Books Read in 2007

As another year comes to a close, I've again put together a list of the books I've managed to read this year. Once again, there are many that I've not finished, some of which were started but left uncompleted in 2005 or 2006, but I'm not going to bother listing those this year. While in previous years I've reviewed almost every book I read on Amazon.com, this year I've hardly done so at all, and my Amazon.com reviewer rank has dropped accordingly--I had hopes at one time of cracking the top 2000 (and got up to 2,171), but that won't happen if I don't write some more reviews. I'm disappointed with how few books I've read this year--this is the first time I can recall purchasing more new books than I've finished reading, so I plan to use my vacation days (the rest of the year) to see if I can finish a few more.

• Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution: A Biography
• Barton Biggs, Hedge Hogging
• Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement
• Giles Foden, Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
• Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
• Barry M. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (nowhere near as good as I remembered, and the other two I read were so bad I didn't buy the fourth)
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door
• Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
• Mark R. Levin, Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy and Anguish
• Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
• Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Goedel's Proof
• Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World
• Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (revised edition)
• Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
• William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
• Rudy Rucker, Frek and the Elixir
• Jim Steinmeyer, The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer"
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
• Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State
• Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea

(Previously: 2006, 2005.)

Chris Hedges gives Huckabee too much credit

Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, has written an article about how the religious right's support for Mike Huckabee "represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right" in that Huckabee is a candidate who repudiates many of the core principles of conservatism in favor of populism. I'd say he's more of a William Jennings Bryan than a Barry Goldwater.

Hedges' article correctly identifies some very serious reasons to be concerned about a Huckabee candidacy, with his ties to Christian reconstructionism and his complete ignorance of foreign policy. He concludes with a few paragraphs about Huckabee's opposition to the HPV vaccine and his desire to quarantine AIDS patients. It's here that Hedges gives Huckabee too much credit, when he writes that "Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position." In fact, Huckabee hasn't backed off from the position, only from the specific words he used to describe it.

Here's what he said about it to Chris Wallace, as reported at the Huffington Post (with the accompanying video record):

This morning, Huckabee first tried to deny his comments. "Chris, I didn't say that we should quarantine," he said. In fact, he said we "need[ed]" to isolate AIDS patients.

Pressed repeatedly by host Chris Wallace, however, Huckabee relented. "That is exactly what I said. I don't run from it, I don't recant from it. Would I say it a little differently today? Sure, in light of 15 years of additional knowledge and understanding, I would."

That's not backing off from the position.

What would happen if Jesus converted to Islam?

The Onion has the story. The part about Jews for Jesus splitting into three groups is priceless.

Irony

Unlike the examples in Alanis Morissette's misnamed song, this is both unfortunate and ironic:

Roofing billionaire dies in fall through roof

The 91st richest man in the U.S., a roofing company billionaire, has died after falling through his home garage's roof, local authorities said Friday.

Ken Hendricks, 66, was checking on construction on the roof over his garage at his home in the town of Rock Thursday night when he fell through, Rock County Sheriff's Department commander Troy Knudson said. He suffered massive head injuries, according to his company, ABC Supply Co.

Lakota Nation withdraws from U.S. treaties

Yesterday, a group of Indians from the Lakota Nation announced that it has withdrawn from all U.S. treaties and will be issuing its own passports and driver's licenses and creating a tax-free state where non-Native Americans are welcome to move so long as they renounce their U.S. citizenship. They've stated that they will be filing liens against the properties within their territory which have been illegally homesteaded, and have contacted the governments of Bolivia, Chile, and Venezuela seeking recognition.

You can find a map of the Lakota Nation territory here, with more detail and explanation here. It covers western North and South Dakota and Nebraska, and eastern Montana and Wyoming.

This declaration of independence was made yesterday by Russell Means, leader of the American Indian Movement (who was nearly the 1988 Libertarian Party candidate for president instead of Ron Paul), and is based on many years of U.S. government failure to live up to its treaties with Indian tribes. But Means actually has no authority to speak for the Oglala Sioux (the Lakota tribe he is a member of), since he did not win the 2005 election for president of the tribe, though he unsuccessfully contested it.

I haven't seen any specific mention with regard to the Lakota Nation's action of the case of Cobell v. Kempthorne, a lawsuit which has been in federal court since 1996. This lawsuit is over the U.S. Department of the Interior's mismanagement of Indian land lease trust funds, in which they've lost the accounting records for 118 years of data about $13 billion in funds and its accumulated interest, which the plaintiffs would like to see returned to them. (I previously mentioned this lawsuit two years ago as one of the issues former Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth was on the right side of.) Eloise Cobell is a member of the Blackfeet tribe of Montana.

