Posts

William Saletan points out in Slate that Bush can’t even get his seeming allies to agree with him that now’s the time to bum rush Iraq.

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Washington Post op-ed, If We Must Fight . . ., is worth reading. Basically he lays out the steps that must occur for us to justifiably go to war with Iraq. I’m not a big Brzezinski fan, but I think that he lays things out pretty well here. I’m extremely uncomfortable with our preparations for war with Iraq, for any number of reasons. The most basic is that I don’t think that our reasoning for war is sound, that our preparations are adequate, or that our expectations are realistic. The Iraq hawks are cozying up to a bunch of Iraqi exiles who aren’t what we’d likely refer to as the sons of liberty. I personally don’t believe at all that they’re going to work tirelessly to make democratic reforms in Iraq, nor do I necessarily believe that Iraq is ready for democracy. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Iraq has the worst government in the world (although it might). Finally, it seems obvious to me that Saddam Hussein is quite interested in self preservation. I may be a fool, but I don’t believe that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or Israel without provocation. If he were suicidal, he’d already be dead. I could be wrong about every one of these things, but it’s up to someone to make the case. The case has not yet been made. ...

Network Associates sold off its PGP products to a new company founded specifically to market PGP technology. This has to be good news, because Network Associates did absolutely nothing useful with PGP while they had it. Hopefully this new company has hired some real software engineers that can take the basic PGP code (which is very simple) and turn it into something usable by the majority of people. Encryption aside, routine use of digital signature to verify one’s identity is something that’s long overdue, and it’s because the software to make it easy just hasn’t caught on. I think the fundamental reason is that most email is trivial in nature and people don’t really care enough to verify the sender of email they recieve, but for certain applications, digital signatures are really useful. Another advantage of PGP becoming more mainstream is that it would provide a limited alternative to some of the trusted computing crap that’s going to be shoved down our throats in the near future, ostensibly for our own good. ...

Apparently so-called “phone phreaks” are being blamed for voting massive numbers of times for the contestants that they prefer in American Idol. They blame broadband lines in part for the problem, which doesn’t make much sense to me, unless they’re talking about broadband lines that are being used as many voice lines as opposed to one fat data pipe. In any case, a real phone phreak would hack the system to block or divert all of the calls to contestants other than the ones they wanted to win. That’s a much more elegant approach than just voting thousands of times. ...

The Caucho Web site has the clearest explanation of how to set up a servlet mapping I’ve seen anywhere. Why is there no such page on the Tomcat site? (Probably because Tomcat is mostly a volunteer effort, so never mind that.)

In response to the ongoing problem of lack of investor confidence in the stock market, President Bush proposes tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts. The tax cuts take a variety of different forms, some of which are friendlier to regular people and others which are more friendly to rich people, but they’re all tax cuts.

The other day, someone forwarded Dave Farber an email from an FBI agent who is investigating warchalking. I’m not sure whether this is more or less inane than the big FBI investigation into a house of ill repute in New Orleans that I read about a few weeks ago. Don’t these people have bigger fish to fry?

Steven Den Beste wrote a provocative item about transnational progressivism yesterday (and followed up on it today). He also pointed to an article that looks interesting, but that I haven’t yet read. The item is worth reading, even if you don’t agree with it. This might surprise some people, but I agree with a pretty good sized chunk of it. The bottom line is that I don’t blindly trust anybody, especially anybody that’s invested with power. I don’t trust the politicians in the US, even the ones that I vote for. I don’t trust the management and directors at big companies, even the ones that I work for. I hope that they’ll do the right thing, but I watch them like a hawk to make sure that they’re doing the right thing. The thing that generally freaks me out about international law is that it invests power in people that are not accountable to me, or really to anybody. If you read Den Beste’s writings, this is his strongest point. If there’s no feedback loop for the governed, then they’re pretty much screwed. Regardless of the fact that in many cases I agree with the technocrats, I don’t want them to be in a position to run things in a top down fashion, at least to a greater degree than they already are. The thing is, I can certainly see the temptation of transnational progressivism. All too often national governments (like their citizens) are belligerent, myopic, and hypocritical. Nations often define their national interest in a way that’s bad for their own citizens, and certainly disastrous for other countries around them. There’s also a tendency to compromise the long term in favor of the short term. Every thinking person sits and thinks that things could be better if they were more carefully planned and thought out. I think though that if you give in to that temptation, you just end up mucking things up worse than you ever would have thought. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that Yasser Arafat, Jonas Savimbi, and most other bad dictators throughout history would claim that they had the best interests of their people at heart. I confess that I’m really just getting started thinking about this issue, and I’m not in favor of nationalism, per se. I am, however, in favor of transparency and accountability, and am strongly biased toward systems that favor those qualities. ...

The Bush administration has responded to Egypt’s sentencing a pro-democracy advocate to 7 years in prison on trumped up charges by saying that until he’s released, Egypt will recieve no additional aid from America. The key word there is “additional,” we’ll still be writing those checks for $2 billion in annual aid we’ve promised, we’re just not going to consider upping Hosni Mubarak’s allowance. Back on August 4, Thomas Friedman castigated the Bush administration for not taking action against Egypt for utterly rejecting the basic principles of democracy and free speech in this case. This, I assume, is the non-response. ...

The New York Times has the full story of the hearing for Yaser Esam Hamdi, the so-called unlawful combatant who is being held without access to an attorney in federal custody. Never mind that there’s no evidence that’s been presented that Hamdi ever fought against the United States, or that he’s a US citizen, or that it has never been clearly explained what makes him an “unlawful” combatant rather than just a regular old enemy soldier. ...