november 2005 / greg goebel
* Entries include: McCain & Wilkerson blast Bush II Administration, return of aggressor squadrons, airlines on the upswing, Ahmadinejad blasts Israel, antibiotic-resistant staph, high gas prices, Bill Buckley turns 80, ARAMCO dominates oil producers, Japan likes robots, Sony copy protection fiasco, France and US get along, peanut butter for the developing world, arranged marriages online, terrorist finance tracking fiasco, machinima videos, Wolfram & Hart online, terrorist attacks in Jordan, virtual properties, intelligent design controversy, spam blogs, Charity Navigator, Afghan opium, Transdimensional, global car industry, CIA extraordinary rendition, H5N1 flu precautions, my own blog.
* MAD AS HELL: After Senator John McCain's measured but unambiguous criticisms of the Bush II Administration's policy on harsh interrogations of al-Qaeda prisoners and their indefinite detention without trial, an official who had been a member of the administration has come forth with criticisms along the same lines, but far less measured.
According to an AP report, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who had been chief of staff for Colin Powell, secretary of state in the administration's first term, had scathing comments about administration officials who had pushed the get-tough policy -- Colonel Wilkerson identifying them as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, and their followers. Colonel Wilkerson said that he had to believe Mr. Cheney thought he was doing the right thing, since "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot, or a nefarious bastard." When Colonel Wilkerson was asked by a BBC reporter if Mr. Cheney could be accused of war crimes, he replied: "That's an interesting question."
Colonel Wilkerson assessed the attitude of the get-tough faction as "that the President of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the President of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases." Those opposed to the new order included Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Condi Rice, plus others in the state department and uniformed military. Colonel Wilkerson reported that Secretary Powell loudly objected to the policy, once roaring into a phone at Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: "Donald, don't you understand what you are doing to our image?!"
Colonel Wilkerson claimed that President Bush did try to figure out a reasonable compromise, agreeing that limits were needed but asserting that the war against terrorism couldn't work by the old rules. A policy might have been established that could stand up to public scrutiny, but the message was ambiguous and the attempts to impose bounds broke down drastically in the field.
* ED: This is the sort of report that is amusing -- "nefarious bastard"!? -- but it's hard to know how seriously to take it. Colonel Wilkerson is being hotheaded, and that undermines his credibility. I have to think of this report as basically "tabloid politics".
Still, I find it only too easy to believe that the administration got into trouble by trying to finesse things. Anyone who's ever been in the military knows what a blunt instrument it is, and knows it can't ever be anything else: "We break things and kill people." That's not a slam, that's what the military's trained and equipped to do. It was like trying to do surgery with an axe instead of a scalpel. Most of the brass knew that; knew how much trouble it would cause to think otherwise; and knew they might well end up holding the bag when things went south.
Colonel Wilkerson also went on to criticise the weak rationale for the invasion of Iraq. As far as I'm concerned, that's water under the bridge. The rationale was provably weak by the evidence after the fact and there is no real dispute over it any longer. The only question was whether the administration was deceitful or foolish, and the distinction means little to me. People can easily convince themselves of things that aren't true, and in such cases I'm not sure they get much credit just for being sincere.
I can still cut the administration some slack. If anyone had tried to claim even in the Clinton Administration that Saddam Hussein didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam was simply putting up a front to bluff the rest of the world as an intimidation tactic, people would have laughed the notion off as crackpottery. Anybody who was following America's misadventures in Iraq during the 1990s couldn't help but think, at least on occasion, that somebody needed to do something about Saddam Hussein. The PBS FRONTLINE show "The Survival of Saddam" from 2002 provides a useful reminder.
The Bush II Administration did do something about Saddam, something drastic. The question remains open for the present as to whether the cure was worse than the disease, but the issue of how we got into the jam no longer seems particularly relevant. It seems more important to figure out how to get out of the jam.
* I always find it interesting to hear the things Colin Powell says when he's not under the spotlight. Mr. Powell is a model of diplomacy when he needs to be, but the Regular Army in him is always just under the surface. I look at him and think: "N-n-n-nice doggy!" I do have to respect the way he managed to rise to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the face of deeply entrenched prejudice ... he was ROTC, not West Point. That is not completely a joke, either.
* AGGRESSORS RETURN: One of the "glamour" jobs in the business of military flying is the role of playing "aggressor" to train other fighter pilots; the US Navy's "Top Gun" program has a Hollywood chic to it. However, since the end of the Cold War, aggressor squadrons have suffered from cutbacks, being reduced to bare-bones operations.
According to an AVIATION WEEK article ("Bandits Are Back" by William B. Scott, 31 October 2005), this downward trend is now being reversed. The US Air Force's (USAF) only aggressor unit, the "64th Aggressor Squadron" at Nellis AFB in Nevada, is now being brought up to full strength with the planned arrival of F-15 Eagle fighters to complement the F-16 Viper machines already serving with the 64th AS. The F-15s will be given aggressor blue / brown disruptive camouflage colors, fitted with data and tracking pods, and the pilots will be trained in air tactics used by air arms of potential adversaries.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the USAF had a total of four aggressor squadrons -- one in the Philippines, one in the UK, and two at Nellis. In the 1990s, this capability shrank to a total of seven F-16s associated with the Red Flag organization at Nellis, given the undistinguished name of the "Adversary Tactics Division". Nobody was too happy about the decline of aggressor training -- Vietnam had proven that it was an essential, not a luxury -- and so in 2003 the 64th AS was reactivated and given five more F-16s to bring the total strength up to twelve aicraft. The 64th AS now provides support to the F/A-22 Raptor fighter development program, the annual Red Flag exercise in Nevada, the annual Maple Flag exercise in Canada, and a long list of other training exercises.
The addition of eight F-15s in 2006 will bring the 64th AS up to full squadron strength, 20 aircraft. In two years' time, the squadron will be able to go on "road shows" to take training to USAF fighter squadrons around the world. Although there has been consideration of using F/A-18s or MiG-29s in the aggressor role, since it is useful for pilots to be trained against aircraft that have unfamiliar performance characteristics, the cost of maintaining aircraft not otherwise in the inventory has kept this from happening.
Traditionally, USAF aggressors have emulated Soviet tactics, the pilots even wearing Soviet uniforms. With the fall of the USSR, the Soviet theatrics have disappeared, but the 64th AS still does try to duplicate Soviet-style air tactics. However, the world is a more complicated place now. During the Cope India exercise in 2004, USAF pilots found that Indian pilots in Su-27s and MiG-29s had a few surprises up their sleeves. Aggressor pilots have to expand their role to cover a wider range of possibilities. Nellis has introduced an "Adversary Tactics Group (ATG)" that includes the 64th AS, an intelligence squadron, and other elements to plan out a training program.
* MCCAIN SPEAKS: Arizona Republican Senator John McCain took his case against the Bush II Adminstration's policy on treatment of prisoners public in the 21 November 2005 issue of NEWSWEEK. The senator was careful to be tactful:
BEGIN QUOTE:
It is also quite fair to attribute the administration's position ... to the president and vice president's appropriate concern for acquiring actionable intelligence that could prevent attacks on our soldiers or our allies or the American people. And it is quite unfair to assume some nefarious purpose informs their intentions. They bear the greatest responsibilityfor the security of American lives and interests. I understand and respect their motives just as I admire the seriousness and patriotism of their resolve.
But I do, respectfully, take issue with the position that the demands of this war require us to accord a lower station to the moral imperatives that should govern our conduct in war and peace when they come in conflict with the unyielding inhumanity of our vicious enemy.
END QUOTE
The senator recalled that during his interrogations when he was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, he became fairly skilled at making up answers to keep his torturers happy. While acknowledging that al-Qaeda has no respect for any sort of rules, he went on to observe that undermining the credibility of the Geneva Convention could affect the treatment of American soldiers taken prisoner in other conflicts. Most importantly, he insisted that: "Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas ... the mistreatment of prisoners harms us more than our enemies."
