Returning to the US after a trip overseas—in this case a nine-day trip to England—always brings with it a mild readjustment factor. Remembering which way to look when crossing the street. Pulling out greenbacks instead of queenbacks at Starbucks, and not having to do conversion math on the dollar-seventy price. At least for my trip to Italy in two weeks, I’ll be able to continue thinking one-to-one thanks to the weakness of the dollar, which will be an advantage over dividing by 1,850.

But the biggest shift is coming back to US political philosophy. The radical left-wing fringe here is comfortably center-left over there, so once again I must don the persona of the marginalized lunatic.

I left with the SEC scandal in early full swing, and was hoping to return to at least a debate on whether the foxes are guarding our henhouses. But W’s teflon suit, inherited from Reagan with tailoring by Bill, shows few signs of hand-me-down wear. Yesterday’s Washington Post reports Bush approval ratings still in the 72 percent zone, and W is handily beating most Democratic contenders in their home states in fictitious one-on-one matchups. In the face of an issue that is perhaps the best of all possible tailor-made scandals against the administration for the Democrats, the polls show only ineffectual peeping rather than full-blown resonance.

A Brit asked me last week, “If Gore had been President during 9/11 and the aftermath, the Republicans would have utterly eviscerated him. Why is your left so ineffectual?” My best response was complete political incompetence. It is one thing to form coalitions for national unity and interests of security; it is another to be cowed into silence.

So what is causing the silence? Michael Kelly offers the obvious answer in yesterday’s Post op-ed, titled “Two-Edged Weapon”. After an interesting summary of Bush’s actions involving Harken—including some follow-on shenanigans with the Texas Rangers that I hadn’t previously heard—Kelly suggests that the Democrats are also tarred by this scandal. Terry McAuliffe, current chair of the DNC, was offered $100,000 in Global Crossing pre-IPO stock, which he cashed out for approximately $10 million. Democracy 21 reports corporate donations over ten years to the Republicans at $636 million; to the Democrats, $449 million. Therefore, we are led to conclude, the Democrats have no moral standing to question whether the Republicans are too much in bed with the corporate sector.

Which, of course, is very convenient for the perpetrators of abuse. We are systemically ensured of never having a moral paragon on this issue come to the fore—only a statesman who is not affiliated with the major parties and who never accepts money from corporations (or those employed by them) could say such. These people are comfortably mired at the local dogcatcher level; it is not possible to became a US representative or senator without a few million dollars at your disposal.

So we the people should stop affecting our comfortable black-and-white opinions and sound bites and start firing up some neurons on this. There is more than a semantic issue at stake when comparing a recipient of a sweetheart deal to a former member of the audit committee of a corporate board of directors. If we can all agree that the Republicans are more disposed to the unfettered and unregulated free actions of corporations than the Democrats, we should not then conclude that all politicians are alike when those free actions result in scandal and economic repercussions.

Those who benefit most from the status quo maintain their power when the rank-and-file meekly accept the system. Those in power benefit most from the presumption that there is no credible opposition or alternative. 2002 is an abnormally good year for the voters to be heard, with great shifts of power possible in key elections across the country. Make some noise.

The last thing I saw when I read the Sunday paper was the Alfred E. Newman grin of George W. Bush, his arms around a demographically-proper mix of cute tykes, as a cover story in Parademagazine touting Bush’s call for more volunteerism.

In Bush’s State of the Union, or, um, speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, W called for 4,000 years hours of volunteer service over the rest of your life. So it was wonderful seeing him speaking to the weekend’s marchers on Washington for Palestinian rights and against the IMF, lauding them for their volunteer principles and their commitment to a cause.

No, sorry, just joking. Bush would more rapidly be buried alive at Yucca Flats than do anything so radioactive as speak to a peace march.

I’m trying to give W the benefit of the doubt, but he just makes it so damned hard. On the face of it, volunteerism is great stuff; I used to be an organizer of a nonprofit network, and the fact that it’s still going today and has generated hundreds of volunteer projects makes it one my proudest achievements in Washington.

