Proudly afflicting the comfortable [and collecting shiny things] since March 2003

Send Magpie an email!


RSS Feeds
Click button to subscribe.

Subscribe to Magpie via Feedburner  Magpie's RSS feed via Bloglines
Add to Netvibes

Need a password?
Click the button!


Bypass 'free' registration!


Cost of the Iraq War [US$]
(JavaScript Error)
[Find out more here]

Hooded Liberty


BLOGS WE LIKE
3quarksdaily
Alas, a Blog
alphabitch
Back to Iraq
Baghdad Burning
Bitch Ph.D.
blac (k) ademic
Blog Report
Blogs by Women
BOPNews
Broadsheet
Burnt Orange Report
Confined Space
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dangereuse trilingue
Echidne of the Snakes
Effect Measure
Eschaton (Atrios)
feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
Follow Me Here
gendergeek
Gordon.Coale
The Housing Bubble New!
I Blame the Patriarchy
Juan Cole/Informed Comment
Kicking Ass
The King's Blog
The Krile Files
Left Coaster
librarian.net
Loaded Orygun
Making Light
Marian's Blog
mediagirl
Muslim Wake Up! Blog
My Left Wing
NathanNewman.org
The NewsHoggers
Null Device
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pandagon
The Panda's Thumb
Pedantry
Peking Duck
Philobiblon
Pinko Feminist Hellcat
Political Animal
Reality-Based Community
Riba Rambles
The Rittenhouse Review
Road to Surfdom
Romenesko
SCOTUSblog
The Sideshow
The Silence of Our Friends New!
Sisyphus Shrugged
skippy
Suburban Guerrilla
Talk Left
Talking Points Memo
TAPPED
This Modern World
The Unapologetic Mexican New!
veiled4allah
Wampum
War and Piece
wood s lot
xymphora

MISSING IN ACTION
Body and Soul
fafblog
General Glut's Globlog
Respectful of Otters
RuminateThis


Image by Propaganda Remix Project. Click to see more.


WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
Magpie is a former journalist, attempted historian [No, you can't ask how her thesis is going], and full-time corvid of the lesbian persuasion. She keeps herself in birdseed by writing those bad computer manuals that you toss out without bothering to read them. She also blogs too much when she's not on deadline, both here and at Pacific Views.

Magpie roosts in Portland, Oregon, where she annoys her housemates (as well as her cats Medea, Whiskers, and Jane Doe) by attempting to play Irish music on the fiddle and concertina.

If you like, you can send Magpie an email!



WHO LINKS TO MAGPIE?
Ask Technorati.
Or ask WhoLinksToMe.


Politics Blog Top Sites

Progressive Women's Blog Ring

Join | List |
Previous | Next | Random |
Previous 5 | Next 5 |
Skip Previous | Skip Next

Powered by RingSurf



Creative Commons License


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Check to open links in new windows. Uncheck to see comments.


Saturday, November 12, 2005

Tinfoil hats.

The question on every paranoid internet user's mind is: Do they work?

Well, there's only one way to find out — do a study!


Science on the march!

Hard at work in the MIT labs.


Here's the abstract for 'On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study':

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

The whole report is here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:55 PM | Get permalink



What do you say about Canada?

Shuala Evans spent an insomniac night trawling quote about Canada, looking for the name for an online project. She didn't find the name, but she did find a bunch of great quotes about Canada and by Canadians, and she considerately decided to share some of them with the rest of us.

We have a few of them for you here, but you really should go check out the whole collection.

  • It's going to be a great country when they finish unpacking it.
    — Andrew H. Malcom

  • Be sure to choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.
    — Robertson Davies, 1972

  • If I were President of the United States, I'd wake up in the morning and probably look at the events around the world — Americans under attack here, acts of terrorism and violence — I'd look at all that and I'd look up at Canada and say, 'Thank God I have Canada for a neighbour. Now what can I do for Canada today?'
    — Brian Mulroney, 1984

We never thought we'd be quoting former Canadian PM Brian Mulroney here at Magpie — especially not favorably. The world just gets stranger and stranger.

Via Tsuredzuregusa.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:30 PM | Get permalink



Dead on arrival.

The Dubya adminstration's plan for dealing with a flu pandemic isn't just dead, says Revere at Effect Measure. The tax-cutting, 'small government' mania over the last few decades [fostered by the US right wing] has ensured that the pandemic plan could never work.

An influenza pandemic will essentially be a local affair and depend on the leadership, resources and ingenuity at that level to cope with the consequences of a possible 30% to 40% absenteeism rate over an extended period. That is a community planning problem that takes time and resources. Our communities have neither. And with no effective public health infrastructure, even the vaccine (which doesn't exist) wouldn't save us. This sad predicament is the result of the social policies of the last twenty years.

It is fine to have a political slogan that each person knows better what to do with their money than the government does. But if you give me back $500 in a tax cut, I can't buy better public health with it, or better fire protection, or better teachers. I can only do that when I put my $500 together with someone else's $300 and someone else's $900 and so on. Tax cuts, so popular at election time, are now coming back to hurt us. A terrible harm that has been done to public health (and public service in general) by an attitude that implicitly looks down on public servants as unnecessary.

