Freedom in Iraq

Three murdered for having the sheer audacity to wear shorts.

Compare that annecdote to this figure from the Brooking Institution Iraq Index.



NOTE ON INDEX OF POLITICAL FREEDOM TABLE: Each country is scored on a 10-point scale, with 1 being the lowest score and10 the highest. Indicators of freedom include election of head of government, election of parliament, fairness of electoral laws, right to organize political parties, power of elected representatives, presence of an opposition, transparency, minority participation, level of corruption, freedom of assembly, independence of the judiciary, press freedom, religious freedom, rule of law and property rights.

I don't want to scorn Brooking's efforts. I think what they do is important. To me, it's critical to analyze issues and not to write them off as "complex" or "hard work". It's important to strive for understanding and the Brooking Institution does the best job I've seen of assembling the relevant data and variables.

However, I offer this criticism. When people are executed for wearing shorts, it's time to reevaluate your political freedom rankings.

(note: Syria and Libya ranked lower than the Saudis, but didn't fit the photo)

Zefrank

Zefrank is a little different. I guess it's technically videoblogging. It takes a bit of getting used to, and it's probably a love/hate thing. I think it's hilarious. Watch 4 or 5 entries and decide for yourself.

Fun with the NRO

Michael Leeden posts a satrical letter to the Iranian president from George Bush from an annonymous "former Reagan-administration official".

The funny part about this letter, is with a very few changes it could have been written to Bush, not from him. In case it's really hard to tell, my edits are [bracketed].

Dear [George],

I am genuinely sorry to hear that so many [Americans], especially the young, have lost their faith because of their profound disillusionment with theocratical [Republican] rule. Apparently, there is no way for them to distinguish between their religion and your rule. That is understandable since you claim there is none, that your authority comes directly from God and you are ruling in his name. It is no wonder you disdain “liberalism and [an informed populace]” Under it, you would be answerable not only to God, but to the [American] people, to whom God gave certain “unalienable Rights” that you and the [Republican Congress] have chosen to ignore. How ironic that, in the name of God, you deny your people’s God-given rights.

When young [Americans] survey the way in which the [Republican] regime has enriched itself and impoverished the country, and enforced its rule with such harshness, what are they to think of this “God” who rules over them in this way? As a result, they abandon their religion and, unfortunately, many turn to drugs.

You know that we know you are doing this. In fact, you deliberately exacerbate the free world’s worries with your continued exhortations about wiping [Islamic nations] off the map. I understand that your policy of confrontation helps you to consolidate your domestic power and that is why you generate so much tension. The more likely you can make it seem that Iran will be attacked from the West, the more [Americans] will rally around you. You provoke us. We respond. You get stronger. Since the [American] people will soon realize we have no intention of attacking them, they will soon weary of this artificial hysteria and begin to wonder why your government fails to provide even the most basic necessities.

We also understand the real reason you want [a preemptive war policy]. Of course, you have the dream of being the [flight-suit wearing "war president"], and the prospect of your having [a preemptive war policy] already terrifies your neighbors. But you also want them for the same reason as [any arbitrary dictator]. Once you possess [a preeemptive war policy], you believe you will be immune, as is [the Supreme Court], from external pressure for domestic political reform. You can tell the world to take a hike and to leave you in peace to oppress your own people. This is why [Americans] who wish to see a return to genuine democratic, constitutional order despair at the thought of your succeeding. They know they will be finished, that no one will then dare speak up on their behalf.

So this is not really about [a preemptive war policy]; it is about the rights of the [American] people – your desire to take them away, and our desire to see them respected. We don’t worry about Great Britain, or France, or now India, having [a preemtive war policy], because they are democracies; they are founded on the “unalienable Rights” of their peoples. People who are free to exercise those rights seldom seek to take them from others. We, and the rest of the world, are worried because of the nature of your regime, because you deny you[r] own people its rights. Therefore, we take you seriously when you say you will take rights from others – most especially their unalienable right to life – by ["keeping the nuclear option on the table"] and we see you seeking to obtain the means to do this.

