In Search of the World\’s Best Mobile Phone

U.S. official: Missile test ‘still not realistic’

A successful U.S. missile defense system test completed this week did not realistically duplicate conditions of an actual attack, a top U.S. defense official said Saturday.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on CNN’s “Novak, Hunt & Shields” that decoys used to try confusing the “kill vehicle” were not “as good a decoy [as] we expect to face later.” CNN

Three posts courtesy of David:

• World Press Photo of the Year 2001
  

• The Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade vs. the Taliban
  

• The Company Therapist: this /. paean by Jon Katz describes a site whose premise is that you are reading the case files of a fictional therapist whose patients are employees of a fictional San Francisco tech company.
  

  …(A) company called Pipsqueak Productions devised this hyperfictional environment as the perfect vehicle for collaborative fictional storytelling in cyberspace. Very original move. A therapist’s office is a font of narrative, a great device for collecting different stories, honing different voices, full of interesting characters with evolving problems and case histories, able to draw on telephone calls and office transcripts, a place to discuss theories of treatment. Balis’s world — the pressured, constantly changing world of hi-tech – emerges vividly. Updated daily, The Company Therapist provides nearly two years of well-organized, easily accessible stories, doctor’s notes and other materials. Since it’s written by its collective audience rather than a single author or the site’s creators, the range of tales and voices is fascinating.

  Every contributor retains a recognizable style, yet is still able to move the collective narrative forward. In fact, many stories are moving forward at once, relating both to “work” and the personal lives of the patients, each told in an idiosyncratic voice and representing the challenges of a different life, yet collectively, painting a vivid portrait of a culture. This site is unique on the Web, both for its originality and quality of design, strong testimony to the notion online, technology and art are fusing to create things that are as new as they are exciting.
  

  The Company Therapist site is here; this might be a place I would explore if I had the time, but a totally irresponsible first impression after a cursory scan is that I might be annoyed at its focus on the stereotypical aspects of being a therapist…

Review of Warrior Poitics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos By Robert D. Kaplan:

‘In late January, the diligent Internet surfer might have come across a chilling exchange of letters between Robert Wright and Robert D. Kaplan, the latter a respected foreign correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly; an author who has written a number of books based on his travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and North America; and war guru of the moment. Kaplan’s books blend history, current affairs, and forecasts of future world trends.

The first two letters reveal that Kaplan favors some form of “benevolent global hegemony” exercised by the United States. He instructs Wright that “nation-building requires the implicit assumption that we will only have one or two nations at a time to rebuild.” This sentence reflects what Kaplan believes to be humility and realism.

(…)

Conclusion:

Kaplan’s book seems to be, at bottom, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound. The Pagan Ethos aims to provide a kind of pseudo-intellectual and historical cover for the governing class of the United States to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants, all the while claiming the moral high ground and demonizing any opposition. Likewise, U.S. allies have a free reign to overthrow democracy, violently suppress independence movements, sell narcotics, and engage in torture, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing, while designated “enemies” of the United States can be bombed and invaded for doing the same things, or even for simply being accused of doing them.’

I had similar concerns about Kaplan’s dangerous conceit when I heard him interviewed on NPR last month. More about Ludwig von Mises and his Institute, which is located in Auburn, Alabama, and which describes itself as “defend(ing) the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive”, appears here. While I’m by no means aligned with absolutist free-market, private-property, non-interventionist less-government-at-any-cost principles, politics makes strange bedfellows…

Thatcher: Britain must start to quit EU: ‘The time has come for Britain to start pulling out of the European Union, according to Baroness Thatcher. She damns the EU as “fundamentally unreformable”.

The former Prime Minister says in her new book, serialised in The Times, that most of the problems the world has faced, including Nazism and Marxism, have come from mainland Europe. Enoch Powell had been right when he gave warning in the 1970s that entry to the Common Market involved an unacceptable loss of sovereignty.’ The Times of London

“Francis Boyle is a lawyer of the quality of Thomas More or Gandhi… the most competent and impassioned advocate of international law in the U.S.”

The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence by Francis A. Boyle, rofessor of law at the University of Illinois:

‘The Clinton Administration’s Presidential Decision Directive 60 asserted a U.S. right to target non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons in 1997. But PDD60, as well as nuclear deterrence as a whole — both the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons — is illegal under the international law of warfare.

