April 10, 2004

Maybe the G was supposed to be a 6.

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Declassified and Approved for Release, 10 April 2004

Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a ...(redacted portion) ... service.

An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an ... (redacted portion) ... service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.

The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the US. Convicted plotter Ahmed Ressam has told the FBI that he conceived the idea to attack Los Angeles International Airport himself, but that Bin Ladin lieutenant Abu Zubaydah encouraged him and helped facilitate the operation. Ressam also said that in 1998 Abu Zubaydah was planning his own US attack.

Ressam says Bin Ladin was aware of the Los Angeles operation.

Although Bin Ladin has not succeeded, his attacks against the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 demonstrate that he prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks. Bin Ladin associates surveilled our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombings were arrested and deported in 1997.

Al-Qa'ida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s.

A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a ... (redacted portion) ... service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Shaykh" 'Umar 'Abd al-Rahman and other US-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

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I read Wonkette.

I am proud to state that I've never considered Matt Drudge's sexual orientation one way or the other. Having now been forced to do so, I have to say the idiot that started the conversation Wonkette posted has probably lost a hero. And I'll be chuckling off and on for the rest of the evening.

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Well, tomorrow is the high holy day of Christiandom.

This means I'm expecting everyone to be offline so (barring something momentous or my finding out where to get a copy of the 8/6/01 PDB) blogging will be light. I'll be wrapping up the official production MTClient 1.5 release and deciding if my next immediate project will be practical or educational.

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The World As Blog. And the code that it's build with is free for non-commercial use.

Of course, if every blog had geocoding (like P6 does) the poor boy's system would likely explode.

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Michael at Move The Crowd;

This led me and Jon in to conversation about mistaken identity. He was telling me how was just on a recent trip to the Bahamas where many of the hotel guests thought he was either an athlete or a soap opera star. I've had people tell me that I look like Eddie Murphy, Busta Rhymes, and I've also heard that I had another twin who was an actor on a soap opera back in the day.

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Thus begins my education about Republican politics in the real world.

You'll dump it within three years.

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Press Release from United for a Fair Economy
For immediate release - April 7, 2004
Contact: Christina Kasica, (617) 423-2148 x19

Bush Tax Cuts = Tax Shifts
New UFE Report: Tax Burden Shifting off Wealthy onto Everyone Else
$197 Billion in Tax Cuts to Top 1% of US Taxpayers as Big as States’ Budget Shortfalls of $200 Billion

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE: Shifty Tax Cuts (PDF)
Or, email Chris Hartman to receive a copy by return e-mail.

BOSTON — A new report, entitled “Shifty Tax Cuts: How They Move the Tax Burden off the Rich and onto Everyone Else,” from United for a Fair Economy (UFE) indicates that between 2002 and 2004, the Bush tax cuts to the top 1% of US income earners redirected billions of dollars in revenue that could have eliminated virtually all of the budget shortfalls in the states.

“Congress had the option to send aid to the states to prevent $200 billion worth of service cuts and regressive tax increases,” said Chris Hartman, UFE’s research director. “Instead, they gave tax breaks totaling roughly the same amount to multi-millionaires and the rest of the top 1%.”

The report identifies five main areas of shifting tax burden:

FEDERAL TO STATE — a 15% shift in tax burden between 2000 and 2003

PROGRESSIVE TO REGRESSIVE — at the federal level, a 17% decline in the share of revenue from progressive taxes and a 135% increase in the share of revenue from regressive taxes since 1962

WEALTH TO WORK — A tax cut on unearned income — such as inheritance or investment — of between 31% and 79%, but a tax hike on work income of 25% since 1980

CORPORATIONS TO INDIVIDUALS — a 67% drop in the share of federal revenues contributed by corporations and a 17% rise in individuals’ share

CURRENT TAXPAYERS TO FUTURE GENERATIONS — record deficits that shift the tax burden to our children and grandchildren

“When President Bush and Congress trumpet, ‘Here’s a tax cut', we say, ‘Taxpayer beware!’ said Chuck Collins, United for a Fair Economy co-founder. “Unless you are super-rich, it’s a tax SHIFT, not a cut. Non-wealthy taxpayers will pay for these tax cuts with increased state and local taxes or cuts in public services.”

“Between 2002 and 2004, a full $197 billion in new tax breaks went to the top 1% of American taxpayers,” Hartman commented. “This is money that has disappeared into the pockets of the very wealthy, making it unavailable to solve ongoing budget crises at the state and local levels.”

“I got a rebate check last summer for $400,” said Collins. “Then my eight-year-old’s public school asked me to contribute money to replace worn-out chairs for the students. At the same time, I found out they laid off the librarian because of budget cuts. What good is a $400 tax cut when parents have to cough up additional money for chairs and books or else see their children go without?”

The report concludes that the total federal, state and local tax burden has become increasingly the responsibility of middle-and low-income families in recent decades, and that revenues being generated by taxes are not sufficient to pay for existing public services. Work in particular is being taxed at a higher rate than investment. “I do a lot of work in predominantly Latino areas of Boston,” said UFE Education Specialist Gloribell Mota. “Residents there are the working poor — they have jobs and pay taxes — yet are getting pennies in tax cuts and seeing health care services they depend on slashed.”

“The Bush administration has followed a strategy of starving public services by pulling tax money away from education and housing and giving it away to multi-millionaires,” said Karen Kraut, UFE’s State Tax Partnership director. “States are suffering as a result, and people are going without essential services in order to fund the lifestyles of the rich.”

The report calls for tax reforms to improve the fairness of tax distribution and ensure adequate revenues. Concerned Americans are urged to pass resolutions in their cities and towns to stop the tax cuts and restore local services that have been affected, to call and write their congressional representatives to take action to stop the cuts, and to sign the Tax Fairness Pledge at www.ResponsibleWealth.org/taxpledge.

The co-authors of the report are Chuck Collins, UFE Co-founder; Chris Hartman, UFE Research Director; Karen Kraut, Director of UFE’s State Tax Partnerships; and Gloribell Mota, UFE Education Specialist.

United for a Fair Economy is an independent national non-profit that raises awareness of growing economic inequality.

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For Welfare Reform to Work, Jobs Must be Available
By Heather Boushey and David Rosnick
April 1, 2004

As Congress debates significant changes to the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act, commonly known as welfare reform, they should take into account the hardships that higher unemployment has caused for low-income women and their families. Wanting to be off welfare is not enough; the labor market must provide employment opportunities. Although the recession was relatively brief, from March to November 2001, the labor market continued to shed jobs until late summer 2003. Since then, job growth has been paltry at best and the unemployment rate of less educated women and single female heads of households remains high.

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Antonin Scalia apparently is afraid to have his soul captured.

Marshal Orders Tapes Of Scalia Talk Erased Reporters Told Justice Bars Recording

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004; Page A02

A federal marshal guarding Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ordered two reporters to erase audio recordings they were making of Scalia's speech to a group of high school students in Mississippi on Wednesday, prompting protests from local journalists who said they were victims of official interference with the press.

As Scalia was addressing an afternoon assembly at the Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube confronted the journalists and told them they must erase their recordings because they violated the justice's policy against audio- or videotaping of his public appearances.

After Associated Press reporter Denise Grones balked, the marshal took her digital recorder and erased its contents -- after Grones explained how the machine worked. The marshal also asked Hattiesburg American reporter Antoinette Konz to hand over a cassette tape and returned it, erased, after the event.

"The deputy's actions were based on Justice Scalia's long-standing policy prohibiting such recordings of his remarks," David Turner, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said. But, he added: "Justice Scalia did not instruct the deputy to take that action."

This isn't a new thing, and it doesn't bother me so much that Scalia is subject to this particular neurosis. What bothers me is the U.S. Marshall took what I feel is an illegal action independently. Her job was to guard Scalia. She needs to stick to that.

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I read Pedantry because is is, for the most part, an intellectual and cultural discussion. A break from the news and politics. So when Scott Martens decides an article is worth a high-level fisking, I read. Never mind that David Brooks is always an easy target.

What would you think of someone who said that their debts weren't a problem, because they were sure to win the lottery before their debts caught up with them? The illusion Brooks is praising is no different in nature.

I wasted four years of my life in American suburbia believing that if only I had a little more stock in my Schwab account, I could quit working and really live. I resent Brooks telling me that this fantasy - this delusion that took away time that I can never win back - was a good thing. I saw this sort of delusion all around me when I lived among the subjects of Brooks' analysis. Brooks believes that he is seeing some grand manifestation of the American Zeitgeist. There is no American Zeitgeist - what is going on here is quite immediate and material. It is the effect of how American society is structured, and it isn't always a blessing.

The failure to stop and think, to try to actually live in the now instead of, as Brooks puts it, having a "future-minded mentality", does immense damage to America. He doesn't do justice to the anti-sprawl advocates. This dream of a new world in the next development is their nightmare. Their vision is of urbanisation spreading like a forest fire: an expanding fringe of brightness and activity enclosing an ever larger area of decay and destruction. Brooks' complaints about the decline of the inner suburbs are identical to complaints about the inner cities in the 50's and 60's.

Brooks' exurbias have a seedy side. The exurbs are more than a little like Potemkin villiages. They thrive on the backs of a lot of unseen labour - factories and farms whose workers live very different lives, construction workers who can't live in the houses they build or shop in the malls they pave, the people who make their food and scan their groceries. That population lives very differently. Brooks pays them only the slightest bit of attention, when he talks about someone who has "left behind that exorbitant mortgage, that long commute, all those weird people who watch 'My Daughter Is a Slut' on daytime TV talk shows." They don't wear Land's End clothes. They don't fit in his Zeigeist, but they are just as real and just as important.

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Schwarzenegger to Keep Workers' Comp $100G
By STEVE LAWRENCE
Associated Press Writer

April 10, 2004, 12:53 AM EDT

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to keep a $100,000 contribution from a workers' compensation insurance company as he negotiates workers' comp legislation.

The Republican governor had pledged not to take money from workers' comp insurers because doing so might suggest he was beholden to them while he seeks a compromise with lawmakers on curbing the rising costs of work-related injuries.

Marty Wilson, who oversees a Schwarzenegger campaign committee that raises money for ballot initiatives, said donations received from workers' comp insurers after the March 2 primary election would be "promptly returned."

But he said a $100,000 contribution from the American Financial Group was an exception because it was pledged before the primary. The campaign committee received the donation on March 4.

Schwarzenegger suggested last month that there was no starting date for the donation policy. "We don't put a date on it, March 2 or before or after or anything like that," he said.

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Diane Warth at Karmalized has posted a most appropriate poem for these days and times: Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

Check Karmalized for the whole poem.

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Yesterday I said I know this is important. I don't know if it's good or bad. Well, I got my answer.

The bill concerns "defined-benefit" plans, the sort which, unlike a 401(k), guarantees a certain size of pension to workers. The main provision changes the interest rate that these plans use to calculate how much they will need to meet their promises. Until now, sponsors of the plans have assumed that their assets will grow at the modest rate of money put into risk-free Treasury bills; because pension promises are supposed to be risk-free, this seemed appropriate. In the future, however, sponsors of retirement plans will assume they're going to earn the higher rate investors get when they risk their capital in a basket of corporate bonds. Moreover, the basket includes bonds with credit ratings of A or AA, not just rock-solid AAAs; and it is composed only of high-yielding long-term bonds, even though pension obligations to workers approaching retirement will come due in the short term. By assuming this higher interest rate, companies will pay $80 billion less into their pension plans than they otherwise would have over the next two years. If they go bust, the government-backed Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will shoulder their unfunded promises. In short, companies will effectively borrow money from their pensioners; if the companies default, taxpayers ultimately will be liable.

…Without the efforts of the White House, the bill would have been worse. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) led a campaign to allow cuts in contributions to multi-employer plans -- never mind that the funding requirements applying to those plans are already extraordinarily lenient. The Senate also wanted to waive the rules for all underfunded plans, rather than just for the steel and airline lobbies. The Bush team deserves credit for successful resistance on both fronts. But its attempts to declare a complete victory are hollow. The bill "provides important worker protections and prevented further systemic pension plan under funding," a statement from the Treasury declares. This is Orwellian nonsense.

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Strip-search hoax plagues fast-food outlets
Caller poses as police, falsely warns managers of thief on premises

By Mitch Stacy, Associated Press, 4/10/2004

The caller to the Phoenix-area Taco Bell said he was a police officer and informed the manager there was a thief on the premises. Someone's pocketbook was missing, the caller said, ordering that a female customer be detained and strip-searched in a back office.

But there was no theft. Investigators believe the caller was an impersonator, possibly from north Florida, who has pulled the same stunt dozens of times nationwide since 1999 with alarming success.

The caller, who sometimes poses as a company official, has persuaded managers at restaurants and other stores to detain and search employees for drugs or money. Targets have included Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Ruby Tuesday, Applebee's, Perkins, and others.

On Feb. 20, a male caller convinced managers at four Wendy's restaurants in Massachusetts to strip-search employees.

The caller's motive is unknown. Because his targets are mostly restaurants, one theory is that he is a disgruntled former fast-food worker. Some investigators believe he may be a sexual deviant who enjoys exercising power over people.

The searches have included male and female victims. Some businesses have been sued, and some managers have faced criminal charges.

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Maybe it's time to read some of the major leftie blogs again. I been slopping off.

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Tax Message in Treasury News Releases Assailed
Democrats see the statement as political propaganda and say it violates the law.
From Associated Press

April 10, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department issued a batch of tax-related news releases Friday saying America has a choice between growing the economy and raising taxes, which could hurt the recovery.

Democrats immediately denounced the action as an improper use of government resources to subsidize political propaganda.

Although the message is a long-held position of the Bush administration, it was the first time the department had included it at the bottom of its news releases, said Treasury Department spokesman Rob Nichols.

"America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the president's policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation," the releases said.

The message, on four different releases issued by the department, does not mention presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John F. Kerry, a critic of President Bush's tax policies, or anyone else by name.

Asked whether the message was referring to Kerry, Nichols said: "No. It is a reference to anyone who suggests that raising taxes is the right thing to do. There have been many who suggest that taxes should be raised. We don't share that view."

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the language appears to be an improper use of official government resources for political purposes.

"Once again, there are questions to be asked about American taxpayers subsidizing political propaganda to distort the debate in our country and to whitewash President Bush's failed economic policies," Wade said.

Nichols said there was nothing improper about including the message on the tax releases. "That is nonsense, baseless and groundless," he said.

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Debra DeShong said there should be an investigation to determine whether the language violates the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of government employees.

"For them to say it's not political, you know — it looks like a duck, walks like a duck. It's not a goose," DeShong said.

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Stigma Against Gays Fading, Survey Finds
By Elizabeth Mehren , Times Staff Writer

April 11, 2004

Gays and lesbians have experienced a dramatic rise in acceptance over the last two decades, according to a new Los Angeles Times Poll.

Almost seven in 10 Americans know someone who is gay or lesbian and say they would not be troubled if their elementary school-age child had a homosexual teacher. Six in 10 say they are sympathetic to the gay community, displaying an increasing inclination to view same-sex issues through a prism of societal accommodation rather than moral condemnation.

On questions ranging from job discrimination to adoption to whether homosexuality is morally wrong, responses indicate that as gays and lesbians have become more open, heterosexuals in return have become more open toward them.

The change has come within one generation. In two Times Polls in the mid-1980s and other data from the same era, the level of sympathy toward gays and lesbians was half what it is today.

"The stigma of being gay is disappearing," said Gary Gates, a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington. "This is a huge change. Gay people in general are feeling more comfortable in society — and society is feeling more comfortable with gay people."

The fact that 69% of those polled by The Times said they know a gay or lesbian — up from 46% in 1985 — is particularly significant, Gates said. "Being gay is no longer an abstraction. It's my friend, my neighbor, my brother, my office-mate."

The Times Poll showed that women tended to be slightly more sympathetic toward gays and lesbians than men, and the survey affirmed a polarization that puts liberals and conservatives at opposite ends of a broad spectrum.

The poll also found a profound gulf in attitudes between older and younger Americans. Compared to those over 65, respondents between 18 and 29 were so much more favorably disposed toward gays and lesbians that, Gates said, over time, "many of these issues are simply not going to be issues any longer."

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U.S. Losing Support of Key Iraqis
A threat by Governing Council members to quit in protest of tough military tactics may hurt coalition plans to hand over power June 30.
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer

April 10, 2004

BAGHDAD — Tough U.S. tactics in Fallouja and Shiite Muslim cities of southern Iraq are driving a wedge between the Americans and their key supporter — the 25-member Governing Council that puts an Iraqi face on the occupation and is expected to serve as the basis of a new government.

One council member, angered by this week's heavy fighting in Fallouja and the prospect of a U.S. move against the militia of an anti-American Shiite cleric, suspended his membership Friday. Four others say they are ready to follow suit.

A sixth council member, Adnan Pachachi, a respected former diplomat who less than three months ago had accompanied First Lady Laura Bush to the president's State of the Union address, harshly criticized U.S. actions as "illegal and totally unacceptable."

From the beginning of the occupation, one of the biggest questions for U.S. authorities was how to create an indigenous leadership that would be acceptable to both the United States and the Iraqi people.

The Governing Council was a tenuous solution; many Iraqis accused its members of being little more than America's puppets.

But now even that backing seems on the verge of crumbling, undermining U.S. insistence that it has Iraqi support for its policies and leaving no one to hand power to, as the Bush administration insists it will, on June 30.

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Thousands in Fallouja Flee; Council Totters
A cease-fire in the city crumbles after less than two hours. Five more U.S. troops die in Iraq in the coalition's deadliest week since Hussein's ouster.

By Tony Perry and Nicholas Riccardi
Times Staff Writers

April 10, 2004

FALLOUJA, Iraq — A cease-fire between U.S. Marines and insurgents collapsed less than two hours after it took effect Friday as tens of thousands of women and children fled this besieged city and occupation officials scrambled to stave off a revolt from their handpicked Governing Council.

On the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, authorities reported that five more U.S. troops had been killed in the last two days, bringing to 49 the number of American deaths since Sunday.

As the deadliest week for U.S. troops since Hussein's ouster neared its end, Marines launched a major ground offensive this morning in Fallouja, bolstered by a third battalion that boosted troop strength from 2,500 to 3,750.

Iraqi insurgents said they had taken six more hostages — two Americans and four Italians — a day after militants showed footage of three Japanese captives whom they threatened to burn unless Tokyo withdrew its troops, which are noncombat.

By most accounts, the Iraqi dead numbered in the hundreds. In Fallouja, residents took advantage of a lull in the fighting to bury dozens of their dead in makeshift graves in the city's soccer stadium. As today's offensive began, at least 18 more were killed.

A week of intense clashes between coalition troops and a variety of Sunni and Shiite Muslim fighters triggered concern that the coalition had lost control of the country.

"The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC Radio. "There is no doubt that the current situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced.

"It is plainly the fact today that there are larger numbers of people, and they are people on the ground, Iraqis, not foreign fighters, who are engaged in this insurgency," Straw said.

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April 09, 2004

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You know, I'm almost prepared to stop talking about the Middle East. You see, the die is already cast.

One makes a decision then deals with the repercussions. Decision = free will, repercussions = destiny. And we are definitely in the destiny phase…the next decision is about how to deal with the new world, not how to shape it.

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N Korea on 'brink of nuclear war' with US

North Korea has issued its latest pronouncement in its diplomatic stoush with the United States, saying it is on the brink of nuclear war with the US.

Pyongyang has dismissed the recent multilateral talks on the region as fruitless.

The Korean Central News Agency says Washington is "driving the Korean peninsula to the brink of a nuclear war".

It argues Pyongyang has no choice but to step up its push for nuclear weapons.

In February, six nations, including North Korea and the United States, held talks in Beijing.

Pyongyang is describing the negotiations as "fruitless" and blaming Washington for the lack of progress.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney is about to begin a tour of the region.

The nuclear crisis will be high on his agenda.

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U.S. forces retaking Kut; gunfire undercuts halt in fighting in Fallujah
LOURDES NAVARRO, Associated Press Writer
Friday, April 9, 2004
©2004 Associated Press

(04-09) 09:44 PDT FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) --

U.S. forces Friday said they had retaken most of a key southern city from a rebellious Shiite militia, and an American-declared halt to fighting in the embattled city of Fallujah was undercut by bursts of gunfire on the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

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Can we now stop calling on Black folks to recognize the progress we've made in civil rights while still understanding we have quite a way to go?

We've done out part.

In the poll of people 18 and older, nearly 90 percent of whites, 73 percent of blacks and 78 percent of Hispanics said civil rights for blacks had somewhat or greatly improved over their lifetime. Seventy-five percent of whites, 69 percent of blacks and 68 percent of Hispanics said that civil rights for Hispanics had somewhat or greatly improved over their lifetime.

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I been tolerant of you corporate muthafukkas so far…

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Most Corporations Don't Pay

Over the next week, millions of individual Americans will settle up with Uncle Sam – and most corporations will skip out. A new GAO report reveals that from 1996-2000 more than 60% of U.S. corporations paid no taxes whatsoever. During the Bush Administration, things have gone from bad to worse as "corporate tax receipts have shrunk markedly as a share of overall federal revenue." Last year "they had fallen to just 7.4% of overall federal receipts, the lowest rate since 1983, and the second-lowest rate since 1934." Even corporations which do pay taxes don't pay much. Although the corporate tax rate is theoretically 35%, in 2000 "94% of U.S. corporations reported tax liabilities amounting to less than 5% of their total income." According to Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) the discrepancy can be explained by "massive tax avoidance, and perhaps in many cases tax evasion."

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Welcome to the first day of the 375th Annual Convocation of Quantum Griots. I am delighted that you've chosen to join us in our sharing and exploration of the Ways of Power. Please remove all your personae and put them in your Griot bag, for you won't be using them until you leave here tonight and they will just get in the way of our work.

Normally at this point, humans would review to the plan of the evening. From the material distributed at the door you already know we have an exciting program for you this year, so I feel no need to go into that…we are here, ready to work, and that is what is important. So rather than distract you, let me simply cede the platform to our Keynote Speaker so that we may begin. I give you he whom we all know so well…Chaos Lord, Bodhisattva Master of Time and Space, True Man, Manifestor through Speech…his titles are endless and fully appropriate. I give you…Alim Ra.

(Alim Ra walks onto the stage. He goes to the podium, reaches behind it, pulls out a wooden soap box, places it in the center of the front edge of the stage and stands on it).

Welcome, my people. It's good to be here where I can relax …walking the world amusing, but it's also strenuous. It is pleasant to abide in the Real once more.

We often wonder why people don't see the things we do, know the things we know, when it's all so obvious to us. We rarely reflect on the fact that our wondering means there is a gap in our knowledge as well. Though humans may be fools, they are a wonder as well and not to be lightly dismissed. After all, they have created most of the world on which we work our wonders. Yet many of us seem to want to dismiss them…which is a different matter than simply not joining them…and this indicates the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the nature of humans, even of that part of their nature that we share.

This is understandable. We tend to see the world as though from a great altitude, attempting to dispassionately map the patterns we see. This effort serves us as well as a street map of this city would…it guides us from place to place, but is useless once we are in the place. Once in the place, we need a floor plan more than a street map. And even then we have the same conceptual problem. A street map can't help you find the bathroom in the building in which you stand. A floor plan can…yet it won't keep you from stumbling over the furniture on your way there, especially if it's dark Any number of differently furnished buildings can be found with a given floor plan (those of you whose personae live in a suburban housing development or urban apartment building know what I'm talking about). So light, and knowledge of the particular layout are needed to keep from banging your shins painfully, no matter how well you know the city.

Stepping briefly away from metaphor, then, we find that our understanding of humanity doesn't help us understand humans. This being the case, we should explore the nature of humans. This is still of limited benefit in understanding particular people…it's like studying architecture, whereas dealing with individuals is like exploring a building. But the study of architecture makes you understand some of the bizarre, flying buttress-like structures humans create to maintain their structural integrity…though there's still no real need for all those gargoyles on the parapets.

Each of us has our worldview by which we explain the creation of humans. I do not intend to discuss them; as you know, that simply leads to useless disputation. I mention them to point out the one thing they all have in common…the body came first. It was completed prior to mind. This is important to recognize, because it means that mind inherits the full complement of physical capabilities and liabilities. Because they both form and filter our field of knowledge, I would like to discuss the perceptive abilities by which we navigate on the planet.

Because our bodies need material and energetic input from the planet, the first senses to develop were touch and taste, in order to determine the presence and nature of substances and energies in our environment. The olfactory sense developed as an extension to the sense of taste to allow operation at a distance…some substances being toxic, the ability to chemically analyze molecular amounts at a distance is of great benefit. Touch, meanwhile, differentiated twice…into hearing (to perceive mechanical energy at a distance) and sight (to perceive radiant energy at a distance).

