When the nanobots start invading the bodies of the characters, causing them to say malevolently sarcastic things and to pucker their lips to administer fatal kisses -- well, much as I appreciated the technical verisimilitude, I could not help groaning a bit.

I like to make incisions into the belly of infants then ---- the incisions until the child dies.

One day after school I went to her house . . . and she offered me some twinkies and I sat on her lap and said let's fuck.

Big bald, sweaty, tattooed love boys cast from the waist up in their cold concrete tanks lounging on their backs . . . all 200 lbs plus and also about 5 to 8 more of whom we call the bitches skinny feminine . . .150 lbs and less.

It is time now for the 'fortunate ones,' the cheerleaders and the football jocks to strip down naked in front of the entire school at an assembly and plead with every ounce of their souls for mercy and forgiveness . . . they are representatives of gluttony and selfish values and to say that they are sorry for condoning these things will not be enough, they must mean it, they must have guns pointed to their heads.

If it proves useful, TAI [sic: TIA] will then be turned over to the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement communities as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism.

Despite their total lack of usefulness, business books are successful because there's a part of the human brain--called the stupidity lobe--that makes us believe that stories of successful people apply to our own situation.

Every society, it's been said, tends to worry about those things it has least cause to worry about. Queen Victoria probably worried about lax sexual attitudes, even though Victorian England was bound tighter than a corset. Today, we worry desperately about our personal and political freedom even though we are more free today than at any time in our history.

The war on terror and the tracking of potential terrorists and terrorist acts require that we search for clues of such activities in a mass of data. It's kind of a signal-to-noise ratio. What are they doing in all these things that are going on around the world? And we decided that new capabilities and new technologies are required to accomplish that task. Therefore, we established a project within DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that would develop an experimental prototype -- underline, experimental prototype, which we call the Total Information Awareness System. The purpose of TIA would be to determine the feasibility of searching vast quantities of data to determine links and patterns indicative of terrorist activities.

There are three parts to the TIA project to aid in this anti- terrorist effort. The first part is technologies that would permit rapid language translation, such as you -- as we have used on the computers now, we can -- there's voice recognition capabilities that exist on existing computers.

The second part was discovery of connections between transactions -- such as passports; visas; work permits; driver's license; credit card; airline tickets; rental cars; gun purchases; chemical purchases -- and events -- such as arrest or suspicious activities and so forth. So again, it try to discover the connections between these things called transactions.

And the third part was a collaborative reasoning-and-decision- making tools to allow interagency communications and analysis. In other words, what kind of decision tools would permit the analysts to work together in an interagency community?

The experiment will be demonstrated using test data fabricated to resemble real-life events. We'll not use detailed information that is real. In order to preserve the sanctity of individual privacy, we're designing this system to ensure complete anonymity of uninvolved citizens, thus focusing the efforts of law enforcement officials on terrorist investigations. The information gathered would then be subject to the same legal projections (sic) currently in place for the other law enforcement activities.

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It is absurd to think that DARPA is somehow trying to become another police agency. DARPA's purpose is to demonstrate the feasibility of this technology. If it proves useful, TAI [sic: TIA] will then be turned over to the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement communities as a tool to help them in their battle against domestic terrorism.

The bottom line is, this is an important research project to determine the feasibility of using certain transactions and events to discover and respond to terrorists before they act. We all share the frustration associated with vague warnings of terrorist threats. We hope that TIA will help the U.S. government narrow those generic -- genetic reports -- generic reports down to advance notice of specific threatening acts. I hope that's clear.

[W]hat John Poindexter is doing is developing a tool. He's not exercising the tool. He will not exercise the tool. That tool will be exercised by the intelligence, counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Q: Can you run over the transactions again? It sounds like every time I would enter or a citizen would enter a credit card, any banking transaction, any medical -- I go see my doctor, any prescription, all of those things become part of this database -- right? -- hypothetically?

Aldridge: Hypothetically they would, although the data that would go along with personal information such as bank accounts, that would all be protected in the Privacy Act just as it is today. Individuals would not be associated with that.

In the real world, as opposed to the philosophy seminar, the choice is often not between the good guy and the bad guy, but between the bad guy and the really bad guy. In such a situation, a country is justified in allying with a bad guy to oppose a regime that is even more terrible. The classic example of this occurred in World War II. The United States allied with a very bad man, Josef Stalin, to defeat someone who then posed a greater threat ? Adolf Hitler.
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Critics of U.S. intervention abroad frequently miss the point that foreign policy is a practical enterprise. Those who condemn the United States for once backing bin Laden and Saddam are blind to the fact that situations change, and, therefore, policies must be devised to deal with a particular situation at a given time. It is foolish to hold the United States culpable for "inconsistently" changing its policy when the underlying situation that justified the original policy has also changed.

