I'm Not Worried (too much) ...

... about the election being postponed due to a terrorist attack. The idea has been floated out there, everybody knows about it, and everybody thinks it's a bad idea.

However, I am seriously worried about a terrorist attack. Al Qaeda favors Bush, for the obvious reason that Bush's policies have been totally ineffectual against Al Qaeda, and Kerry might actually do something effective, like find a way to put a decent number of troops into Afghanistan and lean on Pakistan to clean up their act in the "tribal" areas.

So how could Al Qaeda campaign most effectively for Bush? A nice big, messy terrorist attack, no more than a couple of days before the election would be ideal. The ideal date, IMHO, would be 31 October. Long enough for the fact of the attack to sink in and for people to get good and scared, but not long enough for rational thought to return. People will rally behind the President in times of high stress, despite the fact that Georgie failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks and will have just failed to prevent another attack.

Another scenario is that Kerry is ahead in October and Bush appears to be catching up. A postponement would then give Bush more catch-up time. Theoretically, it wouldn't even need a real attack; just a warning that an attack is imminent, coupled with raising the Terror Alert Level to Red. However, the Administration has cried "wolf" like this 'way too often for it to be effective.

The most worrisome scenario would be if Kerry has a huge lead, is pulling further ahead, and looks to have long enough coattails for the Democrats to take over at least one branch of Congress. The Republicans, with actions that range from thoughtless (NAACP, gutting environmental regulations, tax cuts for the rich) to out- and- out criminal (The Valerie Plame affair; "no bid" contracts for Halliburton), have made it very clear that they never expect to be out of power ....

Doesn't help that, from what I've seen, the "increased precautions" against terrorism that we've put in place seem to be pretty pathetic. Most of them seem to be press releases, bureaucratic shuffling (the "Department of Homeland Security"), and "terror theater" (airport search silliness).

Warning sign -- any significant diversion of effort from border security and "watch list" monitoring to "wild goose" chases like porn, pot, or protesters.

If I were a terrorist, I'd have had the explosives/ poison gas/ germs/ whatever stashed well in advance (months ago) -- putting up checkpoints now would be a waste of effort. All it'd need would be a phone call -- or just a wait for the timer ....

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the stablishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
• He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
• For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
• For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
• For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
• For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
• He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and onditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these surpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

The signers of the Declaration represented the new states as follows:

New Hampshire:

Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts:

John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:

Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut:

Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York:

William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey:

Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania:

Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware:

Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland:

Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:

George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina:

William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina:

Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia:

Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

We all need to reread this occasionally -- and not just the first and last paragraphs.

For extra credit -- explain why this was posted on 3 July.

Old Joke

Originally from somewhere in Eastern Europe, as the Soviet Union was crumbling:

An elderly man has been waiting for hours outside the meat store when the clerk announces that there is no meat today

He loses it. "I worked hard all my life. I fought in the Great Patriotic War. And now I can't even get a piece of meat? This whole system stinks!"

A large, thuggish man steps up next to him. "Comrade, comrade, think of what you are saying! In the old days, you know what would happen to you." He mimics shooting the old man in the head.

When he got home, his wife greeted him. "So they're out of meat again?"

"It's worse than that. They're out of bullets."

So how do we know we're in Real Trouble in Iraq? We're running out of bullets.

Why I Love the Internet, part 247

Searchable database of lies, half-truths, innuendos, etc, from the Bush administration.

Someone with more time and energy than me could put together a drinking game from this. "If <administration official> says "Saddam" and "Osama" in the same sentence, take a drink".

Pep Rally

From the right side of the aisle, we've been hearing the cant of "support the war, support our President, dissent is treason" since this little war started. Now, this is more than just your basic "shut up and sit down" that you get when The Powers That Be don't want to hear something. The Administration is perfectly capable of simply ignoring views that they don't like without calling "treason". Consider oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They're gonna do it, and they don't care what anybody says.

Where is this coming from? Where do we get the idea that, not only is it treasonous to disagree with any little thing the Administration says, we all have to cheer as hard as we can to "support the troops"?

