mcgees.org

I’m alive.  More to follow.

4 stars for being a serviceable thriller, with
+1 stars for Jim Carrey in a compelling role where he does not talk out of his ass, and
+1 for stars-playing-multiple-roles, and
+.5 for Rhona Mitra, with
-3 stars for Schumacher being a total douchebag, and
-1 for the wrong ending, redeemed with
+.5 for the almost-sufficient explanation in InfiniFilm of why they chose the wrong ending

So why not 3 stars?  You’ve got me.

Recommendation: Queue it

I said I’d start exploitation cinema at 0 stars, right?  So:

0 stars, with
+1 for Michael Biehn, and
+3 for gleefully exploiting the genre without exploiting the audience, and
+1 for Bruce Willis, and
+1 for the shocking anti-gun moment in an otherwise pro-gun movie, though
+1 extra for Rodriguez hiding this from his son, despite
-1 for the sickening use of meat throughout, except
+1 because I’m fairly confident it was meant ironically

Recommendation: Buy it

Either there is sky-splitting thunder and lightning in the next valley, or the Inland Empire is being bombed.  I suppose I’ll know tomorrow.  Or later today, that is.  I still can’t fucking sleep.

Retraction:  I likely made an error in my September Satan’s Face post.  Details are available at that link.

Four excellent food products that you are unlikely to know about already:

1. Maine Coast Sea Vegetables Alaria: “Similar to wakame biologically and nutritionally, with a black or dark-green color. A more wild, yet delicate taste….”  This is delicious to eat raw, straight out of the bag; it may also be cooked for soups, salads, or boiled as greens.  The bag, by the way, is resealable and has “PLEASE RE-USE THIS BAG” printed on the front.  Kudos to them.
2. Whole Foods 365 Cola: Whole Foods have reformulated this beverage to use cane syrup as a sweetener; this imparts a delicious flavor reminiscent of the “microbrew” birch beers (birch beers are soft drinks, like root beers are.)  This product does not contain caffeine.
3. Kettle Chips Habañero Chili with Ginger Potato Chips: I think the name says it all: a creative flavor, and it is a well executed one as well.  The heat is present but not calibrated to blow your head off.  The ginger is restrained and adds a great undercurrent of flavor.
4. Health Valley Lentil with Couscous Soup: Presented as a Cup-o’-Noodles-style single-serving container, this is great to keep in a desk drawer at work for late nights.  It is far tastier and more nutritive than the cheap ramen cups; the seasoning emphasizes curry that fills the room with a delicious exotic aroma.

I just had the pleasure of watching the skateboarding vert finals of the 2001 Gravity Games.  What a great competition.  Rune Glifberg followed his second-run 92-plus score with an amazing and beautiful 96 point final run.  This truly has to be one of the most beautiful vert runs ever.  He stitched together five back-to-back technical tricks (including two 540s), he threw down a gorgeous full-extension Madonna, he pulled off a textbook-perfect tailgrab so flawless that it floored me to see it in the middle of a competition run.

The pleasure was not just the beautiful, technical and creative riding.  It was heartwarming to see, yet again, this community of sportsmen who are genuinely happy and congratulatory when a co-competitor beats them.  There is a tangible atmosphere of personal respect and nobility; the community feeling reminds me of Seattle musicians who consider sales to be after-thoughts and spend entire interviews endorsing other bands rather than talking about their own work.  If you are a skeptic please take some time and watch part (or all) of the next pro skateboarding competition: the level of skill and sportsmanship is sure to surprise and impress you.

[Edited 04 Jan 2002] I am removing this post.  It dealt with my very angry feelings towards the website of a group of big-game hunters whom I had called “sadistic” and “murdering”, but it unnecessarily adds unpleasantness to the site.  If you are interested in the URL I was referencing, let me know by email.

There are games in which an element of chance is decisive, such as roulette or Snakes and Ladders: these games are appropriate only for children (if they are complicated) or for gamblers (if they are simple).

