Magpie

Saturday, December 3

You really have to wonder.

How many political 'litmus tests' does Dubya's administration have, anyway?

Dubya's administration has taken the use of these litmus tests to an extreme that would have been hard to imagine back before the prez stole his first election in 2000. In the past few years, we've found out that appointees in the Interior Department get advanced [or hired in the first place] based on whether they support the prez's environmental policies and appointments to government scientific bodies are given based on whether appointees follow Dubya's strange psueudoscientific orthodoxy. We've even found out that nobody gets into event where Dubya appears unless their politics have been thoroughly vetted. And those examples just came off the top of our head — some research would no doubt turn up many more.

Today, however, the particular litmus test we're concerned with concerns how Dubya's administration is enforcing 'message discipline' about its policies in Iraq. According to a wire service report by Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, interviews with officials and internal emails show that the State Department has been refusing to allow anyone who's criticized Dubya's handling of Iraq to represent the US abroad.

In one recent case, a leading expert on conflict resolution who's a former senior State Department adviser was scheduled to participate in a U.S. Embassy-sponsored videoconference in Jerusalem last month, but at the last minute he was told that his participation no longer was required.

State Department officials explained the cancellation as a scheduling matter. But internal department e-mails show that officials in Washington pressed to have other scholars replace the expert, David L. Phillips, who wrote a book, "Losing Iraq," that's critical of President Bush's handling of Iraqi reconstruction...

In another instance of apparent politicization, a request by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, to arrange a visit by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who lived in Indonesia when he was young, was delayed for seven months. The visit never occurred.

A prominent translator of Islamic poetry who toured Afghanistan to rave reviews last March fell out of favor when he later criticized the Iraq war in front of a department official, two U.S. officials said.

According to Strobel and Landay, anyone who's being considered for the State Deparment's overseas speaker program is checked out to see whether they've said or written anything that criticizes administration policy. While one of the usual anonymous officials said that there was no requirement that a potential speaker be a Republican, they 'better not have said anything against them.' And while there apparently isn't a list of banned names, there definitely is a list of people who've been approved for the speaker program.

[The anonymous official] and others agreed to discuss the State Department practices only on condition of anonymity, saying they feared retaliation for exposing them.

Late this week, after Knight Ridder inquired about the litmus tests, Alexander Feldman, the head of the department's International Information Programs bureau, which runs the speakers program, sent a memo to his employees warning that "no one is to speak to the press without following the procedures" and getting approval. Knight Ridder obtained a copy of the memo.

We suppose that the administration's vetting of potential speakers should be seen as a victory of sorts for Iraq war opponents. If opposition to Dubya's Iraq policies (both at home and abroad) wasn't increasing daily, we doubt that even the current administration would be paying this much attention to how the US is presented abroad in a low-profile program. And we're certain that State Department officials wouldn't be trying so hard to keep from getting caught at using yet another litmus test.

Via Knight Ridder Washington Bureau.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:26 AM | Get permalink

'The search for the why of a tone.'

One of the all-too-rare pleasures of trawling news services and newspapers is that we sometimes find out about people who otherwise would have remained unknown to us, and whose very existence makes us feel a bit better about the rest of the human race. Today, we discovered luthier Étienne Vatelot, one of the world's foremost violin restorers. Given that we're a fiddler [albeit a middling one at best], we're embarassed that we'd never heard of Vatelot until tonight.

French luthier Étienne Vatelot

Luthier Étienne Vatelot. [Photo: Ed Alcock/NY Times]

Vatelot comes from a family connected to the making of musical instruments: his father made violins and his great-great grandfather was a guitar maker. Vatelot studied his craft in the French violin center of Mirecourt and in the New York lutherie of Rembert Wurlitzer. He learned well and, by the early 1950s, was known for his 'keen ear for the qualities of a violin and a physician's diagnostic skill for analyzing what may be wrong with it.' As a result, Vatelot became the 'doctor' for the instruments of soloists such as Pablo Casals, Yehudi Menuhin, and Isaac Stern.

Vatelot has also had a role in the revival of the craft of violin restoration in France. He established a school for young luthiers in Mirecourt, which has since produced 200 students and graduates. He also founded a foundation that gives scholarships to apprentice luthiers from disadvantaged families.

He believes there is a tonality that fits the violinist's personality, so he tries when possible to hear the violinist in concert. (In fact, he still maintains his lifetime practice of attending violin concerts virtually every night of the week.) Failing that, he will have the violinist play in his workshop and, on occasion, will play the instrument himself.

