The death of shame

This is a gem. From the Daily Telegraph for February 19.

An Iraqi leader accused of feeding faulty pre-war intelligence to Washington said yesterday his information about Saddam Hussein's weapons, even if discredited, had achieved the aim of persuading America to topple the dictator.

Ahmad Chalabi and his London-based exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, for years provided a conduit for Iraqi defectors who were debriefed by US intelligence agents. But many American officials now blame Mr Chalabi for providing intelligence that turned out to be false or wild exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. "We are heroes in error," he told the Telegraph in Baghdad.

"As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

That is, Chalabi is effectively admitting not only that he lied, but that he doesn't care that he lied because it got him what he wanted.

No wonder the Bush team gets along with him.

The link, by the way, comes via investigative reporter Bob Dreyfuss's new blog about Iraq on TomPaine.com.

Watch this space

Back on January 4 I told you about the dispute between Richard Convertino, a federal prosecutor in Detroit, and his superiors over the handling of the first major post-9/11 terrorist trial and whether or not Convertino was being punished because he gave testimony to Congress about terrorism prosecutions. I also noted how the case was coming apart because of misconduct by the prosecutors' concealment of exculpatory evidence.

Well, there's a new development in this strange case, as reported by USA Today (tip by Buzzflash).

Washington (AP, February 17) - A federal prosecutor in a major terrorism case in Detroit has taken the rare step of suing Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino of Detroit accused the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" of the war on terrorism in a whistleblower lawsuit filed late Friday in federal court in Washington. ...

Convertino is seeking damages under the First Amendment and Privacy Act, alleging he has been subjected to an internal investigation as retaliation for his cooperation with the Senate and that information from the internal probe was wrongly leaked to news media. ...

Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.

The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and "interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities," the suit alleges.

This has the potential to get really interesting.

Quick Cyprus update

I expect there won't be a lot to report on this for a while, so I thought I'd put in this brief mention that the talks about the future of Cyprus have started. As the BBC reports,

Greek Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash arrived in Nicosia's buffer zone for the UN-brokered talks. ...

The BBC's Tabitha Morgan in Nicosia says the signs for success are good.

Our correspondent says the current formula ties both Mr Papadopoulos and Mr Denktash into a process virtually guaranteed to end in agreement.

Turkey needs a solution to help its bid for European Union membership, and the EU itself wants a united Cyprus to join in May, rather than just the Greek part of the island, as currently proposed. ...

Unresolved issues include the powers of the central government, the number of Greek Cypriot refugees to return to the north, land concessions and the number of Turkish troops on the island.

In short, it's in everyone's interests to work out something mutually acceptable. Of course, that's almost always true, but in this instance both the process and the political reality point in that direction. We should know within a few weeks of the optimism is justified.

Addendum: Al-Jazeera.net has an article on some of the worries among street-level Greeks and Turks on the island.

"When I came here a year or so ago," leading Turkish columnist Ferai Tinc told Al Jazeera.net from Nicosia, "almost everyone wanted to sign the Annan Plan.

"Now though, as things have got more serious, many are putting on the brakes."

As the idea of reunification moves from the theoretical to the real and the time from the someday to the imminent, people are, natuarally, becoming more focused on the details. What's good about it is that the concerns are on hows, not shoulds or musts. For example, a large number of Greeks fled to the southern part of the island in the face of the Turkish invasion in 1974, and one of the issues to be addressed is, again, their return. But the concerns revolve around "what sort of arrangements are we going to make?" There don't seem to be a lot of Greek Cypriots going "We will take back what is ours!" or Turkish Cypriots going "We will defend to the death what is ours!" And that is encouraging.

Where geek meets activist

The Union of Concerned Scientists has charged the Bush administration with a policy of distorting scientific findings to advance its political agenda.

"The scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."

"We're not taking issue with administration policies. We're taking issue with the administration's distortion ... of the science related to some of its policies," said the group's president, Kurt Gottfried.

The report is scathing. These are the "Findings of the Investigation" as stated in the executive summary:

1.There is a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health,public safety,and community well-being. Incidents involve air pollutants, heat-trapping emissions, reproductive health, drug resistant bacteria, endangered species, forest health, and military intelligence.

2.There is strong documentation of a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda. These actions include: appointing underqualified individuals to important advisory roles including childhood lead poisoning prevention and reproductive health; applying political litmus tests that have no bearing on a nominee's expertise or advisory role; appointing a non-scientist to a senior position in the president's scientific advisory staff; and dismissing highly qualified scientific advisors.

3.There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about "sensitive" topics. In this context, "sensitive" applies to issues that might provoke opposition from the administration's political and ideological supporters.

4.There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.

Interestingly, the report was released the same day the National Research Council commended the White House for a "much improved" plan to study global warming. Even accepting that at face value, it still is a study, which is the stall the Bushites and their fossil fuel corporate buddies and their flacks have pushed for all along. As even the article notes,

[t]he White House has argued that the causes of climate change have yet to be proven, saying natural factors could be as important as human industry.