We do not think the [American] people are going to let you get away with this. They see their religion prostituted to power and their great culture traduced by fanatic ideologues. We are on their side.

Thanks for writing.


Sincerely,
Someone with a clue.

P.S. I attach a copy of the [Constitution].

Who wants to bet the NRO folks don't get it?
Special thanks Annonymous Reagan Official for teaching me the word "traduce".

Really Unhappy

I've been spending the last 3 hours trying to load a 10 megs worth of paper onto a journal's online sever. It takes a while to upload, and then even longer to merge the files into a PDF. Just when it was done, as I was about to confirm it, I noticed I had not updated the word count for the final revisions. That's gonna cost another hour's sleep.

So I'll be taking this opportunity to add a few links to the sidebar. First up is Charging RINO. Jeremy is self-desrcibed as a "centrist", one of the rarer breeds of the often shrill blogosphere. As usual, here is a noteworthy sample to accompany the sidebar addition. This one might seem bland at first, a routine obsrevation that Congress is spending money, and Bush is pretending to slap their wrists. But here we have evidence that even as Bush enacts powers never granted by the constitution (aka: breaking the law), he fails to use powers explicitly granted him. What a bizzare individual!

Jermey is a big fan of the centrist cause, the gang of 14, the compromise, and the middle ground. The cynic in Lanky wishes to remind the reader that compromise is not ideal if one side is being realistic and other extremist, or more commonly, when both sides are utterly full of it. Just the same, Charging RINO's a good read and a portal to other "purplish" political blogs. Enjoy.

Oh the places you'll go...

Maybe it's appropriate around graduation time, that classic time of endings and new beginnings, to show off some of the breadth and depth that the world has to offer. For instance, did you know that you can make a great living as part of an anti-evironmentalist think tank?

To show an example, here's the biography of one Myron Ebell

Myron Ebell is director of energy and global warming policy at CEI. He also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, which comprises over two dozen non-profit groups in this country and abroad that question global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies. Prior to coming to CEI, Mr. Ebell was policy director at Frontiers of Freedom, a public-policy advocacy organization founded by former US Senator Malcolm Wallop.

While at Frontiers of Freedom, he worked on property rights, the Endangered Species Act, federal-lands policies, and global warming. He previously served as senior legislative assistant to Rep. John Shadegg, where he helped develop landmark legislation that would reform the Endangered Species Act, and before that as Washington representative of the American Land Rights Association and as assistant to the chairman of the National Taxpayers Union.

Mr. Ebell has appeared as a guest on numerous television shows, including the NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, BBC's Newsnight, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, MSNBC's Hardball, ITN, Voice of America, Televisa, Sky TV, Fox News's Special Report with Brit Hume, O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity and Colmes, and on national television networks in Australia, Canada, France, Belgium, Greece, Switzerland, and Germany. He has appeared frequently on a variety of BBC radio news shows and on hundreds of radio talk shows, including G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Jim Bohannon, Blanquita Cullum, Janet Parshall, Neal Boortz, Thom Hartmann, Jane Chastain, Alan Colmes, Alan Nathan, and National Public Radio's Diane Rehm, Talk of the Nation, To the Point, Living on Earth, and All Things Considered. In 2004, he was featured in a BBC Radio documentary, The Climate Wars, and in 2005 participated in a BBC World Television debate on the Kyoto Protocol. Mr. Ebell's writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including USA Today, Washington Post, Human Events, London’s Guardian, Star Ledger, Philadelphia Inquirer, Manchester Union Leader, Anchorage Daily News, and Environmental Law Forum.

(I love that: "worked on".)

So maybe you're a recent graduate and you're curious about the credentials it takes to follow in Myron's prestigious footsteps. All you really need is a degree in Political Theory, and if you work on the presidential campaign of a prominent Republican, you'll be qualified to sign on as a "Public Policy Expert". That's kinda like a scientist, except you don't have to bother with math or science or facts.