I’m just convinced that the world will be a better place if you get off your butt to work for your beliefs, even if those beliefs are diametrically opposed to mine. There’s a net gain if we’re both working to undermine everything the other stands for, when taken against the status quo of both of us sitting on our couches watching the tube. (For reasons of cardiovascular fitness, if nothing else.)

But now the Republican hierarchy wants to take credit for volunteerism, despite the fact that America already has the highest incidence of volunteerism in the world. So if I go out and do my thing, and contribute to some GAO statistic next year that shows N hours given over the year, you just know the Bushies will say that it was motivated by dedication to Republican ideas.

Here’s why I don’t trust it. The activist loves volunteerism because we ascribe morality to action: you don’t like the world, go out and make your difference! That difference can be on-the-ground, the “getting your hands dirty” part, or it could be motivating government, corporations, or communities to do the right thing on their own.

But the obvious subtext of Bush volunteerism is, “get out and do stuff so the government can walk away from it.” You know, hold a bake sale for your school, but don’t question why the school so desperately needs cookie money. (And absolutely don’t question why school monies are indexed to property values, ensuring that the schools most likely to hold bake sales are the ones least desperate for funds.) Add in the utter hypocrisy that the Republicans are now supporting and expanding AmeriCorps after spending years trying to shut it down utterly.

The Republican mantra is “the government can do nothing well, therefore it should do as little as possible.” We’ll ignore Reagan-Bush-Bush spending increases and the current Ashcroft attacks on privacy and freedom in the name of freedom and give them the benefit of the doubt that the less cynical members of the party actually believe this. Is there no room in that philosophy for the thought that every political and social action has a “natural” best place to be, and that some of those places are in the local, state, and federal government?

In other words, if you want to reduce hunger in your town, by all means, give money to your church. If you want to end hunger in your country—where do you go? The status quo answer, which the Republicans (and many Democrats) are satisfied with, is: “You know, we’d love to, but we just can’t. Sorry.”

So, please, by all means, get out there and do your thing. And if you’re so inclined, tell your government that there are things that you can handle on your own or with your community, but really, some things just need government, and laws, and leaders. That’s why we put them there.

I’ve never met John Scalzi, but I hope I do someday. We’ve emailed a few times after discovering that we’re separated by two degrees of separation (we share the same literary agent).

John writes a web column called Whatever, and I just read one of his recent columns, I Hate Your Politics, which I predict will someday be mass-forwarded by email 10,000 times without attribution to John (or alternately, attributed to Vonnegut).

Some fair-use excerpts to encourage you to just go and read the column:

Liberals: The stupidest and weakest members of the political triumvirate, the political equivalent of the kid who lets the school bully pummel him with his own fists.

Conservatives don’t actually bother to spend time with people who are not conservative, and thus become confused and irritable when people disagree with them; fundamentally can’t see how that’s even possible, which shows an almost charming intellectual naiveté.

Libertarians blog with a frequency that makes one wonder if they’re actually employed somewhere or if they have loved ones that miss them.

Yahoo News reported a gadget from Siemens (website auf Deutsch) that triggered my interest.

Then, unfortunately, I thought about it for 15 seconds longer.

Is the problem really that keyboards are fantastic devices, but gosh darn it, there’s never one right there when you need one? I’m not likely to agree. I’ve been pounding away at one for about 12 hours now, and my fingers are starting to get a bit frazzled, Dvorak keyboard or no.

Talking for 12 hours, though, that’s much easier. And I can yammer faster than I can hammer, as can most people. The sooner we toss our keyboards in the pile with carbon paper and platens and switch to speech recognition, the better off we’ll be.

So while this gizmo’s undeniably got some Holodeck cool to it, I’m not seeing the point. And if you think typing without any tactile feedback is fun… I’ll use the Selectric, you use the Atari 400. Race ya.

P.S. Strikes me as interesting that the tag line for the Atari 400 is that you don’t have to be smart to use it, while today the subtext of Think Different is very much that it’s what the smart people go for.

The House of Representatives, showing their willingness to do something in the complete absence of understanding or common sense, has widened the list of computer crimes that will land you behind bars for the rest of your life. (In case you didn’t notice, hacking became terrorism last fall.)

