Bush Sug­gests War on Ter­ror Can­not Be Won. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=694&u=/ap/20040831/ap_on_el_pr/cvn_bush&printer=1 Bush Sug­gests War on Ter­ror Can­not Be Won

By SCOTT LINDLAW, Asso­ci­ated Press Writer

NASHUA, N.H. — Pres­i­dent Bush (news — web sites) ignited a Demo­c­ra­tic inferno of crit­i­cism on Mon­day by sug­gest­ing the war on ter­ror­ism could not be won, forc­ing his aides to scram­ble to defend his remarks just as he had hoped to bask in con­ven­tion accolades.

Bush sought to empha­size the econ­omy — New Hampshire’s appears to be on a rebound — but his com­ments on ter­ror­ism dom­i­nated national attention.

In an inter­view on NBC-TV’s “Today” show, Bush vowed to stay the course in the war on ter­ror, say­ing per­se­ver­ance in the bat­tle would make the world safer for future gen­er­a­tions. But he sug­gested an all-out vic­tory against ter­ror­ism might not be possible.

Asked “Can we win?” Bush said, “I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can cre­ate con­di­tions so that the — those who use ter­ror as a tool are less accept­able in parts of the world.“
[…] Read more! [Michael Badnarik’s Oper­a­tion Amer­i­can Free­dom]

Of course it’s been obvi­ous all along to any­one with the least bit of sense that the “war on ter­ror” was just a con, not a real war that could be won. So nat­u­rally the response to Bush’s com­ment by the Democ­rats is a loud cho­rus of “it can too be won.” Just more proof that any­one who wants the US to stop try­ing to pick fights with the entire world will be wast­ing their vote if they vote for Kerry.

I’m test­ing City­Desk from Fog Creek Soft­ware. It’s a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for small to medium web­sites, and sells for a rea­son­able price (unlike the bloated sys­tems used by big cor­po­ra­tions). I’ve used “Fron­tier” exten­sively in the past, and it’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the two. They both store all the web­site con­tent in a sin­gle data­base file, have tem­plates, and a script­ing lan­guage. The inter­face of City­Desk is much bet­ter, but its script­ing lan­guage is rel­a­tively primitive.

Elec­tion 2004: Alien vs. Preda­tor [LewRockwell.com]

Some­one else has picked up on my com­par­i­son.

And How About This Other Shirt? The One That Says You Go to Grayson “High” School?. Reader “Zorel” points us to the story of a Geor­gia teenager who got into trou­ble for wear­ing a t-shirt to school that said “Hemp­stead, NY 516.” An admin­is­tra­tor thought it was a pot reference.

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­ated Press, the stu­dent “was allowed to return to class after con­vinc­ing school offi­cials to do an Inter­net search, which con­firmed that Hemp­stead was a real town.” [Hit & Run]

I won­der if those pub­lic school morons would has­sle a stu­dent for read­ing a his­tor­i­cal novel with a set­ting where hemp was com­mon (such as the many nov­els about 18^th cen­tury sail­ing warships).

Bad day in Najaf. NAJAF — I don’t know what the news is from the rest of Iraq or even what’s going on with the gov­er­nor of Najaf. I do know what’s hap­pen­ing with the police depart­ment, how­ever. They’re raid­ing the Sea of Najaf hotel and round­ing the 100 or so jour­nal­ists at gun­point and sub­ject­ing them to mass arrest. [Back to Iraq 3.0]

I find it inter­est­ing that mem­bers of the sup­pos­edly evil Mahdi Army are pro­tect­ing jour­nal­ists, includ­ing Amer­i­cans, from Fed snipers, while the Feds are send­ing their sepoys to threaten journalists.

Lib­er­tar­i­ans and War. Once upon a time, the U.S. over­threw a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment in Iran
run by a prime min­is­ter named Mohammed Mossadeq. Our replace­ment was
absolute rule by a guy named Moham­mad Reza Pahlavi, who styled him­self
the king of kings, and we spent a lot of effort keep­ing him in
power. Even­tu­ally, peo­ple in Iran got fed up with him doing things
like run­ning tor­ture cham­bers and oper­at­ing the coun­try as his own
pri­vate piggy bank, and they over­threw him. Sadly they replaced him
with a nutty theoc­racy run by a guy named Ruhol­lah Khome­ini, but you
couldn’t really blame them — des­per­ate peo­ple rarely pick the
right rev­o­lu­tion to fight for.

Did the U.S. say “hey, we under­stand that they’re upset with
us, we’ve got a long his­tory of screw­ing them, lets leave them alone?”