The best part of working in the anti-environmentalism industry is there are some big corporate dollars there. With that kind of backing you can become a world famous luminary without any credentials or even merit! And with the current bevy of environmental crisess to spin away, it's a growth industry.

(Motivated by the really depressing Competitive Enterprise Institute ad for CO2. With link credit to Kevin Drum.)

Lanky Poetry

I title this: Bad end to a bad day

2 AM
I have cold
riding home
lightning storm

Is that Haiku? I don't even know. It just came to me out of the blue on the way home from lab. Time to strip out of my wet clothes and find a shot of NyQuil.

A simple question

If, as some people argue, it's legal for the telecoms to give our sell our phone records to the NSA...is it legal for them to give or sell them to corporations or other governments?

Computers vs the leakers

There's a discussion over at Kos today on whether the government is using their new phone surveillence program to track down leakers. It wouldn't surprise me a bit, that's why it's safer for the press to only take leaks from sanctioned sources like Libby or Rove. Those two won't ever get caught by an automated program.

It's ironic to me that terrorists are supposedly smart enough not to use phones, but intel officers and reporters are not. I'm thinking for the rest of this administration leakers should just cut use the post office and send letters cut out of newspapers like kidnappers do.

Sticking with the paranoid theme, I wouldn't be surprised if the government had another little data point they monitor on cell-phone calls. Why not record the location of the tower that picks up the call, and by extention the person's approximate location? Hey if I were actively spying on people I'd do it in a heartbeat.

My cellphone is a little peculiar. Whenever it transmitts it puts out a serious RF interference field, any sort of speakers nearby start buzzing, monitors waver, and once my TV went black and white (no kidding, it's not a joke). Ever since the TV thing I've been VERY consciencious about turning off the cell phone on airplanes. Anyway, it's easy to tell when my phone is talking to someone, cause it's not quiet about it. And it talks a lot, not just when I'm on it, but periodically, every hour or so. Most likely it's just checking to see if I have any messages, but sometimes I wonder if it's off telling people where I am.

The Greyhound Code

When your weekend involves spending 4 hours on a Greyhound bus with only a USA today and The Da Vinci Code, wierd things happen.

I'm pretty sure there's a hidden message in Susan Page's front page story "Furor erupts over NSA's secret phone call database."

And I think that message might be: "Führer balls Rover. Press opts to eat caca and tease UN."

I blame Dan Brown.

The government and your phone records.

Publius has a nice post on why Americans may not care that their phone records are being collected by the government. In addition to my previously stated concerns that too much power is pooling up in the hands of a few individuals, the whole internal spying issue rubs me the wrong way, because I always thought we were stronger than we are.

Once upon a time Americans said things like "Give me liberty or give me death." Now we endorse secret police programs.

Once upon a time America stood a perpetual 20 minutes away from WWIII and global annihilation. Now we live in fear of disgruntled jihadis who have to hijack airplanes to kill a few thousand of us.

We've lost something.

Google Trend of the week

Google is actually my homepage at work. In terms of research it actually rivals PubMed and other scientific search engines. Now they have a new feature, Google trends, that displays what people search for. This fascinating device is going to become a regular feature here, until I become bored with it. This first comparison is credited to a labmate.

God vs Porn in the news and on the internet: I'll let you draw the obvious conclusions.

You are being watched.

What kind of oppressive asshole government spies on it's own people? Why the US of course! I'll probably have lots to say on this, but it's too much to get into at the moment.

I'll start with the obvious. Everyone who argued that the government was only monitoring international calls turns out to be full of it. While there's no evidence that the US was actually intercepting or recording domestic calls, they've been caught twice in sucessively worse situations...what do you think? Furthermore, it's obvious that electronic media is more easily screened and filtered. Some program is probably filtering all your e-mail for code words, and another is recording every web site you visit.