Senator McCain detailed some of the interrogation techniques that have been allowed under current policy, for instance "waterboarding", in which prisoners are doused with water to make them feel they are being drowned. The senator went on to say that if he had a choice between a beating and mock execution, he'd take a beating any time -- a mock execution is something that is never forgotten, and it is torture, pure and simple. The attempts to establish a "torture lite" that is legally permissible are just as much a walk across the bounds as hot irons and the rack.
The senator's basic thrust was that if America is a nation based on certain values, those values cannot be compromised even in an emergency without fundamentally undercutting the vital conviction that we are truly working for a just and noble cause. If we're not, then we're no better than our enemies.
* NEWSWEEK backed up the senator's essay with a study of the torture issue. CIA officials are divided on the effectiveness of information obtained by tough interrogations, some claiming useful intelligence has been obtained, others deriding the idea. Certainly, there appears to be considerable uneasiness over harsh treatment of prisoners in the CIA and the uniformed military. The US public also appears divided on the issue. The international political impact, not merely of torture but of indefinitely holding suspects without trial, is not so ambiguous; Senator McCain commented: "It's killing us."
The administration has always known they were walking a fine line, allowing some interrogation techniques and disallowing others, with the standards adjusted over time. The biggest problem was that this careful exercise was accompanied by a push down the chain of command to get intelligence, and out in the field the line inevitably gets much blurrier and nowhere near as careful. Senator McCain became aware of the issue from troops who spoke out, and decided to push in Congress to stop the prisoner abuse.
Other countries have dealt with the torture issue. After ten Palestinian prisoners died in custody, the Israeli High Court banned the use of torture in 1999. However, hard interrogation techniques can be authorized by the authorities there if a clear emergency can be identified, though interrogators will be liable to prosecution if they are found to have trumped up their case. Senator McCain acknowledges that in certain situations -- "ticking time bombs" -- extraordinary measures could be authorized: "You do what you have to do, but you take responsibility for it. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War, and FDR violated the Neutrality Acts before World War II."
There is apparently a split in the administration on the issue. Secretary of State Condi Rice, no doubt tired of getting "torture" thrown in her face on her international travels, has been encouraging the president to take a firm stand against it. She is backed up by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England; England's boss, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, appears to be straddling the fence. The hawks on the matter are believed to be Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington.
The administration currently insists that it doesn't condone torture, but the history of the last few years and the attempts to legally tapdance around the issue over that time have badly muddied matters. Senator McCain would like the administration to establish a completely unambiguous policy on the treatment of prisoners. The president is not oblivious: Mr. Bush has spoken with Senator McCain about the possibilities for a compromise. For the moment, the matter remains unresolved.
* FRIENDLY SKIES? The airline industry may not seem like a picture of robust health, burdened with high fuel costs and bankruptcy proceedings, but THE ECONOMIST ("Lining Up For Profits", 12 November 2005) offers a contrarian view: the world's airlines are headed for boom times.
The hidden story behind all the bad news is that hard times have resulted in much more efficient airline companies, which are now poised to take advantage of a projected rise in passengers. The airlines are indeed buying new aircraft: both Boeing, with its new 787 Dreamliner, and arch-rival Airbus, with its A380 super-jumbo and smaller A350, have their order books so full that it's been the biggest year for airliner purchases ever.
In the meantime, deregulation of the airline industry worldwide has resulted in mini-booms of regional airlines -- in India, China, even in Africa. The Emirates airline of tiny Dubai is becoming not merely a regional but a world power. European airlines are consolidating -- most significantly seen in the recent merger of Air France and KLM -- to become more profitable and to exploit the "new frontier" of Eastern Europe, where citizens are travelling more and more.
As far as the dismal news about the US carriers goes, it's not so bad as it seems. United Airlines recently reported a loss of $1.8 million USD, but as it turns out this is basically just accounting paperwork, preparatory to emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings early next year. Other US airlines are also benefiting from Chapter 11, using the process to shed excess capacity and return to profitability. It's admittedly a nasty thing to go through, and the nastiness is being passed down the pyramid: Northwest has threatened to outsource inflight service if their own employees don't agree to cuts, and Delta has similarly put the screws to its pilots.
The new airliners will also improve profitability. While Airbus is getting good orders for their A380 super-jumbo, with Emirates leading the list, the real action appears to be between the Boeing 787 and Airbus A350. Boeing, it seems, was right to deemphasize the super-jumbo market, instead focusing on a large-capacity airliner with extended range that could allow passengers to fly directly to their destination without a layover in a primary hub. Airbus is now scrambling to get their comparable A350 in the air and catch up with Boeing's lead. Both jetliners not only offer more economical operation, they feature modern entertainment systems to keep passengers happy. After all, such flashy gadgetry is basically a one-time up-front cost and can compensate for the trimming back of other services.
Boeing, incidentally, is also hedging bets in the super-jumbo market by introducing a new Boeing 747 variant, the "747-8", featuring 787 engines and avionics, a new wing, and a fuselage stretch to allow seating of 450 passengers, compared to the A380's 550.
The evolution of the airlines in the first years of the 21st century hasn't been a pretty sight, but things may well be looking up. Airlines seemed poised to make good profits, and passengers will be able to travel the world on competitive fares.
* ANGRY IN IRAN: On 26 October 2005, the new hard-line president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, issued a fiery speech that blasted American imperialism (no real news there) and (more significantly) called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." The response was widespread condemnation, even by Palestinian Authority officials, but Mr. Ahmadinejad seemed unmoved, saying that had always been one of the goals of the revolutionary Iranian state.
According to an ECONOMIST article ("Is The New President Really An Exterminator?", 5 November 2005), not only did the speech seem an exercise in emotion at the expense of common sense, it also displayed the background muddle of Iranian policy. Mr. Ahmadinejad was obviously surprised at stirring up a hornet's nest with his speech -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested quietly that he might have to "do something" about Iran -- and the exercise ended up making the Iranian president appear simply naive instead of strong.
He could have hardly handed anything more useful to the coalition of Western nations -- led by the US, the UK, France, and Germany -- who are now beginning to push for United Nations sanctions in the against Iran for the country's nuclear program. Up to this time, American efforts to "contain" Iran have seemed heavy-handed and bullying, but as of late the Americans have been playing the "multilateral diplomacy" card much more skillfully, and Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks were a gift to the Bush II Administration. There was no need to label the Iranian government as run by loose cannons if Iranian officials got up in public and loudly proclaimed that was exactly what they were. Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks also resulted in a sharp decline on the Teheran stockmarket exchange, with an Iranian economist suggesting that there was a difference between "running a country" and "pursuing transformative ideals".
Iran's government has an unusual, possibly unique structure, being split in halves. One half is controlled by unelected clerics, who provide ideological direction and make high-level decisions; the other is an elected administration that carries out policy and takes care of low-level matters.
The government's policies seem to be torn between two poles, one of revolutionary zeal, the other of pragmatism, leading to a bit of inescapable muddle. In the mid-1980s, even while Iran was backing the Hizbollah group in southern Lebanon to fight the Israelis, Teheran was quietly dealing with Tel Aviv to run the infamous arms-for-hostages deal. There seems to be some sympathy in Iranian government factions with the "two-state solution" in Israel, but officially the regime praises Palestinian suicide bombers, and one Iranian government faction tried to send a shipload of arms to the Palestinians in 2002, only to have it intercepted by Israeli forces.