"I may find the instrument is whistling a bit, or is not quite in form," he said. "It can be due to several things. First of all the humidity, if the instrument is too dry, or too humid. In Indonesia, for example, there is very high humidity. Secondly, if the tone is bad you do various tests."

He may order the violin cleaned or, if there is damage to the wood, repaired; the finger board, usually made of soft ebony wood, may be uneven and in need of being sanded down. He may adjust the tension of the strings, the angle of the bridge, the tiny wood piece that supports the strings. He may adjust by fractions of an inch the sound post, the slender wedge of wood inside the violin that the French call l'âme, or the soul, of the violin, for its crucial role in creating the tone.

Mr. Vatelot has often compared his activity to that of a physician, diagnosing an illness and prescribing the remedy. "You are like a doctor doing a verification of the health of the instrument, to see if all is in place," he said. "In general, a soloist is like other people: he doesn't want to change doctors. He chooses a violin maker and keeps his confidence in him."

In 2000, Strings magazine ran a nice piece about Vatelot on the occasion of his [partial] retirement from his restoration business. You'll find it here.

Via NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:02 AM | Get permalink

Friday, December 2

How many important facts can you ignore in a news story?

Damn near all of them, if you're the AP and CNN.

Online, CNN has been running an AP story about how New Jersey governor-elect Jon Corzine may have decided to appoint state senator Nia Gill to fill out his unexpired term in the US Senate when he moves from Washington to Trenton.

CNN screen shot

Screen shot from CNN.com.

As you can see from the headline and photo, Gill is both black and a woman — both of which are significant reasons to appoint a person to the US Senate, given how overwhelmingly white and male that body is compared to the US population as a whole.

However, being just black and a woman shouldn't in itself be a reason to get the job, we'd think. And when we read the story to find out about Gill's other qualifications, what we discover is that she's a lawyer — and if we read way down to the very bottom of the story, we also find out that she served in the New Jersey House. Not irrelevant qualifications, but certainly far from a good picture of Gill's experience, wouldn't you say?

On the other hand, the AP story does go to the trouble to tell us the following, not too far from the top:

Political analysts say that by choosing Gill, Corzine would be seen as rewarding a faithful base that turned out for him on Election Day — and possibly sending a signal about his higher political aspirations.

So, as far as the AP bothers to tell us, Gill's main qualifications for being a senator are that her appointment would pay off one of Corzine's political debts, and maybe give him a leg up if he wants to run for president. Right in line with the concept of 'reverse discrimination,' the story is implicitly telling us that Gill will get the job because she's black — not because she's qualified.

What's really annoying here is that it would have taken no time at all to come up with a good list of reasons why Gill is qualified for the US Senate. [It took us about 30 seconds of Googling.] Here are just a few of them:

Gill was Democratic Whip for three of the four terms she served in the New Jersey House.
In 1997, she helped lead the opposition to an attempt to override the governor's veto of a law that would have banned third trimester abortions [so called 'partial birth abortion].
She was a sponsor of a recently enacted state law that bars public officals from depriving anyone of their civil rights, including 'racial profiling' done by law enforcement.
Gill sponsored a bill providing a $3000 tax deduction for families that provide home care to an elderly family member, and another to abolish the state's death penalty.
She currently serves on the state senate's Judiciary Committee, which — as with the US Senate — is one of the body's most powerful committees.

From that list, it's pretty obvious that Gill has excellent credentials as a progressive legislator and — from her service as House minority whip and on the Senate Judiciary committee — is highly regarded by her Democratic colleagues in the legislature. And we figured all of this out from info at the very first place we looked.

But the AP didn't see fit to look into Gill's background. Or, if they did look, they didn't think it important enough to include any of it in their story. And no flags went up when the CNN editor saw the story either — they just passed it on without adding any information about Gill's background. Instead, both AP and CNN were content to leave readers with the impression that, if Gill is appointed to the US Senate, the only thing involved is a political payoff that hinged on her ethnicity.

We have difficulty believing that this story would have looked the same had Nia Gill, a black woman, been Neil Gill, a white man.

Can we say 'racism'?

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for pointing us to the CNN story. His excellent post on this topic can be found here.

[Post changed to correct misattribution to CNN only.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 6:24 PM | Get permalink

Eek-a-Mouse's Irish birthday party.

The Jamaican reggae/dancehall DJ Eek-a-Mouse turned 50 last month, and happened to be in Ireland, in Cork City, on the big day. He spent most of it at the Sin E pub, arriving around noon and staying until closing. Somewhere along the way, that evening's traditional Irish music session got going. Eventually, Eek-a-mouse and the trad musicians started bouncing stuff off each other, and some of the result has shown up online in the form of a six-minute MP3 file.

