US Diplomat's Letter of Resignation

The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.

[...]

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

Weapons first, testing later

Either we are stopping disease or we are preaching morality; doing both simultaneously just doesn't work. Certainly abstinence is an effective preventive for STDs; it's just that its failure rate among the nonabstinent is close to 100 percent. Condoms have no opinion on the morality of sexual activity, making them a better choice to stop an epidemic.

jon carroll.

Harper's Magazine: Cool War, p. 1 of 7

cool war: economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction, by joy gordon.

In searching for evidence of the potential danger posed by Iraq, the Bush Administration need have looked no further than the well-kept record of U.S. manipulation of the sanctions program since 1991. If any international act in the last decade is sure to generate enduring bitterness toward the United States, it is the epidemic suffering needlessly visited on Iraqis via U.S. fiat inside the United Nations Security Council. Within that body, the United States has consistently thwarted Iraq from satisfying its most basic humanitarian needs, using sanctions as nothing less than a deadly weapon, and, despite recent reforms, continuing to do so. Invoking security concerns -- including those not corroborated by U.N. weapons inspectors -- U.S. policymakers have effectively turned a program of international governance into a legitimized act of mass slaughter.

went to tai chi last night, and i am now realizing that my leg muscles are sore. so i'm stomping around the house muttering "ow ow ow ow ow" and smiling, because it's good that they're sore.

still live on jocelyn square, nothing much has really changed
still think about you, but only really when it rains

(jocelyn square, love and money)

we have a wheel of death upstairs that dispenses frozen food.

this has done wonders for my annual pizza roll consumption. i had them for lunch again today!

depression is different than the blues.

if you ever talk to me about how i have the blues when i am depressed, i will likely go off and cry, and then put your name on a list of people whose butts i will kick to somewhere up between their ears if i ever am not depressed again.

the odds on which are pretty good, by the way. i've been seriously depressed twice in my life so far. and i've gotten better both times.

today, we got some of my furniture out of my parents' house. i can hear you saying that you didn't know that it was possible to fit any more furniture into this house. well, neither did we...

oh i am testing this. testing testing testing.

judy k. zimmerman died last friday. her funeral was today.

i worked with her at dakota county. she was enormously sweet and nice. i worked there summers when i was in high school and college, and my favorite bits of it were working in the office where she worked. she talked to me like i was a real person.

as my mother just said to me, it's not fair.

The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Molly Ivins: French-bashing is all the rage

This is where I think the real difference is. We Americans are famously ahistorical. We can barely be bothered to remember what happened last week, or last month, much less last year. The French are really stuck on history. (Some might claim this is because the French are better educated than we are. I won't go there.) Does it not occur to anyone that these are very old friends of ours, trying to tell us what they think they know about being hated by weak enemies in the Third World?

i keep reading stories about the horrible storm out east.

here, in minnesota, home of legendarily awful winters, we have maybe six inches of snow, it's 22f out, and i walked across the street to get breakfast without a jacket on. it's making my brain hurt.

there is to be no nibbling on my earlobes until at least march, possibly longer.

i went and bought 5 18 gauge captive bead rings on saturday night, and had them put in. (kryss, at inklab. a very nice lady.) many of the holes were just fine, but the newst one of them had to be stretched a little bit. it's still kind of sore, and kryss said that i should treat them all like new piercings. so, antibac soap, occasional spritzes of ear piercing cleaner, and no one gets to lick them. i've lost piercings that way; no more!

Unspeakable Conversations By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

(nytimes, requires registration. go ahead and try cypherpunks349/cypherpunks. if 349 doesn't work, try 347. i forget what i told it.)

it's a very good article. it's very hard to read.

Is There a Better Way to Go? (washingtonpost.com)

We have been at this -- trying inspections and containment -- for 12 years. A policy of determined patience for another 12 months seems a reasonable price when weighed against the unknowable human, political and economic costs of war. If the coercive inspections fail, war would be necessary. But there is one huge benefit that war cannot bring if the inspections succeed. That is a message of unswerving, broad-based, international determination to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It will be heard far beyond Iraq, all the way to Pyongyang.

i don't know what i think of this, other than that it sounds better than the shrub's push for war at any cost.

and a test post, to see if i fixed my template...

Strategic Pastoral Action - U.S. firms, agencies said to be on list of Iraq arms suppliers

The list of corporations include the following, according to United for Peace:

USA

A - nuclear K - chemical B - biological R - rockets (missiles)

1)Honeywell (R,K)
2)Spektra Physics (K)
3)Semetex (R)
4)TI Coating (A,K)
5)UNISYS (A,K)
6)Sperry Corp. (R,K)
7)Tektronix (R,A)
8)Rockwell )(K)
9)Leybold Vacuum Systems (A)
10)Finnigan-MAT-US (A)
11)Hewlett Packard (A.R,K)
12)Dupont (A)
13)Eastman Kodak (R)
14)American Type Culture Collection (B)
15)Alcolac International (C)
16) Consarc (A)
17) Carl Zeis -U.Ss (K)
18)Cerberus (LTD) (A)
19)Electronic Assiciates (R)
20)International Computer Systems
21)Bechtel (K)
22)EZ Logic Data Systems,Inc. (R)
23)Canberra Industries Inc. (A)
24)Axel Electronics Inc. (A)

i cannot even begin to tell you how thankful i am that i have never, to the best of my knowledge, worked for any of the companies on this list.

i did, for a while, work for rhone poulenc (i'm spelling that wrong), which is a foreign company also known to have provided aid to iraq.

i have holiday in cambodia going through my head. i just wanted to share.

happy valentines day, even if you think it's a dumb holiday.

(i got chocolate from one of my coworkers. so at the moment, i don't think it's dumb at all.)

Sunshine Project: US Plans for Use of Gas in Iraq

i'm trying to post cheerful things. really i am. i just can't find many.

Top US military planners are preparing for the US to use incapacitating biochemical weapons in an invasion of Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, revealed the plans in February 5th testimony before the US House Armed Services Committee. This is the first official US acknowledgement that it may use (bio)chemical weapons in its crusade to rid other countries of such weapons.

my accent identification skills have gone straight to hell, apparently. there's been an australian working in the next row for a few weeks now, and i'd have bet a quarter he was english.

i am looking at kittens on petfinder. no kittens for us while there's an allergic person in the house who is not either nathan or i. that's the rule.

thank goodness all the ones that i am getting all squeeee! over have already been adopted.

if anyone knows of a similar piece, written about male privilege, i'd love to see it. just fyi.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us".

it has occurred to me, that a useful move, rather than just getting frustrated with people who don't seem to understand the concept of privilege, would be to make it possible for them to do some of the same reading that i've done.

so. here you go.

i really hate it when people invite me to meetings that i don't know where the conference room is.

having spent too long last week on an extendo safari hunt on the second floor, i'm not gonna do it again.

Salon.com Life | No way out

There were letters in response to your piece in the New York Times Magazine that essentially said, "These people should not be having babies." What do you think of this response?

Having children is not a class privilege. The moments in the book when people become pregnant and people are born are part of a lifeline. We like to freeze the frame of this lifeline at the moment when a girl gets pregnant, because that is the moment when you can turn the story of social injustice into a personal blaming session. As if you can pinpoint the social problem on a single person, and then you can get into that whole useless discussion about "choice."

from an interview of adrian nicole leblanc, about her new book "random family: love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the bronx".

(suck it up and go click through the ads. it's a good interview.)

Bill Summary & Status

Title: To repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002.

i bet you haven't heard about this, huh?

call your representatives and ask them to co-sponsor it.

call the news and ask why they're not covering it.

Image /www/html/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/2003/02080-Pool-Party/ddb 20030208 010-005

and here i am again. collating. whee!

