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Have you installed your free Google Web Analytics package yet?.

Urchin Reborn: Google Web Analytics Continues »

Some smartasses in search of investors have invented a new term: Web 2.0.

Basically that means using Javascript in advanced way to improve the functionality of individual websites. Or in simpler terms, improve your website.

The nasty chaps over at The Register in the UK have had enough of pompous manifestos and declarations about Web 2.0 and decided to run a contest for definitions of Web 2.0 among their readership.

Web 2.0 Definition Continues »

I've had enough of Farhad Manjoo's articles on the 2004 election. He is at it again this week as the self-designated hatchet man for Mark Crispin Miller's new book Fooled Again!

Manjoo's Closed Mind Compromising Salon on Election Fraud Continues »

I was surprised a week or so ago about the media storm over Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadineja's comments about Israel. His remarks were reported as threatening to wipe Israel off the map.

What Ahmadineja actually said -

there is no doubt that the new wave in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.

This is predication rather than menace. Predicting the end of another sovereign nation is not a particularly tactful thing to say. On the other hand, Iran speaking ill of Israel or America hardly sounded like news to me (or to the BBC).

There is a larger plan afoot here. The publicity around this remark was supposed to inflame Europe and raise domestic It was also a nice distraction from the fiasco in Iraq and implicitly suggests (Iran and Iraq are indistinguishable to most Americans - same part of the world, same dark people, same two syllable name) that the invasion of Iraq was justified.

It turns out that the game is more macabre than I thought. The plan is apparently not to invade or intimidate Iran, but rather to nuke Iran.

In the context of looming nuclear assault, misrepresenting the Iranian president as threatening Israel militarily with annihilation was a great publicity coup.

Apparently this plan has been publicly known since July this year:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.... Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections. [source: The American Conservative]

No wonder the Iranians are so hot under the collar. While our population may not be aware of these policies and plans, one can be sure that the Iranians do.

For those who don't think unilateral military action is a possibility, I recommend reading carefully the original of Joint Chiefs of Staff March policy paper on nuclear war (69 page PDF). From the executive summary:

The decision to use nuclear weapons is driven by the political objective sought.....No customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict. (p.10 - original is bolded)

Justification for the use of nuclear weapons in a theatre of war include the usual WMD rhetoric, but now also include three other clauses.

(d) To counter potentially overwhelming adversary conventional forces, including mobile and area targets (troop concentration).
(e) For rapid and favorable war termination on US terms.
(f) To ensure success of US and multinational operations. No customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict. (p.47)

Those last two clauses, basically read to me as "we feel like it" or "because we can".

Any country that doesn't have ready nuclear weapons pretty much has to develop them at this point. Nuclear readiness seems to be about the only effective deterrent against American aggression and threats.

As the whole world knows by now, France has been buffeted by nightly riots for the last two weeks.

American mainstream media coverage began with one of the most stupid editorials I have ever seen. Mark Steyn suggests that what was happening in the Parisian suburbs was akin to war and that should be addressed as such with troops.

After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois...For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc....Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

From what I can understand of this preposterous rant, is that Steyn considers that in the best of cases the French should regard these citizens (almost all of these young people are French) as the Israelis regard the Palestinians.

They should deprive them of their rights, terrorise them, attack them in their homes and put them behind checkpoints.

Given the success of Israeli policies in bringing peace and prosperity to Israel, this is a very intelligent suggesion. Then the French too could live under constant threat of suicide bombing in their churches, schools and markets in perpetuity.

As France is the number one tourist destination in the world with 75 million visitors/year representing 34.5€ billion euros, destroying the entire tourist sector with internecine violence would be a great first step to bankrupting the country.

This would set the stage for an Iraq-like situation with widescale ethnic violence and regular military action.

While this may suit the American neocon/PNAC cheerleaders like Steyn, happily the French have a great deal more sense than this.

Indeed, they understand the grievances of these young men. Basically it is next to impossible for them to get decent jobs. First there is a dearth of jobs to be had - in general one has to have connections to get a job (pistonner is the word in French) - whether French or not. As the parents of these young men are for the most part working in menial service jobs, they don't have a lot of pull to push their children into good careers.