And if a pandemic strikes, make no mistake, we will be a world of hurt. From my perspective as a public health professional you can't view the massive potential problems a pandemic can cause to the lives of ordinary people, their livelihoods, their businesses and their future without saying clearly that the social policies of the last decades have left us more vulnerable and defenseless to the threat of infectious epidemic disease.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:07 PM | Get permalink



No comment needed.

Political cartoonist John Sherffius nails it.


Exhibit A

[Cartoon © 2005 John Sherffius]

You can see more of Sherffius' cartoons here.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:47 AM | Get permalink



Friday, November 11, 2005

Kansas Board of Education versus Charles Darwin.

Political cartoonist Mike Keefe of the Denver Post sums things up nicely.


Who needs more than one book?

[Cartoon © 2005 Mike Keefe]

You can see more of Mike Keefe's cartoons here.

For more on the Kansas Board of Ed's decision to gut the teaching of evolution in the state's public schools, see this earlier post.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:54 AM | Get permalink



Krugman without the pay firewall.

Nah, we're not going to post Paul Krugman's new NY Times column on Dubya's pathetic Social Security prescrption program. [You'll have to go here to read the bootleg.]

What we have instead is this link to an interview that Campus Progress did with Krugman earlier this week, and the excerpts below. Not such a bad deal, we'd suggest.

[CP:] What prompted you to write your November 4th column 'Defending Imperial Nudity'? We were passing it around the office and couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry — especially when we got to the end.

[Krugman:] We finally reached a point where a lot of people are starting to acknowledge the obvious, which is that we were deliberately hyped into war, and a lot of defenses are coming up. People are still trying to pretend that nothing happened and it all made sense, and I felt that it was time to find a way to play how ridiculous that is.

[CP:] I get the feeling that we're living in a really good political satire.

[Krugman:] Yeah, or a really tawdry political novel. If you tried to make this stuff up, nobody would dare — they'd say that it's ridiculous.....

[CP:]You mentioned watching the indictments coming in. Some of us might want to believe that this is a dissolution of Karl Rove's dream of a permanent Republican majority — what will be the long-term effects of what we see happening?

[Krugman:] I think the Roveian dream of a permanent majority is dying rapidly, but it's not just because of the indictments. There are other things. The defeat of TABOR [Taxpayer Bill of Rights] in Colorado, which shows that "starve the beast" isn?t going to work. We are seeing — let's put it this way: on the war and all the things that surround it, we've really seen a tectonic shift here. You watch apologists for the war, not so much the people who were thrilled to go to war, the people who are still saying, "Well, everybody thought they had weapons, I don't want to sound like Michael Moore," and they woke up one morning and saw that a happy majority of people believe we've been misled into war. I think that changes everything.

[CP:] It seems we went through a dark period and we?re not out of the woods, but you do see some bright spots ahead.

[Krugman:]There's a long way back from this very bad place we?ve gone into, but when I compare the political atmosphere now with the way it was two and a half years ago, it seems that there's been a major return to sanity.

Thanks to Suburban Guerrilla for pointing us to the interview.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:44 AM | Get permalink



Karl Rove comes out from under his rock.

And tells the world how truly ugly his view of the world is.

Speaking on Thursday night at a banquet for the right-wing Federalist Society, Dubya's political advisor Karl Rove warned the country about those nasty activist judges, and spun a really strange theory about the role of the Supreme Court:

'Judicial imperialism has split American society, politicized the courts in a way the Founders never intended. It has created a sense of disenfranchisement among a very large segment of American society, people who believe issues not addressed by the Constitution should be decided through elections rather than by nine lawyers in robes.

We'll leave aside the fact that the politicization of the courts is largely a calculated political tactic of Rove and his ilk. What's important here is that Rove goes way beyond the views of strict constructionists in interpreting the Constitution. Where the constuctionists would say that the provisions of the Constitution should be interpreted as narrowly as possible, sticking to the literal meaning of the document and what is known about what the Founders intended at the time it was written, Rove wouldn't even go that far: If the Constitution is silent on a subject [the internet or the rights of lesbians and gay men, for example], Rove apparently believes that the courts shouldn't rule on that subject at all. Anything not literally spelled out in the Constitution is beyond the purview of the nation's courts, saith Rove.

But all of that is just an aside to our main point, which deals with this part of Rove's speech:

Many ordinary men and women — non-lawyers — believe our courts are in crisis. And their concerns are well-grounded. For decades, the American people have seen decision after decision after decision that strikes them as fundamentally out of touch with our Constitution.'

So what decisions are 'out of touch' with the Constitution? Well, a federal court's ruling that he words 'under God' should be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance. [Words that only got into the Pledge in 1954, after a campaign by the conservative Catholic group, the Knights of Columbus.] Or a Massachusetts court's ruling that the state can't bar same-sex marriages. But the one that really seems to stick in Rove's craw was the US Supreme Court's ruling that it's unconstitutional to execute anyone under 18 years of age:

"In its decision, the majority ignored the fact that, at the time, the people's representatives in 20 states had passed laws permitting the death penalty for killers under 18. Just 18 states, or less than 50 percent of the states allowing capital punishment, had laws prohibiting the execution of killers who committed their crimes as juveniles."