It disregards a virtual worldwide consensus that human industrial activity is to blame for much of the steady warming of the planet's climate over the past century.

Personally, I never understood how Big Energy's line was supposed to impress anyone. If half the pain you're feeling right now is because a rock fell on one foot and half is because I'm standing on the other one, does that mean I shouldn't move?

At the same time, be sure to note the very real progress and unacknowledged victory: The nanny-nanny naysayers have been forced to retreat from is there climate change to how much climate change and from is there a human effect on the climate to, again, how much of an effect. They're being run to ground; the only question is will it be too late. The truth is, it's probably already too late to avoid serious affects - but it may not be too late to avoid disaster.

Unintentional Humor Award Dept.: White House science adviser John Marburger, who was "disappointed" in the UCS report, admitted that the complaint was signed by a wide assortment of prominent scientists, including Nobel Prize winners and recipients of the National Medal of Science. He called that "evidence we are not communicating with them as we should and I'll have to deal with that."

I'll bet. "Hey, remember that grant you were hoping to get?"

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who was Dwight David Eisenhower?

DOUBLE JEOPARDY!
Fill 'er Up! for $400

"You can trust your car to the man who wears the star," the big, bright one of this station.

What's the good word?

Columnist Eric Margolis, writing in the February 8 Toronto Sun, says a reader called the situation in Iraq "Mess-opotamia." The name certainly seems to fit and recent developments with regard to establishing a "transitional government" there by June 30 provide no reason to challenge it.

Even though the increasingly-irrelevant Paul Bremer continues to insist

that the central elements of the November agreement could be carried out - that an Iraqi national assembly could be chosen in nationwide caucuses and that the Americans could hand over power by June 30,

the widespread and stiffening rejection of the US plan makes such a notion fanciful at best, even as support for the date is equally widespread and stiffening.

But with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan saying that early elections are not possible, the "how" of the June 30 "when" is left dangling. While Annan said

"we hope we will be able to work with the Iraqis and the coalition to find a mechanism for establishing a caretaker or an interim government until such time elections are organized,"

it's also true that

[t]he United Nations plans to wait to be asked by the Iraqis to return and make an assessment on what kind of interim arrangement can be put in place.

Bremer put on his best Pollyanna face and gamely suggested that there are "dozens" of approaches. That may be true, but it just points up the difficulty: There is no approach on which everyone can agree. Perhaps the closest thing to a consensus is for an expanded Iraqi Governing Council, but that, too, has its troubles. Not only political in its legitimacy - as I noted Tuesday, the IGC has little of that in the eyes of Iraqis - but practically in its makeup, as Reuters reports that Shiites on the council

want an appointed transitional government that ensures their political dominance as Iraq's majority group.

"There are two choices: elections, or compromises that respect the existing balances," said Adel Abdel Mahdi, a senior official of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the top party among Shiites who form 60 per cent of the population and hold a like share of Council seats.

"There can't be any playing of the one issue against the other. If you refuse the elections, then you have to accept the balances."

It's hard to imagine the Sunnis or the Kurds agreeing to lock in Shiite dominance.

One approach now being pushed by some would be a real migraine for American forces - and it could become a nightmare, if I can jumble up my metaphors.

Baghdad, February 17 (New York Times) - Shiite leaders are pushing a new plan for the transfer of power in Iraq that calls for partial elections, with balloting in the relatively secure Shiite and Kurdish areas but not in the more turbulent "Sunni triangle."

The proposal, which has grown out of an emerging alliance between Kurdish and Shiite political parties, is part of the intensifying scramble for power....

The partial election plan calls for representatives in the predominantly Sunni areas to be chosen in tightly guarded caucuses, an idea vehemently opposed by members of the country's Sunni minority, who say it is illegitimate and would further divide Iraq's people.

Since the Sunnis are already the source of most of the attacks against US forces in Iraq, further alienating them is something Bremer's team very much wants to avoid.

But there's more to this than that. As the Times notes,

until now, each of the three main groups in Iraq - Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds - had been pursuing its own agenda. The Shiites and Kurds make up 75 to 80 percent of the population, and even if the partial election plan never materializes, the prospect of an alliance between the two groups is terrifying to many Sunnis.

There's also the matter of what each side gains in this emerging alliance. A hint might be found in a remark by Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaqobi, described as a cleric and part of the inner circle of Shiite leadership:

"There is no perfect solution," he said in an interview in Najaf. "But we have 10 stable provinces south of Baghdad where it's possible to have elections right now, and the Kurdistan areas have had their own government for 12 years. As for the Sunni areas, they can do what suits them best."

His breezy reference to "Kurdistan" (rather than "northern" or "Kurdish") areas with their "own government" suggests to me that the deal is for the Kurds to help the Shiites cement a dominant position in exchange for a federal system with a semi-autonomous Kurdistan.

