Month: June 2004

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 “cooperate” 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.