There is another social concept in France - it's called chasse gardée (the English historical equivalent would be royal forest). What this means is that all good jobs in France belong to the French. And in this context, French means born French and born part of the French elite.

The school system in France is quite unique. While there is a large university system, the universities actually represent a second-tier education. Anyone who aspires to high office in either industry or government must study in something called a grande école. The elite of government, politics and business have almost all studied in one grand école or another. In the case of politics, most of them studied at the Ecole Nationale d'Aministration in Paris.

After the second world war, fifty percent of those admitted into the grandes écoles had to come from a worker or popular background as a matter of state policy. With time that figure has slipped to five per cent of those admitted. All the rest of the students are either children of the elite or of the bourgeoisie. I don't know if exact figures exist for the division between these two categories.

One's fate is more or less decided by twenty with one's admittance into a grande école or not.

And these young men in the Paris suburbs have definitely been left out of the game. But even for normal employment, the unemployment rate for people in their twenties is as high as 25% - a figure in itself kept down by the high number of young people studying for higher degrees.

As the grievances of these young men in the Paris suburbs are real, there are very few in France who would like to see an attempt to crush these youths. Far from being some kind of Islamist terrorists, these are disadvantaged young people legitimately expressing grievance.

Since the police have kept their heads and the French have not shed large quantities of blood, these riots will probably pass without leaving much trace or doing much damage to the economy.

Were Paris to go up in flames as a consequence of punitive and murderous assaults by police and/or military units on these youths, the immediate damage would be enormous.

Moreover, the French have no desire to have an incarceration system like the United States with two million behind bars, half of them from the black underclass. It's less expensive (and far kinder) to provide state aid and work training programs and welfare than to keep people in penitentiaries.

There is strong evidence that the inflammatory comments of Interior Minister (and would-be presidential candidate) Nikolai Sarkozy made the situation much worse. That had someone else intervened in a more conciliatory way earlier that the rioting would have just stopped, as it seems to be petering out now.

Keeping level heads and the redressing injustice seems to a good plan.

Further commentary on the historical background with emphasis on the Algerian colonisation from Juan Cole.

Over at the moral cesspool of Little Green Footballs, the rhetoric is incredible. Here is a contribution from longtime LGFer savage_nation:

ENOUGH TALK! When are we going to see some ACTION? Every second spent flapping your lips means the Islamists are gaining ground! Crush these cockroaches once and for all. Declare martial law! Fuel up every Mirage and unleash HELL on the rioters. Western Civilization is at stake, you morons!

For more of the same visit - http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=18137#comments.

There is a lively discussion going on over at The Carpetbagger Report on who is the worst president ever. After an examination of historical precedent (apparently regular candidates include James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon), consensus is that the current occupant of the White House easily outruns all past candidates.

Sorry, this is simply no contest. It is Bush already - and he has three more years to put distance between himself and any challengers. No other president is so comprehensively a disaster. Name a category, war and peace, foreign relations. the economy, health care, the environment, energy, helping the poor, the elderly, the infirm, cronyism and profiteering, responding to natural disasters, treason, lying, torture and responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths. When it comes to arrogance, ineptitude, and yes, moral weakness as well as neglectful and intentional evil, our boy has finally come in first, on his own merits.

But the wrong question is being asked. It is difficult to see Bush as a president at all. Really policy has been run by Dick Cheney from the beginning. Bush is just the front man - the ventriloquist's dummy. Dick Cheney and his PNAC cohorts must take the blame and our ire. Of course, as chaos reigns behind the scenes, the dummy has to speak and act on his own.

The world's best hope is for resignation or impeachment. I think it's a real possibility. These men are war criminals. These men are political criminals (Plame game). The last election is tainted (Kerry believes now that it was rigged). These men are white collar criminals (if Haliburton can be called white collar). These men are traitors (subverting America's interests to those of a foreign nation).

It doesn't get much more serious than this. I think the situation now is akin to that of a bully who's authority has been challenged. The road downhill can go further. Having bent the rules of civilised discourse and political behaviour so far, there really isn't a safety net underneath them anymore.

They have made enough enemies (Paul O'Neill, Colin Powell, Joe Wilson, Lawrence Wilkerson, John McCain - to name just a visible few) on their own team that first impeachment and later trial for war crimes in the Hague or treason at home are a real possibility.

