Wampum

The Standard Saturday GNSO Council meeting isn't happening at this meeting, instead, we few, we lucky few, are remaking the GNSO, and this morning I'm sitting in on a meeting on how "working groups" shall, in the future, be constituted, tasked, and report.

The first "working group" under the new model, on "fast flux hosting", was a hare started by the "Business Constituency" (a non-contracted party under the new structure), and captured by their allies in the "security" rackets, so I'm here with a partially healed case of road rash.

Posted by EBW at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Travel day for me too. No body armor, and the standard arms kit consists of a laptop and some accessories.

Update. The Tampa->Dallas flight became ... different when a passenger appeared to stop breathing. His traveling companion cried out for help and the attendant and I moved him from his seat to the aisle. He was grey, utterly limp, and i didn't bother going for a pulse, I just started compressions. ... And he woke up just as the cardiologist who happened to be on the flight got there. We spent the next half hour talking over the O2 mask, and the pilot called in an emergency and then we were down on the ground and the DFW Paramedics took him off the plane.

People sat very patiently for the 15 minutes it took to get him off the aircraft, and swapped seats (the flight was full) so the Cardiologist and I had seats (I'd the O2 bottle to mind and the prattle on while keeping my fingers on his distal pulse tasks) when we landed. He and his girlfriend were going skiing, and he's on a hypertensive medication. When I saw him last he was shaking the hands of the DFW PM crew, standing up, so I guess the EKG showed normal heart function.

I look forward to the tacos, and the National Museum of Anthropology.

Posted by EBW at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

These troops are departing Ganci Air Base (aka "Manas AFB"), Kyrgyzstan, and they won't be landing at Dover AFB in caskets. The Bush/Cheney clowns screwed up the rest of former Soviet Central Asia so that our troops are being sent away from the steppes of central asia to the music of Bordin.

Posted by EBW at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been busy actually _doing_ security this week and last that I didn't notice that Declan McCullagh managed to start yet another stupid-storm in writing legal bunk for CNET. Declan-the-Idiot managed to tart up a kiddie-porn bill, the text of the bill, which is in committee, is here, into a your-home-wifi-router-is-spying-on-you story.

Of course, Declan is the idiot who coined the "Al Gore invented the Internet" fake, and the fact that he's still being paid for his copy is more surprising than anything he actually writes.

So, legislation that is consistent with Article 20 (real-time collection of traffic data) of the Convention on Cybercrime, will call for data retention, by service providers, a term of art that includes AT&T and excludes your home wifi router, no matter how much unsecured joy it provides the local "wardriving 31337".

Declan's writing is dumb stuff happening.

Posted by EBW at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was asked to be on a conference call on progressive strategies for implementing the recovery plan at the state level. Kate Gordon gave a tour of provisions in the recovery plan pertaining to clean energy and green jobs, a lot of which was weatherizing retrofit monies but some was for grid, and transmission lines affect a lot of western tribes, as MB's written about on (see "Section 1813"). But most of what the Progressive States organized call was about was ... states. There was some interesting policy, and some interesting politics -- discussion of the not-so-bi-partisan themes of transparencies (note the plural), and how skewed "measurement" is (shades of education policy and NCLB hoop dances), but the best thinking point was What you want, you need to measure. The alternative restatement is What you don't measure, you can't defend. This applies to programs competing for stimulus monies, how many (sustainable, quality) jobs are created by each contractor, sub-contractor, ... to show that money here works better than, provides more economic stimulous, than money there.

When I was asked for questions I was ready. I brought up the absence of the indian governmental element in "a progressive strategies for implementing the recovery plan at the state level". This isn't something that's an automatic toxic no-no because Indians are a Federal Problem (tm), nor is it unnecessary because Indians have Casinos and Pay (or Should Pay) into States Treasuries (tm), our governments exist side-by-side and, absent economic Jim Crow, should stop sinking and start swimming, even acquire some economic buoyancy, together.

Tribal governments don't have "transparency" process or any means to show money spent by tribes results measures competitive with states claims to be better stewards of the same monies, (as well as the underlying resources, rocks, sticks, fish and people) which isn't fatal as states don't have much there either, but as the biggest bang for the buck is food stamps and lower income bracket "disposable income", by whatever means, and since tribes do have poor, by percentage, more than the states, some of the federal economic plan's general delivery of stimulus monies should go to tribal governments and tribal members.

