Nice Guys Finish Last: Why do we expect presidential candidates to be kind? - Slate

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but in the past few days I feel I've been overwhelmed by a tsunami of commentary, all of which purports to prove the fundamental nastiness of Barack Obama or, alternatively, the deep unlikability of John McCain. You thought our presidential candidates were nice guys, regular guys, guys who you'd like to sit down and have a beer with? Guess what, lots of people are now telling me: They aren't!

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Nation's Spies: Climate Change Could Spark War - Wired

Environmental groups have been warning for years that global climate change could make already-tense parts of the world even worse, and even spark whole new conflicts. Now, the nation's spies are saying pretty much the same thing.

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We are becoming a nation of narrow thinkers, thanks to the Internet, newspapers, and schools.
by John C. Dvorak

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism, and the rest of it. Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge. When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

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Our New Energy Crisis - Mother Jones

Almost four years ago, when oil was trading at around $40 a barrel, Paul Roberts wrote a story for Mother Jones on a bleak scenario gaining currency among energy insiders, but not yet in the mainstream consciousness: peak oil, basically the notion that the world's petroleum resources are nearing exhaustion. If the theory held true, Roberts warned, oil prices could soon leap to "perhaps as high as $100 per barrel - a disaster if we don't have a cost-effective alternative fuel or technology in place."

Welcome to the disaster: $100-a-barrel oil is in the rearview mirror, and no cost-effective (or even cost-prohibitive) alternative has emerged. The most dire consequences of this failing - hurricanes, drought, extinction - are occurring far more rapidly than even Slideshow Al could have predicted four years ago. And then there's the war.

It's easy enough to blame Dick Cheney, Big Oil, Detroit - all of whom have done their part in obstructing progress. But their chicanery distracts us from the far greater problem, one that, unfortunately, comes down to Organic Chemistry 101. Every technological advance of the last 150 years has been powered by a unique, extremely energy-dense, but finite - and, as it turns out, planet-killing - source of fuel. Switching away from fossil energy requires an economic and social transformation at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. And we have to build this new economy on the fumes of the old, hoping that we don't run out of gas, or ice caps, before we get there. As Roberts points out in this special issue on energy, if we sit on our hands or let the process be hijacked by vested interests, "there may not be enough crude left in the ground to fuel a second try."

Read on ...

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D. H. Lawrence

Ignoring the Supreme Court - Washington Post
The Bush administration punts on greenhouse emissions

The Bush administration never had any intention of doing what the Supreme Court commanded it to do a year ago today: regulate greenhouse gas emissions. We infer this because, even though President Bush ordered his agencies last May to work together to meet the court's directive, and even though the Environmental Protection Agency delivered to the White House last December its finding that those pollutants endanger public welfare, a prerequisite for regulation, EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced last week a plan to seek public input starting in the spring on how best to limit the emissions. Translation: punt to the next administration. This giant step backward is the starkest example yet of the chasm between the words and deeds of Mr. Bush on climate change.

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FCC living in the dark ages; a threat to net neutrality aims - Ars Technica

The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with 83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006. "Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P application users and other consumers know that the agency will take their comments seriously?

The invasion of America: Creeping intrusions against our privacy rights are an assault on the Constitution.
By Andrew P. Napolitano

When President Nixon was in his pre-Watergate heyday, he ordered the FBI and the CIA to electronically monitor the private behavior of his domestic political adversaries. Shortly after Nixon resigned, investigators discovered hundreds of reports of break-ins and secret electronic surveillance. None of it was authorized by warrants, and thus all of it was illegal. But it had been conducted pursuant to the president's orders. Nixon's defense was, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

He made that infamous statement in a TV interview years after he left office, but the attitude espoused was obviously one he embraced while in the White House. He, like his present-day successor, rejected the truism that the 4th Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from conducting electronic surveillance of anyone without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of a crime, restrains the president.

In response to the abuses during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 1978. The law provides that no electronic surveillance may occur by anyone in the government at any time under any circumstances for any reason other than in accordance with law, and no such surveillance may occur within the U.S. of an American other than in accordance with the 4th Amendment.

Read on ...

Andrew P. Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His latest book is "A Nation of Sheep."

Let's do away with the legislative fiction of the terrorist alarm clock. - Slate

The cliche holds that we are always fighting the last war. I disagree. For the last seven years, congressional Democrats have been fighting the next one: the war perennially set to erupt if they don't deliver whatever the president asks of them immediately. Time and again, they've been rendered so terrified by White House threats about imminent terrorist attacks that they have caved on issues ranging from detainee rights to secret surveillance to torture. And every time they've caved, it's under the threat that if they withhold from the president extra powers (ones that he's often already seized in secret), terrorists will mass against us instantaneously, and they will be blamed.