Think that's a paranoid delusion? Would you have said I was paranoid 2 days ago if I told you the government was tracking all of our phone calls and feeding them into a giant database?

For anyone who hasn't thought about this enough, and it seems to be most of the country, here's the reason it's bad for democracy.

When politicians have access to people's phone records, they're likely to use that to advance their personal causes. Maybe they keep tabs on their political opposition... who just might be on the phone with mistresses or stock brokers. Maybe they specifically keep tabs on who journalists are talking to. Maybe they cross correlate their list of direct mail respondants with all the people they communicate with for more effective mail campaigns.

It is additional power consolidated in the single most partisan bracnch of the government, and that is dangerous. It's dangerous when Republicans are in office and it's dangerous when Democrats are in office. This administration has already proven that they're willing to leak the idenity of a US spy for polotical gain. You think there are lines they won't cross? Don't bet on it.

Badness

National debt:

8,365,946,061,857

The estimated population of the United States is 298,684,791 so each citizen's share of this debt is $28,009.28.

If you divide by the number of working taxpayers it's closer to 50k each.

Rethinking Dem bashing

To anyone who's ever trotted out the tired old script on how the Democrats have no ideas, I present this bit: (via carpetbagger)

Americans believe Dems are better positioned than the GOP to make the right decisions about the war, 48% to 30%.

Who would have seen that coming? Wish we knew how many of the remaining 22% were undecided vs universally disgusted. Numbers on the economy and other topics get worse from there. The point is Republicans are good on the offensive, but it's hard to maintain good attack rhetoric without a high-profile adversary. As the Republican government overreaches and implodes, I'm reminded of the adage:

Better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

Imagine the campaign commercial you could make out of that!

More drunken Kennedys

This should be blazing through the conservative blogs by morning, if it's not already. On one hand it's just careless stupid stuff compared to corruption and selling our country. On the hand it's careless and stupid.

I don't know why we tolerate these huge lapses of judgment from elected officials. GWB hit a tree drunk driving in his youth too. They can revoke doctors' medical licenses for DUI, but we still elect these people as President, Congressman, or Senator.

Maybe if we made them do this they'd straighten out.

A successful plastic surgeon got 1 DUI. He was cleared by BF. He got second opinions from several other addiction/psych MDs clearing him, saying he was no threat and had no substance issues. He paid tens of thousands of dollars (as he could afford it) in his defense. When he went to the diversion board he got the same deal as everyone else. 5 full years of diversion. 7 meetings a week. 4 monthly urines. 3-6 months inpatient rehab (which I will have to be doing soon, regardless of how many MD and PhD specialists have stated that I have no substance problems, require no treatment or rehab, and am not even a candidate for diversion).

These doctors all had DUIs outside work. Some of them were 1st year med students at the time. 1 DUI = 3 months of inpatient rehab?! Craziness. It costs them hundreds of dollars a month for 5 years too. The way these doctors are penalized is excessive and wrong...but at the same time I really wish we could apply 1/10th of their sentence to our government officials.

Hamas and the American Press

So whenever I read about Mid-East violence, crazy Iranian Presidents calling for the destruction of Israel, or whatever, my first reaction is that it's just another part of some crazy bug-up-the-ass fetish that Arabs have for hating us. And then I read stuff like this.

So Hamas won the democratic election among the Palestinians, and one of the first things we did was stop giving them financial aid. I have no issues with that. Now that hurts the Palestinian state (as we intended it to), because the government represents a huge portion of their economy.

The Palestinian Authority employs some 165,000 people and the UN estimates a quarter of the Palestinian population relies on government salaries.

And it appears to not be a self-sustaining thing, but rather one that's dependent on 1: transfer of tax revenues from Israel or 2: foreign aid. That's a ridiculous mode of government (temporarily pretending that we don't have a swollen government dependent on foreign support), but whatever, that's Hamas's problem, not ours.

