Ends and means

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: A Blow to the Rule of Law

But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

Madness.

How To Complain about your Wireless Service = especially SprintPCS

How To Complain about your Wireless Service

SprintPCS hides well, but this web site exposes its mailing address. Thank heavens for Consumer Union -- and Google.

Sprint finally managed to push me far enough that I decided to fill out a complaint form from the office of our famously combative state (MN) attorney general. Problem is, I needed a mailing address for the form and Sprint hides its mailing addresses quite well. Happily Google found it for me.

What drove me over the edge? They went too far in hiding information about their calling plans and contracts. After my second call to the desperate and hapless folk who work Sprint's customer service lines it became clear that Sprint considers information on their service plans to be a corporate secret. The information on the web site is hopelessly incomplete and misleading, and they don't provide printed summaries in any form to anyone.

GRRRR. Its worth filling out the bloody complaint form. Hatch wants to run for Governor of MN, if he wants to make his name he can go after Sprint and force them to put their plan information online clearly and completely.

Dyer has 8 more articles on his public site

Dyer 2005

If anyone knows of a free web service that would generate RSS updates based on changes to this page let me know!

You too can be a Guardian!

Want to be a Guardian of the Enlightenment? Well, if you have a Blogger account you too can join this exclusive club! Just add 'GOTE' to the interests section of your Blogger Profile. When the profile is viewed these 'tags' display as a link. Clicking on the link will display the thousands, nay ones, of your fellow guardians.

Join now and win a Darwin bookmark!

The Halifax Explosion -- how transient is history

CBC - Halifax Explosion

December 6, 1917 dawned clear and sunny in Halifax. Before darkness fell, more than a thousand people would die, with another thousand to follow. Nine thousand more would be injured and maimed in the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever seen...

...American emergency teams--most of them from Massachusetts—arrived as well. They remained for months, and became part of the rebuilding effort. Halifax was front-page news around the world. By one estimate, relief donations eventually topped $23 million.

Shades of the WTC attack including similar death toll, but this was an accident. Some quick thoughts:

1. A hundred years from now, how well well will most people remember the WTC attack?
2. Some of the terrorist scenarios that have been discussed in the past few years focus on hijacking a very explosive ship and deliberately triggering this kind of disaster.

I've been to Halifax, but I'd forgotten about this. I don't recall seeing any tourist booklets about the explosion.

(Link via Metafilter)

Defending the enlightenment: Darwin stickers

CHARLES DARWIN HAS A POSSE -- free bookmarks and stickers

Darwin. Franklin. Jefferson. Einstein. Sir Francis Bacon. We need stickers for all of 'em and more.

Rep Barney sums up the Schiavo debacle

Federal Court Hears Schiavo Case (washingtonpost.com)

Totally incompetent. Not much more to say about this.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said it is foolish to think the bill will not become a legal precedent. 'Every aggrieved party in any similar litigation now will go to Congress, come to Congress and ask us to make a series of decisions,' he said. 'This is a terribly difficult decision which we are, institutionally, totally incompetent to make.'

Fortunately my wife has the technical skills to ensure that congress will not have to debate the placement of any future feeding tubes I may have.

Google books are online: The Origin of the Species

Google Print Search: The Origin of Species

Darwin now more readable. Quick, burn the computers.

The highlighted text is annoying however. I can't see how to turn it off.

Calendars, leap years and when spring starts

Why Leap Years?

Spring came on 3/20 in Minnesota this year. This page explains why the first day of spring varies, and gives some good calendar backgrounding as well.

Two years of war - visiting the graveyard

washingtonpost.com: Faces of the Fallen

Intel Dump suggested a visit to this Washington Post site on the anniversary of the war. I've made my visit. You should too. January was worse than I'd remembered.

Propaganda works in America

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News

In a rare non-partisan note, let me point out that the Clinton white house was reasonably good at propaganda. Bush has merely exceeded their skills by an order of magnitude.

Why invest so much into propaganda? Because it works:

... Enron "was fixated on its public relations campaigns." It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company's Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. "We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in," a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling" even though "some of the computers didn't even work."

If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.

Undoing the enlightenment: the attack on the science musuems

The New York Times > National > A New Screen Test for Imax: It's the Bible vs. the Volcano (3/19/05)

The Enlightenment is being undone one science museum at a time (see excerpts below, emphases mine). The "Intelligent Design" team are doubtless "shocked, shocked" that their assaults on evolution are part of a larger attack on all of the "origins sciences". The Gates Foundation should be pleased with how well their money is being used.

This attack will work on science museums the same way it has worked on textbook publishers. An attack that denies 10% of a market is more than sufficient to bias future product production. Commercial IMAX theaters are the most vulnerable to attack, then southern science museums. If both of those are picked off then "origins sciences" will disappear from IMAX productions.

We need the Guardians of the Enlightenment to awaken. If I were a member of the Fort Worth science museum I'd be calling for an urgent meeting of the museum board -- and I'd be considering terminating any museum membership. In a more positive light perhaps science museums that actually teach and support science could create an international support network so that the strong (Boston, London, Toronto) could support the weak (Fort Worth, Texas). As a past Guardian once said: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject - or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth - fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film's bottom line - or a producer's decision to make a documentary in the first place.