That ambiguity makes Iran's nuclear ambitions a troubling issue. The US Central Intelligence Agency doesn't believe that Iran will have a nuclear capability for ten years or so; the main motivation for acquiring the Bomb seems likely to be protection from the US and not an attack on Israel. The Israelis already have the Bomb, many of them in fact, and a better ability to deliver such weapons: Iran could not destroy Tel Aviv without Teheran being smashed in turn, and that just for a warm-up.
Mr. Ahmadinejad's remarks have strengthened the hand of outsiders who want to put a leash on Iran's nuclear program. He is unrepentent, continuing to blast Islamic states that he sees as too cozy with the West, and even trying to impose self-defeating "sanctions" on trading partners who have supported the effort to restrain the Iranian nuclear program. Iranian foreign policy doesn't seem to flying much better in other sectors, either. Syria, a close ally, is being hounded mercilessly for interference in Lebanon; Sunni Arab states, particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia, are critical of Teheran's involvement with Iraq's Shias; and the Iranians seem to have mixed motives for helping the Shias as well, since Teheran perceives -- no doubt rightly -- that once the US and Britain get themselves out of the Iraq briar patch, they will be free to turn more unwanted attention on Iran.
By an irony, it appears that the clerical half of the Iranian government is uneasy at Mr. Ahmadinejad's grandstanding, finding it extreme and imprudent. Iran's enemies may well see Mr. Ahmadinejad as the perfect Iranian leader: he gives them a convenient target to blast while he simultaneously weakens the country's position. What the clerics will do next remains anyone's guess.
* MEAN STAPH: When antibiotic drugs were introduced in the middle of the last century, they provided a miraculous defense against bacterial infections that scored a major win of medical science over disease. However, even at the time researchers knew that bacteria were adaptable and that the antibiotics wouldn't work forever.
By the 1990s, the decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics was becoming obvious, the most prominent case being the rise of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. "Staph" is a fairly common bacteria that can be often found harmlessly taking residence on human skin, but it likes to infect the nasal passages and can turn mean once it gets inside the body, causing anything from acne to death by massive toxic shock. With the rise of antibiotic resistance, fears have grown that it won't be too long until hospitals return to their condition of a century ago and become the least healthy place for a sick person to be.
According to an ECONOMIST article ("The Struggle Against Superbugs", 5 November 2005), the real threat, a methicillin-resistant staph (MRSA) strain, became a political issue in British elections, thrown up as a banner of the filthy state of British hospitals. The rhetoric was overblown, but MRSA has been killing an increasing number of Britons since the early 1990s, and it's worse in some other places. Countries like China and Japan have failed to take MRSA seriously and are suffering accordingly; in contrast, places like Finland and the Netherlands have worked hard to deal with MRSA, making sure that hospitals are kept thoroughly disinfected and isolating those patients infected with the bug, keeping a lid on the spread of the bug.
Development of new antibiotics is not even coming close to keeping pace with the threat. Work on antibiotics is reaching diminishing returns, with the ability to produce new antibiotics outmatched by the ability of bacteria to adapt, and pharmaceutical companies don't have a strong financial incentive to push harder. Developing and in particular qualifying drugs is an expensive process. Pharmaceutical companies find it much more profitable to produce drugs for chronic conditions: patients need to take them over a long period of time, meaning they return steady revenue, and the drugs generally remain effective indefinitely.
A more promising approach is development of a vaccine against MRSA, with at least two development efforts in the works. The body's immune system, once activated, is far more effective at suppressing pathogens than antibiotics, and pathogens find it more difficult to adapt to defeat the body's defenses. A vaccine could be administered to patients going into a hospital, or patients who are undergoing continuing procedures such as kidney dialysis that leave them at high risk of infection. However, developing a vaccine is not trivial either, and for the moment MRSA remains a real threat.
* In this context, I recall articles on the use of "bacteriophages", or viruses that infect bacteria, as an anti-bacterial medication in the USSR and modern Russia. The idea of breeding bacteriophages to attack specific strains of bacteria attracted a lot of interest before World War II, but difficulties with getting the scheme to work and the rise of antibiotics led the West to abandon the idea.
The USSR did not, and in fact bacteriophage treatments were fairly common behind the Iron Curtain. It would seem like an elegant idea: get a resistant strain of a bacteria, breed a new bacteriophage to kill it. Since bacteriophages are selectively "engineered" to attack bacteria and not mammalian cells, it would seem like an approach with few side effects or potential hazards. There have been questions about the effectiveness of bacteriophage treatments, but given that old antibiotics are becoming more ineffectual and few researchers are trying to make new ones, it is puzzling that bacteriophage therapy isn't being more seriously considered.
* GAS PAIN: After saying I was relieved to see gas prices dropping, I knew in the back of my mind that since high gas taxes in Europe keep the price of fuel at least twice as high as it is stateside, I might get some sniping about it.
Sigh, I did. The comment was simply to note that gas prices have dropped dramatically over the last month after a period of even more dramatic rise. I replied to one correspondent from the UK that I was perfectly aware that gas prices are higher elsewhere; I passed back for his consideration the facts that mass transit is common in Europe but only found in large urban areas in the US, and that when I drive to visit my parents twice a year, the trip is 1,600 kilometers one way.
It is also an illumination to Europeans when I tell them that I can make the one-way trip in one day. The speed limit is high and it's all four-lane blacktop from Loveland to Spokane, with not a single traffic light, or for that fact any large cities. The emptiness of the US mountain states is likely hard for Europeans to imagine; the state of Wyoming is half the size of France, has a population of about a half million people, and apparently the population's been in decline for the past few years.
I suspect that cattle outnumber people there. There was once a sign on the Wyoming-Colorado border that read: WYOMING -- LIKE NO PLACE ON EARTH! I always thought when I saw it: "Yep, this is about as much like noplace on Earth as I can imagine." They eventually changed the sign; possibly the joke was too obvious. I think it's now: WYOMING -- A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE! ("Please, somebody move here!")
Oh well, at least somebody's reading the blog. It gets a lot of traffic, but I was suspecting that it was people seeing my aviation writeups and thinking the blog was about aircraft -- to be disappointed when they found out it only infrequently mentions flying machines. I keep telling people that in terms of total amount of text, the aircraft writeups do not represent a majority of the material on the site. Most of the aircraft documents are one chapter; the Civil War history has 89 chapters. Now if I could just get somebody to read the damn thing ...
* SAINT BILL: An essay in THE ECONOMIST ("St. Bill Of The Right") celebrated William F. Buckley's 80th birthday by showing how Mr. Buckley managed to create a conservative movement that is now the law of the land. Fifty years ago, when Mr. Buckley founded THE NATIONAL REVIEW, America was thoroughly middle-of-the-road, and the only inhabitants of the land of right-of-center were John Birchers and worse.
Bill Buckley established a no-compromise conservative creed based on free markets, traditional values, and anti-Communism that rejected the rantings of extremists for an Ivy League intellectualism. The idea of a conservative intellectual might have seen completely contrary in 1955, and it still is in most universities, where outnumbered conservative faculty complain of being harassed by their colleagues. In the corridors of power, however, conservative intellectuals have put their liberal counterparts thoroughly on the defensive.
It is unclear if Mr. Buckley is entirely happy with the way things have turned out, however. He pitched his message in an urbane, witty, articulate style -- like him or not, he was unarguably polished and shiny -- but in the present day, the commentaries of the Right are dominated by shrill demagogues who are about as articulate and credible as barking dogs. Conservative intellectuals once were noncomformists trying to make their voices heard in the wilderness. Now the people setting the obnoxious tone of the debate are as famous as rock stars, and making about as much money with their book contracts and speaking tours.
