Posted 5:48 PM by Floyd

Today Lileks linked to one Liv Aleo, a cute young woman who runs a pacifist website called "Become the Change." (Presumably for people who want a faster path than "Working for Change.")

To call Aleo a dim bulb would be an insult to hard-working 20-watt illuminators. The GE products in my house may not know much, but they surely are more aware of history than Ghandi's grandson, approvingly quoted by Aleo:

When a man asked him with distress how we could have protected the millions of victims of Hitler's abuse without using violence, Mr. Gandhi replied, "If people had gone out in masses, sitting in the roads, thousands deep, would Hitler's troops have trampled them to invade a nation?"

Mr. Gandhi continued that of course they wouldn't, nor could they. The eyes of the world and just pure shame would have turned them away from their violence.

Yes, you read that right. Hitler's regime commited every possible cruelty against its Slavic foes. For example: "The Fuehrer has decided to have St. Petersburg wiped off the face of the earth." And Goering: "Whether ten thousand Russian females collapse during the construction of an antitank ditch does not concern me, so long as the ditch gets built." While the Nazis concealed evidence of their most vile crimes, in general they worshipped power and cruelty. But when confronted with the grandson of a famous man and a hippie chick with a nice chest, the three-million strong attacking force would have turned around and slunk off. Shirer wept.

(The initial attack involved three million men along an enormous frontier of something like 800 miles. How many hippies does it take to man an 800-mile long front "thousands deep"?)

Anyway, Aleo is inspired by the idea of thousands of activists shaking their fingers on the Iraqi border:

What soldier can drop our bombs over land where his mother or wife might be?

I think it's easy for a soldier to figure out whether his mom or wife is a human shield ... by calling them up and asking them? "Hi Mom, it's Kenny. Have you lost your mind? Sorry, I was just checking."

Become The Change is recruiting human shields, but in an innovative way:

What we at becomethechange.org are doing is asking people to make a pledge: "If 5,000 (or 6,000, or 8,000 – whatever feels most comfortable) others will go, I will join them in Iraq to form a human shield ..."

So you can have the self-satisfaction of working for peace while calculating a sufficiently large number of co-conspirators that makes it unnecessary for you to leave your couch! And thus we have anti-war activism as conceived by 16-year old girls considering skinny dipping: "I will if everyone else will."

Posted 1:02 PM by Floyd

Here's another strange job lead, this one from Dice: A job at the Second Foundation!

We are looking for 3 web developers/engineers who have experience working with php, Mysql based website development ...

Contact for more information:
... ...
Second Foundation, Inc.
3723 Haven Ave

"Where if you don't get along with your manager -- we'll fix it."

Posted 11:12 AM by Floyd

Here's a job lead mailed to me by Monster:

Macroscopomy Company Seeks C++ Engineer With Pathology Background

Makes you wonder what such a person would do with operator overloading. Do you think they'll bring out a cadaver for the interview?

Posted 11:42 PM by Floyd

John Jay Ray emailed me "word up" about a new blog called PC Watch, which documents ridiculous applications of political correctness worldwide. Peter Cuthbertson (and Ray, who also posts) have an eye for the ridiculous and the absurd; reading their blog reminds me of the great Liberty column "Terra Incognita". For example:

Unfriendliness is PC

How heavily the obsession with equality influences the PC movement can perhaps be seen most clearly in the actions of a British welfare agency who banned a job advertisement because it discriminated against UNFRIENDLY PEOPLE! A company placed the advertisement looking for a "friendly person" for a catering-related job but the local Job Centre rejected it because they said it "may discriminate against certain applicants". See here (originally from the Bolton Evening News of June 7th, 2002 but no longer online at that site).

Posted 11:34 PM by Floyd

As we know, dissent is crushed in George Bush's Amerikkka. Thus it is only every other day that the local newspaper carries an editorial telling me that when thousands of office workers are massacred, it's my fault:

Iraq war will not end the threat of terrorism
By Paul Locatelli

Strawman alert: Nothing will end the threat of terrorism. Locking up Sirhan Sirhan did not end the threat of assassination.

On April 11, 1963, Pope John XXIII gave the world a vision of peace on earth. Nearly 40 years later, we have made significant progress in fulfilling that noble vision: the emergence of human and civil rights for women, people of color and minorities, the increase of democracy around the world, and greater possibility for the poor to overcome grinding poverty through global economic development.

Nonetheless, the world is poised on the brink of war with Iraq. This ominous cloud casts a dark shadow over Pope John's vision and over the whole world. Why have we come to the brink of war? At its root is the festering hatred that led to the brutal, homicidal attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yeah, it's tough on rich people from Saudi Arabia and Egypt when my country keeps shovelling money at their governments.

Without the threat of terrorism and the random attacks that keep occurring, no American would tolerate a pre-emptive strike on Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Pope John challenged all peoples to establish universal peace on four pillars: truth, justice, love and freedom.