You can push people so far before even your nominal allies come and take you out. Think of Beria's fate. The entire Central Committee turned against him and he was executed after secret trial within two weeks.

No one will feel an ounce of pity for advocates of torture - neither loyalty, nor remorse.

It looks like the world is finally starting to sort itself out across the ocean. Mid-term elections are scaring the hell out of the Republican members of Congress and some of the Senate. It's become evident to them, that the White House has hung them out to dry with an unpopular war, a terrible domestic record (FEMA), many failed and unpopular policies (social security reform anyone, plans to overturn Roe vs. Wade), huge deficits and a generally unsavory aura (legalized torture, the Plame Game).

What is shocking is how long it took for the media and the Republicans to address these issues. All of this should have come out in time for the last presidential election.

But the indefatigable strategists of the GOP do have one confidence-restoring scenario - another terrorist attack on US soil.

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people".... “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”...Such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

What a great idea to restore national unity! What is a few thousand lives to political advantage.

It turns out that after all it was Joseph Stalin who won the Cold War.

While we are questioning the Bush/Cheney Presidency it is high time to reexamine 9/11. To anyone who has lived in the world and followed world history, the whole event has a false aura to it.

How could such a thing happen without insider collaboration?

My own take on the 9/11 is that the idea of flying jetliners into buildings was a long-time plan of al-Queda. The American intelligence services were aware of this plot and allowed it to proceed - even acting as enablers. The motivation was to allow the Project for the New American Century to be put into action. Goal number one was invading Iraq. To their consternation, the neocons found themselves obliged to invade Afghanistan first.

It's not complicated.

There are any number of paranoid and weird websites which talk about no plane flying into the Pentagon, kidnapped citizens, etc... Nonsense.

Finally there is a website which covers historical precedent (the Reichstag Fire, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, Kuwait) and mechanics (NORAD's no show, demolition tech) and motive (manufacturing enemies, empire expansion, petroleum pursuit) in great detail.

Highly recommended reading. Pay especially close attention to the Pearl Harbor section. It is one of the most shocking incident of political cynicism in the history of the world and a clear precedent for 9/11. The short version of the story is that F.D. Roosevelt and his closest advisors knew well ahead of time about the impending attack but deliberately kept that information from the Pacific commandeers.

Why? Without an act of aggression against America, Roosevelt had promised not to take the country into war. By 1941, he and his advisors wanted to take America into the war but needed a pretext. The massacre at Pearl Harbor was exactly that.

Something like the PNAC/Bush/Cheney presidency and the Middle East (beginning with Iraq).

The difficult situation for the principals is that when they are driven from political office if/when these actions/this inaction are revealed, they become international war criminals subject to prosecution in the Hague for launching a war of aggression and as well as domestic traitors (allowing the murder of 3000 innocent civilians in the World Trade Center).

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

It's amazing that a public figure can stand up in the United States and advocate torture. That it could be the vice-president of the land boggles the imagination:

In the Congress, Sen. John McCain, with support from 89 colleagues, is pushing a separate measure to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody -- against veto threats from the White House and fierce opposition from Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington, who are maneuvering to exempt clandestine CIA activities from oversight. And reporters have uncovered a network of "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere -- secret detention camps run by the CIA, where suspects are being held and brutally interrogated.

The idea that torture could be so publicly defensible -- and the news that the United States is maintaining secret facilities in former Soviet-era prisons for torturing nameless and disappeared people -- fills me with shame and horror. And while it's encouraging that John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war, wants to make it illegal to strap naked prisoners to boards and hold them under water, electrocute them or mock-execute them, it's profoundly depressing that the discourse about torture has come to this point.

Even as a critical observer of American culture since childhood (one of the privileges/disadvantages of growing up in Canada), I am not prepared for this. The nominal good guys are passing laws which make Nazis look like camp counsellors gone bad.

Are these guys directly inspired by the Dark Lord Sauron or am I missing something?

An assessement:

You fit in with:
Spiritualism
Your ideals are mostly spiritual,
but in an individualistic way.
While spirituality is very important in your life,
organized religion itself may not be for you.
It is best for you to seek
these things on your own terms.
80% spiritual. 60% reason-oriented.