My high school had mediocre sports teams. Mediocre players, mediocre coaches, mediocre results. We won some, we lost some. But for those of us not actually on the teams, when we lost, it was always because we weren't cheering hard enough. "We need your support", said the posters, the rallies, the announcements on the PA system. Don't show up for the game? You're stabbing them in the back. Show up and they still lose? You didn't cheer hard enough. In short, you are responsible for the performance of the players on the field.

I should mention that this idea didn't extend to the players. They knew darn well why they won or lost. High school sports at this time and place were viciously competitive and the coaches weren't really up on the latest theories. Four hours a day of practice is not good for high school students.

So this "support the troops" business is no more or less than a high school pep rally. If we all chant slogans and jump up and down and cheer on cue, our team will win; otherwise, they will lose. It's our attitudes that matter; not theirs.

Now, on the basic level, this is just silly. Your friendly average soldier in Iraq doesn't care squat what I, or any other blogger, says. "Oh, no! Lightning says we shouldn't be in Iraq! I'm gonna walk in front of an RPG!". Not bloody likely.

But on a deeper level, this is profoundly disrespectful. The current U. S. military is a fine, very professional organization. "Professional" means doing your job. Saying that the troops would not do their jobs because not everybody agrees with the policies that put them there reduces them to the level of unprofessional crybabies.

But it's just fine for shifting the blame to somebody else. The disaster in Iraq is squarely the responsibility of Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and all their furry little Neoconservative friends. Not bloggers, marchers, or pundits who were all considerably more accurate than the Administration in foreseeing what would happen if we marched into Iraq.

From now on, any time anybody gives me the "support our troops" nonsense, I'm gonna demand to see them dance with pompoms. Or do a real cheer. Georgie Bush should be good at this; he was a cheerleader in college. Maybe this explains it ...

The Fruits of Abu Ghraib?

I'm as horrified as anybody else about the "abuse" reports and photos from Abu Gharib prison. Go take another look at those photos -- that's what a lost war looks like. What few remaining friends and allies we may have had in the area are gone.

But we may have seen another result. We bombed a house in the middle of the night and killed 40 people. We say they're terrorists; they say it was a wedding party.

So why would we attack a wedding? The obvious answer is bad intellegence. Bad intel can come from a number of places; people with grudges are the obvious source.

Another source is people forced to give information that they don't have, so they make it up. Torture.

Torture is great for extracting confessions. Under torture, anybody will confess to anything. But for extracting real information, it's less than useless. Even if you get the people who have the information, you have to decide if what you're getting is truthful or a carefully crafted cover story. After a bit of torture, the victim can't tell the difference. It requires real police work to figure out what is real and what is fantasy.

However, what happens if the person you're torturing doesn't have any information? Well, they'll make up some for you. Wouldn't surprise me if that's what we're seeing here. Now, from everything I've heard coming from Iraq, it doesn't seem like we're doing any "police work" at all. We round up a buncha guys and ask them who the Bad Guys are. Then we go round up those guys. Wouldn't stand up for five minures in an American court, but we don't have any American courts in Iraq to deal with. No Iraqi courts either; that's one of the sore points with the occupation.

Doesn't make it any easier that the military categorically refuses to consider the possibility that they might have made a mistake.

Passive

One thing that struck me about the Bush administration officials' testimony was their incredible passivity. In amongst the bureaucratic arse-covering was an underlying attitude of "So what? It's somebody else's problem". Condi Rice even whined that there wasn't an agency that pulls together intelligence information from the FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA and all the other agencies that gather intelligence. There is one. It's the Office of the National Security Adviser. Her office.

Bush: "Al Queda in the US? The FBI is on it."

Ashcroft: "Terrorism isn't a priority. The FBI has plenty of resources"

Rice: "No definite information. Come back when you have names, addresses, and dates."

Moeller: “Wha ... did somebody say something?

Now, this is interesting. Bush is famous as a “big picture”, hands off leader. One of the “kiss and tell” books from a former cabinet member (O'Neill?) described cabinet meetings with Bush. Basically, they were real-life Dilbert cartoons, as Bush displayed no interest in matters being discussed and threw questions back at the questioners. This is alpha-male business stuff -- from the “how to intimidate underlings” class at Harvard Business School.