                  - J. Mark Thompson, “Defining the Abstract”

I am upgrading the Perl installation on a Linux machine.  The installation script is interactive, beautifully written, and sometimes very funny.  It just scrolled the following:

(Looks like you have stdio.h from Linux.)

Checking how std your stdio is…

Your stdio acts pretty std.

Anyway, I thought it was very funny.

I just saw the new Yahoo!/Pizza Hut advertisement using JavaScript animation.  If the ad is not showing on Yahoo! right now (you cannot miss it) I have cached a copy.  While I am loathe to admit liking something that could easily become a highly invasive advertising trick, this new ad works.  As long as the animations are under five seconds and the graphics under about 200×200 pixels, this is in my opinion preferable to pop-ups/pop-unders, at least until the novelty wears off.

I have written some fun software to solve Boggle games (this is the game in which six-sided dice labeled with letters are shaken in a plastic container to form an N x N array; the object of the game, in short, is to find paths through adjacent letters to form valid English words, subject to minimum length rules and a prohibition against using one die twice in a single word.)  The searches are very fast, even on this 266 MHz machine.  I just shook the game to get an array, as follows:

JFDER
GDARD
MWOTE
PTUCP
HILAH

A few seconds glancing gives me adder, water, actor, and rear/reared. 

I plugged the grid into the Boggle program, which found 363 matches in about one second, including the four I mention above.  Other notables that the program found include acuter, alcoate, capered, chaptered, outpaced, readout, rerouted, retouch, ulcered, and watered.  I might touch up the program a bit and release it as freeware, perhaps open-sourced under the GNU GPL.  Let’s see if there is any interest.

Here is a screenshot:

Longtime readers might remember the post from February of this year in which I questioned Match.com’s choice of this advertisement:

I expect that the photograph must be in Corbis or some similar database.  Consider this ad from the RealPlayer download page …

… and this ad from a magazine …

One last note before bed.  If you have a juicer, especially a good one like the Juiceman II, I recommend Granny Smith apple and red cabbage juice.  It is delicious.  The key to keeping it delicious, by the way, is the same for almost all freshly made juices: drink them within the first thirty seconds after they have been made.  If you do not believe me, try an experiment.  Make a glass of fresh juice, give it a quick stir, and then drink half the glass quickly while standing in the kitchen.  Then take the half-empty glass to another room, wait two minutes, and drink the rest.  It is startling how quickly some juices “crash”.  Get into a habit of drinking your juice while you stand next to the juicer and you cannot go wrong.

One time when I was in school I was seated in the office of my advisor, a brilliant and funny physicist.  In the middle of one of his sentences something on his whiteboard distracted him.  It looked much like this:

He started thinking out loud: “A, B, and pi-zero … A, B, and pi-zero … what was I doing?  Was I working on quantum mechanics?  What was … Wait!  That’s not a pi-zero!  That’s a goat!”  The professor had been explaining the “Monty Hall Problem” to a student earlier in the day.

Note: This post has been displaying strangely in some browsers.  I have made a change that I expect will make it render better.

I did not intend to write this post.  I sat down to compose a post on the Richard Dawkins book I just finished reading.  As I began to compose it I had need to add a hyperlink.  This is a bit of a pain in the neck (in terms of unnecessary typing) in Notepad++, a third-party replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad.  Since mid 1995 I have used one or the other to compose web pages.  It should be trivial to add a link in a web editing program: highlight the text, hit Ctrl-something, and type in the URL, preferably having the program fill in the “http://” for you if you leave it off (only if you leave it off; it should be smart enough not to turn your FTP URLs, for instance, into “http://ftp://ftp.microsoft.com”.)

In six-plus years I have not found a program to help me compose HTML that does not infuriate me through feature creep.  I want something bare-bones, at code level, that helps me with syntactic constructs.  I can handle the semantic stuff myself.  Prompted by this I went to Download.com to see what programs were ranked well.  The program I tried to download required me to supply a name and email address that they cross-their-heart-and-hope-to-die will not use for any purpose.  Right.  So I did what I usually do: I went to Mailexpire.com, typed in my real address, and it provided me with a Mailexpire.com email alias that will expire in twelve hours.  Take a moment and try it for yourself.