Our body is the prime determinant of the nature of our respective worlds. We know we have a limited view of the planet. Consider what your world would look like if you had a terrapin's sonar. A deep pulse, essentially a sonogram, would tell you more about your friend's condition than the ritual response to a "Yo, how you livin'?" ever could. Suppose you could discriminate body sensations as clearly as you can musical themes? Suppose you could sense magnetic fields, like sharks. Suppose you had a bird's homing instinct, or could see into the ultraviolet spectrum, like bees? Even an expansion of your current senses, say acquiring a bloodhound's hearing and olfactory abilities, would present aspects of the planet that humans are unaware of…aspects that would significantly change human behavior were they but perceivable.

Bodies are connected to senses by a neural network. This network is issued with some fairly sophisticated pattern matching capabilities, and heuristics for information acquisition and processing. The network self-modifies in response to repetitive stimulus, so that its processing power is directed toward the type of input it receives. In other words, the body can, and does, learn.

Actually nothing said so far is unique to humans. Even a flatworm, possessing no more than a few hundred neurons, learns. The spatial senses are essentially the same mechanically in all living beings. They all perform the same function…converting the outside world into the inside world so that the body may operate on it. It is the particular aggregation of them that determines what the world looks like.

Our temporal senses are more interesting to investigate. As vision depends on the eye, our temporal senses depend on our nervous systems, and just as a high level of structural complexity was required to transform phototropic cell patches into eyes, temporal sensitivity requires a certain minimum level of neural complexity because it is actually patterns in neural firings, rather than time directly, that is being detected. Then we infer direction, causality, force, etc. It may be that the neural development makes temporal senses useful, rather than possible.

Unfortunately humans suffer a form of synthenasia, the blending of sense data, as regards the temporal senses. As a result the most common words for these senses… intelligence and memory…define concepts that don't quite accurately map to the actual senses. In particular, thought is perceived as part of intelligence when it is actually a response of memory, and knowledge is perceived as a part of experience when it is actually an action of intelligence. Learning the true extent and use of the temporal senses is the initiation of a Quantum Griot and the root of our power, because memory and intelligence are active senses…as neither past nor future truly exist, discrimination of possibilities is an act of creation. Any number of possible futures can spring from this point, just as any number of possible pasts could have led to this point, so by using the full power of intelligence and memory, we can select our past in order to determine our future. Not using these senses forces others to create our past and future.

Here, at the annual Convocation, we gather to reinforce and extend the knowledge that grants us the ability to choose. We also gather to transmit the knowledge, because the creation that accompanies the application of intelligence means the more people think the same way, the less localized will the effect be. So we welcome all of you, regardless of the level you have attained. In fact, three of you just wandered here by accident…I hope you stay. As they say, 'There are no accidents.'

This year's theme, "Sensory Interfaces", is a second level theme. In the first of our three days together we present "Empty Mind" so that each perception can be seen clearly, in sharp relief against the self. At this point, the speakers will be happy to discuss first level themes to the degree necessary to make the topic at hand clear. As masters of time and space, we can be sure of covering all the material and so do not need to consider such explanations a delay.

On the second day, with Empty Mind fully engaged, we watch the transformation of substance into perception, perception into thought, thought into idea. This day is the most difficult, and the most critical. Because the work done here lays the groundwork for the third day, where we watch the transformation from idea into thought, thought into perception, perception into substance.

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Aight by Montell Jordan is excellent.

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You know, if someone really wanted to twist Condi's nipple, they might remind her that as of October 6, 2003 (or thereabouts) she has been the responsible party in the Iraq Stabilization Group.

Iraq: New U.S. Plan Seeks To Expedite Reconstruction

By Andrew F. Tully

The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, facing persistent problems with restoring order in much of Iraq, has formed the Iraq Stabilization Group to expedite its rebuilding and security efforts there. Ultimate responsibility for reconstruction has been shifted from the Pentagon to the White House, under Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

Washington, 8 October 2003 (RFE/RL) -- At a news conference in Washington on 6 October, U.S. President George W. Bush expressed confidence that all is going well in Iraq.

"The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better, the infrastructure is getting better, the schools are opening, the hospitals are being modernized," Bush said.

During the same appearance, however, Bush appeared to contradict that conclusion by discussing the creation of the Iraq Stabilization Group, under which the ultimate oversight of Iraqi reconstruction will no longer rest with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld but with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and the White House National Security Council.

"This group formed within the National Security Council is aimed at the coordination of interagency efforts, as well as providing a support group to the Department of Defense and [top U.S. administrator in Iraq L. Paul] Bremer," Bush said.

The fact that Rumsfeld was originally in charge of Iraqi reconstruction represented a shift from past practice. Historically, such efforts have been the province of the State Department, which reportedly had spent 18 months developing a reconstruction plan for Iraq in case the United States went to war there.

Bush originally decided to give the job to Rumsfeld's Pentagon, but the White House now recognizes that the job has not been going well. That's the conclusion of Marina Ottaway, a senior associate of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington policy center.

Indeed, in an interview with the "Financial Times" yesterday, Rumsfeld said he had not been informed of the creation of the Iraq Stabilization Group beforehand.

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I've been thinking about the whole Bushista approach to communicating with the public. Assume all the standard left/progressive complaints about distortions and evasions, but beyond that the absolute refusal to acknowledge error kept striking me as awfully familiar.

This morning I realized what it reminds me of: Usenet.

Bush & Co. argue their position like they're in a Usenet political newsgroup.

So, in an effort to assist my cohort I decided to do some research on how to deal with that type of argument. It turns out there are many styles of Usenet argumentation and it's critical to identify which particular type of asshole you're dealing with.

With the assistance of Mike Reed's Flame Warrior database I have determined the archetypes of several major players in the Bush administration.

George Bush	Big Dog
Dick Cheney	Capitalista
Condoleeze Rice	Me Too
Dick Ashcroft	Troglodyte
Don Rumsfeld	Tireless Rebutter
Colin Powell	Diplomat
Tom Ridge	Klaxon
The administration as a whole	Cyber Sisters

Feel free to add to the list.

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• An unspoken purpose behind her testimony was to support the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and similar legislation.
• She couldn't say as much publicly as she could in private session, so literally nothing she said was a surprise to the commissioners (not to mention anyone in all of BlogNet)
• Because of the previous item, her testimony yesterday will have little impact on the final report.
• The August 6th PDB, though…

Here are a couple of interesting quotes from Jim Lehrer's post-testimony interview with Gov. Keane and Lee H. Hamilton:

JIM LEHRER: Governor, what would be on your standout list?

THOMAS H. KEAN: I'd agree with Congressman Hamilton in most of those areas. Certainly that whole, that whole business of trying to integrate, trying to get the agencies to communicate with one another, and the fact that their emphasis that we were structurally unprepared.

A lot of people put the emphasis on what could have been by some person here or some person there, but she didn't say it was people. She said we actually were structurally unprepared for what happened to us on Sept. 11. And the implication was that they have changed a number of the structures since 7/11... since 9/11, but there's a lot more to do. She said it was not impossible, although it's less likely, it's not impossible there would be another event.

JIM LEHRER: Based on what you have heard so far, Governor, do you agree with her, that it was not people, it was structure?

THOMAS H. KEAN: Well, I think probably the combination, but certainly she's right about the structures. There's no question that the FBI, the CIA, a number of those agencies were not structured really to take on the terrorism fight the way they... the way they should have been able to.

…

JIM LEHRER: Governor, speaking of priorities, on the charge from Richard Clarke that he made in his testimony before you all a couple weeks ago that the Bush administration, prior to 9/11, did not give an urgent priority to combating al-Qaida specifically and terrorism generally. Now you heard Dr. Rice, you heard Richard Clarke, where do you think the truth lies?

THOMAS H. KEAN: Well, as usual, you know, it doesn't lie entirely I don't think with one or the other. She had a very spirited defense today of the Bush administration and the fact that terrorism was a priority for the Bush administration.

On the other hand, some of Mr. Clarke's points are still there.[P6: emphasis added] I think it's one of things the commission has got to sort out. We've got to make judgments here, and some of the judgments are going to be very difficult. But whether or not this administration took terrorism seriously enough is going to be one of the judgments we're going to have to make.

JIM LEHRER: In fact, you are going to make that judgment? You're going to sit around the table and the ten of you are going to agree on whether or not the Bush administration did or did not give enough priority to this?

THOMAS H. KEAN: We're going to have to agree on the wording of the report, and the wording of the report is going to make some judgments. And I can't predict in advance what those judgments are going to be, but it's our job to sort it all out. We got a lot of testimony from a lot of people and we have to put it all together in the end.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, Governor, that this is an important issue, the priority issue?

THOMAS H. KEAN: Oh, it's a very important issue as to what the Clinton administration did, what the Bush administration did, how high a priority it was, whether the programs they both came up with were successful or unsuccessful, what could have been done if those hadn't all been done.

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Same Room, Different Views for Relatives of 9/11 Victims
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

Published: April 9, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 8 — They sat several seats apart on Thursday, listening to President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, testify before the Sept. 11 commission. What they had in common was suffering.

But John Owens of Mineola, N.Y., whose brother, Peter, died in the World Trade Center, and April Gallop of Woodbridge, Va., an executive assistant for the Army who was injured at the Pentagon, might as well have been watching from Venus and Mars.

Three hours of long questions and longer answers could not have struck them more differently. Mr. Owens nodded his head in agreement and several times applauded, while Ms. Gallop shook her head disapprovingly and often appeared skeptical.

"I came here to show support for President Bush," Mr. Owens said.

Ms. Gallop came looking for accountability. "I heard her responses," she said. "There was a failure to mention that mistakes were made. I didn't hear that."

Together, they seemed to reflect parallel universes for a rare public accounting by an administration witness responsible for helping keep the country safe and secure. But as such, Ms. Rice was a reminder, too, of a nation still searching for someone, anyone, to blame for failures before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"She is someone who can be trusted," said Ernest Strada, the mayor of Westbury, N.Y., for the last 23 years, as he left the hearing room. His son, Thomas, was killed at the trade center.

"She answered candidly," Mr. Strada said. "She didn't try to dodge the questions. She serves our country well. She serves the administration well."

Beverly Eckert of Stamford, Conn., whose husband, Sean Rooney, died in the trade center, was near tears in frustration and disappointment. She could not have disagreed with Mr. Strada more.

"I don't think this resolved anything," Ms. Eckert said. "She didn't acknowledge the fact that this administration wasn't addressing issues and problems the right way. They asked her what she did, and she said she didn't do anything. To me, that's a lack of responsibility, a lack of accountability, and it's very troubling."

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Quote of note:

It is the first time that a governor appointed by the central government has been forced from power by an armed faction, and will be a test of Mr. Karzai and his government's ability to reassert control. General Dostum is Mr. Karzai's representative in the north and has often voiced support for the central government. Yet he has been an advocate for a federated state and has been reluctant to give up military and economic control of his region.

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Provincial Capital in Afghanistan Is Seized by a Warlord's Forces
By CARLOTTA GALL

Published: April 9, 2004

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 8 - Forces loyal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum seized control of the capital of Faryab Province in northern Afghanistan on Thursday, forcing the governor to flee and drawing a sharp rebuke from President Hamid Karzai and his ministers in Kabul.

The central government ordered in troops of the Afghan National Army, along with their American trainers, but they arrived too late to prevent the takeover of power. It was more a political coup than a military clash, with just some shooting in the air in the city, witnesses said. But militia loyal to General Dostum had seized control in four districts throughout the province, they said.

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Quote of note:

Few expect any improvement. "Thank God that the American administration is too stupid to win the Iraqis over," said Montasser Zayat, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo. "On the contrary, they create feelings of frustration and commit more mistakes, leading more Iraqis to rise against them."

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Arabs Worry Over Extremism While Evoking Vindication
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

CAIRO, April 8 — Some Arabs watching the escalating violence in Iraq expressed fear Thursday that the United States, rather than helping to stamp out extremism, might have created a new, toxic incubator for it, while others expressed satisfaction that the Americans were getting their nose bloodied.

There is an almost universal sense in the Arab world that Washington is paying the price for entering Iraq with no coherent plan beyond toppling Saddam Hussein, and that the anarchy they allowed to run unchecked in the first days of occupation a year ago has never really been tamed.

"Iraq appears to be disintegrating, and the Iraqis are not better off today than they were before the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime," said Mohammed Kamal, a professor of political science at Cairo University. "The Americans don't have a plan on how to get out of this mess that they put themselves in."

Most Arab governments, especially those enjoying close ties with Washington, maintained a studied silence on Iraq, trying to avoid either alienating the Bush administration or fomenting anger at home. There was a scattering of official statements, including one from the Arab League, calling for a greater United Nations role in restructuring Iraq and protecting its civilians.

"The developments in Iraq in the last few days are alarming, and we fear that we are facing a civil war in Iraq, reminding me of what happened in Afghanistan and Lebanon," said the foreign minister of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, one of the few to speak out. "We are worried about the cluster of resistance and terrorist organizations in Iraq, which has become a fertile ground for these people to implement their extremist ideology."

Arab news reports tended to concentrate more on events in Falluja than events in the Shiite community. "Falluja Is Burning" said a huge red headline in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahrar, while Al Wafd, an opposition daily, screamed: "A Massacre Against Muslims in Falluja."

Many commentators drew parallels between Israeli repression in the occupied territories — and its failure to pacify the Palestinians after more than three decades — and United States actions in Iraq. Indeed, there have been frequent accusations that the Bush administration is mistakenly following the Israeli model.

"I don't think the Americans can achieve what they want by force, and it is the same phenomenon in Israel," said Abdulwahab Badrakhan, a columnist at Al-Hayat newspaper, published in London. "The Americans made a mistake when they did not involve the Arabs in the situation."

There is widespread concern that the violence will further inflame existing divisions in Iraq, which could easily provoke similar ethnic or religious schisms in neighboring states.

Among critics of the United States, and they are legion, there was satisfaction that chances are growing more remote by the day that Iraq will serve as a model that would eventually reshape the region. There is a sense that Syria and Iran are off the hook, while on a broader scale the violence is further undermining Washington's credibility and making Americans ever more unpopular.

"Freedom, democracy, the rule of law and other such promises have been transformed in the occupation's lexicon into violations, invasions, sieges, curfews, bombardments from Apache helicopters and the terrorization of a people," the daily Al Khaleej in the United Arab Emirates wrote in a typical editorial.

Few expect any improvement. "Thank God that the American administration is too stupid to win the Iraqis over," said Montasser Zayat, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo. "On the contrary, they create feelings of frustration and commit more mistakes, leading more Iraqis to rise against them."

There have been few demonstrations in the Arab world, which some analysts took as a sign of general satisfaction that Washington is in trouble and the resistance succeeding.

Among the Arab world's majority Sunni Muslim population, there is less of an emotional connection with the Iraqi Shiites, who are generally seen as an extension of Iran, analysts said. Also, the fiery young cleric who is leading the Shiite uprising, Moktada al-Sadr, is an unknown quantity.

The exception is the Shiite communities in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, which evidently pay close attention to their brethren in Iraq.

The top Shiite cleric in Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, once the Americans' nemesis there, condemned the "horrible massacres" by the United States in Iraq, saying they proved that Washington is lying when it says its goal is bringing freedom. At the same time, he called for self-restraint by Iraqis.

In Tehran, an editorial in the English-language Tehran Times, often used to send messages abroad, said the United States should be working more closely with moderate clerics to defuse the situation.

The wider Shiite populations worried that Mr. Sadr and his followers, who have little support outside Iraq, will divide the community and wreck the Shiite's historic opportunity to gain a dominant role. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who enjoys wide respect outside Iraq, has been biding his time, figuring that a democratic system will gain the Shiites effective control, given their majority status.

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Because it's happening again. Maybe not (yet) on the scale of the disaster 10 years ago, but…

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Sudan and Rebels Agree to New Cease-Fire
By REUTERS

EL FASHER, Sudan, April 8 — The Sudanese government and two rebel groups agreed Thursday to a 45-day cease-fire and to allow relief groups access to war-torn Darfur Province.

Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said the three sides also agreed at a meeting in Chad to hold more talks in two weeks on the conflict, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur, a region in western Sudan along the Chad border.

Arab militias have been driving African villagers off their land in Darfur in what international organizations have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations said Wednesday that international military intervention might be needed to stop the conflict.

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Iraq Insurgency Spreads, U.S. Finds More Foes and Fewer Friends
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, April 8 — The spreading insurgency in Iraq has drastically altered the strategic equation for the United States military. One year after United States forces fought their way into Baghdad, Americans now find themselves facing more enemies, with fewer effective allies, than they had counted on.

And the military also has two new and demanding missions: subduing a restive Sunni city of about 250,000 people, and the subtle and complex job of neutralizing the militia of a radical Shiite cleric without alienating the rest of the Shiite population.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of the American-led force in Iraq, today bluntly committed his forces to a sustained campaign to do both. The victory that seemed to be sealed when American armor rolled into Baghdad a year ago now appears to hang in the balance as American forces do battle with a diverse array of insurgents and militias.

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$80 Billion Pension Bill Is Approved by the Senate
By CARL HULSE and MICHELINE MAYNARD

WASHINGTON, April 8 - The Senate delivered American companies more than $80 billion in pension savings Thursday, sending President Bush legislation that provides additional relief to steel companies and some airlines that had clamored for the help.

…The legislation, a top priority of business groups, saves companies substantial amounts on their pension plans by changing the way their required contributions are calculated. The legislation ends a requirement that contributions be tied to interest rates on 30-year Treasury bonds; it substitutes a rate based on a composite of long-term corporate bonds for 2004 and 2005.

A separate provision grants an estimated $1.6 billion in savings to airlines and steel companies with weak pension plans by allowing them to pay only 20 percent of what they would have to provide under requirements to bolster their pension funds.

Some of the nation's largest airlines were the beneficiaries of the bulk of those savings, with United Airlines the primary winner. All the companies were pressing for the bill to become law before new quarterly payments come due April 15.

The changes would have no effect on the amount of pensions that individual retirees receive.

Opponents of the legislation said they were not contesting the aid to the company pension funds; their complaint was that the Bush administration and Republican Congressional leaders had given short shrift to so-called multiemployer pension plans that are having problems of their own because of stock market losses and a weak economy.

Democrats led by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said the union pension plans were largely denied government help at the behest of White House and Republican lawmakers controlling negotiations to reconcile the House and Senate bills. The Senate had previously voted overwhelmingly to extend the relief to multiemployer plans.

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Reliant and 4 Officers Indicted in California Energy Shortage

WASHINGTON, April 8 (Reuters) - A federal grand jury returned an indictment on Thursday charging a unit of the energy company Reliant Resources and four of its officers with driving up electricity prices in California by creating a false shortage.

The indictment charged Reliant Energy Services and Jackie Thomas, a former vice president of Reliant's power trading division; Reggie Howard, a former director of the trading division; Lisa Flowers, a term trader for the trading division, and Kevin Frankeny, Reliant's manager for Western operations.

The company and executives were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and commodities manipulation, wire fraud and manipulation and attempted manipulation of the price of a commodity in interstate commerce.

According to the indictment, Reliant Energy Services and its officers and employees intentionally drove up the price of electricity in California during June of 2000 by shutting off its power generation to create the false appearance of a shortage.

The indictment said the plan worked and Reliant Energy Services reaped millions in illegal profits.

The Justice Department said the charges were the first ever brought against a corporate entity for engaging in fraudulent and manipulative trading practices during the California energy crisis of 2000-2001.

The indictment says that Reliant was faced with a potential multimillion dollar loss in June 2000 when prices in the electricity markets fell sharply. In order to reverse its losing position, the defendants devised a scheme to force the price of electricity up by shutting off most of the company's power plants, thus creating the appearance of an electricity shortage, the indictment contends.

Reliant then disseminated false and misleading information to the market that wrongly attributed the shutdowns to environmental limitations and maintenance problems, according to the indictment.

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A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity
By MARC LACEY

KIGALI, Rwanda, April 8 — Although he is not a government spokesman, Ernest Twahrwa can recite Rwanda's official view toward ethnicity with great precision: "There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan."

Mr. Twahrwa, a Hutu, is halfway through a six-week government re-education camp set up to purge him and other former fighters of any ethnic ideologies that they may still harbor from 1994, when extremist Hutu massacred 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

"They're trying to change what we think," Mr. Twahrwa said. "There have been many changes in this country. I need to change too. I need to be a new person."

This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinctions by decree.

The re-education camp is one way of driving the point home to people who once lived by the motto "Hutu power." As Hutu fighters who fled to Congo after 1994 return to Rwanda they are sent to the camp. Along with civics they are taught some hands-on skills like carpentry. They leave with $75 and, at least in theory, a whole new way of thinking.

That new thinking has its critics — those who say that denying that ethnicity exists merely suppresses the painful ethnic dialogue that Rwanda requires.

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The worst possibility is an Iraq unified against the occupation.

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Signs That Shiites and Sunnis Are Joining to Fight Americans

Officials fear that the growing uprising against the occupation is forging a new level of cooperation between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

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April 08, 2004

If you want to know what it would take to move the Bushstas into action, check the end of the post. They want to have their hand held as they walk up to the threat.

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RICE: Once again, on the August 6th memorandum to the president, this was not threat-reporting about what was about to happen. This was an analytic piece that stood back and answered questions from the president.

But as to the principals meetings...

ROEMER: It has six or seven things in it, Dr. Rice, including the Ressam case when he attacked the United States in the millennium.

RICE: Yes, these are his...

ROEMER: Has the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions.

RICE: No, it does not have the FBI saying that they think that there are conditions. It has the FBI saying that they observed some suspicious activity. That was checked out with the FBI.

ROEMER: That is equal to what might be...

RICE: No.

ROEMER: ... conditions for an attack.

RICE: Mr. Roemer, Mr. Roemer, threat reporting...

ROEMER: Would you say, Dr. Rice, that we should make that PDB a public document...

RICE: Mr. Roemer...

ROEMER: ... so we can have this conversation?

RICE: Mr. Roemer, threat reporting is: We believe that something is going to happen here and at this time, under these circumstances. This was not threat reporting.

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I was just a The American Leftist where I picked up this quote from Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi in Jordan:

I really want to understand from Rumsfeld where are his “majority”?? the “majority” of Iraqis that are against the current uprising, the majority that he wants to help them in reaching to their freedom… where are they?
If the millions in the “Sunni Triangle” are the minority, and the other millions of AsSadr are the minority… where are the majority? In Washington?

And if the minority can do all of this! And kick the coalition forces from cities like Kut… what can the majority do? Occupy the United States?

I wanted to read it in context; thought it might be amusing.

It ain't, not really.

The Three Smart Political Steps of the Day:

Uno) AsSadr announced that this uprising is the choice of the Iraqi people, he didn’t ask anyone to fight.
I know he is lying, he knows that he is lying…
But that was a smart political thing to do though.
He preferred to leave the opportunity of representing himself as a public leader, but gave more opportunities for other political and religious parties to join the uprising.

Dos) AsSadr started a compassion campaign for the people in Falluja, which had a good response from the majority of Iraqis. This ended the Sunni-Shia tension.

Tres) AsSadr launched his first regional affairs message, he sent an open message to the Kuwaiti people to start putting more pressure on their government, “It is the responsibility of the Kuwaiti people to help us free both our counties from the big devil”.

The Sunni-Shia reconciliation gave the uprising people another boost, and the speeches of Sistani and Baghdadi showed sympathy with AsSadr.

Now, the two unhappy campers are the governing council and the Kurds. The soft GC is the easiest target to attack and blame for the situation. The Kurds are not very comfortable with the anti-occupation alliance which could threaten their plans.

I really want to understand from Rumsfeld where are his “majority”?? the “majority” of Iraqis that are against the current uprising, the majority that he wants to help them in reaching to their freedom… where are they?

If the millions in the “Sunni Triangle” are the minority, and the other millions of AsSadr are the minority… where are the majority? In Washington?

And if the minority can do all of this! And kick the coalition forces from cities like Kut… what can the majority do? Occupy the United States?

The Ukrainian Army withdrew today from Al-Kut city, because of the huge pressure of the street fighting…

I think similar events will happen in Amara soon with the British Army… although the British Army handed over authorities to Iraqis 10 months ago… but still they have some patrols going across the city.

And maybe the uprising people will try to put more pressure on the Italians at Nasryya… but I doubt if they can make the Carabinieri leave the city…

But the thing I expect most is to see more attacks in the extremely-quiet Simawa and Diwanyya… where the Spanish and Japanese soldiers are located.

This new war is not going to stop in days... but the question is when and how...

Killing hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of foreign soldiers (Americans, Brits, Italians, Polish, Ukrainians, El Salvadorians and others) is not the answer.

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Not like you didn't know.

Ancient Sumerian Traditions

So far, Condoleezza Rice's testimony is going like this:

"Dr. Rice, what is your full name?"

