Posts

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in The Nation: The Junk Science of George W. Bush. (Or, if you’re more comfortable with the view from the right, Glenn Reynolds weighs in as well.)

The head of EV1Servers.net, a hosting provider, posted an explanation to the company’s support forums of its decision to cave in to extortion from SCO. It’s easy to cricicize EV1, but sometimes when you live in a neighborhood run by organized crime, it makes sense to pay off the thugs, principle aside.

Larry Lessig has written his first hand account of Eldred v Ashcroft for Legal Affairs magazine. His story is riveting and heartbreaking. I hope he gets another chance to argue before the Supremes and that he wins.

Is anyone else wondering what, exactly, went down in Haiti this weekend? It seems there is no way for a layman like myself to figure out what went on, and I’m putting the blame on the media. The administration says that Haiti’s President, Jean-Bertrand left the country voluntarily, but I’m troubled by the idea of US soldiers showing up at his house in the middle of the night and telling him that they had a plane waiting for him. It’s not as though they were doing him a favor – Aristide’s relations with the current administration are poor at best. There’s also a long and complex backstory here involving Roger Noriega and Otto Reich, current Bush foreign policy hands with ugly histories. Over at Counterpunch, Heather Williams has an analysis of what’s going on, and how poor the media coverage of the situation has been. Maybe the administration claims that they had nothing to do with arming or supporting the rebellion are true, but thanks to the bad job the media is doing, there’s no way to tell. Update: The New York Times reports that Aristide had been getting ready to go for awhile. ...

Gilbert E. Metcalf writes about the Social Security shell game in a Boston Globe op-ed. I view Alan Greenspan’s suggestion that we handle the current deficit problem by cutting Social Security benefits now that I read that he was responsible for raising the payroll tax to cover those same benefits 20 years ago. Many people suggested that if Bush wanted to give people some of their money back and goose the economy, he could cut the payroll tax instead of cutting things like the estate tax, but that suggestion was ignored. That would have made the most sense given that any surpluses the government has shown have come from the payroll tax side of things, but that’s not the direction we went. Now we’re going to be stuck paying the same high payroll tax (which is incredibly regressive), and the powers that be are going to cut the benefits that are paid out. This is highway robbery. ...

Ed Felten has posted his own list of six must-read science and technical books. I’ve read one of the six books he recommends (Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene).

Seymour Hersh has a New Yorker article this week on Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation. Hersh alleges that the US accepted the bogus confession and pardon of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist who admitted to handing out nuclear technology to anyone with money to spend on it, in return for allowing US forces to search for Osama bin Laden within the borders of Pakistan. If the allegation is true, then I think it’s much more likely that we’ll find Osama, but I’m not entirely sure that Osama scares me more than Pakistan’s willingness to share nuclear technology with various and sundry dictators and scumbags. I do think that if the Islamists manage to assassinate Pervez Musharraf, Pandora’s box will be opened. He’s one dictator I’m very much in favor of propping up. Update: Last year I speculated that Libya’s sudden decision to give up its nuclear program was, in fact, a well timed move to rehabilitate its international reputation. Hersh’s article seems to confirm this. ...

Andrew Brown: A postcard from Jerusalem

Mark Schmitt has an informed post on the topic of the Senate stock profits story that’s getting lots of play pretty much everywhere. His conclusion is that the statistical anomaly between the returns on Senators’ investments and those of everybody else are the result of the study’s small sample size as much as anything else.

Phil Carter has a good post today about land mines and how the US military uses them, in light of the news that the Bush administration is reversing the Clinton plan to eliminate all use of anti-personnel mines by 2006. The Bush administration is going to continue to allow the use of smart mines (they turn off after a few hours or days), and is going to stop using all “dumb” mines, including anti-vehicle mines which were still allowed under the Clinton plan. Carter explains why smart mines are an important tool for the military, and makes the point that (currently, anyway), the US isn’t really the source of land mine trouble anyway. He may be right about all that, but I don’t think that the power of the United States to set an example for other countries can be overstated. When we pull out of these international agreements, it makes it much easier for other countries to ignore them as well. ...