And there lies the nightmare. Such an arrangement, if it came to pass, would likely enrage the Turks, who are deeply fearful of the effect a Kurdistan, even one part of a federalist Iraq, might mean to the independence-minded Kurds within their own borders. Turkey has already threatened armed intervention to prevent the formation of an autonomous Kurdish state in Iraq. It would further marginalize the Sunnis, likely provoking more violence against not only Americans, but Shiites as well in what could easily become a spiraling cycle of chaos leading to the civil war so many have long feared.

And, less noted but equally important, it continues and emphasizes the religious and ethnic fault lines in Iraq, something the US tried to covertly undermine as part of the caucus plan, which had more emphasis on geography and promoted the idea of "mixed" areas for caucuses. So-called "Balkanization" of Iraq continues to be a very real possibility. I frankly don't think the US gives a flying damn about the arrangements in Iraq or how free or repressive it is or how representative the government is - so long as it's pro-West and stable. Instability is bad for business and bad for US prestige across the region, which is likewise bad for business.

The idea of a Shiite-Kurd alliance must send shivers down the spines of the State Department and Pentagon every bit as much as it does those of the Sunnis.

Mess-opotamia, indeed.

Footnote, just in case we've forgotten: The Times' report also notes that

Bremer stressed that the June 30 deadline would not mean the end of U.S. involvement in Iraq.

One hundred thousand American troops would remain in that nation and the Coalition Provisional Authority would transfer to a massive embassy with thousands of government officials.

Contrary to many of the pundits (including some lefty blgogers) who seem to think that any kind of successful handoff by June 30 will be the end of the matter, I think that Iraq is going to be a continuing political headache for Bush. Continuing US military presence will mean continuing attacks and even if the issue is not heavily pushed in the general election campaign, you can bet people are going to be thinking "but if we've transferred authority, what are we still doing there?"

Sudden death

The death toll in the runaway train disaster in eastern Iran is approaching 300 with more than 400 more injured, reports the February 19 Toronto Star.

Some 51 train cars, some of them variously loaded with sulphur, gasoline, fertilizer, and cotton, had rolled out of the Abu Muslim train station, outside Neyshabur, Iran, about 400 miles (650 kilometers) east of Tehran. They ran down the tracks to the next stop, Khayyam, about 12 or 13 miles (20 km) away. There, 48 of the cars derailed and caught fire.

The black smoke and bright flames were a major challenge to the firefighters and rescue workers who flocked to the scene. Nevertheless, a few hours later they had managed to put out about 90% of the fire.

Then, perhaps just at the moment the workers thought they had things under control, the train exploded.

The explosion was so powerful it shattered windows up to six miles (10 km) away. It was felt well over 40 miles (70 km) away; Iranian seismologists recorded a 3.6-magnitude tremor in the area. It devastated the clay houses of nearby villages, where an unknown number of people still lie trapped in the rubble. It killed 180 of the firefighters and rescue workers, leaving a scene of "shredded torsos, clothes ripped from their bodies, and severed limbs."

Even now, everyone is being kept a half-mile away from the burning wreckage because of the fear of more explosions. All anyone can do, it seems, is to wait for the thing to burn itself out.

It may seem petty to politicize this in any way, but I wonder if the Bush administration will offer any sort of help to this part of the "axis of evil." There is likely no particular reason to think such an offer would be accepted - but still, it should be made.

Update: CNN reports that the death toll is now 309 with 450 injured and may go higher, but rescue work is thought to be nearly complete. It also says the fire is now out.

Dead man walking

For the second time in two weeks, a condemned prisoner in North Carolina has been freed after being found not guilty of the crime of which they were originally convicted.

Windsor, North Carolina (AP, February 18) - A prisoner taken off death row after a judge ruled prosecutors withheld key evidence in his murder trial was found not guilty Wednesday in a second trial.

Alan Gell, 28, has spent a decade behind bars in the 1995 murder of retired truck driver Allen Ray Jenkins, who was shot twice during a robbery. ...

He was immediately allowed to go free. When asked what he was going to do, he responded: "Go home, where I should have been years ago."

Gell obtained a new trial when it was revealed that prosecutors had concealed exculpatory evidence. The case was mostly based on the testimony of two teenagers that they had seen Gell kill Jenkins on April 3, 1995. But in a taped phone call with her boyfriend, one of the witnesses refused twice to answer when he asked if Gell actually did it but did tell him she had to "make up a story" about how Jenkins died. Prosecutors knew this but didn't tell the defense.

In addition, prosecutors concealed statements from more than a dozen witnesses that they saw Jenkins alive after April 3. Gell was either out of state or in jail on a car-theft charge from April 4 until after Jenkins' body was found April 14. That is, they knew he had a solid alibi but hid the fact and still went after him.

Gell's acquittal came less than two weeks after Darryl Hunt was cleared of all charges in a 1984 rape and killing in Winston-Salem. Hunt, who was found guilty of the murder of Deborah Sykes at two jury trials, was freed in December after a DNA test pinned the crime on another man, who has since confessed.

On that same day, February 6, the state Supreme Court overturned two death sentences, ordering a new trial in one case and a new sentencing in the other.

In what can be hoped to be dramatic understatement, the AP notes that

[t]he case has led to calls for North Carolina to impose a moratorium on executions, and the verdict likely will fuel the debate.