Also on the PSN call: Phineas Baxandall, Federal Tax and Budget Policy Analyst, U.S. PIRG, Maurice Emsellem, Policy Co-Director, National Employment Law Project, Kate Gordon, Co-Director, The Apollo Alliance, Nick Johnson, Director of the State Fiscal Project, Center for Budget & Policy Priorities, Joel Packer, Director of Education Policy and Practice, National Education Association, Jenny Sullivan, Senior Health Policy Analyst, Families USA, and Nathan Newman, Interim Executive Director, Progressive States Network (who used to be a blogger).

Posted by EBW at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Robert Greenwald has a new project, Get Afghanistan Right: We oppose military escalation in Afghanistan and support non-military solutions to the conflict, and he'd like my support (not really, I'm just on his mailing list), but he's coming at the question from the Dream of Cordite, where the Authorization for Use of Military Force was correctly voted.

It is koolaid I never drank. In July of 2004 I wrote in Interdicting the Swiss Navy that containment was sufficient to the supposed problem of causation arising from the inaction, or even the actions, then hypothesized, of the government headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, who in the fall of 2000, banned opium cultivation in Afghanistan. In August of 2004 I wrote in Samurai Spy that just as a question of method, destroying the evidence was inferior as a means of discovering root causes and original actors and the extent of their direct and indirect causation and the better course of action the protection and collection of evidence. Finally, in December 2004 I wrote in A Winter Count that

The decision to conduct a military campaign against one fragile government of Afghanistan resulted in an even more fragile government, a return to the narco-state model, and little effective infiltration of the Atta Group's peers operating outside of the theater of operations.
...
According to the best work product arising from the EU methodology [investigative, law enforcement, not destructive, military], the al-Qaida network is no longer operationally dependent upon its first generation leadership -- Osama Bin Laden et alia.

Its good to see people aren't sitting quietly on their hands while their party's leader picks up the mantle made of human skins, the personal intellectual error of George W. Bush made in the week following the execution of the Atta Gang's operational plan of mass murder. But it is insufficient to "get an error right", we need to get out of the Central Asian impoverishment via careless dumb bombs and equally careless assassinations business and into the Central Asian development business -- schools for girls, aid for women of child-bearing age, economic development, the Grameen Bank, and policing, within the societies that stand, by mutual intent, outside of the Punjab State, in "Pakistan", and outside the NATO State, in "Afghanistan".

If you drank the "good war" koolaid, and most did, including Juan Cole, who I think of as a highly principled person who simply was, and perhaps still is, mistaken on this question, and you'd like to join Robert Greenwald, which is vastly better than (a) going along with the Bush/Cheney gag when the punch line is told by a friendlier fool, or (b) doing nothing whatsoever, because (c) supporting the first President (of Color or post-Coup) is mandatory-to-implement, then I suggest clicking on the link at the top of this post.

Posted by EBW at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today (in 1942) is the birthday of Karl May, the creator or Winnetou, Old Shatterhand, and via the flickering image, the "Spaghetti Western" genre.

Karl never got futher west than the eastern end of Lake Erie, and eastern indians didn't interest him. But who needs facts when fiction is so close at hand?

Today, well, actually yesterday, but I was up to my elbows in bits and expired signatures and every test case for brokenness and wrongness I or anyone could stumble across, and just briefly, when it was asserted that the policy, in particular, the signing of the .gov zone, applied recursively to all .gov sub zones, federal, state, and "native soverign nation", asserted by the GSA, that my ears perked up and I thought "no, GSA doesn't make policy for the Peers of the United States, the Parties to Treaties ... but the moment passed and a mismatch of Zone Signing Key and the zone signature cause me to realize that the key hash was undervalued as the real unique identifier of correctness ... and that that was what was really important.

Anyway, yesterday the USSC decided Carcieri v. Salazar, which in a nutshell comes down to the founders' intent analysis of ... "now"

I can't imagine (without giggling) legal challenges to any bill acted on by the federal legislature on February 24th, 2009, which contain the word "now". Who knows, a bill containing those three magic letters, in that order, may mean that the Congress was knowing precluding, for all time, all future Congresses, from any act concerning the same parties, or that the same Congress, was vacating all pending claims upon the United States, which had not matured before the fatal "now" was legislatively uttered. Or, to be creative, both. All VA claims not processed by "now" are junk, and no future Congress may ever offer (in fact, legislative fiction is a perpetual joy), after "now" any "Veteran's Benefits" to any sliced and diced signed-at-18 who takes a through-and-through or otherwise absorbs some opfor kinetic effect.