CSEA’s original language said in cases where miscreants knowingly attempt “to cause death or serious bodily injury” through electronic means, the punishment would be life imprisonment. That wasn’t strong enough for the committee, which succumbed to pressure from the Bush administration […] promising life terms for computer intrusions that “recklessly” put others’ lives at risk.

On the face of it, that looks pretty reasonable. The problem is that the enforcement of this law will be done by people who, frankly, rarely know what the hell they’re talking about. Turn on your laptop at the wrong time with your wireless Internet card activated, and that can be recorded as an “intrusion” when it automatically attempts to handshake with the government or military antenna a block away. Here in DC, there aren’t many places where that won’t be happening.

Tech people working the Internet use “hacker” tools all the time on their own sites; it’s a pretty good idea to use the bad guys’ tools to see if the bad guys can break in. But when your site is at 123.93.13.1 and the FAA is at 123.94.13.1, it’s not that hard to accidentally ping flood the wrong location. Do you think that an explanation of “typographical error” will cover the problem?

Better yet, which is more likely: 1) the FAA will say, “damn, it was really incompetent of us to put a critical system on the Internet with no protection,” or 2) the FBI will jail a bunch of people and trumpet yet another advance in the war on terrorism?

It’s impossible to accidentally hijack a plane or release anthrax. It’s very possible to do entirely legal things on the Internet in such a way that you accidentally target someone else — or make someone else think they’ve been targeted, even when zero damage is done.

Odds of people in power understanding this before several poor schmucks have been sent to jail: zero.

Addendum: 2/28/02, 8:20 PM:

Here’s a perfect example of the kind of activity I’m talking about. My industry views this as “white hat” hacking which is far preferable to exploiting a security issue and then keeping your mouth shut. It could also earn Adrian Lamo a long stretch in jail from people who don’t know the difference between criminal activity and responsible reporting of security issues.

This story is so bizarre, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

US planes rain dollars on Afghanistan

>CHAMAN, Pakistan: US aircraft over southern Afghanistan have scattered $100 bills tucked into envelopes bearing a picture of President George W. Bush, witnesses said on Thursday.

Picture of George W. Bush? $100 bills?

Ok, assuming for the moment that the story is true. $200 is about three months’ income; seems to me that 200 one-dollar bills would be a lot more useful. (Can’t imagine there are too many places where you can break a large bill.) If someone can advise me on what strategic purpose this serves, it’s escaping me.

And why a picture of W? We’re not talking about a media-saturated country; unless the armed forces have been on a publicity campaign that we haven’t been told about—always possible—the average Afghani wouldn’t know George W. Bush from Joerg Haider.

On the other hand, if the story is false, why is the Times of India running it? And if the story is off the Reuters news wire, why is the Times the only paper to pick it up?

The Republican Party of Texas wants to you shoot off your gun, not your mouth.

In my vote for “boneheaded legal move of 2002”, the RPT is suing a website for appropriation of trademark. So, naturally, now thousands more people are hearing about the site, Enron Owns the GOP, than ever would have if the RPT had just ignored it.

Here’s a sample from the RPT site, and the spoof site’s version:

These images are 2/3rds original size, and look more similar here than they do in the originals. You’ll have noted the big honking “E” in the word Republican and superimposed over what I’m guessing is the state of Texas — not that I’d have seen that if I didn’t have the RPT version for comparison.

Oddly enough, EnronOwnstheGOP considers this to be a top story, while the RPT web site doesn’t mention it. Maybe that’s because of the apparent moratorium against mentioning Enron at all anywhere on their site, which strikes me as pretty weird.

But what really annoyed the hell out of me was the proof positive that the RPT thinks the average American has the mental acumen of a toaster. From the letter written by one Jonathan Snare of Loeffler, Jonas, & Tuggey:

>Your website is clearly intended to imitate and mimic the RPT trademark symbol and website, and to create confusion and mislead the public. As a result, the public is likely to be deceived into believing that your website… is sponsored by or affiliated with the RPT.

Perhaps if the public has been lobotomized. Problem for their theory #1: satire is Constitutionally protected. Problem for their theory #2: in order to get to the spoof site, you have to accidentally type E-N-R-O-N-O-W-N-S-T-H-E-G-O-P instead of T-E-X-A-S-G-O-P-.-O-R-G.

Of course, a third party could maliciously point to the wrong site. Of course, that third party would be entirely outside the control of the spoofers. And if you’re feeling third-partyish today, you can buy the texasgop.com domain from BuyDomains for the low price of somewhere between $650 and $10,000. Or you can wait until the registration expires on June 11th and try to pick it up cheaper.

The Republican Party of Texas: We Can Subvert the Constitution and Make Mountains from Molehills, All Before Breakfast! My thanks to those fine folks for bringing this to my attention.

From Wired News Ephemera:

>Price of Arrogance

You can be penalized for being late with a bill payment. You can be penalized for early withdrawal. You can be penalized for unnecessary roughness. And if you’re a customer of New Zealand’s largest phone company, you can be penalized for being “an arrogant bastard.” That’s what Auckland businessman James Storrie found when he opened his bill from Telecom Corp. this month. It was right there: A $337.50 “penalty for being an arrogant bastard.” Telecom Corp. is investigating.

After the World Trade Center attack, a political cartoon portrayed Superman with his head in his hands, while a young boy asks him, “Where were you?” I thought this was a rather poignant message at the time: faced with a disaster of comic book proportions, we didn’t have comic book heroes to protect us.

Our president apparently felt the same way, because he’s still using comic book metaphors. After his gaffe on September 11th, promising to find the “folks” that did the attack, we’ve been treated to a steady stream of black-and-white views: our enemies are evildoers, and the entire world falls into two categories, with us or against us.

I happen to agree that terrorists are evildoers, but President Bush’s definition has been much more fungible. First it was the terrorists; then it was Al-Qaeda (although we the people had to rely on Britain to provide us with proof); then it was the Taliban. Since the Taliban has been defeated, though, many ex-Talibs are now the allies of the new, US-supported government, and apparently these doers of evil have been completely rehabilitated so long as they weren’t mentioned on the front page of the New York Times.

Now that the country we were at war against has been vanquished, and the terrorist group has been decimated, one might think we could switch to a state somewhere north of vigilance and somewhere south of war. One who might think that hasn’t been paying attention to Bush’s popularity figures, which peaked at an all-time high around 93% and have been hovering in the 80s since.

If you were paying close attention to these numbers, you’d have noted that they started going up before Bush really did anything; it took a week before he reached his first widely hailed turning point, during a speech he gave at the National Cathedral, before which he set the Cheney standard for flying to undisclosed locations. A White House political aide can be excused for coming to the obvious conclusion: war, good; recession, bad. Look no further than the last Bush administration for proof of that.

Bush II is obviously going to avoid making the same mistakes his father made, and it appears he’s decided that daddy’s biggest mistake was letting the war end. So now we’re at war against a shadowy terrorist organization, replete with comic book monsters, which luckily for the administration has no clear finish line.

Destroyed the terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan? Not done yet, bin Laden is still out there.

bin Laden might be dead from kidney disease? Not done yet, he has many lieutenants.

Lieutenants are boxed up on the Pakistan border with no means of escape? Oh, keep worrying; Al-Qaeda has people everywhere.

But someone near the top is paying attention to public opinion, and realized that in order to have a war, you have to have clear enemies. Eventually, the fervor for war will lessen unless there’s a clear focus, and victories in the offing. Clearly, Al-Qaeda won’t fit the bill.

Ta da! For your wartime pleasure, we present: the newly unveiled Axis of Evil! (Somewhere, Lex Luthor must be kicking himself for being upstaged so badly in the criminal naming department.) Let’s look at its founding members:

1. Iraq. Ok, surely there’s some evil here. Biological and chemical weapons development, run by the star of the last War on Evil. Not evil enough to catch the attention of the president before September, but maybe he was just napping.
2. Iran. Hmm. A favorite evil star of the 1970s, but weren’t they one of the democratic up-and-comers of the 1990s? Sure, it’s hard to have a democracy when it’s coexisting with a theocratic state, but there was a brief period of time when the Iranians were looking like the good guys; notably, during our war against Axis of Evil Member #1.
3. North Korea. And from the history files of the 1950s returns that old evil from M*A*S*H 4077. A country devastated by hunger with a military budget that would barely cover Colin Powell’s annual brass polish supply. (We outspend them 55 to 1.) They’ve got a few missiles, though, which on a good day and with a strong tailwind can reach Japan. Perhaps they have to be part of the Axis of Evil in order to justify the Nonfunctional Missile Defense.

