Interesting Stuff

There’s been a lot of news recently, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

Despite the inaction of the country as a whole, the western states have banded together to reduce carbon emissions, thereby joining the rest of the world in combating global warming. It’s pretty cool to watch the whole world (with a couple idiotic exceptions) come together to work on this stuff.

A battle has moved through the British courts over how far the freedom of the press extends: there is currently a scandal over a deal made by Tony Blair’s fundraisers, wherein they offered honours to various people in exchange for off-the-record loans during the campaign season, and then tried to cover up the whole thing. The government, claiming it would mess up the police investigation of the events, repeatedly tried to bar newspapers from discussing the evidence. However, it looks like the high court has sided with the press, and they can publish stories about the scandal. Much of this hinges on an email between Lord Levy and Ms. Turner discussing their deal, but I can’t seem to find a copy of the text online. I suspect this will damage even Tony Blair’s reputation, though I could be wrong about that.

Speaking of scandals and cover-ups, “Scooter” Libby has been found guilty of obstructing justice in the whole CIA leak thing (remember, the one with Valerie Plame?). It’s nice to see that his comeuppance has arrived, but it’s kinda too bad that Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald couldn’t get enough evidence to try others; I strongly suspect Libby was the “fall guy,” and there are others who are equally guilty but will go free.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to put a timetable on the Iraq war and bring our troops home before Bush leaves the oval office. I strongly doubt this will actually happen, but it’s nice to see that they’re trying to hold him accountable, if only symbolically.

As usual, Bush has been greeted with violent protests every where he goes, because most of the world is reasonable and sees this man is a greedy warmonger. This is happening pretty consistently across all of Latin America, on top of Hugo Chavez’s scathing words against him (Bush is on a tour of the area at the moment).

Finally, the UN is beginning to consider an embargo against Iran over its nuclear programme, but China and Russia are expressing their doubts. We’ll see what happens, but Iran will probably not be faced with strong penalties.

As always, remember to use BugMeNot if you can’t access these or other articles.

Iran now claims to have launched a rocket into space, although other countries have yet to confirm the achievement. President Ahmadinejad says this is for peaceful satellite launches, but as always, Europe and America don’t believe him. Moreover, Iran has not halted its nuclear programme in spite of the sanctions imposed by the UN in December. The UN security council is convening with Germany about what to do on this front. Many western countries, chief among them the US, are still of the opinion that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, despite the Iranians claims of merely having a peaceful energy programme (to which they’re entitled, having signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970). Moreover, UN inspectors have been allowed to examine Iran’s operations since 1992 and have found absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. As Ahmadinejad has said, it’s time for the West to stop “bullying” Iran into giving up what it is rightfully entitled to.

Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and author of Cable News Confidential, gave a talk at work earlier this week.

A summary of the talk →

Huh. It looks like Portugal will legalise abortion soon. I admit I know very little about Portugal, but this entire story surprises me. I hadn’t realized abortion was previously illegal there, nor that it had a Socialist prime minister (nor that his name is Jose Socrates; as bigoted as it sounds, my first impulse on his name was to wonder whether he was Mexican or Greek). Upon further inspection, I’m surprised that my parents can remember a time when Portugal was a dictatorship (which ended in what appears to have been a beautiful, peaceful-ish revolution).

Hurrah for socialism and progressive values!

As more details come out, it looks like I was spot-on last night in my analysis of the embassy bombing in Athens. Hot damn!

It turns out one of my coworkers used to work for Evolution Robotics, which made the ER1 I used in my robotics research a year and a half ago. It’s nice to know that he agrees with me that the ER1 could have been a great product except the basic software, power converter, and marketing department were crap (though apparently if we had sprung for the $1,000 software it would have worked better). Intriguingly, he also thinks that adding a laptop and camera to a Roomba is a good way to get a cheap robot, which is what Prof. Dodds is doing now (he was my robotics research prof). Nifty!

The American embassy in Athens, Greece was apparently bombed this evening? I can’t find any articles on the internet about it, but I suspect there will be several tomorrow. Remember: you read it here first!