To be sure, the commentaries of the Left have been reduced to the same sorry state -- Ann Coulter and Michael Moore would make the ideal couple -- but it is hard to think of someone as upper-crust as Mr. Buckley taking much pleasure in the surly diatribes of conservative low-brows, the very sort of people that he began his career attempting to transcend. Worse, although it must be satisfying to Mr. Buckley to see conservatism triumphant in Washington DC, it can't be so satisfying to see how success has tarnished the movement. Conservative politicians are now suffering through their own ethics scandals; possibly there is less there than meets the eye, but there is no hiding the way the current regime has been pushing pork-barrel bills and busting budgets as if deficits didn't matter. Will a new Mr. Buckley come forward to get conservatism back on the straight, right, and narrow?
* BIG ARAMCO: I just refilled by car after a month, and was relieved to find prices had dropped from over $2.75 a gallon to $2.10. I don't mind handing over a $20 bill to fill my little car, but more than that was uncomfortable.
At the height of the gas crunch, Washington DC politicians were grilling the bosses of Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco over charges of price-gouging. According to THE ECONOMIST ("The World's Number One", 12 November 2005), the politicians were probably barking up the wrong tree. It is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that controls oil prices, and OPEC is dominated by Saudi Arabia's Arab-American Oil Company (ARAMCO). ARAMCO pumps about 11 million barrels of oil per day (MBPD), making the company about 20 times bigger a producer as Exxon Mobil. In comparison to ARAMCO, Iraq and Venezuela pump 3 MBPD.
ARAMCO has now announced a $50 billion USD plan to raise production to 12.5 MBPD by 2009. Some skeptics have argued that the Saudi reserves are going to run dry much faster than ARAMCO estimates, but the International Energy Agency (IEA) just released a report that claims ARAMCO could be pumping 18 MPD by 2030. It does appear that there will be plenty of oil for the near and mid term futures; however, even that optimistic view includes the unpleasant reality that the world will continue to become increasingly dependent on Middle-Eastern oil.
* ROBOT NIPPON: A BBC WORLD Online article discussed the optimism of Japanese designers of personal robots for the future of their products. Attempts to sell household robots haven't really taken off to this time, since the machines never really amounted to much more than elaborate toys. However, with feature sets growing all the time, they're starting to get to the point where they seem useful.
Interactive household robots could prove popular with the elderly in Japan, particularly for widows or widowers who find having an animated presence around the house comforting, even if it's not any more aware than a toaster. It's not just because the Japanese tend to be unusually gadget-happy, either: the Japanese Shinto faith is animistic, and by that standard it's not a fantasy to attribute a spirit to something made of plastic and integrated circuits. In Shinto, even the rocks have spirits. Japan's population is graying and there could be a big market for robot companions.
As far as usefulness goes, it's less accurate to think of a personal robot as a mechanical servant than it is to think of it as a mobile computer and entertainment station. It won't be able to mow the law or dust the shelves or cook dinner, but it will be able to stream music, send messages or emergency alarms via wireless, provide reminders, and relay video from a built-in camera. Imagine having a mobile phone with a video display, and calling up a robot to go check and see if a door was left unlocked.
For the moment, personal robots are still expensive toys, but the technology is advancing rapidly and Japanese roboticists believe that it won't be too long in the future before they find the right mix of price and capability to make personal robots more than worth the price. When they do, Japanese will be the first to buy them. As a Japanese comedian put it: "We Japanese are not scared of robots, because we do not strongly distinguish between them and people."
* SONY STUMBLES: As summarized in an AP release, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is still smarting over the company's attempt to implement the XCP copy-protection scheme on their audio CD disks, which installed a resident agent on a user's PC to prevent an audio CD from being copied more than three times. The scheme involved reporting copies back to Sony and was dubbed "spyware" by the critics, raising a storm of protest, particularly since XCP could be used by writers of viruses and other malicious software to penetrate computer security.
Sony was forced to withdraw XCP after printing 4.7 million CDs and selling 2.1 million of them. A CD recall campaign was implemented. Sony then compounded the mistake by distributing an XCP removal tool that opened more security holes in users' PCs.
The whole thing was an expensive, hideous embarrassment to Sony that, as some commentators put it, set back audio protection technology for years. Critics of copy protection schemes are gloating, one saying that the record labels are "letting their lawyers make technical decisions ... lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra."
The interesting thing about this whole mad fire drill is that it brings back memories of the late 1980s and early 1990s or so, when software vendors were tinkering with copy-protection schemes. I recall that installing a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was a pain, and some software actually required hardware keys to work. The end result of all this activity was that it was more bother to everyone than it was worth, and mainstream software dropped copy protection.
* BON AMIS: According to US NEWS & WORLD REPORT, ("Bad Vibes? How Passe", 14 November 2005), both the US and France are making earnest efforts at fence-mending after a bout of chilly relations over the US invasion of Iraq. The fact of the matter was that hostility didn't buy either side very much, and they had many things on which they could cooperate to mutual benefit. As one American foreign policy observer put it: "Both sides looked over the precipice, and they didn't like what they saw."
George Bush and Jacques Chirac took the lead with a cordial dinner in Brussels in February. At a lower level, US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is now meeting regularly with his French opposite number, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne. The meetings actually began when Secretary of State Condi Rice was National Security Adviser, and she still pays courtesy calls to Gourdault-Montagne when he's in DC. At the bottom of the pyramid, cooperation between US and French forces in Afghanistan is said to be splendid, and the French have been sharing intelligence from their MidEast spy networks with the US.
One high-profile bit of evidence of the thaw was a joint front between France, the US, and the UK on a UN declaration to push Syria for more cooperation into an investigation into the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister. The French, who had once been the colonial masters of Syria and Lebanon, took the lead on the initiative. The Bush II administration is particularly keen on US-European cooperation in dealing with Iran's nuclear program and France is seen as one of the key players in the exercise.
* ED: Hopefully, the bouts of French-bashing that have been going around here for the last few years will fade out to the noise level. OK, I will admit that I did laugh at some of the jokes, but still -- the idea that just because US and French leadership had a quarrel I was then supposed to have a personal grudge against every last French man, woman, and child was a bit rich.
It would have seemed like a waste of effort at the very least. I have enough grudges against people I know personally to not want to bother with animosity towards people I don't. Besides, one French site linked to mine with the caption: INDISPENSIBLE! I tell you, if forgiveness points were needed, that would buy a lot of them.
* PLUMPY'NUT: According to an ECONOMIST article ("The Wonders Of Plumpy'Nut", 5 November 2005), famed French cuisine has scored an international hit with a new recipe for ... peanut butter.
The concoction, known under the cutesy name of "Plumpy'Nut", was invented in 1998. It consists of peanut paste mixed with milk powder, plus vitamins and other necessary nutritional supplements, provided in a handy foil packet. This mixture may not sound like something off the menu of a high-class Parisian restaurant, but it is ideal for feeding malnourished children in the back of beyond. It is not only effective -- starved children can rapidly grow healthy on a diet of nothing but Plumpy'Nut -- but also cheap, with a monthly ration for a child running at only about $20 USD, a tenth of what alternatives cost.
Plumpy'Nut was first used in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003 and is being currently used on a large scale by the Medicins sans Frontiers aid group in Niger. The paste has the consistency of mashed potatoes, meaning that toothless and weak infants don't have to struggle to eat it. Peanuts are a common crop in Africa, ensuring there is little resistance to the taste, which is strong enough to cover up the unpleasant taste of the vitamins and minerals.
Just out of curiosity, I'll have to see if I can order a packet of Plumpy'Nut over the Net. I once wrote up some notes on MRE rations, and after doing so I picked up a civilianized MRE -- it's illegal to sell military MREs commercially but they can be re-packaged with civilian labelling. It was not my idea of a treat.
* According to an AP report, the era of TV for mobile handhelds has just arrived. In October Apple Computer signed a deal with Disney to make TV programs like LOST or DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES available for download to IPod handheld video players at $1.99 USD a pop. Three weeks after the website went online, a million videos had been downloaded.