One does not really want to put a valid name down, either.  One can use something off the top of the head (I find this is frequently drawn from something in my field of view, what could be called the “Mrs. Doubtfire” approach) or use a random name generator such as the excellent one at kleimo.com.  Playing with it just now, with the “obscurity factor” set to 50 and gender set to “male”, I was offered Hal Tutas, Marlin Couser, Kendrick Guderjahn, Elwood Alessandro, and Jackson Sheild.  None of these names shows up in Google, by the way.  (The obscurity factor is fun to play with.  A setting of 1 [”common”] gave Martin Haviland [shows up in Google 5 times], Gary Verret [in Google 6 times], Lawrence Easter [26 times], Charles Flint [659 times], and Luis Grimaldo [58 times].  A setting of 99 yielded Wes Fosso, Cedrick Baresi, Jeromy Easlick, Rueben Alesse, and Alonso Egidio of which, predictably, none shows up in Google.)

But we already have a string literal to work with: the part of the Mailexpire address before “@mailexpire.com”.  One could try to make a name out of this; this has the arguable advantage of convincing a human screener, at least one who does not know how Mailexpire works.  Better yet, Mailexpire should buy, for instance, npqo.com, ncqn.com, and ofpi.com and randomly assign these domains to the email addresses, which would further convince a human screener.  The domain names I chose for this example, in case you are interested, are the result of hitting the keyboard randomly to generate a four-letter string and checking to see if the domain was reserved.  It took me twelve tries before I found a total of three unreserved four-letter .com domain names.  My sample is very small, so we cannot say with any confidence that 75% of four-letter domain names are already taken (maybe it was a fluke, or maybe my finger motions, for any of a number of reasons, preferred common sequences of letters when hitting “randomly”.)  But keep in mind that there are just under half a million four-letter domain names alone.  Have people really registered three quarters of these?

But back to making a name out of a Mailexpire address.  I just generated fifteen Mailexpire aliases, as follows: aroubtfuln, cliffectat, dravarrors, enroachink, hopelonalt, mumiosinev, myrtlyauei, neiteousic, peerledgeo, synodsuuoo, taphyseleo, turbidelpi, volishelty, welkindrew, wirelloned.  The intriguing thing to me about these is that they are clearly not random strings.  They are far to English-like, embedding words, parts of words, and (which may be the same as the last one) likely combinations of letters.  It belongs to the class of what Hofstadter describes as “English-sounding nonsense”.

Some of the names split easily into a first and last name.  Some present difficult juxtapositions of consonants.  I have a way that I deal with this (this sounds like a ton of work but it all happens very quickly in one’s head.)  In descending frequency, the order of vowels in English is much as you might expect: e-a-o-i-u-y.  What I do for a difficult name is to take the first consonant juxtaposition and insert an ‘e’ in between, take the next pair and insert an ‘a’, and so on; this makes it just believable that the email address could have been formed by removing letters from a too-long name.  Sometimes once the name is split it appears much better if the “first” and “last” names are swapped.

As if I were not spending too much time on an obscure topic already, here are my results on the fifteen names above:

Anyway, it may be fun to play with.  Alternatively, you could use Mailexpire.com to generate fictitious names for characters in stories and novels, for RPG NPCs, etc.

I have spent a couple of hours making this front page, and all of the archived pages, HTML 4.0 compliant.  I hope this will help the page render more consistently across platforms and browsers.

Well, it’s quite late.  I have wanted to finish my vast overhaul of Postal Cancel Art for the past few nights and did not have a chance.  I should be asleep, but I’m glad it’s done.  I plan to add commentary on them soon.  Let me know what you think of it.

I just had an ironic experience (this is one of the rare times that “ironic” is actually an appropriate word to use.)  I was thirsty and went to one of the vending machines here at work.  This machine dispenses 20 oz. bottles of soft drinks for $1.00 apiece; this price seems a bit high to me, so I can justify buying exactly one at this price if I am very thirsty.  I insert my dollar, press the button for Wild Cherry Pepsi, and hear the clunk as the bottle enters the tray.  I pick it up and turn to leave.

