I’m commenting a bit late on President Bush’s speech from Veteran’s Day because I’ve decided that I can’t just let it go by. I found it bitterly sad that President Bush would choose that day, the day that marks the end of an incredibly bloody, completely unnecessary war started simply because people decided that having a war was better than not having a war to try to justify his own war of choice. For all the talk of bad intelligence and revisionist history, everybody who paid attention at the time knows that we invaded Iraq because the President desperately wanted to invade Iraq.

What did Senators know about Iraq before the war? Who cares. The truth is that getting authorization to invade Iraq was the President’s agenda, and many of the Senators who voted for the war did so because they feared the political repercussions of voting against it. They are to be blamed for their lack of courage, but it wasn’t they who thought that war was better than no war. And I think that’s how history will and should remember these past few years.

History teaches us that when a national leader wants his nation to go to war, there is generally very little that the citizenry and the rest of the government can do to stop them. The President chose war, we went to war, and everything else is just details.

Kash at Angry Bear has an interesting post on free trade. He puts forth 7 observations, and then comes to this conclusion:

So now to the real question: Why do economists like me, who profess to care about individuals, continue to think international trade is generally a good thing? (Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to get into this… but let me make just one point…)

Here’s the reason: The negative or positive impact of trade is ultimately an empirical question (see point #2 above), and the evidence I’ve seen in my years of researching this subject suggests that the negative effects are outweighed by the positive. Actually, to be more precise, the evidence I’ve seen mostly suggests that the effects of trade are pretty small in a country like the US. Some people win from trade, and some lose from trade (just as is the case with any new technology)… but overall, though the effects are small, trade seems to make life better for most people. Not just for corporations: for people.

Here’s Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s Veteran’s Day post for 2005, which I mentioned yesterday.

So one of the things Sony’s DRM rootkit/spyware/malware does is completely conceal any files with names beginning with $sys$. Another thing that it does is prevent you from burning CDs with copy protected material on them. Well, one blog reports that if you rename your CD burning software so that the copy protection software conceals it, the other part of the copy protection software won’t stop you from burning the CDs.

Usually Mac OS X users are not subjected to the same indignities that Windows users are when it comes to DRM. In Sony’s case, however, users are subjected to slightly different but equally bad treatment — certain CDs actually install kernel extensions on your computer when you insert them for the first time. At least on a Mac you have to enter your password to permit the software to be installed, something I would not recommend doing.

Update: The thing about using some features of Sony’s copy protection software to evade other features probably doesn’t work.

TodayTomorrow is Veteran’s Day, originally set aside to commemorate the armistice that ended the Great War in 1918. Teresa Nielsen-Hayden always posts an incredible set of links, but she hasn’t done so yet for 2005, so you’ll have to settle for the 2004 list.

Update: I have exposed the ugly secret that I usually don’t know what day it is.

Am I the only person who has noticed that more and more companies are using the user management facilities in phpBB to manage identity across their entire Web sites? The ability to create, update, and otherwise manage user accounts is functionality that has to be built for most Web sites, and it seems like a lot of people are just opting to use the features already built into phpBB rather than building something new. At first I associated this trend mostly with Web sites associated with games, like Curse Gaming and Warcraft Realms, but it’s popping up elsewhere as well. For example, the folks who sell MyEclipse use the forum login for handling all account issues, including keeping track of who’s allowed to download their products.

I suspect that this trend arises from the fact that if you want to provide forums as part of your site and you don’t want to write them yourself, the easiest approach is to just extend the account management facilities of the forum rather than writing your own system and hacking the forum software to interact with it. It kind of makes you wonder whether there isn’t room for a generic open source PHP login system or perhaps even just a simple standard that Web applications could use to provide even more opportunities for integration. Forums are just one type of software that requires logins, there’s also blogging software like WordPress, wikis like Mediawiki, and plenty of other account-based software as well. Using your forum’s user tables works fine if you only want to use one off the shelf application, but when more enter the picture, you’re as stuck as you ever were. It seems like this is an area where some standardization effort would pay off.

The bad news from yesterday is that the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 yesterday to add “intelligent design” to the state’s standard for science education. The good news is that in Dover County, Pennsylvania, all eight school board members who mandated the teaching of intelligent design were defeated by a slate of candidates opposed to making the county a national embarrassment. Next year, Kansas voters can do the same thing — four of the six board members who favor intelligent design are up for reelection.

It’s really nice to see voters take care of a problem like this rather than letting the courts handle it. I’m for courts striking down unconstitutional laws, even if critics call it judicial activism, but it’s always preferable for voters to choose progress on their own.

I had given up writing about torture for awhile, mainly because I’ve stated my views repeatedly and couldn’t be plainer. But since President Bush talked about it at a press conference yesterday in Panama, I feel the need to bring it up again. Here’s what he said when asked whether he supports Dick Cheney’s attempts to exempt the CIA from any ban on torture:

Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.

First of all, as we all know, the last sentence is a lie. There’s a story about a detainee in Iraq who died during interrogation in this week’s New Yorker. Here’s a paragraph:

Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,

Despite the fact that I live in North Carolina, I’m endorsing the ballot initiatives in California and Ohio that would shift responsibility for drawing Congressional districts to nonpartisan panels. In California, the intiative is backed by the loathsome Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Republicans, and opposed by the Democratic party, but I’m for it anyway. The current system serves mainly to protect incumbents or shuffle things for partisan advantage, and I think it’s important for us to change the rules so that Congressmen see their jobs as something more than lifetime appointments and to encourage constituent service. I honestly have no idea how the composition of Congress would change if every state drew its districts in a nonpartisan fashion, but I believe such a system would be preferable to one where partisans sit down and shuffle precincts around with specific political goals in mind.

The Ohio plan to me seems suboptimal, with its emphasis on competitiveness rather than on grouping people by community, but it’s still better than the status quo.

Update: Mark Kleiman opposes California Proposition 77 on pragmatic terms. Kos argues in favor.

Dahlia Lithwick has a warning for Senate Democrats heading into Sam Alito’s confirmation hearings that they’d do well to heed:

It will, unless Democrats get it together, become yet another Jerry Lewis telethon, raising national awareness about the dangers of “judicial activism” and the plague of “the reckless overreaching of out-of-touch liberal elitist judges.” Democrats in the Senate either will not or cannot put the lie to these trite formulations. They need to shout it from the rooftops: that blithely striking down acts of Congress is activism; that the right’s hero Clarence Thomas may be the most activist judge on the current court; that reversing or eroding long-settled precedent is also activism; and that “legislating from the bench” happens as frequently from the right as the left.

I actually think this is a charge for all liberals and progressives. When your colleagues, friends at a holiday party, or family members at Thanksgiving bring up word one about “judicial activism” and “out of control judges,” it’s up to you to broaden their outlook.