Not Osama, not Saddam, it was Iran!

The media propogandists for the war mongers in the US government are at it again: Faux News host Greg Gutfield has publically suggested that Iran, not al Qaeda or Iraq, was behind the September 11 attacks.

Well over six years after the attacks, many questions about the attacks remain unanswered. There is a vast amount of misinformation (mere errors) about the attacks, but I have no doubt that much of it is actually disinformation put out to discredit skeptics of the official government account. Knowing that we’re being lied to is easy… the hard part is telling which bits are lies, which bits are half-truths, which are mistakes and what is the truth.

Whatever happened that terrible day, it has served the Bush administration well. Not just them either: while the US economy is tanking, Exxon has reported a profit for 2007 of $40.6 billion, making nearly $1300 per second 24 hours a day, every day, for the entire year. That’s the highest reported profit of any commercial enterprise in history. And people wonder “cui bono?” about the Iraq war…

 

Teaching the Black Arts

And now it begins: the War On Teachers Who Might Make Education Enjoyable. Florida school teacher Jim Piculas has been fired by Rushe Middle School for performing “wizardry” after he showed students a 30 second magic trick where he made a toothpick disappear and then reappear.

That’s how it starts folks: first a bit of sleight-of-hand, and before you know it, the children are sacrificing babies to Beelzebub.

 

Microsoft blocked Youtube as a Phisher?

According to Slashdot (and it’s on the Internet, so it must be true) Microsoft’s Messenger service has been blocking messages which include Youtube URLs. Some users suggested that the blocks might have had something to do with Microsoft’s new “Messenger TV” service, but others suggested that it was more likely a glitch in the anti-phishing scanner Microsoft uses to “protect” its users from phishing sites.

Whatever the real reason (my money is on incompetence rather than malice), Messenger now seems to be back to normal, with Youtube URLs no longer being blocked. For that matter, I’m not sure that any URLs are being blocked, phishing or not. In my tests using a couple of spare MSN accounts I happened to have lying around, I couldn’t get any URL blocked — including such verified fake banking sites as www.emtmalumni.org/greymatter/eppi/. If you’re looking for an open list of phishing sites to perform your own experiments, check out this database of user-submitted and verified phishing URLs: the Phishtank.

Personally, I have little time for such measures to “protect” people unless, at minimum, there is full disclosure of what is being blocked, and whenever feasible provision for people to opt-out. Otherwise, even when done with the best intentions, or with unintentially funny results, it is still censorship and unacceptable. Censorship doesn’t cease to be censorship merely because it is not done by a government.

Here in the US, we are so schizoid and deeply opposed to government censorship that we insist on having unaccountable private parties to do it instead. — Bill Cole

 

Dog pack versus alligator

At times Nature can be cruel, but there is a raw beauty in the struggle for survival. Consider the alligators, one of the oldest predator species. The alligator is an apex predator, but can still fall victim to team work. A dog pack’s tightly knit social structure and survival-of-the-pack mentality enables it to defeat even such a fearsome predator as the alligator, as seen in this graphic photo from Florida.

For the protection of the squeamish, after the cut.

 

The War on Photography continues

News from the world’s greatest surveillance state, the UK, a place where you can’t walk more than a few metres in most cities without being photographed by cameras run by the government and private corporations:

Photographers are being harrassed and intimidated by police and security guards, in defiance of the law, for innocently taking photos of public events.

Gosh, police and security guards over-stepping the bounds of what they are allowed to do? Whoever would have imagined that could happen?

The BBC reports:

Phil Smith thought ex-EastEnder Letitia Dean turning on the Christmas lights in Ipswich would make a good snap for his collection.

The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera.

A licence for a camera? A licence for a camera? As in, this cop thinks that you need government permission to own a camera. And I bet that he thinks “they hate our freedoms”.

After explaining he didn’t need one, he was taken down a side-street for a formal “stop and search”, then asked to delete the photos and ordered not take any more. So he slunk home with his camera.

Smith said that he was singled out because he had an actual camera with a flash, and that there were people taking photos with mobile phones and pocket cameras. Presumably terrorists don’t know how to use camera phones. I want to know what sort of a training system British cops go through that leads them to simultaneously display heavy-handed authoritarianism and the sheer incompetence by ignoring or not noticing all the other photographers.