It's truly amazing — right up there with with the meeting of DJ Kentaro and Shinichi Kinoshita that we pointed out back in September. The MP3 of Eek-a-Mouse's birthday doings may take a while to download, but it's definitely worth the wait.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:24 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

The coolest pic of the Crab Nebula that we've ever seen!

Photo mosaic of the Crab Nebula

[Photo: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll/ASU]
The Crab Nebula is the debris cloud resulting when a star exploded as a supernova about 65,000 years ago. That explosion was observed on Earth in the year 1054, when it was for a time the brightest object in the sky — visible even in daytime. Written or visual records of the supernova were left by Native Americans, European monks, and Chinese astronomers. The image here is a mosaic of 24 exposures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope during 1999 and 2000.

You can read more information about the image and about the Crab Nebula if you go here. There's a much bigger version of the image here.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:38 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, December 1

Having a bad day.

We've been out of work since late August. Today, we had our first job interview in well over a month. And we just found out that we were their second choice.

Grrrrr.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:02 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, November 30

OK, we lied.

We are going to post about Dubya's Iraq speech. But only barely.

In mid-November, we noted that Dubya's message about Iraq had slipped a bit since the war's early days:

What's that message, again?

May 1, 2003 [AFP] and November 11, 2005 [Eric Draper/White House]
With Dubya's speech today, the slippage is so big that even a Republican would be able to see it.

I have a plan, honest!

Dubya shows how much things have deteriorated in Iraq since his 'Mission Accomplished' speech in 2003.
[Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP]
Maybe the next time around, Dubya will deny that the US has troops in Iraq, and blame all the bad war news on the fevered imaginations of critics who hate America.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:57 AM | Get permalink

Dubya's 'Plan for Victory.'

We'd planned to blog on his Iraq speech today, and on the administration's new strategy document for dealing with the war. But since Dubya didn't say anything new, and the plan contains the same old stuff — just jumbled around a bit so it will look new — we won't be blogging on either after all.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:23 AM | Get permalink

Aljazeera's staffers have a blog.

It's called Don't Bomb Us, and you can read it here. As you'd expect, there are lots of interesting posts about that memo in which UK PM Tony Blair allegedly talked Dubya out of bombing Aljazeera's offices.

Check it out!

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:21 AM | Get permalink

Firefox 1.5 is out!

The latest version of Mozilla's Firefox browser is finally out officially. Mozilla touts the 1.5 version as being faster and more secure than the last version, and that its pop-up blocker works even better than previously. So far, we've found no reason to argue with any of that.

We downloaded Firefox 1.5 a few hours ago, and we like it a lot — much better even than the last beta version. So far, it appears to be less of a memory hog than any of the recent Firefox versions, which settles the biggest gripe we've had about the browser. The only problem we've encountered as a result of upgrading to the new version is that the Googlebar extension doesn't work any more, forcing us to use Google's own toolbar, which we don't like anywhere near as well. Hopefully the Googlebar's developer will be releasing an updated version soon.

[And, yes, Opera is a great browser, too — especially now that it's free. But we've used the most recent Opera version [8.5.1] and still don't like it as well as Firefox. Yes, Opera is very fast and uses considerably less memory than Firefox, but it has no native ad-blocking ability worth talking about. When Opera can block ads as easily and as well as Firefox's Adblock extension, we'll reconsider our decision.]

You can download the new version of Firefox here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, November 29

When is an insurgency not an insurgency?

When Rummy doesn't like the word, that's when.

Rummy's epiphany

Rummy showing how big his epiphany was.
[Photo: Yuri Gripas/Reuters]

Asked at a Pentagon news conference why he did not think the word insurgency applied to enemy forces in Iraq, [US defense secretary Rumsfeld said he had "an epiphany."

"I've thought about it. And, over the weekend, I thought to myself, you know, that gives them a greater legitimacy than they seem to merit," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld instead referred to the guerrillas in Iraq as "the terrorists" and "the enemies of the government." U.S. military statements also have referred to insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces."

We don't have the problem with 'insurgency' that Rumsfeld seems to find so vexing. From Merriam-Webster:

in·sur·gen·cy
1 : the quality or state of being insurgent; specifically : a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency

No one has, to our knowledge, called what's going on in Iraq a revolution. And the fact that the US won't allow the label 'prisoner of war' to be applied to its captives confirms that Washington [at least] doesn't recognize the armed conflict in Iraq as being a 'legitimate' war. So what's going on in Iraq fits the dictionary description of 'insurgency' quite nicely, we think.