At least.

Almost over, yet to be begun

Friday brings the elections in Iran, and what a meaningless exercise that has turned out to be.

Nearly 130 deputies have resigned in protest over the banning of most (and all well-known) reform candidates. The Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest reform party, is boycotting the elections. This week, 679 candidates whose qualifications had been approved by the Guardian Council withdrew to add their voices to the protest.

And now,

Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace laureate, joined protesters on Tuesday in announcing that she would not vote in parliamentary elections on Friday in which more than 2,000 candidates were disqualified by the government.

"I cannot tell people to vote or not to vote, but I will not vote because I do not know any of the candidates who have been allowed to run," said Ms. Ebadi, a human rights lawyer. "I would have voted if I knew and trusted the candidates."

This followed on the heels of a letter from reformist members of Parliament that took the shocking course of openly criticizing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accusing him of "lead[ing] a system in which legitimate freedoms and the rights of the people are being trampled on in the name of Islam."

The saddest figure in this is President Mohammad Khatami, who initially threatened a mass resignation of his whole administration if reformers were not reinstated to the election rolls, and then backed down, and then threatened not to hold elections, and then backed down to the point where on Monday he released a statement urging people to vote in spite of "the unfairness of the election." It's impossible to know what pressures Khatami felt (or even what threats of mass reprisals might have been made behind closed doors) but still I find it rather sad to see him trying to maintain what dignity he can in the face of what amounts to his total capitulation.

Yet against this dark background there are signs that changes in Iran ultimately can't be denied, as indicated by a trio of recent Christian Science Monitor articles. I'd urge you to read all three.

On February 11, CSM described how many among the clergy are coming to question their political power.

"Behind closed doors, even the clergy is debating velayat-e-faqih [divine rule by clerics] and secularism, and their role in political power," says a Western diplomat. "They are asking: 'Is it so wise that we are running the state, that we are doing things against the will of the people, which is against Islam?'" ...

"Islam is the religion of peace, of rights, of justice, not tyranny, violence and prisons - let alone terrorism and killing people and torture in prisons, even if this torture is putting them in solitary confinement," said reformist Grand Ayatollah Yusef Saanei, in a recent interview.

"All of these things are against Islam," says Mr. Saanei, one of only a handful of grand ayatollahs in Shiite Islam. "In one word: What you would like for yourself, you must do for others. These are all the human rights and freedoms, which the Prophet calls justice."

Indeed, even as the hardliners wield the real power, the conservative forces are not monolithic and even after their expected triumph on Friday, reform may not be dead in the majlis (parliament). This is from February 18.

Even among hard-line Iranians at a recent celebration or at Friday prayers, there are shades of gray. Some advocate violence against the "enemy within"; others say rhetorical persuasion is enough. If conservatives reclaim control of parliament after Friday's elections, as expected, new political divisions are likely to emerge between conservative factions. The tough faction will cling to hard-line views, while moderates have signaled intent to address some issues of the popular reform agenda - a recipe for future rightwing clashes.

And clashes of a harsher sort than political maneuvering and bickering may be in the offing. Because there are really two Irans, separated by a cultural and economic chasm so wide that each can barely perceive the other across it. On February 19, CSM went to an upscale shopping mall in Tehran.

This mall - home turf for Iran's prosperous and disillusioned social elite - is a place where two worlds collide. On one side are young free-spirited Iranians, radicalized beyond politics against Iran's Islamic revolution and hard-line rulers.

One the other: Feared enforcers of the regime's Department of Vice and Virtue, who routinely target improper garb, pop music, and the peddling of Western influence by selling men's ties. ...

The social and political fault line in modern Iran has become so pronounced that both sides have taken to protesting the other in the most niggling ways.

At this mall, shoppers push the limits, wearing required long coverings, or manteaux, skin-tight and above the knee. Kerchief-sized headscarves are often accompanied by matching nail polish and lipstick.

Indeed, the secular world in more affluent parts of north Tehran is saturated with the Internet, illegal but tolerated satellite TV, and Western music, and thick with respect and even yearning for Iran's top enemy, America.

It could not be further from the poorer, religious areas of south Tehran, where Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution took root and still commands a faithful following. Indeed, Hossein [who runs a women's clothing store in the mall] says that most of the mall's morality enforcers appear to come from less privileged families, "and haven't seen this kind of thing in their lives. It's a different world."

As is often mentioned, 2/3 of the population of Iran is under 30 and has voted consistently for reform. But now many are disillusioned by the power of the hardliners and the failures of the reformers and so express their resistance in other ways. Like many before them, such as was seen in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they adopt the outward signs of what they perceive as the freedom of the West, and so push the limits of allowable dress and music.

For some, that seems enough - if they would be left alone, they'd be satisfied. But happily, others have learned a better lesson.

"Their Islam and their state are different from the ones we know," says her sister Parisa, who also studies architecture. She says she and her young friends once said their prayers regularly, but no longer do. "Even those who took part in the revolution 25 years ago say that this is not Islam. They are working against Islam."