British MP and amateur photographer Austin Mitchell isn’t amused, and has tabled a motion in the House of Commons calling on the police to “educate officers about photographers’ rights”:

“There’s a general alarm about terrorism and about paedophiles, two heady cocktails, and police and PCSOs [police community support officers] and wardens and authorities generally seem to be worried about this.”

Another moral panic. Oh noes, he has a camera, he must be a terrorist, or a paedophile, or maybe a terrorist-paedophile!!!!! Panic!

Patrick from Making Light writes about a recent experience he had, and I’ve written about similar cases before.

There’s a deeper, more fundamental issue here. As Avram Grumer points out, the primary mission of authority is to preserve authority. In a story about abuse of power from Washington DC, he writes:

Even today, knowing that almost anyone could be holding a video camera and their actions could wind up on YouTube, cops will still bully and assault people for refusing to instantly defer to arbitrary authority. (That first video is a classic of the genre. The cop is a tubby man in a ridiculous uniform, riding around in a tiny vehicle that may as well be a clown car. His life as a cop isn’t turning out like it does in the movie and on TV, and he’s taking it out on anyone he can push around.)

Megan McArdle, another DC libertarian, picks up the story, and her comments section quickly fills with forelock-tuggers and knee-benders justifying the actions of the Park Police, even if they have to make up facts to do it. It’s practically a catalog of dishonest argumentation and propaganda. In fact, I think it’s useful to dissect the examples so that we can recognize them when we see similar arguments on the nation’s editorial pages.

I don’t believe that the constable who singled out Phil Smith and destroyed his property (his photos) was merely ignorant of the law. I don’t believe that he or her really, honestly, didn’t notice a crowd full of people taking photos on their cameras. I believe that (s)he knew exactly what he was doing: making himself feel big by singling out a single person and making their day miserable, just because he could.

 

The economic benefit of compassion

Via Metro, a new report from Canada concludes that providing proper housing and care for those suffering from mental illness instead of dumping them in the streets to rot will actually save the province $211 million every year.

The paper – entitled “Housing and Support for Adults With Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illnesses in British Columbia” – says providing non-housing services for such people costs the public system more than $55,000 per year per person.

It says providing adequate housing and supports could reduce this cost to $37,000 per year.

Is anyone surprised that providing adequate health care and housing for people enables them to become less dependent on help than not providing them? Safety nets aren’t just the right thing to do for moral reasons, they end up being cheaper than working without a net. Otherwise you get situations like this:

The [above] study comes two months after a disturbing report by the Vancouver Police Department.

It said up to half the calls police get in some areas of the city are related to mentally ill people.

The police department report suggested officers were spending huge amounts of time dealing with severely mentally ill and drug-addicted people on the streets, when they weren’t specifically trained for that type of intervention.

I have often felt that the self-proclaimed “fiscal conservatives” are penny-wise and pound-foolish. It’s the sort of mindset that will pay a dole inspector $60,000 a year to cut questionable dole payments by $10,000 a year. I’m not suggesting that welfare fraud should be encouraged, but the mean-spirited aggressiveness that the (e.g.) UK government goes after it is all out of proportion to its actual cost.  And of course liberals and lefties can equally be foolish once they get their snouts to the trough, but in general we’re all better off when we look after each other instead of letting those who fall be trampled.

 

Exiting the foolish war

When an old Cold War warrior like Zbigniew Brzezinski argues for exiting the “foolish” war in Iraq, you have to take it seriously:

The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for “staying the course” draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush’s and Sen. John McCain’s forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of “falling dominoes” that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier. Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush’s obsession with the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars — not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States’ world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing — the answer almost certainly would have been an unequivocal “no.”

Nor do the costs of this fiasco end there. The war has inflamed anti-American passions in the Middle East and South Asia while fragmenting Iraqi society and increasing the influence of Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Baghdad offers ample testimony that even the U.S.-installed government in Iraq is becoming susceptible to Iranian blandishments.

Brzezinski correctly notes that al Qaeda doesn’t have much influence or impact in Iraq, although it’s not clear whether he recognises that al Qaeda in Iraq is unrelated to al Qaeda:

The end of the occupation will thus be a boon for the war on al-Qaeda, bringing to an end a misguided adventure that not only precipitated the appearance of al-Qaeda in Iraq but also diverted the United States from Afghanistan, where the original al-Qaeda threat grew and still persists.

(Via Liberal Values.)