The Court is 'out of touch' because it decided that executing minors isn't the kind of business the government should be in? And that because more states allowed minors to be executed than barred such executions, that the Court had overstepped its bounds?

In other words, if the majority believes something, it's right. And those pointy-headed liberal activist judges better just get out of the way.

If the banality of Rove's evil hadn't been thoroughly exposed by his actions already, these words spoken to the Federalist Society would certainly bring both the evil and the banality to light.

What a creep.

Via Washington Times.

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



Thursday, November 10, 2005

Geography lesson.

CNN obviously needs one. The map below appeared on CNN International last week, during the first few days of the unrest in France.


CNN's very bad map of France



Every city on the map is in the wrong place. Most are merely shifted 50 mi/80km east or so, but some are really in the wrong spots. For example, CNN has Strasbourg somewhere in southern Germany, and Toulouse looks to be in Switzerland.

We'll ignore the word 'France' floating over in Poland, hoping that this was just the title of the map, not where CNN thinks part of France is located.

With maps like this, it's no wonder that the rest of CNN's coverage of the rioting in France has been, to put it kindly, less than stellar.

Thanks to Dangereuse Trilingue for her message calling the map to our attention.

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:22 PM | Get permalink



No comment.

Right-wing fundamentalist Christian evangelist Pat Robertson on today's 700 Club, talking about Tuesday's vote in Dover, Pennsylvania to throw out the school board majority that had put 'intelligent design' into the local school curriculum:

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don?t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don't wonder why He hasn?t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don?t ask for His help because he might not be there."

Via People for the American Way.

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:29 PM | Get permalink



GOP gay-bashing season has opened again.

Given the bad day the Republicans had on Tuesday, losing two major governor's seats and numerous mayoral elections around the US, we were just waiting to see how long it would take until the GOP started scaring the country with the perils of rampant homosexuality. Nothing like a bit of gay-bashing to firm up that base, and scare some fence-sitters back into the fold.

And, sure enough, a US Senate subcommittee has taken the first step in moving a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage toward a vote by the full Senate. Right-wing GOP senator Sam Brownbeck of Kansas led the effort to get the measure approved. [Brownbeck, not so incidentally, is considering running for president in 2008.]

We think it's important to note that 'moderate' Republican Arlen Specter provided the deciding vote to get the anti-gay measure out of the subcommittee, saying that he opposed the measure but thought that it shouldn't be 'bottled up' in the subcommittee.

Yeah, right.

Via AP.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:21 AM | Get permalink



Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Why Dubya didn't exactly wow them in Latin America.

Like it really needs explaining.

But sometimes, knowing reasons is a good thing, and journalist Tony Karon gives us a big one:

"Only a generation ago, this was a continent plagued by military dictatorship and civil war," Bush intoned in Brazil on Sunday. "Yet the people of this continent defied the dictators, and they claimed their liberty ... Freedom is the gift of the Almighty to every man and woman in this world — and today this vision is the free consensus of a free Americas."
Chile's presidential palace being bombed, 1973
Right, and where was Washington? Many of the same leaders with whom Bush met at the summit were in prison, or buried their friends and colleagues murdered for their activism, and faced the constant threat of murder and torture for standing up to dictatorship. And in most instances, they were fighting dictators backed by the United States.

Chile's President Ricardo Lagos is a case in point: He was imprisoned by Washington's man, Pinochet. Yes, he wants a trade deal with the U.S. But you can hold the democracy lecture, thank you.

The photo above shows Chile's presidential palace [La Moneda] being bombed during the 1973 military coup that put right-wing Gen. Agosto Pinochet [current Pres. Lagos' former jailer] into power. The planes and bombs were US-made, by the way. As, most would agree, was the coup.

Via Rootless Cosmopolitan. [Thanks to Cursor for the tip.]

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:01 PM | Get permalink



The dirty details of the lawsuit against Fox News.

You may already have seen the news that the US Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a sexual harassment suit against Fox News. In the suit, the EEOC alleges that Fox fired several female employees after one of them complained about discriminatory behavior by a Fox vice president, Joe Chillemi.