Let’s put it this way: South Korea is concerned that we’re being too belligerent towards the North Koreans.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the nations which aren’t even on the Meridian of Perfidy:

1. Saudi Arabia. Source of many of Al-Qaeda’s expatriate members and a vast chunk of their money (funneled out of US pockets thanks to our dependence on oil). Always willing to speak up to the rest of the Arab world about our “misguided” policies in the Middle East, and brilliantly effective distributor of anti-American propaganda whenever CNN isn’t looking.
2. China. North Korea is maybe trying to get nuclear weapons—which would be harder for them if we’d stop blocking international arms treaties. China’s got ’em, and they’ve got missiles that can reach the West Coast. Oh, and they’re still Communist. But they’re also a big market for corporations that give a lot of money to the Republican party, so China good… Cuba still bad.
3. Montana and Idaho. Okay, so they’re not countries. But let’s not forget that before September, the most successful terrorists in America were white guys named Ted and Timothy.

Now, you can’t very well declare war on Montana, it’s inconveniently part of the United States. War on Montana is silly. No, for the terrorists in Montana we need to use the FBI and law enforcement. Iran, though, Iran’s outside the United States.

I’d agree that war was the most efficient method of destroying 80% of Al-Qaeda, but now we’re up against the remainder — decentralized, at least still partially funded, located God knows where. Perhaps in friendly nations without the ability to root them out. War isn’t the way you pursue such an enemy, just as war isn’t the way you pursue the enemy in Montana. Inside the U.S., there’s the FBI. Outside the U.S., there’s the rest of the alphabet soup: CIA, NSA, and all of the other agencies whose budgets we don’t get to know about.

So you’re the Bush administration. You can:

1. ferret out enemies of the United States the way we’ve been doing it for 50 years, with the CIA and Interpol and friendly nations around the world; or you can
2. declare an ongoing state of war, with no clear end, against Axis of Evil countries (and whomever else comes to mind), during which time you may
   1. massively increase the defense budget and the bankrolls of those military-industrial companies who give you money;
   2. ram through right-wing policies which normally cause domestic resistance; and
   3. wrap yourself in a patriotic flag, call your domestic and foreign opponents anti-American, and keep up the military displays as long as they keep your approval rating inflated.

When do you suppose that war would end?

It’s 7 AM and I haven’t slept yet, which is probably why I think this is really funny. Click on the image to see it full-sized.

I still have my gambling story followup to post, and I have an essay brewing on W and the State of the Union, but that’ll wait until I have more available bandwidth.

A wonderful site found today on the history of ping, which is a Unix command to see if another computer on the Internet is minimally responsive. It’s also the title of a wonderful children’s book which was my fave back in 1972. The ping page includes a review of the children’s book as if it were an allegory for the Unix command, not to be missed, and a humorous anecdote about a Unix manager who bought the book by mistake.

Before I post this, I’ll issue a few disclaimers:

1. George W. Bush is not responsible for what his family says.
2. Saudi Arabian newspapers are not exactly known for their commitment to veracity.

Still, doesn’t the following just seem, well, creepy?

Win American hearts through sustained lobbying: Neil Bush

>JEDDAH, 22 January—Neil Bush, brother of US President George Bush, said here yesterday that the distorted image of the Arab world could be removed through the sustained lobbying of US politicians.

>”The US media campaign against the interests of Arabs and Muslims and the American public opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be influenced through a sustained lobbying and PR effort,” Bush, chairman and chief executive officer of Ignite! Inc., said in his keynote address on the concluding day of the three-day Jeddah Economic Forum at Hilton Hotel here.

