TCS: Tech - Pork Addicts and Hypocrites

Great article on the HOV scam. They don't work here in Houston, either, which is why the new I-10 widening project will be doubling the number of HOV lanes :-(

Viewing the remarkable retrenchment of American foreign policy the last few days (for example, here, here, and here), the question must be asked: Where did it go wrong? Where did America's resolve first flag?

The answer lies, at least in part, with Congress' failure to declare war in the days after Sept 11.

In 1812, following several incidences of interference in US sovereignty, Congress declared war on England.

In 1846, following disagreements and border conflicts over Texas' southern border, Congress declared war on Mexico.

In 1892, following the mysterious explosion of a US ship in a Spanish port, Congress declared war on Spain.

In 1917, following the discovery of a plot between Germany and Mexico for the invasion of the US, Congress declared war on Germany and her allies.

In 1941, following the attack on the US possession Pearl Harbor (Hawaii wasn't a state then, of course), Congress declared war on Japan and her allies.

In 1993, following a bombing attack on the World Trade Center, Congress fails to declare war on Islamic terrorists and their allies.

In 1998, following synchronized attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Congress fails to declare war on Islamic terrorists and their allies.

In 2000, following the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Congress fails to declare war on Islamic terrorists and their allies.

In 2001, following the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, Congress fails to declare war on Islamic terrorists and their allies.

Given an embarrassing excess of provocation, Congress passed resolutions of support for the president, resolutions of condemnation of terrorism, and aid packages for the airline industry. Oh, and it took over the airline security business.

But it did not declare war on the enemies who, in both word and deed, had declared war on us.

An "Authorization Of The Use Of Force" is a fine and good thing. But it is not a declaration of war. It imposes considerable congressional oversight in the conduct of the war, limiting the president in exercising his constitutional role as commander-in-chief, keeping one hand tied behind his back to congress can keep a close eye on it. It gives legal status to the role of political bickering and maneuvering.

It is a good way to ensure that we do not win this conflict.

And it took just two days after Sept 11 for Congress to fail.

The declaration of war is a serious thing, not to be undertaken lightly. It is serious because it commits the military to forceful conflict. It is serious because it commits the president to the prosecution of that war as the primary national interest. It is serious because it commits congress to supporting that war as the primary national interest. It is serious because commits the people to supporting that war as the primary national interest.

It is a considered instrument for focusing the entire resources of the United States in the defense of itself. It forces the the State Department to act in ways that support that war. It forces congress to pay attention to the issues of importance. It reorients the political debate around the most effective way to destroy our national enemies, instead of the usual topic of destroying the other part. And it enforces that concentration to the exclusion of all other distractions.

All of which have been conspicuously missing in recent months.

FOXNews.com

More evidence that Israel and the US should cut Arafat loose and finish cleaning out the Palestinian areas. Talking doesn't cut it with these people.

John Derbyshire on Profiling on National Review Online

John Derbyshire knows the importance of being rude to your enemies.

Independent Argument

More european whining about how the US doesn't sufficiently respect their obvious wisdom and superior morality. Actually, we might respect them were their wisdom actually obvious (or even vaguely apparent) and their morality superior (or even equivalent).

NakedWriting.com

A liberal's take on the prospect of the US using nukes in the middle east. He's all for it.

Why Bush Has Given Up on Europe

Fred Barnes doesn't agree.

NATIONAL POST ONLINE | Commentary story

Mark Stein has some interesting ideas about Bush's war (or peace, depending on how you interpret things) on terror. While I agree that the Bush presidency has come badly offtrack since December, I dunno that I agree with the rest of the article. If Bush were really planning some major whoopass for the next few months there'd be more (or even some!) evidence. My suspicion is that Bush's interest in the actual warlike aspects of the "War on Terror" were derailed as soon as he started talking about international consensus and diplomatic pressure. Historically, the usual result of diplomacy is to simply delay action in the hopes that the problem will eventually go away. And the danger of a coalition, especially one that does not spring immediately into existence but requires "building", is again that it delays action, weakens resolve by turning a nice-to-have into a must-have; and because of the weakness of the other partners that had to be enticed, cajoled, or bribed, the desire for action is muted by their lack of enthusiasm, and by the need to secure their concensus (again via begging or bribing) for each step of the way.

The result is that eight months after 9/11, the US is still coalition-building after an initially successful first campaign into Afghanistan. The president is stating publicly that the US is no longer planning to do anything about Iraq and Iran. The president is slashing the military in the tradition of his father and Clinton. The War on Terror has devolved into the malaise of courtroom arguments.

And Iran and Iraq are funding and fomenting additional trouble in Israel. Al-Quaeda is planning more grand strikes with Saudi money. Muslim clerics and politicians are inciting the entire middle-east to war against the US. And the very politicians that Bush is trying to cajole into his coalition are publicly siding with Palestinian terrorists.

The US in general (and Bush in particular) had better get off it's ass. This is not a game. Should al-Quaeda mount another successful attack against the US, Bush jr will have to face some very difficult questions, not just about security lapses, but as to why he has failed utterly to deal with the foundations of Islamic terror.

