Philip­pine Past, Iraqi Future?. John Judis in the pages of For­eign Pol­icy thinks Pres­i­dent Bush should be dis­cour­aged by the exam­ple of the Philip­pines when con­tem­plat­ing the future of Iraq. An excerpt:bq. [T]he U.S. Navy ousted Spain from the Philip­pines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of cre­at­ing a Philip­pine democ­racy, the McKin­ley admin­is­tra­tion, its con­fi­dence inflated by vic­tory in that “splen­did lit­tle war,” annexed the coun­try and installed a colo­nial admin­is­tra­tor. The United States then waged a bru­tal war against the same Philip­pine inde­pen­dence move­ment it encour­aged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Fil­ipino civil­ians and sol­diers were killed. Resent­ment lin­gered a cen­tury later dur­ing Bush’s visit.

As for the Philip­pines’ democ­racy, the United States can take lit­tle credit for what exists and some blame for what doesn’t. The elec­toral machin­ery the United States designed in 1946 pro­vided a demo­c­ra­tic veneer beneath which a hand­ful of fam­i­lies, allied to U.S. investors

Groove and the US Gov­ern­ment. Boston.com : Acci­den­tal Con­trac­tor When he founded Groove Net­works in 1997, tech­nol­o­gist Ray Ozzie envi­sioned a tar­get mar­ket for its col­lab­o­ra­tion soft­ware: busi­nesses eager to com­mu­ni­cate with their part­ners and sup­pli­ers. ”In the found­ing doc­u­ments, I don’t think there was… [Jeroen Bekkers’ Groove Weblog]

Acci­den­tal or not, the con­nec­tion, espe­cially when con­sid­ered together with Ray Ozzie’s his­tory of col­lab­o­rat­ing with the NSA, means that only a fool would rely on Groove for any­thing where secu­rity was important.

From mado­gre:
bq.
“Ogre — The ani­mal rights activists would lynch me for this, but here
is how to stop a rodent infes­ta­tion. Green and Brown glass (wine and
beer bot­tles) finely ground into pow­der between two bricks. Mix the
glass with molasses into a runny mix­ture. Set out this mix­ture in
promi­nent rodent loca­tions. The rodent packs this into his cheek
pouches, and if he does not bleed to death on the way back to the
bur­row, the rest of the rodents in the bur­row swal­low this mess, and
they all die. I have used this on mice in the grain bins on our
farm. Works great. Mart“
[End the War on Free­dom]

It sounds clever, but I’d worry about other ani­mals (cats and dogs) being drawn to the molasses. I’ll stick to cats for han­dling rodent infes­ta­tions, I think.

Hiibel Tells Us Why. Brush­ing aside mouth­pieces like me and Tim­o­thy Lynch, Larry Dud­ley Hiibel tells us why he went all the way to the Supreme Court over not want­ing to tell a cop who he is, in the pages of the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor. [Hit & Run]

Over the week­end I tested Skype’s new Skype­out ser­vice by leav­ing a mes­sage for myself on my office voice­mail. It worked fine, although it was dif­fi­cult to find out how to make the call. It turns out that to call a tele­phone from Skype, you need to dial “+” (plus sign), the coun­try code, then the num­ber. This wasn’t made par­tic­u­larly clear, nor was there any way in the UI to look up a coun­try code. Per­son­ally, I had no idea what the coun­try code for the United States was, and I sus­pect that prob­a­bly most peo­ple won’t know the code for their own country.

#
Clay S. Con­rad at The Amer­i­can Jury Insti­tute -

Doing Your Best as a Trial Juror: Sur­viv­ing Voir Dire — you can’t
nul­lify a law if you’re not on the jury. How a fully-informed juror
can get on a jury with­out per­jur­ing him­self. [claire­files] [End the War on Free­dom]

As it hap­pens, I had jury duty last Mon­day. There were no cases requir­ing juries that day, though.

Bush is an awful leader, but so far there’s no indi­ca­tion that he’s com­pa­ra­ble to Hitler. But he’s run­ning an <a href=“mms://media4.streamtoyou.com/gwb/KCOWE_256k.wmv”>ad with pic­tures of Hitler, between pic­tures of John Kerry, Al Gore, Richard Gephardt and Howard Dean. How could some­one want to win so badly that he would be will­ing to do that? What are we sup­posed to think about this? Does he know that Amer­i­cans have fam­i­lies who were mur­dered by Hitler? Is this what com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­v­a­tivism is? What does he stand for? This should be ques­tion #1 at the next Bush press con­fer­ence. [Script­ing News]

Per­son­ally I find it rather amus­ing that he’s rip­ping off the Democ­rats for ad ideas.

House Passes ‘National Con­cealed Carry for Cops. The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives today over­whelm­ingly passed H.R. 218, leg­is­la­tion that would allow qual­i­fied off-duty and retired law enforce­ment offi­cers to carry their firearms con­cealed in all 50 states.

Orig­i­nally drafted by Rep. Randy ‘Duke’ Cun­ning­ham and Law Enforce­ment Alliance of Amer­ica (LEAA) Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Jim Fotis in 1992, the ‘National Con­cealed Carry for Cops’ leg­is­la­tion has been a 12-year fight that has been embraced by nearly every asso­ci­a­tion rep­re­sent­ing rank and file police offi­cers and a sig­nif­i­cant bipar­ti­san major­ity in the House and Senate.

At a press con­fer­ence mark­ing pas­sage of the life-saving leg­is­la­tion in the House, Fotis remarked, ‘After more than a decade of fight­ing, a major vic­tory has been won for America’s men and women in blue. For 12 years the Law Enforce­ment Alliance of Amer­ica has backed Con­gress­man Cun­ning­ham in his efforts and helped lead the fight to pass H.R 218. In that time Duke has proven him­self, time and time again, to be a good friend and the great­est ally a good cause — and cops — could ever have. We owe a debt of grat­i­tude to Law Enforcement’s ‘Top Gun’ on Capi­tol Hill. Thank you Con­gress­man Cun­ning­ham.’ [FirearmNews.com]

The cops are obvi­ously happy about this, but it’s bad news for us peas­ants. This is just one more step on the way to mak­ing cops into the new samu­rai class.

#
Har­vey Sil­ver­glate at LewRockwell.com -

Ashcroft’s Gulag — on the Com­mu­nist Russ­ian tac­tics of the
Bushe­viks’ “jus­tice” depart­ment. [lew]
bq.
See the emerg­ing pic­ture? It’s an end­less series of faux
pros­e­cu­tions in which defen­dants are threat­ened to “coöper­ate” and
plead guilty, or face indef­i­nite incom­mu­ni­cado impris­on­ment, with all
the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­rors that accom­pany find­ing one­self
in a bot­tom­less legal pit. Like a Ponzi scheme, the struc­ture of these
pros­e­cu­tions resem­bles a pyra­mid: defen­dants are pres­sured to tes­tify
against other friends, asso­ciates, and cohorts, who are then indicted
regard­less of whether the tes­ti­mony, given under enor­mous pres­sure,
would ever stand up in a real trial — and, in fact, it never
will have to stand up at a real trial. Those new defen­dants are
then, in turn, sub­jected to the same pres­sures. None of the “evi­dence“
ever gets to be heard and eval­u­ated by a jury of hon­est Amer­i­cans, but
the march of pros­e­cu­tions and guilty pleas rolls onward, and the Bush
administration’s war on ter­ror is palmed off on the pub­lic as a
huge suc­cess.
[End the War on Free­dom]

There were some other cases, not men­tioned in the arti­cle, that ended in plea bar­gains that looked sus­pi­ciously coerced; for exam­ple, the guys who were sent to prison for play­ing paintball.

Islam believes in self-defence too. In Saudi Ara­bia the government’s response to attacks on for­eign work­ers is to allow them to carry firearms. Any chance of that hap­pen­ing in Lon­don? I can get a for­eign pass­port if nec­es­sary. How­ever, for­eign con­trac­tors for the Saudi gov­ern­ment will not be allowed to carry weapons because they are under the pro­tec­tion of the State. Good luck to them. On bal­ance, I think I would swap the British Home Sec­re­tary for his Saudi coun­ter­part:… [Samizdata.net]

The orig­i­nal story con­tains this quote:

bq. “In prin­ci­ple, a Saudi has the right to carry a weapon if he has a per­mit. Like­wise, a for­eign res­i­dent, if he felt in dan­ger, could get a per­mit to carry a weapon,” the prince said in remarks reported by the offi­cial Saudi Press Agency.

Inter­est­ing choice of words. A Cal­i­forn­ian also has the right to carry a weapon if he has a permit–in prin­ci­ple. Of course, in prac­tice, you have to be very rich and pow­er­ful to get a per­mit. I won­der if the Saudis intend to take their “prin­ci­ple” seri­ously, or if this is just lip-service–like the US gov­ern­ment with armed air­line pilots.