But that is what Carcieri v. Salazar is. All those treaties for the California, Oregon and Washington tribes, entered into by the Executive Branch, that a pissy House leadership decided (on an appropriations bill) would never reach the Senate for a ratification vote (Appropriation Act of March 3, 1871, Ch. 120 sec. 1, 16 Stat. 544, 566 (codified at 25 U.S.C. sec. 71), all those tribes terminated by the Oklahoma Statehood (Curtis Act of 1908), and not restored prior to 1934, starting with the Narragansett who were not recognized until the late 20th century, like most east-of-the-Appalachian tribes, just became "peculiar fruit" in the Neue Süddeutsche Bundes-Indischen Recht.

I thought Justice Ginzberg's deciding that Indians and Whites have distinct access to facts was a gem competitive with Wild Bill Rehnquist's finest (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York), and I expect that Justice Breyer's joining the Rehnquist-Roberts majority means we've lost another member of the court to Wild Bill's theory of Injun Justice.

Posted by EBW at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent two days in Washington signing and resigning zones, and generating key signing keys and zone signing keys and doing key recovery and key roll-over and you're-getting-the-wrong-answer-find-why problems.

.gov will be signed this week. Or not. And of course, the IANA root remains unsigned. Is a location independent (hierarchy independent, and not necessarily unique) delegation look-aside record (DLV) registry preferable, or is an interim trust anchor repository (ITAR) at the IANA preferable? The ops list burned on this question this week -- are they the same mechanism (and therefore distinguishable only by temporal properties, one "configured in" a resolver, the other discovered at run-time) or is the act (looking aside) and the time of the act (before, or at the time validation is required) still insufficient to characterize the difference, and the policy, that is, the layer 9 politics, latent in any "who owns dot" or "who owns proof" the only distinction which makes a difference?

Driving to Tampa from Orlando in the dark after the early evening flight from Dulles I listened to President Obama deliver a speech. It was well delivered, and better than I expected, as political rhetoric and as policy. The rebuttal was worse than I expected, on both counts.

In other surprising news, Verisign today announced that .com will be signed before hell freezes over. I've lost count the number of times senior tech people at VGRS have gone on record that it would never happen due to the computational complexity of signing the zone.

Posted by EBW at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your Bank is a nationalized back, its management and their policies and practices supervised by public banking administrators, and you read in the news that Your Bank is now ready to be re-privatized ... do you leave your savings and checkings where they are, or do you vote with your feet and keep your savings and checkings in a public bank?

One consequence of privatizing the ponzi banks is the possibility that we could finally obtain, and retain, public banks. This isn't a guarantee of prudence, but the bonus culture would be absent in public banks, and who wants another serving of Ponzi Pie?

Posted by EBW at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not shown is Senator Lieberman, who arrived in Tel Aviv this morning to utter the following blank check: Our enemies, unfortunately, are as common as the values and the interests that have united us for all these years. I have no doubt that with Netanyahu's government here we will have good and positive relations with the Obama administration in Washington and with members of Congress, and I look forward to playing my part in contributing to that.

What Holy Joe didn't say was which of the three basic choices open to the extreme right and fascist coalition committed to he personally preferred:

1. expulsion of all non-Jews, or at least all Palestinian non-Jews (the Russian demographic the US paid $10bn to move from the Soviet Union to Occupied Palestine is too precious to deport, even if the "Jewishness" of the demographic appears to be more than insignificantly opportunistic, because they vote for the extreme right and fascist parties),
   
2. apartheid, and as a plus, incrementally moving the apartheid wall to "rationalize" the existing illegal "settlements" (and allow new illegal "settlements" in the "rationalized" territories), this "stay the present course", as former President Jimmy Carter observed, and
   
3. citizenship for all persons in the Occupied Territories, which would reduce the electoral power of the religious parties to an extent that the "Jewishness" of the { Zionist Entity | Jewish State | Israel } (pick one according to taste) would be subject to political contest (currently, the extreme right and fascist coalition is committed to making Jewish religion part of compulsory education for Israeli Arabs, which is rather droll as the Russian demographic which voted fascist is at least as needy of religious cosmetics as the non-voting or peace-voting Arab demographic).
   