Press reports about the EEOC suit say that Chillemi allegedly used obscene and vulgar language to describe women and their body parts. However, the details contained in the suit are far more graphic:

Defendant Fox, including through its Vice President Joe Chillemi ("Chillemi"), sexually harassed and subjected Weiler and a class of similarly situated female employees to a hostile work environment because of their sex. Chillemi routinely used gross obscenities and vulgarities when describing women or their body parts (referring, for example, to women?s breasts as "tits" and declaring that something was "as useless as tits on a bull"). He routinely used obscenities and vulgarities with women employees that he did not use with male employees (such as telling women that they had put his "cock" or "dick" "on the chopping block"). Chillemi routinely cursed at and otherwise denigrated women employees and treated them in a demeaning way (including telling women not to be a "pussy" but to "be a man", and referring to women as being a "bitch"). He made a number of derogatory comments about pregnant women (such as regularly stating that a pregnant woman had "tits" that were "fucking huge" and like "cannons" or "melons" and the on-air talent?s breasts needed to be "covered" or not shown when the pregnant woman was being filmed). In addition, at a department discussion about a segment on sexism in the workplace, Chillemi said that in choosing who to hire "if it came down between a man or a woman, of course I?d pick the man. The woman would most likely get pregnant and leave." Women in the Fox Advertising and Promotions departments supervised by Chillemi were also referred to in a derogatory way by a supervisor as his "Promo Girls."

Why doesn't it surprise us that a male manager at Fox would have these sorts of attitudes about women?

You can see the entire lawsuit here [PDF file].

Via AP and Raw Story.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:34 AM | Get permalink



Tuesday, November 8, 2005

Creationists lose one in Pennsylvania.

Darwin has a posseFor the last six weeks, the town of Dover, Pennsylvania has been in the news because of a lawsuit challenging its school board's decision to include 'intelligent design' [ID] in the science curriculum. A federal court is currently deciding whether, as the parents of six Dover students claim, ID brings religion [in the form of creationism] into the classroom, violating the US Constitution.

Regardless of what the court decides, Dover voters have made it clear what they think about the school board's decision to put creationism into local schools: They kicked out all but one of the current school board members — including all of the pro-ID members — replacing them with a new board majority opposed to ID. And, unlike the old board, the new board actually includes some teachers.

Via Reuters.

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:51 PM | Get permalink



The Kansas Board of Education does it again.

They've approved new science standards for the state's public schools that mandate the teaching of 'intelligent design."

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that the basic Darwinian theory that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

All six of the votes for the new standards came from Republicans. Two Republicans and two Democrats voted against them.

The AP article on the new Kansas standards contains a sentence that irks us:

The Kansas board's action is part of a national debate.

There's no debate here, in the sense that there are facts at issue. The whole evolution/'intelligent design' argument is a debate only in the sense that you could have argue over whether, say, the sky is blue or diseases can be caused by viruses. A less cliché-prone reporter might have written: 'The Kansas board's action is part of a national campaign to insert Christian religious beliefs into the teaching of science.'

| | Posted by Magpie at 4:00 PM | Get permalink



GOP leaders want investigation of US secret prisons.

Yep, that's right. Senate majority leader Bill Frist and House speaker Dennis Hastert — both Republicans — are calling for an investigation into revelations of the secret prison system operated by the CIA. However, they don't want an investigation of the system itself, or who in Dubya's administration authorized it — the two GOP congressional leaders are circulating a letter calling for an investigation into who leaked info about the secret prisons to the Washington Post.

"If accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks," stated the letter, which Hastert's office said the House speaker had signed. There was no immediate word on whether Frist had given it his signature....

The letter said a joint probe by the House and Senate intelligence committees should determine who leaked the information and under what authority.

"What is the actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States and our partners in the global war on terror?" the letter asked. "We will consider other changes to this mandate based on your recommendations."

We'll just note that the GOP leaders haven't seen it important to determine the 'actual and potential damage done to the national security of the United States' by the Dubya administration's manipulation of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. We're sure you can think of examples of your own.

Via AP.

More: Oh, we couldn't make this up if we tried: GOP senator Trent Lott told CNN this afternoon that mnost of the info in the Washington Post story was leaked by one or more attendees of a meeting of GOP senators last week — a meeting that at which VP Dick Cheney was also present. The senators met the day before the Post story ran. So that terrible threat to US security that Frist and Hastert are so hot to investigate wasn't the fault of Democrats or leakers inside the CIA. Nope, it apparently came from inside the GOP.

Think Progress has video of the CNN report here [MOV file].

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:11 PM | Get permalink



No comment needed.

The first paragraph of an editorial in one of today's US newspapers:

After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

That editorial, incidentally, appears in the NY Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:10 AM | Get permalink



Dubya's torture denial.

We posted earlier about Dubya's denial on Monday that the US tortures prisoners it suspects of being involved in terrorism. Since then, we found this interesting quote from the blog of ABC [US] Washington correspondent Jake Tapper, who was one of the reporters in the room when Dubya made his comment.

It's much more instructive to see someone speak than to read their remarks. Having been a few feet away from the President, I can tell you he spoke more vociferously about this topic than anything I've seen him speak about on this trip. He was passionate. He was steadfast.

And even thought he clearly said the U.S. does not torture -- he declared it -- his heart, his soul, seemed more infused in the other point he was making: the idea that the U.S. government, as long as he is in charge of it, will do everything it can to protect the American people from terrorists, and if some messy stuff goes down in the process he isn't going to lose any sleep over it. [Emphasis added]

While Tapper's glowing words about Dubya's steadfastness make us queasy, we think there's a lot of truth in the last line. Probably more than Tapper intended to convey.

Thanks to the WB42 5:30 Report With Doug Krile blog for the link to the Tapper post. Krile, who's a newsie for the WB's station in Little Rock [AR], does an excellent job of link-trawling. We usually check him a couple of times a day.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:34 AM | Get permalink



New evidence that US used phosphorus shells in Iraq.

The Italian RAI television network has broadcast video of white phosphorus shells exploding over Fallujah [WMV file] during last year's attack on the city by US forces. Phosphorus clouds over Fallujah [The photo reportedly shows phosphorus shells exploding over Fallujah during the attack.] RAI also broadcast interviews with former US servicemembers who took part in the assault, and grisly photos of bodies that were extensively damaged by white phosphorus.

White phosphorus is very nasty stuff. It burns on contact with air, and any phosphorus that contacts a person's skin will continue to burn until the phosphorus is totally gone. If not removed, white phosphorus can burn right down to the bone, as some of the RAI images show very graphically.

Ever since the the attack on Fallujah, there have been charges that the US used chemical weapons — including white phosphorus — during the attack. [See, for example, this Asia Times story from December 2004.] The US government, however, has repeatedly denied these allegations. The RAI report, however, appears to put the lie to that denial.

From the UK Independent's report on RAI's story:

In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy Pete.

"Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone ... I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for."

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."

We're waiting to see how the Pentagon and Condoleezza Rice wiggle out of this one.

More: Information Clearing House has English [Windows Media & Real] and Arabic [Windows Media only] versions of the documentary available here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 2:20 AM | Get permalink



You may already be a loser!

Political cartoonist Scott Stantis of the Birmingham News shows that you're not paranoid if someone really is out to get you.


You may already be a loser!

[Cartoon © 2005 Scott Stantis]

Stantis is referring to the 30,000 national security letters used by the FBI last year to covertly spy on US residents. There's more in this earlier post.

If you want to know more about the dangers of national security letters, this webpage from the ACLU is a good place to start.

Via Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:27 AM | Get permalink



Can you spot the contradiction?

Exhibit A: Dubya in Panama City on Monday, after meeting with Panama's President Torrijos:

Q Mr. President, there has been a bit of an international outcry over reports of secret U.S. prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects. Will you let the Red Cross have access to them? And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture....


Exhibit B: From a Friday, Nov. 4 article in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session.

Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.

Hint: Does Cheney have a boss who'd give the job of advocating 'inconvenient' policy positions to a subordinate?

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



Understanding the unrest in France, continued.

[Also see our earlier post on the rioting in France here.]

Dangereuse Trilingue, a blogger out of Paris, has a very good post on the why young people in France are rioting if you go here:

A last word about punditry. I'm unconvinced that this is about the "failure of the French model of integration" at all. Oh, not that I don't find fault with it. It's just that as intellectual exercises go, criticising a national ideology, any national ideology, is one of the easier ones. The UK, which is always held up as the opposite model, the path that France doesn't want to go down, has rioting, too, sometimes between communities of immigrant origin (which is non-existent in France); despite lower unemployment, disaffected youth isn't unknown over there either, and as some harsh "white" UK housing estates show, skin colour and ethnic origin have nothing to do with it. No, the failures are much more tightly related to perfectly rational policies and measures. Like providing affordable, subsidised housing in all towns and not only in those that are already among the poorest in the country; reducing the rampant segregation between white and non-white, which also would help reduce the educational gap; giving more than peanuts of additional help to education in low-income areas; going tough on racism—racist employers, landlords and police above all; actively improving the representation of non-white French people in political parties, trade unions, the police (again), the school system... Admittedly, part of the last point is related to ideological mindsets, but much comes down to recruitment decisions and the creation of training facilities where they are needed.

In addition, a reader recommends three posts at Lenin's Tombhere, here, and here. We second the recommendation.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:07 AM | Get permalink



Monday, November 7, 2005

Playing politics with terrorism, Aussie government-style.

Here are some interesting items relating to Australia's anti-terrorism legislation. Let's see if we can connect some dots:
  • A press release from Prime Minister John Howard's office on November 2:
    Today the Government will introduce into the House of Representatives an urgent amendment to Australia's counter-terrorism legislation and seek the passage of the amendment through all stages tonight. The President of the Senate will recall the Senate for 2pm tomorrow. It is the Government's wish that the amendment be law as soon as possible.

    The Government has received specific intelligence and police information this week which gives cause for serious concern about a potential terrorist threat. The detail of this intelligence has been provided to the Leader of the Opposition and the Shadow Minister for Homeland Security.

    The Government is satisfied on the advice provided to it that the immediate passage of this bill would strengthen the capacity of law enforcement agencies to effectively respond to this threat.

  • From a World News Australia report on Nov. 2:
    The Australian Senate has rushed through amendments to anti-terrorism laws, a day after Prime Minister John Howard said he had received credible reports of a possible attack.

    Mr Howard said it was urgent the amendments, which make it easier for police to prosecute suspects, be passed because of the threat of an attack, which experts believe targeted the southern city of Melbourne.

