Privacy schmivacy!

To follow up my post about the recent security breaches at T-Mobile and ChoicePoint there is an article from Wired that dishes the dirt on the T-Mobile breach. Apparently the security breach at T-Mobile affected at least 400 people who's information was extracted using a WebLogic server security flaw. The flaw that was announced by BEA (who make the WebLogic server) as a high severity problem along with a patch to fix it March 2003. The hacker was able to exploit the flaw for a year before being arrested in October 2004, a full 18 months after WebLogic had posted the patch for the problem. By which time he'd already extracted all kinds of private information including social security numbers and passwords from the T-Mobile databases, this information was made available for sale online by the hacker. Just what where they doing storing unencrypted passwords in their database? Duh!

At this point it is not clear if the hack on Paris halting T-Mobile account exploited the same flaw, but regardless it seems clear that all those "privacy" policies that companies send their customers aren't worth the paper they are written on. A company can say all the warm and fuzzy things it wants to about how carefully it will guard your private information, but if they don't follow even the most basic procedures for keeping websites secure then its going to be open season on your "private" information. For a company like T-Mobile to leave a publicised high risk security flaw unpatched for 18 months, or even for one month, well its is just plain negligence - heads should roll and fines should be imposed on them.

That's the problem with all these privacy rules, none of them really have much bite. Even with the ChoicePoint situation where the law forced them to publicize their breach there is no serious consequence for them. Sure they get egg on their face and have to field some bad PR and a few civil suits. But ultimately there are no punitive measures taken, no license to store private data is revoked, and no audit to ensure the source of the problem has been corrected.

What I suggest is that any organization storing personal information on a website should be licensed, regularly audited and held fully responsible for the privacy of that information. Like the captain of a ship, "responsible" means there will be consequences if privacy compromised. So if it can be shown that company was negligent in guarding the privacy of its customer information then their license should be revoked and all data they hold should be made completely inaccessible from any website, by any means. That means the likes of T-Mobile would be forced to shut down their websites and loose a hugely popular and convenient feature of their service. T-Mobile could probably muddle by with only phone and snail-mail based customer service, but for a company like Amazon it would basically mean the end of their company.

Notice I said the company would have to be shown to be negligent, that's usually a pretty high bar to prove. Being responsible for a problem is one thing and usually quite easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt, but for example, even Union Carbide has not yet been proved negligent in the Bhopal incident. So if T-Mobile area are hacked because of a flaw in someone else's technology that they didn't know about that's probably not negligent. If they are hacked the day after a security flaw is published, that's also probably not negligent. If they systematically or consistently fail to implement security policies to guard information then that's quite likely a long way towards provable negligence.

But the severe consequences of being proved negligent (in a court of law) would mean a company would do everything they could do to avoid falling foul of. And to avoid the problem of corporations with how shall I put it - "slippery shoulders" (aka. high paid lawyers and "connections") - perhaps some kind of three strikes rule could be used. If a company experiences three breaches where privacy is compromised and is demonstrated to be responsible but not necessarily negligent, then they will loose their license just the same. This is rather like the points system for driving licenses, once the points add up to high away goes your license, no questions asked - just to be safe.

Allen Holub stole my job!

Yeah, yeah, and dingoes ate my baby...

I'm sure you've heard it all before but apparently today I was usurped on my first opportunity to do contract software engineering by one Allen Holub. My fatal mistake was, apparently, to say "Can I let you know tomorrow?". In between then and tomorrow the software rockstar Allen Holub was drafted and apparently took the job. I guess that I, a veritable software jack-of-all-trades shouldn't feel bad that Holub was selected preferentially over me, after all I had all along said I wanted the client to get the right person for the job.

Never mind, I've heard there are still jobs available fixing wind generators over at Altamont pass...

I, Bush - Episode 2 Take 3

Nicely following my topic of people getting screwed by ChoicePoint and probably with no effective recourse comes Just a cost of doing business, an article by Jeff Kaplan. In it Jeff Kaplan points out that Bush's recent bill to restrict class action suits by private citizens has further swung the pendulum of unequal protection in further in the direction of corporations. Bush told us that this bill was necessary to prevent frivilous lawsuits hurting businesses and damaging our economy.