As I am turning, I hear another clunk.  Sure enough, there is another Wild Cherry Pepsi sitting in the tray.  What luck!  I am about to leave once more, but I then begin to wonder if the machine is malfunctioning so that it always dispenses two bottles per dollar.  There is no way to confirm one way or the other except by trying, but it seems a win-win situation.  If the machine behaves properly I get a third Wild Cherry Pepsi, making the bottles $0.66 apiece, which is a reasonable price.  But if the machine continues to misbehave, dispensing two bottles, then I will have four bottles at $0.50 apiece, less than what it would cost at the grocery store!  We have a refrigerator in one of our labs, so the extras will stay cold until I want them.  You will note that at no point in these deliberations did any ethical concerns bother me in the slightest.  I put the second bill into the machine.

Care to guess what happened?  How would O. Henry write this story?

That’s right: the machine ate my second dollar.

“Remember, under the oppressive Taliban regime, people live in constant fear of an oppressive order to which all must submit.  …  There is no freedom of speech, press, or assembly, as dissent of any kind is not tolerated.  …  All who fail to unquestioningly obey are punished with reprisals of brutal violence. We must not allow such a regime to threaten our great democracy….

“It is therefore urgent that all Americans be quiet, stop asking questions, accept the orders of authorities, and let us get on with the important work of defending liberty, so that America can continue to be a beacon of freedom to all the world.”

Click here for full text of the satire.

I had an interesting experience yesterday.  I am collaborating long-distance with a researcher in another state, and we have started to investigate a particular problem.  I was working to understand it and ended up stumped on one part, so I sent him an email asking a question.  While I was waiting for a response I continued looking at the problem.  An hour later I realized that I had completely misunderstood the problem, which would render my question not only useless but also foolish.  After another hour of research I realized that I had asked exactly the right question but for entirely the wrong reason, so my email, rather than appearing foolish, would appear quite insightful.

I TiVoed an episode of FoodTV’s Good Eats on the subject of chilies and watched it this evening.  One of the interesting claims that Alton Brown made was that capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the “heat” in chilies) is alcohol-soluble.  “So should you drink beer to get rid of the fire?” he asked.  “No, because beer is mostly water.  You would have to swill pure ethyl alcohol.”

But this got me thinking: distilled spirits are only a factor of two away from the proof of laboratory ethanol, and have fully ten times the alcohol content per volume as beer.  So it should work, right?  I decided to try an experiment.  I went to get the big bottle of cheap vodka that I have been storing for a couple of years since I tried making liqueurs, but I realized that I had used it to combat our ant problem this summer (using it was a burst of sudden inspiration: it kills ants on contact and completely obliterates their scent trail, apparently.)

I then remembered that I have a bottle of Absolut in the back of the liquor cabinet that I purchased when I didn’t know any better (they have a damn fine advertising campaign, but the spirit is so feinty that the best tasting notes would be something like “the lining of a rain-proof parka wrapped in a wet tarpaulin covered in vomit.”  My guess is that the accountants are making the decision of how much of the distillation run to keep rather than leaving the decision to the distillers.)  So I poured vodka for mouth rinsing, a large glass of milk as a fallback, and I clipped a habañero from the garden.

Crunch, chew, contemplate, spit.  “This one is not that hot, Jenn,” I say.  Crunch, chew, contemplate, swallow.  Contemplate.  Begin to suffer seriously as the apparent heat rises and rises and rises.  “Time to try the vodka,” I think to myself (if I had tried to say it out loud at this point it would have come out “pime poo pie uh ah-kuh”.)  Swig, rinse, contemplate.

You curious?

OK: it didn’t work.  If anything the burn of the ethanol on the sore taste buds made it worse.  I quickly gave up on the vodka and switched to the milk (for the record, that did not help all that much either, but at least it was cold and coating.)  I drank more milk (probably three quarters of a liter) than I have likely drunk in the past month total.  And now, getting to the end of this post, my lips and tongue are almost back to normal.

