The BBC fawns over a looterfest in Tunisia, to which 15,000 delegates, and more than 50 heads of state, are gleefully converging (likes ants to a picnic) to panhandle their way into control of at least a slice of the world’s most important information technology delivery system. It isn’t fair, you see, that

The net’s infrastructure has been managed in an informal way through collaboration with businesses, civil society, academic and technical communities.

Many developing countries have felt left out of this process.

A private, not-for-profit group, formed by the US Department of Commerce, called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), currently supervises the net’s infrastructure.

Its oversees domain name and addressing systems, such as country domain suffixes, and manages how net browsers and e-mail programs direct traffic.

Developing nations want the net and its domains shared more equally, so that everyone can benefit from the web’s economic, political, social and cultural advantages.

The US is reluctant to relinquish its grip, arguing that UN proposals would shift regulation from private sector leadership, to government, top-down control.

WSIS takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, from 16 to 18 November.

Possible US sell-out to European plan.

11/15 Follow-up on OSM

The McCain Amendment will only increase intelligence demand and create a black market in interrogation astutely predicts Wretchard:

What the McCain Amendment will do is change the bean-counting rules. It will not create a framework in which real torture can be limited and stopped. That would require accepting moral responsibility for affirming practices which may be proscribed under the Geneva Conventions but fall short of real torture. That would mean explaining to the public that we are correspondingly determined to outlaw real, barbaric torture, even when by foreswearing it, public losses must be endured. Instead politicians will want to have it both ways and promise the public that they will neither soil their hands nor let the sleeping populace come to harm. No one who desires re-election can promise the voters only “blood, sweat and tears”. The time is long since past when politicians could say to a nation at war “death and sorrow will be the companion of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valor our only shield.” That’s too much of a drag. Today even our conflicts, like our food, must be untouched by human hands.

Jack Bauer, the indefatigable Counter-Terrorism agent played by Kiefer Sutherland in Fox Television’s popular prime time evening drama, is certainly headed for federal prosecution, and a long-stretch in federal prison, under the terms of the soon-to-be-adopted McCain Amendment banning cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of any individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location.

Season after season, as the clock ticks away, bringing the bad guys’ nefarious plots closer to completion, and innocent victims (frequently including Jack Bauer’s own loved ones) closer to horrible death, Jack inevitably turns outlaw, defying orders, breaking the rules, and proceeding time after time to abusive interrogation techniques, as the television audience nods in approval.

I’ve only watched a handful of episodes of 24, but the plots from one season to another seemed very similar. On one occasion, Jack forces the bad guy to talk by shooting him in the leg. In another episode, Jack kidnaps the villain right out of confinement in Counter Terrorist Unit Headquarters, drags him out into the building’s parking lot, handcuffs him to a steering wheel, and sets to work (off camera) breaking his fingers one by one.

Strong measures certainly, but Jack has his reasons. One season, he’s preventing the explosion of a nuclear warhead over Los Angeles. In others, he’s stopping the assassination of a major party presidential candidate and a Defense Secretary, and he is always saving the lives of innocent women and children.

The plots of this television series throw a lot of light on the way our society characteristically approaches moral dilemmas. We are naturally against bad things like torture, and we want there to be systems and rules prohibiting anything so cruel and unpleasant to contemplate as coercive interrogation. But we also want those in charge of protecting us to break all the rules and go outside all the systems in really serious circumstances when society’s existence or serious numbers of innocent lives are at stake. We insist that we be lied to, so that we can kid ourselves about realities too unpleasant to think about. We will reliably codify and institutionalize hypocrisy. And we don’t mind jeopardizing the real-life Jack Bauers out there, just so we can participate in a momentary gesture that makes us feel good about ourselves.

Republican Party video . (Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.)

Today at Elemendorf Air Force Base, the president concluded his speech:

Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people. Leaders in my administration and members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence on Iraq, and reached the same conclusion: Saddam Hussein was a threat.

Let me give you some quotes from three senior Democrat leaders: First, and I quote, “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.” Another senior Democrat leader said, “The war against terrorism will not be finished as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.” Here’s another quote from a senior Democrat leader: “Saddam Hussein, in effect, has thumbed his nose at the world community. And I think the President is approaching this in the right fashion.”

They spoke the truth then, and they’re speaking politics now. (Applause.)

Glenn Reynolds links the abstract of a prepublication law review article, titled Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, by Benjamin Barton, a University of Tennessee Law School colleague, arguing that the Harry Potter series is capable of being read as a sustained critique of government. Rowling’s portrait of the Ministry of Magic, its decisions, and operations represents so negative a view that

The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence.

Instapundit tells us that Barton believes that Rowling’s disenchantment with government may be the product of her experiences dealing with the British Welfare bureaucracy during her early years of poverty.

——————————————————————————-
New Orleans Gambling (from an Angling correspondent:)

The Louisiana State Police received reports of illegal cockfights being held in the area around New Orleans and sent their famous detective, Boudreaux, to investigate.

Boudreaux reported to his sergeant the next morning. “Dey is tree main groups in dis cock fightin'”, he began.

“Good work. Who are they?” the sergeant asked.

Boudreaux replied confidently, “de Texas Aggies, de Cajuns, and de Mafia.”

Puzzled, the sergeant asked, “How did you find that out in one night?”

“Well,” he replied, “I went down and done seen dat cock fight in person. I knowed dem Aggies was involved when a duck was entered in the fight.”

The sergeant nodded, “I’ll buy that. But what about the others?”

Boudreaux nodded knowingly, “Well, I knowed de Cajuns was involved when summbody bet on de duck.”

“Ah,” sighed the sergeant, “And how did you figure the Mafia was involved?”

“De duck won …”

Peter Lushing of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law discusses, and rejects, claims that the Graham Amendment, denying habeas review to War on Terrorism detainees held prisoner by US forces outside the territorial boundaries of the United States, constitutes a possible violation of the Suspension Clause of the Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 2:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

to put it in the language of talk radio, the guys in the powdered wigs would have flipped over the idea that habeas extends to foreigners we are in combat with who have been captured and are being held by us abroad.

What, indeed!

is the title of a chin-stroking meditation in the Sunday New York Times News of the Week in Review section. Home ownership has traditionally been viewed as a good thing all around. But is it, after all… entirely? wonders the Times. Certainly, there are positives, but it’s hard to be sure about the role of home-ownership in some things the Times is not at all keen on:

Owning a home relates to a bunch of other things, too, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that homeownership causes or encourages them. For instance, according to the 1998 study, homeowners are older, richer, more likely to vote Republican, and more than half of them own guns, while only a quarter of renters do.

“There’s a pervasive problem in trying to sort out whether there is something intrinsic about homeownership that causes these externalities or whether the people that become homeowners are the kind of people that generate these externalities,” said James Poterba, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Sanity discusses Bush Derangement Syndrome, a problem whose tragic impact I see daily on my college class listserv.

November 13, 2005

We turn to France, whose decision to stay out of the Iraq war is starting to make more sense. After all, why go all the way to the Mideast when you can fight Muslims in your very own suburbs?

— JON STEWART

The situation is really bad — today Chirac announced that the French are pulling out of France.

— JAY LENO