Of course when Bush says "businesses" he is always quick to frame that as "small businesses" of the mom and pop kind. Approximates 80% of all businesses are sole proprietorships or partnerships, the rest are corporations, however 95% of all revenue comes from the big corporations. So while appealing to the "small business sector" Bush manages to appeal the the maximum number of people with the minimum of economic effect. We can all associate with those small guys, well all know a small business and a great number of people own one of some kind.

But the problem is, according to Kaplan recent studies have shown its the corporations, not people and small businesses, who are 160 times more likely to sue, and even worse they are 69% more likely than a regular person to be chastized for launching a frivilous suit.

So, did the Bush bill address frivilous lawsuits by corporations too? Hell no! The truth is by restricting suits by people but not corporations (who actually claim to be people when it suits them) Bush was able to create a lot of noise and smoke without the actual fire that might damage the huge profits made by legal companies that prop up our so called democracy.

And so it came to pass that the people got screwed, and the corporatiosn ruled - again.

A two tiered response to privacy violations?

Does anyone else see not just a slight, but a massive inequity between what happened when Paris Hilton's personal phone information got stolen, and what happened when ChoicePoint managed to give away personal details of not just one, but potentially hundreds of thousands of people?

In one situation we have a bunch of celebrity phone numbers and some happy photo snaps posted on the web. A few celebs get their phones jammed with crank calls and no doubt quickly got a new phone number, big deal. I'm sure that T-Mobile has probably dished out new phones and free T-Mobile service credits to everyone concerned even if, as it is likely to be the case, they weren't to blame for the "hack". So, one emabarassed celebrity who probably wont get anyones phone number given to her again, and a huge amount of press, and bad PR for T-Mobile even though its quite possible she just had a dumb password that someone guessed.

In the other case we have a bogus application to ChoicePoint resulting in the release of names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers and every else the budding identity fraudster needs to steal the identity of thousands of people. And even after the fact, even those who didn't yet get their identity stolen (several hundred already did), the rest and sit back and wait, fingers crossed, that their information isn't out on the web somewhere waiting to suck their bank accounts dry at any moment. No one really nows and quite possibly these people will have to run scared for years before they can think of taking their eye off their credit reports.

So what is the inequity? Well in one case we have the Secret Service involved, looking out for Hilton's back, working with T-Mobile to investigate and shutting down all sites that continue to propogate the information from her mobile. In the other well, the news of the fraud appears to have been buried for almost a year at the request of "federal authorities" in defiance of the California law that required ChoicePoint to notify everyone of the release of their personal information. Now ChoicePoint are just offering a free year of subscription to credit history monitoring services to those 145,000 is has, so far, identified as victims of the fraud. Apart from that little, if anything seems to be done about it and ChoicePoint appears to be washing its hands of the problem.

At least one person has already decided to hit ChoicePoint with a law suit and I can easily expect a class action suit to follow quite prompty, although being a multi-state case it is likely that it would fall fowl of Bush's recent anti-class action bill that forces it to be fought in class-action unfriendly federal courts. Wired News is now indicating they think such suits will fall on deaf ears, as courts have previously dismissed attempts to sue banks that have been duped by identity thieves on the grounds that the victim wasn't a customer of the company they were suing. Maybe that was just a badly presented suit that failed, but it certainly sounds like there should be a case to sue someone when a company that you didn't even ask to be holding your data screws up and hands it over to criminals.

Or is it, that just because we the people are many and not of celebrity status we dont get a personal investigation by the Secret Service, and in general we just get screwed because on average we don't have the time or resources to seek restitution in a court of law.

Repost: Hunter S. Thompson

In honour of the late Hunter S. Thompson who died today I'm reposting this LDTT entry from July 2003. Yesterday I came across the following quote from Hunter S. Thompson. After some investigation I discovered it is from an essay in his latest book "Kingdom of Fear : Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century".

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world--a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us....No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers speak for America today--and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American Character. They are the racists and hate mongers amon us--they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. -Hunter S. Thompson, 2002

The essay in full is here.

Mmmmm mergers

As the news breaks that SBC really is going to buy AT&T its a good time to remember that the break up of AT&T into the baby bells was the last significant use of the Sherman anti-trust act. Since then its been a ever growning tide of merger mania. Throughout the 80's and 90's and now into this century corporations have been going at it like crazy. Many of these acquisitions are dismal flops, unless you happen to be an executive that gets a huge bonus or pay-off or an investment banker or lawyer that gets a fat commission check for making it all happen. After the merger its bad news for the employees and customers, and quite often shareholders. Like a cascade of dominoes merger mania either wrecks a path of destruction and waste, or eventually assimilates enough power to collapse internally from its own size.

When all is said and done there should be room for the little guys to sneak through cracks in the pavement and take reguvenate, just like those pesky mammals did after the dinosaurs all went tits up. But what price must we pay for such a chance at renewal and just how long will it take for corporate America to implode all over again? Maybe it's a good time to refresh our memories with tales of robber barons, railroad tycons, and the implosion of the business world of the thirties. If so then you could do worse than read the interview with Thom Hartmann over at BuzzFlash.

A forking liar

It was good to hear the senate committee put Rice through the wringer these past two days. Well, at least half the committee did so and Senators Boxer, Kerry, and Biden certainly turned on the screws extra tight. If Boxer didn't actually call Rice a forking liar, then she certainly implied it yesterday and again this morning. The best quote of the hearings surely came from Biden when he said "Don't listen to Rumsfeld, he doesn't know what the hell he's doing". Its too bad Boxer couldn't have been so candid.

The rest of the committee were mostly wearing their sycophant hats, patting Rice firmly on the back for having made it through another glass ceiling and congratulating her on her "performance" at the hearing. Never mind her past performance, which had been resoundingly dragged through the mud from whence it came these past two days, lets just rubber stamp her for showing up, knowing her party lines, and putting on a good act.

One thing that occurred to me, while the proceedings were just a rubber stamping affair (since Senators rarely break partisan ranks, and the Dems apparently have lost all their balls - except ironically, Sen. Barbara Boxer) it would have been nice to see such debate surround the appointment of a President. The quality, quantity and depth of questioning exceeded anything we ever saw in the Presidential debates by so much it makes me wonder how we can pay so much attention to questioning the puppets, while ignoring the puppet master in chief? Can anyone imagine George Walker Bush surviving even one day of such questioning without completely melting down and then seizing up in terminally goofy paralysis?

As they say, God bless America, 'coz now one else is going to!

Google echoes real life

Thanks to SEC filings it seems that Google employees are getting a glimpse of who is worth what in their company. Previously limited to the executive level, such disclosures are reaching down to the rank and file Google employees. So now hundreds of the employee planned stock sales are appearing in public and hence lots of Google employees now know at least how much their cubicle buddies are worth. Those recent hires who didn't have years to accumulate generous stock handouts are apparently feeling a little tension from the wealth inequity.

I think someone should go to Google and study this effect in detail, it might provide a fascinating glimpse of how the world at large would be if we all knew the wealth, or lack thereof, of our neighbors. I once had occasion to find out the salary and stock grants of every employee in a company I previously worked for (no I wasn't hacking into the finance computers, it was by legitimate means) and I can tell you it was an "enlightening" experience. Think how society would be if everyone knew the wealth and income of everyone else. I think the stark inequity of wealth and income distribution in this country would be thrown into sharp relief and could wreck some havoc. Yes the statistics are there for all to read should they bother, but if you were confronted with this information day in and day out it might rub it in.

There is an argument frequently made by some people about privacy and disclosure of personal information - that what is the harm in it because if you haven't got anything to hide then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. I wonder then why they isn't applied to information about wealth in this country. Those with most to hide seem most interested in hiding that information, something we are frequently reminded of when the wealthy manage to find their way into top positions that require the most disclosure of financial information. What is driving that desire to disclose as little as possible, do they have something to be ashamed of? Gentlemen, why don't you just revel in your wealth and show the world what good you have put it to??? Yeah, as if... :-)

Broadband == democracy?

I just read an article that claims the US isn't so far behind the rest of the world on broadband roll out. I beg to differ with McCullagh's argument about geographic size, just check where Canada is on the list, however the interesting part is his map of broadband access by Zip code in the USA.

Boy that looks awfully familar to me, wasn't it only a couple of months ago we were all staring dumbfounded at this map of Presidential Election 2004 voting by county?

