Followup on the story I linked previously, about the Air Force/Boeing joint venture to swindle the American public. The summary of that story is that the Boeing, facing the closure of the 767 production line from lack of orders, asked for and received a massive handout from the Air Force, which bent over backwards to break the rules. You may not be surprised to learn that the primary mover in the Air Force for this project started a new job at Boeing last year. And, while I can't report that the deal has been cancelled and American taxpayers saved billions of dollars (the deal included over-payment of perhaps $5B out of $20B total, and that's without examining the assumption that the United States should maintain the infrastructure for complete air superiority of indefinite duration anywhere in the world), at least a few of the responsible parties got fired as Boeing executed evasive maneuver Charlie Yankee Alpha One:

The chief financial officer, Michael Sears, was fired for discussing a job with the Pentagon official, Darleen Druyun, while she was representing the government in talks with the company over a multibillion-dollar contract to supply aerial refueling tankers.

An internal inquiry found that Mr. Sears, once considered a candidate for Boeing's top job, and Ms. Druyun, who was also fired, tried to cover up their discussions, the company said.

[Kennedy's] larger goal after that was to settle the Cold War, without either victory or defeat—a strategic vision laid out in JFK’s commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

And that was, partly, a question of atomic survival—a subject that can only be said to have obsessed America’s civilian leadership in those days, and for very good reason. The Soviet Union, which had at that time only four intercontinental rockets capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, was not the danger that rational men most feared. The United States held an overwhelming nuclear advantage in late 1963. Accordingly, our nuclear plans were not actually about deterrence. Rather, then as evidently again now, they envisioned preventive war fought over a pretext.

Beginning July 1, 2005, [California] counties will not be able to purchase any machine that does not produce a paper trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.

Dark Sun. Richard Rhodes.

The definitive history of the making of the thermonuclear bomb. Also a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, among the greatest of historical non-fiction thrillers. A lot of the physics from the first book is gone, replaced mostly by Soviet espionage. There's really only one big breakthrough to go from the A-bomb to the H-bomb, and it's not Edward Teller's.

Edward Teller is of course the man known as "The Father of the H-bomb," a devoted fan and promoter of weapons of mass destruction (he would call it, defending freedom from the evils of communism), and the father of "Star Wars," the result of a short conversation with Ronald Reagan. Teller died a few days apart from Leni Riefenstahl, and neither ought be missed. (Caveat - I'm not up on my Riefenstahl yet. When I feel like diving into the art vs life of the artist thing I'll keep you all posted.) Teller gets a lot of ink in Dark Sun, and it's generally not positive.

Other villians: Curtis LeMay tried to start World War III singlehandedly - more than once - under the theory that the US should start and win the first nuclear war before mutually assured destruction came into effect and prevented the use of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer seems innocent of charges that he was a Soviet spy. I.I. Rabi testifies in his defense, "We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it ... and what more do you want, mermaids?"

However, Oppenheimer's famous quote, "physicists have known sin," is put in much-needed context: he said it to President Truman, the person who had actually made the decision to use the A-bomb in war, and it comes off more as whining than conscience.

In general, a great book. Read it and learn how polystyrene is a key component of H-bombs.

Live From New York. Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller.

Pure crack cocaine entertainment. A complete history of Saturday Night Live told through spliced together interviews with every living participant but Eddie Murphy. Goes down so easy, you keep flipping pages until you realize it's 3 am and Chris Farley's dead.

The one failing of the book is that it isn't in an integrated multimedia package so that you can watch a skit in real video on one page and then read about the politics and drugs and sex going on backstage on the next page. Very noteworthy is the way that drugs and sex are present and integrated into the narrative in detail without prurience. Also, Chevy Chase and Robert Blake come off as unredeemable; Bill Murray, Phil Hartman, and Will Farrell are standouts. Janeane Garofalo takes a beating, including plenty of self-inflicted wounds. (Ben Stiller has a much shorter but equally negative appearance.)

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Alan Deutschman.

Jobs is either clinically insane or else willing to be pathologically hurtful on a daily basis for thirty years for personal gain. The book is entertaining and reveals that Pixar is successful solely due to John Lasseter; Next was always doomed; and a drunk Bill Gates was once induced to leave a message on Jobs' answering machine: "Zeez eeez Feee-LEEEEEP Kahn! Zeee Macintosh sucks!"

The Scar. China Miéville.

Completely captivating multi-genre escapism. I am very happy to have found another writer who works in science fiction but writes adult prose with convincing characters.

I mailed three boxes of my own stuff from Seattle to Copenhagen. Two arrived in a timely fashion; the third was delayed a week or so because it had customs due. Which I thought was odd, since I was transporting my own goods. A conversation with the USPS's local contractor revealed that, if I agreed to pay the tariff, I could get my stuff the next day. So now I have a bill, in Danish, for a sum of money due German customs (because that particular box was shipped through Germany) and an accompanying form, also in Danish, that I am supposed to send in parallel to get them to refund my money. I've been sitting on this particular task for a while, but today something strengthened my resolve.

I order some samples of my new Bill of Rights merchandise, mugs and bumper stickers. The mug got clipped a bit, so that the first four amendments are unnumbered, I, II, and V respectively, but in general it looks pretty good. The annoying thing, though, was that before the post office (motto: open 10 am to 5:30 pm for our convenience) would give me my own stuff, they took out a DKK78 tariff for each of the two sets of samples. The wholesale cost of a mug and bumper sticker is listed as US 15 on the package, so that's DKK 95. Lars explained the charges: 23DKK for VAT (25%), 44DKK fee for charging VAT, and 11DKK VAT on the fee for charging VAT. So I had to pay an 82% tariff to get my own merchandise samples through customs. Look, I'm sorry if the US has imposed illegal steel subsidies against Europe, insulting the global free trade movement and putting the lie to the Bush administration's ideology - and cutting maybe 30,000 US jobs from steel consuming US companies in order to save a few steel jobs in electoral swing states. There's not much I can do about. But I'll tell you what, I'm going to take that other tariff bill, which I still haven't paid, and I'm going to ignore until they come to deport me.

"In my opinion, it makes no more sense to launch an assault on our civil liberties as the best way to get at terrorists than it did to launch an invasion of Iraq as the best way to get at Osama bin Laden," Gore said.

I've been skimming Bruce Schneier's book, Secrets and Lies, and finding it a bit disappointing. He's such a good, clear, thorough writer in his online column that the book represents a bit of a step down. It's a basic primer in security, especially computer security. It's still written in his smooth, readable style, but I'm confused by the level of detail. It doesn't offer much new to someone like me, a computer person who more or less keeps up on computer security. It does offer a general overview on a lot of topics, but sometimes he seems to surf over the complexity instead of diving into it and explaining it, which makes me suspect that people who don't already understand the details may not get them. I might be wrong - he covers a lot of basic topics better and shorter than I've seen anywhere else - but it kinda seems like sometimes he introduces a topic, decides he doesn't want to dive into the necessary depth, and then glosses over it, all in the name of being thorough.

My other complaint is that he spends plenty of time talking about users and how they're easily fooled, but very little time talking about how security professionals have failed socially. The single biggest failing of institutional security I've seen is that security people (and network people) are often bullying jerks, and hence get ignored as soon as they're out of sight. If security people understood the day-to-day hassles of their proctectees, and were more often seen as allies and educators instead of unhelpful authorities with only negative powers, it seems like a lot of vulnerabilities would close up.

Tejada seems the most likely to get the biggest deal, what with his May 25, 1976 birth date courtesy of the Dominican Republic, where, as I'm sure you're all aware, means there's a significant chance that not only is Tejada not actually 27 today, but there is a fair chance that he doesn't even bat right-handed ...

Early prediction: park-adjusted, Matsui [Kazuo] will be the fifth-most-valuable shortstop next year or thereabouts, all facets of his game considered, and will spark another silly round of discussion on why, exactly, first-year players shouldn't count as first-year players if they're Japanese (incidentally, if it's racist to consider Japanese players rookies despite their being rookies, I'd like to know how it was racist for former Negro Leaguers to win Rookie of the Year awards, and how, exactly, we should regard the RoY being named for one of these players--is it really the greatest racist insult baseball's perpetrated in 50 years?).

President Bush is scheduled this Saturday to make his second trip in seven weeks to Mississippi. New York City's former mayor Rudolph Giuliani is scheduled to come to the state this week. The former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole; Senator Elizabeth Dole; the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Florida's Governor Jeb Bush; Education Secretary Rod Paige; and former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts have all been there.

[Republican candidate for governor Haley] Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

... When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be `coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

Orcinus writes:

Indeed, Bush is touring there today, and his remarks were interesting:

"I'm proud to stand with this man ... He's proud of this state, and that's the kind of governor you need — somebody who relates to people from all walks of life."

This frankly seems like a coded reference to Barbour's wink-and-nudge refusal to take have his picture removed from the CofCC's Web site.

...

"Identity politics," though it was not called that then, was an invention of 19th-century white supremacists who, along with their acolytes, continued to employ such divisions with abandon through most of the first half of the last century. Their heirs continue to do so, but in less nakedly racial terms.

Now we have attacks on affirmative action, the "welfare state," hate-crimes legislation, and various aspects of civil-rights law, all under the umbrella of combating "identity politics." And consistently, there has been one primary source for this resurgence of white supremacy camouflaged as "normal" politics: the conservative movement generally, and the Republican Party specifically.

Black leaders often criticize the Democratic Party for its abysmal lack of leadership at times like these, pointing to such failures as indicative of the party's tendency to take black voters for granted. Certainly, there's little doubt that Democratic silence on these issues not only empowers the bigots, it also saps the energy from the party's base.

Democrats really need to ask themselves whether they want to be courting the votes of people inspired by the Confederate flag, or the same minorities for whom that flag is a symbol of oppression and intimidation. And if the latter, it is well past time for them to speak up about what is happening in Mississippi.