In fact, Francis A. Boyle argues in The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, the Bush administration’s toying with the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan, its intent to proceed with National Missile Defense, to renew nuclear testing and develop “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons will have disastrous impact on existing international efforts to rein in the global nuclear arms race through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Already, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has fallen before its scythe.

This book provides a succinct and detailed guide to understanding the arms race from Hiroshima/ Nagasaki through the SALT I, SALT II, ABM and START efforts at arms control, to Star Wars/National Missile Defense, U.S. unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty, and events in Afghanistan and beyond.’

Bill Designed to Force Draft Registration:

‘California’s draft-age men, among the nation’s worst at registering with the Selective Service, could be denied driver’s licenses for failing to sign up under a bill moving through the Senate.

Despite objections that it would quash dissent to the draft and might be used to “flush out” illegal immigrants, the bill passed the Senate Governmental Organization Committee on Tuesday.’ LA Times

The bill is opposed by immigrant advocacy groups and pacifist organizations such as the Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mennonites whose members’ faiths may compel noncomplicity with the selective service system. More generally insidious, however, is the the bill in effect automatically registers draft-age men when they are issued their first driver’s license or state ID by forwarding their names to a federal databank, in essence implementing the cradle-to-grave totalitarian identity control which opponents of a national ID card system decry. 15 other states, it should be noted, sanction nonregistrants with similar consequences, but it does not appear they take this extra step of automatically forwarding driver’s license information to Washington.

An injustice in any tongue: Funding runs out next month on the Massachusetts account that pays for 90% of the interpreters in the courts of the state. Trials involving non-English-speaking parties will simply be put off, according to judicial planners. Nobody seems to care very much; providing interpreters is usually seen as a perk for perps. But in reality it speaks to the very core of our system of rights. This Superior Court judge, a friend of mine, is considering refusing to hear any cases because of the blatant inequality of allowing the English-speaking but not those who speak foreign tongues their day in court. Government is abdicating its responsibility to ensure equal protection under the law, in his powerful argument. Boston Globe

Gray Whales Rebound for West Coast Ritual: “After several trying years for the migratory gray whales, when hundreds of calves and their parents washed up dead along the shore — baffling scientists and dismaying a public that gives them nicknames and tracks their movements — the beginnings of a recovery are meandering up from Mexico, leaving behind a local tourist economy that just hates to see them go.” NY Times

Jennifer Szalai‘s thoughtful essay, whether you agree with it or not, reflects on issues of renewed relevance as we grapple with fundamentalism — among the terrorists and in the dysadministration in Washington. ‘Evil’ is back, and Americans seem to be leading the charge. From Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to Dubya’s ‘axis of evil,’ is the problem the disingenuous misuse of the word, with its hypocrisy and namecalling, or having recourse to the concept of evil at all? After a century that has seen some of the worst atrocities in human history, suggesting almost no bounds to the human capacity to inflict harm on others of his own race (yes, it’s usually males…), do we have to grapple seriously with a notion of the diabolical, free of detachment or irony? Is it unfair that moral absolutism has been usurped by the pitiful and embarrassing Right, from McCarthy through Falwell and Buchanan, to Reagan and the Bushes and Shrubs? Does a notion of evil preclude understanding the perpetrators of heinous acts?

Try to understand we should. But suppose, for a moment, we were to come to a point where we amassed all of these “root causes” and then arranged them into a narrative resembling a “logic” behind 11 September; what kind of story would satisfy our craving for “cause and effect”? What kind of structural factors could completely account for the magnitude of the intended carnage? We can try to say that 3,000 office workers were incinerated “because” of American hegemony in the Middle East or Israeli barbarism in Palestine; we can try to say that 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “because” of the legacy of Belgian imperialism; we can try to say that six million Jews were murdered “because” of the Treaty of Versailles, or “because” Hitler was an illegitimate child. All of these factors surely helped to create grievances, and these grievances surely helped to create the events that followed. After a certain point, however, they ceased to contribute anything, as what was to follow exceeded any sense of necessity that characterises the causal relationships we desperately seek.

This dark space – this gap between what would conceivably constitute a necessary response and what could only be considered a horrifying excess – deserves a name. New Statesman

Conference announcement: “Rational Animals?” (Oxford, UK, October 3-4, 2002) — “Are any non-human animals rational? Do they act for reasons? Do they employ reasoning or are there simpler explanations for their behaviour? The focus of this two-day meeting will be on the character and limits of rationality in animals, in particular, apes, cetaceans, and birds. Speakers will include leading scientists from around the world researching cognitive abilities in animals and philosophers interested in the issues raised by their work.”