Sunday, July 25, 2004

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 9:09:19 PM     Most important, please read this excellent analysis of what has to happen to the US position towards Islamic revival. I cannot recommend this too highly. It is in four parts, and commissioned by the DOD!. It is issue thinking at its best. http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040717-015137-2040r.htm    part 1 http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040717-015400-5229r.htm    part 2 http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040717-020325-3451r.htm    part 3 http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040717-021046-7505r.htm    part 4 ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 9:03:49 PM     I find this unacceptable, and will work this next  year after the election on the underlying problems. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/national/26parole.html U.S. 'Correctional Population' Hits New High By FOX BUTTERFIELD Published: July 26, 2004 he number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year to reach a new high of nearly 6.9 million, according to a Justice Department report released today. The total includes people in jail and prison as well as those on probation and parole. This is about 3.2 percent of the adult population in the United States, the report said. ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 7:27:28 PM     This op ed by Clarke on the 9/11 xommision is a good summary of some key points. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/25clar.html?hp Honorable Commission, Toothless Report By RICHARD A. CLARKE Published: July 25, 2004 Clarke, Richard A Terrorism Al Qaeda Americans owe the 9/11 commission a deep debt for its extensive exposition of the facts surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Yet, because the commission had a goal of creating a unanimous report from a bipartisan group, it softened the edges and left it to the public to draw many conclusions. click above to read the whole. ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 5:00:19 PM     Some things are both funny and serious. Note ehre the tendency of the republicans to seek out taxes that everyone pays for a system that benefits the wealthy. July 7, 2004     The Honorable George W. Bush President The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20500 Dear Mr. President: Thank you for your outstanding leadership in defending Internet consumers against destructive taxation and regulation. Your advocacy of a permanent ban on Internet access taxes and your determination to remove regulatory obstacles to broadband deployment are critical ingredients in America's continued economic success. Yet as clear as your clarion call for freedom and innovation has been, it appears that some in the administration still aren't getting the message. The attached story from News.com describes an IRS decision to consider putting new taxes on the Internet -- specifically, by extending to the Internet the Spanish-American War Tax on telephone service enacted more than one hundred years ago. Ironically, Republicans in Congress have been working hard to abolish this tax completely. When it comes to consumer excise taxes, only alcohol and tobacco are taxed more heavily at the federal level than phone service. Telephone customers are then hit with state and local tax rates that can run up to three times the rates paid on other goods. That is why the House has voted to liberate consumers from this regressive tax. I can think of few initiatives that would do more to impede the Bush broadband agenda than extending the Spanish-American War Tax to Internet telephony. I urge you to direct the IRS immediately to affirm that this 100-year-old tax does not apply to the Internet, but only to traditional analog voice services. If IRS analysis suggests that this will prevent Washington from raising new revenue from this tax, that would be very good news for American consumers -- and more than 100 years overdue. Thank you for your leadership in protecting American consumers from destructive taxation. Please let me know if I may be of assistance in keeping the Spanish-American War Tax off of Internet telephony. Sincerely, Christopher Cox U.S. Representative ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 3:06:31 PM     From Kevin Drum http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ scroll to today. IDEOLOGY....David Brooks is getting some attention for his latest column, in which he agrees with the 9/11 commission that we're not engaged in a war on terror. Rather, "we are in the midst of an ideological conflict": Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 11:36:36 AM     We are seeing increasing use of the internet to lay out maps of influence. For example http://www.exxonsecrets.org/ ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 11:08:28 AM     I sometimes think our tendency to be overweight have grocery stores that are wonderful amount of money and effort spent on food are interpretable as anxiety about the future of food. WORLD FOOD SECURITY DETERIORATING: Food Crunch in 2005 Now Likely Lester R. Brown Closing the gap in the world grain harvest this year following four consecutive grain harvest shortfalls, each larger than the one before, will not be easy. The grain shortfall of 105 million tons in 2003 is easily the largest on record, amounting to 5 percent of annual world consumption of 1,930 million tons. The four harvest shortfalls have dropped world carryover stocks of grain to the lowest level in 30 years, amounting to only 59 days of consumption. Wheat and corn prices are at 7-year highs. Rice prices are at 5-year highs. (See data.) The concentration of ownership in the food industry is also worrisome. The alrge travel distances make food prices very vulnerable to fuel costs and terrorism. ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 11:05:40 AM     Very interesting NYT article on the rise of thinking in the democratic party. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html?position=&;adxnnl=1&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1090768484-50koLL/FdDYA/U/G8x5vBw The article is long, and very short on actual ideas and directions, but you can feel the energy toward trying to do something like the think tank ensemble that has supported free market anti-regulation and a general libertarian private property approach to politics. What is massing on the progressive side is a coherent story about what can happen.   ********

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 8:10:32 AM     You have probably seen this but worth knowing if not. The presence of very large waves and their impact on shipping. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/25/1090693835341.html?oneclick=true Rogue waves are believed to have sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades. Long thought to be a myth, freak waves as high as 10-storey buildings are far more common than previously thought, the European Space Agency has found. Severe weather has been responsible for the sinking of more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades, and rogue waves are believed to be the main cause, the agency said. Three weeks of imaging data by the agency's satellites from early 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe of more than 25 metres in height. Previously, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years. "Having proved they exist in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecast," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research centre in Geesthacht, Germany. In February 1995, the QE2 encountered a 29-metre rogue wave in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water - it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover", the agency said. And in the week between February and March 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre rogue waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen was left drifting without navigation or propulsion for some hours. Advertisement Advertisement "The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels. Two large ships sink every week, on average, but the cause is never studied in the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'," Dr Rosenthal said. Why don't they reach the mainland? ********