  • From an article in The Age [Melbourne] on Nov. 4:
    Australians should not expect arrests within days just because urgent terror legislation was rushed through Parliament, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.

  • From a Reuters report on Nov. 7 [Nov. 6 in Europe and North America]:
    Australia's government is playing politics with anti-terrorism laws by unveiling plans to deploy troops in the event of an attack just days after it warned of an undisclosed terrorist threat, opposition parties said on Monday.

    They accused Prime Minister John Howard of scaremongering in a bid to divert attention from controversial labour reforms after the government said its urgent amendments to anti-terrorism laws last week may not result in any arrests.

  • From an AP story earlier today [Nov. 7]:
    Police in Australia arrested 17 terror suspects, including a prominent radical Muslim cleric, in a string of raids early Tuesday and said they had foiled a major terror attack.

    New South Wales Police Commissioner Ken Moroney said 400 officers were involved in raids in Sydney that captured six men while nine more suspects were picked up in the southern city of Melbourne.

    "I'm satisfied that we have disrupted what I would regard as the final stages of a large scale terrorist attack ... here in Australia," Moroney told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Even by the standards of the Dubya administration — which is a master at using terror threats to achieve political ends — the timing of today's arrests are, shall we say, convenient.

Thanks to Road to Surfdom for spotting a couple of the articles we linked to. All emphasis was added.

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:36 PM | Get permalink



Understanding the unrest in France.

We've been shying away from this story for the last week or so because all we'd have been able to offer would have been regurgitated wire service reports. With some stories, we have enough background knowledge that we can read between the lines of wire reports, but with this one, we just didn't feel that we knew enough to be able to sort out the facts from the propaganda.

However, we've found an excellent report on the French riots from Doug Ireland, a journalist who spent ten years in France and has a better knowledge of the story than most.

To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.

If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the  post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers (especially Moroccans, particularly favored in the auto industry) were favored by industrial employers as passive and unlikely to strike (in sharp contrast to the highly political Continental French working class and its militant, largely Communist-led unions) and cheaper to hire. In some industries, for this reason, literacy was a disqualification -- because an Arab worker who could read could educate himself about politics and become more susceptible to organization into a union. This government-and-industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom then saved up to bring their families to France from North Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the arrival of the Harkis.

The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence -- and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments -- the Harki tragedy is still an open wound for the Franco-Arab community.

France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités"  (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers, today encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.

Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent....

The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes , with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else.... a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair as the dream of integration failed. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques ... But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism. It is the anguished scream of a lost generation in search of an identity, children caught between two cultures and belonging to neither -- a rebellion of kids who, born in France and often speaking little Arabic, don't know the country where their parents were born, but who feel excuded, marginalized and invisible in the country in which they live

We recommend reading Ireland's whole piece; the situation in France will make much more sense to you afterwards.

Thanks to CJR Daily for the tip.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:19 PM | Get permalink



Sunday, November 6, 2005

Dirty campaigning.

There's a heaping helping of it going on in two US states, courtesy of the GOP.
  • In New Jersey, GOP gubernatorial candidate Douglas Forrester has been running a TV ad [WMV file] featuring the ex-wife of Democrat Jon Corzine. In that ad, Joanne Corzine says that her ex-husband has 'let his family down and would probably let New Jersey down, too.' That's a play on a previous Forrester ad, in which Forrester's wife says that her husband would 'never let New Jersey down.'

    Sadly, polls indicate that Forrester's low blows may be having the desired effect.

    More: Or then again, maybe not.

  • Fake Democratic voter guideIn Virginia, a rather official-looking 'Democrat and Progressive Voter Guide' has been turning up in mailboxes around the state. [Cover shown on right.] The guide purports to show voters which candidante for governor is actually the progressive, and compares the records of Democrat Tim Kaine [currently ahead in the polls] and independent candidate Russell Potts, a former Republican. The message of the guide is that real progressive voters should choose Potts.

    Funny thing is that the contact numbers for both Kaine and Potts are wrong. Even more telling is this legend next to the photo of Tim Kaine: 'Paid for and authorized by Virginians for Jerry Kilgore.' Can you guess what the name of the GOP's candidate for governor is?

    It's not yet clear whether this dirty trick is working for or against the GOP.

Via Philadelphia Inquirer, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, and MyDD.

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 PM | Get permalink



McCain vows to force Dubya to accept torture ban.

Currently in the US Congress, Senate and House conferees are deciding whether a measure barring torture and abuse of prisoners held by the US military will survive. That measure was added to a defense spending bill and passed by the Senate on a 90-9 vote. It's being strenuously opposed by Dubya's administration, who are trying to kill it altogether or add a ton of exceptions, such as VP Cheney's plan to exempt the CIA from the ban.

Even if Dubya's administration manages to evade the torture ban, that won't be the end of it. GOP senator John McCain say that he plans to add the anti-torture amendment to every important bill until the administration stops opposing it.

Speaking from the Senate floor, Mr. McCain said, "If necessary — and I sincerely hope it is not — I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. ... Let no one doubt our determination."