"Well, first, let me tell you about ancient Sumerian naming traditions, and point out that I did not choose my own name - it was chosen for me. If I could have chosen my name, I might have made different decisions, I might not. Now, the first cities of Mesopotamia..."

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Maybe Its Time to Go...
Standard Times (Freetown)
April 8, 2004
By Augustuine Beecher

May be this is not my business, and in fact there was a time when I taught it was indeed not my business, but the more I hear and see pictures of the quagmire into which the Americans and their allies in the Coalition have found themselves in Iraq, I can not help but get involved.

…May be its time for George Bush Junior to bite the dust and say its all over, for how many more body bags does he have to receive at the White House to make him believe that he is not going to achieve anything out of that venture?

Yes there may be talk of a democracy, but it remains to be seen what kind of democracy it will be.

Waiting until the end of June is like waiting for the number of casualties in Iraq to reach a certain figure before he call it quits, which they are nevertheless determined to do.

What will become of Iraq after their departure is everyones guess, and we can only pray that all goes well for the poor and innocent people.

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The documents reveal

• CIA's report to top officials on day two of the crisis identified the "Presidential Guard, gendarmerie, and military" as killers of "several government officials--including the Prime Minister";
• State Department intelligence informed policymakers the morning after the shoot-down of the plane that "rogue Hutu elements of the military--possibly the elite presidential guard" were probable culprits;
• The U.S. defense attaché in Rwanda, who reported to State Department, defense intelligence and U.S. European Command officials, on the second day forwarded "reports that the Presidential Guard is "out of control" on the streets of Kigali while all other military units remain in their barracks."

Around 8 PM local time on the evening of April 6th, 1994 the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down over Kigali, Rwanda as the presidents returned from a summit of regional leaders in Tanzania. Both men died, as did their senior aides and the French aircrew. Within hours, the Presidential Guard was out on the streets setting up roadblocks in Kigali and going house-to-house to find and attack prominent Rwandan opposition leaders and Tutsi civilians.

As Lt. Gen. Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, recalls "In just a few hours, the Presidential Guard had conducted an obviously well-organized and well-executed plan--by noon on April 7 the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost."

The genocide in Rwanda had begun.

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But of course the Center for American Progress beat me to it. Only today the Progress Report is a bit late to the web. That's why you need to get it by email, like me.

Anyway, check today's coverage for links to the fact-checking they applied, for instance:

CLAIM: "While we were developing this new strategy to deal with al-Qaida, we also made decisions on a number of specific anti-al-Qaida initiatives that had been proposed by Dick Clarke."

FACT: Rice's statement finally confirms what she previously – and inaccurately – denied. She falsely claimed on 3/22/04 that "No al-Qaida plan was turned over to the new administration." [Washington Post, 3/22/04]

CLAIM: "When threat reporting increased during the Spring and Summer of 2001, we moved the U.S. Government at all levels to a high state of alert and activity."

FACT: Documents indicate that before Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush Administration "did not give terrorism top billing in their strategic plans for the Justice Department, which includes the FBI." Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until Oct. 1, 2001, said during the summer, terrorism had moved "farther to the back burner" and recounted how the Bush Administration's top two Pentagon appointees, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, "shut down" a plan to weaken the Taliban. Similarly, Gen. Don Kerrick, who served in the Bush White House, sent a memo to the new Administration saying "We are going to be struck again" by al Qaeda, but he never heard back. He said terrorism was not "above the waterline. They were gambling nothing would happen." [Sources: Washington Post, 3/22/04; LA Times, 3/30/04]

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Self-proclaimed 'black Confederate' walking 'path to peace, racial reconciliation'

By RICHARD WALKER, T&D Staff Writer and DONNA L. HOLMAN, T&D Correspondent

Carrying his Confederate flag, one North Carolinian who passed through Orangeburg Tuesday says he has a vision that some day all Americans will be enlightened to the truth.

Having made marches across many sections of the country previously during his "March to the Sea" that has a dual purpose, H.K. Edgerton said he is proud to be a black Confederate American.

"On this particular trip, I am on my way to the burial (Hunley funeral) in Charleston," Edgerton said. "We are raising funds for heritage defense for the Southern Legal Resource Center, a non-profit civil rights law firm that fights heritage violations against the Christian Cross of St. Andrew."

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Donna, the obnoxious fuck that's selling the things, has three stores in North Carolina selling them. eBay, to their credit, pulled the shirt from their site. Donna says "Once again our First Amendment Right to free speech has been trodden upon," which means it has no clue what those first amendment rights are or mean.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER POSTING: I delinked the picture from the site. No sense inciting the lurking racist bastards. But here's some history on its creation:

The conflict has its roots in an old dispute.

In February 2003, Yow criticized the NAACP and its influence on county politics, saying at one point he wouldn't vote to hire a county manager who was a member of the group "unless he was very overly qualified."

Members of the NAACP and others took the statement as racist because the civil rights group lobbies on behalf of African Americans. Six months of controversy ended when the commissioners elevated Willie Best, who is black, from deputy manager to manager.

During what was then an ongoing fracas, Yow and a friend came up with the idea for the shirt, which originally circulated among a small circle of associates. Word-of-mouth built demand and a company.

In October, Donna Montgomery of Sweetwater Court founded Free Speak Inc., copyrighted the design and stepped up sales of the $15 T-shirts. Although Yow is not affiliated with Free Speak, he has not backed away from the shirts' message and has helped sell them.

African American leaders and others have said this association is enough to mark Yow a racist and have called on the commissioner to stop the shirt's production, something he has said repeatedly he cannot do.

And Yow's response is what you'd expect:

"I don't owe them the courtesy to sit there while they bash me," Yow said, explaining why he left the room. "I don't owe them anything. They are not my political destiny. The silent majority are."

The "silent majority" responds as well:

Although they were not as numerous as those lashing out at Yow, some defended him or were critical of the NAACP.

"The NAACP to me stands for racism," said Alan Stockard of Greensboro. Stockard added he thought the use of the Confederate battle flag was inappropriate. "That's why I'm not wearing the Yow shirt," said Stockard, who was wearing a shirt with a Confederate battle flag logo.

Keep Alan Stockard in mind the next time someone says the Confederate battle flag is about "persuhvin ouah hur-tige."

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You want progress? Time ta git hard. Make them scared of your vote.

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What Will Drive Black Voters to Polls?
One expert says voters have to ask themselves whether they are better off now than they were four years ago
By Joyce Jones

…For Republicans and Democrats, the votes of African American voters, who have been Democratic Party faithful for years, will count more than ever. “I think turnout is going to be extraordinary,” says Hilary Shelton, who heads the NAACP’s Washington office. “Blacks turned out in record numbers in 2000, and I think they see this election as much more crucial.”

If primary results are any indication, Shelton is right. While lamenting that Kerry is not more “Clintonesque,” African Americans gave him strong support. He is not warm and fuzzy, but does claim to feel black America’s pain, and that pain will drive them to the polls this fall.

“There’s a perception that Bush and the Republican Party back policy and policy changes that are not positive for African Americans,” says Robert Brown, a political scientist and assistant dean at Emory College at Emory University. “I can’t think of an issue that would be so compelling it would cause large numbers of blacks to support Bush.”

It is said that all politics are local, but blacks from coast-to-coast are confronting the same crises, with jobs topping the list. In a poll conducted by brilliant corners Research & Strategies, 47% of college-educated African American men cited jobs as the most important election issue. “It’s an amazing number that denotes a great deal of angst around jobs and job security from a group of voters who you would think should be more secure economically,” says the firm’s president, Cornell Belcher. “If you look at exit polling from the last two cycles, African American men are the ones dropping out of the electorate at a fairly fast rate, so the ability to speak to them honestly will be important,” particularly in such states as Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. “[Black votes] could very well turn the tide in those states alone,” adds Belcher.

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Registered to vote? No?

Take you lazy butt to BlackEnterprise.com and register online.

Register to vote online with blackenterprise Voter Registration. The simple step-by-step process to become a registered voter or change your voter registration will only take a few minutes. Legal restrictions may apply.

You must be a U.S. Citizen either through birth or naturalization to register to vote.

Come on. You're online now, or you couldn't read this. And you don't even have to get out of your chair

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Condi got it. Not as bad as The Coulter Thing or The Ingraham Clone, but she got it.

We now know, btw, that "threat reporting" must have a specificity of time, place and players that means there has never been a threat report issued in the hsutory of the USofA.

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Kerry: The president said he was "tired of swatting flies." Can you tell me one fly he swatted in reference to Al Qaida?…Why didn't we respond to the Cole? Why didn't we swat that fly?

But I will pause and say Dr. Rice is handling herself as well as I expected. MAD long answers to Kerry (who just asked her not to filibuster him because he only has 10 minutes and she's DEFINITELY staying on message. The more she drags out her answers, the fewer questions can be asked.

Sometime in the last few days I heard a commentator suggest that had Dr. Rice testified the same day as Mr. Clarke did it would have been entirely difference, Said commentator was right. She's good, and the truth is less incompetence in responding to criticism and there'd have been much less criticism.

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Somehow, Dr. Rice's answers to Democratic commission members are so long they only got to ask three questions, while Republican commission members get six or seven.

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Baby got back?

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The crowd applauded when Richard Ben-Veniste tried to shortcut Condi's overextended answer to a yes-no question. She ain't having it, but neither is he. He's leaning on the Aug 6 PDB, and I'm feeling exactly why they didn't want that thing declassified. The title alone (which they couldn't even speak aloud until today) is damning.

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She says Rummy and Wolfowitz were the ones that raised the issue of invading Iraq while planning the Afghanistan war.

9: 40 - Lee Hamilton is asking about foot-dragging on developing terrorism policy, quoting all the testimony about the apparent low priority terrorism by Al Qaida was given. Part of her answer, as regards that Bob Woodward quote (didn't see them as a high priority) was an attempt to put that quote into context. She said the full quote was about pre-9/11 attempts to kill bin Laden, something like "I didn't see it as a priority, my blood wasn't as boiling."

Think Howard Dean. You want a president that needs boiling blood?

9:46 - She says they only showed 33 principles meetings, not the 100 that everyone else says took place.

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At 9:25 I haven't heard her mention Iraq yet. It's all Pakistan, Afghanistan, Taliban and Al Qaida. I can't wait for the transcript for this one.

So far the big dispute is going to be who initiated what. Clarke says he told Condi this or that needs be done, and Condi says she told Clarke to do this or that.

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Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., is House majority whip, the third-ranking House Republican.

Tax cuts are not 'spending'
50 minutes ago
By Roy Blunt

With deficits rising as a result of the war on terror and a faltering economy, the House has passed a budget for 2005 that will cut the deficit in half in four years and continue pro-growth tax-relief policies to make our economic recovery last.

One important component of the debate on spending is budget reform, and House Republicans are pushing for greater efforts to rein in spending by rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in federal programs. In fact, this budget mandates that five House committees must find $13.2 billion in wasteful federal spending in their areas of oversight over five years.

We also want to see all new federal spending paid for. In other words, if you want to propose a new program, you also need to propose a way to pay for it. House Republicans believe in this pay-as-you-go approach, known in Congress as PAYGO, as a realistic way to slash the deficit.

What we don't want to see, however, is PAYGO for tax relief. House Republicans don't believe that tax relief is "spending." To spend money, it must first be yours. To us, tax relief is simply returning a family's hard-earned money.

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So...when you take out a mortgage you haven't actually spent the money on the house.

Boy, an adjustment like that would do wonders for the GNP figures.

But you know what? I'll take it...IF you admit that voting against tax cuts isn't voting for a tax increase. Youcan't have it both ways.

And seriously. Lay off the chronic.

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Been a while since I used that title. TOTALLY appropriate, though.

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Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Bush’s Unemployment Line
Newest labor statistics show that at least snow jobs are on the rise
April 6th, 2004 11:57 AM

In his weekend radio broadcast, Bush spoke of "powerful confirmation" that his prized economic recovery is turning out to be a godsend across-the-board, with the Labor Department reporting 308,000 new jobs in March, the highest monthly job growth number since spring 2000. Added Bush: "And since August, we've added over three-quarters of a million new jobs in America. The unemployment rate has fallen from 6.3 percent last June to 5.7 percent last month."

But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a respected liberal think tank in Washington, was quick to point out, "Americans are working less, not more, due to shorter average work weeks. The rise in the number of payroll jobs was more than canceled out by a decline in the number of hours worked in the average payroll job." Citing the Labor Department as its source, the think tank noted, "The total number of hours worked by all Americans in payroll jobs declined in March."

In addition, the think tank said, "The gain of 308,000 new jobs was canceled out by equally large losses in self-employment . . . and the percentage of Americans at work is the lowest for any March in 10 years." It also pointed out that the ranks of the long-term unemployed—those who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks and are still looking for a job—rose by 117,000 in March.

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Rwanda's Latest Ethnic Cleansing~
True reconciliation is impossible until the Hutus' suffering is also recognized.
By Michael J. Kavanagh
Posted Wednesday, April 7, 2004, at 3:18 PM PT

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide. While the world looked on unashamed, the Hutu Power movement went on a 100-day killing spree to exterminate the minority Tutsi population and any political opposition by moderate Hutus. It took a Tutsi-led rebel force called the Rwandan Patriotic Front to put an end to the killing and start the long, slow process of rebuilding this small African nation.

Over the past 10 years, the RPF—now the democratically elected government—has made incredible progress in Rwanda. It has established a government dedicated to "unity and reconciliation" whose rhetoric is high-minded and enlightened. Women make up a greater percentage of the Rwandan parliament then anywhere else in the world (they are required by law to fill 30 percent of all government positions). And security in Rwanda is impressive; I feel safer walking around the streets of Kigali at night than I do in my Brooklyn neighborhood.

…If such social engineering could ever work, Rwanda—a country where insensate respect for authority has often been cited as a main reason why so many people could suddenly turn around and kill neighbors, friends, even family members—is the place. But in fact, ethnicity is as present as ever in Rwanda. If Rwandans don't use the words "Tutsi" and "Hutu," it's because they've found other ways of saying them.

Take, for example, rescapé—roughly, "survivor"—the widely used term for those who escaped the genocide. Rescapé is reserved solely for Tutsis. In a recent interview in Kigali, my translator—without prompting—told a Hutu woman who had suggested that she herself was a rescapé that such a thing was impossible because she wasn't Tutsi.

She looked at him, and then at me, with a mixture of confusion and pain. She'd done time in the refugee camps, lost family members, fought off rape attempts, and was now dirt-poor after 10 years of supporting her husband in jail. In her mind, she was a survivor.

"But maman, survivors are only Tutsis," my translator explained once more—again without prompting.

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Reflecting on Rwandan lessons
By Helena Cobban

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. - Ten years ago this week in Rwanda, thousands of hate-filled Hutu extremists launched a well organized, 100-day campaign of killing that left more than 800,000 of their countrymen dead. Most of those killed, raped, and mutilated were Tutsis - the rest were pro-coexistence Hutus.

The features of that genocide should cause everyone, in Rwanda and internationally, to reflect on the terrifying capacity of humans to perpetrate acts of great cruelty, or to turn a callous, deliberately blind eye when such acts are committed against others.

Just to put the horror in stark statistical context, Rwanda's daily murder rate was several times greater than at the height of the Holocaust in Europe. But in Rwanda, unlike the Holocaust, the killing was low-tech and personal. The Hutu killers "worked" close up with machetes and nail-studded clubs, and only sometimes at an impersonal distance with guns or grenades.

Hundreds of thousands of Hutu Rwandans participated in what seemed to many of them to be a somehow "necessary" activity. Alcohol and peer pressure both played a part in egging them on. Leading institutions in society, including many government and local church leaders, either participated directly or condoned the killings. In those circumstances, it is noteworthy that many Hutus stood aside from the pressure to participate: More than 150,000 of them lost their lives for that act of courage.

Today, Rwanda has a Tutsi-dominated government that is dedicated to rebuilding the links between the country's main communities: the Hutu majority (84 percent), the Tutsis (15 percent), and Twa Pygmies (1 percent).

This project faces many obstacles, including the legacies left by the genocide, the minority nature of the government, Rwanda's chronic poverty, and its location in a very unstable part of Africa.

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He says nothing I haven't heard before but he says that nothing SO smoothly...

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Learning to Expect the Unexpected
By NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

The 9/11 commission has drawn more attention for the testimony it has gathered than for the purpose it has set for itself. Today the commission will hear from Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, and her account of the administration's policies before Sept. 11 is likely to differ from that of Richard Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, in most particulars except one: it will be disputed.

There is more than politics at work here, although politics explains a lot. The commission itself, with its mandate, may have compromised its report before it is even delivered. That mandate is "to provide a `full and complete accounting' of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and recommendations as to how to prevent such attacks in the future."

It sounds uncontroversial, reasonable, even admirable, yet it contains at least three flaws that are common to most such inquiries into past events. To recognize those flaws, it is necessary to understand the concept of the "black swan."

A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

…Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily.

All of which brings us to the 9/11 commission. America will not have another chance to hold a first inquiry into 9/11. With its flawed mandate, however, the commission is in jeopardy of squandering this opportunity.

The first flaw is the error of excessive and naïve specificity. By focusing on the details of the past event, we may be diverting attention from the question of how to prevent future tragedies, which are still abstract in our mind. To defend ourselves against black swans, general knowledge is a crucial first step.

The mandate is also a prime example of the phenomenon known as hindsight distortion. To paraphrase Kirkegaard, history runs forward but is seen backward. An investigation should avoid the mistake of overestimating cases of possible negligence, a chronic flaw of hindsight analyses. Unfortunately, the hearings show that the commission appears to be looking for precise and narrowly defined accountability.

Yet infinite vigilance is not possible. Negligence in any specific case needs to be compared with the normal rate of negligence for all possible events at the time of the tragedy — including those events that did not take place but could have. Before 9/11, the risk of terrorism was not as obvious as it seems today to a reasonable person in government (which is part of the reason 9/11 occurred). Therefore the government might have used its resources to protect against other risks — with invisible but perhaps effective results.

The third flaw is related. Our system of rewards is not adapted to black swans. We can set up rewards for activity that reduces the risk of certain measurable events, like cancer rates. But it is more difficult to reward the prevention (or even reduction) of a chain of bad events (war, for instance). Job-performance assessments in these matters are not just tricky, they may be biased in favor of measurable events. Sometimes, as any good manager knows, avoiding a certain outcome is an achievement.

The greatest flaw in the commission's mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk. The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them. And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

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18 Arrested in Lucrative Prostitution Ring Out of Staten Island
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Eighteen men and women were arrested yesterday on charges that they helped run a sophisticated prostitution ring that masked its operation behind a series of corporate fronts and escort services with names like Gentlemen's Delight, Day Dreams and Personal Touch, officials said.

Records that were seized in a search at the home of one of the ring leaders indicated that the operation brought in $1.6 million in nine months, a law enforcement official said.

Prosecutors from the State Organized Crime Task Force, working with the New York Police Department and the F.B.I., charged 16 people with enterprise corruption and two others with falsifying business records and promoting prostitution and money laundering.

About eight midlevel managers ran the ring, which operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using about 15 to 20 drivers to dispatch 30 to 40 prostitutes each day, officials said. In most instances, customers paid $250 for sex, sometimes using credit cards. The transactions, officials said, were processed through merchant accounts held by escort services or limousine companies, and in one instance a company that hired musical bands for weddings.

"This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who oversees the task force, said in a statement. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable."

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Panel May Avoid Partisanship in Public Questioning of Rice
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, April 7 — The leaders of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks urged the panel's members on Wednesday to try to avoid partisanship in their public questioning of Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, whose long-awaited sworn testimony could alter the public's view of her, the Bush administration and the commission itself, panel officials said.

They said that at a final strategy session before the hearing on Thursday, the panel's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, asked the other eight members of the panel to try to avoid questions that suggested partisanship and that could undermine the public perceptions of the commission's work.

Both men have said they are concerned about the appearance of a partisan split created at last month's testimony by Richard A. Clarke, President Bush's former counterterrorism director, who was harshly questioned by Republicans on the panel after he said that the Bush administration — and Ms. Rice, in particular — had largely ignored terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001.

"In a very difficult atmosphere, in a town that is the most polarized I've ever seen, the commission is trying to do a job for the American people that is, to the best of our ability, nonpolitical," Mr. Kean said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In a statement after its meeting on Wednesday, the panel also disclosed that it had identified 69 documents from the Clinton White House that needed to be turned over the commission by the Bush administration, which acknowledged last week that it had not turned over 10,800 pages of Clinton administration files gathered by the National Archives.

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7 file class-action suit challenging `no-fly' list
4/7/2004

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Seven American citizens filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday to challenge the US government's "no-fly" list, which is meant to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes. All seven say that they have been wrongly placed on the US Transportation Security Administration's "no-fly" list because their names are similar or identical to names on the list. The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands that the government remove their names so that they can travel on planes without being interrogated and searched. The seven plaintiffs, who range from a college student to a woman in the military to a retired minister, joined in the lawsuit filed against the US Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. (Reuters)

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Another snippet from the same page:

Policy proposal widens drug testing methods

The hair, saliva, and sweat of federal workers could be tested for drug use under a government policy proposed yesterday that could set screening standards for millions of private employers. The proposal will expand the methods to detect drug use among 1.6 million federal workers beyond urine samples. It is being implemented with an eye toward the private sector, however, because it would signal the government's approval for such testing, which many companies are awaiting before adopting their own screening programs. (AP)

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Although I have to tell you, people who buy gold as a hedge don't REALLY think things are going to collapse. The value of an inert lump of shiny metal is purely a social phenomenon and pretty low in my personal estimate.

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Dollar Under Pressure on Iraq Violence
By Vidya Ranganathan, 4/7/2004

TOKYO (Reuters) - The dollar came under pressure on Thursday as escalating violence in Iraq and the fear of further militant attacks drove investors into safe-haven currencies and pushed up the price of gold.

The euro was at $1.2188 up nearly two cents from Tuesday's lows amid reports that three days of fighting in Iraq had claimed the lives of 35 American and allied soldiers and at least 200 Iraqis. It was around $1.2175 in late U.S trade.

Markets feared repercussions after the U.S. military bombed a mosque compound in the Iraqi town of Falluja and following a recent audio tape from an al Qaeda supporter exhorting followers to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

"I can only see rising violence in the Middle East. That is one of my reasons for believing that it is not a question of if but when something will happen in the U.S. or U.K.," said Lee Boon Keng, economist with DBS Bank in Singapore.

"Certainly Iraq has gone out of control."

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This ought to sound REAL familiar to those who saw the civil rights struggle. And don't ass up on me and claim I'm equating the Iraq insurgency to the civil rights movement because it's the government rhetoric I'm comparing not the motivation of the government's opponents.

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White House Blames Minority Extremists in Iraq
By Steve Holland, 4/7/2004

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday blamed "minority extremist elements" in Iraq for a deadly upsurge in fighting that pits U.S. forces against Sunnis and Shi'ites and said a militant Shi'ite cleric could help end the violence by surrendering.

President Bush got two updates on the fighting in videoconference calls with top advisers who make up the National Security Council. These included the U.S. civilian leader in Iraq, Paul Bremer, and Gen. John Abizaid, chief of U.S.-led military forces there. Bremer had canceled a trip to Washington to brief U.S. lawmakers.

U.S. officials said Bush wanted to make sure military commanders have the resources they need and discussed troop levels with the commanders. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced in Washington afterward that the imminent departure of some U.S. troops from Iraq may be delayed beyond their promised one-year tours.

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Plea bargain for mom in C-section case
By Alexandria Sage, Associated Press Writer, 4/8/2004

SALT LAKE CITY -- A woman charged with murder for allegedly delaying a Caesarean section that could have saved one of her twins pleaded guilty Wednesday to child endangerment in a deal with prosecutors. Under the plea bargain, prosecutors are recommending no prison time for Melissa Ann Rowland, 28. They said they dropped the murder charge based on her "mental health history."

"We don't think two felony convictions is a slap on the hand," District Attorney David Yocom said. "We felt this was a reasonable and just result." Sentencing was set for April 29.

Yocom would not disclose details about Rowland's mental health.

Rowland has said she never intended to kill her baby and was not informed she needed immediate surgery to save the babies' lives. She disputed prosecutors' allegations she was worried about a scar from the surgery, saying she delivered two previous children through C-sections.

In court Wednesday, she admitted using cocaine in the weeks before she finally underwent the C-section that produced a stillborn boy. The second child, a girl who survived and has been adopted, had cocaine and alcohol in her system.

Legal experts said they do not know of any other instance in the United States in which a woman was charged with murder for refusing or delaying a C-section.

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When they stop lying to Africans about AIDS and condoms, I might consider listening.

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O'Malley confronts 'culture of death'

Describing the United States as a "hostile, alien environment" for Catholics, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley yesterday exhorted Boston priests to do a better job preaching to a society he described as characterized by "a culture of death . . . consumerism, hedonism, [and] individualism."