By this reasoning, America was justified during the 1980s in providing weapons to the mujahedin, even if this group included bin Laden, to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan. Similarly, there was nothing wrong with America's supporting Saddam in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the greatest threat in the region came from Iran. Obviously bin Laden and Hussein are much greater threats today, and we know things about them now that were not known at the time we supported them. This new situation justifies the Bush administration's current policy of attempting to neutralize the threat posed by both men.

But now, under near-perfect laboratory conditions, we have witnessed a test of what Democrats get by responding to a reactionary and ideologically unapologetic Republican agenda with either acquiescence or timid frowns: smoking ruins. Election day 2002 marked the worst midterm performance by a party outside the White House since the Republicans in Franklin Delanore Roosevelt's 1934.

For the majority of Americans, who are not unabashed enthusiasts for unlimited abortion on demand, the difficulty lies in determining how the law should distinguish between human life that must be protected and that which should still be subject to a woman's "choice." But science is making it increasingly difficult to draw that line at some arbitrary point such as the end of the "first trimester" or "second trimester." Given the enormity of the moral implications involved, should we not then err on the side of drawing the line as close to conception as possible? In our ever-roiling debates about abortion, cloning, and research using embryos, the awe and respect for nascent human life that the new science rightfully generates should place the burden of proof on those who would ignore the inherent dignity of human life--those who prefer the interests of the strong over the weak, who prefer those with voices against those powerless to speak for themselves, and who prefer convenience and control over the selfless embrace of the most vulnerable among us.

But the more important reason is this: Like the war resolution on Iraq, a vote on partial-birth abortion would reveal a deep division within the Democratic party, and once again forcibly expose the party's utter confusion on matters of clear moral principle--whether it is the forthright defense of America from its avowed enemies, or the defense of late-term, unborn children from an abortion method for which the term "barbaric" is insufficiently strong.

Second, and more importantly, Safire's nightmarish scenario appears to have no basis in fact. The Total Information Awareness program is a proposal to create a database to "data mine" evidence the government has already legally collected, not to collect new evidence. The program would let evidence already collected by different parts of the government and found in the public domain to be assembled together and examined for clues about terrorist activity. In other words, TIA would not authorize the collection of evidence about your credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, websites you visit, e-mails you send or receive, academic grades, bank deposits, or trips (much less all of these, as Safire claims). The framework of privacy laws that the government must comply with to collect evidence would remain unchanged.

As best I can tell, TIA is not a surveillance system, but the press has decided to cover it as if it were. Strange. Very strange.

Perhaps the most corrosive element of the California Constitution is the initiative. As evidenced by Proposition 13 (limiting property taxes) in 1978, and Propositions 209 (abolishing affirmative action) and 227 (ending bilingual education) more recently, conservatives use the initiative to advance their policies, rather than building a political majority of Republicans to advance their principles. Although a popular way of correcting bad government policies, the initiative process makes electing Republicans less relevant, and in the long run may be destructive of deliberative, constitutional government.

Initiatives appeal to the passions and emotions of voters, drowning out any deliberation about principle. Proposition 209, for example, was supported by a large majority of Californians, but instead of being debated on the floor of the legislature, un-elected liberal proponents of affirmative action responded hysterically, hurling allegations of racism and bigotry against anyone who opposed race-based preferences. What could have been a re-aligning opportunity for the Republican Party of California, and a political vindication of equal rights and colorblind law in our halls of legislation, was squandered. Republican legislators had little at stake in the fight, and most preferred to stand on the sidelines and say nothing about a subject that was then on everyone's mind.

There is one glaringly obvious problem with the argument that the steps are designed to make sure states don't lose money on tax revenues: How can you lose money that you've never had to begin with? It's like saying: "Damn, I lost 56 million bucks on the lottery last night" and you never even bought a lotto ticket. For tax collectors in Utah to address their budget problems by taxing Missourians shopping online (who, as Missourians, have no representation whatsoever in Utah's legislative process) is silly. Utah isn't $411 million in the hole because it wasn't getting its fair share of tax revenues from families in West Jordan buying Veggie Tales books off Amazon.com; Utah is $411 million in the red because it spends too much money.