Photo: IMG 3322 | 2003 Pool Party album | Larry Sanderson | Fotki.com - photo sharing and photo printing service

what betsy does for fun on the weekends.

well, some weekends.

okay, only this one.

but it was fun!

this is a picture of the back of my head (and my goodness, am i blonde!) while i am busily applying one of 2863 labels to one of slightly more than 2863 progress reports for minicon. i can tell i was doing labels, because when i was stamping, i sat on the other side of the table.

that's susan and gavi levy-haskell, in height order, and also andrew bertke. you can barely see nathan, with the electro-stapler of dooooom through the doorway.

nathan and abby and i went to go visit heidi and sebastian last night. he is a fine sweet quiet baby. i got to hold him for a while. at this point, the happy family should be at home. yay baby llama!

(apparently there are pictures online somewhere, but i have yet to find where. but i'm looking!)

Editorial: State of state / Undervaluing government's role


A memorable moment in Gov. Tim Pawlenty's first state of the state address, delivered Thursday, came when he held up the dollar bill sent to him by Phyllis Bakke of Northfield as a voluntary contribution to the state budget.

Pawlenty saluted Bakke for her "spirit of giving and sacrifice," and called on Minnesotans to show more of the same.

There used to be a way in which Minnesotans could come together to make such contributions, through the consent of a majority of their elected representatives. It was called a tax increase.

an undervalued concept, by me.

from world wide wamm:

Emergency Response Plan
We will hold a nonviolent demonstration against the "war on terror" if and when there is a major escalation of the war. A major escalation might include the expansion of the war to another nation. Here is the plan: Gather at the Federal Courts Building at 4th Street and 3rd Avenue, Downtown Minneapolis, at 4:30 p.m. If news of a major escalation is reported before noon, the protest will take place at 4:30 p.m. on that day. If news of a major escalation is reported after noon, the protest will take place at 4:30 p.m. the following day. Please feel free to call us if you have questions about the emergency response plan. Sponsored by the Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness, Students Against War, and others. FFI: 612-827-5364 or wamm@mtn.org.

we have a llama! llama llama llama!

sebastian w, born at 10:23am. 8 pounds, 7 ounces, 21 inches long.

everyone is doing fine.

yay, llama!

for those of you who are local, the mnstf pool party is this weekend! saturday, february 8th, at the radisson south. show up in the afternoon, swim, hot tub, schmooze, eat, drink, be merry... all that good stuff. the pr mailing party for minicon will be at the pool party as well, so as part of the being merry you can collate til your heart's content.

i am hoping that i will be less contagious and icky by then and will be able to go hottub and collate.

(this is a reply to a piece that i just wrote that i'm not sharing. so there.)

i have a chicken pox scar on my forehead. a small circle inside a small circle.

and i scratch mosquito bites fiercely-- i end up with new scars every year from those. on my arms, my legs, hands, feet, everywhere.

on my right hand, there's a stylized letter s, where i had surgery when i was in college. that finger doesn't grip right any more, but it's much better than it was before the surgery, y'know?

on my left kneecap, there's what looks like a stretch mark, almost. it's from getting a shot there. apparently, if you spill steroids on skin, they make the skin react like that. who knew?

i have two scars, a dot and a line, on the top of my left breast. this time last year i touched that spot whenever i wasn't paying attention because i was worried about it. now, after the surgery, i want to show it to people. see? here's where i don't have cancer. it was just a cyst.

CNN.com - Bush to families: 'Entire nation grieves with you' - Feb. 1, 2003

as much as i dislike the man, he got it right.

All Americans today are thinking, as well, of the families of these men and women who have been given this sudden shock and grief. You're not alone. Our entire nation grieves with you. And those you loved will always have the respect and gratitude of this country.

The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.

it will go on. it has to go on.

(thanks to rivka for the pointer. i didn't watch because i was afraid to see what he'd do. but it looks like he nailed it.)

to quote many a person this morning, well, fuck.

the space shuttle columbia blew up upon reentry. seven astronauts dead. there are no known casualties yet from the debris.

my home page is set to news.google.com, which had a link to it, then i saw more links on l-space, then my friend davey called, then i watched cnn, and then i called nathan at joanna's house and let him and joanna and isobel know, and then i called abby and my parents.

no words right now.