Democrats are scrambling to tamp down former Vice President Al Gore and firebrand Howard Dean before they step to the convention podium, worried they may embarrass John Kerry with red-meat anger and excessive Bush bashing.
        --The Boston Herald, DNC: Don't bash Bush: Kerry wants Dems to tone down criticism by David R. Guarino and Andrew Miga

That's an odd use of the word tamp. One of the definitions is, "To pack clay, sand, or dirt into (a drill hole) above an explosive." So they're hurriedly preparing Dean for his explosion? It might backfire like Phineas Gage discovered.

Dr. Patrick Johnson, in his essay, "Why Christians Should Not Vote for Bush," challenges the general assumption of conservative Christians--that Bush is a good choice for President because he represents traditional Christian values. Johnson shows how Bush does not hold to traditional Christian values on the issues of abortion, sodomy and others. He also rebuts the "lesser of two evils" voting mentality.

Of course, being that he is the current Vice-Chairman of the Constitution Party, Johnson is not afraid to tout the 2000 candidate, Howard Phillips, or imply that Michael Peroutka is the best candidate for this year's race.

Update to "Slashdot needs Unicode support"

Now it is possible to use some limited set of special characters by entering that character (it won't work to use its HTML entity).

• opening single quote: '
• closing single quote: '
• opening double quote: "
• closing double quote: "
• en dash: -
• em dash: --
• ellipsis: ...

Also, to avoid further embarassment, Slashdot has blocked validation of its site. This is especially important since the wrong HTML entities are substituted for the characters you enter.

There are many online articles that detail the correct HTML entities to use for Unicode characters. One is on my website: "Basic HTML Typography."

In March, spam levels remained about the same as February. Due to a combination of factors, this is the final report.

I have created a SpamCop email account and will be migrating away from my NetZero account. NetZero decided to stop allowing POP access for their free email accounts. These users will only be allowed access to email through their website as of June 2004.

The changes at NetZero created the catalyst, but I was getting a little bored of all the spam reporting and tracking. I'll still be filing some reports, but only to agencies that allow filing by email. SpamCop's email system makes it a simple box to check.

I continued my practice of reporting spam to SpamCop, the FTC and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center. The IFCC has been dropped from my reporting, since they require a special form, and not simply an email.

I recieved a total of 152 spams in March. This compares to 148 in February, 259 in January, 270 in December and 356 in November. Overall, spam continued to decline at the rate of 2.8 spams per week.

English spam decreased much faster than foreign spam. English spam decreased at 35 spams per week while Russian spam only decreased 7.2 spams per month. March brought in 35 English, 93 Cyrillic and 19 Asian spams.

Spam Quantity by Day of Week
Language of Spam
Daily Spam Quantity
Historical Weekly Spam Quantity
Historical Monthly Spam Quantity by Language

There is a version with better formatting available on my website.

In Fegruary, my spam levels dropped to the lowest levels since I began keeping records. I am greatly relieved that the sharp rise in January did not continue into February. Maybe there is some hope that the generally weak CAN-SPAM Act will have some effect.

I have continued to file reports for every spam recieved with SpamCop, the FTC and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

I recieved a total of 148 spams in February. This compares to 259 in January, 270 in December and 356 in November. Overall, spam continues to decline at the rate of 4.7 spams per week.

Over the last four months, English-language spams have decreased almost four times faster than Cyrillic messages (40.8 vs. 11.2 spams per month). In February, 47 of my spam emails were in English and 84 in Cyrillic.

Spam Quantity by Day of Week
Language of Spam
Daily Spam Quantity
Historical Weekly Spam Quantity
Historical Monthly Spam Quantity by Language

There is a version with better formatting available on my website.

The spam level for January is roughly unchanged from December. December was a month in decline, and January saw a sharp rebound. This is after Congress passed the extremely ineffective CAN-SPAM Act. The name of the act is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. It is a misguided attempt at spam-control by well-meaning politicians.

I have continued to file reports for every spam recieved with SpamCop, the FTC and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

I recieved a total of 259 spams in January. This compares to 270 in December and 356 in November. Overall, spam continues to be in decline at the rate of 1.4 spams per week. Spam levels have dropped significantly in February, so these statistics should improve.

Spam Quantity by Day of Week
Language of Spam
Daily Spam Quantity
Historical Weekly Spam Quantity

There is a version with better formatting available on my website.

In the State of the Freenet address, Ian Clark announced a fix for the Freenet slowness problem. Ironically, it seems the network was being overloaded with messages about it being overloaded.