There were fears that the Ipod downloads might reduce the broadcast audience for hit shows, but nobody's noticed any change in the viewing audience. Some suspect that most of the downloads are by people who missed an episode. Other outfits are jumping in; for example, NBC is offering a replay of Nightly News online; Comedy Central is showcasing hit comedians online; and AOL is preparing to make old TV programs available online as well. Internet TV is a bit player and stands to stay that way for the immediate future, but everyone involved is intrigued and considering the possibilities.
* A BBC WORLD report displayed the first steps in implementation of an early-warning network in the Indian Ocean to provide defense against tsunamis, like the one that devastated coastal regions of southeast Asia late in 2004.
The work is being performed by a collaboration between a German research organization and the Indonesian government. A series of sensors is being laid on the ocean floor near the faultline that is the source of tsunamis in the region, with the sensors reporting to buoys on the surfcae. The sensors will monitor changes in water pressure, with the buoys tracking surface conditions and relaying all the data to a central station by satellite communications link.
The sensors normally only take readings every 15 minutes -- presumably to conserve battery power -- but will take readings every 15 seconds when an anomaly is detected. A network of sirens will be implemented on shore to alert communities when a tsunami is coming; more informal email and cellphone networks are being used in the short term.
* Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur who posted the $10 million USD "Ansari X-Prize" for the first commercial spaceflight, is now promoting another space-related competition, the "Rocket Racing League (RRL)". The RRL will perform pylon races with rocket-powered aircraft; although this is not exactly a practical application, the idea is to encourage innovation in rocket propulsion systems. XCOR Corporation of Mojave, California, is now working on a rocket racer.
* ONLINE MARRIAGE: An ECONOMIST article ("Made For Each Other", 22 October 2005), says that one of the signs of the New Digital India is a popular website named "Bharatmatrimony.com", which is used for brokering arranged marriages. Details of candidates are logged in a database, and those looking for a suitable mate for son or daughter can search for a match to their criteria. Although only a small portion of the population of India has Internet access, Bharatmatrimony.com has millions of users. There is the problem of fraud, but the company is bringing up a verification service to validate database entries.
I've always been curious about arranged marriages. From a Western point of view it seems like a preposterous idea, but given that the Western approach to marriages isn't noted for its high rate of effectiveness, I keep wondering if arranged marriages work any worse. From what I've heard, arranged marriages are not always a case of a couple being thrown together sight unseen, with candidate matches lined up on the basis of suitability and then tested a bit to see if there's obvious incompatibilities before committing to marriage. Seems sensible enough to me, but I would think it's only workable in a culture where social structures are stronger than they are here.
I recall a quote from Samuel Johnson, in which his foil Boswell asked if Johnson didn't believe that some couples were made for each other. Johnson scoffed, replying: "I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter." In another exchange, Boswell asked: "Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy, as with any one woman in particular?" Johnson replied: "Aye, Sir, fifty thousand."
Whilst hunting for these Doctor Johnson quotes on Google I found another that I hadn't heard before: "I hate mankind, for I think myself to be one of them, and I know how bad I am." I laughed. That's stronger than I would put it: I don't hate people in general, but I'm not easily impressed by them either -- and I do know how bad I am.
* IT'S NOT WORKING: An article in THE ECONOMIST ("Looking In The Wrong Places", 22 October 2005) had critical observations on regulations intended to track terrorist finances.
At the outset of the American-led "global war on terror" that was declared after the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the US in 2001, one of the main goals of the effort, as stated by American President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was to impose controls and monitoring in the world financial system, to choke off terrorist funding. Four years on, the general reaction of those involved in this particular effort are asking: "Tell me again why are we doing this?" -- and suggesting that we might make better use of our resources to fight terrorism in other ways.
The effort to zero in on terrorist finances required banks to keep tighter records and identify suspicious transactions. America drove the new rules, and they didn't just apply to US banks: foreign banks that didn't follow the rules were subject to strong sanctions as well. The commercial banking sector has never been all that enthusiastic about tighter controls since banks had to bear the costs of exercise, with little or no government assistance. Customers are also getting frustrated with mounting government-mandated red tape at banks. Some people are happy with things, particularly software vendors who produce programs to scan through lists of bank accounts and look for anomalies, but the banks are finally working up the nerve to complain.
The answer to complaints about the overhead is that it is the price to pay for fighting terrorism. The problem with that response is that there is little evidence that the effort is getting useful results. Al-Qaeda operations are home-grown and financed on the cheap, with the cost of the 11 March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, which killed almost 200 people, estimated at a mere $15,000 USD. With such relatively small sums changing hands, it is nearly impossible to pick up the "signal" of a terrorist attack from the "noise" of people, say, buying new cars. To the extent that banks have any capability to spot terrorist transactions, the terrorists are becoming stealthier, for example simply using more cash.
There has been much fuss about the informal financial-transfer structures used in underdeveloped countries -- such as the "hawalas" used in some Islamic lands -- as a source for terrorist funding. The fuss seems misdirected. They are hard to monitor and control, and to the extent that they can be policed, it is hard to see much benefit in it. They handle very large numbers of small transactions, and interference with their efforts makes life more miserable for poor people who find them tailored to their needs.
In the end, banks have been deluged by a "regulatory tsunami" that keeps on flooding them as nervous lawmakers keep adding to the rules. In the meantime, the law-enforcement agencies who receive the piles of data from the banks can hardly sift through them. The consensus is emerging that the system isn't working. Banks need to stop trying to hunt for needles in haystacks and focus on shady transactions that will actually be visible in the noise. There's no way to build a leakproof net with such an approach, but a net created out of vast numbers of regulations is every bit as leaky, and a waste of resources on top of that.
* MACHINIMA: WIRED Online had a report on the recent "Machinima Film Festival" in Queens, New York. I hadn't heard of "machinima" before, but it turns out to be videos produced by using imagery from videogames. It sounds like one of those ideas that is likely to produce some real junk, but maybe somebody who is really clever could make something of it. The article did say that some of the machinima videos were surprisingly polished and watchable, with good scripts.
Apparently there is a machinima series titled "Red Vs Blue", based on the sci-fi tactical combat game HALO, that is fairly popular -- I tried to download an episode from the site, but traffic was apparently heavy, since the download just sat there and cycled. Since video game graphics keep improving all the time, machinima does seem like it could be a cool hobby for amateur video producers. However, once machinima starts becoming commercially viable it is also likely to run into copyright issues.
In the future, video game designers are likely to provide more "hooks" into their games to allow the knowledgeable to manipulate them, and software tools will become available to make use of those hooks. After all, if game designers go through all this effort to create an artificial world, users might as well make maximum use of it. Indeed, ultimately there may be a blurring of game and theater, with different players taking on roles and playing out a script on the stage provided by the game, with the gameplay recorded and distributed as video entertainment.
* WOLFRAM & HART: I have been selling off my old DVDs through AMAZON.COM; it's definitely a worthwhile exercise, in the end it makes buying DVDs closer in level of expense to renting -- a lot of the stuff I watch isn't stocked at BLOCKBUSTER and renting isn't practical. In any case, I just sold off a DVD to a femme giving me an office address in Denver, and it turned out after a search that she was working for some international law firm there.
When I see a law firm I always think of Wolfram & Hart, the demonic law firm from the ANGEL fantasy TV series, a spin-off of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. For those of you not familiar with Wolfram & Hart, it operates on Earth as well as over parallel demonic dimensions, and is run by mysterious, powerful, and unseen "senior partners" -- the Wolf, the Ram, the Hart. Most of its legal services are sinister. It can be thought of as taking "deals with the devil" to a high level of corporate bureaucracy.
The ANGEL series used the company partly as a satire of corporate life, with more than a trace of black humor: "After the last headquarters review, all the management was sacked -- and they really did end up in sacks ... " When I go home to Spokane, Washington twice a year to visit my folks I always walk to the law library at Gonzaga University across the river from their house to write in a study kiosk most of the day. I see all the law students there and have a fantasy expectation of seeing a "RECRUITING FAIR TODAY -- WOLFRAM & HART" sign in the lobby.
Anyway, I got to wondering if there was a Wolfram & Hart website online, since it was the sort of thing that somebody might do as a joke. Indeed there is such a website, and to my surprise it was part of the BBC Online complex, a segment of the "Cult / Buffy" branch of the tree. It had the style of a weak-tea / low-budget corporate website, obviously having been thrown together quickly and on the cheap, but it did have its moments. When I swallowed the bait and hit the link to ask for employment opportunities, the website didn't bother to ask for my particulars, the acknowledgement ending with: "We know who you are and we know where to find you."
According to a recent ECONOMIST article, Auntie Beeb runs one of the biggest and most heavily used website operations based in the UK. BBC Online features 525 subordinate websites and the operation is funded to the tune of 66 million pounds a year, and those stats don't factor in the sheer power of the BBC's worldwide network of correspondents. Readership in 2005 is running at about 7.8 million readers a week -- I moan, I've been straining to get 100,000 a month and wondering if a million is even possible.
The operation was launched by then-BBC Director John Brit in 1998. The success of BBC Online has not made British newspapers happy. Newspapers everywhere have been hit with continually declining readership in the face of the Internet, and British newspapers that have tried to build up their own newsites have not always "got it". Even when they do, the BBC Online complex is murderous competition. Auntie is everywhere.
* WEDDING KILLINGS: On Wednesday, three terrorist bombing attacks were performed nearly simultaneously on the Grand Hyatt, Radisson, and Days Inn hotels in Amman, Jordan. At least 56 people were killed. A suicide bomber crashed a wedding party between two Palestinian families; the bride and groom survived, but many family members died, including both their fathers.
A group calling themselves "Al-Qaeda In Iraq", led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility, stating that the attacks were performed to punish Jordan for the country's closeness to and collusion with the West. The hotels had long been targets, with a number of terrorist attacks foiled in the past, but despite the efficiency of the Jordanian security apparatus, this time the attacks succeeded. The next day Jordanians crowded the streets, honking horns, waving flags, and denouncing the indiscriminate attacks on their brethren. The attack was widely condemned across the Islamic world, though a BBC reporter went to the town that the Palestinian families hit by the wedding attack had come from, and found that many of the locals believed that the bomber had been an Israeli agent.
A website for Al-Qaeda In Iraq said there were four bombers, all Iraqis, including a husband-and-wife team. It seems they were getting a bit ahead of themselves in making this announcement, unaware that the wife of the suicide bomber who attacked the Radisson got cold feet and didn't set off her bomb belt. Jordanian security picked her up -- they probably spotted her on tapes from security cameras -- and put her on Jordanian TV, where she wore her (disarmed) bomb belt for the audience.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi followed up the bombings with an audio tape that breathed blood and murder, even threatening to kill Jordanian King Abdullah II. The terrorist's extended family in Jordan, no doubt at least partly motivated by fear of reprisals against them, took out big newspaper ads to disown him: "We sever links with him until doomsday."
* VIRTUAL PYRAMID: BBC WORLD had an interesting report on the sale of "virtual properties (VP)" on the Internet. A VP is a fabricated island or city or country or whatever, rendered as a virtual reality environment. I hadn't really heard much about this sort of thing but it was nothing too surprising, nor too surprising that there was trading of VPs for virtual cash. What was surprising was that VPs were being traded for real cash, sometimes large amounts of it, with properties sold at a high price bringing in more on resale for their purchasers.
This is one of these items that doesn't quite make sense on first sight. Up front, it sounds like a pyramid scheme, with fools hoping they can unload their VPs on greater fools until the process runs out of steam leaving the ultimate fools holding the bag. However, that may be an overly cynical view of matters; maybe it's just a case of a game where the players decided to stop playing for matches and decided to play for real stakes.
* Incidentally, I only reason I watch BBC WORLD NEWS is because it's preferable to the alternatives. US network news programs not only tend to be fluffy but are overloaded with commercials that I have to fast-forward through. The PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour has the problem of being ... an hour. This is not just more time than I feel like sparing, it's also that a half-hour is all that's really needed to cover the daily headlines, and so PBS spends the other half hour broadcasting talking heads. I will admit that a few talking heads have something interesting to say, but more often they're just going on, and every now and then one is a self-important windbag: "Oh please be quiet, why don't you?" BBC WORLD is a half-hour and much more convenient. Auntie Beeb can be a bit stilted at times, but it's the optimum solution for my needs.
* INTELLIGENT DESIGN? I have been trying to avoid the "intelligent design (ID)" controversy that has been floating around for the last few months, but it's getting too noisy to ignore.
OK, the background: A few months ago the school board of Dover, a small rural town in Pennsylvania near Harrisburg, tried to require that biology teachers tell their classes that Darwinian evolution was "just a theory" and not a fact; that Darwinian evolution was full of holes; and recommend the book OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon, which describes the alternative doctrine of "Intelligent Design (ID)", to provide an alternate view. Eleven parents, backed up by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations, promptly filed a suit against the school board, claiming it was an attempt to impose a religious doctrine on public education.
Unlike creationists, ID advocates do not deny that the Universe and the Earth have been around for billions of years, do not try to attack dating methods, and do not even deny that Darwinian evolution by natural selection takes place. What ID advocates do insist is that there are elements in the progression of life that cannot be explained by scientific theory, and that can only be explained in terms of "intelligent design" by some higher power. ID advocates do not specify the nature of that higher power, and admit it might have been done by advanced aliens and not some class of deity.
ID is perfectly unarguable in some respects. There are gaps in evolutionary knowledge, the most significant being the idea that life could arise spontaneously from nonlife. This is a big thing to swallow, and Charles Darwin himself admitted as much. Scientists have speculations but no strong consensus on how this happened, and since the rise of life billions of years ago couldn't and didn't leave much in the way of detailed traces behind, it's hard to find strong evidence one way or another.
In addition, ID advocates have thrown interesting challenges at Darwin advocates. For example, ID advocates ask how complicated biological systems that can only usefully operate as an assembly of parts could have evolved by chance processes, citing a mousetrap as a comparative example. Darwin advocates reply by showing how the different components or assemblies of different components could have evolved for a range of purposes, providing a kit of parts that could be rearranged by chance processes to perform different tasks. This kind of debate is healthy.
If that were all there was to it, nobody would have any reason to object to ID. The problem with ID is that it does not claim that solutions to the quandaries posed by the advocates simply haven't been found yet and require more investigation, instead stating -- as the point of the exercise -- that these quandaries can only be explained by the intervention of a higher power. In short, ID invokes miracles to explain evolution.
There's no way to say that's not the case, but by invoking miracles ID
becomes an attempt to subvert science instead of an alternate scientific
theory. Science is based on the faith, backed up so far by consistent
experience, that the Universe runs by logical rules that can be understood.
ID claims that the rules are broken on a regular basis, which sets ID against
the basic premise of science. There's a classic science cartoon that
captures the notion perfectly: a prof is scribbling endless equations on a
blackboard, and in the middle of the blocks of equations he has written:
AND THEN A MIRACLE HAPPENS ...
Another prof is inspecting the work and says: "Possibly you need to be a bit
more rigorous here."
By the same logic, I could claim that the entire Universe was actually created five minutes ago, that all our memories of the past are fabrications, and defy anyone to prove me wrong. Of course, this notion is just so much overwhelming intellectual excess baggage, but such a proposition differs from ID only in degree, not in kind.
Darwin defenders are particularly indignant at the attempts of ID advocates to claim that the scientific community is deeply divided on Darwin, replying that the only loud objections are from a small faction that is clearly outside the scientific mainstream. The reality is that there is as much honest controversy over Darwin as there is, say, over the idea that the 9-11 attacks were performed by the CIA instead of al-Qaeda, or that the Moon landings were faked.
In fact, ID advocates tacitly admit they are an outsider minority. Comparisons with the Scopes monkey trial of 1925 are misleading in the Dover case. The Scopes trial was to determine the admissibility of Darwin in schools; the Dover trial is to determine the admissibility of ID. The shoe is on the other foot, and ID advocates claim that their minority view is generally being given unfair, even undemocratic, treatment.
The problem is that ID advocates are trying to promote a doctrine whose spirit is clearly opposed to science, and so they are not in any position to object to rejection in turn by the scientific mainstream. The matter is perfectly fair, and considerations of democracy are no more admissible as scientific evidence than they are as evidence in a court of law -- even less so, since unlike the laws enforced by the police, the laws of physics are completely unbreakable. A fellow science fiction writer once suggested to Dr. Isaac Asimov that there had to be something to magic, since so many people believed in it through history. Dr. Asimov replied: "People used to think the world was flat. Do you want to put it to a vote?"
The thing about ID is that it is, in the literal sense of the phrase, by no means an unreasonable idea. There is a thread, most significantly in the works of Isaac Newton, of scientific research as a way of praising the greater glory of God as seen through His works, and even in this less devout age there are still scientists who believe this. Particle physicists like to talk about "knowing the mind of God" in their attempts to understand the fundamental architecture of the Universe, though it's clear that many of them are speaking figuratively. The plaintiffs in the Dover case were shrewdly careful to bring in expert witnesses who were all believers in God, including a theology professor.
There is no sensible reason to object to seeing the hand of God through knowledge of creation. Some religion-bashers may respond that while the devout may find this a nice thing, it doesn't really have anything to do with science. That is unarguable, and also irrelevant, since much the same sort of circumstances apply to, say, baseball. A star baseball player might well be devout and claim his work is supported by his faith, but that would have absolutely no bearing on how the game is played or how it is administered. Nobody would have a sensible reason to complain about the star player's religious devotion, any more than anyone would have a sensible reason to accuse baseball of being atheistic.
From this point of view, ID is ironic in that it postulates an unintelligent design of the Universe, that having put the machinery in motion at the outset, the Creator didn't get everything right and keeps having to come back and tweak things: "Oh dear Me! I didn't think of that."
Even more ironically, as it is phrased by its advocates, ID is exactly the opposite of seeing science as the glorification of God through His works. The sciences are constrained by measureables and observables, meaning that by their nature they can't explain everything. It's like somebody shining a flashlight into the dark, only able to describe what the flashlight reveals. ID focuses on the things that aren't seen, claiming (though by careful indirect implication) that it is the unseen that prove God's existence: "I claim there's really something out there, but only because you can't see it -- and whatever you can see, you won't see it there."
This is not exactly the kind of robust argument that makes much of a believer out of a skeptic; it's more like Douglas Adams laughs in his grave. Ah, but this is a subtlety lost on ID advocates. In fact, the Dover school board wasn't even as subtle as the ID advocates, since the statements of school board officials demonstrated that they made little distinction between ID and straight creationism.
ID has almost no way to avoid falling into this trap, since it is a doctrine that appeals to the scientifically tone-deaf, those who clearly have no enthusiasm or feel for the sciences. In fact, for obvious reasons hardcore creationists attack ID at least as bitterly as the scientific community does, claiming it is a corruption of proper creationist beliefs. The only appeal of ID is that the US courts have no sympathy with creationism. The attempts of creationists to claim their beliefs are scientific instead of motivated by religious doctrine amount to no more than Jedi mind tricks that don't work.
Anybody who's into the sciences immediately sees that creationists hate the sciences, and finds their pretense of being scientific as about as convincing a disguise as somebody wearing "glasses with fake nose and bushy moustache". The courts see through the disguise just as fast, and strike down without hesitation creationist efforts to push the creationist agenda in the schools. ID is simply playing exactly the same sort of game with a somewhat better disguise in hopes of sneaking it past the courts.
* In the end, however, I have to regard the whole controversy as something of a joke. I don't take responsibility for how the world works any longer, if I ever seriously did, and even if the Dover school board got their own way (fat chance) I would have lost no sleep over it. Most people don't know Darwin from donuts, don't care about the issue, and have no particular reason to care. What the dispute mostly seems to be in practice is a sports event between two groups that enjoy arguing.
It certainly did seem like a comedy show I found out that the entire Dover school board got voted out in a recent election, I would guess because voters didn't like being made to look silly in front of the entire nation. In keeping with the comedy theme, extremist Christian commentator Pat Robertson announced: "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 ... If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."
I can be silly sometimes, but at least it's on purpose.
* SPLOGS: What they won't think of next ... WIRED magazine reports that bloggers are now being targeted by "spam blogs" or "splogs" that lift their blog materials and dress them up with tons of spam ads, essentially parasitizing off of not only the blog materials but also their search engine ranking. Splogging seems to be a real nuisance, with tens of thousands of splogs rising up from the darkness since last summer.
It is intriguing to observe how the evolution of online technology has been shadowed so closely by the evolution of obnoxious parasites. Fortunately, the last Big Idea in spamming, referrer spam -- hammering on somebody's website in hopes of generating spam traffic when people check the backlinks -- seems to have come and gone. It was obviously not very effective, given that the population of netizens who check backlinks is small, and they aren't in general the sort of naive users who would buy off on spam products anyway. Every now and then somebody seems to try it once more and then gives up after a while.
In fact, THE ECONOMIST reports that over the last year the volume of spam declined. The reasons appear to be that spam filters are working better than ever and that the small percentage of people who can be suckered by spam pitches has been shrinking. However, this decline has been matched by a ramping up in "phishing" -- emailing people fake alerts to update their credit card or PayPal info and then ripping off their account data. I've actually been sent phishing lures for accounts I don't possess, or haven't even heard of.
A criminal trial has just been completed in the UK of a ring of a half-dozen British phishers that took in about 200,000 pounds / $360,000 USD in about a year from over a hundred gullible Ebay users; the ringleader got two years in prison, the others lesser penalties.
In more online crime news, BBC WORLD reports that websites keep popping up claiming to be affiliated with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), giving glowing promises of resettlement and jobs in other countries. Of course, a fee is required, which promptly disappears. The UNHCR has managed to shut some of the scamsites down, but all they do is come back again elsewhere. Die scammer die.
* CHARITY NAVIGATOR: I mentioned coming into a bit of money in an earlier posting; I figured I'd use part of it to make a donation to assist relief for the Kashmir earthquake. However, the big-time charities I'm used to dealing with, like the Red Cross, didn't seem to be involved. I'm a bit -- exasperated is the right word -- with the Red Cross for the moment anyway, since I made a donation to Hurricane Katrina relief and they ended up taking 50% more than I told them to. I finally shrugged after thinking it over hard -- they were obviously overwhelmed, no sense in making a fuss about it. However, the next time the Red Cross hits me up for a donation, I'll have to reply that they will have to go to the back of the queue and work their way up again.
Anyway, I found an international relief organization named "AmeriCares" that I wasn't familiar with. I was a bit leery of passing money to some charitable organization I hadn't hit on before -- also like I said, I'm a student of scams, and some charities that pop up after disasters are fronts for ripoffs, while some that aren't may have hidden agendas -- but on nosing around I found a site named "www.charitynavigator.net", which evaluates charities. It gave AmeriCares four stars, same as Red Cross, so I felt more comfortable with handing over my cash.