So the lessons:

1. I grow very hot habañeros.
2. Vodka is not a magic cure-all for spice overload.
3. Someone with chronic acid reflux disease should not go around taking enormous bites out of the world’s hottest chilies (this last one is just starting to dawn on me.)

You might want to just take my word on these points.

My brother has a new, excellent website at davidjmcgee.com.  I have now come to the realization that he put the site together in order to clearly demonstrate that he has far more useful and interesting things to say than I.  Seriously worth a look and a bookmarking.  One note: if you cannot get to mcgees.org, you probably will not be able to get to davidjmcgee.com either, as they are hosted on the same machine.

The answer is “James”.

I asserted that Ari Fleischer was lying when he said “human rights has [sic] always been at the forefront” of the actions of the “American military and our nation.”  It has been bothering me that I did not provide any justification for this accusation, so I wanted to take a moment and do just that.  This also lets me share a link to the National Security Archive if you are not yet familiar with this group.

In April 2000, the U.S. State Department released, under the Freedom of Information Act, a startlingly frank interagency study of recent U.S. humanitarian interventions entitled “Interagency Review of U.S. Government Civilian Humanitarian & Transition Programs.”  The National Security Archive hosts a scanned copy of this document.  I cite from Annex 1, “Kosovo Case Study”:

The U.S. response [in Kosovo was] significantly shaped by the lack of a humanitarian voice in senior policy deliberations.  …  The first phase was a confused scramble, during which there was a disturbing perception at the highest levels of the USG [(U.S. Government)] that no one was in charge of USG civilian humanitarian programs.  …  It became apparent that little forward planning had been conducted, including the establishment of prior collaborative arrangements between USG civilian and military agencies.  …  [Later,] while humanitarian components within the USG cited the need for a more aggressive posture vis-à-vis the Macedonians in humanitarian forums, they made no effort to push for a shift in policy at more senior levels.  …

The KCC [(Kosovo Coordination Council)] was established by the White House one week after the bombing to provide high-level leadership of the humanitarian aspects of the Kosovo crisis.  …  [It] had mixed results.  …  Its impact on policy formulation was largely marginal: most policy decisions were taken at the daily [video teleconference] or at [other high level] meetings  …  It [(the KCC)] was ad hoc and lacked continuity and follow-through.

If we grant that life, health, shelter, and nutrition (i.e., humanitarian provisions) are human rights, then Fleischer’s claim seems untenable.

I figured out how to get a floating menu bar, as you see near the upper-right of the screen, rather than a strip down the entire page.

Some more points from the latest round of press briefings that may be interesting.  First, to draw attention to one passage from Tuesday’s briefing:

MR. FLEISCHER: You know, I think if you take a look
around the world, at all the actions that over time
our American military and our nation has been called
on, human rights has always been at the forefront of
it.  It’s true in the manner in which the United States
military conducts its operation and the manner in
which any type of harm to civilians has always tried
to be kept to the absolute, absolute minimum.

This rather blatant lie set me on guard (Note: I justify this accusation in a later post.); this is relevant for my reaction to the next passage I cite, from Wednesday’s briefing:

Q: Is the United States taking a softer line on Russia
over Chechnya in return for the cooperation Putin has
offered in this effort?

MR. FLEISCHER: President Putin gave a very important
speech the other day. … [The President] wants
to note particularly President Putin’s remarks … in
which [he] called on Chechen insurgents to
disassociate themselves immediately from the
international terrorist networks.

…

Q: And so, the administration believes, with President
Putin, that the resistance in Chechnya has been
infiltrated and is linked to the same terrorist
networks that committed the atrocities in New York?

MR. FLEISCHER: [T]here is no question that there is an
international terrorist presence in Chechnya that has
links to Osama bin Ladin.

…

Q: Haven’t we made many statements denouncing Russia
for its attacks at Chechnya?  And is there some image
of some freedom fighters there?  And all of a sudden,
you’re calling them terrorists?

MR. FLEISCHER: As I just indicated, the concern for
human rights remains a vital part of American policy,
and the only solution to the problem in Chechnya is a
political one.

Q: Yes.  But why is it just today that you’re calling
them terrorists?  What has changed?  Is this what Putin
has asked for, in exchange for his help?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, as I indicated, that’s not the
case.  That’s been the longstanding position.

Q: I think this is the first time — is this not the
first time you’ve used this word at that podium?

Q: It’s the first time we’ve heard it.

MR. FLEISCHER: I’m not sure that I have discussed the
situation in Chechnya with the White House Press Corps
prior to this.  We haven’t had much reason to do so.

…

Q: Sounds like a deal, though.  It sounds like in
exchange for Putin’s support, we, rhetorically from
this podium, are lending him support in characterizing
the opposition as international terrorists.

MR. FLEISCHER: No, no such conclusion should be
reached.  This is consistent with actions taken by the
previous administration, because it’s an accurate
statement about developments in Chechnya.

Q: Can you give us the date of [the] Senate testimony
[you mentioned regarding Chechnya]?

MR. FLEISCHER: If I recall, it was November 1999.

“Yeah, right,” I thought to myself.  “You have really outdone yourself this time, claiming that there is Senate testimony identifying the Chechen rebels as terrorists and linking them to bin Laden.”  So I dug around, using November 1999 as the guide.  I decided Fleischer had to be referring to S. Hrg. 106-294, entitled “Chechnya:  Implications for Russia and the Caucasus,” from November 4, 1999 (Text|PDF), and I read this with interest.  And I found that Fleischer was absolutely correct.  I stress this now because I certainly would have made a big deal out of it if Fleischer had been lying.    From the testimony of Stephen R. Sestanovich, U.S. State Department:

Chechen insurgents are
receiving help from radical groups in other countries,
including Usama [sic] Bin Laden’s network and others who have
attacked or threatened Americans and American interests … Russian government statements
linking Osama Bin Ladin’s organization to Chechen fighters Basayev and
Al-Khattab are plausible.  We are aware of continuing cooperation
between Bin Ladin’s Al-Qaida organization and Chechen rebels, including
Ibn Al-Khattab.  It is likely that some of the non-Chechen rebel
fighters coming from outside Russia have received training, funding,
and other logistical support from terrorist organizations.

Fascinating.  If the media did not know of this it is their own dumb fault, as it is clearly a matter of public record.  But before we leave the transcript of these testimonies, I would like to excerpt a few more passages:

In the name of rooting
out terrorists, Russia is using force against Chechnya in an
apparent effort to undo the military defeat it suffered … Islamic fundamentalism obviously
affects the stability of the region as a whole.  Yet suppression
of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists may be a very convenient
pretext for Russia to pursue its designs in the Caucasus.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to draw a parallel between this and the current situation, substituting ‘U.S.’ for ‘Russia’ and ‘Afghanistan’ for ‘Chechnya’.  The State Department seem to have had a good perspective on the issues less than two years ago when they dealt with a foreign government; let us hope they can apply it here.

Also fascinatingly, there is a senatorial question from this session on record as follows:

From the perspective of the Administration, how can we
tell when the United States should discourage Russian military excesses
combating Islamic forces in the Caucasus, and when–if ever–should the
United States consider collaborating with Russia in fighting Islamic
sources of terrorism?

The answer, in retrospect, seems quite clear: the U.S. decided to collaborate with Russia once U.S. soil was attacked.  Just so we are clear on this: Russia, supposedly our allies, suffered attacks resulting in extensive loss of life from terrorists funded by extremist Islamic groups.  Congress then talked about “when, if ever” we should join Russia “in fighting Islamic sources of terrorism.”  They talked about it, and, to my knowledge, made no commitment until the attacks of 11 September.  The new President, backed by Congress, then had the audacity to announce to the world, including Russia, that the U.S. will begin the international war against terrorism, and if the rest of the world, including Russia, did not support us 100%, then they should be considered the enemy.  The hypocrisy here is stiflingly thick.

An article I read last week in Le Monde sported the headline «George W. Bush se pose en chef de guerre et leader du monde civilisé.»  No kidding.

I did not know until today that White House press briefings are published on whitehouse.gov.  This is very good; it allows us to bypass yet one more level of spin and agenda, that of the print and broadcast journalists who compose stories for public consumption.  And it is reassuring to know that hard questions are being asked, even if they seem not to make it to the front pages of newspapers.

The most recent briefing contains several important questions and responses that I would like to consider.  Emphasis is added.

Q: Ari, it does seem that across the board, on proving that these charitable organizations, non-governmental organizations, [and] banks have links to terror; on proving that bin Laden is behind these acts; on what plans the administration has post whatever movement we make in Afghanistan; the answer is always, “that’s classified, trust us.”  Does that really serve the democracy well if all this information on which the government is basing its actions is classified?

MR. [Press Secretary Ari] FLEISCHER: I think the American people get it.  I think they understand that as the nation moves from a peacetime footing to a wartime footing, the government’s need to hold certain pieces of information closer is an important need.  And I think the American people are accepting and understanding of that. And I think you all will be the judge if you believe the government has gone too far.  But I don’t think there’s any indications among the public, certainly, that that is the case.

…

Q: — the Swiss and the Cayman Islands and other governments, places where money is usually — large amounts of money are usually stashed and they have strict rules about giving out information to law enforcement?

MR. FLEISCHER: As I indicated earlier, we’re going to continue to work with all nations around the world and we’re going to continue to see what the level of cooperation is with each nation.  But make no mistake, what is so different about the executive order the President signed last night is now the United States is prepared to take action against nations that don’t take action themselves.

Q: So the U.S. is willing to take action against the Swiss?

MR. FLEISCHER: The United States is prepared to take action against nations that don’t help in this cause.

Q: How will that process work?  For instance, you identify one of these groups and you go to a foreign bank and say, we want you to freeze the assets of this organization.  Will the U.S. just attest that this is linked to terrorists?  Will they supply some sort of detailed information? How do you avoid — how do you do that and avoid using sources and methods?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, every case is going to be different. … I can’t be in a position of being the spokesperson for every bank or foreign nation around the world.  We’ll see what they do to cooperate. …

Q: No, but I was asking you what the administration intends to do, not what they intend to do — what you intend to do to give them information to convince them?  I mean, if someone came to a U.S. bank and said, by the way, lock up this account because we think these guys are terrorists — you would have to go through some legal procedures, you couldn’t just say, oh, the Swiss told [us]–

MR. FLEISCHER: [The Departments of Treasury and State] will be the most appropriate places to go [with these questions].

…

Q: The Treasury — the response from the Treasury Department to that this morning was, “we will act like responsible adults.”  I think those were the words he used, even.  I mean, you’re really asking people to trust the government on this.  And without being more specific, do you intend to be more specific soon?

MR. FLEISCHER: I think what you need to do is talk to these foreign governments and talk to the foreign banks and get their point of view. I think you are surmising what their point of view may or may not be. … [W]e’ll see where it goes over time.

That is quite a bit more informative for me than most news reports.  More unsettling, too, as it reveals the efforts Fleischer makes to emit sounds from his mouth without answering the questions.  I am not a scholar of history so my depiction may be incorrect, but this seems to be the pattern in our country’s history:

1. We limit freedoms (Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, McCarthy’s witch hunt) for what seem to be valid reasons.
2. We later decide that the restrictions were excessive, but justifiable given the circumstance.
3. Even later, we decide that the restrictions were an abuse of governmental power and that the actions were unjustifiable in any circumstance.

Proofs from history are inherently flawed, but I am not attempting a proof, rather a comparison.  When the nation is in a state of hysteria, the sacrifice of our freedoms seems a price we are willing to pay.  Spurred by the sense of closeness and trust engendered by foreign hostility, we seem to accept that “the government are our friends”, that “they would do nothing to take advantage of this situation.”

