In Making Torture Legal, Anthony Lewis takes a broad look at the various memos and rulings that have emanated from the White House during the war on terror and how they subvert or invalidate laws and treaties that are already on the books. The degree to which this administration sees laws as obstacles to be overcome is consistently shocking. Anyway, just ignore my lame commentary and read the article.

A couple of weeks ago I started using del.icio.us as a link manager. I run across stuff every day that I want to keep around for future reference and browser bookmarks just aren’t the right place for them because I use a different computer at work than I do at home (just like most everyone else). Also, for whatever reason, I’ve never been able to deal that well with bookmarks. They just become a morass of links that I never bother to go through again. I generally just remember the URLs of sites I use a lot and type them in myself. Anyway, I’ve really taken to del.icio.us, and I find that not only is it a nice organizational tool, but it does serve as a useful adjunct to rc3.org for links that are interesting but that I don’t have much to say about, and there’s an RSS feed for my links over there if you’re interested.

What I’m finding particularly interesting is that the links I wind up saving over there are almost all about technical stuff. For whatever reason, the differences between my weblog software and del.icio.us seem to cater to different parts of my brain. I’ve been contemplating changing the software I use here, and now I’m starting to wonder how a different tool would affect how I decide what to write about.

Update: Also, it’s worth pointing out that I can get a lot more done if I get rid of my own personal “not invented here” syndrome. I could have written something like del.icio.us for myself relatively easily, but not as easily as just signing up for the service. And I’m getting around the fact that I can’t see any stats on the del.icio.us RSS feed by running it through FeedBurner. The Web really does seem to be the API these days.

Looks like the Bush administration went 0 for 3 in the Supreme Court on terrorism cases. Once again my faith that the Supreme Court won’t let things get too out of hand is rewarded. (Don’t get me wrong, I disagree with the Supreme Court a lot of the time, but I still find it to be a moderating influence.)

Christopher Allbritton writes from Iraq:

This is hard to write, but I’ve come to the conclusion that after a year of horror and insecurity, the average Iraqi doesn’t want freedom. They want a set of laws that they can live with, do business under and raise their kids. If it takes a benign dictator to do that, then they’re more than happy to have one. Remember, the most beloved recent Iraqi leader, Abdul Karim Qassim, was more or less a benign dictator.

I’m not sure why that’s hard to write or hard to understand. It’s just Maslow’s hierarchy of needs at a societal level. People want food, water, a safe place to live, and security more than they want the privilege of expressing their political will through elections. That’s not really surprising, is it? How many homeless people in the United States vote? Democracy is a totally unproven concept as far as Iraqis go, and they seem to feel that ongoing fear of their government is preferable to chaos in the streets.

So I’ve written a Web service that a customer is supposed to be using, but they’re using a specific Microsoft XML class to call it, and I had never interfaced with it before. We ran into some compatability issues, and I have to make some changes, but being that I’m Mr. Test Driven Development these days, I didn’t want to update the servlets until I had a real test written to make sure that my changes made them compatible with the MS stuff. So today I sat down, looked at a C# book I bought awhile back, and hacked out a .NET program to call my API, then figured out how to compile it with the command line compiler that comes with the .NET framework. I don’t have any interest right now in becoming a .NET expert, but it’s pretty cool to sit down with a new language and platform and make something work.

There are a couple of reminders of the incredible importance of language in the news lately. The first is the Darfur situation in Sudan. Nobody in the US government can call it what it is, genocide, because making such a declaration would legally compel us to do something about it, and we don’t have the troops or motivation to help out.

On Tuesday, President Bush took some questions from the press and he was adamant on the subject of torture:

Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.

This statement might have some meaning if we hadn’t witnessed over the past three months a number of attempts by the Bush administration to define torture downward. When it’s obvious that the word torture doesn’t mean the same thing to President Bush or his administration that it means to most other people, what meaning does his seemingly absolute statement really have?

And if torture isn’t part of our soul and our being, then why the hell have we tortured and murdered people all over the world since 9/11? President Bush would do well to admit that the capacity for torture is a part of every human’s soul and being, and only self control and careful supervision can prevent people from indulging the darker aspects of our nature.

Just when you thought that the Bush White House had a monopoly on stupidity and vindictiveness, you read something that evens things out. Some supergenius at Kerry HQ has decided to freeze out Amy Sullivan because she gave quotes to the Washington Times regarding Kerry’s message on religion. Pathetic.

Garret posted about the problem of perchlorate contamination in water and milk over at Dangerousmeta, and a PR flack for the “Council on Water Quality” found his post and pasted a press release on the issue in his comments. Rather than deleting the press release, he wrote up a lengthy, well sourced, and well reasoned response. I’m linking so that anybody who Googles this issue will find the post and its comments, plus I find it interesting that responding to critics on weblogs is something that I wouldn’t have thought was happening yet. For what it’s worth, the Council on Water Quality is an industry funded organization. In other words, it’s an industry group representing business interests that pretends to be an activist group representing the views of regular people.

Bruce Schneier’s latest column points out that limitations of government power are a form of security, in reference to the Supreme Court cases on terrorism that are being decided this week.

Charles Miller explains why Gmail’s system of handing out invitations is a good way to carefully scale up the system’s capacity instead of just opening the floodgates to everyone at once. What I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere is that Gmail’s invitation system seems to be roughly modeled by Google’s earlier efforts with Orkut, the invitation-only social networking system. With Orkut you could invite as many people as you wanted, but there’s not nearly so much demand for Orkut as there is for Gmail.