This is where it gets hairy. Muslim and Arab nations are trying to donate money to the Palestinians (not even through the Hamas government, but directly to the employees), but their banks are afraid that if they do the US will charge them with abetting terrorism and shut them out of international finance. So basically, fear of the US is causing Palestians to not get paid, even by other Arabs. That's not exactly going to make for a more stable situation. (1. Hungry oppressed people with nothing left to lose are hard to make peace with. 2. How long does it take for angry Arabs who are prevented from donating money to feed people to decide to donate that surplus money to less humanitarian causes?)

Now maybe the Palestinians deserve to go hungry for voting for Hamas. We all know terrorist states are potentially more dangerous than rogue terrorists. Maybe threatening the banks and preventing Muslim charity is a just use of our global fiscal dominance. I don't think so, but I'm open to the argument.

(I also think it casts a big shadow on our determination to bring democracy to the Middle East when we blacklist an elected government. And this is the first thing I'll be thinking of next time some yahoo claims "They hate us for our freedom." Newsflash: I'd hate any country that caused me to not get paid for 2 months, and you would too. But believe you want to believe, I'm cool with that.)

What I'm not cool with is the total lack of press coverage on it here in the US. CNN mentions that we consider Hamas a terrorist group and have cut off aid. As mentioned within the context of US envoy James Wolfenshon's (former Pres of the World Bank) quitting his envoy job:

The militant group's stance has led to a cutoff of funding from Israel and the
West.

"It would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians," Wolfensohn said, according to a State Department transcript from Monday's news conference.

He added, "But I do think that the Palestinians need to understand that it is not business as usual. Here you have a Palestinian group which has said that it wants to destroy its neighbor. "

(btw - it's a bad sign that this guy's quitting, he sounds good)

No mention of the Arab nations trying to help the workers, nor the blockage of fund transfers. Nor is there any in this piece about Bin Laden's opposition to the US-Hamas issue. (Reading the piece, you'd think Bin Laden just expects us to give Hamas money) This one comes close, but doesn't really show that we're blocking non-US donations as well.

In a memo obtained by the AP, the U.S. Treasury Department said "transactions with the Palestinian Authority by U.S. persons are prohibited, unless licensed." The memo said the decision was based on "existing terrorism sanctions," according to the AP.

It still sounds like it's just between us and Hamas...But hold your britches!! What about Fox? This is a surprisingly accurate article from Fox News.

Public sector salaries are two months late, largely because Israel and the West have frozen the transfer of funds to the Hamas-led government, branding Hamas a terror organization.

"We have given alternative suggestions and plans, including what has been reported about sending the lists of the employees to the Arab League to have a direct transfer to their accounts," [Palestian leader] said, but "we even faced American pressure to prevent the direct transfer."

Also, Israel has halted transfer of about $55 million a month in taxes it collects for the Palestinian government.

I stand corrected. This is merely under-reported, not unreported. Thus I am placated by the unlikely savior of Fox News. They've done good journalism. The lesson here, repeated twice, is that well-known crazy bug-up-the-ass fetishes aren't nearly as encompassing or explanatory as we think they are. My plug of the day is to read BBC and Fox News. I wonder if anyone has ever suggested that pair in combination before.

Congress Spends More

So...the $109 billion dollar emergency spending bill for the war and the Katrina recovery includes an extra 4 billion in farm aid?

Says Bush:

"Congress is considering a piece of legislation that will test its commitment to spending restraint," Bush said in an address to the American Council of Engineering Companies. "I've requested a bill that would provide emergency funds for the war on terror and hurricane relief. Unfortunately, there are some here in Washington trying to load that bill up with unnecessary spending. This bill is for emergency spending, and it should be limited to emergency measures."

It's a rare day I get to agree with Bush. This is at best the wrong time to work these in (assuming they're not a waste altogether). Note that Bush does have an option besides whining. He could veto it. Not only might it help reign in the spenders in Congress, but it would be a bold, constitutionally supported, adult thing to do. At this point Congress knows that Bush won't veto anything because, for whatever reason (pride, a bet, dared by a frat brother?) it's important to him not to. Of course it's rare to find a person willing to vote against a bill that "supports the troops", much less veto one.

