged the ideas that the world faces problems of overpopulation, pollution, global warming, and mass extinction. That’s actually an oversimplification of his argument, but you can read it as well as I can. Anyway, some readers pointed out that Lomborg has plenty of critics, who probably ought to be read as well. Here’s a list of reader submitted links:

• Union of Concerned Scientiests examination of Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist
• World Resources Institute media kit for journalists about The Skeptical Environmentalist
• A critique of Lomborg’s work by his colleagues at Aarhus University
• anti-lomborg.com

Lawrence Kaplan asks why the State Department won’t give the Northern Alliance its due. Contrary to widely held fears that the US would ignore the past crimes of the Northern Alliance, we’ve in fact been obsessed with them since the war in Afghanistan began. While I have utmost respect for organizations like RAWA that are fighting for the human rights of Afghanis, you can’t change the fact that the Northern Alliance is responsible for liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban. They’ve also largely avoided the crimes against humanity that marked their past rule, and have done a better job than conquering forces in most tinpot countries at maintaining order and stabilizing the places that they’ve liberated (yes, I use that loaded term intentionally). Kaplan says that most fears of the Northern Alliance were sown by Pakistan:

“What you’re seeing now is the same [State Department] hand-wringing that held up the bombing [of northern Taliban positions],” complained one senior administration official on the day Kabul fell. “The arguments never change.” What were those arguments? First, State Department officials argue that the last time the Northern Alliance had a say in governing the country–prior to the Taliban’s seizure of the capital in 1996–it made a hash of things, most notably Kabul, which it all but leveled. The second argument holds that were the minority-dominated Northern Alliance to march south of Kabul, the Pashtuns would recoil into the arms of the Taliban. And the third and final argument is that if Afghanistan falls into the hands of the Alliance, it could destabilize Pakistan.

None of these arguments entirely holds up–perhaps because all three originate from Pakistan, which loathes the Northern Alliance. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s insistence that “[i]f the Northern Alliance enters Kabul, we’ll see the same kind of atrocities against the people there”–a claim U.S. officials have been regurgitating daily–is largely contrived. To begin with, the destruction of Kabul in the mid-1990s was to a great extent the work of Pakistan’s own client, the Pashtun leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who killed thousands of residents and shelled the city into dust after breaking with the Northern Alliance’s Ahmed Shah Massoud. And since the capture of Kabul this week, we have seen little evidence of the widespread atrocities predicted by Pakistan. To be sure, there have been isolated cases of the Alliance meting out rough and violent justice to Arab and Pakistani cadres. But, for the moment at least, Kabul is a city celebrating its liberation with music, kite-flying, and discarded burqas.

Spotted at Kausfiles: a pointer to this Economist correction.

Meet Khalid Abu-al-Dahab, the Silicon Valley’s former Al Qaeda operative. Currently doing a 15 year hitch for terrorism in Egypt, Dahad was charged with recruiting Muslims with US passports into Al Qaeda, and also helped to smuggle Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, into the United States for a fund raising tour.