People who follow trends at commercial and institutional Imax theaters say that in recent years, religious controversy has adversely affected the distribution of a number of films, including "Cosmic Voyage," which depicts the universe in dimensions running from the scale of subatomic particles to clusters of galaxies; "Galápagos," about the islands where Darwin theorized about evolution; and "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea," an underwater epic about the bizarre creatures that flourish in the hot, sulfurous emanations from vents in the ocean floor.

"Volcanoes," released in 2003 and sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation and Rutgers University, has been turned down at about a dozen science centers, mostly in the South, said Dr. Richard Lutz, the Rutgers oceanographer who was chief scientist for the film. He said theater officials rejected the film because of its brief references to evolution, in particular to the possibility that life on Earth originated at the undersea vents.

Carol Murray, director of marketing for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, said the museum decided not to offer the movie after showing it to a sample audience, a practice often followed by managers of Imax theaters. Ms. Murray said 137 people participated in the survey, and while some thought it was well done, "some people said it was blasphemous."

In their written comments, she explained, they made statements like "I really hate it when the theory of evolution is presented as fact," or "I don't agree with their presentation of human existence."

.... Hyman Field, who as a science foundation official had a role in the financing of "Volcanoes," said he understood that theaters must be responsive to their audiences. But Dr. Field he said he was "furious" that a science museum would decide not to show a scientifically accurate documentary like "Volcanoes" because it mentioned evolution.

... Mr. Cameron said he was "surprised and somewhat offended" that people were sensitive to the references to evolution in "Volcanoes."

"It seems to be a new phenomenon," he said, "obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science."

... Large-format science documentaries "are generally not big moneymakers," said Joe DeAmicis, vice president for marketing at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and formerly the director of its Imax theater. "It's going to be hard for our filmmakers to continue to make unfettered documentaries when they know going in that 10 percent of the market" will reject them.

Guardians of the Enlightenment Awake -- your fields are afire ...

Congress in desperate battle to avoid anything important

BBC NEWS | Americas | Congress to debate patient's fate

US President George W Bush has cut short a holiday in Texas so that he can sign legislation to intervene in the case of a brain-damaged American woman.

Today its steroids and bloviating about a family tragedy. Next week congress will pass the anti-Michael (Jackson) amendment.

These guys aren't stupid. They can talk about this kind of stuff for months. Anything to get away from Bush's flailing social security transformation or that darned pesky budget.

National Do Not Call Registry

National Do Not Call Registry

The state registries are no longer used to update the federal list. So you have to do the federal separately. It works well, but it's only good for five years.

Something to add to one's "moving list", and to one's 5 yr calendar.

The Argentinian solution

Christopher Brauchli: The Etymology of Torture

Rendition. Torture. Corruption. Shrinking middle class. Fiscal chaos.

Which nation?

1. Argentina
2. United States of America
3. Both

In Argentina "transferal" referred to the process of taking a person from the Naval Mechanics' School in Buenos Aires known locally as ESMA. In an earlier incarnation it was an officers' casino. In its later incarnation it was one of the detention centers to which political dissidents, leaders of the opposition and those considered a threat to the military dictatorship were taken from March 1976 until the end of 1983. Its name notwithstanding, it would only have been considered a "school" by those who consider the use of torture as a teaching device to educate people as to what they should say to the torturer.

According to a description by Larry Rohter of the New York Times, the building had a long hall the name of which had something in common with "transferal" and "rendition." Its name was a euphemism. It was called "Happiness Avenue." There were no stores on Happiness Avenue as there are on some of the elegant avenues in Buenos Aires. There were just rooms in which acts of torture took place. "Happiness Avenue" was not a one-way street. Once the authorities completed the torture, which could go on for extended periods, the victim was drugged and participated in what the Argentine navy called "transferal." The victim was taken to the airport, placed in an airplane, flown over and then thrown into the ocean. Drowning was much pleasanter than the activities on Happiness Avenue. It had an end.

The United States uses "rendition" which loosely translated means "we provide the body, you perform the torture." "We" is the United States government in the guise of the CIA and "you" is the country to which those the soon-to-be-tortured are sent. Those who participate in rendition are sent to countries where torture is an accepted way of extracting information. That is not, however, why they are sent there. According to a report in the New York Times prisoners are moved to other countries in order to help the United States with budgetary problems. Administration officials have said that sending prisoners to Egypt, for example, is an alternative to the "costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries." The fact that those countries engage in torture is nothing more than a coincidence.

Even though rendition is primarily a money saving device, a number of individuals were tortured following their rendition. Maher Ara is a Canadian citizen who was arrested at Kennedy airport, transferred to and tortured in Syria before being released without being charged with a crime. Khaled el-Masri was arrested on the Serbia-Macedonia border, held and tortured for five months and then released without being charged. His captors told him it was a case of mistaken identity. They meant to torture someone else with his name. He was an incidental beneficiary of the torture rather than its intended target.