>The support for Israel had been strong for many years because of the strong public opinion in its favor and continuous lobbying by Israeli supporters among politicians. After all, politicians shape policies based on public opinion, he said.

Charles Wiltgen has written the first hype free explanation of .NET that I’ve ever seen, and it’s surprisingly positive, explaining things that I was still hazy on. (Haziness generally caused by the MS marketing machine.)

The article is aimed for the Mac OS tech-savvy, with lines like, “C# is to .NET as Objective-C is to Cocoa.” I think it’ll be clear in the non-technical points, but if there are any analogies you want to clear up, feel free to email me.

Longish essay coming up shortly on the new Microsoft security strategy. I wrote this yesterday, but it was eaten by an Internet glitch and I haven’t had the heart to rewrite it yet.

Update, April 12, 2002: Joel Spolsky, a programmer who generally really knows what he’s talking about, says that .NET is just about the greatest thing since sliced bread.

SURPRISE SETTLEMENT EVENLY SPLITS MICROSOFT

> Under the agreement, Microsoft will no longer issue patches, which Gates said explains the recent five-day outage at Microsoft’s upgrade site. “That was planned,” he said. “It was a test of the Microsoft No Patch Access system. Went perfectly. No one was able to download anything.”

>One Reuters reporter, meanwhile, questioned the long-term viability of Patchsoft. “This seems like a logical split right now, but what if Microsoft’s products improve to the extent that patches are needed less frequently, or perhaps not at all?” she asked.

>”I’m sorry, I can only respond to serious questions,” Blumenthal answered.

I’ve been troubleshooting a problem over the weekend with the speed of this site. I’m getting conflicting information as to whether the problem is with my site provider (i.e., everyone sees it), or with my home ISP (i.e., it’s just me).

So I’d appreciate it if you’d click that Reply button and let me know whether this site seems fast/medium/slow compared to the other sites you visit, and what kind of connection you use. (Something like, “Your site came up normally and I’m using an AOL dial
-up”, or “Your site came up slowly and I’m on Verizon DSL.”)

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies.

I don’t mean to make this become “all spam reports, all the time”, but I found this in my almost-never-checked dialup email box today and thought it was wonderful.

Chances are you’ll switch ISPs in the next year. Or possibly change jobs.

This means yet another e-mail address and the inconvenience of notifying all your personal and business contacts. And free e-mail account providers, including Yahoo and Hotmail, brand themselves, not you or your business! Your e-mail address should be a reflection of you.

Avoid the hassle, and always stand out with your own personalized e-mail address: Jeff [at] JeffPorten.com Now that’s unforgettable!

Click here to get Jeff [at] JeffPorten.com now.

Nice to know someone else thinks so.

More spam over the transom today, this time flogging the new .biz domain space and yet another company offering to register it for me, as if I couldn’t do it myself for nine bucks.

So I do whatever I do when I get spam, which is to open up the Internet email headers, track down their Internet service providers, and let them know which of their users is violating Terms of Service and must be instantly eradicated. Copies go off to the FTC for good measure, who occasionally bring out the big guns.

So I’m doing that for these new guys, tracking down their domain, when I come across this tidbit in the WHOIS database:

dotbiztoday.com
Request: dotbiztoday.com
Internet Domain Registrars WHOIS Server v.1.5
Registrant:
Dot Biz Today
   629 - 465 NE 181st Avenue
   Portland, Or 97230
   US
   (PH) 670-3611
   Registration Date:   11-Sep-2001 14:03:28
   Expiration Date: 11-Sep-2002 11:03:27

These guys are on the West Coast, as is their registrar (I checked), so at somewhere between 2:03 PM and 5:03 PM Eastern Time on September 11th, these guys were busily working on setting their new spamming business.

Now maybe you’re thinking, “hey, maybe they just hadn’t heard yet,” to which I remind you, these people were on the Internet.

You’ve got to be a pretty feculent life form to send spam, but these guys took it to a whole new level.

“Microsoft Product Support Services” (note the quotes!) has posted the vitally important help file, “How to RTFM“. Vital reading for too many Internet users.

Link contains offensive language and geek-oriented humor. Caveat lector.