“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” The Party Slogan, Orwell’s 1984

Ward Churchill took the stand yesterday to defend himself. He was a University of Colorado professor who was removed from his position after he made impolitic comments in the wake of 9/11. He said some of the victims were, apparently, worthy of death

because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”

Offensive? Yes. Quite. It’s not that he isn’t on to something, however. The U.S. has rained hell on various countries around the world, leaving a trail of corpses that would reach to the moon if stacked. It seems to bother no one here that we bomb cities, starve children, torture and use chemical warfare on other countries.

But 9/11 happened to us , and that’s not right. The outpouring of victimhood was sad to watch – people so blind as to not be capable of seeing suffering in others, yet wanting vindication and revenge when it happens to them. Americans are an insulated people, kept ignorant by a pliable news media, and distracted by games and TV while our soldiers are off committing atrocities in our name.

It was blowback. Churchill said as much. The University people, of course, acknowledged his free speech rights. He could, as a citizen and a professor, make offensive remarks.

Then they railroaded him out of town. His scholarly work underwent scrutiny none could withstand, and sure enough, they found some alleged incidents of plagiarism and an unsourced conclusion regarding the U.S. Army infecting native Americans with smallpox way back when. (Churchill is Native American.)

Something very similar happened to Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul for his controversial stands on Israel. His real crime was to expose Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz as a fraud. He got the Dixie Chicks treatment, as did Churchill.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech. (Chomsky)

I have commented elsewhere at this blog on the seeming contradiction that the people of East Germany and Russia could bring about meaningful change. They overthrew oppressive governments thought to be intractable. Here in the United States we don’t seem to be able to affect much change, no matter what.

Oh yeah – and freedom of speech … it’s kind of an illusion. Isn’t it.

Thanks to a boatload of free publicity from Professors Natelson and Juras of the University of Montana, I and many others are now aware of the Kaimin, the campus newspaper, and more specifically of its Bess Sex column, by Bess Davis. I should probably go to the archives to find the really salacious stuff, but I’m nearly 59 years old, and I just don’t have the energy. It feels a bit creepy.

Today’s column is pretty tame, urging campus couples to use condoms, or to avoid “riding bareback”, as she calls it. That’s good advice for young couples. (It’s an “advice” column.) Other than abstention, which few take seriously, promotion of the use of condoms is good public policy.

I’m a long-time observer of the way people behave, and become shrill and annoying when I see powerful people bombing and killing weak people and stealing their stuff. It’s all part of being the youngest child in a family, sensitive to injustice. Humans are capable of all forms of depravity, and also of justifying that depravity, and of even going so far as to claim that depravity is virtuous.

That’s part of what driving the professors – the notion that depravity is taken for granted. They are Victorian in their outlook, and open talk about sex, free indulgence – it’s all depraved in their eyes.

But sex is hardly something to get upset about. Since the 1960’s and the advent of the pill, it’s become easier to have sex without consequence, and social norms have softened. Many enlightened men now understand that women enjoy sex too, and occasionally have orgasms. So I’m told. And women are more open about it now, and men are taking this openness as an invitation. In olden days a girl who openly enjoyed sex was considered either a tramp or the “town pump”; now it is now understood that even good girls have sex, and enjoy it, and want it to be safe and protected.

But some things don’t change, and the current Bess Sex column hits on an age-old theme – honesty in a committed relationship, and trust. That part, it seems, has not changed. Women still want men to be faithful, and Bess acknowledges that men are often not faithful, and urges the use of condoms. Buzzkiller.

What little I know of computer programming can be put in a bean bag and still leave room for lots of beans. But I do know this – higher quality accounting software keeps a record of all transactions, including those in which transactions are deleted. There’s always a trail for the auditors to follow. They know who did what, and when it was done.

Election machines have such audit logs. But Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) machines have an additional feature – a built-in “Clear” button that allows traceless deletion of the audit logs. (And five of the company’s models delete the first deck of ballots automatically – it’s supposed to be used to delete the test deck before actual use, but in practice deleted real votes.)

So the machines don’t count votes correctly, and can easily by tampered with.

No self-respecting voting machine manufacturer would allow such sloppiness. It’s so common, so basic, so well-known, that such a flaw could only be there by design.

Current versions of Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) have such design flaws. All of them in 34 states.

How ’bout that.