O'Malley, at one of the signal moments of his first Holy Week in Boston, told hundreds of priests at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross that they must speak out clearly about "public issues" and "social causes" because "no one will follow an uncertain trumpet blast." He did not refer directly to the church's current public policy battle -- its effort to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage -- but said the church's teachings about life and family are "essential for civilization in the long run." He quoted the apostle Paul as saying "the word of God cannot be changed."

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It only took since, what, 1964.

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US to review state records on minority contractors

The Federal Highway Administration will begin poring over records and procedures at the state's minority business certification office this month amid allegations that politically connected companies have been improperly certified and later obtained lucrative subcontracts on the Big Dig and other projects, state and federal officials said yesterday.

The first federal review of the State Office of Women and Minority Business Assistance will occur as federal authorities step up criminal probes in Boston and nationally to root out fraud in the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program, which ensures minority participation in federally funded construction work.

Last week, more than two dozen agents from three US agencies searched and removed records from two North Shore demolition companies. One was Testa Corp., one of the nation's largest demolition companies; the other was PT Corp., owned by Pamela J. O'Brien, sister of Testa Corp.'s chief executive, Steven Testa.

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Has anyone ever compared the ratio of income to disposable income for humans, to the ratio of pre-expense to post-expense income for corporations?

How about the aggregate salaries paid to all employees to the aggregate pre-expense income generated by all corporations?

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From the roundtable run by Jim Lehrer:

So, Colonel Lang, is there a way for U.S. forces to quickly end this violence?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: No, I don't think there is. In fact, it's understandable that the Defense Department doesn't want to build this up to look bigger than it really is. But in fact what you have around Fallujah and Ramadi is you have quite substantial numbers of Sunni Arab fighters using reasonably sophisticated weapons to try to get us to back away from them out of that town so they can declare it to be a liberated area. This would have a tremendous political effect in Iraq and across the Arab world.

And now have you the Shiia starting to say well, we don't want to be excluded from this process of fighting the occupier because it might damage our political prospects. So you have that going on. This is a serious matter. Your introduction said ten cities. My information says more like 14 cities were engaged today. This is a large scale thing and it will go on for a while.

That seems like a non-hysterical analysis. We can crank up the hysteria a bit without going over the top, though.

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Mearsheimer, in general terms, is this going to work?

JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, the United States is basically in a situation where it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. If we get tough on the Iraqis as we're doing now, tough on the insurgents, it's likely to backfire on us. What it's going to do, is it's going to enrage more of the population and make them more sympathetic to the Iraqis. And even if we shut this down in the short-term, we still have the long-term problem that we have no political institution inside Iraq that we can turn power over to on July 1. We also suffer greatly from the fact that the Iraqi security forces that we have been building up over the past year are effectively melting away and many of those forces are joining insurgents.

It's very hard to see how getting tough with the Iraqis is going to solve the problem. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to me that it is going to work if we back off either because then we'll show weakness and the Iraqi people will tend to bandwagon with the insurgents. The insurgents will grow stronger. So we're in a hopeless situation. Either way we turn we lose.

…

JIM LEHRER: Col. Gardiner, do you see this as hopeless a situation as Mr. Mearsheimer does?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: I don't think I'd go that far, Jim. I think we've got three problems: We have got an immediate problem, a mid-term problem and a long-term problem. The immediate problem we have to remember is we started this. In both cases the aggressive policies towards Sadr that came from us, shutting down his press.

JIM LEHRER: The reason we shut down his press is because it was calling for violence and anti-American...

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: Sure.

JIM LEHRER: I just want to get that on the record.

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: But we went there. And the other thing is we went into Fallujah for the purposes of revenge against the attack on those four civilians. Again, that was our choice to go in there and start this.

Now in the immediate thing, I think in both cases, there's a possibility for us to soften. We need to do that. We need to have a week without 20 casualties. We need to have a week where the press isn't covering it both in the United States and in the Middle East. This needs to be calmed down a little bit and we can do that. Mid-term, we have to deal with the control of the situation. A serious thing happened since Sunday, and that is we lost more than half of the coalition.

JIM LEHRER: Meaning?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: The coalition consisted primarily of the Iraqi security service. The lesson of the last four days is you can't count on them. We've lost a number, probably in the neighborhood of five coalition partners of other countries. So the situation, with respect to that, has changed significantly since Sunday.

JIM LEHRER: But do you see... in Mr. Mearsheimer's equation there that you are damned if you do, you're damned if don't, if you go tough you lose, if you go soft you lose -- where do you come down on that?

COL. SAMUEL GARDINER: I come down on we have to go through a transition period of softening. Back off now, put the cordon around Fallujah, which is what we had thought we were going to do before. And I think that may have been what the Marines had planned up until this attack on the four contractors when then we decided for what reasons, it would be interesting to find out, that we had to go in there and do revenge. We had to find these people.

The decision to counter recent attacks
JIM LEHRER: But that resulted, did it not, Colonel Lang, from a decision of the part of the U.S. leadership that we could not sit back and let those four Americans be killed and their bodies be mutilated in such a way. We had to take action, correct?

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: Yeah. I think that's right. I think the decision essentially was that we were losing control of the city of Fallujah -- most places in the Sunni Triangle, and that you can't afford to do that. You can't afford to show that kind of weakness.

In the Arab world if you show weakness, you're just prey, in fact. People will decide to move against you. If... there may be people who think that the Iraqis like our occupation of their country but the Iraqis, the vast majority of them, know that's not true.

JIM LEHRER: Whether that's Sunnis or Shiia.

COL. W. PATRICK LANG: That's right. Any of them. The military-- the only people that like having us there probably are the Kurds because they expect we're going to protect them from the rest of them. But if we start to show that we are not going to resolutely stand up to them with the forces available, they're going to start to move on us everywhere.

---

April 07, 2004

Today Gwen Ifill interviewed Tony Perry of the L.A. Times, who is embedded with the troops in Fallujah. It is available via a RealAudio stream. It is not as happy sounding as the last set of embedded reports. For instance 1:55 into the stream they discuss that mosque that was bombed, killing some 40 people…but it turns out they cratered the ground in front of the mosque and when the gunfire stopped there were no dead or wounded Iraqis around. Perry says either they took all their dead and wounded with them or no one was killed at all.

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Old heads only.

The other day I got a link to www.rime.org, the inheritor of the BBS network I used to hang on. Several free associations later I decided to google "bbs tagline." See, we used to use these offline readers like Qwkmail and EZ-Reader, that has like 60 characters available for a sig and as a result produced some of the tightest humor I've seen to this day. My favorite remains:

Any lawyers in the house? BLAM! Any more?

closely followed by

Foolproofing assumes a finite number of fools.

I found a site that has all of them. Yes, all the taglines you saw back in the day.

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Growing GOP Dissent on Iraq
NEW YORK, April 7, 2004
By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

President Bush is facing increasing dissent among leading conservative politicians and pundits in the face of mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq.

The war has become the long slog that some Republicans feared. Since Sunday, 32 Americans have been killed in fighting across Iraq. American body bags are on the front page of major U.S. newspapers.

The Washington Post and The New York Times brandished images of charred U.S. civilian remains last week. The networks are leading their nightly news broadcasts with stories of dead Americans.

"If we have two or three more weeks of this you are going to start to see Republican members of Congress who have never been critical of President Bush and the Iraq policy starting to get that way," said Charles Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Republican Party ranks are beginning to break and the White House is worried. Longtime GOP critics on Iraq are growing progressively more vocal in their condemnation.

---

U.S. Troops May Face Extended Iraq Tours -Pentagon
Wed Apr 7, 2004 06:03 PM ET
By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some U.S. troops due to return home soon from battle-torn Iraq may have to stay beyond their promised one-year tours of duty, Pentagon leaders said on Wednesday. But they denied the military situation was out of control.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers said fierce new fighting in Iraq that has left 35 U.S. and allied troops dead in three days was expected ahead of the June 30 turnover of power to an interim Iraqi government.

"The answer is no," Rumsfeld said when pressed at a news conference on whether a sudden two-front war that U.S.-led forces are fighting with Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim militants meant that the military situation was out of control.

"Relatively small numbers of people" are causing the violence in Iraq, he said.

"You have a mixture of a small number of terrorists, a small number of militias, coupled with some demonstrations and some lawlessness. And it's a serious problem. And the problem's being worked."

But Rumsfeld and Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that some of the 135,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq may be kept there beyond their planned one-year tours of duty scheduled to end soon.

The Pentagon is near the end of a massive rotation of weary troops home from Iraq and fresh ones into the country under a plan that originally was designed to leave about 115,000 in Iraq beginning this summer.

"Because we're in the midst of a major troop rotation, we have a planned increase in the number of U.S. troops in the Centcom (Central Command) area of responsibility and, indeed, in Iraq," Rumsfeld said.

"We're taking advantage of that increase, and we will likely be managing the pace of the redeployments to allow those seasoned troops with experience and relationships with the local populations to see the current situation through," he said.

---

Rummy said there were "only" a couple of thousand insurgents out of a population of 25 million.

Haiti had "only" a couple of hundred insurgents out of a population of 7,100,000.

---

Today's News Hour on PBS is very interesting. The topics are, of course, the latest Iraq insurgency and Dr. Rice's testimony tomorrow.

I'll be pulling the transcripts, which will be available within 24 hours.

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I better return those library books...

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White House criticism disputed (USATODAY.com)

USATODAY.com - Dealing with criticism that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wouldn't testify in public before the 10-member commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan complained last month that when she testified in private, "only five members showed up" to hear what she had to say.

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Quote of note:

But what about the files of organized crime leaders and other nefarious characters? Even mobsters have mothers, fathers, spouses and children who could argue that their right to privacy would be harmed by the release of unfavorable government documents about their loved ones. Will the government now seek their permission before releasing files? And how can the media and the public make the case that documents they have not yet seen show government impropriety?

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Supreme Court's ruling marks blow to public's right to know
Wed Apr 7, 6:40 AM ET
By Tony Mauro

The U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) last week struck a blow for privacy at the expense of the public's right to know. Few people will disagree with how it ruled in the awful case before it, but the public should be very concerned about what the ruling could mean for the future.

The justices unanimously agreed with the Bush administration and with the family of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster that the government's graphic suicide-scene photographs of Foster should not be made public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The family has suffered enough, the court suggested. Five investigations have concluded that Foster died by his own hand in 1993, the court said as it dismissed the claims of conspiracy theorists who sought the release of the photos to prove that the probes were incomplete.

All true enough, and yet the Supreme Court's decision is still troubling because it ultimately could poke a major hole in the FOIA, which was enacted in 1966 to open government files to the public.

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Oakland cops under U.N.'s watchful eye

Tuesday, April 06, 2004 -

THERE'S NOTHING like making the list of the world's worst government violence against activists. The Oakland Police Department earned that distinction for its assault on peaceful anti-war demonstrators at the port last year. The action, in which police fired wooden dowels and shot-filled bean bags at protesters, was noted in the recent report of an investigator for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. "This alleged incident was the subject of a letter of allegation by the Special Rapporteur on the question of torture and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression ..." reads the report. The question of torture, that's pretty scary. For the protesters who were hit, the unprovoked attack was a form of torture. The more seriously injured went to the hospital. One woman needed surgery. Even the less-seriously injured suffered enduring physical pain. Another woman who was hit in the back of the leg and the back of her upper arm limped for a couple of weeks and suffered pain for several months.

You may have noticed I unequivocally called the action an assault on peaceful demonstrators and an unprovoked attack. While the department claimed protesters threw rocks and objects at the officers, a police video of the demonstration did not show protesters throwing anything at officers. Department spokesmen continued to claim a video shot by a television news station showed objects being thrown, but no video was ever produced.

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France Fails to Accept Responsibility over Rwanda
Julio Godoy

PARIS, Apr 7 (IPS) - In the face of overwhelming evidence that France backed the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army responsible for the massacre of some 800,000 people ten years ago, it continues to deny its responsibility in the tragedy.

On the contrary, former minister for foreign affairs Dominique de Villepin claimed three weeks ago that ”French intervention in Rwanda saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

New Rwandan leader Paul Kagamé, a Tutsi, corrected De Villepin. ”Yes, the French saved many lives -- of those who committed the genocide.”

De Villepin was referring to Operation Turquoise, a peacekeeping mission launched by the French government with UN authorisation on June 23, 1994 -- when the genocide was mostly over.

Experts who have studied the events say Kagamé is right. Operation Turquoise protected Hutu authorities who had led the massacres since April 1994, partly to flee Rwanda and to seek refuge in neighbouring Zaire, then controlled by another Francophile dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.

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Conservatives used a VERY effective tactic to weaken the civil rights establishment: falsely naming organizations such that they would be perceived by the unknowing as supporting civil rights. It seems a similar tack is the next wave in the neocon culture wars on Islam.

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From Nation-Building to Religion-Building
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 7 (IPS) - One thing that can be said about U.S. neo-conservatives is they do not lack for ambition.

''We need an Islamic reformation'', Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confided on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year, ''and I think there is real hope for one''.

Echoing those views one year later, another prominent neo-conservative, Daniel Pipes of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF), recently declared that the ''ultimate goal'' of the war on terrorism had to be Islam's modernisation, or, as he put it, ''religion-building''.

Such an effort needs to be waged not only in the Islamic world, geographically speaking, added Pipes, who last year was appointed by President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), but also among Muslims in the West, where, in his view, they are too often represented by ''Islamist (or militant Islamic)'' organisations.

Pipes is currently seeking funding for a new organisation, tentatively named the ''Islamic Progress Institute'' (IPI), which ''can articulate a moderate, modern and pro-American viewpoint'' on behalf of U.S. Muslims and that, according to a grant proposal by Pipes and two New York-based foundations obtained by IPS, can ''go head-to-head with the established Islamist institutions''.

''Through adroit media activity and political efforts'', says the proposal, ''advocates for a supremacist and totalitarian form of Islam in the United States -- such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) -- have effectively established themselves as the spokesmen for all Muslims in the country''.

''This situation is fraught with dangers for moderate Muslims as well as for non-Muslims'', the proposal continues, adding, ''Islam in America must be American Islam or it will not be integrated; there can be no place for an Islam in America that functions as a seditious conspiracy aimed at wiping out American values, undermining American inter-faith civility, and, in effect, dictating the form of Islam that will be followed in America''.

Leaders of the three groups named by Pipes strongly deny his characterisations of their views, and stress that they, like Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups in the United States that promote the interests of their members are neither more nor less radical or chauvinistic in their political or theological views than their non-Muslim counterparts.

''We are non-sectarian'' said Sayyid M. Syeed, ISNA's secretary general, who said his group has had leaders from both the Shi'a and Sunni currents of Islam and whose current vice president is a woman. ''If we were Saudi-oriented, we would never have a Shi'a president or a woman in such a role'', he said, adding that his group is also actively engaged in many ''inter-faith partnerships''.

CAIR's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, said his organisation strives to represent the views of all U.S. Muslims, and pointed to a new survey of the views of mosque leaders and congregants in Detroit, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country, as an example of the fundamental moderation of U.S. Muslims and those of his group.

The survey, carried out by the Michigan-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, found that only about eight percent of the leadership and members of Detroit's 33 mosques described themselves as adherents of a fundamentalist, ''salafi'' approach to Islam of the kind that is identified with the ''Wahhabi'', or ''Islamist'' views of concern to Pipes and other neo-conservatives, who have said that as many as 80 percent of U.S. mosques preach Wahhabism.

The vast majority of both mosque leaders and participants, according to the Detroit survey, were registered to vote and supported active engagement in the political process; wanted to engage in civic and educational activities with people of non-Muslim faiths; and even took part in public school or church events designed to teach others about Islam.

''Detroit mosques are not isolationist ... and very few mosque participants hold Wahhabi views'', said Ihsan Bagby, who conducted the survey and teaches Islamic Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Pipes, who has written four books on Islam and taught Islamic studies at several leading universities, came to national prominence after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. While he has long insisted that there is nothing inherently violent about Islam, ''moderate Muslims'', in his view, have been intimidated by radicals both in the Islamic world and in the United States.

''While Muslims in some Muslim-majority countries (like Turkey) have demonstrated a commitment to moderate Islam'', he writes in his grant application, ''Muslim communities in the United States, Canada and Western Europe are dominated by a leadership identified with Wahhabism and other radical trends, such as the Muslim Brethren and Deobandism ...they seek a privileging of Islam and intimidate their critics''.

Within the United States, ''all Muslims, unfortunately, are suspect'', Pipes wrote in a recent book, which called for the authorities to be especially vigilant towards Muslims with jobs in the military, law enforcement, or diplomacy.

Last year, he cited as evidence of this insight the arrest on suspicion of espionage of Muslim chaplain James Yee at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility that houses hundreds of prisoners from Bush's "war on terrorism". The Yee case later fell apart.

Pipes is also the founder of Campus Watch, a group that monitors university professors of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and exposes them for alleged anti-American or anti-Zionist views.

That effort, which has been denounced by leading Middle East scholars, has become the basis for a far-reaching bill pending in Congress that would provide unprecedented government oversight of regional studies programmes in universities.

Pipes has also criticised Bush for meeting with, and thus he argues legitimising, the leaders of major Islamic organisations, including CAIR and ISNA, which he believes are pursuing radical, if partially hidden, agendas that he attempts tirelessly to expose on his personal website. CAIR has called him ''the nation's leading Islamophobe''.

Like many of his fellow-neo-conservatives, Pipes has also been an outspoken supporter of positions taken by the governing Likud Party in Israel, to the extent even of opposing the U.S.-backed ''road map'' designed to lead to an independent Palestinian state.

To encourage ''moderation'' among Palestinians, he has written, ''the Palestinians need to be defeated even more than Israel needs to defeat them''.

In his grant proposal, Pipes writes that he is working on launching the IPI with ''a group of anti-Islamist Muslims'', whom he does not identify.

Contacted about the proposal, Pipes told IPS, "I can't confirm anything. MEF doesn't talk about its proposals. We don't talk about projects that have not been announced. We don't talk about internal matters to the press."

In a trip to Cleveland in February, Stephen Schwartz, a writer and former Trotskyite activist who claims to have converted to Islam in the mid-1990s, and Hussein Haqqani, a former Pakistani government official now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, unveiled plans for a new ''Institute for Islamic Progress and Peace'' (IIPP) of which Schwartz identified himself as executive director.

Schwartz, who has praised Pipes' work and claims to be personally close to Wolfowitz, has published articles in 'The Weekly Standard' and other neo-conservative publications, where Pipes' writings also appear regularly. Schwartz was quoted by the 'Cleveland Jewish Press' saying that the new group would serve as a ''platform'' for ''people who view Islam as a private faith''.

''This is a unique chance to change the position of the Muslim community in America'', he said. ''If we don't do it, no one else will''. Schwartz and Haqqani also did not return messages left at their offices.

Muslim leaders say they are not worried their membership will desert them for either new group.

''There's a big difference between organisations that emerge organically from a community in response to the demand of their constituencies and one which is manufactured for political reasons by people who dislike what the consensus views of that community are'', said Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which has also been a target of Pipes.

''For Mr. Pipes to create an organisation that purports to represent the community that he makes a living systematically defaming demonstrates an amazing degree of effrontery.''

''It's a free country'', said CAIR's Hooper. ''If Pipes and his friends think they can gain legitimacy in the Islamic community, good luck, but I wouldn't hold my breath''. (END/2004)

---

Arrests key win for NSA hackers
By DAVID AKIN
Globe and Mail Update

POSTED AT 8:03 AM EDT Tuesday, Apr. 6, 2004

…Citing anonymous sources in the British intelligence community, The Sunday Times reported that an e-mail message intercepted by NSA spies precipitated a massive investigation by intelligence officials in several countries that culminated in the arrest of nine men in Britain and one in suburban Orleans, Ont. -- 24-year-old software developer Mohammed Momin Khawaja, who has since been charged with facilitating a terrorist act and being part of a terrorist group.

The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest.

"That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it," Mr. Farber said.

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Wal-Mart and the like actually has more economic power than most of the communities it negotiates with. Unchecked it can starve out unions and workers and worse: they change the environment such that everyone else is inspired to starve out unions as well. And if you think they will deal with individuals (whose efforts would bounce off them as doth the spring rain with falleth gently from above) more generously than with collectives that at least have a chance of affecting them, you must be a corporate executive.

At this point, only governments are powerful enough to protect the interests of humans in the necessarily adversarial relationships that are marketing and employment.

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2 Bills Target 'Big Box' Benefits, Impacts
Democrats hope the legislation will force companies to improve healthcare for workers.
By Robert Salladay
Times Staff Writer

April 7, 2004

SACRAMENTO — As Wal-Mart battles to expand in California, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and other Democrats are pressuring the world's largest retailer through proposed legislation to improve health benefits for its employees — or pay a steep price.

The effort is part of a five-year push by Democrats to target Wal-Mart and large warehouse stores that do not hire unionized workers. The attack is coming on two fronts.

One bill would require "big-box" stores to reimburse government for the cost of providing public healthcare to workers. Another would require the stores to pay for expensive studies on whether they harm local economies by crushing competition and offering inadequate benefits to workers.

To retailers, the legislation is a special favor for unions battling Wal-Mart as the company moves vigorously into California. The retailer has said it wants to open 40 Supercenters, which carry everything from cheese to chairs in stores that are at least 200,000 square feet.

"When the unions say jump, the lawmakers jump," said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Assn., which represents grocery stores and other large retailers such as Target but not non-member Wal-Mart. "I think the unions are introducing [the] bills as a platform to continue their fight with Wal-Mart."

Although most of the recent skirmishes over Wal-Mart have occurred at the local level — most notably Tuesday night's vote against the mega-store's expansion into Inglewood — Democratic officials are continuing a long-standing fight with the firm at the state level.

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Inglewood Voters Reject Walmart
By Sara Lin and Monte Morin
Times Staff Writers

9:55 AM PDT, April 7, 2004

A bid by the world's largest corporation to bypass uncooperative elected officials and take its aggressive expansion plans to voters failed Tuesday, as Inglewood residents overwhelmingly rejected Wal-Mart's proposal to build a colossal retail and grocery center without an environmental review or public hearings.

With all votes counted Tuesday evening, 4,575 Inglewood residents had voted in favor of Wal-Mart's plan, while 7,049 had voted against it.

Wal-Mart hopes to break into California's grocery business by opening 40 such Supercenters statewide. The one in Inglewood would have been Los Angeles County's first.

"It is a shame that a small number of voters have determined that more than 100,000 Inglewood residents will have to leave their community to enjoy the shopping opportunities that others have close to home," Wal-Mart officials said in a statement.

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I can't help but wonder what their announcement would have been if the numbers were reversed and "a small number of voters" had approved the thing.

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A War President's Job
By George F. Will
Wednesday, April 7, 2004; Page A31

… Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents. The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control."

The transfer is to be to an institutional apparatus that is still unformed. This is approaching at a moment when U.S. forces in Iraq, never adequate for postwar responsibilities, are fewer than they were.

U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient for that mission; unless the civil war is quickly contained, no practicable U.S. deployment will suffice. U.S. forces worldwide cannot continue to cope with Iraq as it is, plus their other duties -- peacekeeping, deterrence, training -- without stresses that will manifest themselves in severe retention problems in the reserves and regular forces.

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In Iraq, Without Options By Harold Meyerson Wednesday, April 7, 2004; Page A31

…I'm not predicting that Sadr will succeed in evading U.S. forces and in time set up an Islamic republic as extreme as Lenin and Stalin's Soviet republic -- much as he may wish to. But, like Lenin, he has tapped into a popular sentiment that is far broader than the size of his own narrow legion might suggest. It's also clear that the civil authority that is supposed to take power June 30 will have few reliable domestic forces to defend it -- a situation reminiscent of the one confronting Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian provisional government who had no loyal forces at his disposal when the Bolsheviks seized power.

What the Iraqi provisional government will have is the Americans. It would be far better off if it had a force under the U.N. banner, with troops from nations that had opposed as well as supported the war, troops from Arab nations in particular.

But the time to have built such a force, I fear, has come and gone. The administration's utter failure to envision the problems that a U.S.-controlled occupation would encounter kept it from going to the United Nations until the situation on the ground was barely tenable. It's still worth trying to get a U.N. high commissioner to supplant Paul Bremer, but it grows harder to imagine why the U.N. would sign on at this late date.

Mr. Meyerson is half right. The opportunity has gone, but it was never really here to begin with.

Remember Napster? Not that poseur that's running around under that name but the original one. The anarchistic, libertarian, cyberspace-is-the-true-reality philosophy that made Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker feel they could discuss design decisions to help folks get away with trading copyrighted works:

Boies has argued that Napster bears no responsibility for its customers' downloads, and that, as far as the company is concerned, the service should be used only to swap songs that its customers already own or that are in the public domain. Some jurists seem sympathetic to that point of view. During the oral argument before the Ninth Circuit on Oct. 2, Judge Robert Beezer asked, "How in the world are [Napster's executives] expected to have knowledge of what's coming off some kid's computer in Hackensack, N.J., for transmission to Guam?"

