Author: Glenn Hauman

According to the Military Casualty Information of the Vietnam War, our casualties to date is 737, which surpasses all the casualties in Vietnam from 1957 to 1964, and we’re well into 1965.

We can now get US soldiers killed in a year, when it use to take seven.

I had commented to a friend who was in the thick of the Vietnam protests back in the day that Iraq felt like Vietnam on Internet time. I’m not happy to see that I called that one right.

For an even harsher take on the subject, see Billmon’s Vietnam on Crack.

Some of you know that in a past life, I was an e-publishing pioneer. It seems to be coming back to haunt me.

Normally, I’d never look at a site named shortshortshort.com, but here we have Short-short Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers, so it’s worth a look. Bruce is running a subscription, $5 a year gets you 36 stories– lord only know what type, since Rogers is an award-winning writer in many fields (Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker, etc.), and many of the subscription stories have gone on to appear in print in such magazines and anthologies as The Sun, Realms of Fantasy, Descant, Analog, and Polyphony. Give it a shot.

Second piece: one of the little odd joys I got in the BiblioBytes days was from watching the reactions on people’s faces as a brief explanation and demonstration of the latest technology loose on the net. I saw it happen with musicians with Napster, and I saw it happen with authors and publishers with ebooks.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen that particualr look of wonder and horror on someone’s face– but I just saw it yesterday. On someone who works in the comic book industry.

Stay tuned.

So there won’t be a transcript of the ventriloquism act in front of the 9/11 Commission today. Why?According to this:

The decision, following a practice President Ronald Reagan used in 1987 when appearing before a commission probing the Iran-contra matter…

Iran-Contra, yeah, that’s what I want to cite as precedent when trying to convince America that there was no wrongdoing, yessiree.

The press is starting to give a hard time about it too:

“MR. McCLELLAN: Well, first of all, the President is already under oath as the President of the United States. But let me go back to when the President signed the legislation creating this commission.

“Q He’s under oath 24 hours a day? (Laughter.)”

And if he is under oath 24/7, does that mean we can try him for perjury for such lines as “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” and “Mission Accomplished” and… well, you know the list.

Schneier.com: Crypto-Gram: April 15, 2004

I see that Charles Murray has a piece in the NY Times called You Are What You Tax which echoes my sentiment.

Murray, author of The Bell Curve, makes me want to double-check my thoughts instincively, but the arguments he puts forward here are similar to mine. He does, however, neglect the “let the government decide” checkbox, which I think a lot of people would take– that’s why we have a government anyway.

I would say that corporations wouldn’t get that “vote”, as corporations don’t have opinions, shareholders do– if the shareholders voted, then maybe. With income tax only accounting for 40% or so of governement revenue, surely there would be enough cash in the other 60% or so to cover shortfalls in other areas.

Most of all, it’s a simple feedback form– one that the government could really use. If there’s support for paying down the debt, then do it. If there’s support for NASA, go wild. And so on.

Today’s Mallard Fillmore promotes an interesting idea: end the withholding tax, give workers their full paychecks, and let them see how much they really pay.

I’m against the idea, mainly becuase it makes more work for people and it makes government revenue a bit difficult to predict– cash comes in spikes rather than a more or less smooth pattern. And we already know how much we really pay, thank you very much– we spend a lot of time each year figuring that out.

I’d much rather see the following: put a fill in chart on the back of the tax return, saying how you’d like your tax money allocated. Want all of it to go for defense? Perhaps you want to pay down the debt? Half for education, half for transportation? Or would you rather kick it all into the general fund and let your elected officials budget it out? Obviously, an percentage breakdown estimate of how your federal tax dollars would be spent would be included for comparison.

Doing this would get more people involved in the budget process in America, and let them think about where their money is going, assuming it’s non-binding– or where they’re putting their money, if it’s not. Or does the government really not want to know how the citizens want their money spent?

From the mailbag: The Republicans are scurrying around saying the August 2001 memo isn’t a smoking gun; it’s not even a “cold” gun. Here’s why New Yorkers will disagree…

Rice says there way no way they could have prevented the 9-11 hijackings. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s not. But if they did their jobs, they would have saved the better part of one thousand lives on that fateful day. If Bush et al had publicly acknowledged the terrorism threat, here’s what would have happened in New York City on September 11, 2001.

The North Tower at the World Trade Center would have been hit, and all those people who died there would have died there anyway. But the people in the South Tower, who (like the rest of us who were familiar with the story) immediately thought of the time an airplane hit the Empire State Building at the end of World War II would have instead thought there was the possibility this event was a terrorist attack. After all, the North Tower attack was the second made on the WTC; the parking garage was blown up eight years earlier. SOME of the people in the North Tower would have evacuated immediately; the lemmings effect would have caused more people to leave. As the word spread about the effect of the North Tower crash, still others would have left within those 30 minutes.

The police and firemen would have approached the situation differently; they probably wouldn’t have entered the South Tower in force, if at all. It’s probable that most of he guys who rushed into the North Tower would have done so anyway, I regret to say.

A great many lives would have been saved, if only Bush and his masters took the August 2001 memo seriously. But now they tell us there was no smoking gun.

They’re right. It’s not a smoking gun. It’s a smoking tower.

My correspondent doesn’t go nearly far enough. If there had been any sort of people doing their jobs, fighter jets would have been in the air in time to not only stop the South Tower from being hit, but quite possibly the North as well. Certainly the Pentagon.

Or, if you like, they could have hardened the cockpit doors to attack in a month’s time– lord knows that they did it in under a month’s time after the fact.

Yahoo! News – Enron Ex-CEO Skilling Taken to Hospital

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a hospital early Friday after several people called police saying he was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press.

Now, is he merely laying an early gambit for an insanity plea, or has he truly, shall we say, withdrawn early from his 401K?

…not what he will do. So said Von Clausewitz.

This, more than anything else, is the cardinal crime of the Bush administration, particularly Dr. Rice. “Bin Laden determined to strike inside the U.S.” really says it all, but the lack of response to it says even more. We already knew what he was capable of doing with the Cole bombing.

Remind me sometime to tell you about Citykilling 101…

I admit it. I’m the one who showed this to Teresa, and I should have warned her about reading it while eating. Go read her take on it at The miserable Hugo.

Teresa, I’m sorry I got you all choked up. But honestly– it was worth it, wasn’t it?

Then read her other posts bashing Ms. Austen Doe (as Neil Gaiman notes, she was an idiot for being anonymous when having a name could have boosted her sales… man, I could have written this a few days ago and been seen as brilliant, but no, I have to worry about deadlines) for complaining that her advances were too big and she spent them too quickly. That isn’t a problem for writers. Crippling writer’s block– that’s a problem.