Of course not, because we didn’t even remem­ber that they had a rea­son
to be pissed off at us. The U.S. has about zero national mem­ory of all
the times we’ve screwed var­i­ous third world pop­u­la­tions to the wall in
the name of href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik”>“Realpolitik”. We
then act puz­zled about why they might dis­like us — the
know-nothings in the White House go so far as claim­ing that the
prob­lem is that var­i­ous peo­ple around the world href=“http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/17/gen.bush.transcript/”>“hate
freedom”, as though the mur­der­ous thugs in third world coun­tries
who tor­ture their cit­i­zens with our fund­ing were a form
“free­dom”. (None of the 9/11 hijack­ers came from “free” coun­tries as
we under­stand the term, but they all came from coun­tries that could
claim to be strong allies of the U.S., and in many cases these
coun­tries are the recip­i­ents of lots of U.S. aid which funds the local
dic­ta­tor­ship. I sup­pose that is how we show our sup­port for
“freedom”.)

Any­way, back to our nar­ra­tive. After the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, we
decided that one of Iran’s neigh­bors, Iraq, was a great proxy for our
war on them, so we handed that country’s brand new dic­ta­tor, a fel­low
named Sad­dam Hus­sein, lots of help. Hell, we sent href=“http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/press.htm”>Donald
Rums­feld to go and shake his hand, and tell him that it was okay
if he went off and killed a bunch of his own peo­ple for good mea­sure,
so long as he attacked Iran. We knew he was a mur­der­ous thug, but it
seemed like a good idea at the time. Later he turned around and
invaded one of our even more spe­cial friends, Kuwait, and we were
forced to break off our good work­ing rela­tion­ship with him.
Even­tu­ally, of course, we ended up decid­ing to get rid of him —
why we picked the par­tic­u­lar time we did is unclear, but the pub­lic
excuse was that he had bio­log­i­cal or chem­i­cal weapons, and that he’d
been involved with ter­ror­ism against the U.S., although it turned out
that nei­ther was the case. Who have we paid off and propped up this
time to help us meet our goal? Every­one in sight.

Mean­while, recall that the Sovi­ets invaded Afghanistan in the late
1970s. We could think of no bet­ter solu­tion at the time than to hand
lots of money, weapons and train­ing to var­i­ous “free­dom fight­ers”,
such as a fel­low named href=“http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp”>Osama bin Laden, who
we hoped would take care of the Sovi­ets for us. Even­tu­ally, of course,
this lead to lit­tle prob­lems like the Tal­iban tak­ing over Afghanistan,
and giv­ing shel­ter to bin Laden and com­pany, who turned out not to
really be our friends. We decided to invade, but we didn’t have any
nearby bases. Did that stop us? No! Fol­low­ing our usual pat­tern, we
found dic­ta­tors in nearby coun­tries like Turk­menistan who were will­ing
to give us use of their mil­i­tary bases in exchange for our look­ing the
other way and hand­ing them a bunch of money.

Why has all this stu­pid­ity hap­pened? Because the U.S. is run by a
gov­ern­ment, and gov­ern­ments pretty much always end up behav­ing
stu­pidly. When a busi­ness acts stu­pid (and they all do even­tu­ally),
the mar­ket pun­ishes it by tak­ing away its money and power. When a
gov­ern­ment acts stu­pid, there is no mar­ket mech­a­nism to pun­ish it, and
no com­pet­ing gov­ern­ment to womp it in the mar­ket­place, so it almost
always per­pet­u­ates the stu­pid­ity instead of get­ting rid of it.

What I want to know, though, is not why gov­ern­ments act stu­pid —
thanks to lots of good research over the years I think that’s now
fully under­stood. I’m not even ask­ing why most peo­ple trust their
gov­ern­ments — that just strikes me as a sub­set of the gen­eral
ques­tion of why so many peo­ple believe utterly unbe­liev­able things,
such as the idea that the Bible is the per­fectly accu­rate mes­sage of a
super­nat­ural being.

What I want to know is why so many seem­ingly ratio­nal peo­ple who claim
to be lib­er­tar­i­ans are out sup­port­ing this mad­ness. Take, for exam­ple,
the folks over at href=“http://www.samizdata.net/blog/”>Samizdata. Most of the time
they seem to be per­fectly rea­son­able folks, but for the last cou­ple of
years they’ve been seized by the notion that the war in Iraq is not
merely jus­ti­fi­able but indeed laud­able. I’ve seen this same dis­ease
afflict­ing many lib­er­tar­i­ans around the world. They ignore the
hun­dreds of bil­lions in forcible tax­a­tion needed to pay for the war,
they ignore that the excuses for the war proved ulti­mately false, and
they ignore all the inno­cents killed, all on the basis of var­i­ous
vague jus­ti­fi­ca­tions like “fight­ing ter­ror­ism” (though there is no
evi­dence that the war in Iraq has done any­thing at all to reduce the
threat of ter­ror­ism) or the fact that Sad­dam Hus­sein was a ruth­less
dic­ta­tor (fully ignor­ing all the other ruth­less dic­ta­tors we’re
actively sup­port­ing world­wide with money taken by force from
U.S. taxpayers.)

Worse, these “lib­er­tar­i­ans” even for­get straight­for­ward lib­er­tar­ian
prin­ci­ples about the use of force in acquir­ing resources. Sure, a
per­son can decide he wants to sup­port some “good cause” like can­cer
research or knock­ing off a third world mur­derer — but to a
lib­er­tar­ian, no amount of “good” to be done by sup­port­ing a cause
jus­ti­fies tak­ing money by force to pay for it. If a large num­ber of
Samiz­data con­trib­u­tors (or any­one else) wanted to per­son­ally sup­port
efforts to depose third world dic­ta­tors, that would be one thing, but
what they advo­cate instead is that my money be used to
achieve their goal, and that it be taken from me by force if
I won’t agree. Indi­vid­u­als can do what­ever they want with their own
resources, but they can’t decide to com­mit other people’s
resources. That vio­lates the Non-Coercion Principle.

So, at last get­ting to my ques­tion of the day, does any­one have a good
expla­na­tion for what has got­ten into these “lib­er­tar­i­ans” who are out
cheer­ing for the war? I’d be very curi­ous to hear people’s
expla­na­tions. No, I don’t want to hear more of their ratio­nale for the
war — I’m famil­iar with their argu­ments and I don’t need them
repeated. I’m inter­ested into some sort of insight into their men­tal
state. What takes a per­son who dis­trusts all uses of gov­ern­ment to the
point where they’ll sup­port some­thing as inde­fen­si­ble to a lib­er­tar­ian
as the Iraq war, and par­rot obvi­ously false claims like “this will
stop ter­ror­ism”? (Some might say this hap­pened because 9/11 deranged
a lot of peo­ple, enrag­ing them so much that they can’t think clearly,
but that seems like a poor expla­na­tion to me — I watched the
Trade Cen­ter tow­ers fall live and in per­son, with peo­ple I knew
inside, and I’m not out argu­ing that we should invade ran­domly
selected third world coun­tries.) [Dimin­ished Capac­ity]

I would say the answer is simple–the “lib­er­tar­i­ans” cheer­ing for the war were never really lib­er­tar­i­ans at all. They’re actu­ally either con­ser­v­a­tives, who are in favor of small gov­ern­ment except for all their favorite gov­ern­ment pro­grams, or else Repub­li­can partisans.

Inside the Imam Ali Shrine. A day in the Shrine [Back to Iraq 3.0]

This is the best on-the-spot report I’ve seen.

CNet.  Next gen­er­a­tion Push-to-Talk (PTT) phones are run­ning into trou­ble with the gov­ern­ment.  As with most new forms of decen­tral­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy, there isn’t a clean way to mon­i­tor their usage. [John Robb’s Weblog]

Nat­u­rally there’s noth­ing in the arti­cle to even sug­gest that there might be any­thing wrong with the gov­ern­ment spy­ing on peo­ple using these phones. Nor is there any men­tion that all of the alpha­bet soup of Fed­eral agen­cies that have taken an inter­est are ille­gal under the US Constitution.

Cyber­Cafe Vio­lence. Anti-violence rules in effect at L.A. cyber­cafes: Appar­ently there’s vio­lence in and around “cyber­cafes” in L.A. I’m assum­ing “cyber­cafe” is a trendy way of say­ing “cof­fee shop with kiosk machines and wifi.”

bq.

Los Ange­les is the largest of sev­eral South­ern Cal­i­for­nia cities to enact restric­tions on Inter­net gam­ing par­lors. The ordi­nance was pro­posed after sev­eral shoot­ings in 2002 near cyber­cafes, two of them fatal.

A police analy­sis found that most of the peo­ple arrested at cyber­cafes were minors who vio­lated cur­few or tru­ancy rules. Offi­cials were con­cerned that the cafes were havens for gang activity.

First of all, why cyber­cafes of all places to cen­ter gang activ­ity? Sec­ond, why the vio­lence? Did some­one take the “good” com­puter or some­thing?Click here to com­ment on this entry [Gadgetopia]

There’s not any logic behind this, it’s just another case of the LA City Coun­cil using tem­po­rary hys­te­ria to expand the grip of fas­cism on the city.

Reuters.  Kennedy — one of the most rec­og­niz­able fig­ures in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics — told a Sen­ate com­mit­tee hear­ing on Thurs­day he had been blocked sev­eral times from board­ing com­mer­cial air­line flights because his name was on a “no-fly” list intended to exclude poten­tial ter­ror­ists. [John Robb’s Weblog]

The irony is that as a mem­ber of the Sen­ate, Kennedy is prob­a­bly the clos­est that list has come to con­tain­ing an actual terrorist.