Now, to make this work, those underlings have to be real go-getters that will take the initiative, find out things on their own, and do the right thing. They do all the work and the Boss looks smart and gets the credit. Unfortunately, these are not traits that we associate with the Bush administration, outside of Rumsfeld and Cheney.

It's sure not what we're seeing from the testimony on the 9/11 commission.

The Parable of the Tree

I have this fantasy. I'm walking in the woods, a good half day's hike from Civilization (empty beer cans) when I hear feeble cries for help. Following them, I find another hiker with his legs pinned under a fallen tree. He begs me for help - there's no way he will ever make it out on his own, and the chance of someone else coming by is nil.

Now, in what is jokingly called the Real World, I would do my darndest to get him out and damn the consequences. I know just how quickly things can go bad when you're out of cellphone range - in the boonies, everybody helps each other out of necessity. I'm not a political liberal, at least the way it's normally defined - I just grew up in a very rural environment, where the nearest help can be hours away, even the best of circumstances.

But that's not the fantasy. In it, I recognize the philosophy of the trapped hiker and can react accordingly:

Fundie

"In the name of God, help me!"

"But you're there because God wants you there", I reply. "Would you go against the Will of God?"

"Get me out or you'll burn in Hell"

"Why? Do you believe that God is the master of the world?"

"Well, yes …"

"Do you believe that God alone determines the time and means of our deaths?"

"Yes, but …"

"Do you believe that if God hadn't wanted that tree to fall, it wouldn't have?"

"Yes …"

"Then that tree fell on you because God wanted it to."

"Uhh …"

"Then if I pry it off of you, I'd be going against the Will of God."

"But …"

I kneel down, safely out of reach. "Pray with me. Dear God, we pray that you receive the soul of … what was your name"?

Conservative

"Help me"

"Why?"

"Just get this tree off of me, goddammit!"

"Why? What did you do to get yourself into this mess?"

"Nothing! Now help me or you'll be sorry!"

"*I* should be sorry? You're the one who has screwed up and gotten himself into this mess. If I help you, you'll just keep wanting more and more help. Why should I pay for your stupidity?"

"It wasn't stupidity, it was an accident!"

"Yeah, right. It's always an accident or somebody else's fault or maybe an Evil Conspiracy. If you don't take responsibility for your own actions, you'll end up just another welfare moocher."

"It'd be criminal to leave me here!"

"Oh? I'll mention that to the Mayor and the Chief of Police at our Wednesday night poker game. They'll get a chuckle out of it. Getting panhandled by a whiny welfare case in the middle of the woods."

"I'm not a welfare case!"

"Excuse me? Who's demanding that I drop everything and help get him out of his own mess? If you had anything at all on the ball, you'd never have gotten into this mess.."

I turn to go. "Don't leave me!"

"Why not? You got yourself into it, get yourself out of it."

Libertarian

"Help me!"

"How much?"

"What do you mean, how much? Just get this tree off of me!"

"I'd have to invest significant effort in moving that tree. I expect compensation."

"I'll give you anything you want!"

"OK, let's say, $100,000."

"What! That's highway robbery!"

"No, just an attempt at finding a market price."

"I can't pay it! I'd have to sell my house!"

"And your house is worth more to you that getting rid of that tree?"

"It's outrageous!"

"So get another bid. It's a free market; anybody could move that tree. If you can get a better offer, take it."

"I've been here for two days! You're the first person to come along in that time."

"Do we have an agreement? Freely agreed to?"

"I'll die of I don't agree."

"So? You've got the money, you can have anybody you want move the tree"

"But there isn't anybody else"

"Bye"

Liberal

"Help me"

"Good grief, this is terrible! You must be in tremendous pain."

"Yes. Get it off."

"I'm sorry, all I have is aspirin and a little bit of water." I give him one of my aspirins and a tiny drink of water.

"At least give me some more water."