McCain's sponsorship of the amendment carries extra clout in the Congress because of his experiences while being held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese.

Via Toledo Blade and Seattle Times.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:47 PM | Get permalink



What's the news from Iraq?

As usual, Riverbend ferrets out how thing are really going:

Americans constantly tell me, "What do you think will happen if we pull out of Iraq — those same radicals you fear will take over." The reality is that most Iraqis don't like fundamentalists and only want stability — most Iraqis wouldn't stand for an Iran-influenced Iraq. The American military presence is working hand in hand with Badir, etc. because only together with Iran can they suppress anti-occupation Iraqis all over the country. If and when the Americans leave, their Puppets and militias will have to pack up and return to wherever they came from because without American protection and guidance they don't stand a chance.

We literally laugh when we hear the much subdued threats American politicians make towards Iran. The US can no longer afford to threaten Iran because they know that should the followers of Sadr, Iranian cleric Sistani and Badir's Brigade people rise up against the Americans, they'd have to be out of Iraq within a month. Iran can do what it wants — enrich uranium? Of course! If Tehran declared tomorrow that it was currently in negotiations for a nuclear bomb, Bush would have to don his fake pilot suit again, gush enthusiastically about the War on Terror and then threaten Syria some more.

Congratulations Americans — not only are the hardliner Iranian clerics running the show in Iran — they are also running the show in Iraq. This shift of power should have been obvious to the world when My-Loyalty-to-the-Highest-Bidder-Chalabi sold his allegiance to Iran last year. American and British sons and daughters and husbands and wives are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years.

What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?

Iraq has been the land of dreams for everyone except Iraqis — the Persian dream of a Shia controlled Islamic state modeled upon Iran and inclusive of the holy shrines in Najaf, the pan-Arab nationalist dream of a united Arab region with Iraq acting as its protective eastern border, the American dream of controlling the region by installing permanent bases and a Puppet government in one of its wealthiest countries, the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdish state financed by the oil wealth in Kirkuk...

The Puppets the Americans empowered are advocates of every dream except the Iraqi one: The dream of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen... the dream of a united, stable, prosperous Iraq which has, over the last two years, gone up in the smoke of car bombs, military raids and a foreign occupation.

You can read the rest of the post here.

Via Baghdad Burning.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:16 PM | Get permalink



Bits & pieces.

Stuff we've been looking at during another exciting Magpie Saturday night:
  • The NY Times' public editor sounds an alarm over how advertising is creeping into the paper's editorial content.

  • Air America logoAt WFMU's Beware of the Blog, The Professor has an excellent review of the current state of Air America Radio, focusing on what appears to be the imminent exit of Morning Sedition's Marc Maron. While we're not as much a fan of Maron and Morning Sedition as The Professor, our 20 years in the trenches of community and public radio leads us to most of the same conclusions he reaches: That Air America's management doesn't understand radio very well. Which is too bad for Air America. And, especially, too bad for Air America's listeners [including this one].

  • The Minneapolis Star Tribune looks at the effects of the 'Spanish flu' pandemic of 1918 in Minnesota.

    The Spanish flu arrived in Wells, a town of 1,755 not far from Albert Lea, with an unnamed soldier in September 1918, according to historical accounts. The soldier, on furlough from Camp Sheridan in Illinois, probably didn't know he was contagious. Within 48 hours, people all over town were falling ill. The soldier's fate is a mystery.

    In the Twin Cities, the deadly virus had yet to claim its first victim. People knew from news reports that a virulent influenza had struck the East Coast, mainly in crowded military camps.

    No one was prepared for what was about to happen here.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:58 AM | Get permalink



Has the FBI issued a national security letter on you?

If they have, you'll already know that you can't say a single word about it without risking prison. If they haven't, you're probably wondering what the hell we are talking about.

Briefly put, national security letters are vaguely like judicial warrants, in that they order a person or organization to surrender documents, credit card records, phone records, e-mail logs, and the like to the FBI. Where they differ from warrants, however, is that no judge has to authorize a national security letter — the permission of an FBI supervisor is enough. They're also different from warrants in that there's no review after the fact — neither Congress nor the courts can review national security letters. In fact, it's impossible for anyone to review how particular national security letters are used since the person, business, or organization that received that letter can't say anything about it. Ever.

We've looked at the threat that use of these letters poses to civil liberties before [see posts here, here, and here]. However, a story in today's Washington Post shows that this threat has mushroomed since the passage of the Patriot Act. Instead of the 300 or so letters that would have been used in the average pre-9/11 year, the FBI is now using more than 30,000 national security letters each year. To put it another way, for each national security letter that the FBI used before 9/11, it's now using 100 of them.

You might not think this is anything to worry about. After all, the FBI is just using all these national security letter to do surveillance of terror suspects or spies, right? Wrong. Under Dubya's administration, these letters have become a tool of FBI fishing expeditions into the records of average US residents. Despite all of this surveillance, however, neither the FBI nor Dubya administration officials have been able to identify a single instance in which the use of a national security letter helped the feds break up a terrorist plot.