Okay the maps aren't identical, but it does show a high correlation between broadband access and blue voting... One explanation is obvious - cities have the best broadband access and those danged metropolitan and diverse cities are most likely to vote blue. However another explanation might be that those with broadband get the most diverse news about the country and the world (and of course get the most porn on their screens) and generally appreciate freedom of information and freedom speech the most. So much so that they are willing to vote blue to protect it.

Thank the lord for broadband!

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

The Economist has a great article about America's increasing gap between rich and poor, and the increasingy lack of mobility between rich and poor. This, the article argues, is coming dangerously close to bringing an aristocracy to the USA while its citizens look on both blissfuly ignorant of what is going on and powerless to make a change.

For prior commentary on income inequality see "The Gini Index - how does your inequality measure up?" and "Why the Democrats suck and why being rich doesn't".

2005, year of the personal phonebooth

I'm sure some, or at least one, of my regular readers wish that 2005 really was the year of the personal phonebooth especially with the possibility of mobile phones on airplanes coming dangerously close to reality. For those that want to see what life with a personal phonebooth would look like go no further than Nick Rodrigues performance sculpture " The Portable Cellphone Booth". Its a very clever and funny video, and when you're finished watching it try Automotive Armor, a critique of our auto obsessed culture.

The end is in sight?

I think perhaps an end to the long dark tea-time could be in sight - at least according to Hiroyuki Nishigaki whose book How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?. Thank to the Tin Man for recommending I check out this book, I'm not sure if its the butt and navel clenching exercises that will good-bye the long dark tea-time or the sheer hilarity of reading this book. I have to say I read all the 35 Amazon reviews of the book and I'm feeling much better already. As one reviewer put it "I still randomly open to a page, read it, and feel better about whatever the heck was bringing me down in the first place." and another one said "This book will blow your mind, not to mention your O-ring! I have learned so much control by reading this book. I can now accurately launch cherry stones into my wastebasket; and its not even near my recliner, its on the other side of the room by my catcher's mitt!"

New year salutations

In an unprecedented outbreak of high spirits I'd like to wish all my regular readers and casual interlopers a warm and hearty "Happy New Year!". Agent J and I have just returned from a local party crawl which involved several stops around our 'hood at various parties in unique and cool loft spaces including those of "The Dude" and the recording studio in a loft Pajama Studios who apparently have one of their productions up for a Grammy this year.

Party on!

Holiday give away

I have a bunch of gmail invites to give away. So if anyone out there doesn't yet have a gmail account and has been lusting after on then this could be your lucky year. If so send me email: blogger at longdarkteatime.com.

America's first coup

Most countries have numerous skeletons in their closet, if you go back far enough you'll reach a period when pretty much anything goes. As a Brit I can lay claim an exceptionally long history of colonial ills - its not something they teach in school either, its more a deeply entrenched part of the British psyche. We know we did wrong in India, in Africa, in... well pretty much everywhere we invaded and added to the British Empire.

As for America's prior indescretions overseas, well I guess I'm just slow to catch up on those - they certainly aren't on the tip of people's tongues. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the CIA colluded with the Brits in 1953 to overthrow the elected leader of Iran and replace him with their own stooge. I've heard something about this, but never the full story. So here it is as signed off by Eisenhower himself and all driven by the lust for, get this... oil. Yes the Brits didn't want the elected leader Mohammad Mosaddeq to nationalize the British run oil business in Iran so they worked together with the USA who wanted to stop communists from being elected in Iran. Together they worked to "take care" of that little problem. The coup was recently acknowledge by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, and was also written about in the New York Times along with a handy time-line of the whole sordid affair.

And you wonder why people march today in the streets with "No blood for oil" signs? Is it time for me to say again "History repeats"? Nah, why bother, no one even learns history these days, let alone learns from it.

Stingy States of America

Well I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that the USA was being stingy with their promise of a whopping $15 million of aid. Unlike poor Jan Egeland of the UN I don't have to do any back-peddling and hastily say I misinterpreted that figure and that it was actually "very generous". No, I can sit back and gloat as Bush back-peddles himself and suddenly forms another of his famous "collations", this time a "coalition of the giving". Obviously someone was listening to world opinion in the White House.