I have sympathy for those who genuinely take the moral position “We broke it, it’s our duty to stay until we fix it”, but that’s not how it works. Despite the neo-con fantasies of being welcomed as liberators (remember those film clips of Iraqis waving American flags that they just happened to have lying around?), whatever gratitude the Iraqis have for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is outweighed a thousand times by the anger and fear of seeing their sons and husbands killed, their houses blown up, the torture, the mass arrests, and the undeniable fact that their country is under foreign occupation. The problem isn’t al Qaeda, the problem is the occupation, and the longer it goes on, the worse it will be.

 

Found cat

…or why we need to teach people more field biology.

Image from Grrlscientist, and thanks to Noni Mausa for the link.

I’m reminded of a time when I was a callow youth when my mother and I accidentally trapped what we thought was some sort of cute little marsupial. Thinking it could have been an endangered beastie, we did the socially responsible thing and called the local park ranger to come identify it.

She took one look at it and pronounced “It’s a rat.”

 

Professionalism

I recently came across somebody quoting software developer Jamie W. Zawinski:

Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that’s not what I do. I’m a hacker, not an engineer.

If the quote is accurate, that’s a shockingly ignorant and wrong-headed thing for Jamie Zawinski to say. I know artists, including Mrs Impala, and they not only take their art seriously but they also treat their fans and customers with the greatest of respect — often more respect than they probably deserve. To paraphrase something Mrs Impala says, “When I’m on stage, the audience owns me.”

The artists I know — well, most of them — behave with great professionalism, and get incredibly frustrated by the dilettantes and prima donnas and selfish, lazy artists who don’t act with professionalism: the ones who turn up to gigs late or too intoxicated to work, the ones who fight over credit, the ones who have no respect for their audiences (paying or not), the self-indulgent and egotistical ones, the ones who ponce about demanding attention and respect and giving nothing back. Even if they are talented, they’re poison.

I have no idea whether Zawinski is one of them. I’ve never worked with him, so I couldn’t say. If he wants to proudly proclaim that he’s unprofessional, that’s his decision to make. But for him to impugn the artistic credentials of those writers, musicians, actors, programmers and other actors who aren’t jerks because they aren’t jerks, well, that’s pretty poor, and a big clue that perhaps Zawinski is one of those jerks himself.

One should also remember that, fundamentally, “professional” just means you get paid for doing it, and as Terry Pratchett wrote in Soul Music:

‘In my experience,’ said Glod, ‘what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.’

 

Toxic drinking water

Dr Aust discusses the attempt by Dr John Briffa to convince people to buy more bottled water (much of which is actually just tap water!) by emphasising the apparent risk from drinking tap water: drinking chlorinated water regularly over large periods of time may be associated with a small increase in the risk of bladder cancer:

SO… what is the snag with the statement as presented on John Briffa’s blog?

To my way of thinking, the problem is the lack of explanation, and particularly of context. The basic statement “there is quite a body of evidence linking the consumption of tap water with an increased risk of cancer” leaves out several crucial pieces of information that you need to put this information in context.

[...]

Anyway, without this kind of information, which you are not given by being told “There is scientific evidence that cholorinated water increase cancer risk” you cannot make a sensible judgement about whether to be worried.

Instead, you just worry. And then drive off to the supermarket in your 4×4 SUV to get a huge multi-pack of bottled mineral water. Ker-chhhinnng.

Context is vital. As it turns out, the studies are not even close to clear: they suggest, but do not prove, a small increased risk of bladder cancer. Dr Aust goes on to suggest a less misleading way to put the risk in perspective:

Risk factors are interesting. They are the meat and drink of medical and scientific papers about causes of disease, but are notoriously poorly understood. And peoples’ reaction to them is quite strange and unpredictable. The same “risk rate” means different things to people in different contexts.

An interesting way to probe how you view a “risk factor”, I find, is to “invert” it – to turn it back to front. This is because “increase” always sounds more scary, and hence more useful to someone trying to sales-pitch you, than “decrease”.
[...]
“Do you know you can reduce your risk of bladder cancer by about one-sixth if you never drink, or bathe in, or swim in, chlorinated water?”

I bet that most people, on reading something like that, would immediately ask “Okay, what’s my risk of bladder cancer now?” — a question that all too often gets forgotten if you describe risk in terms of an increase. (The answer is: not very high. Most bladder cancers are diagnosed in people in their 70s or older, and they are one of the more easily treated cancers.)