The current "little bit of freedom" now tolerated, Parisa says, is meant only to "calm people." But for the anonymous shopkeeper, recent months have been marked by a clampdown that he thinks will only worsen if conservatives win parliament.

"Girls and boys coming out like this are only pretending to be free," he says, waving toward flirting couples. "What do you call liberty? Uncovering your hair? This is not freedom. The true liberty is expressing your idea.

"With the Internet and satellite TV, people are understanding more and more every day," he adds. "This is the atomic age, and each person knows better if they are on the right path. I know what is right or wrong.... I don't need anybody else to tell me."

I keep thinking of lines from an old Donovan song: "Now live your own life, I tell you for why:/You gonna be around when they all die off."

"The conflict is brewing, and one day, one group will win," says Somayeh. "If the conservatives were to win, they would have done so already. In the end, they will lose."

In the immediate wake of the elections, there may be dark times. But keep hope alive.

Fancy steppin'

Math education. That's it. That's the real problem. Math education. That's the real threat to the standard of living of Americans.

Not shifts of wealth to the rich, not globalization, not the undermining of labor unions and the concomitant strengthening of corporations, not capital flight and greedy profit-mongering by a relative handful of powerful elites, not "outsourcing" (what a classic weasel word) of jobs, none of that matters.

The problem is math education.

Over the next 15 years, 3.3 million U.S. service-industry jobs and $136 billion in annual wages will move to India, the Philippines, China and Malaysia, among other countries, according to Forrester Research, a consulting company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And why? I already told you. Math education.

Who says so? Why, that well-known educator and sociologist Alan Greenspan, of course. Greenspan

has added a new twist to the ongoing debate on jobs outsourcing. Last week, the U.S. Federal Reserve chairman told the Senate Banking Committee that the real threat to the standard of living in the United States came not from jobs leaving for cheaper Asian locations. The bigger worry, he said, was a drop in U.S. educational standards. ...

"What will ultimately determine" the "standard of living of this country is the skill of the people," Greenspan told the Senate committee. "We do something wrong, which obviously people in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan do far better. Teaching in these strange, exotic places seems for some reason to be far better than we can do it."

So says Andy Mukherjee in a Bloomberg News commentary reported in the International Herald-Tribune for February 17. Greenspan, he says, added "a 'math gap' spin" to the debate about vanishing jobs. "After all," he summarizes Greenspan as saying, "if American students underperform their Asian rivals in acquiring intellectual capital, why should corporate America pay them premium wages?"

Educators, involved with the nuts-and-bolts of academic issues, explain just how "strange, exotic" Asian countries may be stealing a march over the United States. ...

"The American education system," [Sumit] Gupta [a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the University of California, Irvine] notes, "is designed so as not to hurt the self-esteem of any student in class. So, nearly everyone can pass the high-school level." This leads to inadequately trained high-school graduates....

[But if] American education places too much importance on preserving students' self-esteem, the Indian system, which "completely ignores students' feelings, opinions and ambitions," can easily break their spirit, Gupta says. ...

Bear in mind that Singapore's attainment of rigorous standards comes at a price. The city's education system pushes students hard and doesn't leave any scope for late bloomers. Students who don't perform well on exams are weeded out at age 12 and told they won't be attending university.

Would U.S. education be any better off, trading its inbuilt flexibility for such rigidity?

Greenspan ought to use his own example as a test case. In any Asian nation, it would have been rather difficult for a teenager to select a musical career, tour with a professional band, give that up, go back to college, study economics and surface at the helm of the country's central bank half a century later.

In other words, if Greenspan were Asian-born, he might still be playing the clarinet in jazz concerts. And not by choice.

Footnote: Greenspan's comments were based on a 1999 study of mathematical ability among 8th-graders in 38 countries. US students came in 19th. Four years earlier, as 4th-graders, the same students ranked seventh.

When you hear about any tests like this, you have to keep a few things in mind. First, what did the test cover? I think we can safely assume that the same test was given to all the students. But, for example, did the 8th-grade test cover algebra? That's something that many American students are not exposed to until the 9th grade. If other nations introduced it earlier, their students would have a leg up in scoring.

Second, who is being tested? As Mukherjee notes, by age 12 students in Singapore are being weeded out of a university track. So are 8th-grade US students (ages 13-14) competing against all Singapore students, or only those who have already shown superior academic ability?

Third, what do the results actually mean? Saying US students came in 19th tells you very little unless you know the range of both scoring and results. For example, suppose the maximum score on the test was 100 and national averages were computed to the nearest tenth of a point. Even disallowing for ties, the top 20 scores could be within two points of each other. Is that a significant difference? If the averages were computed to the nearest hundredth of a point, the top 20 scores could be within less than a half-point of each other.