More details when I can find them…

Edit: That’s right—I beat Reuters to a news story! by about an hour! The blast appears to have been outside the building itself, and it looks like no one was hurt, though it shattered quite a few windows. Personally, I suspect this is a group of leftist extremists trying to “retaliate” to Bush’s speech last night. Many Greeks are against the Bush administration, as shown by the protests when Condi visited the country in April.

This evening, President Bush gave a speech about his new strategy in Iraq (link goes to the full text). This strategy basically seems to involve sending in 20,000 more troops and doing the same thing they’ve been doing all along. I seriously doubt this is a viable strategy, particularly when a significant part of the “extra” troops will come from simply extending the tours of the soldiers who are currently over there. Anderson Cooper had some interesting analysis, however: pulling out of Iraq would cause the country to break out into a Sunni/Shia civil war, rather than falling back into a state similar to what Saddam’s reign was like. Perhaps the US is actually doing a fair amount to help by keeping this war from bubbling to the surface. Perhaps it would be best to keep our noses out of their business, and let them fight their own wars without our intervention. Either way, it was a point of view I hadn’t heard before.

However, the thing that struck me most about the speech was that it didn’t end in “God bless America.” This is the first speech of his that I have heard that didn’t end that way (for instance, every State of the Union address he has given as well as his inaugural address ended with that or a similar phrase). Instead he hoped that the “Author of Liberty” would “guide us,” which is at least slightly less Christian. Perhaps he has realized that bringing fundamental Christianity into politics, particularly when he’s talking about a Muslim civil war, is a bad idea? Here’s hoping!

Things are at least beginning to change a little in American politics. The Democrats, since taking over the legislative branch of the government earlier this month, have already started passing ethics legislation to try to curb the problems Washington has been having with lobbyists. This is part of their larger plan to make changes now that they’re in power. We’ll see how far these measures actually go, but it’s at least a start. In particular, I hope they actually create an independent investigative group for ethics violations; it seems like many ethics problems in Congress get brushed aside because the people involved are also the ones in charge of policing such actions. Time will tell.

As part of rethinking the Iraq policy, President Bush has begun rearranging the military staff, and is considering sending in 30,000 more troops to the country. I don’t think adding in more troops is a good move; I imagine it would be more demoralizing for Iraqi civilians and give the insurgents hope because they were able to thwart the 140,000 US troops already over there. However, from what I’ve heard from Anderson Cooper’s interviews of soldiers in Iraq, they really need more troops, or else the country will never get out of its current troubles. I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is no way to get Iraq into a better situation in the foreseeable future, and the “best” thing for everyone might just be to pull out and let it sink into civil war for a couple years. I know it sounds heavy-handed, but I still haven’t heard of a strategy that doesn’t eventually degenerate into that anyway.

On a related note, the US death toll in Iraq broke 3,000 over New Years. I realize it’s not much compared to the tens of thousands of Iraqis killed (or the conflict in Darfur, or the Falun Gong persecution in China, etc), but it’s still worth noting.

A bit of a rant: the LA Time’s article that I linked to discusses “next week’s announcement next week” that President Bush is expected to give. Don’t they have editors for these articles? They could at least have someone give a quick once-over to these things. Bah.

The United Nations voted to impose sactions against Iran regarding its nuclear programme, and President Ahmadinejad has (I believe rightly) called these sanctions illegitimate, citing the right of all countries, according to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, to develop peaceful nuclear energy programmes. and as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter describes in his book Target Iran, the current weapons inspectors in Iran right now can find absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. So, here’s what we’ve got from Iran at the moment: peaceful nuclear development, denial of the Holocaust, vows to destroy Israel, rejection of every trading package which would supply them with nuclear energy without developing it on their own (including Russia’s very generous offer), and now correctly calling the UN on their misguided sanctions. What on earth are they trying to accomplish? They have all the drawbacks of a real programme and an empty threat, without any of the advantages of either one. Any insight would be appreciated.

It seems that AT&T has given up on their anti-net neutrality stance, though I suspect the issue will flare up again in a year or so. Since the last time I discussed it, I have been convinced that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a really good stance on the issue: neither “side” on the issue is particularly meritorious (getting rid of net neutrality is obviously a bad thing, but getting the US government to examine and regulate most of the world’s internet traffic is a privacy problem waiting to happen). I don’t have a good solution to this yet, but I’ll keep watching the issue.