Of course, the paranoid part of me asked if Charity Navigator was on the level, but that was getting baroque, all the more so because the site is pretty extensive to be a scam. Another site gave the board of directors for AmeriCares, with such notables as Colin Powell, Barbara Bush, James Earl Jones, and Zbigniew Brzezinski lending their names. Bit surprised to see "Zbig" on the list -- haven't heard much out of him for a long time, I guess he's been teaching poli-sci at Georgetown University in DC.
* SECRET PRISONS: The European Commission is now investigating reports that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly stashed Al-Qaeda prisoners in prisons in Eastern European countries. According to the story, the arrangements were set up with intelligence services in those nations, with some uncertainty that top government officials knew about them.
While it is unarguably true that Al-Qaeda slaughters civilians indiscriminately as their central strategy -- even indifferent to killing other Muslims who have the bad luck to be innocent bystanders; does not hesitate to torture and gruesomely murder prisoners; and as a nongovernmental organization has little protection under the rules, the Bush II administration's attempts to circumvent the Geneva Convention and even American law in the treatment of Al-Qaeda prisoners remains distinctly uncomfortable for those who want to think of Americans as the "white hats".
Some might find that a naively idealistic attitude; the alternatives, however, have a nasty taste to them and some clear practical defects of their own. It is certainly hard to swallow that the benefits of such heavy-handedness outweigh the cost of the approach to the administration's political credibility, both domestically and particularly internationally. It remains completely astonishing that the administration has continued to waffle on the issue instead of reading the writing on the wall and declaring in an unambiguous fashion that the US is going to play by the rules.
The CIA claims the reports are false. I hope they are telling the truth. Senator John McCain has been pressing for a rider to a bill that would insist on treatment of Al-Qaeda prisoners by the rules of the Geneva Convention. McCain was on the receiving end of rough treatment as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese for over four years, giving him a good deal of credibility on the issue.
* In related news, the US Army, exposed to public criticism over the treatment of al-Qaeda detainees, is now issuing a manual to clarify Army policies on the matter. The manual outlaws the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners and prohibits "acts of physical and mental torture". The guidelines do not rule out intensive interrogation techniques, with these to be detailed in a separate manual that will be kept secret to make sure prisoners won't be trained to identify and resist specific interrogation techniques. The guidelines of course do not cover the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners in the hands of other organizations, such as the CIA.
It should be noted that in the debate over the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners, the armed services seem to have taken the conservative position. Military judicial advisory group (JAG) lawyers have been long conditioned to believe in the Geneva Convention, and have questioned the push to get tougher on interrogations. Their reluctance is not merely based on a consideration of ethics and military honor, but also the fact that the armed services, though they have their elite units, are in general big clumsy bureaucracies. The rules have to be spelled out in black and white, and any attempt to finesse things is an invitation to trouble.
There is also a certain element of enlightened self-interest in being careful about crossing the line. Directives can be vague, actions will always be specific; if a public outcry flares up over abuses, those who passed down the directives may find it only too convenient to declare that the directives didn't authorize the specific actions -- and throw the offenders to the wolves.
* FLU DEFENSE: In a presentation at the US National Institutes of Health, US President George W. Bush announced the start of a $7 billion USD effort to prepare for "bird flu", the H5N1 influenza virus, which has spread from Asia to Eastern Europe with the winter bird migrations. One ex-Bush II administration official described the threat of bird flu to the US as far greater than that of Islamic terrorism.
H5N1 was first spotted in Hong Kong in 1997, and was controlled by killing about 1.5 million poultry. It popped up again in South Korea in 2003, and since that time about 150 million birds have been slaughtered in order to control the disease. About 120 people who worked on poultry farms or otherwise dealt closely with birds came down with the flu, with about half of them dying. Although an H5N1 infection is very dangerous, so far the virus has not demonstrated an ability to be transferred from human to human. Influenza is a funny sort of virus, however. In the first place, it uses RNA for its genetic coding, not DNA, and RNA is more unstable than DNA, meaning its mutation rate is more rapid. HIV is an RNA virus as well, which is why it mutates rapidly.
Unlike HIV, the influenza virus consists of eight genes divided into 11 segments or "chromosomes". If one strain of influenza infects a victim who is already infected with a different strain, there is a chance that a "hybrid" influenza can be produced, with part of the 11 segments from one strain and the rest from the other. Most of the time these hybrids are not very effective, but it's like rolling dice: it might also create a new strain that is much more dangerous. The fact that some of the nations threatened by H5N1 also have large numbers of AIDS victims enhances the threat, since AIDS sufferers have suppressed immune systems, making them incubators for other diseases.
The fairly mild flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968 seem to have been different avian-human flu hybrids. A human-contagious flu can spread widely and rapidly, meaning that a high percentage of the world's population will be infected. Because of the widespread footprint of the infection, even the mild pandemics killed millions. The dreaded 1918 flu had a fatality rate of about 2.5% and killed tens of millions. With so many people sick at once. medical facilities are overloaded, pharmaceutical manufacturers have no prayer of keeping up with demand, and large job absenteeism means curtailed economic productivity.
New antiviral drugs, particularly Tamiflu, block the replication of the influenza virus, reducing the severity of an infection if taken within 48 hours of onset of symptoms. It is, however, expensive, and in limited supply. Vaccine production is currently based on using large batches of eggs, but work is underway on creating new processes that can produce vaccines rapidly in big vats.
The Bush II administration was caught napping on Hurricane Katrina and publicly embarrassed at a time when troubles seem to be piling up at the White House. The bird flu initiative was clearly sending a message that the administration has learned from fumbles. Since the initiative involves investment in antiviral medicines and vaccines, it is seen as good news for pharmaceutical companies.
In his presentation, the president pointed out that the vaccine manufacturing capability of the US has been decimated by litigation. That raises the question of whether there is any parallel effort to pass laws to reduce the liabilities of the pharmaceutical companies. The problem is that vaccines involve an inherent risk: use of attenuated live virus vaccines can result in full-blown infections, and even use of vaccines based on completely lifeless protein fragments can sometimes cause violent allergic reactions. In fact, the rate of adverse reactions is generally low, and overall the public is vastly better off with workable vaccines than without. If liability issues are going to be raised, the political debate promises to be interesting.
* MY OWN BLOG: Although I don't have a high opinion of weblogs -- there's some good ones out there, but I tend to think of them in general as "BS logs" -- I finally decided to put one together. The main reason is because my memory seems to be slowly going south, and so I'd like to have a way to remember when something actually happened instead of wondering later if it was just a figment of my imagination. It's nice to look back on comments on events made a few years ago and find out they were vindicated later, and educational if embarrassing to find out they weren't. Besides, the more pages I have, the more ad exposures I get, and the more "hooks" for search engines to latch on to.
I was looking around for blogging software for a while, until I thought: "Whaaaat? It's just a daily log file." Trivial to put together as a web page. I do running updates during the day, then proof and upload first thing each morning.
* As usual, a quiet Halloween last night -- only seven kids dropped by my door, despite mild weather. A pity, really, some of them were little cuties. I keep suspecting that trick-or-treating is a dying custom, due to a more protective generation of parents and the occasional rumor (urban legends, maybe) of vicious tricks played on kids -- razor blades in apples, poisoned candy, and so on.
In compensation, Halloween decorations have become elaborate and widespread. Some folks get really enthusiastic about it. Me, I limit myself to a simple plastic-electric jack o'lantern. One custom that seems to be happily dying out is putting out jack o'lanterns made from real pumpkins -- people are finally realizing that it's nothing more than an invitation to local rowdy kids for a messy exercise in pumpkin-smashing.