What has happened, however, is that the amount of data that the feds are accumulating about US residents is growing astronomically:

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined....

Senior FBI officials acknowledged in interviews that the proliferation of national security letters results primarily from the bureau's new authority to collect intimate facts about people who are not suspected of any wrongdoing. Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

Are you comfortable with the FBI, other government agencies, and those 'appropriate private sector entities' knowing all this stuff about you? We certainly aren't.

There's a whole lot more about national security letters in the Post article. We enourage you to read it all.

You might also want to check out Jeralyn's post on this topic at ">TalkLeft. She does an admirable job of breaking down the complicated legal and legislative info in the Post article into chunks that even this magpie could understand.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink



Ooooooh, shiny!

The northern lights from space!


Northern lights from the International Space Station

[Photo: Don Pettit, ISS Expedition 6/NASA]

Since the International Space Station orbits at about the same height that many auroras appear, it sometimes goes over them and other times passes through them. The photo looks north over Quebec, with the northern lights appearing along the horizon. You can see both bands and curtains.

You can read more information about this photo and about the northern lights if you go here. A much bigger version of the image, with the perspective corrected, is here.

Via Astronomy Picture of the Day.

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



What's the worst job in science?

The current issue of Popular Science has their annual top-10 list of the very worst science jobs, including orangutan-pee collector, nuclear weapons scientist, and semen washer.

3. Kansas Biology Teacher
On the front lines of science's devolution

"The evolution debate is consuming almost everything we do," says Brad Williamson, a 30-year science veteran at suburban Olathe East High School and a past president of the National Association of Biology Teachers. "It's politicized the classroom. Parents will say their child can't be in class during any discussion of evolution, and students will say things like 'My grandfather wasn't a monkey!'"

First, a history lesson. In 1999 a group of religious fundamentalists won election to the Kansas State Board of Education and tried to introduce creationism into the state's classrooms. They wanted to delete references to radiocarbon dating, continental drift and the fossil record from the education standards. In 2001 more-temperate forces prevailed in elections, but the anti-evolutionists garnered a 6-4 majority again last November. This year Intelligent Design (ID) theory is their anti-evolution tool of choice.

At the heart of ID is the idea that certain elements of the natural world?the human eye, say?are "irreducibly complex" and have not and cannot be explained by evolutionary theory. Therefore, IDers say, they must be the work of an intelligent designer (that is, God).

The problem for teachers is that ID can't be tested using the scientific method, the system of making, testing and retesting hypotheses that is the bedrock of science. That's because underpinning ID is religious belief. In science class, Williamson says, "students have to trust that I'm just dealing with science."

Alas, for Kansas's educational reputation, the damage may be done. "We've heard anecdotally that our students are getting much more scrutiny at places like medical schools. I get calls from teachers in other states who say things like 'You rubes!'" Williamson says. "But this is happening across the country. It's not just Kansas anymore."

You can see the full list here.

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




Liar, liar, pants on fire!


NEWS HEADLINES

Mail & Guardian [S. Africa]
NEWS LINKS
BBC News
CBC News
Agence France Presse
Reuters
Associated Press
Aljazeera
Inter Press Service
Watching America
International Herald Tribune
Guardian (UK)
Independent (UK)
USA Today
NY Times (US)
Washington Post (US)
McClatchy Washington Bureau (US)
Boston Globe (US)
LA Times (US)
Globe & Mail (Canada)
Toronto Star (Canada)
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
AllAfrica.com
Mail & Guardian (South Africa)
Al-Ahram (Egypt)
Daily Star (Lebanon)
Haaretz (Israel)
Hindustan Times (India)
Japan Times (Japan)
Asia Times (Hong Kong)
EurasiaNet
New Scientist News
Paper Chase
OpenCongress

COMMENT & ANALYSIS
Molly Ivins
CJR Daily
Women's eNews
Raw Story
The Gadflyer
Working for Change
Common Dreams
AlterNet
Truthdig
Truthout
Salon
Democracy Now!
American Microphone
rabble
The Revealer
Current
Editor & Publisher
Economic Policy Institute
Center for American Progress
The Memory Hole


Irish-American fiddler Liz Carroll

IRISH MUSIC
Céilí House (RTE Radio)
TheSession.org
The Irish Fiddle
Fiddler Magazine
Concertina.net
Concertina Library
A Guide to the Irish Flute
Chiff & Fipple
Irtrad-l Archives
Ceolas
Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann
BBC Virtual Session
JC's ABC Tune Finder

SHINY THINGS
alt.portland
Propaganda Remix Project
Ask a Ninja
grow-a-brain
Boiling Point
Bruno
Cat and Girl
Dykes to Watch Out For
Library of Congress
American Heritage Dictionary
Dictonary of Newfoundland English
American's Guide to Canada
Digital History of the San Fernando Valley
MetaFilter
Blithe House Quarterly
Astronomy Pic of the Day
Earth Science Picture of the Day
Asia Grace
Gaelic Curse Engine
Old Dinosaur Books



ARCHIVES