Now that the Freenet software is back to some workable state, the finances of the project are in dire straits. Even with payroll only being GBP 850 (USD 1587), the project is broke and asking for donations.

I was going to copy my latest 'blog entry here, but the topic, "Basic HTML Typography," means almost none of it will show up.

The W3C Standards non-compliance is appalling for a 'nerds' site. Slashdot claims to be written in HTML 3.2, but it uses features from later versions that aren't available in 3.2.

In addition to the standards non-compliance in HTML, the comment/journal filtering methods prevent one from using standard typographic symbols to punctuate your prose.

No opening & closing quotes, no primes, no en or em dashes, no minus signs and no elipses. Each of these can be approximated with ASCII characters, but it's high time Slashdot supports the real thing.

But this is only a small subset of the characters available. I would like to see Slashdot move to full Unicode support. Even if they keep their encoding at iso-8859-1, I should be able to enter the number codes for any character I want.

What a pipe dream--the editors can't even figure out how to spell or prevent dup's.

Bush seems to be trying his best to save face in the very embarassing situation that has developed around the alledged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is not a justification for lying, but I do not believe the administration is guilty of anything quite that sinister. It seems more like a hefty dose of incompetence.

Dale Lature writes in "Bush dodges the REAL question:"

Interesting how Bush gives his defense to STILL NO WMDs. He keeps coming back to the "Saddam is BAD" defense. Well, we all know that. He then uses the pre-emptive strike defense, which will not fly with most people except the most hard-core military. He completely refuses to answer how the JUSTIFICATIONS he gave are totally bankrupt. He lied. They used deception to rush us into something, riding the coat tails of 9-11.

And still, the religious right holds up Bush as a "moral example." It sickens me.

As Jonah Goldberg says in his editorial, "Straightforwardness would defuse WMD issue:"

As I've tried to demonstrate in this space before, the idea that the president lied to the American people hinges on--at least--one almost impossible fact: that George W. Bush knew for a certainty that the intelligence agencies of America, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Australia, as well as the United Nations and countless independent experts were all wrong.

It seems more likely to have played out as the Minneapolis Star Tribune describes in "WMD/Bad intelligence, but more:"

...The Clinton administration was getting the same intelligence, yet it, reasonably, did not head off to the United Nations to warn that Iraq needed to be invaded yesterday. It wanted to take out Osama bin Laden; Saddam was a secondary concern.

That suggests someone in the Bush administration made an early decision to put the most dangerous possible spin on what Iraq intelligence was available. Information that was tentative became certain; equipment that might have numerous uses became certified WMD material; rumors became fact.

There has been quite a bit of misleading going on, but it is not at all clear that the Bush administration knew that there weren't any WMDs and told the public otherwise. There are more reasonable theories that some CIA informants lied, and the Bush administration (and many other governments) wrongly believed the bad reports.

Also interesting is the Al Bawaba report, "Iraqi party insists intelligence on WMD was accurate."

Dr. Jeffrey Record, a Visiting Research Professor of the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute, has published a paper, Bounding the Global War on Terrorism , critical of the Bush Administration's Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).

Record asserts that, "The global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly that its parameters should be readjusted to conform to concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American power." The paper proposes six changes the administration should make to its foreign policy. I have abbreviated these conclusions:

1. Deconflate the threat. This means, in both thought and policy, treating rogue states separately from terrorist organizations, and separating terrorist organizations at war with the United States from those that are not.
2. Substitute credible deterrence for preventive war as the primary policy for dealing with rogue states seeking to acquire WMD. This means shifting the focus of U.S. policy from rogue state acquisition of WMD to rogue state use of WMD. There is no evidence that rogue state use of WMD is undeterrable via credible threats of unacceptable retaliation or that rogue states seek WMD solely for purposes of blackmail and aggression. There is evidence, however, of failed deterrence of rogue state acquisition of WMD; indeed, there is evidence that a declared policy of preventive war encourages acquisition.
3. Refocus the GWOT first and foremost on al-Qaeda, its allies, and homeland security. This may be difficult, given the current preoccupation with Iraq. But it was, after all, al-Qaeda, not a rogue state, that conducted the 9/11 attacks, and it is al-Qaeda, not a rogue state, that continues to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S.
4. Seek rogue-state regime change via measures short of war. Forcible regime change of the kind undertaken in Iraq is an enterprise fraught with unexpected costs and unintended consequences. Even if destroying the old regime entails little military risk, as was the case in Iraq, the task of creating a new regime can be costly, protracted, and strategically exhausting.
5. Be prepared to settle for stability rather than democracy in Iraq, and international rather than U.S. responsibility for Iraq. The United States may be compelled to lower its political expectations in Iraq and by extension the Middle East. Establishing democracy in Iraq is clearly a desirable objective, and the United States should do whatever it can to accomplish that goal. But if the road to democracy proves chaotic and violent or if it is seen to presage the establishment of a theocracy via "one man, one vote, one time," the United States might have to settle for stability in the form of a friendly autocracy of the kind with which it enjoys working relationships in Cairo, Riyadh, and Islamabad.
6. Reassess U.S. force levels, especially ground force levels. Operation IRAQI FREEDOM and its aftermath argue strongly for an across-the-board reassessment of U.S. force levels. Though defense transformation stresses (among other things) substitution of technology for manpower, postwar tasks of pacifi cation and nationbuilding are inherently manpower-intensive. Indeed, defense transformation may be counterproductive to the tasks that face the United States in Iraq and potentially in other states the United States may choose to subdue and attempt to recreate.