Holy Joe's real message is the guy who said You are on the wrong side of history! a couple of weeks ago didn't mean it, and things are just going swimmingly in the Eastern Med and West Asia.

Posted by EBW at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The NYT is running another CFR / Judy Miller op, with David Albright sourcing the new meme "breakout capability" (translated into rational speak, anyone in the commercial nuclear fuels business, with much less than enough capacity than what is required to produce the annual reloads for an LEU powered electrical generation facility, say the facility at Bushehr, has got a bomb and has got to be bombed), milked into print by Bernard Gwertzman. This is echoed by copy in all the major media outlets.

During the 2006 near-war we coded these eruptions of mass stupidity as propaganda ops targeting the US ribbon-base (they're the ones who source the willing active and reserve component uniformed officers and enlisted, and who sink the toe tags and the vegetative and reduced limb and cerebral function lifetime dependent status billets in the VA / poverty health "benefits" apparatus) and the rhetorically moral voters who vote for "good wars" but don't put on a uniform.

How to decode this eruption of mass media stupidity now that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice are retired from the Executive Branch command and control loop? A pre-Easter Likud promotion? Resurrection of the Undying Vampyre, the NeoCon version of the Nibelungenlied? Manipulating Obama and Biden and Gates and Clinton for the purpose of determining their pliability? Media ops for fun and profit?

Prior Art: Iran & the Bomb 1: How Close Is Iran?, a guest post by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of armscontrolwonk.com on January 21, 2006, and more in our archives.

Posted by EBW at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The review by Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz is worth reading.

Posted by EBW at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Labor is a walking corpse -- the only “social-democratic” party in the world whose leader’s sole aim is to stay on as war minister."

A gem from the post-election column of Uri Avnery at Gush Shalom.

Meanwhile, the fascist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, headed (until indicted) by Avidor Lieberman, has made Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu, the party with a six week mandate to form a governing coalition. The price Bibi has to pay to the Russian? The ministries of Justice, Public Security and Foreign Affairs.

Shas, United Torah Judaism, Habayit Hayehudi and National Union will form the Likud coalition, and the electoral promises Bibi will be expected to keep are:

1. lots of money wasted on another generation of industrial "parks" capturing the surplus value of Palestinian labor, the labor camp and gulag so near and dear to the 20th century European experience of inhumanity on a vast scale,
   
2. stage another arial massacre, this time of Iranians, transiting an Iraqi airspace that apparently isn't controlled by a competent force with lots of air superiority assets, followed up by ... perhaps naval forces turning the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman into a free fire zone?
   
3. topple Hamas' rule in Gaza, which means pretty much what it says -- movement orders for air and armor assets, followed by a lot of toe tags
   
4. militarization of the Golan (it will never be returned to Syria), expulsion of Jerusalem's non-Jewish residents, annexations of the Territories, ...
   

Posted by EBW at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've asked a friend in Iran to look into the whereabouts of Hossein Derakhshan, who's blog is Editor, myself.

My friend has confirmed that Hoder is in state custody.

Posted by EBW at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The photo is by Callie Shell, and it won 1st prize in its category in the World Press Photo competition, and I really appreciate the candidate-and-spouse morning fatigue during the late campaign.

Posted by EBW at 07:32 AM | Permalink

Bibi and the Fascist had a phone call, the conjecture it was about forming a government. People should get over the kibbutz myth, Israel chose cash-and-carry "liberalism" (in the European economic sense, meaning snake oil the RNC sells here, and while that ship of fools seems to have sailed "into the West" here in the Americas, it and its happy passengers seems to have found a safe harbor in the Land of the Likudniks.

Posted by EBW at 04:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To make the deadline for U.S. evening news programs, reporters must file by about 1 or 2 A.M. Israel-time, so they won't have anything but exit polls. At 4pm Tel Aviv time, 42% of the electorate had voted. The early turnout is 3% up, if the voter turnout remains constant throughout the day, the final rate could reach 69%. The turn out for the previous election in 2006 was 63.5%. I don't know if this means the Arabs are voting, or if more Russians are voting, or if the rise is broader than a single demographic. Here's nice four-up of the four miserable "choices" the Israeli electorate have graced themselves with.That's Lieberman (overt fascist), Livni (so so), Netanyahu (kill more) and Barak (kill more) casting their "votes" as if they were ordinary schmoes, not a quartet of moral idiot and three monsters.