And here arises the logical fallacy I am intending to address: we cannot fundamentally change the state of a system and have any confidence that the system will continue to exhibit the same behaviors.  Thus it is (strongly) arguable that the very reason the government seem our friends is that the Constitution explicitly limits their power by delegating responsibility to the people.

The past few weeks seem to indicate America turning a blind eye to many abuses.  Racial profiling in the federal investigations, for instance: how many of us think that the FBI agents did not take the passenger manifests and scan them first for Arabic names?  “Well, Josh, it seems to have worked,” my hypothetical conversant replies.  Well, yes; but enforcing a police state, or creating a dictorship, or executing people for their thoughts are all means to ends as well.  We cannot use expedient methods that violate Constitutional principles to accomplish a temporary aim.

“I don’t think there’s any indications among the public” that they resent the government telling us to trust them as benevolent, says Fleischer.  I hope he is wrong.  And I certainly hope the U.S. government will come to their senses and stop saber-rattling (”The United States is prepared to take action against nations that don’t help in this cause … We’ll see what they do to cooperate”) against countries that keep a cool head through these events.

Another exchange:

Q: A statement broadcast today, apparently a fax from Osama bin Laden, in which he called on Muslims in Pakistan to “fight the American crusade.”  A, does this administration believe the statement is credible, and do you have any reaction to it?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, there have been so many different statements coming out of the Taliban that I think the only statement that the President is looking for is a statement of action.  And the words that were issued today by the Taliban are a chilly reminder about how serious and real this is.

I reread these passages a couple of times to make sure I was reading correctly, and I left the passage intact to show I am not selectively quoting.  Since when were missives from Osama bin Laden identical to statements by the Taliban?  Oh, right: since the “we will make no distinction” speech.  Let us assume that North Korea decides that they are not too keen on letting the U.S. government stomp all over their banking system, and refuse to open financial records to American eyes.  Could we envision this exchange at a White House press briefing?

Q: A fax from Osama bin Laden called on Muslims to begin a Jihad against Americans.  Do you believe this is a threat?

FLEISCHER: Well, North Korea has been engaging in many threatening behaviors in the past few years, and we are worried about their possession of nuclear weapons.  But we are really waiting for an explicit declaration from North Korea before we start taking bin Laden’s threats seriously.

I am trying to figure out what flaw my hypothetical conversation partner would find in my analogy, but I cannot find anything (”bin Laden is on Afghan soil” is insufficient.)  I thought the “make no distinction” speech was posturing, a statement of hegemonism, a threatening and imposing way of saying “Help us NOW!”.  I did not think the administration would literally make no distinction between the terrorists and harboring states.   That just doesn’t make sense.

It has been a while since I have written any malts reviews.  I added one tonight, and I remember now how much I enjoy doing so.

I purchased Nickelback’s new album Silver Side Up yesterday (the album was released, rather unluckily, on the eleventh.)  I have been a fan of Nickelback’s since May 2000 when I heard “Leader of Men” from The State, purchased the album, and was extremely impressed.  The new offering is quite solid.  On my first listen, “Never Again”, “Good Times Gone”, and “How You Remind Me” stood out prominently, the latter dramatically so.  I believe “How You Remind Me” will be the track that makes them a household name.  On that listen I thought there was a lot of filler on the album, but I have listened through it once more, with “Hollywood” and “Where Do I Hide” catching my attention and the remainder sparking more interest than the first time.

A flip-through of my CD collection should indicate whether you (the reader, personally) should trust my musical recommendations.

The Washington Post ran a story [local archive] headlined “Chinese Working Overtime to Sew U.S. Flags,” relating to the rocketing number of American flag purchases in the wake of the terror.  This is not surprising, given that U.S. mythology casts Betsy Ross as Prometheus: a legendary figure who once gave us a great gift, before the means to produce it became cheap, widespread, and completely disposable.  Many U.S. citizens fail to realize that the headline indicates the source of the problem in the first place.