What Iraq Looks Like On The Ground

image credit: U.S. Army

The image caption reads:

A Baloor resident talks with Soldiers from 6-9 Armored Reconnaissance Squadron, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, at a temporary checkpoint after a concerned local citizen stronghold was shot during a drive-by shooting in Baloor, Iraq, Oct. 6.

It seems like there's been a succession of right-wing morons proclaiming recently that the people who oppose the Iraq war aren't the ones fighting it. As with just about everything they say, this is about 180 degrees away from being true. Another case in point surfaced today as an op-ed in the Washington Post:

As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we've seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it's like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it's time to get out'

What does Iraq look like on the ground? It's certainly far from being a modern, self-sustaining country. Many roads, bridges, schools and hospitals are in deplorable condition. Fewer people have access to drinking water or sewage systems than before the war. And Baghdad is averaging less than eight hours of electricity a day.

Iraq's institutional infrastructure, too, is sorely wanting. Even if the Iraqis wanted to work together and accept the national identity foisted upon them in 1920s, the ministries do not have enough trained administrators or technicians to coordinate themselves. At the local level, most communities are still controlled by the same autocratic sheiks that ruled under Saddam. There is no reliable postal system. No effective banking system. No registration system to monitor the population and its needs.

The Real Iraq We Knew

One of the reasons it's been hard for Americans to understand what's going on in Iraq is their lack of access to real information. Covering the war is dangerous, and so the main view we get of the war is from the soldiers (and Marines) who are involved in it, and the journalists who are embedded with them. The real lives of ordinary Iraqis are largely hidden from view. As the preceding quote shows, things haven't been getting any better there since Saddam fell.

For readers of this blog, and other progressive blogs that cover defense issues, this should be no surprise. The first article I wrote dealt with the incredible increase in mortality since the war began. The Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet in late 2006 indicated that perhaps 650,000 people had died in Iraq due to the changes brought on by the war. Needless to say, this study has been pooh-poohed by the war's apologists, mostly because it doesn't agree with other studies that either gather data differently or don't count the same kinds of casualties.

Yet we hear very little about this on television news, which is what most Americans depend on to keep them informed. While we can deplore this choice of news sources, the fact remains that the people who like this war are the ones largely in control of what we see of it. The Defense Department is protecting the journalists who are embedded with our troops, and the rest of the Administration has a great deal of regulatory power over broadcasters. They call the shots. This isn't how it's supposed to work, but it's how it is.

So you can add those twelve former Army captains to the long list of current and former soldiers who think this war is a mistake. As far as I'm concerned, the people who call them "phony soldiers" can go fight the war themselves.

Just remember to take plenty of seat cushions and water purification kits.

(h/t to Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake.)

Florida Says Goodbye To E-voting

image credit: Composite image by Cujo359



"I will get them off my hands, one way or the other” - Florida Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning

That quote, from a New York Times article on electronic voting, signals a radical shift by one of the country's largest states on the question of what methods will be used to count our votes in future elections.

Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15 counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.

Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines, which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million.

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache

Thanks to efforts folks like Bev Harris and Brad Friedman, who have done a great job of documenting the problems with the design and use of electronic touch-screen voting systems, voters are suspicious enough of the systems to reject their use despite some rather large amounts of money that have already been sunk into the systems.

As a technocrat, my opinion is that some of those machines are so flawed and badly verified that they should not have been bought in the first place. In principle, there is no reason voting machines can't be as secure and reliable as paper ballots. All it takes is time, money, and citizen involvement. The problem, I think, is that while the latter was available, there wasn't enough interest in spending the time and money required. There are many examples of computer systems that function reliably under adverse conditions. They are considerably more expensive than the voting machines Florida is now scrapping.

Nevertheless, Florida's actions are the right one, at least in the short term:

Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache

Right now, paper ballots that are counted electronically seem to represent the best compromise between reliability, speed of counting, and expense. If true open-source electronic voting machine designs are implemented, and sufficient interest in them exists, they may be a better way to go in the future. For now, though, the current generation of touch screens aren't worth the expense to record the votes of the average voter.

Congatulations to Al Gore and the IPCC

Former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body created to study the effects of climate change, won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. Congratulations to both. For anyone who hasn't been comatose or living in a cave the last few years, the reason for Gore's award is obvious:

The Nobel committee praised Gore as being "one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians."

"He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted," said Ole Danbolt Mjos, chairman of the Nobel committee.

Gore shares Nobel Peace Prize with U.N. panel

His film, An Inconvenient Truth, and its attendant publicity campaign, created an awareness of the situation among non-technical people. He's made carbon offsets a part of our vocabulary. His message is as much about what we can do as individuals as what our governments ought to do:

I'm under no illusions about how big an impact one person can make. But I do think that if all of us begin to make these changes, it adds up. And it begins to stimulate the emergence of a new marketplace, in which there is a business advantage in reaching out to consumers who want to be environmentally responsible.

Al Gore Interview: "It Is Not Too Late to Stop This Crisis"

The IPCC took a moment to remind us what this award is about, which is their efforts to raise our awareness:

In New Delhi, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the UN committee, said the award was "not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams." In an interview in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, Pachauri cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on climate change.

"The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the IPCC has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change," he said.

Gore and UN panel are awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Of course, the International Herald Tribune felt the need to remind everyone that everything that other nations do is about making President Bush look bad:

Ole Danbolt Mjoes, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, addressed reporters after the award was announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions about whether the awards were a criticism - direct or indirect - of the Bush administration. He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.
...
In this decade the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies whose views on a range of issues differ with those of the Bush administration. They include the former American president Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency as well as its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.

Gore and UN panel are awarded Nobel Peace Prize

I'd like to remind the press in the U.S. and elsewhere that even in America we sometimes do things that are completely unrelated to making George W. Bush look like a fool. President Carter and Mohamed ElBaradei did some very worthwhile things to earn those prizes. How myopic do you have to be to think that everything is about W., because people just love to hate him dontcha know?

So, congratulations, Mr. Gore and the IPCC. You earned it, and if it ticks off our current President, thanks for that, too.

Fix FISA Now

Image credit: National Archives

If I may take a moment to interrupt our collective explorations on the themes of turtle heads and cats in sinks, it's come to my attention that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is trying to draft another amendment to FISA. As the ACLU explains, it's starting to look like nothing more than a continuation of the lamentable surrender of our rights Congress perpetrated on us a couple of months ago. What's worse, it apparently grants retroactive immunity for any illegal activities telecommunications companies may have engaged in to assist the Bush Administration's illegal activity:

Well this gets a big, fat “hell, no” from me. Via e-mail from Liz Rose of the ACLU on the draft Senate version of the FISA bill, which is not yet publicly available and not being widely shared for review either:

…the Senate bill (Committee draft) does contain immunity/amnesty for the telecom companies…Including retroactive immunity for anything they’ve done wrong in cooperating in illegal domestic spying for the past six years.

If they didn’t do anything wrong, why should they get retroactive immunity? And, worse, if it is likely that they broke laws, why on earth would the Senate just hand lawbreakers retroactive immunity before fact-finding on potential criminal conduct was even completed?!? That makes no logical or ethical sense.

Not Ready To Make Nice

Christy Hardin Smith at FDL has the details. If your Senator is on this list, please call or fax them today. If you're not sure what to say or write, there are talking points galore in those links above. Here is the list, courtesy of FDL and Taylor Marsh:

*Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Chairman — (202) 224-6472
*Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) — (202) 224-3841
*Sen. John Warner (R-VA) — (202) 224-2023
*Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) — (202) 224-5244
*Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) — (202) 224-4224
*Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) — (202) 224-5623
*Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) — (202) 224-4654
*Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — (202) 224-5344
*Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) — (202) 224-5274

Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) — (202) 224-3154
Sen. Kitt Bond (R-MO), Vice-Chairman — (202) 224-5721
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) — (202) 224-3521
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — (202) 224-5251
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) — (202) 224-5323
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) — (202) 224-2921


The bolded Senators are the ones that need concentrated calls — the ones which are not highlighted are already on the right track or, unfortunately, likely hopeless on this issue. If Feingold or Whitehouse are your Senators, do take a little time to call and give them some thanks for standing up for the Constitution and the rule of law, but the bolded names need the most push in the next few days. Might as well make the calls count as much as possible. You can reach them toll free as well thanks to these numbers that katymine found:


1 (800) 828 - 0498
1 (800) 459 - 1887
1 (800) 614 - 2803
1 (866) 340 - 9281
1 (866) 338 - 1015
1 (877) 851 - 6437

The preceding was lifted lock, stock, and HTML from Firedoglake. I'm sure they won't mind.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has written a terrific column about professional moron Joe Klein's support of the "Protect America Act" of August:

Thus, in two short paragraphs, Klein manages to say: "I am absolutely opposed to X, and I vigorously support this bill which grants X." He's obviously writing about his support for a bill that he has not read and that he has not begun to comprehend. And yet he repeatedly writes articles on FISA for Time, the largest weekly newsmagazine in America. That isn't anything more nefarious or complex than just garden-variety sloth and ignorance.

Joe Klein's defense of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty

Stupidity and sloth may explain why Joe Klein writes such things, but I don't think it explains why he's writing those things for Time. That part of the story might just be best explainable by something nefarious. I can't believe the folks who run that magazine are that stupid.

The Hazards Of Blogging: Why People Read You

image credit: Canada Phoenix Education Group

This is a photo of the Turtle's Head Islet in the Taihu Lake, near the Yangtze River. Trust me, it's just as obscure a reference as the one that inspired this article.

Some folks show up here for the darnedest reasons. For instance, today several people, from all over the world, suddenly landed here because they were searching for the phrase "wino spittle". To say the least, this struck me as an odd coincidence. Why they showed up here, of course, is obvious. My Google ranking as one of the leading authorities on both "slobber" and "spittle" is a natural draw. Heck, I've even been consulted by a medical school or two on that subject. What concerned me was why so many folks from so many different countries were interested in such an odd phrase. After spending some time on The Google, I've resolved this mystery to my own satisfaction. In short, blame it on Dilbert:

I thought I could get away with “turtle head” because the naughty meaning isn’t universally known and an actual turtle’s head would fit Dilbert’s analogy just as well. So there was a degree of deniability built in. And turtles are cute, damn it!

The Day I Will Be Slightly Amusing

It shames me to admit, but I didn't know what a turtle head was, either. Fortunately, the Urban Dictionary is there for those of us who stopped being cool a decade or two ago. Adams goes on to explain:

So I changed “turtle head” to “wino’s spittle” and you’ll see that on Saturday. Sigh. It could have been something special.

The Day I Will Be Slightly Amusing

Sucks, doesn't it? Of course, I can write pretty much whatever I want, within the bounds of copyright and common sense. I still have to work for a living, though. Freedom, as Kris Kristofferson once observed, means you have nothing to lose.

It turns out that there's no definition for "wino spittle" yet, so I think we'll have to assume that's just a metaphor.

I'm also sorry that I can't show you the cartoon in question, but thanks to our draconian intellectual property laws, I'd be sued for so much money I'd need two or three lifetimes to pay it off.

So, far all of you visitors today who came here looking for an explanation of these mysteries, click the links and move on. We only discuss serious subjects here.

UPDATE (Oct. 7): Thanks to an anonymous commenter, corrected the explanation of what the photo represented.

A Slow Day

Today's a day when I'm doing stuff not related to writing. Meanwhile, here are a few interesting things I read in some old Earthlink News e-mails:

- A site called Cats In Sinks publishes photos of cats in sinks from around the world. Isn't the Internet a wonderful thing?

- There's another site called Nietzsche Family Circus that mixes what EN refers to as one of the most banal cartoons ever with quotes from the most depressing philosopher ever. It's something that has to be experienced to be understood.

On a more serious note, check out Scarecrow's article at Firedoglake, "How Do You Repudiate A Lawless Regime?". Good question, and one I've been asking myself for some time. I wish I had an optimistic answer. I'm a afraid I'm with Niezsche on this one:

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Keep reloading the link about the cats, and maybe it won't seem so bad.

Free Burma

Today (October 4) is Free Burma Day, a day when bloggers and other folks from around the Internet decided to call attention to the plight of the Burmese people.

We are doing it by posting nothing but articles about Burma. Of course, around here at SnS, one post a day is actually above average productivity. And given how little I know about Burma, I think one post will do it.