A political speech the West needs to hear - High Country News

"One of our most urgent projects is to develop a national energy policy. The United States is the only major industrial country without a comprehensive, long-range energy policy. Our program will emphasize conservation ... solar energy and other renewable energy sources. ... We must face the fact that the energy shortage is permanent. There is no way we can solve it quickly. But if we all cooperate and make modest sacrifices ... we can find ways to adjust." - Imagine those words spoken by the next president shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, 2009, continuing a theme originally established on the campaign trail.

In What City Did You Honeymoon? And other monstrously stupid bank security questions. - Slate

Verizon wants to know my favorite ice cream flavor, Google's got designs on my library card number, and Wachovia needs my favorite all-time entertainer. Yahoo! is asking where I met my spouse, and Bank of America wants the details of the honeymoon. Like those squiggly pictures of letters and numbers, weird personal questions have become ubiquitous totems of online security. If you tell the bank your favorite grade-school teacher or cartoon character, the thinking goes, it'll be easy to confirm your identify when you misplace your account number. This thinking is dumb.

Dear Rich People ... All you wealthy Americans, stop complaining and save the economy!
By Daniel Gross

To: The Filthy Rich
CC: The Stinking Rich; the Pretty-Darned Rich
From: America

Look, you've had a pretty good deal these past few years. We gave you everything you wanted. Massive reductions in the top income-tax rates? Happy to oblige. Cuts on dividends and capital gains taxes, which overwhelmingly benefit you? No problem. Going after the estate tax—excuse me, the death tax? You got it. We've even agreed to overlook the fact that you private-equity and hedge-fund managers pay only a 15 percent tax rate.

Because we like you, we've pretended not to notice your gauche taste and rude manners. (You know you're benefiting from the greatest concentration of wealth since the 1920s, right? The share of national income taken down by the wealthiest 1 percent rose from 14.6 percent in 2003 to 17.4 percent in 2005, according to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California-Berkeley.) We have sat patiently on JetBlue and Southwest as your private jets clog runways. We continue to bust our butts, defend the borders, and uphold the rule of law in order to protect your fortunes and property.

Read on ...

A Berlitz guide to Washington English - The Atlantic

Just as modern French-speakers who travel to Quebec often find the dialect of French Canadians to be archaic and quaint, English-speakers who visit Washington, D.C., are frequently bemused by the language spoken there. Though the Potomac dialect shares the alphabet and grammar of English, it has a vocabulary all its own.:

The $100 Barrel of Oil vs. the Global War on Terror
The Bush Legacy (Take Two)
By Tom Engelhardt

Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5%, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great Depression, and the word "recession" was in the headlines and in the air. So when ABC debate moderator Charlie Gibson announced that the first fifteen-minute segment would be taken up with "what is generally agreed to be... the greatest threat to the United States today," what did you expect?

As it happened, he was referring to "nuclear terrorism," specifically "a nuclear attack on an American city" by al-Qaeda (as well as how the future president would "retaliate"). In other words, Gibson launched his version of a national debate by focusing on a fictional, futuristic scenario, at this point farfetched, in which a Pakistani loose nuke would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, be transported to the United States, perhaps picked up by well-trained al-Qaedan minions off the docks of Newark, and set off in the Big Apple. In this, though he was surely channeling Rudy Giuliani, he managed to catch the essence of what may be George W. Bush's major legacy to this country.

The Planet as a GWOT Free-Fire Zone

On September 11, 2001, in his first post-attack address to the nation, George W. Bush was already using the phrase, "the war on terror." On September 13th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration was planning to do a lot more than just take out those who had attacked the United States. It was going to go about "removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism." We were, Bush told Americans that day, in a state of "war"; in fact, we were already in "the first war of the twenty-first century."

That same day, R.W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times reported that senior officials had "cast aside diplomatic niceties" and that "the Bush administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism... or face the certain prospect of death and destruction." Stand with us against terrorism (or else) -- that would be the measure by which everything was assessed in the years to come. That very day, Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that the U.S. would "rip [the bin Laden] network up" and "when we're through with that network, we will continue with a global assault on terrorism."

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A sled, a cow, the future - Mountain Gazette

Few people may believe that at age 57, I recently T-boned, so to speak, a pregnant, 1,000-pound cow while riding my Flexible Flyer sled down the steepest county road in western Montana. To rural sledders, this is plausible, but perhaps not to adults of my generation. The mean age for the 55,000 sledders injured badly enough last winter to need an ER visit is 9.9, a dismal statistic that reveals a paucity of Baby Boomers still willing to have fun hurtling down mountains with a minimum of control. Sledding down icy back roads is a pure and noble calling that offers countless opportunities for high-speed rides on metal-runners that are only somewhat steerable. Obstacles to doing so abound, from so-called common sense, to cows, like the one I collided with.

Foolproof Online Dating Tips for Desperate Guys - Wired

There are a lot of guys out there on the internet who desperately want to find a woman to share their life with, and who don't want to have to go outside to do it. If you're one of them, you may find yourself wondering why the women you meet in chat rooms, discussion groups and online games have so far failed to love you.

California Sues EPA; Says State Law Greener, Cleaner Than Feds - Wired

California today sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency today for preventing the state from reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its cars.

Big Brother gets bigger, says global privacy study - C|Net

According to a new international privacy report, governments around the world are increasingly invading the privacy of citizens with surveillance, identification systems, and archiving of private data.

US Near Bottom of Global Privacy Index - AP/Wired

Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group.

Journey to the Dark Side: The Bush Legacy (Take One) - TomDispatch

If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Osk Arnardottir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time - with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing - she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep... without food and drink and... confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions - "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" - confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."

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50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2008 - U.S. News and World Report

Flame Wars: Why We Can't Resist Hot Blogger-on-Blogger Action - LinuxInsider

You can't help but think that Thomas Jefferson himself would be pleased to know that out there in the awesome equalizing social force that is the Internet, people armed with the power of free-flowing ideas are busy pummeling the crap out of each other. More than that, they're doing it in public, with an often-participatory audience. Blog fights are verbal steel-cage smackdowns with a revolving door.

Ten Best Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com

Ten Worst Technologies and Trends of 2007 - Extremetech.com

Five desktop Linux highlights of 2007 - DesktopLinux.com

2007: The Miserable Year in Review - John C. Dvorak

The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 - Wired

THREAT LEVEL's Year in Review - 2007 - Wired

The Year in Oversight:The yeas and nays of Congress' efforts to gavel the Bush administration into order in 2007 - MotherJones

100 things we didn't know last year - BBC

Interesting comment from CompUSA - Very Grumpy Rabbit

I don't know if you've heard or not, but CompUSA is going out of business. ...

... I asked one of the employees off the record if he could comment at all on the impact of Vista sales on the end of CompUSA's business, expecting no comment. Afterall, most such retail chains don't want local employees speaking out for the company.

That... isn't what I got. With a glaring look he responded I'd be better off asking about the returns. Returns? Well, the employee asked me to follow him to the back, and he pulled out a cardboard box opening it up to reveal it was packed full of copies of Vista.

Returns.

Fabric of America is Fraying
By David Wann

By certain measurements, the U.S. economy has been quite successful in the last several decades, but the fundamental question remains: Successfully what?

We may lead the world in categories like gross domestic product, average house size, and ownership of color TVs, but we also "lead" the industrial nations in debt per capita, the child poverty rate, overall poverty rate, ratio of people in prison, rate of traffic fatalities, murder rate, carbon dioxide emissions per capita, and the per capita consumption of energy and water.

These are hardly distinctions we can be proud of. Clearly, we're not taking care of what really matters.

On the upside, increased awareness of where we stand can guide a reordering of national and local priorities, resulting in a healthier and more satisfying American lifestyle ...

The New Entitlement
By George F. Will

She who would be president excoriates, as Democratic presidential candidates must, the current president and almost all his works. But she and he largely agree regarding the subprime mortgage problem. Granted, she greeted his response to it with the cri de coeur without which Democrats would be speechless: "More!" She upped his ante by proposing a moratorium, for 90 days, on foreclosures. But the crux of her proposal is the crux of his -- a selective five-year freeze on the rates of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages ...

A Gates-Style Thaw
By Jim Hoagland

"We are going to do something terrible to you," one Kremlin insider frequently told Americans in the 1980s as the Soviet Union was crumbling before the unbelieving eyes of U.S. intelligence. "We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

He turned out to be more prophetic than he realized. Today -- to my slack-jawed astonishment -- a senior U.S. official is pursuing a similar approach toward a newly hostile Kremlin by making subtle overtures on ballistic missile defense and other contentious security issues and then wooing world opinion.

Big deal. Diplomats get paid to do that, right? But this is the astonishing part. The official is Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The same Robert Gates who under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush helped shape hard-line intelligence judgments -- which he later admitted were behind the curve -- and cultivated an image as a leading CIA hawk in the Washington political aviary.

No hope now - San Francisco Chronicle Editorial

President Bush announced his HOPE NOW program to ease the nation's mortgage crisis last Thursday. The plan is neither "hope" nor "now," nor will it ease the nation's mortgage crisis.

It's baffling why an administration that believes in the free market as much as this one does would attempt to intrude on an inevitable economic correction. There are two possibilities, both of them desperate: 1) 2008 is coming up, and both parties need to look like they're doing something for Americans who are losing their homes, and 2) The administration is panicked about what might happen should those who invested in mortgage debt start calling off their deals with the banks that sold them.

Desperation rarely leads to good policy. (To be fair, the Democratic counters to the Bush plan are equally irresponsible.) Regarding the two scenarios, the problems of the second are dealt with at length in the article on the front page of this section. As for the first, the main problem is that while politicians may gain a few points for "helping" struggling home buyers stay in houses they can't afford, their bailout policies aren't helping either home buyers - past, current, or future - or the economy.

Read On ...