Well, Judge, Boies's client is more than clever enough to know what's going down between Hackensack and Guam. An internal company memo quotes Napster co-founder Sean Parker as saying that he'd designed Napster's software to avoid links to users' "name or address or other sensitive data that might endanger them, especially since they are exchanging pirated music." That's the sort of smoking gun that Boies might have salivated over in the Microsoft case; unfortunately for him, he's now sitting at the defendant's table.

ran into a real-world snag: "cyber-space" may be a virtual place where meatspace laws don't apply, but it exists in servers which are quite subject to real world influences.

The Bush administration is trapped in a similar illusion. They acted with full belief in the real physical dominance of American military power. They acted to consolidate that power. They've been caught up by two meatspace realities, though:

1. You can not project sufficient force to control that many people from literally half way around the world indefinitely
2. It is in the interest of every nation seeking to deal with the USofA as a peer that the USofA be humbled in the effort

Seriously, why would any country feel comfortable with an elephant in the room that not only CAN overpower them but has directly stated its willingness to do so? The FACT is, even with the most progressive, enlightened administration imaginable it is not in any competitor/potential partner's interest to see no alternative to dealing on the terms set by the other guy.

The Iraq II, from the American people's viewpoint, was the Kick-The-Dog war. A lashing out as SOMEbody in response to 9/11. Most of the antiwar people were antiwar because the outcome was so damn predictable. Now that every foul prediction made about the war has come about, everyone will be forced to realize the obvious—there are physical constraints on even the mightiest of nations.

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Via Reuters, this from NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno":

"Yesterday, President Bush got a little upset with a reporter for calling him 'sir' instead of Mr. President. Man, how upset is he going to be after the election when they start calling him 'George' again."

Also, while we're at it: "Yesterday, Vice President Cheney threw out the first pitch at the Cincinnati Reds opening game. President Bush, he threw out the first pitch at the Cardinals game. It's nice to see they've got time for that kind of stuff now that everything in Iraq is under control."

And from CBS's "The Late Show with David Letterman":

"President Bush says he is looking forward to the testimony from Condoleezza Rice before Congress. Well it makes perfect sense you know, he wants to know what was going on too."

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The Washington Post has summarized and collected links to newspaper articles about Dr. Rice's appearance tomorrow. And that's all I got to say about the sister today.

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StatCounter is a nice thing. If it had Sitemeter's graphs and seven day moving averages it would be perfect.

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April 06, 2004

When I see crap like this in my logs:

2004.04.06 21:39:26 152.163.252.6 Search: query for 'how the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:40:40 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:40:47 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:40:51 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:40:52 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:40:58 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:41:16 152.163.253.68 Search: query for ' prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:41:36 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'
2004.04.06 21:41:39 152.163.253.68 Search: query for 'what is the main character is like at the beginning of prometheus'

I know it's a spammer looking for something to connect to. I've notice they look at blog services, most likely Technorati, and search for popular headlines. It's one reason comment spam has had a minimal impact on me…you rarely see the most popular articles being blogged here.

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The link forum is initially seeded. It should be pretty obvious it's Rwanda week around here, so I started by searching out some good-looking sites on Africa and African issues. I'd have added more sites but, well, I didn't. I did get enough in there to get something of a feel for my design decisions. For instance, 1000 characters of description is a lot or a little depending on if you're displaying or writing the description. Maybe I'll cut back on the description that shows in the link listing, let a fuller description be the first comment.

As for Ya Heard? I figure I can update it twice per day., and I'm thinking of posting directly to it rather than linking back to P6 when I want to aggregate a particular article over there. And I think I need a template tweak here and there. I've got things set to whip up a intro line based on category (which I assign manually) and whether or not the feed includes an author name. It's working. But ultimately I want to impress folks enough that they send me the articles rather than making me go get them. Automation is a Good Thing™.

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Now that some of our lefties have once again decided someone had to be outted exposed as something venal [P6: edited for clarity] for hurting some wingnuts' feelings. the LGF crew has decided they've stumbled into a viable technique. Next target: Nathan Newman.

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Yahoo Launches Soul-Search Engine

SUNNYVALE, CA—Hoping it will push them to the top of an increasingly competitive market, Internet portal Yahoo has added soul-search capabilities to its expanding line of search tools, company executives announced Monday.

"Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what's deep inside them quickly and easily," Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. "All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past."

Yahoo's main competitor recently introduced two new advanced search functions: Google Local, which highlights search results from a specific geographic area, and Google Personalized Search, which allows users to create a profile of their interests to influence search results. But Semel called Yahoo's new search function "vastly more precise."

"As the amount of information on the web increases, individuals want a search engine to provide them with results that are personally meaningful," Semel said. "Enter the Yahoo Soul Search—a powerful new tool that reveals what's deep inside your heart, using the user-friendly interface already familiar to Yahoo fans."

In the past, a soul search was a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, Semel said.

"A soul search often required backpacking trips across Europe, disastrous long-term relationships with incompatible lovers, and years of expensive therapy," Semel said. "Worse, the search process often included depression, lowered self-worth, and intense doubt."

Semel called the old way of seeking clarity "a logistical nightmare."

"Each question you asked yourself seemed to have a thousand possible answers," Semel said. "That's why we designed a way to order returns by relevance and separate them into categories like 'religion' and 'sexuality.' After using the Yahoo soul-search engine, conducting the self-examination process without a computer will seem as ridiculous as doing accounting in old-fashioned ledger books."

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Regional Agreements May Increase Poverty
Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Mar 31 (IPS) - Regional trade negotiations between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries could undermine poverty reduction programmes, says a report released here.

The report by the Brussels-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) Eurostep and five partners from the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries says such negotiations cannot be considered ”synonymous with reciprocal free trade” because WTO rules are currently under negotiation and could be redefined.

Eurostep criticises ”the predominant focus” in the negotiations on removal of tariff barriers and a move towards reciprocity between the ACP and EU.

The study says that the negotiations will result in increased access for EU exports to the 77 ACP countries, but ”pay little attention to non-tariff barriers that are the principal obstacle for ACP imports into the EU.”

Eurostep fears that an influx of EU products will ”overwhelm” ACP economies.

”The promotion of trade liberalisation will lead to significant job losses in ACP countries, particularly in agricultural sectors where people, predominantly women, are already living on low incomes,” the report says.

The study released Wednesday (Mar. 31) looks at the potential implications for people in ACP countries of the proposed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) for defining trade rules between the EU and ACP countries that would replace existing agreements.

The study draws on the experiences of people in Benin, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, Ghana and Jamaica.

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Not “just” the the brutality going on in the Sudan, but the “Arab Muslim” designation being repeatedly applied. This is so obviously not a religious identity issue because it's a government not a church or temple, that's arming the raiders. So no one should tell me how this is an Arab thing or a Muslim thing…I got many more Biblical quotes I could whip out.

This is a human horror.

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Remember Rwanda, but Take Action in Sudan
By SAMANTHA POWER

Ten years ago this week, Rwandan Hutu extremists embarked on a genocidal campaign in which they murdered some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus — a genocide more efficient than that of the Nazis.

On this anniversary, Western and United Nations leaders are expressing their remorse and pledging their resolve to prevent future humanitarian catastrophes. But as they do so, the Sudanese government is teaming up with Arab Muslim militias in a campaign of ethnic slaughter and deportation that has already left nearly a million Africans displaced and more than 30,000 dead. Again, the United States and its allies are bystanders to slaughter, seemingly no more prepared to prevent genocide than they were a decade ago.

The horrors in the Darfur region of Sudan are not "like" Rwanda, any more than those in Rwanda were "like" those ordered by Hitler. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has armed nomadic Arab herdsmen, or Janjaweed, against rival African tribes. The government is using aerial bombardment to strafe villages and terrorize civilians into flight. And it is denying humanitarian access to some 700,000 people who are trapped in Darfur.

The Arab Muslim marauders and their government sponsors do not yet seem intent on exterminating every last African Muslim in their midst. But they do seem determined to wipe out black life in the region. The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur, said Mukesh Kapila, the former United Nations' humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, "is the numbers of dead, murdered, tortured, raped."

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CNN is reporting another “uptick” in the violence in Iraq.

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The Genocide Next Door
By EMMANUEL DONGALA

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — It wasn't surprising that the 20th century ended with Africa having a genocide of its own. The accumulation of myriad little things going adrift was destined to result in a tragedy of such a magnitude. When militia from the majority Hutu population began their killing spree against the Tutsi minority 10 years ago, I was living in Brazzaville, the capital of Congo Republic, in central Africa. It's a cliché now to talk about the global village, but there we were, following what was happening in real time on television broadcasts.

For 100 days, from April to July 1994, the massacre continued unimpeded for the world to see, and left more than 800,000 people dead. Neighbors who did not have a television huddled in my living room to watch, just like they did for sports events. Only this time we were not watching African soccer teams compete in the Cup of Nations, we were witnessing the first televised genocide in the history of humankind. We could see, caught through the long-distance lenses of the cameras, shadowy figures hacking to death defenseless people along the roadways. There, in caricature, was a demonstration of the schizophrenic state in which Africa still finds itself today, that of a continent where different periods of history coexist: the contemporary state-of-the art communications satellite beaming the brutal work of a primitive weapon.

In carrying out their genocide, the Nazis used technology to kill in an anonymous way; for them, the victims were only numbers. In Rwanda, in a perversion of the legendary African conviviality and solidarity, people killed one by one, among those they knew. Some murdered neighbors. Women pushed men to rape other women. And instead of protecting their flock, some church leaders delivered the Tutsis among them to the killers.

Since the brutalities unfolded in full view, we could not pretend, as some had during the Nazi genocide, that we did not know. Yet most of us in Africa did not grasp the gravity of what was going on. It is only when the killing spree ended and we started counting the bodies that we realized there had been a genocide — and a well-planned one, as we later learned. Months before, the Rwandan government had imported thousands of dollars worth of machetes from China.

During those vicious 100 days, though, Western countries, including the United States, refused to call it a genocide. Using the term would have meant moral and legal obligations. Yet many Africans believed the reason for the denial was that genocide is historically linked to "civilized" people. In Africa, where barbarism was the norm, the Hutu killing spree was just another tribal war. After all, how can one commit a genocide with machetes?

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Jackson Goes Home to the Black Community
By Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is a correspondent for NPR's newsmagazine "Day to Day."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Robert Frost made those lines famous in his poem "The Death of the Hired Man," and Michael Jackson, radiating scandal from his second charge of child molestation, has taken these lines to heart.

The boyish man who is best friends with Elizabeth Taylor, married Elvis' only daughter and was accompanied to galas by a chimp named Bubbles, has added new friends to the retinue — the Nation of Islam and Al Sharpton. And some in the black community find that timing awfully interesting.

"Well, you didn't see him with a lot of black people before all this happened," noted one woman, a banker. "But now here he is, showing up, wanting to connect with black folks. And we let him, because we are forgiving people."

Another once-popular black man would have to agree with that. O.J. Simpson's criminal trial split much of Los Angeles — and the country — along racial fault lines. After he was accused of murdering his former wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, the genial Simpson became persona non grata in many of the white circles in which he had happily traveled. Once considered "colorless" by virtue of his fame and wealth, Simpson quickly found that the support from whites whose admiration he craved had eroded to virtually nothing.

But he had not run out of communities entirely. Some of the black venues in which Simpson had been noticeably scarce greeted him with open arms. Media reports covering his movements during his criminal trial showed how diners applauded when he showed up at the Boulevard Café, a now-defunct restaurant on Martin Luther King Boulevard that served as a nerve center for buzz in the largely black Crenshaw community. He got hugs when he visited black churches — also places that, pre-crisis, he was not known to frequent.

Now Jackson, noticeably paler of skin, thinner of nose and straighter of hair than back in the day when his music lived at the top of the charts, seems to be considering where "home" is.

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Quote of note:

What is Hung but an infantilized, incompetent and impotent male image? Strong? No. Virile? No. Sexy? The guy's a virgin.

You can sell that?

You certainly wouldn't see them glorify a black man who couldn't sing and dance on "American Idol." Nor would they prop up a clumsy, tone-deaf white person.

Certainly, there'd be no shortage of worthy candidates for Hung-like stardom. Regular "American Idol" viewers know tons of good singers have been rejected and abused by the show's Simon Cowell.

The difference here? Hung is Asian American. And the accented-foreigner gag is still considered acceptable shtick in modern comedy -- at least when it comes to Asian Americans.

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William Hung: Racism, Or Magic?
Emil Guillermo, Special to SF Gate
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

He banged. I resisted. And still do.

When I first saw Hong Kong-born UC Berkeley engineering student William Hung sing that Ricky Martin song on Fox's "American Idol" last January, I tried to ignore it.

But, after Hung's humiliation, there came a nice outpouring of sympathy for the rejected puppy dog.

Here was an accented Asian American with bad hair, bad teeth, bad moves and a bad accent. And even though he can't sing, America still loved him.

OK. The glorification of bad is a nice twist. But I figured the joke would die off soon enough.

It hasn't. And now I'm wondering why America is extending the joke.

Is there more than just the glorification of bad, something driven by racism?

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…because Baldilocks already thinks I don't like her.

But I've been reading Julliette's discussion with Lester at Vision Circle.

Sister. It's obvious you don't like Arabs. Probably a military thing.

Just go ahead and hate them. Don't try to justify it with out of context quotes from the Qu'ran.

Otherwise someone might raise a few of the more embarrassing quotes from The Holy Bible (KJV), like:

2 Sam 22:38-43 38 I have pursued mine enemies, and destroyed them; and turned not again until I had consumed them. 39 And I have consumed them, and wounded them, that they could not arise: yea, they are fallen under my feet. 40 For thou hast girded me with strength to battle: them that rose up against me hast thou subdued under me. 41 Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me. 42 They looked, but there was none to save; even unto the LORD, but he answered them not. 43 Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad.

or

Deut 2:33-35 33 And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. 34 And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain: 35 Only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves, and the spoil of the cities which we took.

or this one

Deut 20:13-16 13 And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: 14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee. 15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations. 16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

or my favorite

1 Sam 15:1-3 1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. 2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. 3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

I ain't really got a dog in this fight. I just know neither of the gentlemen like their words to be taken out of context.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(*New York, New York*) The Nina Simone Foundation, a non-profit organization established by, Lisa Simone Kelly, for the preservation and celebration of the music, socio-political contributions and overall legacy of the late Dr. Nina Simone, and Corporate Performance Artists, leading provider of Web Art and Technology, announce the launch of The Nina Simone Foundation website located at http://www.theninasimonefoundation.org.

The Nina Simone Foundation is about to open The Nina Simone Cultural Village in Jukwa, Ghana, near Cape Coast. It is to be officially inducted on April 21st, 2004. The Cultural Village is the result of an award to The Nina Simone Foundation by the Ghanaian Council in honor of the outstanding artistic contributions, support and human interest Nina Simone has demonstrated towards the region over the decades. As a result, the now international organization needed a new web site and online management system to coordinate its activities worldwide.

Corporate Performance Artists said it sought to bring a richness and textured style to the design of the website, to best represent the legacy of Dr. Simone and not to make it a historical monument, but a living facility to help promote the mission of the new foundation.

”We tried to address the immediate needs of the community, with a newsletter and calendar integrated into the site. These were implemented using all Open Source technology, which is not only affordable and reliable, but represents the freedom that Dr Simone spent much of her life promoting,” said Donna McElroy, CEO of Corporate Performance Artists.

“By integrating back-end Open Source technology to provide content management, The Nina Simone Foundation will be able to keep information current and fresh without any knowledge of programming, thereby serving their constituents in a more efficient fashion” said Joseph McElroy, President of Corporate Performance Artists. “We look forward to meeting the technical needs of both the physical and virtual communities growing up around The Nina Simone Foundation.”

"The launch of The Nina Simone Foundation has been a first important step in codifying my mother's memory," states Simone. "With an online presence, the Foundation will be able to reach fans of my mother's music from all over the world, and also provide the convenience of being able to make donations online. The website's design and lay-out provide a
comprehensive survey of who my mother was and also offers simple navigation."

*About The Nina Simone Foundation*

Nina Simone is a legendary artist-- one of the most important voices of her time-- whose artistic, civic and civil rights contributions have set a standard for musicians the world over. The Nina Simone Foundation will assist in developing music, written and media materials that help codify the memory of the late Dr. Nina Simone amongst future generations so that her contributions do not go unnoticed.

NSF will also champion the causes that meant the most to Nina, one of which is the education of impoverished children, particularly African children. Nina recognized that children represent the future of any society, and therefore, their education is key for them to successfully contribute to and address the needs of their society. Nina Simone believed that access to adequate education and cross-cultural learning were the most important means for African children and children of
African descent to become productive members of their society.

The establishment of The Nina Simone Foundation will serve to commemorate the legacy and advance the causes of the late Dr. Nina Simone, so that others can see how one woman’s courageous fight and vanguard life can make an impact that will continue long after her death.

Information about The Nina Simone Foundation can be found at the website http://www.theninasimonefoundation.org or by calling C. Zwadi Morris at 212-244-4280

*About Corporate Performance Artists*

Corporate Performance Artists Corp is both a performance practice and a business/technology practice. In the past, it was rare that art knowledge was shared other than in a museum space or theater. Corporate Performance Artists bring this creative knowledge to the work environment through shared technical and cultural exchanges with businesses (and employees of the businesses) and community organizations for which it consults and produces.

Corporate Performance Artists services include web site development, creative technology such as data visioning, technical installation and support of computer systems, and wireless servers. Corporate Performance Artists works closely with Community Development Corporations to develop technology centers that provide education and outreach to small businesses and teens, in the hopes of stimulating economic growth. Corporate Performance Artists intentions are to propagate the wealth created through the creative and business process, both financially and spiritually, to everyone involved.

Information about Corporate Performance Artists can be found at its website http://www.corporatepa.com or by calling Joseph McElroy at 646-279-2309

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How To Understand the News
by Earl Dunovant

Once upon a time, all we needed to know we could learn from what we directly experienced. But no more. Now things that happen half way around the planet can directly impact us. And since we have no way (and in most cases, no desire) to directly experience all that impacts our lives, we have come to depend on the news media more than we ever have in our history… the town crier is the TV and you can't really afford to ignore him.

The news media, however, is an integral part of American society, and as such has certain typically American characteristics… primary of which is that it's intended to make money for someone. And as you know, the news media doesn't directly make money on your paltry couple of bucks at the newsstand, or even your subscription. It's the advertisements that make publishing magazines and newspapers, and broadcast journalism, profitable. Therefore, marketing is also intimately involved in the news media, in that the stories chosen and the spin chosen for them are supposed to maximize drawing power in order to showcase the products being sold by the advertisers.

Since advertisers sell products that are suitable for some but not for others, they like to advertise in places that are seen by those their product is suitable for and don't care at all if it is never seen by those for whom it is not suitable. They will pay more for an ad that reaches 100,000 people of which 80% are prospects than for an ad that reaches 200,000 people, 25% of which are prospects. The advertiser doesn't see it as 100,000 vs. 200,000, but as 80,000 vs. 50,000. As businessmen, the media moguls want to make the most money for the least expenditure. That's why newspapers select a spin and maintain it in the face of all fact. They feel the spin is appealing to some market segment, which will allow them to charge higher ad rates to advertisers marketing to that segment. This is the reason for specialty magazines with different flavors as well. Each tries to zero in most precisely on the mix that will either draw the greatest number of people or lock in a permanently loyal cadre of consumers.

I've gone into some detail here, because in order to use the media to find out the state of affairs you must remember that every newspaper, wire service, radio station, TV network, is a business. You cannot think of them as neutral providers of information when their reports can exacerbate or dampen certain situations. They can't be so foolish as to not notice their impact, and I don't want to think they are evil enough to actively seek such an impact. They must simply feel that what they're doing is more important than understanding, and the whole truth. Therefore the first thing you must understand is that there are no unbiased views in the news media.

Editorials are a special case. They are designed to shape people's thinking, convince them, on some topic. There are magazines which are entirely editorials… the Nation, the National Review, Commentary, such as that. When reading them, keep in mind that when people make a statement, a report or an assertion, there's very little you can be sure of in it. They may be telling the truth, or not (did you ever have the experience where someone thought they were lying to you, but what they said turned out to be true?). They may know the whole situation, or not. You may truly understand what they are saying, or you may not. Through all this, there is one bit of certainty in any assertion: the person speaking/writing wants the person listening/reading to believe the assertion. Always keep in mind the goal of an editorial is not to inform, but to convince.

Next you must understand the people the news is being reported to. Know who the target market of the story is because that will determine the probable spin. More, you'll know that, as of the presentation of the story under consideration, a significant percentage of the target population believes the story to be true.

That is one fact the media can't avoid providing.

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VISITS

Total 64,573
Average Per Day 324
Average Visit Length 1:01
Last Hour 24
Today 405
This Week 2,270

PAGE VIEWS

Total 93,319
Average Per Day 446
Average Per Visit 1.4
Last Hour 36
Today 532
This Week 3,125

About a half hour early. But I specifically set the date-time.

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April 05, 2004

This being the first day of the new year around here, I'm going to share a couple of resolutions with you. Afterward I'll be asking for opinions and such.

You've seen some references to the aggregator blog I was playing with, a combination of Feed On Feeds (a server-side RSS/Atom aggregator), and Movable Type, tied together with a hack and a plug-in by Eyebeam R & D. They call it reBlog, it's a beta of a 0.1 version, it's got a couple of kinks I haven't discussed with Eyebeam yet but dammit, it's good enough. So I'm officially starting it up today. It's called Ya Heard?.

If you visited it when I first mentioned the experiment, you may notice a few small changes: no list of blogs being stolen from and no recent posts list. The previous blog list was a rather random extract from my RSS reader. The official list will be grown from blogs with good writing, strong presentations, by Black folks or on topics of special interest to Black folks. The distribution of political positions will be a (significantly) left shifted bell curve and I ain't having just raggin' on Black folks. You can identify error, but if it looks like you're having too much fun doing it, you ain't invited to the party.

I start with news, politics, the stuff I normally do, plus some "demographic-specific" stuff from the rather high-quality (but rather limited) non-news-and-politics Black bloggers I know. Once I get a respectable list in a respectable variety of categories, it will go into the sidebar.

I can use some help identifying aggregation candidates. That's part of what the other site I'm opening up, the Niggerati.net Community Link Forum, is about.

Okay, I'm still kind of foggy on just what the Community Link Forum is about.

The initial idea is to catalog and rate "demographic-specific" sites; that same "by or about" criteria that gets one considered for aggregation in Ya Heard?. Each listing in the database can have a description of up to 1000 characters, can be rated (the classic five stars system) and commented on. You can email the links from the site (I am protected from spamming by a required interval between emails), and report an inappropriate link or comment or user...I will read EVERY report, but I read between the lines and bullshit reports will rebound on the reporter.

You can suggest a link or comment (which I will have to approve without being registered). If you register you can submit a link or comment immediately, edit links and comments you've submitted and suggest new categories or subcategories (which I will have to approve). And if you manage to become one of the Niggerati, say by talking me into letting you run a subcategory, you can do everything but reconfigure the site; all your links, categories and comments post immediately, you can edit or delete the entries you've made.

The closest thing I've seen to the idea behind link forum is About.com, except I'm kind of hoping for some discussion. So I want links to sites and specific articles on the sites. I want to collect a set of useful links and useful opinions about them. I want to find new sites, grass roots sites, and of course new and old bloggers. But the whole concept of the site is still wide open. I can think of several possible directions to go in and I'm really not done configuring yet. But dammit, it's good enough.

Both these projects will evolve, maybe considerably, as the year progresses. P6 went through a number of visual contortion and may well go through one or two more as I (if you'll pardon the expression) integrate my various online activities into as much of a unified whole as possible,

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I notice The Girlie Matters added my MTClient release candidate announcement to her recent bookmarks list. Just being there is a pretty major endorsement (and I suspect Al-Muhajabah, another official Movable Type Deity, of having a hand in that listing).

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I thought that would get your attention.

Now give it to this article on people who are resisting the war effort by refusing to pay their federal income tax, by Mark W. Anderson at The American Sentimentalist.

According to the War Resisters League, the long-standing pacifist organization, nearly one-half of all government spending goes for the express purpose of supporting military activities, while less than a third is spent on social programs. Each year, the League calculates what portion of the federal income tax collected goes to the military, and for the 2005 budget a full 49% is earmarked for past and current military purposes, up from 47% the year before. And, of course, that doesn’t include the unknown costs of current activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

War tax resistance has a long and distinguished history in the United States, ranging from colonial Quakers, who refused to pay taxes during the American Revolution, and author Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a Massachusetts poll tax that generated funds for the Mexican-American war, to more recent war tax resisters such as Gloria Steinem, Joan Baez, and Noam Chomsky. Currently, there are about 50 or 60 local groups spread across the country supporting the movement in one way or another, such as the inter-faith social outreach program Fellowship of Reconciliation, the National Campaign for Peace Tax Fund, and the Mennonite Central Committee, an arm of the North American Mennonite Church.