At 8pm (We'd an adventure-finding-Jonah bit of time) the turnout is 60%. The polls will close in two hours.

Posted by EBW at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Juan Cole put up a post today on Khatami, Could Khatami be Iran's Obama?. At first I thouht " good survey", but I was too busy to wait for Haloscan (breaking camp) ... then ... I kept thinking about Mehdi Karroubi, the guy who simply promised to put $50 on every poor Iranian's kitchen table -- when Iranian crude was selling for ... about what it is selling for now. The first few comments are interesting.

If Khatami is "Iran's Obama", some banal centerist, who the heck is Karroubi in an economy that is looking at a sharper crash than ours, where crude now sells for 1/5th what it sold for in the hay day, not that many of them, those $3/gallon at the pump days, just a year. Is he Iran's Denis Kucinich?

Looking forward to the 2010 midterms, knowing that, as of day-before-yesterday, children (who don't vote), women (who do), and men who don't do "stimulating work" paving ever wider carbon footprints for Detroit's latest art (who do), just got two rounds behind the ear for the benefit of the Congressional Dems who conceptualize "stim" as guyz drawing paychecks from Republican contributing employers pulling down semi-competitive contracts for paving ever wider carbon footprints for Detroit's latest art... who got a wake-up call at the school board budget meeting, where electable women and men, work every week and every off and every on cycle ...

I can't shake my awareness of who Granite Construction is, acquired when I was 17, because ... well, its spot on. Those guyz work for RNC doners, and quite a few of the vote for their paycheck, not their class's paychecks.

Iranians will go to the polls three quarters of a year after Americans did in the general, and a year and a half after Americans did for the primary. Like Israel (in the present, not as Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu plan), Iran's economy is mostly planned, and unlike the US and Israel, their election will fall almost a year after the banking dominos began to fall.

I really do wonder, does Mehdi Karroubi, both ḥujjatu l-Islām and Speaker of the 5th and 6th Majlis have something? The response to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was profoundly unusual. Almost a refutation of Velayat-e Faqeeh, of imitation. Well, I'll know better in a few weeks.

Posted by EBW at 10:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The website for the Association of Combatant Clerics (Majma’e Rohaniyoon Mobarez) was relaunched yesterday, and at a press accessibility associated with the event, former president Mohammad Khatami told reporters "I would like to announce my candidacy for the upcoming presidential election."

I'm interested in what Mehdi Karroubi is going to do, and then there are the non-reform potential candidates.

Posted by EBW at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The final Ha'aretz polling data shows Yisrael Beiteinu surging from 15 to 18 seats, on the Russian vote dominated by a "kill the Arabs" message, for more unpleasentness, see the link to their English language agitprop page. There is some comedy in this rush to exploit the Russian vote, with posturing on who can "out Putin Putin" (a reference to shooting people you disagree with dead in toilets) and the reality that Avigdor Lieberman is going to end 2009 in court surrounded by defense counsel, not political cronies, so someone else will have to wrap himself in the mantle of "the pupil of the fascist Meir Kahane". For US tax payers, the secret humor is that US taxes provided 10bn billion in "loan guarantees" to move the demographic from Russia to illegally occupied Palestine.

There are three probable outcomes:

1. A Netanyahu-led extreme right + fascist coalition consisting of Likud (26), Yisrael Beiteinu (19), Labor (15) and minor parties (6), with 66 of 120 seats, 76 if Shas is included.
   
2. A Netanyahu-led right + center coalition consisting of Likud (26), Kadima (24), and Labor (15), with 65 of 120 seats, 75 if Shas is included.
   
3. A Livni-lead center + fascist coalition (if Kadima scrapes past Likud) consisting of Kadima (25), Yisrael Beiteinu (19), Labor (15), and Shas (10), with 69 of 120 seats.
   

It is a cliff hanger. 20% of the electorate is undecided and the choices are Arab Raus plus WW3 (1), just WW3 (2) and Arab Raus plus more 33 day and 22 day adventures in cordite, to the north and the south, as the opportunity to game elections present themselves.