Additionally, there is an interesting quote on pages 18-19:

Strategically, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was not part of the GWOT; rather, it was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al-Qaeda. Indeed, it will be much more than a distraction if the United States fails to establish order and competent governance in post-Saddam Iraq. Terrorism expert Jessica Stern in August 2003 warned that the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was "the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one." How ironic it would be that a war initiated in the name of the GWOT ended up creating "precisely the situation the administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs." Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director of counterterrorism operations and analysis, Vincent Cannistraro, agrees: "There was no substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war. Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans."

Spam reporting seems to be effective in reducing quantities of spams recieved. 270 spams were recieved during December. That's down from 356 in November for an average reduction of 6.25 spams per week.

I have been filing reports for every spam recieved with SpamCop, the FTC and the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC). It will be interesting to see if these results will continue or whether spam will rebound in the wake of the ineffective anti-spam laws that Congress has enacted.

English-language spams declined by 49% (210 in November; 108 in December) while Russian spams increased by 85% (129 in November; 140 in December).

Spam Quantity by Day of Week
Language of Spam
Daily Spam Quantity
Historical Weekly Spam Quantity

There is a version with better formatting available on my website.

This is a follow-up to my Illiterate Financially? journal entry.

Many of you commented that question 20 was poorly worded. I read too fast and was also confused.

So I wrote the NCEE a letter through their online form December 17. I was hoping to post some reply from them, but I haven't recieved one yet and probably won't.

Hopefully they read it and they make some changes to future surveys.

I believe question 20 in your recent survey (http://www.ncee.net/cel/test/) may have an unexpectedly high error rate because it is phrased confusingly.

I thought it was just me that was confused and misread the question, but it appears others read the question wrong too.

http://slashdot.org/~capoccia/journal/55429

You should consider creating contrapositive versions of all your questions and rotating which version is asked to account for this type of error.

The National Council on Economic Education sponsored a survey of economic literacy among students and adults in the United States. The average adult scored 57% and the average high school student scored 48%. Take the test, and see how you compare.

Only 6% of adults and 3% of students scored an A, so I should feel good about only missing one question out of twenty, but it's still frustrating because I misread the question. If I had read the question correctly, I would definitely been able to eliminate two wrong answers. Maybe I would have even gotten the question correct.

I have decided to begin tracking the spam that I recieve to my primary email address. I am hoping it will provide some means of quantifying the effectiveness of my spam reporting. November is the first full month of tracking.

I have been reporting my spam using SpamCop's free service. This sends a report to the administrators of every system being (ab)used by spammers. I have also been sending a copy to the FTC via uce@ftc.gov.

I recieved 356 spam emails in November. There does seem to be weekly ebb and flow with the levels peaking in the middle and declining by the weekend. Less than 60% of my spam is even in English. The Cyrillic portion looks like Russian, but I can neither read nor write Russian.

Spam Quantity by Day of Week
Language of Spam
Daily Spam Quantity

Once again, there is a version with better formatting available.

Jackson's accuser has a history of filing lawsuits for large amounts. Jackson's Attorney, Mark Geragos, commented:

Michael Jackson is not going to be abused. Michael Jackson is not going to be slammed--he is not going to be a pinata for every person who has financial motives. This is not the lottery--this is this man's life. This is his family's life. These are scurrilous accusations. If anybody doesn't think that the true motivation of these charges and allegations is anything but money, then they are living in their own Neverland.