“The basic idea behind refusal is that the government doesn’t demand anything else of us in support of a war and the growing military-industrial complex other than to pay taxes,” explains Karl Meyer, a longtime war tax resister and political activist who lives in Nashville, Tenn. “No draft, no demand that we vote – in fact, the only thing they demand of us in support of militarism is to pay our taxes. So if we want to show that we don’t support what they’re doing, we have no choice but to refuse.”

Now, on the one hand I can't endorse this because I know the Borrow and Spend Republicans just going to take the money for the military anyway and shortchange domestic programs. On the other hand, because of other decisions the Bushistas have made, they actually have a chance at getting away with it.

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I asked.

Prime answered:

We all need to stop focusing on who is spreading HIV. Everyone needs to be more conscious and take responsibility for protecting himself or herself from all sexually transmitted diseases spread from having unprotected sex. The Black community needs to wake up and realize that HIV and AIDS do not discriminate based on sexuality, race, or income. Focusing on the men on the “DL” as the cause of the problem is sadly missing the way to best combat this epidemic.

Thank you, Prime.

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Job training programs are not job creation programs. Especially when there are plenty of unemployed folks who already have those skills.

And when are we going to admit there's a limit to how much "unnecessary" bureaucracy exists, beyond which you're cutting into actual functionality?

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Bush to Announce Plan to Double Job Training
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 5, 2004; Page A04

With his opponent making job creation the centerpiece of his campaign, President Bush will announce plans today to double the number of workers who complete federal training each year from the current 200,000 to 400,000 -- but is putting no new money into the effort.

A White House fact sheet said Bush's plan, to be announced in Charlotte, calls for saving $300 million through the reduction of "unnecessary bureaucracy."

Bush also will consolidate four training and grant programs, administered by states with $4 billion in federal funds, into a single grant to governors to give them more flexibility and cut "federal red tape," the sheet said.

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Lightning Rod Puts Spark in Georgia Race
Cynthia McKinney, an outspoken and liberal former congresswoman, is running for her old seat. Her reemergence stirs up strong feelings.
By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer

April 5, 2004

ATLANTA — The most interesting new candidate to watch in Georgia's congressional race this summer may in fact be an old candidate.

Two years ago, political observers pointed to Rep. Cynthia McKinney's defeat in the Democratic primary for Georgia's 4th Congressional District as the signal of a new moderation in Southern politics.

An outspoken liberal, McKinney built a reputation in Washington as a bull with her own portable china shop, particularly when she addressed the Arab-Israeli conflict. That tone seemed to hurt her in 2002, when the five-term incumbent was beaten by another liberal black woman — a political neophyte and former state court judge, Denise L. Majette, who promised voters, "I won't embarrass you."

But with Majette's recent announcement that she intends to seek the Senate seat of retiring Democrat Zell Miller, McKinney may be able to get her job back.

Her reemergence was met with a range of emotions: Plenty of voters in her district rejoiced, and so did Republican strategists who said her presence would be a tonic to conservative voters across Georgia. Democratic insiders fretted about the ripple effect of McKinney's return. Her old political allies celebrated, saying her critique of Bush's foreign policy — seen as radioactive two years ago — has proved to be prophetic.

"Any time, you pay a price for being a pioneer," said state Sen. Ed Harbison, chairman of the state Legislative Black Caucus. In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, "we were all poised to defend ourselves" and hesitated to criticize the president, he said. "Now, in hindsight, it looks like she was right."

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Data with go-faster stripes
Vodafone has launched its 3G card for laptops - and the product could turn out to be a must for laptop users, says Ashley Norris

Monday April 5, 2004

Over the next 12 months, Vodafone and its rivals will have their work cut out to try and convince customers that they need to upgrade their mobile phones to 3G handsets.

It's a tough task, because there does not seem to be a great deal of evidence to demonstrate that consumers have much enthusiasm for 3G's supposed "killer applications", such as football videos and person-to-person video calling.

Not surprisingly, then, Vodafone has taken the easy route first, developing a product that it hopes will claw back some of the £13bn invested in 3G networks across Europe.

The Mobile Connect 3G/GPRS data card for laptops was launched to both consumers and businesses on Friday (it is available with a secure VPN - or virtual private network - often used by businesses to give their workers remote access).

The card, which fits in a laptop's PCMCIA slot, is essentially a version of the company's existing Mobile Connect GPRS card, but with go-faster stripes. Instead of accessing the web at GPRS speeds of around 50kbps, Vodafone promises that the 3G card can download data at up to 384kbps.

"The shift from 2G to 3G is like that from dial-up to broadband", Vodafone's new UK CEO, Bill Morrow, told a press conference on Friday.

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Suspect pleas

What would you have done? ask the prisoners accused of participation in the Rwandan genocide. Rory Carroll reports

Monday April 5, 2004

Believe some of those who answered genocide's call and there is no such thing as guilt or innocence, just a grey area in between.
Many prisoners in Kigali's central prison say they are not killers. They might have run errands for death squads and occasionally joined the hunt for victims but pull a trigger, swing a machete? No, they never did that.

Even their minimal involvement was coerced, they say. The country was at war. It was either help the killers, or at least pretend to help, or be killed yourself. What would you have done?

Interviews with four genocide suspects in the jail yielded much the same story: claims of at least partial innocence followed by a look of defiance and a challenge - what would you have done?

Not an easy question to answer given the often grim choices ordinary Hutus faced when an extremist Hutu regime decided to eliminate Tutsis and their sympathisers.

The way Esperance Nyirandegeya, 43, tells it she was a very minor player who aided the interahamwe militia solely to avert retribution for having a Tutsi husband.

"I wanted to show cooperation so I carried uniforms for them to help my family to hide," the former accountant for Air Rwanda says in a low voice.

Dressed in vivid pink prison garb with a headscarf and spectacles she does not look like a mass murderer but prosecutors say she directed the militia in Kigali's sector 43.

"I didn't kill anybody," says Nyirandegeya. "But ..." The voice trails off. She did lead a mob to the hiding place of four Tutsi men who were promptly butchered. "It was a mistake, I didn't know they were there."

The milita had been looking for different Tutsis, a family, and Nyirandegeya said she led the mob away from the house where they were hiding to another hiding place which she thought was unoccupied. That it was not will remain on her conscience, she says.

---

Debate call on 'multicultural' UK

A senior Tory has called for a "grown-up" debate on immigration after a race equality campaigner said the pursuit of 'multiculturalism' should be ditched.

Alan Duncan said diversity should be welcomed but argued past assumptions about the UK's need for immigration should now be debated.

The Commission for Racial Equality's chairman has also said it is time to stress common strands of Britishness.

Lord Falconer meanwhile highlighted the financial benefits of immigration.

Commission role
British people should be able to celebrate their culture without it seeming offensive to others, he added.

Trevor Phillips - who chairs the Commission for Racial Equality - meanwhile repeated his assertion that the term "multiculturalism" suggested separateness and had ceased to be useful in modern Britain.

It was necessary to "assert a core of Britishness" for all citizens which meant stressing shared values such as believing in democracy and the rule of law.

One of the founding principles of the commission Mr Phillips oversees is multiculturalism - a policy followed by successive government since the 1960s.

It was originally designed to strengthen engagement and relations between Britain's different ethnic communities.

Lost Shakespeare?
But Mr Phillips said the term suggested "separateness" and was no longer useful in present-day Britain.

"We are now in a different world from the 60s and 70s," he said.

"For instance, I hate the way this country has lost Shakespeare. That sort of thing is bad for immigrants.

"They want to come here not just because of jobs but because they like this country - its tolerance, its eccentricity, its Parliamentary democracy, its energy in the big cities.

"They don't want that to change," he said.

---

Rat's 'life code' read by science
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News Online science staff

Scientists have decoded the rat genome, the biochemical instructions in the rodent's cells that guide the building and maintenance of the animal's body.

It is the third mammalian DNA sequence to be deciphered - humans and mice came first - and will be used by researchers to understand the causes of disease.

It should also give valuable insights into the evolution of all mammals.

…Of rodents and dogs

"If one looks at genes that are basically equivalent, then nine out of 10 are the same," said Professor Chris Ponting, from the UK Medical Research Council's Functional Genetics Unit, who worked on the project.

"The disease genes are nearly all within that 90% - they're conserved between rodents and humans. Therefore, in looking at the biology of human disease genes in rodents, it appears rodents make excellent models," he told BBC News Online.

Some families of genes, though, have been greatly expanded in the rat, including, perhaps not surprisingly, those associated with the ability to emit and sense smells.
There are significant distinctions, also, in the genes of the immune system.

Comparison of the rat code with those of the human and the mouse should allow a remarkable view of mammalian evolution.

The rat data shows about 40% of the modern mammalian genome derives from the last common mammalian ancestor that existed tens of millions of years ago. This "core" DNA encodes nearly all the genes and their regulatory signals, and accounts for the similarities among mammals, such as the basic body plan.

More details about the fundamental biochemistry and evolution of mammals will become apparent when scientists get to compare the human and the rodent codes with those of the soon-to-be finished chimp and dog genomes.

"What we know about the dog is that genetically speaking it is closer to humans than rodents, even though in terms of evolution it is further away," explained Professor Ponting.

"That's to say, the dog lineage split off from the human lineage before rodents - it's just that the rodents' DNA has mutated like crazy since then."

---

New light shed on chimp genome
By Becky McCall

A comparison of the chimp and human genomes casts new light on why the two species are so different despite having very similar genetic code.

Scientists have long speculated over what makes humans so different from their closest relatives, the apes.

One of the leading scientists on the project says the answer lies in the process that orchestrates the genes as the chimpanzee is developing.

The human and chimpanzee genomes differ by just 1.2% between the coding genes.

Professor Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig, Germany, is investigating which genes are present and the manner in which they are expressed.

Brain scan
In particular, he believes the key lies in the degree to which they are expressed in each species.

"It's about the extent to which genes are turned on, where and when in the brain.

"What we have now done is systematically looked at gene activity in the brain of chimpanzees, humans, orang-utans and macaques and when we compare them the surprising finding is that we actually find quite a lot of differences.

"And in any particular part of the brain about 10% of our gene activity differs from those of chimpanzees," said Dr Paabo.

The key to the distinction between the two species could lie in the functional importance of different levels of gene expression.

By mathematically modelling the changes seen in gene expression between the two species, Paabo hopes to identify those genes which could have been acted on by natural selection more strongly than others.

---

This is just a way for me to keep something I want to read later handy. It's long and you'll most likely find it boring as hell.

Issue Date: Winter 2003/04, Posted On: 12/12/2003
Networking Nation-States

The early 20th century was filled with predictions that the airplane, the
automobile or the assembly line had made parliamentary democracy, market
economies, jury trials and bills of rights irrelevant, obsolete and
harmful. Today's scientific-technological revolutions (epitomized by space
shuttles and the Internet) make the technologies of the early 20th
century-its fabric-winged biplanes, Tin Lizzies and "Modern Times"
gearwheel factories-look like quaint relics. Yet all of the "obsolete"
institutions derided by the modernists of that day thrive and strengthen.
The true surprise of the scientific revolutions ahead is likely to be not
the technological wonders and dangers they will bring but the robustness of
the civil society institutions that will nurture them.

This may seem counterintuitive to many people. Surely novel technological
capabilities require novel social institutions, right? The experience of
the past century argues that the opposite is the case. Institutions tend to
be modified more than replaced. They do not die out unless they demonstrate
actual and substantial harm, and they adapt only as much as needed to
provide a viable solution to pressing problems. We should respond to the
challenges facing us by strengthening an evolving framework based on our
best and most successful institutions.

Of Civil Societies and Free Markets
At the dawn of the 21st century, it is quite clear that states are
prosperous when their civil society is strong, and peaceful when their
civic statehood is strong. It is no surprise that most of the world's
poorer and strife-wracked states are those with no or little civic nature:
totalitarian states, personal dictatorships and kleptocracies.

A civil society is a vast network of networks, beginning with the
individual and moving outward to encompass families, community
organizations, congregations, social organizations and businesses-all
invented by individuals coming together voluntarily. Such civil societies
beget civic states. These states are ones in which authority begins at the
local and community level and gradually is built upwards to deal with
wider-scale issues. Civic states are built on community assent and a
feeling of participation in a local, regional and national community, and
the authority of the state is not upheld by constant exercise of force but
by the willingness of citizens to comply with its directives.

At the root of civil society is the individual. People who define
themselves primarily as members of collective entities, whether families,
religions, racial or ethnic groups, political movements or even
corporations, cannot be the basis of a civil society. Societies that place
individuals under the permanent discipline of inherited or assigned
collectivities, and permanently bind them into such, remain bogged down in
family favoritism; ethnic, racial or religious factionalism; or the "crony
capitalism" that has marred the economies of East Asia and Latin America.

Democracy and free markets are effects of a strong civil society and strong
civic state, not their causes. Over the past century, there has been a
misdirection of attention to the surface mechanics of democracy, to
nose-counting rather than the underlying roots of the phenomenon. It was
clear that a society containing the strong networks of association
characteristic of a civil society also develops the means of expressing the
interests of society to the state. It is the need for effective means of
expression that gave rise to the original governmental mechanisms we now
call democracy. Later, intellectuals in societies that did not have a
strong civil society (particularly pre-Revolutionary France) looked at
societies that did (particularly England) and attempted to distill an
abstract theoretical construct capturing the essence of that experience.
They called this democracy, but they subsequently focused attention on
their model (and its misunderstandings) rather than the essence of what
they actually admired.

England's strong civic state had its roots in local expressions of civil
society, a process certainly well rooted by the 14th century. These include
the grand and petit jury systems, the election of various aldermen and
other local officials and the quasi-official role of many civil society
institutions. Selecting members of the House of Commons was one of many
different mechanisms by which local communities gave or withheld their
consent to the state.

The lesson of English history has been repeated many times over, up to and
including contemporary events in Taiwan and South Korea. When civil society
reaches a certain degree of complexity, democracy emerges. Without civil
society, importing the procedures, rituals and even institutions of
democracy results only in instituting one more set of spoils for families
and groups to fight over at the expense of the rest of society. Democratic
mechanisms no more create civil society than wet streets cause rain.
Similarly, the market economy is more than the absence of socialism or
strong government; it is the economic expression of a strong civil society,
just as substantive (rather than formulaic) democracy is the political
expression of a civil society and civic state. Entrepreneurship in business
uses and requires the same talents and often the same motives that go into
starting a church, a nonprofit organization or a political party. The
society that can create entrepreneurial businesses tends to be able to
create the other forms of organizations as well. Often, the same
individuals start several of each form at different stages in their lives.

The market economy also requires a civil society with general acceptance of
a common framework of laws, practices and manners. Without a general
acceptance of fair dealing, an agreement on what fair dealing means, and an
adjudication system that can resolve and enforce resolution of disputes, a
true market economy cannot exist-as developments in the post-Soviet sphere
indicate.

These realizations have immense implications for today. The rapid
formation, deployment and financing of enterprises like those found in
Silicon Valley are an inherent characteristic of a strong civil society.
The strong role of non-company organizations (such as professional and
industry associations and informal networks of acquaintances) in Silicon
Valley also suggest that such entrepreneurism is a strong civil-society
phenomenon. And it is highly likely that the innovations spawned by the
current Information Revolution-including the Internet, the communication
satellite and high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable-will spur innovation in the
other science-based revolutions.

Indeed, the new technologies have strengthened civic states and societies,
making them even more competitive vis-à-vis what could be called the
"economic state:" the centralized nation-state in which the government
draws its raison d'être from presiding over the transfer of benefits
between generations, classes and regions. The problem for economic states,
such as France, is that when creativity does arise and ventures start, the
prevailing set of social, economic and political institutions retards their
growth.

In corrupt and undemocratic countries with weak civil societies, family
networks permit entrepreneurs to get around these obstacles-but only up to
a point. They cannot expand easily beyond that. In stronger civil
societies, such as Germany, that have high-trust characteristics but lack
openness and flexibility in their political and social systems, ventures
start but can become frustrated by bureaucratic barriers. There is a French
Silicon Valley, but it does not lie in any of the technology centers
planned by the French state; rather, it stretches from Dover to London,
where hundreds of thousands of young French men and women have relocated to
pursue their dreams without the high taxes and social burdens of the
Continent.

The Economic State's Decline and Fall
States with high regulatory and tax burdens are now coming under heavy
pressure as they increasingly find themselves outdistanced. The erosion of
the monopoly of the economic state over most arenas of human activities is
traceable to the lowering of transaction costs for international financial
activities in the 1960s, which allowed major corporations and banks to take
advantage of the lower tax and regulatory burdens of tax havens such as the
Netherlands Antilles. Corporations became sophisticated consumers of
"sovereignty services."

Over the past three decades, these trends have accelerated enormously as
the breakup of old European empires gave rise to many new sovereign
entities. The increase in the number of providers, combined with the
falling cost of accessing them, has made sovereignty services
(incorporation, ship registration, citizenship, residency permits and so
on) a highly competitive market area. As devolution produces yet more
sovereign states and the Internet reduces the cost of accessing the
services to rock bottom, this market can be expected to flourish. The
market for sovereignty services has shown great price elasticity: the users
of offshore accounts, shell corporations and trust mechanisms proliferate
as the transaction costs of setting upsuch services fall.

Consider the ability to sell products and services on the Internet, and the
decline of the corporation-employment model (seen in downsizing, delayering
and in the rise of "free-agent" contractors and entrepreneurs). Private
Internet currencies based on strong encryption (cybermoney) will soon
provide payment mechanisms that are not recorded in central clearing houses
and are thus beyond subpoena power. Much of the actual economic activity in
the coming era will pass (and already has passed) out of the strictly
national realm. Even the most powerful nation-states are beginning to find
it impossible to set currency or interest rates without reference to the
world market.

Nor can the economic state count on coercive solutions to counteract this
trend. It cannot tax what it cannot see. One of the products of cheap,
ubiquitous computing has been the growing, worldwide availability of strong
programs for encrypting data on personal computers. With such programs,
individuals and companies can communicate and trade beyond the easy ability
of governments to intercept or, if proper precautions are taken, even to be
aware that the transactions exist.

States that cling unrealistically to the models of the past will find their
economies becoming more like that of Italy, where a very substantial
portion of GDP (over 50 percent by common estimates) is thought to be off
the books and beyond the view (and reach) of the state. This becomes a
vicious circle, as the declining collections force the state to cut
services or raise the rates on those who still pay taxes-usually both at
once. Cutting services causes taxpayers to question the value of their
relationship with the government, and raising rates pushes more taxpayers
further into tax avoidance. Both courses of action further reduce the
ability of the state to command the sort of revenue stream it previously
enjoyed.

The reduction of the effective available percentage of GDP to taxation
authorities will accelerate the existing trend toward the decline of
economic states. An economic state's support rests primarily on its ability
to transfer resources from one sector of society to another. Such states
will be subject to stronger pressures to break apart, as the ability to
shift wealth declines and the social compacts they support grow weaker.
Pay-as-you-go services, such as Social Security in the United States, will
be placed under ever-increasing fiscal pressure. To the extent that loyalty
to states depends on the delivery of such elaborate benefits, economic
states will become decreasingly cohesive.

Some politicians believe that immigration of enough young wage-earners will
make cuts from the retired generation's benefits needless. This contains a
hidden assumption: that young immigrants, often poorer and from different
cultures, will feel sufficient solidarity with the retirees to continue to
support the necessary high levels of taxation. Without assimilation, this
is a dubious prospect.

The decline of the economic state will mostly be a quiet and gradual
affair, a revolution made of many individual decisions that, when taken
together and augmented by technical developments like high-speed air travel
and satellite communications, have a cumulative effect. A Canadian
executive may take a job in the United States because the income tax burden
is so much lower. Continental Europeans might move to London to start a
company in order to escape the "social burden" of regulation in France or
Germany. And a company could outsource software development to India, where
the workers speak English well and are cost-competitive. These are the sort
of individual decisions that will shape the emerging world.

What Lies Ahead
a group of people, the self-described "cryptoanarchists", maintains that
the availability of cyberspace transactions beyond the ability of the state
to monitor or control will destroy the ability of the state to maintain
itself. Those who adhere to this school of thought foresee an era of
essentially chaotic social organization, in which market forms predominate
in both the economy and other relationships.

Although many of the individual premises of that argument have some
validity, the results will not be as extreme as envisioned. Rather than
ending the state, it is more likely that these changes will substantially
transform its nature. Most states will either adapt to those changes,
decline in wealth and importance or, in extreme cases, split apart. The
ongoing technological revolutions mean that states will depend increasingly
on voluntary forms for cohesion. Successful states are likely to have one
or more of the following characteristics:

*Small populations with a relatively confined geographical spread.
Consensus and coherence are easier to achieve among a limited number of
people in territorially-compact areas. This will favor small jurisdictions
ranging from Caribbean island states to what Kenichi Ohmae terms
"region-states." Jurisdictions larger than that will probably be structured
as federations of civic states.

*Ethnic or religious homogeneity. Religious or ethnic ties form a strong
bond for cohesion. Israelis put up with the inordinate fiscal and
regulatory interventions of their state because to leave Israel is to leave
the community that supports their identity.

*Visible success. Singaporeans put up with their intrusive government, even
when few have any ideological, ethnic or religious reason to do so, because
it has delivered visible prosperity and security to its inhabitants over
their lifetimes.

*Market-ordered economies with scope for individual enterprise. Citizens
will tolerate state interventions in a market economy so long as they are
not visibly harmful, leave room for individual enterprise, and allow the
state to perform more reasonably the services people require. Citizens have
stayed in social democracies with state-protected corporations and heavy
taxation and regulation, but they tend to flee state-socialist regimes in
droves whenever possible. Swedes have always been free to leave their
country, while East Germans were not. Yet the latter fled in great numbers
when the opportunity arose (to the ultimate demise of their state), while
relatively few Swedes have exiled themselves.

*Low transaction costs for leaving. It is far easier to maintain cohesion
if unhappy persons are permitted and even encouraged to leave, rather than
facing heavy penalties for doing so. Exit taxes are signs of a loser state.
The Soviet Union was rightfully despised for levying one, and the United
States should reconsider its plans to follow in its wake. Many malcontents
will leave; more than a few will decide to return. And, having returned,
they will be less discontented. Even permanent expatriates should be
encouraged to maintain family and social ties with the home country.
Expatriates can deliver useful business and political contacts even when
they are not paying taxes.

*Serving as the home base for a diaspora. A diaspora provides an
environment for useful commercial relationships worldwide. Having even
minuscule territory with sovereign characteristics (such as the ability to
issue passports) makes life far easier for members of a diaspora. The
Internet facilitates personal ties and continued access to one's home
culture.

*Maintaining enough international associations to enjoy the security,
economic and cooperative ties formerly enjoyed only by large states.
Iceland maintains a unique culture and language in a prosperous civil
society with a population of only 270,000 people. As such, it would seem to
be an advertisement for the viability of very small states. It is not at
all clear, however, that it would be nearly as prosperous, secure or
independent if not for its active memberships in NATO, the European
Economic Area and the Nordic Council.

*Sharing a positive, self-affirming narrative. Many such narratives are
provided by religious, national or ethnic identity. Israel has a simple and
effective narrative-exemplified in phrases such as "Hear, O Israel, the
Lord thy God, He is One", and "Never Again." Political entities that do not
have ethnic or religious cohesion need a sophisticated and equally
compelling narrative. The United States has a complex and compelling
narrative-exemplified in the phrases, "We hold these truths to be
self-evident" and "the wretched refuse of your teeming shores." Both have
worked. Nations that lose the ability to sustain a positive narrative, on
the other hand, lose coherence and identity, and thus voluntary citizen
support. In the new environment, such nations will find it difficult to
maintain revenue bases, enforce regulation or defend their citizens.
In this world, civic states that are able to generate an essentially
voluntary adherence on the part of their populations will dominate. The
things of value that civic states provide for their citizens-principles,
identity and a sense of community-are fundamentally intangible things that,
unlike the economic aspects of sovereignty, cannot become commodities in
the world marketplace.

Such civic states are not likely to be able (or want) to form or sustain
large-area organizations with tightly integrated populations that generate
a consensus to pay for and share an elaborate structure of state-provided
and state-mediated benefits consuming high (33 to 60 percent) proportions
of the state's GDP. The decline, decentralization and, in some cases,
destruction of economic states will strengthen civic states by providing
impetus to the search for newer, more flexible and less centralized
mechanisms linking large-scale activities.