Bin Laden challenged all Muslims to establish universal peace on one pillar: Sharia. If it's not from the Koran, our enemies have no use for truth, justice, love, and freedom.

The first casualty in war is always truth, and I fear that truth has already been injured in the rush to war. For Pope John, truth is the foundation for peace because without facing the truth and speaking the truth, there can be no trust.

Did Pope John say that? I thought it was Bernard Law.

Yes, Saddam has not spoken the truth about his weapons of destruction. But has the world heard the full truth about why war is the only means of removing Saddam?

Check out the misdirection. Saddam has not told the truth, but then Molly G. Lackwit, age 14, told her parents a lie about whether she has smoked cigarettes, so what's the big deal?

Our nation should openly acknowledge that we have not always been fair in our actions or in our policies. We have not always respected people of other cultures, forms of government and religions.

Our nation should take off its blouse, lay on the floor, spread its legs, and ask to be raped again.

Democracy demands the logic of truth and an internal ethic that will not compromise freedom, respect for human dignity or the common good, even when faced with a brutal tyrant like Saddam. Because the lives of people are the treasure of democracy, it always resists the recourse to deadly force. Democracy has to exhaust every path that might lead to peaceful resolution. War is the last resort, and only to protect innocent people who have been attacked or when an attack is imminent.

Justice demands that we must never impose our culture and way of life on other people. Just as we demand respect from other nations, we have to respect their right to self-determination.

Listen, cocksucker: I don't care what Muslims eat or how many vowels their language has or what kind of headwear they find fashionable. My culture and way of life says that I have the right to work in a skyscraper or take a trip on an airplane without fear of being brutally murdered.

Respect for differences and for the dignity of each person is the only path that can lead to true harmony among nations and people. This requires that we be unrelenting in forging harmony and trust among diverse people, and that we take the first steps toward reconciliation, not war, with our enemies.

Okay: "Mr. Hussein, please resume your torture, murder, and research into biological weapons."

Listen, asswipe: There are people who need to reconcile their wrongs, and they are not reading San Jose newspapers.

Even on the eve of war, the American public is not convinced that war on Iraq is necessary to defeat the forces of terrorism. If we go down the road to war, it will not end the threat of Al-Qaida or address the causes of fundamentalist Islamic rage.

This recourse to pre-emptive violence will not prevent violence. It could have the opposite result: We could begin a death spiral that will pit nation against nation, religion against religion, culture against culture.

I hope that it is not too late for the truth of justice and the truth of love. I hope that there is still time to work for that vision of peace that Pope John glimpsed 40 years ago.

Paul Locatelli, S.J., is president of Santa Clara University.

Two years ago nobody had heard of Bin Laden. Now every penny-ante leftist is convinced that a war will make thousands of Bin Laden. What makes USA-vs.-Iraq model 2003 different from any one of the thousands of other wars throughout history?

I wonder if 1939's appeasers claimed that a war with Germany would create many new Hitlers?

Posted 10:10 PM by Floyd

One of the unfortunate side effects of 9/11 has been the sad decline of intelligent libertarian commentary. A few months after the war I let my subscription to Liberty lapse. The magazine had become unreadable not because of its opinions but because of the poor quality of its arguments.

Here is an example by the worst of the writers to appear in Liberty's pages after September 11, one George W.C. McCarter. In the October 2002 issue McCarter wrote "The Case of Johnny Jihad," an examimation of the John Walker Lindh affair. Now it would not be difficult to critique the indictment of Lindh on libertarian grounds. Lindh does not belong to the United States. He is not its chattel. If Lindh wishes to go to Afghanistan and fight for Allah, that is his business. The laws of the United States do not and should not extend to Central Asia; what Lindh does there is none of the American government's business. Of course if Lindh should come into conflict with American armed forces, it would certainly be reasonable for them to shoot at him or make him a POW. But Lindh should be treated as any other combatant, not as a slave who ran off his owner's farm.

That was my off the cuff attempt to defend Lindh from a libertarian perspective; it was not at all what McCarter wrote. McCarter attempted to minimize the case against Lindh with enough hand-waving to give ten hardened software engineers carpal. For instance:

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto described those offenses as "aiding terrorists and carrying explosives." Taranto's disingenuous precis is just accurate enough to be grossly unfair. A more complete account was provided by John Riley in Newsda: "Lindh pleaded guilty to supplying services to the Taliban and carrying a rifle and grenades while supplying services." That sounds more like Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War than it does "aiding terrorists."

This is not a philosophical argument; it is the most vulgar sort of obfuscation as might be practiced by Johnny Cochrane. Was Hemingway not a combatant? Is there any point in using him as an analogy (rather than, say, a Danish civilian who volunteered for the SS) other than to cloud Lindh's actions in a halo of romantic literary respectability? McCarter continues on and on in this vein for three pages, conceding the legitimacy of the government's case against Lindh and trying to undermine it by quibbling about pointless details.

