Not Enough Information (Again)

Over the weekend, the mainstream press reported on the shuttering of an Iraqi newspaper operation by the US-led coalition. The stories (1, 2, 3, for example) mention that the newspaper was shut down for inciting violence against coalition troops. A knee-jerk reactionist would lob a comment like, "It's a shame we can't practice what we preach to the Iraqi people" or something like that, but that's not what I'm going to do here.

We're trying to bring democracy to Iraq, and in many ways we're guaranteeing the basic rights that citizens need in order to make a democracy work the way it ought to. While our First Amendement doesn't apply in Iraq, a free press is certainly needed and something like the First Amendment should exist there.

This isn't to say that Iraqi newspapers should be allowed to say whatever they want. US citizens can't use free speech as a shield to incite people to violently overthrow the government, for instance. The Iraqis shouldn't expect to use their new found freedom to incite violence against the government either.

What's missing from the news stories? The one piece of critical information that allows US citizens to make an intelligent choice as to whether or not the coalition is justified in shutting down this newspaper. We don't have any concrete examples of stories this paper printed that call for violence. It's just another "the coalition's word against the Iraqi people's word" story. We can't make intelligent judgments in cases like this. A responsible journalist would have found out what the offending articles were and printed excerpts so that folks in the US could make this judgment.

Instead of having intelligent discourse over whether or not the paper did incite violence, we're going to have people in the U.S. who don't understand the First Amendment arguing that the Iraqis should be able to print whatever they want in their newspapers, and a bunch of people arguing the counterpoint saying that inciting violence is wrong. What we should be arguing about is whether or not the paper committed the offense of which it's been accused.

That's one of the major things that's angering me over the whole situation in Iraq. US citizens are getting bits and pieces of information, with nothing substantial by which they can make intelligent choices. It always boils down to a "this person's word against this person's word" situation, with little relevant facts included. I'm starting to get tired of this, because as US citizens, we're being asked to make intelligent choices without all the information we need to do so. I say suspend your judgments until someone prints some excerpts from the offending articles and demonstrates that the Iraqi newspaper was wrong.

This Man Is Laughing At You

At a recent Washington dinner, our president made light of the fact that our forces in Iraq haven't yet found any weapons of mass destruction.

George W. Bush put together a "coalition of the willing" consisting of forces from nations around the world, coordinated an invasion force under false pretenses and blamed the result on faulty intelligence. Moreover, given all of this, he refuses to admit that the war was unjustified. Now he's making jokes about it.

Take a look at the results of this unscientific Fox News poll. Seems the majority thinks the jokes Bush has made about not finding weapons of mass destruction is perfectly acceptable. But how acceptable is it to families of soldiers who have died or who are still over in Iraq, away from their families?

What show of arrogance and indifference to human suffering will it take for people to realize that this is all a sham and that the "War on Terrorism" is just propaganda that the Bush administration is using to warp public opinion?

Personally, I'm appalled by Bush's callous show of indifference to human suffering.

Comment Spam Honks

Step 1: Get comment spam from the penis pill people
Step 2: Delete comment and ban IP address
Step 3: Get comment spam from the penis pill people again, with an IP address one number off from the address banned the last go-round
Step 4: Repeat Step 2, yank hair out
Step 5: Repeat steps 3 and 4 ad nauseum

Is there an easy plug and play tech solution for this? I'm starting to get tired of these bastards.

Mobile Number Portability Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

I've just emerged victorious from a battle with my former mobile provider, Verizon Wireless. Last Wednesday night, I lost my mobile phone on a trip to visit my cousin in New Jersey. I immediately called Verizon to suspend service on the phone, so that if anyone picked it up, they couldn't ring up charges on my bill. The next day, I visited a Verizon Wireless store and was kept waiting for over a half hour for a sales rep. While perusing Verizon's sad selection of phones, I decided that since it had been 30 minutes and no one had yet stepped up to help me, that perhaps I had better take my business elsewhere. I was already unimpressed with Verizon's service. My phone would often ring to tell me I had voice mail and upon dialing in, I would find out that it was a message left two days prior. Since this might result in a bad situation, I figured it was time for a new provider.

One of the phones that really impressed me was the Handspring Treo 600. Among the providers supporting this phone are T-Mobile (with which I had a nasty experience a few years ago when they were VoiceStream) and Sprint. I elected to go with Sprint and transfer my number.

What I quickly learned is that one can't transfer a number that is attached to an account that has been suspended for any reason. Sprint kept trying to port the number over and Verizon wouldn't release it. I called Verizon several times to try to get them to release the number. After several unsuccessful attempts, a nice customer service rep from Sprint set up a conference call with myself and Verizon to try to ascertain what the problem was.

It turns out the problem was that Verizon had zeroed out the ESN attached to my old phone, in order to keep anyone from using it. The number wouldn't port without an ESN, so Verizon had to put my old ESN in, at great personal risk to me because anyone who had the phone at the time could have racked up charges in my name.

The next day, I called Sprint again because my new phone still didn't work and they informed me the problem still wasn't taken care of. Another call to Verizon indicated that "everything seemed okay" on their end and that there was nothing they could do. I decided to wait it out and sure enough, the next day, the phone started working shortly after noon.

While all of this could have been a legit computer glitch, I'm hearing horror stories from a lot of people about number portability and I can't help but think that providers are deliberately making this process difficult in an effort to hang on to existing customers who want to change their service. If I hadn't been upgrading my phone to something more full-featured, I might have given up during the hour-long conference call between Sprint and Verizon and gone back to Verizon. In retrospect, however, I'm glad I was persistent.