Here's what I know about Burma: it's been run by one military dictatorship or another for decades. It's one of the poorest countries on Earth. Thanks to the ongoing policies of their government, it is also one of the most isolated countries on the planet. According to the CIA Worldbook entry, Burma has a constitution, but it's been suspended since 1988. The BBC has put together a brief timeline of Burmese history if you want to get caught up.

Despite its isolation, Burma has received more attention recently. Dead monks floating in a river tend to grab people's attention. Buddhist monks have something of a tradition of protesting the actions of their governments. Crackdowns have started, killing, among others, a Japanese journalist. Both India and China have been reluctant to provide more than oblique support for the protests. Several countries, including the United States, have ongoing economic sanctions against Burma. Japan is threatening to cut off aid following the death of its journalist.

Peaceful protests, in short, have been brutally punished there. The degree to which countries are trying to protest Burma's behavior seem to be inversely proportional to their chance of affecting Burma. A reader wrote Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic:

If freedom is to be gained in the near-term, the Burmese junta need to be dealt a death blow that can only be administered through military defeat. Satyagraha merely provides the reason for an SPDC soldier to pull a gun out and blow someone's head off for defying an order to provide labor, food, possessions, sex slaves, or whatever is demanded by the junta. Perhaps over the longer term the strategy of non-violent resistance could work, but this presumes that the Burmese junta and its allies such as China will come to value and honor the will of the people, which seems unlikely.

The Limits Of Non-Violence In Burma

I certainly hope it doesn't come to that, because Burma's military appears to have no armed rivals in its own country. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot else anyone can do, except try to rally world opinion. Burma's government stays isolated for a reason, and part of that reason is that they don't want what they're doing to their own people to be seen. But thanks to the Internet, one thing we can do is let the world know.

So please, if you haven't already signed the MoveOn petition supporting the Burmese people, please do so. Let Burma know that we haven't forgotten.

UPDATE: As of 8:10 AM Pacific time, there are more than 8800 participants listed at the Free Burma site. That's up from about 5000 yesterday morning.

Odds And Ends

After my article about Radiohead offering free downloads of their new album, you'd think that some record company would get a clue. You probably will not be surprised to read that that record company will not by Sony. In testimony in a civil case, Sony BMG's head of litigation Jennifer Pariser opined that copying songs from a CD that you own to an iPod or your own computer constitutes theft:

Pariser has a very broad definition of "stealing." When questioned by Richard Gabriel, lead counsel for the record labels, Pariser suggested that what millions of music fans do is actually theft. The dirty deed? Ripping your own CDs or downloading songs you already own.

Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she said.

Sony BMG's chief anti-piracy lawyer: "Copying" music you own is "stealing"

Despite such sterling legal advice, Sony is steadily losing sales. (h/t Slashdot.)

---

As I mentioned in the update to Senator Feingold On Iraq, the Feingold-Reid amendment, which would have demanded that President Bush set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, was defeated 68-28.

---

Someone posted an interesting comment on the lyrics of Livin' In The Future. I've posted a link to the lyrics there.

---

A friend e-mailed a link to an article by Matt Ortega about the new logo for the 2008 Republican Convention. Matt observes:

The Half Hour News Hour train wreck showed us that Republicans just aren’t funny. Are they terrible at Photoshop, too?

I'm not an art critic, but I'd say so.

---

Apparently, people can get around the anti-spam measures at Blogspot if they are really determined. A bit of it showed up on an old article today. Spam, nonsensical comments (believe me, I'm talking not comprehensible, that kind of nonsensical), or comments that consist of nothing but insults will be deleted here. It's the only measure I have to control it, but as this is the first time I've used it I think it's clear I won't be doing that too often.

Senator Feingold On Iraq

Jane Hamsher writes at Firedoglake:

Russ Feingold proves he’s maybe the only one in the Senate who can read a fucking poll:

One question that I keep getting asked by reporters is why Democrats aren’t reaching out to moderate Republicans to come up with some sort of consensus legislation. I also see stories criticizing the Democratic leadership for failing to bring in Republican moderates to pass legislation. My response is simple — what good is getting 60 or 67 votes to pass a nonbinding Sense of the Senate resolution on Iraq that doesn’t bring the troops home? When I hold my town hall meetings in Wisconsin, nobody is asking me to push for an empty compromise. They ask me how we can finally end this war. This summer we heard a growing chorus of Republicans call for change in Iraq but their words have proven to be empty. If members are serious about changing course in Iraq, Feingold-Reid is the surest way to do it.