As a science-minded person with an appreciation of physics, far be it from me to denigrate the importance of math or to approve of approaches that say "there are no right or wrong answers in mathematics." (Actually, that is true in some of the farther reaches of number theory, where there are theorems that literally can't be proved or disproved - but that's hardly relevant here.) But on exactly that same basis, far be it from me likewise to gasp in horror at the isolated statement that US 8th-grade students ranked in the middle of a group of nations on mathematics skills - especially when that statement is being used to justify the surging economic greed of transnational Big Business.

A surprise move

In a highly unusual move, the International Committee of the Red Cross has condemned Israel's "separation barrier" in the West Bank as a violation of international law.

The aid agency said the barrier, whose proposed route cuts into Palestinian areas, went "far beyond what is permissible for an occupying power". ...

The ICRC's comments come just days before a hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the legality of the controversial barrier. ...

The ICRC, a neutral, Swiss-based organisation, has been observing construction of the security fence.

It says that, where the barrier runs through occupied territory, thousands of Palestinians have been deprived of access to water, health care and education.

It has also caused extensive damage to Palestinian land and property, the agency adds. ...

The organisation stressed that it respected Israel's right to protect itself and the statement did not call for a halt to building altogether.

Nevertheless, it remained, the BBC noted, "an unusually outspoken statement from a normally neutral body."

Israel, denying the Court's authority to hear what it claims is a "political" dispute, will not appear for the hearings but has submitted a written statement. Meanwhile, Israel's own Supreme Court is hearing a petition from Israeli human rights groups which are also protesting the intrusion of the barrier into the West Bank and the disruption and damage it has caused.

Previous posts on the issue of the fence were on January 18, January 22, February 2, and February 9.

Jeopardy!

YESTERDAY'S QUESTION
Who was Abraham Lincoln?

JEOPARDY!
Presidents for $1000

As a child, he was known as "Little Ike"; he later dropped the "Little."

Lost in Geek

A study at York University (Toronto, Canada) has indicated that women's opinions of the attractiveness of other women varies with their fertility cycle, says the February 18 Toronto Star.

When women's fertility was at its highest, their opinions of other women's looks dropped, says the study, published today in Biology Letters, a journal published by the British Royal Society.

When fertility was at its lowest point, the subjects looked at the same pictures of the other women and rated them much more attractive.

The research, evidently the first of its kind, was described by lead researcher Maryanne Fisher as another piece in a "small but growing body of research that says women are actually competitive."

However, while I think the study is interesting on its own merits, Fisher's comments raise the very sticky issue of how to interpret the results of scientific tests. While I have a real interest in both, my background is more in the "hard" sciences than the social sciences, and in the hard sciences if you say your results prove the cause of some effect is A, you're also saying that the cause can't be B. As long as it can be reasonably suspected to be B, you can say you think it's A, you're confident it's A, it's most likely to be A, but you can't say it is A. All too often in the social sciences, researchers take results that are consistent with their hypothesis to be proof of that hypothesis, even when another idea might explain the same results.

The issue here is joined by Fisher's conclusion that a fertile woman is competing for males and is trying to gain an advantage by "competitor derogation," that is, by dissing her competition. Perhaps that's true. But another possible explanation springs to mind: A woman at the peak of her fertility cycle feels more self-confident and it's for that reason other women look less attractive than they do at other times. Nothing in the article reporting on the study indicates that possibility was considered, even though I think it could explain another finding:

Ironically, women didn't much care what men looked like. They rated their attractiveness consistently lower than women's, and it didn't change with their fertility.

"That was really interesting to me," Fisher said.

"I completely expected there would be some sort of fertility effect on men's faces. There wasn't. They actually rated men's faces less attractive than men did."

There would have been a simple way to test this: Just have the same group of women do self-assessment surveys at various times during the study to see if they felt differently about themselves at the peak of the cycle than at other times.

I think the failure to examine possible alternative explanations affects far too much of psycho-social research. I remember, in fact, what got me thinking about this. I recall reading a good number of years ago an article in "Psychology Today" (this was back in the days when it actually talked about real research) about a tribe in the South Pacific in which the men were specifically trained in giving sexual pleasure to women. One of the things they had to learn to do was to give a woman an orgasm by touching nothing but her genitals. One of the things the researchers claimed to have proved from this was that "female orgasm is a learned response."

Huh?? I had and still have absolutely no clue how that conclusion arose from the data presented. The only place it could have come from was a presumption going in - and since the evidence didn't conclusively disprove that idea, it was taken as proof of it. That wasn't science, that was sexism.

That, admittedly, was an extreme example. But it still is an issue I believe is inadequately addressed much too often.

Dammit Jim, I'm a president, not an economist

This is a hoot. Both George Bush and Treasury Secretary Tony Snow have run away from the Bush administration's own predictions for job growth in the coming year.

Last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers - you remember, the outfit that arbitrarily change the start date of a recession to benefit Bush, headed by N. Gregory "Outsourcing is just another way of doing trade" Mankiw - issued it's annual Economic Report of the President. It contained the prediction that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs in 2004, a figure not only wildly out of line with other estimates but even more wildly out of line with recent experience.