Do larger-scale economic areas like the European Union offer a potential
solution to this perfect storm of the economic state? To the extent that
such unions concentrate on the positive accomplishments of the Union, the
answer is a qualified yes. The EU has had some success in promoting free
movement of people, capital and ideas throughout its internal area, and
facilitating cooperation in all areas where existing commonalities permit
greater cooperation between similar cultures. A union that would seek to
create a common economic, informational, and residency space for the
citizens of its member-nations could be of benefit.

However, to the extent that the EU has ended up dictating the social
policies of its member-nations, attempted (with some success) to relocate
executive power from national bodies under democratic scrutiny to
unscrutinized bodies on Union-wide levels, and maintained large
cross-regional subsidies to buy assent, it is not only not a solution, but
becomes a new type of problem in itself. The EU has become to international
cooperative organizations what the economic state has become to the
nation-state. By trying to become an economic state on a wider scale, the
EU has increased the amount of bureaucracy, top-down planning and
intervention.

Additionally, it has replaced some of the barriers with which small states
have tried to insulate themselves from economic reality by a new,
Union-wide set of more insidious non-market barriers, particularly in the
area of rigid and expensive standards, and subsidy programs that have the
same ultimately futile goal in the world economy. By trying to maintain an
already strained entitlement and dirigisme-based political and social
model, the EU will find itself under ever-increasing pressure in the coming
decade because of these structural weaknesses, aggravating an increasing
demographic crisis.

The Rise of the Network Commonwealth
In discussions about these changes and their effects, two schools of
thought seem to have emerged to date. One is a gloomy and apocalyptic
vision of many small, essentially unconnected mini-states engaged in
intermittent low-level conflict and confrontation, reminiscent of Hobbes's
"War of All Against All." It is a vision of a few rich Singapores and many
poor, conflict-torn Kosovos. This view is reflected in political works such
as Robert D. Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, and in the imagined worlds of
futurist fiction such as Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

The other could be described as a "One World via Internet" vision of
increased communication (with English as the universal language), omnidirectional cooperation and networking on a world scale. Its proponents, such as
the cyber-futurists of Wired magazine, envision that lowering the
transaction costs of cooperation to a uniform level worldwide will make it
equally likely for any one person anywhere to cooperate with any other
person anywhere else.

In many versions, less futurist, less libertarian, but more typical of
Hegelian-Kantian internationalists, it leads to a vision of world
governance-of increasing integration into regional transnational
organizations, such as the European Union and nafta, in parallel with
single-purpose world-level structures such as the World Trade Organization,
ultimately all merging into a mode of world governance.

If the one vision leads to a few Singapores and many Kosovos, the other, it
is thought, will spawn a multicultural Golden Era, benignly presided over
by an enlightened United Nations and its international organs.1 Neither
vision is likely to be realized. The breakdown of the old structures need
not, and probably will not, continue infinitely. If it were to persist, the
ongoing division of national communities would result in an
undifferentiated and disconnected mass of ever-smaller nation-states-or,
more honestly said, tribal states. The dissolution of the ussr and of the
Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia show what the human costs of
such processes can be.

Equally, there is an inherent limit to the prospect of any form of
universal or global governance in the near future. Such a government
(unless it is a disguised empire of a major power imposed on the rest)
would have to be constructed on a lowest-common-denominator basis to
include a substantial collection of hapless dictatorships, rotten
oligarchies and shabby kleptocracies. One need only look at the
ineffectiveness of the United Nations in coping with many global issues to
see the limits of this approach.

In between the old natural unit marking the limits of easy cooperation,
namely the nation-state, and the distantly (and perhaps chimerically)
glimpsed vision of universal civilization, we must interpose a middling
form: a set of like, but not identical, societies sharing a number of
common characteristics, within which social cooperation bears significantly
lower transaction costs than without. This now-emerging entity is the
network civilization-a new civilizational form enabled by networks.
Consider the visible effects of the current phase of the
scientific-technological revolutions: the Internet; the communication
satellite and high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable; fast, cheap
intercontinental air travel; and all the rest. Even today, these have
brought geographically distant areas into close proximity for many
purposes. The acceleration of these technological and economic trends will
make this "tele-proximity" even more significant. Collaboration in all
areas-economic, educational, political-is becoming relatively easier at a
distance. But as the old natural barriers to trade and
communication-mountain ranges, wide oceans, and other natural barriers-no
longer need be borders, the next most significant set of barriers
remains-differences in language, customs, legal systems, religions, and
other significant values, and particularly things like trust.
The network civilization is associated primarily on the lines of cultural
contiguity: groups of nations sharing language, customs, legal systems,
religions and other significant values, most specifically, trust
characteristics. It has sometimes been asserted that the global adoption of
English will abolish transaction costs of cooperation between
civilizations, or that automated translation will do so. Although both
phenomena are real, it is unlikely they will have the expected effect, for
it is precisely the unexpressed web of assumptions behind the formal words
that create the barriers between cooperation. "We must make an
accommodation" has a different nuance in a business discussion in Lima,
Ohio from one in Lima, Peru.

On the other hand, the unprecedented rapidity, cheapness and ease of use of
modern telecommunications, particularly the Internet and World Wide Web,
knits together culturally similar societies into what is rapidly becoming a
single cultural artifact subdivided along many different lines. Consider
one example: the changes in the public debates in the English-speaking
world at the time of the Gulf War, the Balkan interventions of the
mid-1990s and the Iraq War. The debates over the Gulf War were
overwhelmingly conducted in the traditional style of the 20th century,
somewhat accelerated by satellite television. That is, America, Britain and
other nations each witnessed a debate among their traditional policy elites
in legislatures, the media, and academic circles. The American media
analyzed, summarized, and then presented their summary of "British opinion"
on the matter; the British media likewise encapsulated their impression of
American debate and presented it domestically.

During the Balkan crises, Americans began to be able to follow lengthy
sections of the British parliamentary debate directly on cable television;
the proliferation of cable services and cable channels, particularly ones
devoted entirely to news and politics, suddenly made it possible for
millions of Americans to follow a debate that previously would have been
scrutinized in such a level of detail by mere hundreds, or at most
thousands, of diplomats and academics. Although the speed at which events
unfolded was far faster, Americans and British debaters spoke as much for
and from their national communities as an Athenian or Corinthian might have
22 centuries previously.

By the time of the Iraq War, the proliferation of the Internet and such
phenomena as Web logs-individually produced Web diaries updated daily or
even hourly, with direct links to other "blogs", often linking to
eyewitness accounts to current events, and to a huge host of media
sources-created a situation in which political debate effectively occurred
seamlessly across the English-speaking world without the intervening
mediation of cultural and political elites. It was a debate segmented
primarily by political position rather than by nationality. In fact, both
pro- and antiwar opinion was often elaborated by group blogs, each of which
were collaborative efforts stretching from London to Sydney and everywhere
in between. Both because of direct contact across the Web, and by the
indirect effect of subjecting traditional media to criticism and feedback
of a scope, level and intensity never before experienced, political debate
over the Iraq War has experienced a remarkable degree of disintermediation
and popular involvement. This experience promises to become a new benchmark
for future reportage and debate.

All indications suggest that these patterns will intensify rather than
abate. Network civilizations appear to be the next step in expanding the
circle of civil society, which has elaborated itself over time from local
and regional networks of commercial, intellectual and civic collaboration,
to networks of national scale.

The Industrial Revolution made continent-spanning nation-states possible.
The Information Revolution offers the possibility that civil societies may
link themselves on a globe-spanning-although not universally
inclusive-scale. Such is the network civilization. It can hardly fail to
call forth political and economic forms to parallel its effects. The
Network Commonwealth is an effort to name an equivalent form for the
network civilization, and to identify its emerging precursors in existing
institutions. Just as the ethnic nation was the raw material from which the
classical nation-state was built, so the network civilization is the raw
material from which the Network Commonwealth is being built.

This facilitates the movement of people, goods and services across borders,
forming and strengthening shared cultures (both elite and popular) and
experiences-for example, common publications read by the publics of all of
the nations of a particular network civilization. In turn, this lays the
foundation for greater institutional cooperation (in the form ofcommon
markets, permanent security alliances and joint scientific and
technological projects). A Network Commonwealth would build on these
existing forms of transnational cooperation and thus emerge along existing
information-oriented lines of linguistic and cultural affinity. It would be
defined by close trading relationships and substantial military cooperation
and intelligence-sharing among its constituent states, as well as a high
degree of intra-network flows of migration and investment.

The Network Commonwealth is not a nation-state of the historical type. It
is not a state at all, although it has the potential to offer an
alternative means for fulfilling some traditional functions of economic
states. It is a means of linking smaller political communities so that they
can deal with common concerns. It is a way to provide opportunities to
their members-opportunities that cannot be provided by small, independent
sovereignties alone, and for which economic states and empires exact too
high a price.

The emergence of the Network Commonwealth as a potential form of political,
social and economic organization is driven by three emerging realities.
First, the basis of the world economy is changing from manufacturing to
information-the ideas and informational products, as well as the human
minds and skills in which they are embodied. Just as agriculture remained
important in the Machine Age, manufacturing (and agriculture) will remain
important in the Era of the Information Revolution-but mastery of
manufacturing will come with mastery of information, just as a mastery of
agriculture passed to those who mastered machinery. Similarly, as military
predominance once passed to those powers that led in industrialization, so
too will military predominance pass to those who best master information
technology.

Second, physical space is no longer the most important factor in political
association. Cultural space is. What is the result of this shift? In an
Internet-mediated economy where information is the chief product, London,
Toronto, Los Angeles, Cape Town and Sydney are next door to each
other-while London and Paris, Toronto and Montréal, Los Angeles and
Beijing, Sydney and Jakarta are all separated by a wall of differing
visions and assumptions.

Finally, cooperation is proportional to communication as complexity
increases. Meaningful, thorough and successful cooperation is most easily
accomplished among those who can communicate with the most depth and
clarity-namely, those who share language, a set of political assumptions or
common moral ideas. Certainly, substantial multinational and multicultural
cooperation does occur in business, scientific and political circles, but
when the focus of the cooperation is information-intensive (as in the
production of software or motion pictures), it has most frequently been
among companies rooted in the same linguistic communities.

All-in-all, instantaneous, flat-rate and worldwide communications, in
addition to cheap long-range aviation, are forming a new topology of
political space. In this new environment, physical proximity is no longer
the most important factor in either trade or power projection. Combined
with this are political developments, such as free-trade agreements and
migration arrangements permitting people to travel, visit, study or work
freely outside their native country. This is driving a transition from
organization along lines of geographical proximity to structures organized
primarily along civilizational lines. A further spur to the development of
Network Commonwealths is that they promise to provide many benefits without
the costs that economic states have historically imposed on individuals and
society.

The Emerging Anglosphere
Because Britain, and subsequently the United States, experienced the
Industrial Revolution and political modernity early on, the
English-speaking nations have tended to be in the forefront of social,
political and economic evolution and to develop particularly strong civil
societies. The position of the United States in the Information Revolution
and the emergence of the Internet have continued this tendency. So it is
likely that Network Commonwealth structures will probably emerge in the
English-speaking world quite early. Some developments to date indicate that
this is indeed happening.

Internally, the Anglosphere already exhibits a web of network
civilizational ties that could become the precursors of a budding Network
Commonwealth. Publications like the Financial Times and the Economist, for
example, effectively serve the entire English-speaking network
civilization, not simply a Britain-based constituency. One can also speak
of an emerging Anglosphere entertainment industry, based upon the growing
collaboration of Australian, American and British directors and actors (and
the use of New Zealand for film-shooting), where the final product appears
on screens from Canberra to Chicago to Cambridge. Already, a high
proportion of foreign direct investment-now a more important measure of
economic integration than trade in physical goods-in all English-speaking
countries is from other English-speaking countries.

Network civilizational ties have helped to spawn a series of common
institutions. The close military relationship between the United States and
the United Kingdom, once again displayed in the recent Iraq War, laid the
basis for the world's longest-lasting and most successful alliance, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Similarly, anzus binds the Anglosphere
nations of the Pacific in a similar mutual defense pact. Other
institutional examples of the emerging Anglosphere include the us-UK-a
intelligence-sharing scheme and close cooperation between American and
British intelligence services; organizations that contain a substantial but
incomplete set of English-speaking nations, such as the Commonwealth of
Nations; and a large number of regional sets of collaborative institutions,
mostly linking the three main pairings of English-speaking states (the
United States and Canada, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland,
and Australia and New Zealand). All-in-all, there are a substantial number
of British and American activities and non-trivial sets of
intra-Commonwealth institutions.

U.S.-Canadian collaborative institutions are of particular interest because
they achieve a very substantial degree of cooperation while being based on
a strict understanding of national sovereignty. Unlike the European case,
there is no master treaty of U.S.-Canadian integration that pledges an
"ever-closer union:" neither Jacksonian Americans nor Canadian nationalists
would tolerate any threat, however latent, of a permanent surrender of
sovereignty. Yet the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement (and its more broadly
focused successor nafta), as well as norad in the defense realm, are both
conspicuously successful examples of international cooperation.

One obvious route for further elaborating intra-Anglosphere ties would be
to extend nafta to Australia and New Zealand, a move already under
discussion among policymakers. Another would be to bring into daylight the
existing us-UK-a intelligence-sharing arrangements (not formally
acknowledged at present) in the form of a public mutual-assistance treaty
and permanent formal organization. Such a step might assist in
demonstrating a publicly-visible oversight mechanism for its controversial
elements such as the Echelon data-intercept system.

Welcoming the United Kingdom and, in some areas, the Republic of Ireland
into organizations formed on the armature of U.S.-Canadian collaboration is
likely to depend upon the future course of European integration. The
Washington-London economic and security relationship is the key
relationship of the Anglosphere, considered either in economic terms or
military heft. If evaluated on a dynamic scale anticipating trends in the
Information Revolution, the potential for even closer British-American
economic integration is substantial.

It is also a question of balance. An Anglosphere Network Commonwealth
without the UK is predominantly the United States with appendages. With the
UK, and particularly the financial capabilities of London,
intra-Anglosphere relations are not so lopsided. Yet, given the
substantial turbulence likely in European relations over the next decade
due to its accelerating demographic and fiscal-structural issues, a looser
Europe more open to closer UK-Anglosphere ties is more rather than less
likely. Even today, after decades of British membership in the European
Union, there is a substantial gulf in attitudes towards America between
Britain and Continental Europe. Not only was this seen in the Iraq War, but
at a popular level twice as many Britons report feeling closer to the
United States than to their Continental neighbors. A recent survey by the
Economist, largely a pro-EU magazine, showed that more Britons felt
represented by the American flag than by the EU one, and far more of them
identified with the United States than Europe as Britain's most likely
source of help.

An Anglosphere Network Common-wealth would emerge from a series of
parallel, overlapping and non-exclusive cooperative organizations. Not all
Anglosphere nations would be expected to be involved in every other one.
Ireland, for example, would probably find the economic and migration
dimensions to be of interest, but would probably not participate in
defense-related activities. Nor should a rigid linguistic-cultural test be
used to exclude automatically a particular nation if its cooperation would
be otherwise useful. After all, whether a particular nation is a member of
a particular network civilization is in many cases likely to be a matter of
debate to which there is no automatic answer. Neither India, South Africa
nor even Canada are entirely English-speaking, but they all are significant
actors in the Anglosphere. Still more so, India is part of the Anglosphere
even though it is not primarily English-speaking. Yet its burgeoning
military alliance with the United States is facilitated both by the fact of
an English-speaking elite and, more particularly, by the British
"character" and traditions of its military forces.

So it is probably more useful to define network civilizations inclusively
rather than exclusively: some significant degree of English-speaking
population, and some degree of institutional affinity with Anglosphere
legal or governmental practices probably make it valid to include a nation
in the broader definition of the Anglosphere, and thus indicate that such a
nation might usefully participate in some of its cooperative institutions,
including an emerging Network Commonwealth.

What Spheres May Follow?
The more the highest value in international trade shifts from natural
resources, agricultural commodities and low-tech manufactured goods to
information products and services delivered via the Internet, the more
lines of trade and cooperation will fall along linguistic-cultural lines
rather than geographic ones. This is true not only for the Anglosphere.
Similarly, there has been an increasing trend for Spanish-language
information trade (particularly in electronic entertainment) to flow
seamlessly through what, by extension, could be dubbed the "Hispanosphere:"
an elastic entity that includes Los Angeles and Miami as well as Madrid,
Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

Indeed, the Spanish-speaking world is another prime candidate for the
creation of such a Network Commonwealth in the near future.
Spanish-language information productions (not only books and periodicals
but television programs and movies) flow freely across borders.
Spanish-language literature is enjoyed across national boundaries, and
something like a pan-Hispanosphere intellectual dialogue exists. The
Spanish-language Internet world lags behind that of the Anglosphere, for
obvious economic reasons, but similar trends can be observed within that
world.

In the economic realm, Spanish companies played a substantial role in the
modernization of Latin American economies during the 1990s and can be
expected to play a similar role in the future. Spain is now poised to
become the world's leading investor in Latin America. This is a new phenomenon, as Latin Americans since independence have looked to France, Britain and Am
erica for foreign economic participants. Yet it is likely to continue, and
perhaps accelerate, depending partly on whether the European Union's
structural evolution begins to create obstacles to Hispanosphere economic
cooperation.

Given its demographic vigor, the Hispanosphere could also emerge as another
network civilization. Although there has been relatively little effort to
create formal institutions to date, due partly to existing
intra-Hispanosphere rivalries, the cultural and economic spheres offer
obvious places to start-and there are proposals to turn the annual
Ibero-American Summit into a more permanent forum. Additionally, Spain,
like Britain, will eventually have to decide to what extent its European
ties can be permitted to limit its ability to collaborate with its overseas
linguistic compatriots. Both may find that a looser definition of the
European project is attractive as a consequence. Indeed, for Spain, a freer
movement of peoples from Latin America could present a more tolerable
solution to its share of Europe's demographic challenges than its current
course of action-dependence upon a flow of migrant labor from North Africa.

Along with the possible emerging Hispanosphere, France supports a
substantial apparatus-La Francophonie-for pan-Francophone relations that
could serve as the nucleus for a Francosphere Network Commonwealth. And
finally, the increasingly close connections between Brazil and the former
Portuguese states of Africa foreshadows the possible development of a
Lusophere. Such ties would be an asset out of proportion to Portugal's
other economic opportunities.

Might the Network Commonwealth ameliorate situations in which ethnic
populations spill over international borders? The Commonwealth of
Independent States-and now Putin's current program for a common economic
space that includes Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan-has been suspect as a
stalking-horse for a renewed Soviet Union or revived Russian empire.
Similarly, Chinese interest in Taiwan and Chinese-populated states such as
Singapore, and Turkish ambitions in the Turkic-speaking states of Central
Asia have also been viewed with suspicion. Yet in each case, a Network
Commonwealth approach might provide an outlet for these ambitions without
presenting the problems that any effort at state-building or incorporation
would arouse.

Can the European Union itself be considered a Network Commonwealth of
sorts? It has abolished state monopolies, opened protected markets and has
greatly increased the average European's freedom to travel, reside, work
and compete throughout its territory. Most importantly, it has served to
keep many of its politically more marginal members, such as Spain or
Greece, from backsliding into dictatorship-thereby creating an incentive
for shaky Mediterranean, central and east European democracies to join. But
the answer is no. It is difficult to envision the very broad Union, now
realized with the accession of the central and east European states, ever
successfully replicating the level of integration of France and Germany
from the Azores to the suburbs of St. Petersburg. The inherent problems in
defining a "common European culture" that includes all Union member-states
but excludes the Americas and Australasia make the idea of a wider European
state or a "European Network Commonwealth" highly problematic.

What is more likely to emerge over time is a European Union structure that
enables its member-states to develop Network Commonwealth ties with their
non-European civilizational partners. The most likely arrangement-to
oversimplify brutally-is a "variable geometry" Europe with a tight
federation of the Rhenish states (grouped around the Franco-German core)
much more loosely linked with the four historically "exceptionalist" areas:
the British Isles, Iberia, Scandinavia and east-central Europe. None of
these areas, for various reasons, ever experienced the full charms of the
Colbertian state, and each thus retains a core of resistance to implementing such institutions on a wider scale. Whether the tight federation or
the wider, loosely linked trade area bears the name "European Union" is a
taxonomic quibble.

Alternatives to World Governance
Evolutionary conservatism argues that organizing closely-linked sovereign
nations into a loose and flexible structure is a less costly step than
organizing wide-scale, rigid unions. The evolution of political forms thus
favors the Network Commonwealth. This is demonstrated by the fate of
proposals like that of author Clarence Streit in the late-1940s to form an
"Atlantic Union", a permanent federal union of the Atlantic democracies.
Although this idea had potential benefits, it also had a number of real
problems, many of which have also been encountered in the process of
building the European Union. Almost all of the benefits of the proposed
Atlantic Union promised could have been, and in fact later were, delivered
by less radical mechanisms that neither imposed the costs nor met the
resistance that a federal union threatened. Many of these alternative
mechanisms are the same institutions that promise to become the sinews of
a Network Commonwealth: free trade agreements, alliance structures and
cooperative organizations.

As returns from revenue collections (income, capital and sales taxation)
decline, the economic states that once derived direct benefit from their
large scale will find such benefits increasingly elusive. Rising costs and
falling benefits will foster their devolution or breakup.
Still, benefits to large-scale organization remain. They include mobility
of productive people over wide areas and cooperative pooling for defense or
scientific research purposes. These benefits can be realized more cheaply
by Network Commonwealth arrangements than by maintaining large-scale
economic states or by trying to form purely economic unions. The proposal
to form a free-trade agreement between nafta and the European Union (most
recently raised by British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown) is
fine as far as it goes. But new forms of common economic space must also be
realized to facilitate the collaboration of software, media, financial
services and other high-value information products among countries that are
information neighbors. nafta, the eea and the proposed nafta-EU link may
ultimately have more value in the future as means of linking different
Network Commonwealths, rather than as proto-commonwealths in themselves.
nafta's true vocation may be to link the communities of Shakespeare and
Cervantes rather than merely serve as a means of allowing the sale of
cheaper tomatoes in American supermarkets.

Rather than problematic schemes of universal transnational governance,
associated commonwealths, achieving more modest goals more effectively,
could be the prevailing political form of international organization in the
21st century.

---

The National Interest is one of those weird quarterly magazines you always see in the meganewstands of Manhattan but never see anyone buy. I buy one every year or so when something catches my attention, and this spring's ussue was broght to my attention by The McLaughlin Group this weekend. They, actually McLaughlin himself, referenced an article described in the table of contents thus:

Does Iraq Matter?
By: Morton Abramowitz. Realists, neocons, and liberals all agree that American failure in Iraq would be a catastrophe beyond Iraq. Really? How exactly?

The quotes from the article McLaughlin presented seriously challenged the validity of the ubiquitous "stay the course in Iraq" position as well as the "we can't afford to leave Iraq now" position, though you can't tell that from the excerpt which is all the magazine allows non-subscribers online:

Does Iraq Matter?

The following is an excerpt. Full versions of the article are available to subscribers only.

The invasion of Iraq was in great part a role of the dice. The only certain consequence was an end to the Saddam Hussein regime--an unmitigated blessing--and to its potential military threats to its neighbors. But beyond that, there were no certainties and apparently little introspection and analysis in the top ranks of the executive branch. The future of Iraq was rather in the eyes of the beholder. Iraq policy is now increasingly a response to developments on the ground there and the vagaries of our domestic politics. Ending the Arab-Israel conflict would have far more influence on transforming the Arab world than creating a new Iraqi government.

Knowing what we now know about Iraq, one could make the argument that we would have been better off if we had spent only a fraction of the hundreds of billions our Iraq venture will end up costing us in bribing Arabs and Israelis into a settlement and enforcing it. Neither the United States nor any other democracy for that matter ever works that way. Hopefully, Iraq will turn out reasonably well. This is still certainly possible. Power, much money and better livelihood can contribute significantly. History, however, shows that short-term military occupations have rarely produced successful nation-building. "Staying the course" might just mean digging in. The best that can be said with some certainty is that to stay or leave Iraq is going to be messy, costly and engage our energies and public discussion for a long time to come.

In essence, Abramowitz' argument says we should consider whether it's possible to achieve the administrations' goal at all under the current circumstances.

BTW, Tony Blankley, weekly participant and editorial page editor of The Washington Times, is a shill so deep up the administration's butt he should be an honorary proctologist

---

Several quotes of note here:

They noted that the company paid signature gatherers for the ballot initiative more than it pays its average clerk.

and

The attorney general's letter to the Inglewood City Council states that while the initiative process may be used to adopt land-use and planning measures, the ballot cannot be used to usurp powers granted to elected bodies, like issuing building permits. The attorney general also said the initiative might be in conflict with state laws governing subdivisions and the environment.

and

The only city official vocally supporting the project is the mayor, Roosevelt F. Dorn. He said the complex would bring more than 1,000 new permanent jobs, add $3 million to $5 million a year to the distressed city's tax base and provide a revenue stream to finance as much as $100 million in new bonds. "We're talking about a new police station, a new community and cultural center, a new park in District 4, upgrades for every park and recreation area in Inglewood," Mr. Dorn said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a no-brainer."

and

David Karjanen, research coordinator at the Center on Policy Initiatives, a nonprofit group in San Diego that studies the impact of development on low- and moderate-income families, said he had studied Wal-Mart's efforts to win approval for projects across the nation and found the Inglewood case to be unique in the breadth of the exemption it would win from local land-use planning.