The reason for Rumsfeld's epiphany is obvious in his 'replacement' words — especially in his use of 'the terrorists' instead of 'the insurgents.' Instead of an exercise in using precise language, Rumsfeld's linguistic search is just one more attempt by Washington to equate the war in Iraq with the war on terrorism, and erase the public's conception that there's any difference between the insurgents in Iraq and the terrorists who attacked on 9/11.

Rummy's epiphany would appear to be a rather tired rerun.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:07 PM | Get permalink

Ooooooh, shiny!

The Earth from way out in space!

The big blue marble

The Earth in true-color format, as viewed from the Venus Express spacecraft. [Image: ESA/VIRTIS team]
The European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft is well on its way to the solar system's second planet. One of its tasks on arrival will be to make images of Venus using a photo spectrometer called VIRTIS. To make sure that VIRTIS is working correctly, mission scientists pointed it toward the Earth and Moon and made a number of test images, including the one above.

To get a sense of perspective, Venus Express was about 3.5 million km/2.75 million mi. from Earth when the image was made on November 23. If we remember correctly, that's about eight times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. While this fuzzy image isn't the kind of stunner that we've come to expect from, say, the Hubble Space Telescope, it still shows how different this blue earth is from the empty space that surrounds it.

These Earth observations will be used to test the instrument on a real planetary case, before Venus approach.

"A comparison of Venus spectra with Earth spectra with the same instrument will also be of interest for textbook illustration of the comparison between the two planets," explained Pierre Drossart....

The Moon has also been observed, providing additional observations of particular interest for calibrating the intrument.

The VIRTIS instrument on Venus Express is a twin of the same instrument on Rosetta, and similar observations were sent back by Rosetta in March 2005, so comparisons of the two sets of observations will be very useful for calibration purposes.

You can find out more about Venus Express at the project's main webpage here.

Via European Space Agency.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:42 PM | Get permalink

Christian fundamentalists don't just want to change the way science is taught in US schools.

They're forcing other subjects through their religious filters as well.

Back in August, we blogged about how a group of fundamentalist Christian schools are suing the University of California in order to force the UC system to give credit for high school science courses the embrace the creationist worldview. According to the suit filed by the Association of Christian Schools International, UC's policy of refusing to give credit for classes that use textbooks that challenge the reality of evolution discriminates against 'Christian' schools and attempts to secularize the schools.

The fundamentalists' lawsuit specifically objects to UC's refusal to accept courses that use science books pubished by Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Books. At the time of our earlier post, we went over to these publishers' websites and looked at some of their science books, and we found stuff like the following from books currently in the Bob Jones catalog:

The description of a grade 7–12 book on the fossil record:

A discussion of the evidence from the fossil record, which supports the biblical view regarding the Flood and disproves the evolutionary view.

From the introduction to a text on space and earth science:

The answers to important questions such as those above can be found only in Scripture. It seems proper, then, that whenever you are faced with a question you should first find out what the Bible has to say about it. If the Bible speaks clearly onthe issue, then you have your answer. If it is silent, then you must use the reasoning ability that God has given you to find an answer that is consistent with what Scripture says.

[You'll find more examples in our earlier post.]

Since our August post, the suit against UC has gone to trial, and more examples of the texts used by the fundamentalist Christian schools have come to light. It turns out that it's not just the science texts that present their subjects in a manner that's troublesome. Here are some excerpts compiled by Thomas Vinciguerra in Sunday's NY Times:

"United States History for Christian Schools," written by Timothy Keesee and Mark Sidwell (Bob Jones University, 2001), says this about Thomas Jefferson.

American believers can appreciate Jefferson's rich contribution to the development of their nation, but they must beware of his view of Christ as a good teacher but not the incarnate son of God. As the Apostle John said, "Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son" (I John 2:22). [...]

"Elements of Literature for Christian Schools," by Ronald Horton, Donalynn Hess and Steven Skeggs (Bob Jones University, 2001), faults Mark Twain for calling God "an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master."

Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless. Denying that he was created in the image of God, Twain was able to rid himself of feeling any responsibility to his Creator. At the same time, however, he defiantly cut himself off from God's love. Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel.

Emily Dickinson, too, is criticized for her lack of faith.

Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

If you go through the previous quotes and substitute, say, 'socialism' or 'Karl Marx' for each instance of 'God', 'Christ', or 'God's love', you get the picture of why the UC system isn't willing to grant transfer credit for classes that use these texts.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:36 PM | Get permalink

Monday, November 28

Industrial-strength irony.