However, I'm lead to wonder why on earth the USA feels the need to form yet another coalition lead by the USA to deal with aid for the affected areas. Why not use this as an opportunity to back the UN and other world aid organizations and let them do what they are designed to do. In a years time I wonder how the world response to this disaster will be judged?

Somehow I'm reminded of 1984 when the worlds people got sick of big governments lack of action over the famine in Ethiopia. It took a bunch of pop stars to get together in the UK and raise 8 million GBP with their Band Aid "Do they know its Christmas?" single, and then globally raise over $100 million with the "Live Aid" concert (most of which came from European donations). It just so happens the "Band Aid 20" anniversary charity single has topped the charts for Christmas in the UK this year.

Maybe this time we shouldn't wait for the pop stars to solicit our donations, and we can all do better than the still stingy $0.10 per person the US government has pledged. I personally just donated 1000 times that amount so how about visiting the NPR tsunami relief donations page (or Network for Good) and selecting a charity of your choice to give some hard earned cash to?

Damaged business or improved service?

News.com just published a story about how the free Craigslist community web site has cost Bay Area newspapers $65 million in lost employment advertising revenue and damaged the local classified advertising business to the tune of millions. Well, that's how the Classified Intelligence report they cited spans it, but they would, wouldn't they?

From my perspective CraigsList has done nothing but good and anything that takes revenue away from the advertising business is inherently good. That could be because I don't work for an advertising company, or a company that derives most if not all of its revenue from advertising. But from that vantage point I'd say the CraigsList experience shows that people all over the world have discovered that doing business person to person works, just ask those who buy and sell daily on eBay.

Sure its a different way to do business, one of the most important differences is that buyers and sellers have to trust each other. For many its a huge leap of faith to complete their first such transaction on a person to person basis. Sure it is open to abuse, but the reality is that the huge majority of all such trades go well and the benefit of eliminating middle men, of creating a vast low overhead global market for obscure used (and even new) items, and a focused local market with no need for shipping, far outweigh the risk.

Besides, did you ever get ripped off in some way by a regular business, even by a huge supposedly trustworthy "efficient" corporation? Did you ever get such shoddy service you swore you'd never shop somewhere again, and did you ever by something that turned out to be a piece of crap and find you were unable to get satisfaction without resorting to legal action? Sure you have, and even if you think you haven't realise that consumers are exploited daily in a far more sinister way. Its a steady drip, drip, drip of price fixing, the consequences of efforts to stamp out competition in a market, or companies willfuly hiding information about harmful or faulty goods (think drugs, tires, and cigarettes) while continuing to sell them because the profit exceeds the eventual cost of compensation. It's no wonder we see giant class action suits, and no wonder corporations would rather support someone who would like to see such suits outlawed.

The benefit of doing business person to person is that by eliminating extraneous middle men the price can be lower and because buyers meet sellers more directly. Also CraigsList and eBay have managed to create huge markets for buying and selling used goods that might otherwise have just remained in closets, or been thrown out with the garbage. Again their ability to bring more buyers and sellers together creates a more efficient market, and by recycling items that are still worth more than their component materials they eliminate wastage in the economy. This allows resources that would otherwise have been utilized to recreate them, to be used in the production of something else - or to just stay unused for future use. Local markets all save on all those transportation costs - if you can buy someone elses used Ikea couch from around the corner then Ikea wont have to ship one all the way from Ikealand (Sweden) or more likely somewhere in Asia.

I should also point out that the inference that CraigsList is doing harm by "taking away" $65m in employment advertising revenue from other advertisers by some kind of magical and unfair means is pretty vaccuous. If you remember CraigsList employment ads are actually the one service it actually charges for. So it managed to compete in the employment advertising market by entirely fair means - and is doing very well at it. If anything CraigsList is at a disadvantage because it has to use all the profits from employment advertising to subsidize all its other services making them entirely free. That's opposed to the usual way of doing business which requires a significant amount of the profits being spent on staff to sell the advertising in the first place. The lesson to be learned is that the best places for advertising are the ones that don't ever ask for advertising.

When you think about it, the millions of revenue "lost" to sites like CraigsList or perhaps billions lost to eBay are not lost at all, it is just spent elsewhere. Money is only ever lost when its spent on something that is overpriced or that will never be utilized to its full potential. If I buy a car, keep it in the garage for ten years and then send it to the crusher well sure that provides jobs for the people who built the car and all the middlemen who got it to the showroom and the sales guy who sold it to me and the finance people who loaned me the money to buy it and the insurance agent who insured it etc. etc. But what a waste of resources if its value is never realized, the steel could have made surgical instruments or farm equiment or any number of other things and the people invovled in its lifecycle could have been spending their time doing something far more productive. If I can sell it for even a fraction of the original price then that's much better. Sure most people do sell their cars before they are worthless, but what about all that junk? How many have watch perfectly good junk get tossed away and carted off to the dump before even the local homeless population can salvage it?

Finally, realize that the advertising buisness is one that is like the media business with just a few very large companies doing the lions share of all advertising. Even in the classified world that is true. Does it really take a giant national classified adverts company to help people sell to each other? Far from being the most efficient way to do things, I believe its often the least efficient - there's no advertising executives, skyscrappers stuffed full of extraneous staff or three martini lunches involved when A places and ad on CraigsList and B responds to it and buys the item.

I think that people have simply forgotten how to do business with their neighbours and the hidden cost of this is that people have lost their essential feeling of existing in a community that is trustworthy and cares about them. If you can't even get enough trust in your community members to trade a used couch for a few bucks then how can you even think about the more important things in live that require trust? That cost is one that's hard to quantify, but we all, deep down, feel it. The inability to trust our neighbours, to leave cars on the street, our kids with a baby sitter, the feeling of insecurity even at home behind locked doors, the inevitability of graffiti on buildings, disrespect of personal property, and that inevitable tendency to label everyone untrustworthy until they have earned it.

I look forward to a day when community driven services like CraigsList are the norm and when regular businesses will eschew the steady slide to mediocrity because they are tempted by the lure of advertising dollars. For me I'll happily pay for my daily news if its good and free of advertising. I'll happily pay to watch TV shows I like on a per show basis if they are free of adverts and commercial influence, and I'd even happily pay to use Craigslist if he ever feels the need to charge for it.

How the poor have fallen, how have the mighty given?

Tsunami have always fascinated me and I've spent many an hour digging up photos and videos of them. I've always been able to separate the physical event from the death and destruction that they so often wreck. But that is no longer the case having seen the rows and rows of bodies laid out in streets, hospitals, school buildings, in pits for burial. When such numbers of dead are reported piecemeal over weeks, months and years, or abstractly as a statistic its hard to get a grasp on the sheer scale of human misery. The images from around the Indian ocean really bring home the sheer magnitude of destruction the tsunami caused along thousands of miles of coast line. I doubt I'll ever think about tsunami again without those images flashing to the front of my mind.

So I have to say, as the cynic I am, that I was appalled last night that the US had promised $15 million in aid for the countries affected by the tsunami. Immediately I thought about how the USA is spending $1 billion a week in Iraq - that's $142 million a day, and all we can spare is $15 million? Sure those countries are not affluent Western countries, their damages in dollar value may end up been lower than those caused by the last hurricane season in Florida. However the scale of human misery is surely immeasurable by comparison and the US had a great opportunity to demonstrate world leading benevolence with a large and generous donation.

This morning, having clearly endured much criticism from overseas, the US added another $20 million to their donation. That still is clearly a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. Granted the US is not the only wealthy country in the world, but that donation still only represents about 10 cents per person in our country. How about our government dig deep and find at least $1 per person? And how about we pledge to use all our technological know-how to help the countries around the Indian Ocean to set up a tsunami warning system such as we have protecting our own tsunami vulnerable Pacific shores.

The buoys used to detect tsunami mid-ocean cost about $250,000 each and we operate six in the Pacific. Just think of the difference it would have made if the many hours of warning available had been used to alert the coastal populations in Sri-Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, India and even Africa. What a triumph of technology that could have been and what a tragic failure it was. In this season of giving and good will to all men, not just our people, wouldn't that be the right thing to do?

Love, Poverty and War

My favourite contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, was on the radio this morning talking about his latest book Love, Poverty and War. Although Hitchens can be infuriating to listen to when you disagree with his usually contrarian views, he does make you think. Indeed most of the infuriation comes when you find yourself gently lulled into agreeing with him. At that point you jerk out of it with an angry and indignant start.

Hitchens' is still very much in support of the war - he rarely if ever changes his opinion on things like that. He was criticising "Fahrenheit 9/11", Michael Moore, and of course the liberal left for not supporting the war.

I emailed him a question hoping to draw him out on why he thought it was okay to pursue non-military means to bring down the North Korean regime, but not in Iraq. The question didn't get asked but I suppose his answer would be to repeat his comment that repeated military simulations of an attack on North Korea had predicted an attack on Seoul by North Korean artilery that is located within shelling range, just across the DMZ. But that wasn't my point - he had suggested non-military actions in north Korea to work and would hasten the fall of Kim's regime, so why didn't we just do that to Iraq which by all accounts was just as likely to teeter out of existance in a few years if we'd just stopped boosting Saddam's power by concentrating all our rage on him.

I also wanted Hitchens to say what he thought about what he described as Americas "imperial" aspirations in Iraq. Was that a good thing? Wasn't it more of the same of the awful things we've done elsewhere, especially in South America. My interpretation of Hitchens views is that he believes Iraq is finally a righteous war that the world should have gotten behind. A little late (about ten years), but righteous none-the-less. But if it was really done with the intent of building a democracy in Iraq why didn't Bush say that all along, and why isn't Bush charging ahead full steam against all non-democracies in the world - for instance Saudia Arabia? Why the special and expidited treated for Iraq?

Basically I'd just like to hear Hitchens focus his laser like perception and criticism in some other direction and perhaps come out with something, anything, negative about Bush and his motives for backing of war on Iraq. So far Hitchens seems to be keeping mum on that point - I haven't even heard any criticism of Bush's non-war policies but it could be that I haven't been looking or listening hard enough. Surely Hitchens doesn't think the Bush regime, so representative of its NeoCon backers, is entirely wholesome and wonderful for the world? Or is Hitchens deliberately keeping mum on that point so he can be welcomed deep into the Bush confidence only to later do a contrarian exposee of it?

The only glimmer of hope for something positively negative about Bush was the comment that Richard Perle (who was on the same radio show the day before) wasn't a person that Hitchens would want to spend any time with. Clearly he had some negative feelings or thoughts on Perle, one of the leaders of the NeoCon klan that is pulling the Bush puppet strings. It would be nice to hear some more of his thoughts but unfortunately this wasn't the show to get that opportunity.

Putting money where your mouth is

Mark Morford is suggesting that blue voters express themselves in the way that the red party understands - with their money. So when the going gets blue, the blue go shopping - but only at stores that donated more money to those blue people than those red people. To assist in this goal he points us to Choose The Blue which lists the campaign donations of various corporations under helpful consumer categories like groceries, household and automotic. Buy Blue also has a similar, albeit shorted list, and conveniently sells a bunch of T-shirts to publicize the buy blue campaign.

I'm inclined to agree that putting your consumer dollars where your mouth is can have an effect - corporations are legally obliged to do whatever it is they need to do to preserve shareholder value. If they believe that supporting one party of the other is in their best financial interests then they will - just as Sinclair Broadcasting did. If it can be shown that by doing so they will loose a significant market share and hence revenue and hence stock price then they may find themselves obliged to think again before dabbling in politics. However be warned, this is a quid-pro-quo situation and if blue voters end up shopping only at blue supporting businesses then pretty quickly all the red voters will do the same at their red stores. Since there are arguably more and wealthier red voters at present (if election results are to be believed) then they will win that fight. Once again corporations will argue that while the consumer base is spending with a political motive it is financially best off focusing on the red spenders. That necessarily limits them to about half of the market by people, but not by dollars...

The Buy Blue people make the argument that it will be good for the market to discover there is plenty of room for "blue alternative" stores to corner the market of those who only want to support "blue leaning" corporations. They say that workers will find such businesses better to work at, shoppers will find the workers happier, and communities will reap benefits all around from having more blue stores and fewer red ones. Its a fine theory - I'll sit back and see what happens, if anything. Not shopping at Amazon and Albertsons (a union store) will be hard to accomplish on a day to day basis - as will only buying gas from Shell. Making my next car a Toyota wont be so hard - my previous comments about Toyota and suining California withstanding, as for staying away from Wal-Mart - a piece of cake!