"If this succeeds in Inglewood, it will set a precedent and send a message to developers who have an unpalatable project," Dr. Karjanen said. "It will open the door for others, not just Wal-Mart, and we can expect to see this happen across California and elsewhere."

---

Stymied by Politicians, Wal-Mart Turns to Voters
By JOHN M. BRODER

INGLEWOOD, Calif., April 2 — As Wal-Mart continues its march across the American landscape, this Los Angeles suburb of 112,000 people is the latest testing ground for the company's exercise of political and marketing muscle.

Inglewood voters go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to turn over 60 acres of barren concrete adjacent to the Hollywood Park racetrack to Wal-Mart to create a megastore and a collection of chain shops and restaurants.

The ballot initiative is sponsored by Wal-Mart, which collected more than 10,000 signatures to put the question to voters after the Inglewood City Council blocked the proposed development last year, citing environmental, traffic, labor, public safety and economic concerns.

While Wal-Mart has turned to the ballot in a number of cities and towns to win the right to build its giant emporiums, the Inglewood initiative is significantly different. The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A.

The company is blanketing the community, which is roughly half African-American and half Latino, with mailers and telephone calls and is broadcasting advertisements on television stations with black and Latino audiences.

---

AIDS Fears Grow for Black Women
By LINDA VILLAROSA

HOUSTON — Once a week, the five friends, all members of the Abundant Life Cathedral here, get together to eat sushi, sip wine and talk. But one recent afternoon, the women chose a different activity: They went to see "Not a Day Goes By," a musical about black men on the "down low" who, while not calling themselves gay or bisexual, have sex with other men, often behind the backs of their wives and girlfriends.

To these women, it was a subject of increasing urgency.

"Once I found out how prevalent the down low was in our community, I was very afraid," said one of the women, Tracy Scott, a 37-year-old government relations consultant.

Her friend Misha King, 35, said she needed to get as much information as she could, as quickly as she could.

"I've been on field trips to the gay bars and have seen guys that look like men you would date," Ms. King said. "I treat every man as a bisexual because I don't want to end up as the sister with H.I.V."

In the past, concern about black women and AIDS was mainly focused on those who had used drugs or had had sex with users. But increasingly, women like Ms. Scott and her friends have begun to worry, too.

In government studies of 29 states, a black woman was 23 times more likely to be infected with AIDS than was a white woman, and black women accounted for 71.8 percent of new H.I.V. cases in women from 1999 to 2002. Though new cases of H.I.V. among black women have been stable in the past few years, the number of those who have been infected through heterosexual sex has risen.

In 2001, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group focusing on health issues, an estimated 67 percent of black women with AIDS contracted the virus through heterosexual sex, compared with 58 percent four years earlier. Black women accounted for half of all H.I.V. infections acquired through heterosexual sex, in men or women, from 1999 to 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

---

7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led occupation rippled across Iraq on Sunday, reaching into Baghdad and the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on the capital's outskirts and roiling the holy city of Najaf and at least two other cities in southern Iraq.

Seven American soldiers were killed in Sadr City, one of the worst single losses for the American forces in any firefight since Baghdad was captured a year ago.

An Iraqi health official in Najaf said 24 people had been killed and about 200 wounded in clashes that ensued when armed militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a 31-year-old firebrand Shiite cleric, besieged a garrison commanded by Spanish troops on the road leading into Najaf from neighboring Kufa.

An American military spokesman said one Salvadoran soldier had been killed in Kufa and 13 soldiers wounded, including an American. All the other casualties were said to be Iraqis.

Within hours of a call by Mr. Sadr to his followers to "terrorize your enemy," his militiamen, said to number tens of thousands across Iraq, emerged into the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa and Amara, a city 250 miles south of Baghdad where four Iraqis were reported killed in clashes with British troops.

Forbidden to bear arms under a decree issued last year by the American occupation authority, the Sadr militiamen bristled with a wide array of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades that were fired at American tanks in Sadr City.

Taking advantage of an American policy that has largely kept American and other occupation troops out of volatile Shiite population centers like Sadr City, Najaf and Kufa, the militiamen succeeded in taking control of checkpoints and police stations in all three cities that had been staffed by the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force.

Residents in the three centers said the Iraqis had abandoned their posts almost as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the militiamen in unchallenged control — and punching a huge hole in American hopes that American-trained Iraqis can be relied on increasingly to take over from American troops in providing security in Iraq's major cities.

---

April 04, 2004

Wal-Mart vs Ujamaa It is still an open question as to what efficiencies black owned businesses provide operating in a black community. Lower marketing costs perhaps? Will these necessarily be passed on to the consumer? Or will it be that black consumers are willing to pay higher prices from black merchants?

Efficiencies aren't what they are searching for - effects are what they are searching for. Business isn't sought for the sake of business but as part of the necessary support for a community, and the community effects are what they seek to optimize/

The problem is that community effects aren't free. Put bluntly, it's less expensive to run a business without doing charitable work on the side. That expense can be the difference between survival and bankruptcy, especially if you're talking about owner/operators with little experience navigating the paperwork and legal issues.

Also, though yeah, there should be more Black entrepreneurs…would be if it weren't for racism…I don't think business is a useful tool in holding a community together. Let's face it, if you can run a self-sustaining Ujamaa network it's because you had a community already. Using business as community development and support puts those businesses at an economic disadvantage relative to mainstream business-which does not do community development and support (voluntarily) because the mainstream gets that support through other channels.

---

I saw a reference at Steve Gilliard's News Blog about Instapundit suggestion/approving/whatever a boycott of DKos advertisers, over Kos' lack of sympathy for mercenaries killed on the job. I'm like, "Whoa!" and loking around to find out WTF that's all about.

Found the Kerry blog delinked Kos over it, and the thread give some detail but not enough. Finally got my data fix at The Blogging of the President:

On Friday, Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger Instapundit, was on the case, picking up from right-winger Michael Friedman. Reynolds, a moral leader of the right, suggested this was indicative of general hatred and rot on the left. Following Reynolds was Tacitus, the conservative blogger that most liberals find tolerable. Friedman instigated a campaign to remove the advertisers from Daily Kos, including several Congressional campaigns who had found success raising money there. The South Dakota GOP, the ones fighting Stephanie Herseth by complaining about her 'secret internet fundraising', put Markos's comments on the front page of their web site. Democratic advertisers couldn't wait to jump ship from Markos. Even John Kerry delinked him from the Kerry blog. Other Democrats joined in the chorus. Liberal Kevin Drum asked for an apology from Kos, as did Oliver Willis. Mark Kleiman, a well-respected blogger on the left, compared Markos to Ann Coulter. Seen in light of the history of Zuniga's service to his country and long honest track record versus Coulter's dishonest opportunism and consistent appeals to violence towards the left, this comparison is absurd. But with only one data point to use as a comparison, you can't distinguish between the two. [P6: per usual for BOP, mad links embedded]

But just as important as the detail is the analysis by Matt Stoller:

This attack on Markos was bound to happen; after all, a key strategy of any political movement is to destroy the ability of its opponent to marshal support, and the blogosphere for some reason helps the left more than the right. But the larger trend is worrisome. What we are seeing is the first time a blogger, albeit one who controls hundreds of thousands of dollars of resources and potentially millions more, is put under the microscope of the reactionary media, a media which we have already seen strips context. Unlike any other media personality, a blogger willingly puts his life online, and it is that context which builds the blog into an institution. No blogger can stand up to a distortionary spotlight. And so we see the unvarnished nature of blogs is under attack. Ironically, Michael Friedman, the right-wing blogger who started the campaign to remove advertising from dKos, is worried.

There is a danger, however, that this will lead to retaliation. If I start selling blog ads next week will Kos's readers organize against me? Or perhaps more intelligently, will they start a campaign to get rid of Glenn Reynolds's advertisers? I hope not and even if they do I don't think it will be effective unless the target of the campaign gets seriously out of line with his posts like Kos did. I don't plan to do that and I hope Glenn Reynolds doesn't either.

Probably the most significant long term impact of this incident will be the warning it provides to all blogads buyers to be careful about where they purchase ads and to make sure that the blogs they choose are not likely to embarrass them.

It's an interesting question he raises, about the responsibility advertisers have to monitor the content of the sites on which they advertise. This also includes linking; how responsible is a site for linking to another site which posts questionable content? These aren't new questions, but with the blogosphere writing down conversations that didn't use to get written down, they take on new meaning. Had Markos made this comment among friends, or in a speech, or even on talk radio, it's unlikely that anyone would have noticed. But with everyday discussions among friends subject to such intense public scrutiny, the question of context is amplified, because more and more free conversation is open to exploitation.

Not that I shiv a gitz because not only do I not sell ads there is NO CHANCE IN HELL any official entity wants to be associated with me if I did.

But this is one reason I'm not a partisan of ANY political party. Don't take me for a Democrat just because I feel Bush's ignorance and the aggression of his puppeteers is the more immediate threat. And if you don't believe it, come back after the election.

---

You are Bob Herbert! You're not the most sparkling
writer, but one of the most solid and selfless
on the Op-Ed staff. You focus on New York
politics, the poor, race issues, and civil
liberties. You like to quote others, and rarely
place yourself in your columns. You keep it
real. Seriously.


Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

via Body and Soul

---

Quote of note:

"I understand the president trying to uphold the separation of powers privilege," said Charles Black, an adviser to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign. "But at the same time, everybody on the political side wanted her to testify."

The reason it is to be noted:

"It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis"

Bush's Credibility Now Rests on Her Shoulders
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — It has become a political cliché of Washington to say that Condoleezza Rice's upbringing at the hands of ambitious parents who pushed her to excel - as a concert pianist, a competitive ice skater and a young girl tutored in Spanish and French - created a woman who has lived on stage for most of her life.

It is not a cliché to say that on Thursday, when Ms. Rice publicly testifies to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, she will have to turn in a show-stopping performance as the woman on whose shoulders the credibility of the Bush administration now rests.

Ms. Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, was last week's media-figure-on-the-hot-seat, her scowling face glaring out from the front pages of newspapers and the cover of Time. Her celebrity came not just from her boss's initial refusal to allow her to testify, but from the reality that emerged from the statements to the commission of other senior Bush officials: Ms. Rice is the gatekeeper between the president and the entire counterterrorism policy of his administration.

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Questions for Dr. Rice
By PETER BERGEN

2. Both Bob Woodward's book "Bush at War" and Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" show that shortly after 9/11 there was considerable focus by the Bush cabinet on Iraq's possibly being the perpetrator of the attacks. Why was Iraq considered a suspect when there was no evidence that it was involved in any act of anti-American terrorism for a decade — other than a failed attempt to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush in 1993 — while there was overwhelming evidence that it was the Al Qaeda network that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, tried to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, blew up American embassies in Africa in 1998 and attacked the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000? After all, the cabinet did not discuss the possibility that the attacks were the work of Iran, Libya or Syria, all countries that have a history of terrorism directed at Americans.[P6: emphasis added]

4. The Bush administration's position, and your own, has been that it would not have been possible to conceive that planes might be used as missiles against the United States. Yet during the 1996 Olympics countermeasures were taken for just that eventuality. How do you reconcile this discrepancy?

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Questions for Dr. Rice
By SCOTT ARMSTRONG

4. What was the accumulated evidence on Sept. 11 that Iraq was a direct and imminent threat to the United States? How much reliance did our government put on human sources, Iraqi defectors and former Iraqi officials for this intelligence? In retrospect, do you consider these sources to have been credible? [P6: being three questions, the first of which is the tough one, the second now known and the third a silly shot at extracting a self-incriminating response that Dr. Rice is still too smooth to fall for]

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Option Pie: Overeating Is a Health Hazard
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

THE escalating excess that passes for everyday pay among corporate executives in America has long been justified this way: If they are not paid huge amounts, they will go to greener pastures. Investors will lose.

But a new and comprehensive academic study shows, once and for all, that increases in executive pay, on average, do not translate into later gains for shareholders. Not in the next year, not in three years, not in five.

Joseph R. Blasi and Douglas L. Kruse, professors at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations, analyzed executive compensation at more than 1,500 American companies from 1992 to 2002. They wanted to determine whether increases in executive compensation, particularly stock options, predicted share returns.

Using company filings, the professors analyzed some 16,500 corporate board decisions on pay over those years. Compensation of 7,500 top executives over the last decade totaled $177 billion; almost $100 billion of that came from options and restricted stock grants.

The study found that a 1 percent increase in total compensation for each of the top five executives at companies predicted a 0.22 percent decrease in average shareholder return over the next year and a 0.12 percent decline over three years. The effect over five years was statistically insignificant.

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Is C.E.O. Pay Up or Down? Both.
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Published: April 4, 2004

THE message from corporate directors to shareholders who are fuming about elephantine executive pay is: We're working on it. The response they get back may very well be: Thanks, but this is not quite what we had in mind.

On paper, the days of rapidly rising executive compensation appear to be ending. Many excesses of the 1990's have been wrung out, and the chances that chief executives will reap hundreds of millions of dollars from cashing in stock options have diminished.

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For Directors, Great Expectations (and More Pay)
By ERIC DASH

GOODBYE to golf games and clubby cocktail parties - or many of them, anyway. Hello to weekend work sessions, piles of paperwork and parsing of arcane accounting rules.

That is the new reality for corporate directors like Betsy S. Atkins, chief executive and owner of Baja L.L.C., a venture capital firm in Miami and a board member of three technology companies. These days, she says, board strategy sessions run into early evening. Her workload as a director has tripled, and the time she spends in audit and compensation committee meetings has increased even more. She needs four of her employees - including two accountants and a market researcher - to help manage the burden.

"This is not your grandfather's board, where people just showed up and voted," she said. Board-related business, she added, typically fills about four workdays a month per company, but in a crisis one company can take more than half her time. Demands on directors have intensified in the post- Enron era, and a new risk-reward calculus has emerged, specialists in corporate governance say. A directorship still carries a handsome paycheck and the cachet to help an executive's career. But since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 set new requirements for directors, the work also entails more time and effort - not to mention the risk of litigation and a besmirched reputation if something goes wrong. Far fewer people are willing to assume all this.

Largely in recognition of the extra time, compensation specialists say, pay packages for directors are rising. Last year, total compensation for the average director ranged from $43,000 at small companies to $155,000 at the largest 200 concerns - and it is expected to rise at least 15 percent in 2004, said Edward Archer, a compensation consultant at Pearl Meyer & Partners.

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Blair told US was targeting Saddam 'just days after 9/11'
White House faces fresh pressure over flawed intelligence, Saddam's arsenal, and the threat from al-Qa'ida
By Raymond Whitaker
04 April 2004

George Bush asked for Tony Blair's backing to remove Saddam Hussein from power just nine days after the 11 September attacks, over a private dinner at the White House, a US magazine reported last night.

Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador to Washington, was at the dinner table as Mr Blair replied that he would rather concentrate on ousting the Taliban and restoring peace in Afghanistan.

In a 25,000-word article in this month's American edition of Vanity Fair, Sir Christopher recounts Mr Bush as responding: "I agree with you Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq." Mr Blair, Sir Christopher writes, "said nothing to demur" at the prospect.

Sir Christopher's account presents a new challenge to Mr Blair's assertion that no decision was taken on the invasion of Iraq until just days before operations began, in March 2003. It implies regime change in Iraq was US policy immediately after 11 September.

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…but I'm a hair's breadth away from saying STFU to the entire Holy See.

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Speaking out against gay marriage
Two bishops lead Catholics marching in North Beach
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 4, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Two bishops led about 1,000 devout, sign-carrying Roman Catholics on a five-block march through North Beach on Saturday to protest same-sex marriages in San Francisco.

"We need to speak out, with civility," Archbishop William Levada said on the steps of SS Peter and Paul Church before leading the procession of the faithful. "We must keep society on the right track.'' Levada called same-sex marriages a "regression in society" and urged passage of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages in order to "stand up for the bedrock of society -- marriage and family. ... The only possible resolution of this is a constitutional amendment."

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Playing Into Their Hands
Our "war" on terror breeds terrorists, and a vicious cycle of violence
By George Soros
George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. His most recent book is "The Bubble of American Supremacy."

April 4, 2004

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.

If the administration cannot recognize and admit its mistakes, it cannot correct its policies.

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Man, you want to get disgusted, go to the article and read.It opens with a story of murder that I want to think exaggerated, but I can't.

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Remember the Blood Frenzy of Rwanda
Genocide prevention must become a foreign policy priority to avoid a repetition of those hideous crimes.
By Samantha Power
Samantha Power is the author of "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and a lecturer in human rights policy at Harvard University

April 4, 2004

…The Clinton administration's response was best captured by a State Department press conference two days into the slaughter. Prudence Bushnell, the midlevel official who had been put in charge of managing the evacuation of Americans — and only Americans — from Rwanda, spoke with journalists about the Rwandan horrors. After she left the podium, State Department spokesman Michael McCurry took her place and seamlessly turned to the next item on the day's agenda: U.S. criticism of foreign governments that were preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List."

"This film movingly portrays the 20th century's most horrible catastrophe," McCurry said. "And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference." McCurry urged that the film be shown worldwide.

"The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy," he declared, "is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten."

No one made any connection between Bushnell's remarks and McCurry's, between Rwanda and the Holocaust. Neither journalists nor officials in the United States were focused then — or in the ensuing three months — on the fate of Rwanda's Tutsis.

By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. At least 800,000 people — half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier — had been eliminated.

The Rwandan genocide revealed, more than any other event in the 20th century, the shallowness of the pledge of "never again." Again, a dozen key plotters managed to organize a society around mass murder. Again, an inconvenient minority found itself targeted for extermination. And again, the world watched.

Indeed, the U.S. and its allies on the U.N. Security Council didn't simply watch. They voted to withdraw the U.N. peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection.

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For DJs, a global spin
A movable 'academy' gathers artists from around the world each year to perform, share and learn about electronic music in all its guises.
By Jeff Miller
April 4, 2004

There's a brick building at the end of Jamieson Street, past the auto repair shops, past the blood red duplex and the squatters who have claimed it as their own, behind a set of overbearing wrought-iron gates. At one time, it was a printing factory; before that, a brothel; and before that, an Asian seaman's club.

But on this warm Southern Hemisphere night, there's music blasting out of the windows — beats and raps, blips and samples; high-pitched, oscillating wails. Tonight, 32 Jamieson St. is home to the Red Bull Music Academy, and the squatters down the street watch the third-floor window where a young man screams along with the guttural hip-hop while another dances, seemingly randomly flailing around to the beat. A third twentysomething manipulates the music, slows the rhythm down, and brings it to a halt.

It's 9 p.m., and for these students at this international academy for DJs, the night's just begun.

"Being a DJ in America, you get a little bit jaded," says Vivian Host from San Francisco, one of three American DJ students in this year's academy. "But when you come here, you realize how little access people have to new records, to new sounds, to DJs from other places. You can help expose people to something they might not otherwise get."

That attitude of discovery runs rampant throughout the program, which brings together students and lecturers from all over the world to discuss and perform electronic music in all its guises. The music the students make ranges from loose, spacey jams to hard-thumping beat symphonies. But it has one thing in common — it's music that can be made with synthesizers and computers, with instruments often taking a back seat to electronic sounds.

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Last Chance for an Alliance
By Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page B07

…While we must end the appearance of occupation, it is equally clear that Iraq will need a neutral referee, and tens of thousands of foreign troops for many years to keep these growing political tensions from ripping the country apart.

Instead, the Bush administration's current plan is to have a new U.S. ambassador call all the shots, at the risk that Iraqis will think the occupation has not really ended on June 30.[P6: Hey, AMERICANS won't think the occupation is ended.] Indeed, we will be going from the CPA -- which at least has some international flavor -- to an exclusively American operation with a "Super-Embassy."

Our goal should be to take the "American face" off the occupation so that we are not blamed for everything that doesn't go right in Iraq. Without a strategy to broaden the coalition, the American people will question a policy that requires them to continue to pay nearly 90 percent of the costs in blood and treasure for Iraq's security and reconstruction.

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Of course, I'm not the one that has to know, but I can't think of a single nation in a position to be of real assistance that has motivation to help. I can think of a few politicians…

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Fewer Say Bush Is Serving Middle Class
Poll Shows Americans Split Over Whether President Has Governed Compassionately
By Dana Milbank and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page A06

As he approaches the November election, President Bush has shed a good part of the "compassionate conservative" image he cultivated during the 2000 election, a Washington Post poll has found.

Bush came to office three years ago with a message that he was different from traditional Republican conservatives because he was promoting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. But with his presidency dominated by foreign policy issues and such traditional conservative favorites as tax cuts, he has dropped from his speeches the compassionate conservative moniker that was his trademark in 2000.

The Post poll found Americans split over whether Bush has governed in a compassionate way, with 49 percent saying he has and 45 percent saying he has not. That is down sharply from February 2003, when a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought he had governed compassionately.

While a majority of Americans (58 percent) say Bush has governed as expected [P6: because Republican insiders didn't expect him to be compassionate in the first place], the Post poll showed that the rest are about twice as likely to say the president has been less compassionate (25 percent) than to say he has been more compassionate (13 percent). Forty-four percent now believe Bush cares most about serving upper-income people, an increase from 31 percent in September 1999 and 39 percent in July 2000. Forty-one percent believe Bush cares equally about all people[P6: Logically, a different statement than saying he cares about people.], with small numbers saying he favors the poor or the middle class. [P6: I'll bet those "small numbers" of people are rich as Croesus and angry they pay any taxes at all.]

Whether this loss of compassion credentials is a problem for Bush depends on which voters prove to be the decisive bloc in November. Political strategists say the Bush campaign is gambling that it can win largely by mobilizing core GOP voters in large numbers -- a departure from recent elections, in which many moderate "swing" voters were the key.

Republican pollster Bill McInturff has determined that both Democratic- and GOP-leaning voters have made up their minds early this year. With fewer voters crossing between parties in recent elections, "there's not much flexibility on either side," he said. "Bush folks have been preparing for this type of election for a long time. There's a handful of groups up for grabs."

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Framework of Clarke's Book Is Bolstered

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page A01

… The most sweeping challenge to Clarke's account has come from two Bush allies, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Fred F. Fielding, a member of the investigative panel. They have suggested that sworn testimony Clarke gave in 2002 to a joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures was at odds with his sworn testimony last month. Frist said Clarke may have "lied under oath to the United States Congress."

But the broad outline of Clarke's criticism has been corroborated by a number of other former officials, congressional and commission investigators, and by Bush's admission in the 2003 Bob Woodward book "Bush at War" that he "didn't feel that sense of urgency" about Osama bin Laden before the attacks occurred.

In addition, a review of dozens of declassified citations from Clarke's 2002 testimony provides no evidence of contradiction, and White House officials familiar with the testimony agree that any differences are matters of emphasis, not fact. Indeed, the declassified 838-page report of the 2002 congressional inquiry includes many passages that appear to bolster the arguments Clarke has made.

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Brazil Shielding Uranium Facility
Nation Seeks to Keep Its Proprietary Data From U.N. Inspectors

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page A01

The Brazilian government has refused to allow U.N. nuclear inspectors to examine a facility for enriching uranium under construction near Rio de Janeiro, according to Brazilian officials and diplomats in Vienna, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA and Brazil are at an impasse over the inspections, the diplomats said. Brazil maintains that the facility will produce low-enriched uranium for use in power plants, not the highly enriched material used in nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, Brazil refuses to let IAEA inspectors see equipment in the plant, citing a need to protect proprietary information.

The diplomatic standoff plays into fears that a new type of nuclear race is underway, marked not by the bold pursuit of atomic weapons but by the quiet and lawful development of sophisticated technology for nuclear energy production, which can be quickly converted into a weapons program.

Brazil's project also poses a conundrum for President Bush, who has called for tighter restrictions on the enrichment of uranium, even for nuclear power, as part of a new strategy to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Nonproliferation specialists say that if the United States and the United Nations do not act to curtail Brazil's program, or at least insist on inspections, the lack of action could undermine White House calls for Iran and North Korea to halt their efforts to enrich uranium.

"If we don't want these kinds of facilities in Iran or North Korea, we shouldn't want them in Brazil," said former U.S. nuclear negotiator James E. Goodby. "You have to apply the same rules to adversaries as you do to friends. I do not see that happening in Brazil."

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