Mention has been made, however, of a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision which awarded the Lakota $122 million in compensation for the land that had been taken from them in violation of treaties, but not any land. The Lakota refused the award, which has accrued interest bringing it close to $1 billion today.

Depends on what the meaning of "saw" is

Mitt Romney said on national television several times this year (including at least twice this month) that he saw his father march with Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1978, he claimed to the Boston Herald that he and his father both marched with King.

Susan Englander, assistant editor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, did some research and found that while Gov. George Romney (Michigan) issued a proclamation in support of King in June 1963 for a March in Detroit, he declined to attend, saying that he did not attend political events on Sundays. He participated in a civil rights march in Grosse Pointe a few days later, but King did not attend that march.

Now, after defending the claim repeatedly, Romney has admitted yesterday that neither he nor his father marched with King--but not that he has said anything false. Instead, he says that he "saw" his father march with King in a figurative sense: "If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described. ... It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

Blackwater shoots the NY Times' dog in Baghdad

A Blackwater bodyguard shot and killed Hentish, the mascot dog of the New York Times that has lived its entire life in the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. Blackwater claims Hentish attacked one of their bomb-sniffing dogs and had to be shot.

Former U.S. military officials against "enhanced interrogation"

December 12, 2007

The Honorable John D. Rockefeller IV, Chairman
The United States Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence
Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Silvestre Reyes, Chairman
The United States House of Representatives
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Chairman Reyes and Chairman Rockefeller:

As retired military leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces, we write to express our strong support for Section 327 of the Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, H.R. 2082. Section 327 would require intelligence agents of the U.S. government to adhere to the standards of prisoner treatment and interrogation contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Human Collector Operations (the Army Field Manual).

We believe it is vital to the safety of our men and women in uniform that the United States not sanction the use of interrogation methods it would find unacceptable if inflicted by the enemy against captured Americans. That principle, embedded in the Army Field Manual, has guided generations of American military personnel in combat.

The current situation, in which the military operates under one set of interrogation rules that are public and the CIA operates under a separate, secret set of rules, is unwise and impractical. In order to ensure adherence across the government to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions and to maintain the integrity of the humane treatment standards on which our own troops rely, we believe that all U.S. personnel - military and civilian - should be held to a single standard of humane treatment reflected in the Army Field Manual.

The Field Manual is the product of decades of practical experience and was updated last year to reflect lessons learned from the current conflict. Interrogation methods authorized by the Field Manual have proven effective in eliciting vital intelligence from dangerous enemy prisoners. Some have argued that the Field Manual rules are too simplistic for civilian interrogators. We reject that argument. Interrogation methods authorized in the Field Manual are sophisticated and flexible. And the principles reflected in the Field Manual are values that no U.S. agency should violate.

General David Petraeus underscored this point in an open letter to the troops in May in which he cautioned against the use of interrogation techniques not authorized by the Field Manual:

What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight. . . . is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.... Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong.

Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone "talk;" however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact, our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.

Employing interrogation methods that violate the Field Manual is not only unnecessary, but poses enormous risks. These methods generate information of dubious value, reliance upon which can lead to disastrous consequences. Moreover, revelation of the use of such techniques does immense damage to the reputation and moral authority of the United States essential to our efforts to combat terrorism.

This is a defining issue for America. We urge you to support the adoption of Section 327 of the Conference Report and thereby send a clear message - to U.S. personnel and to the world - that the United States will not engage in or condone the abuse of prisoners and will honor its commitments to uphold the Geneva Conventions.

Sincerely,

General Joseph Hoar, USMC (Ret.)
General Paul J. Kern, USA (Ret.)
General Charles Krulak, USMC (Ret.)
General David M. Maddox, USA (Ret.)
General Merrill A. McPeak, USAF (Ret.)
Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Lee F. Gunn, USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Claudia J. Kennedy, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Donald L. Kerrick, USA (Ret.)
Vice Admiral Albert H. Konetzni Jr., USN (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Charles Otstott, USA (Ret.)
Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, USA (Ret.)
Major General Paul Eaton, USA (Ret.)
Major General Eugene Fox, USA (Ret.)
Major General John L. Fugh, USA (Ret.)
Rear Admiral Don Guter, USN (Ret.)
Major General Fred E. Haynes, USMC (Ret.)
Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, USN (Ret.)
Major General Melvyn Montano, ANG (Ret.)
Major General Gerald T. Sajer, USA (Ret.)
Major General Antonio 'Tony' M. Taguba, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David M. Brahms, USMC (Ret.)
Brigadier General James P. Cullen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Evelyn P. Foote, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General John H. Johns, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Richard O'Meara, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Murray G. Sagsveen, USA (Ret.)
Brigadier General Anthony Verrengia, USAF (Ret.)
Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, USA (Ret.)