Mark Helprin on Defense & War on National Review Online

An eye-opener by Helprin, which I've somehow managed to miss for a month now.

USATODAY.com - Military leaders question Iraq plan

As President Bush tries to rally European support for military action against Iraq, U.S. armed services leaders are questioning whether their forces are ready for another war.

The chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have concluded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must address concerns about an overtaxed military before they can plan action to oust Saddam Hussein, senior uniformed officials with knowledge of the debate said.

If this is true, then the US Military is in a sorry state indeed. In the 80's, the military's goal was to be able to fight a two-front war. Under Bush Sr and Clinton, that dropped to a one-front war.

Even if that front is as small as Afghanistan has turned out to be?

The mind boggles.

FOXNews.com

It's a lucky thing his gun jammed, because due to the stupid federal laws there wasn't anybody around that could have saved them.

I'm curious how he managed to get a shotgun (which tend to be pretty long) into a duffel bag, which I'm presuming is how he got it into the terminal undetected. The article doesn't mention if it had been illegally sawn short, although if it jammed it may have been a semiautomatic, and if so isn't terribly sawable due to the requirements of the action.

FOXNews.com India's going into this with the wrong attitude. This quote from Fox: "On Wednesday, standing about 15 miles from the disputed frontier, [Indian Prime Minister] Vajpayee addressed hundreds of soldiers on the tense Kashmir border and told them to prepare for war.Army officers responded by declaring the troops were ready to die..."

If I were Indian, I would prefer to have troops that were ready to kill.

A New Approach to the Middle East

Bill Kristol lays out Saudi complicity in the current war. He falls down badly towards the end, as in his suggestion of "hoping for and encouraging change from within Saudi Arabia" which doesn't go nearly far enough.

The Saudis are as much of the problem of world terror as Iran, Iraq, and Arafat. They may have more money, and dress nicer, but their goals as detailed by Kristol, are the same.

CNN.com Iceberg 35 miles long, 7 miles wide breaks away from Antarctica.

Sounds bad, and sounds worse as the article progresses with a litany of recent iceberg calvings.

Then, towards the bottom of the article, this gem:

However, new measurements indicate the ice in parts of Antarctica is thickening, reversing earlier estimates that the sheet was melting.

and this one:

That report, in the journal Science, came less than a week after a paper in Nature reported that Antarctica's harsh desert valleys - long considered a bellwether for global climate change -- have grown noticeably cooler since the mid-1980s.

I'm not a scientist in that field, but it does seem possible that the recent spate of calvings could be caused by the thermal stresses induced by the pole cooling, especially if it's cooling at different rates around the poles. And it certainly seems possible that the thickening ice has changed the rate at which parts of the glaciers are flowing, also helping to stress the fragile and unsupported ice shelves.

CNN.com - Card's 'Ender's Game' coming to screen - May 22, 2002 Warner Bros. has made a deal for "The Perfect Storm" director Wolfgang Petersen to bring Orson Scott Card's prize-winning series of science-fiction bestsellers "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow" to the bigscreen, Variety reports.

This is great news. Ender's Game is one of the all-time greats of the Sci-Fi genre, and is one of the few scifi books that non-nerds also enjoy.

The article muffs it badly, however, when it describes the Battle Room as "a cross between "Harry Potter's" quidditch matches and "Star Wars" Jedi light saber battles". If the author thought it up on his own it's not too bad, but if this came out of the press release then it could portend trouble.

Speaking of which, I should mention that the Big Faves on our Sonoma trip were Topolos, Sunce, and Hanna wineries. We bought 3 1/2 cases from Topolos (Bella Lisa, Rossi Ranch, Alicante Bouschet, Zin Port, Pinot), and 1 case from Sunce (mixture of reds and whites). We would have gotten more from Sunce but we were at the end of the trip, and were feeling increasingly guilty everytime we looked at the cases scattered around the hotel room. Only got a couple of bottles at Hanna, but we can get them here at Spec's.

Also honorable mentions were Dry Creek Vinyards (their reserve chardonnay was a real find), and Quivira (esp their "Deiden" Zinfandel, which was a wonderfully zippy yet elegant Zinfandel).

Topolos is owned by a Greek, Sunce by a Croatian, and Hanna by a Syrian. Probably says something about our taste in wines, and certainly makes the missus and I wish a better selection of Greek wines were available here in Houston.

news.telegraph.co.uk - White wine is good for your lungs, says study

Now I don't feel so guilty about the 9 1/2 cases the wife and I brought back from Sonoma.

<snicker>'Copy-proof' CDs cracked with marker pen</snicker>

What does a Newberry-award-winning historian use for his sources? According to Eugene Volokh, a high-school kid's unsubstantiated comments on something she thought she heard someone say.

Yahoo! News - U.S. Won't Allow Guns in Cockpits "The federal government said Tuesday that pilots will not be allowed to have guns in the cockpits of commercial airplanes."

The pilots are as front-line as the marines or army in this war. They should be armed.

