YOU are fighting against international terrorists in a battle that both they and you describe as being one about values. You fight a war against Saddam Hussein at your initiative, not his, and you say that it is a war about law, democracy, freedom and honesty. A big metaphorical banner hangs above both wars proclaiming that your aim is to bring freedom, human rights and democracy to the Arab world. All of that sets admirably high standards for the conduct of your forces as well as of your government itself. Now, however, some of your own armed forces are shown to have fallen well below those standards. What do you do?

That’s for the gentleman at Dana Street, who I overhead making the “Saddam was more evil, so why are people upset” excuse.

And Teresa Nielsen Hayden deflates the whole of the Tom Clancy/Splinter Cell/You-Can’t-Handle-The-Truth crowd:

We delude ourselves when we give permission to commit evil acts to what we tell ourselves is a limited group of specialists.

I spent part of the weekend with the love of my life in a big old house by the Coast, not thinking too much about Iraq, or work. Get away whenever you can. I recommend it.

Link

Consider the bill passed yesterday by the US House that provides for special elections within 45 days in case the Congress is decimated by some catastrophe.

James Sensenbrenner (R, WI,) never a friend of individual rights, and a backer of the bill says it’s important to “preserve democracy.”

Suppose a terrorist group kills 100 or more members of Congress in some horrific attack. What sort of Congress would we get when the electorate reacts? It’d make the PATRIOT Act look quaint.

I’m writing my Congresswoman and asking her to support one of the proposed amendments that would provide for appointing replacements by state governors. Hell, I’d also support eliminating direct election of Senators. It’d make people pay attention to local races.

Again, I suggest you read The Future of Democracy which has hammered the point home that without rights, Democracy is just a mob empowered. The attempts by reactionaries in the Congress to overrule the courts are recent examples of this sort of mob rule.

Must send this to screenwriting teacher.

You can insert that line about the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

*I can’t stand the term ‘race’ because it has no biological meaning.

The French Government believes the mix-up was partially down to the mistaken translation of some Arabic names.

“Sorry we vanished your husband. We’re immune to torts resulting from clerical errors, however, we are prepared to refund you the cost of the bullet we used on him.”

[ Thanks Gordo ]

And given that Clear Channel’s given plenty to the Bushies, it’s not a stretch to see the GOP actually give them the station.

The trick that makes this work is that you, dear reader, are the judge of what is sexually oriented materials. So if that weekly pile of coupons and glossy ads strikes you as lasvivious, then let the USPS know. The weekly shopper will have no choice but to stop sending that ‘filth’ to you.

Sometimes this country’s puritan neurosis comes in handy.

However, I’m not unsympathetic to the White House’s IT staff. According to a NYT article, they receive over 15,000 messages a day (no word on how much of that is spam.) They need a classification system. Fortunately there is such a tool. Here’s what I wrote to the White House Web team.

I read about the new email feedback system for the White House from a couple of sources:

http://www.breakfastforlunch.com/skillet/00000290.html, and http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/18/technology/18MAIL.html

Having tried [the new web form] myself, I’m not satisifed with the soulution either. However, I certainly sympathize with the problem of classifying the 15,000 emails you receive each day, as the Times article cites.

May I suggest an alternative strategy for classifying the inbound mail?

Bayesian rules, as Paul Graham describes in his article at http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html, can not only be used to filter spam, but classify non-spam mail as well.

PopFile (http://popfile.sourceforge.net/) is an implementation of a Bayesian filter that will run on both Windows and Unix systems. It provides a web interface that an intern or non-technical specialist can use to develop filters which will stamp inbound mail from both POP and IMAP with additional headers and/or additions to the subject line which any conventional email client can use to deliver messages to inboxes.

More importantly, it does not require the person sending a message to pick a subject from a list. Thus, as new issues develop and citizens write to the White House, the filter can be trained to recognize those new subjects.

The new web mail form tries to deal with the flood of messages, but inadvertently creates a barrier to citizen participation. A filtering system that routes messages post-hoc removes the hassle for the citizen, while bundling and sorting messages at the receiving end.

Sincerely,

Bill Humphries

Like I said, I don’t doubt the White House is drowning in email they don’t know how to parse, but there are tools for this, and you don’t have to annoy the citizen writing to the President in order to use them.

Link

Delay is at the heart of this matter. It is his plan, pushed by the Texas Republicans, to gerrymander the congressional districts around Austin, that prompted the walk-out.

Ginger Stampley wrote in with a pointer to a Houston Chronicle article on Delay’s involvement, and the dragnet the Republican leadership sent to find the missing 50.

Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party’s tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel’s 1981 raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for “democracy.” They call their revolutionary ideology “Wilsonianism” (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism.

They used to be Trots? Now that makes more sense, and instead of the current situation being a Tom Clancy, a Bill Gibson, or a Bruce Sterling story, it’s actually one scripted by Ken McLeod. You see, Wolfowitz is our Colonel Volkov. Volkov transforms Nova Babylonya, and Wolfowitz transforms America, in both cases Republics, and both nations into engines to defend the State against external aggressors.

Kudos to UT Austin’s IT division for keeping alumni informed.