[W]hile economic growth has been very strong for the last six months, the pace of job creation has been much slower than in previous economic recoveries. After losing about 2.8 million jobs since late 2001, the nation started to add jobs only last fall and has been adding them at the rate of about 100,000 a month,

the February 18 New York Times notes.

The real figure is closer to 90,000 a month (a total of 366,000 since August) - while economists mostly agree that 125,000-150,000 new jobs are needed each month just to keep pace with population growth. Which means that adding 90,000 a month means things are still getting worse on the job front, just more slowly. To add 2.6 million jobs would require more than doubling that rate to 230,000 jobs created per month.

And actually, a lot more than that. The figure of 2.6 million more jobs is actually based on a prediction of an average monthly payroll of about 132.7 million as compared to an average of about 130.1 million in 2003. But - stay with me, now - jobs were lost in 2003, so the average monthly figure was higher than the actual figure for the last months of the year. So to achieve an average increase of 2.6 million jobs for 2004 over 2003, the actual number of jobs created must be more than 2.6 million. In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, the economy would have to add 460,000 jobs per month for the last 11 months of 2004 to meet the administration's predictions.

No wonder Bush hid under the hedge and the Treasury Secretary tried a snow job.

Perhaps the funniest moment, however, was when Scott McClellan, Ari Fleischer's evil stepson,

said the economic forecast was simply the work of "number crunchers." He said Bush - who bills himself as the first president with a Master of Business Administration degree - was not a statistician or predictor.

Neither, apparently, are his economic advisors. Hallucinators is more like it.

Look out behind you!

The attempts to shift blame for the prewar lies about Iraq continue. The Toronto Star for February 18 tells us that

Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed mass-killing weapons.

Perle, a close adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said top officials made no attempt to skew the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he implied, top policymakers relied in good faith on the conclusions of the intelligence agencies.

Never mind the fact that before the war, the White House hawks - I wish there was a word not so insulting to a noble bird, wait, I have one - the White House warmongers set up their own shop, the Office of Special Plans, to comb through intelligence reports to pluck out the most damning indictments they could find, never mind that they fawned over ever hyped-up story from Iraqi exile groups, never mind that they swallowed whole without even chewing every bit of unverified even known-to-be-unreliable tidbit if it was droolingly anti-Saddam, never mind all that was because they were convinced the CIA and DIA were "soft" on Iraq, never mind any of it.

No, we're told now, never mind all that. The truth is, they were taken in, fooled, overwhelmed, their innocent trusting natures cruelly exploited, by those mean old intelligence services. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Let's not forget, of course, that the intelligence sources were indeed wrong. They did conclude that Saddam had WMDs. But what's more important not to forget is that they did that on the preponderance of the evidence, not as a positive determination. The reports were full of "probably," "could be," "likely," "no conclusive evidence," and similar hesitations, all of which the White House stripped out in pitching the war, presenting every "maybe" as a "yes" and every "we think" as an "incontrovertible" to stampede us into a useless war.

That is, they lied through their flaming teeth. Don't let's let them get away with doing it again.

Every Dark Cloud And All That Dept.

There has been one good (and surprising) outgrowth of the Patriot Act: a growing sensitivity to the issue of privacy. (Identity theft also pushed this along, yes, but still, give the devil its due part of the credit.) As an example, this editorial from the February 18 New York Times describes how American Online

announced plans to provide its customers with software that detects and disables "spyware" - covert programs that can secretly record a user's movements through the Internet for use by marketers and identity thieves. The screening programs, which are already available from at least one other Internet provider, Earthlink, are an important tool in the campaign to protect users from intrusive marketers and information thieves. Finishing the job will require action from Congress, which is just waking up to the spyware problem.

Congress recently passed a law aimed at stemming the rising tide of electronic junk mail. But that law will do nothing about the covert programs - variously known as adware, spyware and snoopware - that secretly invade our computers.... The most sinister are illegally installed "keystroke recorders," which allow remote users to capture secure passwords, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, making victims especially vulnerable to fraud and information theft. ...

A better solution, as proposed recently by the Center for Democracy and Technology, is to develop privacy standards that protect computer users from all programs that covertly collect information that rightfully belongs to the user. A good start would be to require all such programs to announce themselves clearly and define their functions, allowing the users to reject software that strikes them as intrusive.

Computer geeks will know that adware and spyware are not precisely the same thing, with the latter being more intrusive: Adware usually enables a host to send you ads, while spyware tracks info about you and sends it back to the host. Also, adware is sometimes upfront; some shareware will tell you that installing it will allow the sending of ads to you. (The more insidious kind will maintain that function on your computer even if you uninstall the program.) Spyware never is.

No matter. The very fact that attention is being directed toward these sorts of programs is encouraging. Now if we could only get legislation that would ban the use of social security numbers for any purpose unrelated to social security programs and tax administration, we'll have made a real stride forward.

Not really a geek item but kinda geeky in its way

A Reuters report from London for February 16 says that

[a] group of marine archaeologists may have solved one of the world's most enduring maritime mysteries - the final resting place of HMS Beagle in which Charles Darwin developed his landmark theory of evolution. ...