No, Actually, Let’s Talk About the War Now

There are a handful of Senators who understand this, it would seem. Most of us can name them: Kerry, Dodd, Kennedy, etc. I don't know what smelly orifice the remaining Democratic Senators have their heads inserted into, but they'd better pull them out and smell the coffee, or damn few people will be showing up next election day.

I've been saying since well before I had this blog that the only strategy that makes sense is for the Democrats to resist this war any way they can. Passing the sort of useless resolutions that "moderate" Republicans will agree to isn't resisting. They need to make the Republicans say no to ending the war, and they need to make Americans aware that they're doing it. The more they do that, the worse it will be for the Republicans. Eventually, even the Republicans will get the message. Unfortunately, right now most Democrats are as clueless as their colleagues across the aisle.

Russ Feingold gets the "Stand Your Ground" award today. There's no more monetary value to this award than there is to the Roll Over and Beg Award, but it's considerably more prestigious, and you don't have to figure out which dog biscuit you like best.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that this is also the inaugural Stand Your Ground" award. Just goes to show we don't do a lot of navel-gazing around here. At least, we try not to do it in print.

The Feingold-Reid amendment was defeated today, 68 to 28 with 4, including Barack Obama, not voting. See Taylor's article for a list of the Democrats who voted for it. No Republicans voted for it, of course. Here are the 21 Democrats who voted against it:

Baucus (D-MT)
Bayh (D-IN)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Carper (D-DE)
Casey (D-PA)
Conrad (D-ND)
Dorgan (D-ND)
Inouye (D-HI)
Johnson (D-SD)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Levin (D-MI)
Lincoln (D-AR)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Nelson (D-FL)
Nelson (D-NE)
Pryor (D-AR)
Reed (D-RI)
Salazar (D-CO)
Tester (D-MT)
Webb (D-VA)

You'll note this list is very similar to this list. Pretty soon, those folks will have enough biscuits that they can open up a pet food store.

Radiohead Gets It

image credit: Colorado State University


Note to record companies: This is how people listen to music nowadays.


From Business Week online:

I've written elsewhere about how I don't much care for Radiohead's music. But what they're doing with the selling of their just-announced new album is nothing short of brilliant.

For starters: Radiohead--probably the biggest unsigned band in the world--is putting out said album, In Rainbows, without any record label. For another: If you want to buy a digital download of the album, you go to Radiohead's Web site and pay . . . whatever price you want to pay.

Getting physical copies of In Rainbows does cost something, but for a high price one gets a pretty luxe package.

Radiohead's Business Head

While this is not a unique practice (a site called Magnatune has a similar policy for all their artists), it's unusual for big-name performers. The question at this point should not be "what makes Radiohead so brilliant", it should be "why doesn't everyone else get a clue?"

The technology of today has completely outmoded the old music industry. A song never has to be put on a physical medium anymore to be distributed to millions of people. All you have to do is put it on the Internet. Music companies, and their idiot cousins in video, should be doing their best to provide places where people can download content that's free of digital rights management (DRM) software. That service is worth money, and they could very easily be earning that money. Instead, they try to sue working mothers, people who don't even own a computer, and the people who do understand what's possible in the medium.

This has been made possible thanks to some recent changes in our laws, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), and recent extensions of copyright law, it is virtually impossible to not run afoul of some intellectual property law when you work on the Internet. The DMCA has even been used by makers of garage door openers to sue (albeit unsuccessfully) a competitor whose remote controls worked with their door openers. In another case, still pending I believe, a printer manufacturer is suing a recycling company for violation of the DMCA. Advocates of open source software, which I use almost exclusively both at home and at work, have long argued that these extensions have imposed placed ridiculous restraints on both trade and the exchange of ideas.

So as soon as we get our country back from the lunatics who want to involve us in useless wars and shred the Constitution, I vote we do something to change this.

Meanwhile, it's nice to know there are artists out there who get it.