I have also been disappointed by much of the writing found in Reason, especially the Hit and Run blog. Hit and Run at least is readable and contains some good stuff, but it also contains a great deal of pointless sniping. For example, take this entry from last week:

A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions.

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council....

Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away -- including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said.

Wow, imagine that: Intelligence is often inaccurate! I thought you could just Google for "Saddam" "uranium" and get all the information you needed. There is of course a great deal of other evidence that Saddam is pursuing various forbidden weapons. Furthermore, if you treat the Baghdad regime with the same hostility and suspicion that you do Washington's, you would assume that Saddam were developing weapons of mass destruction until proven otherwise.

Reason's schtick for promoting libertarianism is not to prosletyze, but to present little bits of evidence that the market works ad that the state does not. This may be a good scheme in general, but not now. There are momentous issues to be decided at this moment -- whether it is appropriate to preemptively strike other nations, what should be done to dictators who have violated ceasefire terms for a decade, how Al Qaeda can best be defeated. None of these issues will be decided by pointing out that a particular piece of evidence is false, or that Vice President Cheney has connections to Halliburton.

Posted 1:14 PM by Floyd

I had a shitty weekend, and tears are running down my face. But I'm crying because of the only good thing that happened to me.

I spent the weekend playing bridge in San Mateo. Saturday I played in a big pair game with my partner Dan Voorhees. Dan is an older guy from up north (Santa Rosa) and I've been playing with him for about a year and a half. We played in a big field full of hopeless players, and they killed us. My friend Len was also playing, also had a bad game, and put it like this: "These people come to my table and they're drooling all over themselves. Then they play like Garozzo for three boards, and leave the table, and it's back to "duh, what?""

Here's two examples:

• Dan opens 1. RHO jumps to 2, weak. I raise to 3. LHO bids 3. Dan bids 4, and now the preemptor gives it one more shot with 4. He catches his partner with the perfect hand and rolls it.
  
  
• Dan opens 1 and RHO jumps to 3. The ass on my left bids 3N on QT9x xx AKJx Kxx because, you know, 3N will play really well opposite seven hearts to the KQJ and out when we hold up the ace. He catches his partner with good hearts and a side entry and rolls 3N.
  

So Saturday was a discouraging day. Towards the end of the session a very good player from San Francisco was wandering around watching people and looking for a game for the Sunday Swiss. I humbly suggested that he could play with me and my wife and my friend Eric. I just said this to be polite, but he said "Let's do it"! I ran out to the car to call Eric -- and found out that he was busy Sunday. So I did not get to play in a team game.

Sunday Sherry and I played in a side pairs. This was much more hopeless than Saturday as all the real players were in the Swiss. Our first session was crummy. During the second session we just sat there as east-west held all the cards. There were two rounds in a row where the East player played the first four boards. And of course the quality of play was awful; if a penguin had waddled in from Antarctica and started playing the cards he would have done better. We pretty much crushed the East-Wests who came to our table, but they were getting killed at the other tables too. It was the kind of field where you worked hard to hold them to no overtricks in a game contract, and then found that when they bid the game they had a top.

Anyway, Sunday night I finally scratched -- tied for 2nd (out of 6!) for 0.99 masterpoints.

The one good thing that happened was that we had lunch Sunday afternoon at Little Szechuan in downtown San Mateo. Sherry ordered a couple of traditional Szechuan dishes that I had never had before. One was a boiled beef dish. Doesn't that sound yummy? (Actually it sounds like English cuisine.) It was kind of like a beef and kim chee stew. It was really good! The other dish was a diced chicken dish with peppers I had not encountered before. They were thick and green, maybe a half inch wide and an inch or two long. They had a bell pepper flavor and were spicy but edible. I am eating the leftovers right now and wiping away the tears.

Here is one cool hand from Saturday night:

Fourth chair, none vul, I held AKJ 52 AK9763 A3. LHO and partner passed and RHO opened 1!

I didn't see that a 1N overcall was right; I decided to pass and maybe bid diamonds later. LHO passed and Dan passed after some consideration.

What would you lead?

If you led a high diamond I must say, what's the rush? I led a low diamond and dummy hit with

96 J986 J85 9842

Partner won the queen! He switched to the jack of clubs and everyone ducked. Another club went to the queen and ace. I cashed my ace and king of trumps; Dan pitched a discouraging heart and an encouraging club. Now what?

Well, the hand should be an open book. The only shape with which a three-card diamond suit is opened in standard is 4432. Declarer is marked with good hearts and the queen of spades. The run of the trumps will strip-squeeze declarer! If he throws two spades, his queen will drop. If he keeps Qxx, then he has come down to two hearts and I can throw him in. Declarer did pitch one spade, I hand-locked him, and he was forced to give me three spade tricks. +250 was a very good score.

Dan's clubs were KJTxx, so we can take all the tricks after a club to my ace, trumps and a club back to the king. We're good, but not that good.