For such a famous ship, the Beagle has been frustratingly hard to find, having disappeared from sight more than a century ago.

But [Robert] Prescott [of the Beagle Ship Research Group], who is based at St Andrews University in Scotland, is confident they have found their quarry.

"We have followed a carefully researched trail that has led us to this berth," he said. ...

After the voyage, the Beagle - one of a type of ship that was the workhorse of the Royal Navy - was attached to Customs and Excise and was used to catch smugglers along the Essex coast.

Prescott's detective work found that for many years the Beagle was moored mid-stream on the River Roach and was home to successive families of coastguards.

Then in 1870, at the age of 50, the ship was sold to a local firm of scrap merchants and the record ceases.

But it is known that the firm had a small dock on the river, and it is at this long-lost dock that the scientists have found the outline of a ship they believe is the Beagle.

Nothing Earth-shattering, but kinda neat if it pans out. Sort of putting a coda to a piece of history.

Just another day at the office

A commentary in that hotbed of radical left-wing activism, Business Week magazine, charges that Shrub's Council of Economic Advisors

unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's reelection bid. Instead of using the accepted start date of March, 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 - a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush Administration to term it the "Clinton Recession." In a subsequent press conference, [CEA chair N. Gregory] Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and "made the call."

What's wrong here is that for the last 75 years, the "call" has been made by a private nonpartisan group called the National Bureau of Economic Research, an arrangement Business Week calls "one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality." It's just another example of why people call this "the most politicized White House in history." Everything but everything must be bent to the purpose of ensuring a second Bush administration.

His first administration has compiled an appalling track record on trade, budget deficits, and jobs and has come to be regarded by many on both sides of the political spectrum as fiscally irresponsible. Still, in fairness it must be noted that a recession starting in March, 2001, less than two months after Bush came into office, can't be blamed on him. He can be blamed for the asinine way his team responded to it, a response that consisted almost exclusively of grotesque obsequiousness to the rich and powerful and undoubtedly contributed to the extent and depth both of the recession and the jobless "recovery," but he didn't cause it.

But that's not enough. It's not enough avoid blame for the onset of recession, it's necessary to be able to point blame at someone else. So move the start date back, back to the fourth quarter of 2000, back to whenever it's politically convenient, and blame it on the Democrats. "We're in a strong recovery from the Clinton recession." It doesn't change the present, it doesn't change anything they've done or not done, it doesn't wipe out their failures - but it does distract from them. It's all slogans, symbolism, and soundbites.

If we've learned nothing else these last three-plus years, it's that while that may be an effective way to run a political campaign, it's a really lousy way to run a country.

Lost in Geek

The Hubble space telescope, apparently doomed to no more than about three more years of full observation because of NASA's decision to no longer service it, has done it again.

The farthest object in the Universe yet detected has been seen by scientists using the Hubble and Keck telescopes.

It is so distant its light must have set out when the Universe was just 750m years old to reach the Earth now. ...

"The new object is a small and compact system of stars," said Professor Ellis. "It's about 2,000 light-years across; our own galaxy by comparison is about 60,000 light-years across.

"It is forming stars prodigiously and is a very energetic source, so it may be an example of an object from that early time [just after the "Dark Ages"] that is the first of its kind to form in the Universe."

The "Dark Ages" is the period after the Big Bang when the universe had cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form (before that, heat energy would rip atoms apart) but before the first stars "turned on," meaning the universe was without light. No one is sure how long this period lasted, but the farther away a light source is, the earlier in the universe it formed: Light travels at a finite speed, so the farther away a light source is, the longer a time that light took to get to Earth, and so the farther back in time from now that light must have been generated.

The object was discovered using "gravitational lensing," an effect first predicted by Einstein. Light spreads out, so the farther away any light source is, the dimmer it appears. But light is bent by gravity, which is related to mass. So light coming from behind a very massive object - like, in this case, a star cluster - can be bent and refocused, as if by a lens, making the object appear brighter and so easier to detect.

A note of light in a darkening part of the cosmos

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Denver, Colorado, has overturned an October ruling by a District Court that had called the FTC's "do-not-call" list an unconstitutional abridgment of free speech because it affected telemarketers barring calls from businesses but not charities and political organizations.

"Just as a consumer can avoid door-to-door peddlers by placing a 'No Solicitation' sign in his or her front yard, the do-not-call registry lets consumers avoid unwanted sales pitches that invade the home via telephone," the court said. "We are convinced that the First Amendment does not prevent the government from giving consumers this option." ...

"As a general rule, the First Amendment does not require that the government regulate all aspects of a problem before it can make progress on any front," the appeals court said. The court said there was also no evidence suggesting charitable or political callers were as troublesome.

Some 56 million telephone numbers have already been registered in the enormously popular list. If your number is not on it, you can go to www.donotcall.gov or call 1-888-382-1222.

Oh, But You're Too Kind Dept.: The Direct Marketing Association said the industry will follow the law while it considers an appeal. "Our industry will respect the wishes of consumers..," association president H. Robert Wientzen said.