For reference, here is a list of the parliamentary groups which are currently functioning in the Seventeenth Knesset, of which the ones significantly affecting the outcome of Monday night's and Tuesday morning's election (Eastern Time) are:

• Likud (English) thelikud.org
  
• Kadima (Hebrew) kadima.org.il
  
• Labor (Hebrew) avoda.org.il
  
• Yisrael Beiteinu (English) yisraelbeytenu.com and (Russian) ndi.org.il
  
• Shas (in Hebrew) shasnet.org.il
  

Parties that should get votes but won't:

• Meretz (in English) meretzusa.org -- the "peace" party who's elected leaders are for every war Israel starts, and an Arab (non-Zionist) party,
  
• Hadash (in Hebrew) http://hadash2009.org.il -- advocates a complete Israeli withdrawal from the territories occpied in 1967, recognition of the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, in addition to full equality for Israel’s Arab citizens.
  

Anyone who even thinks about Israel from time to time could benefit from reading Uri Avnery's final pre-election column, Dirty Socks . The poor dumb bastards in Israel with the fiction of a vote have choices that make Bush look decent and Cheney look average.

Posted by EBW at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jonah has managed to kill a couple of posts today, but my take-away from a couple of con-calls with AFSME and AFLCIO and AFT/NEA from Maine and Nebraska in the past 72 hours about the stimulus bill is that congressional Dems can't get the votes for the labor, more pink than blue, that work in education (Head Start and K-12), and can't get the votes for children, healthy or sick (a pediatrician was on the 2nd call for the FMAP number), and can't even get the votes for the labor, more blue than pink, that build or rebuild schools. But they can get the votes for manufacturing assembly lines and ribbons of cement, the magical images of Ford factories and the Eisenhower years, both several years past their primes, and profoundly high-carbon.

Blaming it on the GOP is fine politics in the moment, but every two years there is a cohort of challenger candidates, nurses in '04, junior brass and NCOs in '06. A whole lot of politically very successful operatives on school boards just got notice that their budget problems don't matter at all. And policy is what drives us.

Bill Gates just made a point by "sharing" a jar full of clean (and neutered) skeeters with the rich at a venue. If the only way we could fund "stimulus" was by zeroing out public health for the employed, would that be a win? Would that sell? If not, then why does real reduction in public health for the dependents of the employed sell, and why does a real reduction in the hours, and quality, of education of the dependents of the employed sell?

Is sexist and "wrenchist" (to coin a phrase, but the reference is to Charlie Chaplin as a factory worker in "Modern Times") what ever it was we just got? How does it work that going to Susan Collins and Olympia Snow and pick one additional Republican member of the Senate, with an anti-women, anti-children's education and anti-children's healthcare message, is the best political choice, and the best policy alternative available?

Posted by EBW at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is just a gem! Via Ha'aretz, The philosopher who gave the IDF moral justification in Gaza by Amos Harel, is one word short of 1k word tour of pseudo-intellectual provenance why GWOT (in Hebrew) makes it ok to kill an entire Arab village to ... save a single Tsahal soldier.

Here's more fun:

Military Ethics of Fighting Terror: Principles, by Asa Kasher and Amos Yadlin, in Philosophia, the Philosophical Quarterly of Israel.

And the expanded version:

Ethical Dilemmas in Fighting Terrorism, by Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, in Jerusalem Issue Brief, Vol. 4, No. 8, 25 November 2004.

It is almost "nits make lice". For extra amusement, Kasher and Yadlin cite Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Isn't that a gem!

Posted by EBW at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been MIA for the past week as Eric and I take the bugs to Ratland WDW, but I have been trying to keep up with the latest twists and turns in the Navajo Trust Case, slated to be heard before the SCOTUS on February 23rd. I want to delve a bit deeper into some of the legal strategies later, but Acee and Indianz has an excellent article on the case and some support from a very unusual group:

Navajo Nation sees support on Supreme Court case Wednesday, February 4, 2009 Filed Under: Law | Trust

The Navajo Nation is getting support from some unexpected sources as it prepares for another battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On February 23, the justices will hear an appeal of the tribe's long-running trust lawsuit. The federal government wants the court to block the Interior Department from being held liable for a botched coal lease.

But a group of former Interior secretaries -- including one who replaced the official at issue in the case -- is backing the tribe. In a brief filed last month, they said they are interested in ensuring the government lives up to its trust responsibilities.