"Now, now, be grateful for what you get. Here, let me make you more comfortable." I move some branches around. "Is that better."

"No, it's not better. The tree is still there. Get it off of me!"

"I can't do that without checking. There are regulations about such things, you know."

"Regulations be damned! Move the tree."

"Sorry. We have to follow procedures here. When I get back, I'll tell the rangers you're here."

---

For those who want explanations, all of these philosophies make nice-sounding speeches, but all have their own ways of avoiding doing anything that's actually helpful.

• For fundies, anything good is the result of their own virtue; anything bad is the Will of God. Of course, they reserve the right to determine what is the Will of God and what is random chance. "Christian charity" for fundies seems to be a null term, or so narrowly defined as to be useless.
• For Conservatives, all anybody really needs is a good sermon. If somebody's life is screwed up, obviously, they didn't get enough sermons; there's no help for them now. There is also always the threat of Calling In The Authorities on people that disagree with them. Conservatives simply see no need to "help" anybody, ever.
• Libertarians attempt to take The Market, which is an artificial system enforced by governments, and elevate it to the level of Natural Law. In any case, The Market is a statistical system; it breaks down when the number of players is small or the power asymmetries are large. "Altruism" is a null term; everything is economics.
• Liberals have all kinds of compassion for people in trouble, but have a striking inability to deal with the root cause of the problems. They're great at palliatives, as long as they don't require any real sacrifice. They're also great ones for referring things to Higher Authority.

Cartoons? Of course. But it's good to think about when somebody says "I'd like to help, but …"

Opening Salvo

I, and a lot of other people, have been yelling for a while about our shiny new computerized, touchscreen voting machines, and how they're totally unauditable and un-recountable. The vote is what the machine says it is. Period.

No problem, say the people pushing the machines. They've all been tested and certified. Uhh, by who? To what standards? What's really in there? Sorry, proprietary information.

Well, Diebold, for one, is getting their feet held to the fire. Their little security breach doesn't give anybody a warm fuzzy feeling; the Powers that Be in places like Maryland look to me like they're frantically covering their tails, after giving Diebold a boatload of tax money. I can't believe that the code that escaped was production code. Nobody uses Microsoft Access for anything more important than a Christmas card list

Well, anyway, this brings us to last Tuesday. Election Day in a number of places, including Fairfax County, Virginia. As well as having the slowest vote count on record, there were a number of severe irregularities. It seems that a bunch of machines malfunctioned, were taken offsite, repaired, and returned, in a gross violation of procedure. The woman who lost has gotten an injunction sealing the machines until they can be checked over Fat lot of good it'll do her.

Even more ominous, some voters noted that the machines seemed to reject votes for one particular candidate.

... it seemed to subtract a vote for Thompson in about "one out of a hundred tries"

... and she lost by less than 1% of the vote.

Oops.

Big oops. This time, something may actually get done. Both of the defeated candidates are Republicans ....

Now, I work professionally with systems like this. It would be perfectly straightforward to design a system where the hardware and software were available for inspection, with random audits to make sure that the checked software is actually in the machines and the hardware corresponds to the prints. Add in any amount of NSA-grade crypto. You can have any amount of testing before election day. And I could still make the results come out any way I want to.

The WaPo reference is from VerifiedVoting.org. They are the group that seems to be doing a lot of the nitty-gritty organizing in fighting these monsters.

Overdue

All the usual excuses. New job. Outrage overload. No time.

In any case, no updates.

One thing that is worth noting, however, is the new kid on the block in Baghdad. Riverbend is an acquaintance of Salam Pax. Pax has gotten a lot less active in the blogosphere, with his column in the Guardian and his book.

Riverbend is a lot sharper and more critical of the Americans than Salam ever was. Salam spoke very carefully, and tried very hard not to offend American sensibilities. Riverbend is less restrained, especially in her descriptions of how Americans, whether through ignorance or design, are stepping all over Iraqi cultural sensibilities.

Some of it seems like it's right out of Robert McNamara's "how to create terrorists" handbook, developed by much hard work in Vietnam. River, the word you're looking for is "defoliation"

Anyway, go read.