Uniforms worn by the US Border Patrol and Customs Service are being made in Mexico.

The company that has the contract for making Border Patrol and Customs uniforms is the VF Corporation, a US-based company that sends a lot of its work outside the country to plants in [among other places] Canada, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. For the last year or so, the Border Patrol and Customs uniforms have been made in Mexico.

While the AP article we're pointing to focuses on security aspects — will terrorists or criminals be able to get their hands on uniforms and walk across the border — just the fact that the uniforms are made outside the country bothers us:

When the US clothing industry is circling the drain and getting ready to disappear, why aren't these uniforms being made by a company that will employ US workers to do the job?

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:13 AM | Get permalink

Smile! You're on candid bacteria!

While E. coli bacteria usually just give people food poisoning, scientists have found a way to use a modified form of the same bacteria to make a unique photographic film. Using genetic engineering, researchers at UC San Francisco have moved genes from a green algae into E. coli cells, creating a light-sensitive variety of the bacteria.

The FSM via bacteria

The researchers used the living film to create an image of the "flying spaghetti monster", which features in an online satirical critique of the intention of the Kansas school board to teach intelligent design in schools [Image: Chris Voight]

When put into a dense bed, the modified E. coli acts as a 'living camera,' taking extremely high-res photos [150 megapixels per square inch]. However, the bacteria must be exposed to light for four hours to make a picture, and it will currently work only under red light.

While the "living camera" isn't going to make waves in the photographic world, its creation is far from an idle exercise:

[Researcher Chris] Voigt's team saw it as an exercise in advanced genetic engineering. But their success in getting an array of bacteria to respond to light could lead to the development of "nano-factories" in which minuscule amounts of substances are produced at locations precisely defined by light beams.

For instance, the gene switch need not activate a pigment, says Voigt. A different introduced gene could produce polymer-like proteins, or even precipitate a metal. "This way, the bacteria could weave a complex material," he says.

You can read more about the 'living camera' here.

Via New Scientist.

More: Antenna has a great story on the photobacteria, including a bunch of photos. Read it here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:10 AM | Get permalink

Sunday, November 27

That Aljazeera bombing story refuses to go away.

Despite the UK government's suppression of a memo that allegedly describes a meeting in which PM Tony Blair talked Dubya out of bombing the offices of Aljazeera, the story continues to roll on.

Protest at Aljazeera

Journalists and workers at Aljazeera's Beirut bureau protesting reports that Dubya wanted to bomb the network's offices. [Photo: Sharif Karim/Reuters]

The UK government is prosecuting former civil servant David Keogh and former political aide Leo O'Connor for allegedly violating the Official Secrets Act by leaking the memo to the Daily Mirror. [UK Sunday Times]
In Parliament, a Labour party back-bencher has filed a motion asking Tony Blair's government to release the memo publicly. [UK Guardian]

"I would hope we can have a fair and full discussion of the very important issues that were discussed at that meeting," [MP Peter] Kilfoyle, a former defense minister, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"The information is out there in the public domain and it seems ludicrous that the media can't discuss it in its entirety," he added.
UK attorney general Lord Goldsmith has rejected charges that his threat to prosecute newspapers if they wrote about the memo was made in order to protect Tony Blair and Dubya. [UK Guardian]

"I'm not acting at the request or under the instructions of anybody else in relation to this."
Tony Blair himself has finally broken silence on the story, calling reports that Dubya wanted to bomb Aljazeera a 'conspiracy theory.' [UK Telegraph]

Looking tired, he appeared to lose his cool when asked about reports claiming that the memo showed him talking Mr Bush out of mounting an air raid on al-Jazeera. "Look, there's a limit to what I can say — it's all sub judice," he said. "But honestly, I mean, conspiracy theories..."
The head of Aljazeera has asked both Blair and Dubya for the facts about the alleged converstation about bombing his network. Wadah Khanfar says that the matter doesn't just involve Aljazeera, but is a concern of journalists around the world:

"We need to know if this discussion has taken place or not...if this document exists or not.

"By banning this document from being published it does cast a lot of concerns about this issue.

"When we are talking about bombing a TV station like that I think it is of historical value to know what's happened."

Tony Blair has rejected the Aljazeera request. The White House has not commented on the memo since Dubya's press secretary Scott McClellan called charges that the prez wanted to bomb Aljazeera 'outlandish and inconceivable.' [BBC, Washington Post]

For details on the memo, see this earlier Magpie post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink