The Substantially Similar Weblog

Borderline unsafe for work Flash video series entitled Leave it to Bush. I’m afraid my right wing readers won’t be too thrilled with it.

Via Steve.

Following up on last week’s excellent interview with Brent Scowcroft, the New Yorker featured a well written and thought provoking article on the Valerie Plame Wilson affair this week. The article doesn’t necessarily break any new ground, but it’s the best summary I’ve seen so far of the scandal. If you haven’t been following every twist and turn day by day, you’ll probably learn something new. Even if you have, the article puts the whole thing in perspective in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Fascinating New Yorker interview with Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to Bush 41. I wonder how the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, gets this degree of access: he’s apparently emailing back and forth with Bush 41, having coffee with Colin Powell, and engaging in frank discussion with Scowcroft for a significant period of time. This sort of reporting is the antithesis of what you see in most newspapers, where the reporter probably spends no more than a few hours piecing together information that is widely available. This is also consistent with everything I’ve seen in the New Yorker for the past few months I’ve been subscribing—high quality writing and primary source information that you won’t pick up just from reading blogs.

In any case, it’s interesting to see all these conservative ideologues from the Reagan-Bush era turn on the neoconservatives. If Brent Scowcroft thinks the war in Iraq is misguided, does the current administration have any hope at all?

I’m trying to accomplish what I believe should be a simple task with iptables—replace my DSL router with a linux box. The linux box also routes packets to other machines on the LAN based on destination IP address (the box receives packets for multiple IP addresses from the Internet) and port number, and blocks other packets based on originator IP and port number, but as I understand the firewalling and inbound routing chains are totally separate from the outbound NAT functionality. In any case, the inbound stuff works perfectly now.

It seems simple enough to set up a box, where eth0 faces the Internet and eth1 faces the LAN, to act as a gateway or proxy to the LAN:

 iptables -A FORWARD -i eth1 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE 

And that actually works perfectly, except that a Windows box inside my LAN is unable to connect to a VPN outside the LAN, while it worked fine with the Buffalo router I had in place before. All other services are properly accessible through the gateway.

So I posted a description of my situation to comp.security.firewalls. I admit that I have, at best, a basic understanding of iptables, but I have read the manpage and documentation and gotten it to do 99% of what I need with the exception of this VPN issue.

In response, a “Wolfgang Kueter” called me clueless multiple times, said that I had no idea what I was doing, and that I “misunderstand almost everything,” and that I should pay a professional to do it for me and read books on TCP/IP and the IPSec protocol specification itself. Other newsgroup postings by this fellow have a similar tone, e.g. building a security suite (Q: What combination of software firewall, anti-virus, etc., are you using and have you noticed any discernable effect on performance? A: None, because they are useless crap. … I don’t use such crap, so how could I?).

Steve suggests that Web 2.0 should have some way to tag people like this as jerks, and their reputation would then follow them around on the web. Since that technology doesn’t yet exist, the next best thing, I suppose, is to just blog about it and hope this entry turns up in a search on the person’s name. Abrasive responses to legitimate requests for help from people hoping to learn something don’t do anything to advance the free software movement. I suppose this kind of person will always exist, but I wish they didn’t.

I don’t want to be petty about this sort of thing, but I actually don’t think I need to hire a professional or read books about TCP/IP and the IPSec protocol specification itself to configure a Linux box as a residential gateway. Does anyone disagree?

Bush Braces As Cindy Sheehan’s Other Son Drowns In New Orleans. Sometimes The Onion is so “on.”

A couple of bits on the hurricane disaster I want to highlight:

• An Open Letter to the President published in the Times Picayune (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to reach the editorial):
  

  Dear Mr. President:

  We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, “What is not working, we’re going to make it right.”

  Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

  […]

  In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, “We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day.”

  Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

  (read the whole thing)

• Two captioned photos on Yahoo! news — one showing a white person swimming through the flood, having “found” bread and soda, the other an African American who “looted” a grocery store. Yahoo! has yanked the captions, but several people saved images, including this flickr site.

  While I agree that the captions probably reflected racism, I think the blogosphere “amplifying” effect is at least as notable here. I know I’m not the first person to notice this phenomenon, but it is interesting that ten years ago a few people might have noticed the incongruity of the captions but their concern wouldn’t extend beyond themselves and maybe a few people they talked to. Now, it only took a couple of days for this to propagate and for Yahoo! to actually remove the controversial captions. It’s also interesting that Yahoo! having yanked the captions doesn’t make it any harder to find them—Yahoo! even links to the flickr site that shows the originals.

Update: a few more interesting points.

• Pelican has some interesting comments from a public health perspective — particularly on how the billions spent on “bioterrorism preparedness” were a waste. He concludes:
  

  The notion that the time and money that the federal government has spent in preparedness for terrorism has actually made anyone prepared is complete horse shit. If you ask anyone who works in this area they will tell you the simple truth: It is not the bureaucracy’s fault. It is not the fault of state and local governments. It is the fault of the political levels of government. This is perhaps one of the most corrupt administrations and there should be a prompt discussion on actively terminating it.

  See also his other entry, Katrina is not a Natural Disaster.

• And then this bit about PayPal entirely obstructing a good hurricane-relief fundraising effort.
• I’ve been waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in—and he finally has, albeit briefly, with security lessons of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Interesting interview with Eric Raymond where he claims that the reciprocity provisions of the GPL are now unnecessary and are slowing down open source adoption. I don’t think I agree, but it’s an interesting argument, and the first time I’ve seen esr attack the GPL so directly.

Update: this article was apparently slashdotted. I try not to link things that have been slashdotted under the theory that they’ve already gotten enough attention, but in this case I read the article before I saw the slashdot link.

Steve has pointed out several times how poorly the mainstream media do in establishing verifiable facts, instead kotowing to the requirement of providing a “balanced view” and presenting “both positions” on an issue. For example, just today the Boston Globe· runs a story entitled Bush argues his Social Security plan aids blacks·:

Under a system based on wages, the average monthly Social Security retirement benefit received by African-Americans is $775, compared with $912 for whites. In addition, many blacks never receive the benefits because a disproportionate number die before they are eligible. On average, black males die six years sooner than white males.

But some groups representing African-Americans say that Bush’s logic is faulty and that creating private accounts would hurt blacks rather than help them. They maintain that Bush is playing a race card to boost his plan.

After summarizing the position on both sides of the debate, the story notes:

Whichever side is right, the controversy has put a spotlight on what some say has been missing in the national discussion over Social Security: Is the system filled with inequities that discriminate against certain demographic groups?

Whichever side is right? There probably is a correct answer to this question, and I submit the media should be responsible for reporting that answer, even if the result is that it appears to be “taking sides” in the debate. Steve pointed me to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities· entitled African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Social Security: the Shortcomings of the Heritage Foundation Reports·. The report notes straightforward actuarial errors made in the report the Bush administration relies on for its claim that the social security system disadvantages racial minorities. One example:

The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Chief Actuary found that Heritage both overstated the payroll taxes that workers pay for Social Security and understated the Social Security retirement benefits that workers receive, with these errors being particularly large for African Americans. The Office of the Chief Actuary found that in estimating the number of years an individual would work and make payroll tax contributions, Heritage failed to take into account the fact that some workers die before retirement and consequently contribute payroll tax for a smaller number of years than those who work into their 60s. Since a larger portion of African-American workers than of white workers die before 65, failing to take this factor into account led Heritage to make particularly large errors in its rate-of-return calculations for African Americans. For example, the actuaries found that the number of years a 20-year-old African-American man is expected to make payroll tax payments into the Social Security system is six years fewer than the Heritage methodology would predict. This flaw in its methodology led Heritage to overstate significantly the Social Security taxes that African Americans pay.

Another good example of this phenomenon is WBUR public radio host Tom Ashbrook’s show, On Point, where Ashbrook bends over backwards to make sure he’s always giving “both sides” a fair shot in the discussion, even to the point where he has take a clearly ridiculous view (for example, “maybe the people who want to ban discussion of evolution from classroom textbooks are factually right!”). National Public Radio has been demonized by the right wing for several years now, so perhaps this is an attempt to preempt further charges of bias.

The Boston Phoenix· ran a a great interview with veteran political writer and Dorchester native Jack Beatty· that focused on this same issue several weeks ago. When asked about the media’s role in the “Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth” smear ads during last year’s presidential campaign, Beatty responds:

In the past, there were terrible lies told about candidates. But I think the difference is that journalism has become a vector for these lies, and a way of dignifying them and treating them through this terrible trap of objectivity. “You say, Mr. Hitler, that the Jews are in fact parasites and need to be destroyed. You over here, Rabbi, disagree. Let’s talk.” This objectivity is strangling. You think of journalism as a mirror and a lamp. It’s strictly a mirror today.

Steve pointed out another great example of this a couple of months ago when the New York Times· ran a positive story on the Mozilla Firefox web-browser·, but declined to establish verifiable facts:

Firefox has won praise from some Internet experts for being more innovative than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and less susceptible to malicious programs that routinely attack the Microsoft browser.

Firefox, they say, is a compact, free-standing browser designed to display Web pages rapidly while blocking pop-up ads and other unsolicited windows. Downloads of the new browser were running at the rate of a million a day last week.

While the security claim might arguably be a matter of opinion (although clearly any argument that up to this point Internet Explorer is no more subject to security vulnerabilities than Mozilla Firefox is laughable), the issue of whether Firefox “displays Web pages rapidly” is quite easy to test. In fact, I’m sure there are people already on the New York Times payroll who would be able to verify (or refute) the claim. And yet, the New York Times—like most other mainstream media publications—lets “you be the judge.”

Hey, one side says it loads faster, the other side says it doesn’t, and who are we to force our opinion on you?

James Grimmelmann· nails David Brooks right on the head·:

David Brooks is an intellectual money-launderer; he repackages the elitist misanthropy that is conservatism into vaguely humorous but reassuringly bland “observations.”

What bothers me so much about David Brooks is his insidiousness. Conservative clowns like Jeff Jacoby· preach only to their own choir; everyone else tends to write their drivel off as.. well, drivel (“the demonizing of John Ashcroft during the past four years has been just about the ugliest spectacle in US politics·”). I actually suspect that the Boston Globe carries Jacoby’s column despite it’s liberal leanings because Jacoby makes conservatives look stupid.

David Brooks, on the other hand, is an undercover agent, and he appeals to a lot of my fairminded left- or liberal-leaning friends. His message is: “Hey, I’m one of you. When I lambast liberals in a pleasant friendly way, I’m really just making fun of myself and my “bobo” values.” He attempts to reduce the opposition to a set of social quirks; a preference for organic goods grown under fair conditions is equated with blue hair and piercings.

Of course, Brooks is to some extent correct that people’s politics are driven as much by socialization as reason and passion (my own characterization). But his superficial attempts to inject some humour and self-deprecation into the debate belie a deeper anti-democratic agenda that only reveals itself when Brooks is writing for his own conservative audience.

See also David Plotz·’s article in slate·, Why liberals are turning on their favorite conservative, for a more in-depth critique.

I’m not sure which possibility is more depressing: that Bush may have stolen the election again, or that he won without stealing the election. In either case, we’re in sorry shape. I’m not quite ready to join the “I’m moving to Canada” crowd, though—I don’t find that rhetorical tactic all that effective.

If nothing else, at least they won’t blame Ralph Nader this time.