There has been a bunch of other news since I last posted, but this is starting to get pretty long. The condensed version: Saddam Hussein was executed, Bangkok experienced a series of explosions New Years Eve which injured/killed surprisingly few people, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is wanking that his $200,000 salary isn’t enough money, and Microsoft gave nice laptops to some bloggers hoping they would post good stuff about the company, but instead has received a backlash from other bloggers (who I think are mainly jealous that they didn’t get one). Right… I think that’s all the news for now.

The news everyone seems to be talking about is that former US President Gerald Ford has died, presumably of something related to old age. Although I had always had the impression that he was a bumbling fool and everyone disliked him for pardoning Nixon (which apparently lead to his defeat in the next Presidential election), lots of people seem to be coming out of the woodwork and saying how great Ford was at bringing the nation together and healing them after the Watergate, Vietnam, and civil rights problems the country was experiencing.

In what I consider more interesting news, the Massachusetts Supreme Court has ruled that the state Senate must vote on the proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The legislature moved to recess without voting on it, which is against the state laws. However, the court aknowledges that they cannot force the lawmakers to vote on the issue (and the lawmakers have done this before). Assuming the amendment gets at least 25% of the Senate’s votes, it would go to a public election. This makes a lot of sense for constitutional amendments; it seems like they should be ratified by the people. However, it seems like a really bad idea to let the often ignorant, stupid, and bigoted masses decide on civil rights issues (can you imagine what would have happened if segregation had been put to a popular vote in 1954, instead of just letting Brown v. Board of Education stand?). We’ll see what happens, and although it would be nice if lawmakers followed the law, I really hope that gay marriages aren’t banned.

Finally, it looks like President Bush is considering changes in his Iraq policy, though I personally doubt he will set any sort of timetable. From what I’ve seen on CNN (Anderson Cooper is so awesome!), we need more troops over there to keep everything from collapsing into civil war (you know, more than it already has), but we don’t appear to have many more troops to send over. The whole thing is a disaster, but at least Bush is starting to consider new options instead of just burying his head in the sand. Time will tell how this turns out.

I’m back in MN for a week, and although it’s great to see friends from high school again (and hopefully play some more bridge with Jim), my mom is already driving me nuts. I think I just need to spend as much time as possible outside of the house, and I’ll be ok. If you’re in town, give me a call; my number is on Facebook (yes, psifer, it really is)!

I realize the title is a bit forced. The worst thing is that if you unscramble the anagram, it’s still a bit forced. Oh, well; they’re both cromulent titles/headlines.

First, some heartening news, as horrible as it is: the Iraq Study Group’s report, which says again that we’re losing the war, our troops, and the hearts and minds of all people involved, has made a lot of people unhappy. However, public opinion seems to be pretty much in line with its claims (which seems unusual; typically expert analysis disagrees with “common knowledge”). The UN seems to be pretty upset with this whole imbroglio as well. It appears that even some Republicans are starting to view the situation from a more realistic point of view, and are beginning to search for a way out of this quagmire before it ruins the political party. Could there be a glimmer of hope for a withdrawl from Iraq? I am not aware of any way to do it without leaving Iraq less stable than it was with Saddam around, but it might still be for the best at this point.

How’s this for some really shiny news: a Firefly MMORPG appears to be on the horizon. Assuming this is as cool as I hope it is, it almost makes me wish I owned a Windows box. Almost.

NASA has announced plans to go ahead with Bush’s (perhaps ill-conceived) plan to put a permanent base on the moon by 2020. This could be really cool, or it could be a huge waste of money. I’m not sure anyone knows which it will become, but several other countries are interested in joining in on this project. We shall see what happens.

There has been another ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians, even though the Palestinians continued to launch rockets into Israel several hours after the supposed ceasefire began. Ordinarily I wouldn’t put much stock in this, but it has lasted a surprisingly long time. There was a bit of intra-Palestinian violence recently, but the truce has lasted remarkably well. In fact, this seems like the best news in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict since about 1993.

For the first time in a really long while, I don’t have any really bad news to post. Huzzah!