This addiction to having 100 billion+ dollar bills on top of the budget has to stop. We've been in 2 wars for 3 years now. Barring the addition of a 3rd war, we should know what it costs and plan for it. We should stop giving congress extra opportunities to spend money. By which I mean we should stop letting congress give themselves extra opportunities to spend money.

UPDATE: who are the American Council of Engineering Companies?

Courtesy of the Long Arm of the Law

Because collecting mug shots is way better than baseball cards.

For an overweight, partially deaf, braindead, drug-abuser....that's a fairly photogenic mug shot. Course it's easier to smile when you don't get any jail-time.

Another felon back on the streets.

Last week's news

Yeah, I've been busy. So I'm just going to toss up links and limit myself to 2cents on each. Credit links are long since forgotten, but are probably the blogs on the sidebar anyway.

Energy news: Gas is fucking expensive. Glad I ride a bike. There's 2 possibilities: 1 Bush is an oil man and it's oil companies day in the sun... or 2 We're rapidly consuming a non-renewable resource and it's only going to get worse. (Of course those aren't mutually exclusive.) I like to pick on Bush, but I lean towards #2. Do we have a way out? Here's a good article comparing automotive energy sources. The option that's not listed is electric cars from non-coal fired electric plants (ie nuclear). The engineer in me suspects that's our best option, but I'm going to have to put more thought into it...someday. Anyway, our Republican Congress was considering moving a tax cut off of the oil companies and giving $100 dollars to each taxpayer instead. While I appreciate that a lot of people vote with their wallet, and thus votes are for sale, I just question whether $100 is enough. Lest it be perceived that I supported this idea, I remind you that we're still borrowing money like crazy. Putting (another) $100 cash advance for every taxpayer on our Chinese Credit Card so we can afford to drive bigger cars and postpone resolving our energy crisis is....pick your own derogatory adjective...and add a profane gerundive in front of it. Our kids will be happy to pay for our gas, right? At least when they have none left, they'll still have the bills.

Big week for hookers. Of course there's the ones bought for Congressman Cunningham (and possibly others). Billmon describes this as "Whores buying whores for whores" (I think Lobbyists buying hookers for Congressmen...though it also works as hookers buying congressmen for lobbyists.) Less in the news was another Euorpean Muslim SNAFU. Seems those sorry repressed bastards got all up in arms (litterally) because Muslim country flags were shown on a 50 foot prostitution ad. Conservative blogger Tigerhawk defends freedom of speech from the rabid islamofascists. Isn't it great that Islam unifies the West? Under any other circumstances we'd have to listen to folks like Dobson explode over the offense of putting the American flag on a 50-foot hooker, but due to the presence of even more crazy bastards, the convervative wing is arguing that this is an issue of freedom. Long may the flag be pasted on a topless 50-foot hooker to support freedom! (In this case the freedom of German prostitution corporations to market to horny men with national symbols. Sorry for the marginally unsafe-for-work photo, but photos without the Stars and Stripes just don't cut it.)

Speaking of whores, there was a White House Correspondent's Dinner (I don't really think the White House Press are whores, but they are awful chummy with elected officials and social events like this just make them closer). If you live under a rock and don't know that Stephen Colbert did his "Bush-supporting" gag as the dinner's keynote speaker, then Google "Colbert Bush Dinner" and watch it. Funny in text, painful in video, and painfully funny in retrospect. Ok fine, here's a link. I almost imagine Colbert dropping Jon Steward an e-mail. "Say Jon, remember how you went on Crossfire and forced them to take a deep look in the mirror in front of their own fawning audience? Well, I wanted to tell you: Crossfire's for chumps."

Since I'm out of prostitution-reference stories I'll call it a day. Check your moral compass...it's going to be a rough summer.