The bill in question has passed in the House. It still needs to pass in the Senate. Bush has threatened to veto the measure.

UPDATE (December 20, 2007): Notes on a few of the above--Taguba did the investigation of Abu Ghraib. Guter and Hutson were Judge Advocates General (i.e., the top Navy-Marine Corps lawyer). Turner was former Director of Central Intelligence (i.e., head of the CIA).

Who gets Jesus' endorsement, and is it a good thing?

This political advertisement explores those questions.



Hat tip to Dave Palmer on the SKEPTIC list.

"Untraceable" looks unwatchable

In January 2008 the film "Untraceable," starring Diane Lane, will be released. It looks awful. The premise is that a serial killer is killing people live on the Internet, via an "untraceable website" that is connected to contraptions that kill his victims as more people visit the site.

The whole concept of an "untraceable website" or the idea that such a thing would be unstoppable by ISPs and law enforcement is absurd--the immediate upstream provider of the site would merely need to null route the IP address(es) where the website is hosted, and traffic stops. They'd also be able to quickly identify the customer who owns the server in question. Even if that server was compromised and being used to reverse proxy or redirect traffic to other servers, it would still be a relatively simple matter to track that backwards, though it would be somewhat more difficult than stopping the traffic. Even if the domain name pointed to a new server on a compromised host every second, it would still be possible to contact the domain name registrar and get the domain name shut down.

If users can get to it, it can be seen how and what they're getting to, even if that's only the front end in a chain of successive proxies. If it has a domain name, that provides another path to shutting off access.

UPDATE (January 2, 2008): I came across the script online while searching for information about the writers. Let's just say that my opinion above is not nearly negative enough. In the first 16 pages are at least six or seven scenes that really bring on the stupid. For example, FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh, who works in the FBI's cyber division, is monitoring machines that are being compromised by hackers (honeypots, essentially, though the script doesn't use the word). One of her machines gets compromised and she sees that it copies her files including fake financial information. It then accesses eBay to use a stolen credit card to purchase a watch. In reality, the stolen financial information wouldn't be likely to be used from the same machine, it would be sold to another player in the underground economy. Marsh then types commands to look for the IP address of the connecting host--but if they've already got honeypots or honeynets in operation, that should already be logged. She then does the usual CSI-style conversion of an IP address into a name and address without issuing a subpoena to an ISP, and discovers that it's a home belonging to a 56-year-old woman. She immediately concludes that the actual criminal must be a neighbor using her wireless connection, despite the fact that she has no evidence that the woman has a wireless access point and isn't just another victim with a compromised machine being used as a proxy. Without doing any more verification, she arranges to get a warrant to knock the door of the neighbor down, and it turns out to be a teenage kid.

On p. 16 appears this nice quote: "She types several commands into a unix shell. Trace routing algorithms begin to run. A different screen shows possible IP addresses. The list begins growing, from ten to hundreds to thousands.... Marsh shakes her head at the futility." There are multiple methods of performing traceroutes and even of adding fake hops to a traceroute, but traceroute is unnecessary to find out the IP address of a website--it's only useful for finding the path traffic takes to get to that website, e.g., for finding the upstream provider. But getting a list of upstream providers is better done by looking at routing tables rather than doing traceroutes, anyway. The real investigative steps would be to look at the DNS information for the domain, get the IP address or addresses from the authoritative name server (and check to see if those are changing with a short TTL), then find the upstream providers.

Funniest exchange I've seen so far in the script (p. 26) is this marvel of self-contradiction:

[FBI agent] GRIFFIN: I traced it to a Georgetown sophomore named Andrew Kinross. But then I looked closer and saw the post didn't actually originate from his computer.
MARSH: Our guy got into his computer and posted it from there.
GRIFFIN: That would be my guess.
MARSH: So let's go after the originating computer's IP.

And so far, I've not mentioned how the hacker mastermind hacks into the FBI agent's car (which features the fictional "NorthStar" instead "OnStar")--in the preview, the hacker apparently is able to control the steering of her car. I suspect drive-by-wire steering will come soon in the future of the automobile, but I don't believe it exists today. (Turns out the preview gives a misleading impression of what the script says is happening--the hacker doesn't actually control the steering, but remotely shuts off the car's electrical systems and power steering.)