Just a small disaster was all they wanted. A few hundred people incinerated in a fiery plane crash. Traffic gridlock in a few urban areas, maybe with a few road rage shootings thrown in. Maybe ten thousand people or so going hungry for a couple of days.

Instead, the 1/1/2000 changeover occurred with nary a whimper — until the inevitable complaining started. Now, the Great Myth of Y2K Doomsday has been rapidly replaced with Y2Kvetching. Nothing went wrong, so maybe we really didn’t need to spend those billions of dollars, after all?

The switch could have been easily predicted — and to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t — by anybody who understands the basic difference between computer programmers and your standard, run-of-the-mill human being. Computer programmers attempt to make their software mathematically elegant; software that merely works is frequently laudable — in parlance, a good “hack” — but it’s not quite as good as software that is logically bulletproof. In the real world, nothing is ever that good, so the average person doesn’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

In my neighborhood in Washington, DC, there are five different bus routes that run up and down Wisconsin Avenue; they all begin in the same spot, but they diverge in Georgetown and continue on to different destinations. In real-world terms, this works just fine. To a computer programmer, this is a pretty kludgy system. (A kludge is a system that works, usually because it’s overly complicated, or as in the Y2K scenario, based upon a limited set of inputs.) Most techies, if we were programming the bus system, would just put one big bus on Wisconsin Avenue, then run different bus lines from the endpoints.

Y2K, in a nutshell, was a bunch of computer analysts looking at a kludgy system as saying, “you know, this just isn’t bulletproof, and we don’t know where the problems might be.” And since there’s not a damn thing that isn’t computer-reliant somewhere, the worst-case scenarios were easy to envision.

So — was all of this blown way out of proportion? The obvious answer is no, but some people would have you believe that everything went so smoothly that the whole thing was a scam cooked up by those of us who would profit by it. Logically, then, these people wanted to see a few disasters, just to prove that all of that money was spent to good purpose. As Germany, Italy, and China seem to have come through unscathed, these people now have their Schadenfreude dressed up with no place to go.

The reality, of course, is different. I guarantee you that some people, somewhere, have had a very bad week, as they tripped up on Y2K issues that they didn’t find in time; more companies and governments will find their own bugs in the next twelve months. They’ll all bend over backwards to prevent anyone from finding out it’s Y2K-related, though — as the first new paradigm of 2000 is that anyone who has a Y2K mosquito bite is a grade-A moron.

At left: Rodin’s sculpture of Balzac.

At right: Robert S. Tarleton, Secretary of the Kappa Alpha Society.

A bit of a placeholder while I’m on the road.

For the past fifty years, the United States has been at the forefront of major international activity to improve the lot of the world in arenas of human rights and armed conflict. Although our actions and motives were frequently obfuscated in the name of the Cold War, most Americans believe that we’ve done much more good than harm on the world stage. At the very least, this is how we wish to see ourselves.

During the 106th Congress, two major steps backward have been taken. First, we first worked to weaken, then refused to sign, the International Criminal Court treaty, despite the fact that it was American initiative — dating back to the Nuremberg trials — that largely brought the ICC to its present state. We are now in the company of such great nations as Iraq, North Korea, and Libya as nonsignators.

Now, this week, the U.S. Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. England, France, Germany, China, and Russia — normally not bedfellows — called on us to ratify it. The vote was nineteen votes shy, not even close.

Special consideration goes to Senators John Chafee, James Jeffords, Gordon Smith, and Arlen Specter, for breaking party ranks to vote for the treaty. Awards for Shame to John McCain for taking a break from principle and integrity, and Robert Byrd for voting “present,” the lone Democrat to do so.

Both parties claim that they wish to continue abiding by the terms of the treaty. We have no plans to test nuclear weapons, or to undertake any other actions that would violate the treaty that we have not signed. Congressional testimony against the treaty states that we have no need to do so until the year 2030 (discounting the possibility that other technologies may preclude the need for testing by then). By defeating the treaty, we have given up the ability to ask other nations not to develop and test nuclear weapons, and the creation of international monitoring bodies to prevent nations from covertly doing so.

Are we so willing to trade our security for the sovereign power to do things we don’t want to do?

October 13, 1999 Update

This morning’s Washington Post has two articles above the fold on the front page: negotiations in the Senate to postpone the vote on the CTBT rather than have it voted down, and the military coup in Pakistan.

Pakistan, for those of us joining us late, became a member of the nuclear “club” last year, and with India is felt to have the highest potential for actually getting involved in a nuclear shooting war. The two nations are involved in active conflict over the disputed Kashmir region, and the flight time for nuclear missiles between the two capitals is measured in minutes. This means that during false warnings about launches, each military has a reaction time of about 15 seconds before they decide whether to retaliate.

Partisan politics are important, but the Senate is literally risking the future of the world on their meaningless squabbles. Contact your Senator today and tell him or her that you want the CTBT passed. The phone number for your Senator can be found here.

October 5, 1999

Readers will be excused if they’ve mistaken recent news reports about the 1966 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as a retrospective. A treaty signed by the United States over thirty years ago, and still not ratified by the Senate, just seems too far-fetched to contemplate.

Welcome to Washington.

I won’t make a comprehensive case for the Comprehensive treaty here, as that’s been done before me by several former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military strategists (both inside and outside the U.S. military), and the Secretary of Defense—whom, lest we forget, was formerly known as the Republican Senator from Maine.

However, the need for this treaty is so blindingly obvious, only the willfully blind would miss it. If you believe in the support and maintenance of international law as a means of preventing international conflict, the CTBT is a good idea as it ensures that fewer nations will have access to nuclear weaponry, within the framework of recognized international organizations. Fewer nukes, fewer triggers, and a safer world.

On the other hand, if you distrust international organizations and you prefer the U.S. to maintain its military superiority ad infinitum, the CTBT removes one of the sole remaining threats to the United States mainland. Nuclear weapons are a much cheaper method than conventional armaments to catch up with the world’s great military powers; why then are we delaying the creation of an international system that would prevent other nations from catching up?

The Republican argument against the treaty, and forgive me if I paraphrase: “This is a bad treaty because it might sometimes be broken, and it might sometimes be imperfectly enforced.” Oddly enough, that’s not what you hear them saying when they’re talking about drug laws, but I digress. The alternate argument boils down to the usual vague fears that signing any international treaty somehow hobbles the mighty American colossus. Far better, I suppose, to live in chaos with the rule of “might makes right?”

The CTBT comes up for vote on October 12. A two-thirds majority is needed, and we’re still several votes shy. Contact your Senators and tell them that you care whether you live in a saner world.

Welcome to either a fascinating resource demonstrating a cross-section of the work that I do, or an act of monumental ego.

After nearly a decade as an activist, and six years working in the Washington, DC area as an Internet consultant, web site designer, database expert, conferencing entrepreneur, published author, and professional dilettante — it’s become extremely difficult to explain just what I do.

The greatest difficulty is continuing to find the thread that links these various pursuits together. The best thing about having varied interests and involvements is the moment when you can bring disconnected people from different worlds together for their common interests and goals, especially when they only then discover that they have common interests.

In my work and my personal life (if you can separate the two), I am blessed with colleagues and friends who are intensely committed, extremely skilled, astonishingly talented, and all-around decent people — most of whom will never meet each other. I hope that by publishing what I do, and writing about the people I work with, more of you will.

And I don’t mind having another soapbox to stand on. Watch this space for essays, rants, raves, and other amusements.

Happy New Year to those of you celebrating 5760.