"Despite the long recognition of these trust obligations, the United States neglected the economic development of the Navajo Nation, the largest tribe in the country, and by the late 1940s the Nation was in such dire circumstances that Congress was forced to authorize emergency relief on the Navajo Reservation," the four former Cabinet secretaries wrote.

The economic theme is the focus of another brief in support of the tribe. The states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah -- where the reservation is based -- say it is everyone's interest for the government to live up to its trust duties.

Read the whole thing. Here is the Amici Curiae.

Posted by MB Williams at 07:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The names and military IDs of the signatory officers have been redacted out from temporary custody orders for Gaza detainees filed with the Be'er Sheva district court. According to civil rights lawyer Tamar Peleg-Shrik, the names and IDs of the officers signing detention orders were not redacted in prior detentions.

The tactic of effacing the command serves the strategy of evading war crimes trials, but I wonder if it transfers the responsibility of defense from some Tsahal officers to all Tsahal officers. Isn't every Tsahal officer who fails to identify himself or herself as not having been in command of a combat arms unit or aircraft during the Gaza War knowingly shielding officers who's units committed acts which meet the legitimate test for scrutiny by an investigative body under international law?

Can any current Tsahal officer travel with impunity where independent courts exist? Isn't this what "human shield" means, using the many to hide the few, so the many take the risk arising from the conduct of the few, for the benefit of the few, and the cost of the many?

Posted by EBW at 07:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Because John H. Lynch intends to be elected to the Senate in 2010, and with Bonnie Newman he'll have an open seat with no incumbent in the general to compete the election, and the primary is a cakewalk. It moves NH out of the Red and into the Blue, in 2010.

Posted by EBW at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As the Obama Administration attempts to find its own, rather than the prior regime's, course in Afghanistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, it would be useful to remember this:

April 8th, 1865.
General R.E. Lee, Commanding C.S.A.:
Your note of last evening in reply to mine of the same date, asking the conditions on which I will accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just received. In reply I would say that, peace being my great desire, there is but one condition I would insist upon,--namely, that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged. I will meet you, or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name for the same purpose, at any point agreeable to you, for the purpose of arranging definitely the terms upon which the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia will be received.
U.S. Grant, Lieutenant-General

Early this morning 30 of the Punjabi State's local police at the Shamozai police post in Swat surrendered to local militia forces. This afternoon they were released, on condition. Ils ont promis aux talibans de démissionner de leurs fonctions et qu'ils ne participeraient plus à aucune opération contre les talibans.

As fierce as the fighting is in Swat, and as profound as the differences between the Punjabi State intent on "extending the writ of law", which is to say, the monopoly of force of the Islamabad Punjabi military elite, and the tribal institutions, militias included, intent on retaining autonomy pre-existing the dissolution of "British India" (1947), and even the establishment of the "Durand Line" (1893), honorable terms are possible.

And the name of this series is Is Pakistan?.

Posted by EBW at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If Bill Richardson (D-Bimbo Problems) is cabinet quality, what earthly reason is there to pass over John Edwards?

Other than the a priori center-right corporatist aversion to single-payer?

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This morning I put on the Violin Concerto in E Minor, Opus 64 for the kids.

The shadow cast by Wagner's essentialist nonsense Das Judenthum in der Musik is long and dark, and in the present. Someone I've known for a long time remarked at the Cairo ICANN social, where a string quartet was performing a standard quite pleasantly in an open-air venue in Giza, that Arabs were inauthentic performing European music. I didn't reply, we disagree on too much, but I'm glad I know that the clarinet is at its peak in the klezmer repertoire. When I'm in Cairo again I'll look in on the luthiers, the oud is a wonderful instrument.

Posted by EBW at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by EBW at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is an entry on Google's blog for yesterday's interesting event.

Posted by EBW at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If Tel Aviv University's Faculty of Law withdraws its employment offer to Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, because she heads Tsahal's international law division and under Sharvit-Baruch's command, Tsahal's legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians, including the bombardment of the Gaza police course closing ceremony, several war crimes planned for, and executed in the first minutes of the Tsahal surprise air ops prior to the ground phase of the Gaza War, then it will lose state funding.

This, according to the thirteen-times-visited-by-police-prime-minister-Ehud-Olmert.

Professor Hanoch Dagan, the dean of the law faculty, does in fact have a gun to his head.

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