~

The Spies Strike Back - Jim Hoagland
Washington Post

The Fourth of July came on Dec. 3 this year for the U.S. intelligence community.

The nation's espionage agencies delivered their own declaration of independence from the war aims and rhetoric of President Bush and Vice President Cheney in a National Intelligence Estimate that was ostensibly about Iran's nuclear program.

But the CIA, DIA and 14 other agencies grouped under the director of national intelligence also delivered a riveting if implicit X-ray of the changing nature of leadership in Washington, where the White House's once-commanding authority over government has been smashed but not replaced by any other power center.

The Bush-Cheney obsession with restoring presidential authority has provoked new challenges to powers the White House can legitimately claim. It is as if this administration has developed its own political version of Jimmy Carter's aborted project for a neutron bomb, which was intended to destroy people while sparing buildings. Bush consistently manages to destroy or damage goals he proclaims and friends who support him, while foes escapes harm.

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~

The United States of debt - Christine Tatum
The Denver Post

As the nation's comptroller general, David M. Walker is essentially licensed to be one of the world's most boring people.

But then he opens his mouth, and it becomes clear that the country's top auditor is ready to bust some chops and to say things a whole lot of people don't want to hear.

The federal budget is crumbling, he says. The nation continues to borrow at an alarming rate and to saddle today's toddlers with exorbitant debt they may not ever be able to repay. The country can't afford the Medicare and Social Security benefits it has promised.

And politicians seemingly refuse to level with Americans about how much financial trouble the country faces if it sticks with the status quo much longer.

Read On ...

Cult Watch 2007: Who's Drinking the Kool-Aid?
Mike Elgan

As we wind down another year in technology, it's a good time to check in on the cults and see how they’re doing.

For companies who inspire them, user cults are nice because they motivate customers to overlook strategic blunders, exaggerate product successes and -- most importantly -- walk the earth “virally” marketing products without pay.

Cult members themselves get an enhanced feeling of self-worth through group association. "I'm better than you! I have an iPhone!" Consumers can become one of the "chosen people" for $399, plus a two-year contract.

Let's have a look at the major tech cults, and see how they're doing.

Read on ...

Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It
By Michael Maniates - Washington Post

Thanksgiving nicely focuses our attention on things of lasting importance: family, friends, community, a rich harvest. None of these blessings come without cost or sacrifice. Today, then, we might consider what we must give of ourselves to preserve such abundance in the face of increasing climatic instability.

One needn't ponder this question in a vacuum. Several best-sellers offer advice about what we must ask of ourselves and one another. Their titles suggest that we needn't break much of a sweat: "It's Easy Being Green," "The Lazy Environmentalist," or even "The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time."

Although each offers familiar advice ("reuse scrap paper before recycling" or "take shorter showers"), it's what's left unsaid by these books that's intriguing. Three assertions permeate the pages: (1) We should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives as consumers, since that's where we have the most power and control; these are the best things to do because (2) if we all do them the cumulative effect of these individual choices will be a safe planet; which is fortunate indeed because (3) we, by nature, aren't terribly interested in doing anything that isn't private, individualistic, cost-effective and, above all, easy.

This glorification of easy isn't limited to the newest environmental self-help books. The Web sites of the big U.S. environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Association for the Advancement of Science offer markedly similar lists of actions that tell us we can change the world through our consumer choices, choices that are economic, simple, even stylish. Al Gore himself isn't immune. His recent Live Earth concert featured a who's-who lineup of celebrities who said that if we all do our little bit to recycle and conserve -- the simple things, mind you, because that's all we'll need (translation: that's all they think we'll go for) -- we can together rescue the world for our children and grandchildren.

Read on ...

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail ...

David Horsey - 21 November 2007

Beautiful Snow by J.W. Watson

Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below,
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of people you meet.
Dancing, flirting, skimming along,

Beautiful snow! It can do no wrong;
lying to kiss a fair lady’s cheek,
Clinging to lips in frolicksome freak;
Beautiful snow from heaven above,
Pure as an angel, gentle as love!

Oh, the snow, the beautiful snow,
How the flakes gather and laugh as they go
Whirling about in maddening fun:
Chasing, laughing, hurrying by,

It lights on the face and it sparkles the eye;
And the dogs with a bark and a bound
Snap at the crystals as they eddy around;
The town is alive, and its heart is aglow,
To welcome the coming of beautiful snow!

Read the complete poem and more info here.

I originally hear this poem quoted by Chris Stevens on Northern Exposure.

The Coup at Home
Frank Rich - November 11, 2007

As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America's two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.

So what if America's chief law enforcement official won't say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You're either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you're with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf's crackdown in Islamabad.

In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that's not exactly news. It's been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda" and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be "regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Read on ...

~

Curveball, Swing and A Miss
George F. Will - November 11, 2007

In late 2002, two strong-willed CIA officers, identified only as Beth and Margaret, were at daggers drawn. They had diametrically opposing views about the veracity of an Iraqi defector's reports concerning Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programs, especially the notorious but never-seen mobile weapons labs.

"Look," said Beth defiantly, "we can validate a lot of what this guy says." Margaret, angry and incredulous: "Where did you validate it?" Beth: "On the Internet." Margaret: "Exactly, it's on the Internet. That's where he got it, too!"

Margaret was right in that episode, recounted in the new book "Curveball" by Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times. Curveball was the code name of the Iraqi defector in Germany on whose reports the Bush administration relied heavily in its argument that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction justified a preventive war.

In 1999, Curveball defected to Germany, which has a significant portion of the Iraqi diaspora. Seeking the good life -- a prestigious job, a Mercedes -- he jumped to the head of the line of asylum-seekers and got the attention of Germany's intelligence agency with the word "Biowaffen," or germ weapons. He claimed to have been deeply involved in Hussein's sophisticated and deadly science, particularly those notorious mobile labs. Notorious and, we now know, nonexistent.

Read on ...

~

Off Target in the War on Cancer
Devra Davis - November 4, 2007

We've been fighting the war on cancer for almost four decades now, since President Richard M. Nixon officially launched it in 1971. It's time to admit that our efforts have often targeted the wrong enemies and used the wrong weapons.

Throughout the industrial world, the war on cancer remains focused on commercially fueled efforts to develop drugs and technologies that can find and treat the disease -- to the tune of more than $100 billion a year in the United States alone. Meanwhile, the struggle basically ignores most of the things known to cause cancer, such as tobacco, radiation, sunlight, benzene, asbestos, solvents, and some drugs and hormones. Even now, modern cancer-causing agents such as gasoline exhaust, pesticides and other air pollutants are simply deemed the inevitable price of progress.

They're not. Scientists understand that most cancer is not born but made. Although identical twins start life with amazingly similar genetic material, as adults they do not develop the same cancers. As with most of us, where they live and work and the habits that they develop do more to determine their health than their genes do. Americans in their 20s today carry around in their bodies levels of some chemicals that can impair their ability to produce healthy children -- and increase the chances that those children will develop cancer.

Read on ...

The Last Ride - High Country News

I don't even remember my first ride. When I was a young teenager, growing up in southern Oregon, my dad and I used to hitchhike back to our car after we’d boated down the Klamath, or the Rogue, or the Umpqua. Hitchhiking wasn’t a very large part of my life until I graduated from college, and became an idealist.

I decided to try to go places, go long distances. I liked the environmental aspect of hitchhiking, that it used less gas, and I liked that it was cheap. It also felt like a grand adventure, like a cool thing to do.

So I took a lot of trips. I went from Arizona to Montana to Colorado and back to Arizona, and I went from Colorado to Oregon and back to Colorado. I hitchhiked around Germany, France, Luxembourg and Holland.

I've probably gotten four or five hundred rides in the last 20 years. I think I did get better at hitchhiking as the years went by. But I also kept thinking I was finding the trick of it, and all of a sudden I would be standing on the highway for six hours with nobody picking me up, thinking I wasn't so smart after all.

Read on ...

I Was Wrong: Microsoft Won - open dot dot dot

I could feel it in my bones: the great victory of the EU over MS is a sham. Here's why.

Ex-steely Neelie - to be renamed wheeler-dealer Neelie - said as follows:

I told Microsoft that it should give legal security to programmers who help to develop open source software and confine its patent disputes to commercial software distributors and end users. Microsoft will now pledge to do so.

And naively, I thought that meant what it said. Silly me. Reference to the rather low-profile EU FAQ clarifies:

Can open source software developers implement patented interoperability information?

Open source software developers use various “open source” licences to distribute their software. Some of these licences are incompatible with the patent licence offered by Microsoft. It is up to the commercial open source distributors to ensure that their software products do not infringe upon Microsoft’s patents. If they consider that one or more of Microsoft’s patents would apply to their software product, they can either design around these patents, challenge their validity or take a patent licence from Microsoft.

Read on ...

What's at Stake in the Surveillance Debate in Congress - Wired Commentary

Over the next few weeks and months, civil libertarians and consumer advocates will wage a battle against the telecommunications companies and the Bush administration to preserve some semblance of privacy rights in Americans' communications.

Congress will be considering several versions of bills that will, one way or another, expand government access to phone calls and e-mails. These legislative proposals are complex and in flux, but there are two main issues at the center of the debate that citizens can focus on. One is whether eavesdropping on millions of Americans simultaneously is acceptable. The second is whether communications companies should get a free pass for breaking the law by allowing illegal warrantless surveillance of all Americans' communications.

In the 1960s and '70s, several Supreme Court cases held that citizens can reasonably expect that the government will not eavesdrop on their personal communications without first demonstrating to a court the need for this privacy invasion. Congress passed the Wiretap Act of 1968 to regulate eavesdropping for law enforcement purposes, and added the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to establish procedures for the president to follow when conducting surveillance for national-security purposes. FISA established a "secret court" -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC -- to review applications for national-security warrants. These could be obtained merely by showing that the target was an agent of a foreign power.

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The Kingdom of the Lotus - Patrick Symmes
A not-always-mythic journey to Shambhala, over sky-high mountains and across vicious deserts, requiring boldness of heart, purity of vision, the recitation of 99 million mantras, and $45 worth of Snickers bars, party balloons, Diamox, and dehydrated soup.

I'm not telling you where it is. But in order to reach Shambhala, you need a mixture of merit and dumb luck, and at first the dumb part seemed to be working. When I wrestled my luggage, packed with clothes for three climates and obscure tracts from four religions, onto the night train out of New Delhi, there was something auspicious in my bunk assignment.

It was a sleeping carriage, the start of a run east. Tomorrow I would cross the border to Nepal on foot. Then on to Kathmandu. Then Lhasa. Then over Tibet and onward, sometimes west and always north, to places unknown. Tonight the train was jostling, hot, full of brilliant Indian colors and smells, the famous synesthesia of the subcontinent, too much of everything. The cabin had four bunks. The pair on the right were occupied by a Brahmin couple, having their feet kissed in farewell by their adult children. And on the bunk below mine, what had to be perfect luck: a Buddhist monk, his elegant robes dark mustard, his disposition affable.

One is enjoined to seek, on the road to the hidden kingdom, the blessing and advice of wise monks, and around midnight, after rubbing menthol all over himself, this learned man listened to my plan. I was setting out on the ancient pilgrimage route to Shambhala, I told him, to seek the king and paradise here on earth. I was afraid, I said. Did he have any advice? No. Any teaching? No. Any blessing? No. Shambhala was "lama nonsense," he said. A Thai, he didn't believe in the stories, carefully curated over the centuries by Tibetan Buddhists, that Shambhala was a real place, a city that could be found. Shambhala, the monk told me, was a destination for an inner journey. I should meditate more, he suggested, and travel less.

"Don't go," he said, and went to sleep.

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Gone: Mass Extinction and the Hazards of Earth's Vanishing Biodiversity - Julia Whitty MotherJones

It is a fact widely accepted by biologists but little known by the population at large. By the end of the century, half of all species on Earth may be extinct due to global warming and other causes. Who will survive the world's dwindling biodiversity, and why?

We awake in our tents in the moonlight to what sounds like a dance troupe in wooden clogs practicing on rock under stunted juniper trees. It's a half-dozen Carmen mountain white-tailed deer, scraping at the ground with bootlike hooves, bending gracile necks to chew on wet soil and lick it dry. They're harvesting the minerals and moisture from our urine soaked into the parched earth of the high desert, the herd toiling through the night and into the morning in a pursuit tenacious enough to enlighten us to the wastefulness of our own bodies. Clearly, the three of us have squandered most of what we drank hiking to 7,400 feet on the south rim of Texas' Chisos Mountains. From the deer's point of view, our arrival here is the next best thing to rain.

Come morning, we pack camp and loiter on the precipice, staring across wracked ranges and sunburnt country to the Rio Grande thousands of feet below, and to the even higher country of Mexico's Sierra Madre. Here, in Big Bend National Park, one of America's truly wild places, there's barely a sign of human impact, and not a sound of it—not planes, cars, or human voices. The silence is so thick that our ears feel congested, and we jump when the quiet is pierced by the whistle of a peregrine falcon on its glide path through thin air.

We spend a couple of hours here with binoculars, map, and compass, scanning 100-mile visibility, scrutinizing the area below the rim and trying to find a trail we might travel another day. Although we don't know it, we're peering down into the place where a lost hiker is desperately trying to find the same trail and a freshwater spring midway along it. At this point he has been without water for three days. We don't see him stumbling through cholla and nopales cactus and writing farewell notes to loved ones—though he is likely staring up at the mirage of us silhouetted against the sky.

Ironically, this corner of the Chihuahuan Desert is lush at the moment, watered by rains two months ago that are still working their way through soils and roots and cells, so that many plants are blooming and an explosion of butterflies jams the breezes. The cacti are swollen with hoarded water. The Chisos oaks are dropping so many acorns that park rangers have closed trails where black bears are fattening on them. Countless millions of walking-stick insects are coupled in such dense mating congregations in the canopies of mesquites that entire trees appear to be walking through the sky. Everything is haloed in the golds, yellows, and greens of desert grasses, some taller than us, all bowed under heavy seed heads destined to feed and water kangaroo rats.

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Colleges shouldn't have to police illegal downloading - Rocky Mountain News Editorial

Congress is in the process of renewing the Higher Education Act of 1965, the federal law that established a major role for Washington in providing aid to low- and middle-income college students.

As with most legislation that has large sums of taxpayer funding attached, lawmakers are finding the temptation to lard it up with regulations impossible to resist.

Beltway-based micromanagement of colleges and universities is rarely wise, but it's really offensive when the hammer of federal law is wielded at the behest of a narrow interest group.

In this case, the powerful interest is the entertainment industry, which wants to sic U.S. Department of Education officials on schools where students use campus Internet networks to illegally download music and video files.

It's odd that Congress would entangle the Education Department in an otherwise unrelated law-enforcement issue; that's usually the bailiwick of the Justice Department.

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Edgar Allen Poe dies on this date in 1849, four days after being found in a Baltimore gutter.

(He) was an American poet, short story writer, editor, literary critic, and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and of the macabre, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre.

- Wikipedia

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore --
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door --
"'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door --
           Only this and nothing more."

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; -- vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
           Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
"'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door --
Some late visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door; --
           This it is and nothing more."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you " -- here I opened wide the door; ----
           Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" --
           Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore --
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;--
           'Tis the wind and nothing more!"

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door --
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door --
           Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore --
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning -- little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door --
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
           With such name as "Nevermore."

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered -- not a feather then he fluttered --
Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before --
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."
           Then the bird said "Nevermore."

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore --
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
           Of 'Never -- nevermore'."

But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore --
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore
           Meant in croaking "Nevermore."

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
            She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee -- by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite -- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! -- prophet still, if bird or devil! --
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted --
On this home by Horror haunted -- tell me truly, I implore --
Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil -- prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us -- by that God we both adore --
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore --
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting --
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! -- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
           Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
           Shall be lifted -- nevermore!

Practical Values: Hard to Break - MotherJones

As the scary studies about plastic's health effects pile up, should we kick the habit?

My moment of plastic panic came a few months ago. As a science writer, I've spent the past several years following the steady stream of research into the disturbing effects of the chemicals that leach into our bodies from everyday plastic objects. I'd managed to stay pretty calm about these unsettling discoveries, but then I went to yet another presentation where renowned scientists described new, peer-reviewed findings on how plastic's ingredients may cause reproductive abnormalities and obesity. Afterward, I huddled with the other journalists present, brimming with uneasy questions: Does this mean we should ditch our refillable plastic water bottles? Is it safe for our kids to chew on plastic toys? Should we try to go completely plastic free?

It's one thing to use cloth shopping bags in the name of ecofriendliness or to forswear plastic cutlery in the pursuit of style; it's another to eschew plastics because they might be a health risk. But are you about to give up your computer or cell phone? What about your bike helmet or your child's car seat? Your contact lenses? Your toothbrush? Probably not.

Then what to do about the alarming fact that plastic's chemical constituents are percolating throughout our bodies, apparently interfering with our metabolism, our sex organs, and our children's neurological and reproductive development? The Centers for Disease Control has found two compounds—phthalates, used in polyvinyl chloride (pvc) plastic, and bisphenol A, a building block of polycarbonate plastics—in the urine of a majority of Americans tested. Both chemicals are short-lived once they enter the environment, but they're being scrutinized for their potential to mimic and disrupt our hormones—even before we're born.

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Sabotaging Google - John C. Dvorak

A reader, Courtney Cox (no relation to the actress), recently pointed out to me that the top results of recent complex Google searches turned out to be inane Chinese sites that were not even parking sites, just an assortment of keywords that somehow got indexed and brought to the top of the results list. After seeing a few of these sites, I have to wonder what's going on. Is it sabotage?

Let's start by showing you a typical site: http://vmk.wtoxd.cn/xmijotb.html (there's some annoying Active X here. So visit at your own risk). This site was the top result listed when the search term "reset mp3 player m240d" was entered. And here are the full search results, in which nine of the top ten results are these weird Chinese sites.

Courtney sent me numerous examples of this phenomenon, and it's obvious that the more specific and detailed the search request, the more likely Google is to list these Chinese sites. The issue has apparently been reported to Google, but if the basic algorithms allow this sort of result, even banning the specific sites will not stop this sort of abuse.

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The Road from Media Ethics to Information Anarchy - John C. Dvorak

The definition of "media" has undergone some major changes over the past few years. Many of the changes—and confusion—can be attributed to the immediate nature of information, thanks to new media and the arrival of bloggers and vloggers.

Is a blogger a journalist? The answer is evolving to "Yes, if he/she wants to be." The fact is that in this country, anyone can be a journalist, as there is largely a protected right to a free press. And a free press does not mean that you have to be owned by the Times-Mirror, or anyone else for that matter.

Newsletter writers are journalists just as much as New York Times reporters are (albeit without the NYT structure and all of its ethical and other rules). The subject of ethics always enters the "journalist" debate because it gets attention. What we consider ethical journalistic behavior, for the most part, is dictated by the corporate policies designed for specific news organizations. The big news organizations usually preach that their ethical standards are the best and that everyone should use them. This is a form of marketing and nothing more. Unfortunately, it's a trick that tends to confuse the small fries who often no longer define themselves as "true" media.

Old media ethics bugaboo. Much of what is deemed ethical by The New York Times is simply impractical for a low-budget online publication. Here's the example I often use to prove this point: A small-time publication is given the opportunity to cover an event in a faraway place, and the sponsoring corporation offers to pay for the trip. The Times would insist on picking up the tab itself. But the small-timer may not have the budget to do so. If it doesn't accept the sponsor's offer, it doesn't get the story, and the Times does. How is that fair to the readers? In fact, if the small-time publication adopts the same ethical code as the Times, it loses out. It's as if the small-timer was tricked into submission.

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DRM, Vista and Your Rights - polishlinux.org

In the US, France and a few other countries it is already forbidden to play legally purchased music or videos using GNU/Linux media players . Sounds like sci-fi? Unfortunately not. And it won’t end up on multimedia only. Welcome to the the new era of DRM!

In this article I would like to explain the problem of Digital Rights (or restrictions) Management, especially in the version promoted by Microsoft with the new Windows Vista release. Not everyone is familiar with the dangers of the new “standard” for the whole computer industry. Yes, the whole industry — because it goes way beyond the software produced by the giant from Redmond and its affiliates.

A similar (but a bit more specialized) term to DRM is Trusted Computing. The term is intentionally misleading. It does not try to improve the security of the user, but rather wants to ensure that the user can be “trusted”. Obviously it’s not about the trust, it’s about the money. The companies that deliver content (specially multimedia, but it’s not restricted to media only) to the client want to be able to control the way it is used. For example, they want the content to be displayed on approved media only, banning all the “illegal” applications (illegal does not mean that it violates the law, but rather the agreement between the client and the company that sells the media). More on Trusted Computing can be found (as always) in Wikipedia.

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It's from January, but still a good read if you are unfamiliar with what DRM really is.

Just Don't Call Them Communes - U.S. News and World Report

It's the luxury edition of the American exurb: hilltop scenery, new-money mansions, horses galloping behind split-rail fences. About 25 miles west of Washington, D.C., Loudoun County boasts a median household income of $98,483, twice the national rate. It's the kind of place beloved by D.C. power brokers, whose sprawling estates serve as monuments to the American dream. These days, however, Loudoun County is also at the forefront of a very different if no less American vision: the commune.

The idea that like-minded individuals should forge a community is on something of a comeback tour. An online directory of "intentional communities" has more than doubled in the past two years to 1,295 in North America, and 20 new listings are added each month.

Past imperfect. But forget the term commune. Try "ecovillage," where residents live in Earth-friendly homes on communal land, or "cohousing," where a common house serves as a gathering place. Driven by a green ethos and discontent with impersonal suburbs, residents frequently dine together, share possessions, and baby-sit one another's children. But shared income is a thing of the past, and private homes are essential. Still, the old stereotypes of socialism, drugs, and rebellion dog these communities. "We've fought this for years," says Joani Blank, a cohousing advocate who lives in a divvied-up former market in Oakland, Calif. "Our ideology is about neighborhoods more than anything else."

Poverty and disillusionment drove many older communes to extinction, but the idea was reincarnated, particularly in Europe, in the post-Cold War era. By 1995, Danish activists Hildur and Ross Jackson had created the Global Ecovillage Network to promote sustainable living around the world. Even some of the most archetypal communes, such as the 1960s socialist experiment, the Farm in Tennessee, have reshaped themselves. In New York, the 175-acre EcoVillage at Ithaca boasts two 30-home neighborhoods, office space, and working farms.

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Iraq by the Numbers - TomDispatch.com

Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

This January, President Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward." It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new American troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors -- hired guns, if you will -- who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.

Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of the President's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report -- "Iraq by the numbers" -- can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the U.S. military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report."

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Can 'green chic' save the planet? - CSMonitor

Ecofriendly buying choices alone can't sustain America's lifestyle, experts warn – unless 'looking green' becomes 'voting green.'

Green, it seems, has gone mainstream. Magazines like Elle, Fortune, and Vanity Fair have published "green issues" in the past year, and the Academy Awards were carbon neutral. The Vatican recently announced plans to offset its 2007 emissions, while Costa Rica pledged to arrive at "net zero" by 2021.

Green has also gone trendy. Last week, Whole Foods Market released a limited edition, $15 cotton bag with "I'm not a plastic bag" emblazoned on its side. When the bag went on sale at outlets in Taiwan, a stampede followed. In Hong Kong, throngs shut down a shopping mall. In New York City last week, lines formed at dawn. Later that day, bags were offered on Craigslist for between $200 and $500. "These bags are walking billboards," says Isabel Spearman, a spokeswoman for the bag's designer, Anya Hindmarch. "You do have to make something trendy, and it becomes a habit. That's the whole point."

Savvy marketers have clearly tapped into something. But the green craze has many asking how, if at all, it addresses what many characterize as an impending climate catastrophe.

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The Digital Imprimatur - How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle.
November 4th, 2003

Over the last two years I have become deeply and increasingly pessimistic about the futu