What will the Bush administration think of next? Forbid citizens from carrying guns in their apartments?

It's way past time for the Bush administration to get serious about this fight. Lately the administration been coasting on its performance immediately after Sept 11. Tough talk followed by inaction is not a recipe for success.

The Independent has this gem to offer on how to solve the the Kashmir problem: "Once again, the US must take the lead through a diplomatic minefield."

Personally, I think the US is a little too simplisme for a complicated issue like this. It's time Europe recognized the burden of it's superior moral judgement and started dealing with problems like this on it's own.

Hyperbole from Steve Connor of the Independent News

Planet Earth is going through its sixth and probably its most devastating period of mass extinction with scores, and possibly hundreds of species of animals and plants dying out each year. But unlike the previous five extinction waves, this time the culprit is just another lifeform, Homo sapiens.

Mind you, we're the only species that is currently capable of designing the sort of asteroid defense system that could have prevented the prior extinctions, so that should excuse us.

Almost a quarter of the world's mammals face extinction within 30 years, a United Nations study on the state of the global environment will announce tomorrow.

Ok, this is just deceptive. It's 25% of the mammalian species, not 25% of the mammals themselves. Although I don't know, I'd guess that the number of mammalian deaths as a percentage of population is probably much higher than 100%, that is there will be, on average, more than one generation turnover.

Even so, there's no particular reason to believe, as the article implies, that this rate of species die-off will continue. There are a lot of marginal species out there that have been gradually dying off for a long time. It happens. Fortunately, the ones that are left are the stronger species that actually have an ecological niche to fill. It's called evolution. Get used to it.

And besides, didn't Darwin predict that new species develop in response to changing environmental pressures? Think of all the biodiversity that we're helping to create.

While searching for a reference to Cellular Automata Machines by Norman Margolus of MIT which I devoured while deep in the middle of my own CA phase, I ran across this gem of a page on the subject of CA's, which had this to say about it:

Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science [This is almost, but not quite, a case for the immortal ``What is true is not new, and what is new is not true''. The one new, true thing is a proof that the elementary CA rule 110 can support universal, Turing-complete computation. (One of Wolfram's earlier books states that such a thing is obviously impossible.) This however was shown not by Wolfram but by Matthew Cook (this is the ``technical content and proofs'' for which Wolfram acknowledges Cook, in six point type, in his frontmatter). In any case it cannot bear the weight Wolfram places on it. Watch This Space for a detailed critique of this book, a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter batshit insanity.]

What he doesn't say, but I will, is that while CA is a valid subject for serious research, for most math and computer nerds that get into it, it's a bit like drugs or masturbation, that is, it feels good but accomplishes nothing. Most of us get similar ephiphanies as Wolfram about the Deep Cosmic Significance Of It All. Most of us have the sense to do it in private.

Stephen Wolfram's excellent example of a vanity page. Interviews and Publications about Stephen Wolfram

Mathematica was (and is) indeed a nice program, but it must not be forgotten that Macsyma had already been there for many years.

More on his new book A New Kind of Science after I've had a chance to finish reading it, but at first blush it really sounds like bullshit. CA is a well-known time-waster, and while it's certainly possible that he's discovered some amazing new theory of everything like he claims, it's much more likely that he's simply rediscovered the well-known fact (among people who've played with CA) that simple CA systems can display both chaotic and ordered characteristics. But claiming that the universe is just one big cellular automaton is a bit much, unless he can prove that there are a finite number of quantum states (currently unproven), and that these states react to each other in CA-like ways (also unproven), that such rules and states can be discovered and verified (unknown, and likely impossible due to the computational complexity) and that this knowledge helps us model the universe (unproven, and he's stepping very close to uncomputability here -- CA's are hideously computationally expensive -- they're one of the few areas where seriously specialized computers are still being built and used).

I still haven't decided if he's fried his brain from too many years of staring at the pretty pictures, maybe once I've finished the book.

From the Times Online breaking news

Yasser Arafat's popularity is slipping but no other Palestinian can muster enough backing to pose a serious challenge to the Palestinian leader. An opinion poll has found overwhelming support among Palestinians for reforms - including firing corrupt Cabinet ministers, streamlining rival security services and holding elections within the coming months. According to the poll, Arafat has the support of 35% of Palestinians, compared with 46% in July 2000 before the outbreak of fighting with Israel, and 36% in December 2001.

If this is true, then Sharon needs to step up to the continued suicide bombers and up the pressure to reinforce this developing Palestinian realization that Arafat and his terrorists are the wrong answer to the question.

Times Online Pakistan and India 'very close' to war'.

Abdul Kader Jaffer, Pakistan’s High Commissioner in London, said that the international community should be aware of the seriousness of the stand-off and exercise its influence to calm the situation.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Jaffer was asked how close the two countries were to war. He responded: "They are very close. And therefore it is necessary for all our friends to get together, bring sanity where there is total insanity. There is a one million deployment of armed forces on Indian-occupied Kashmir."

Sounds like Pakistan is under no illusions that it's gonna get a severe pasting.