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May 4, 2004
…the new head of the prison, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller… said that some interrogation techniques, such as sleep deprivation or stressful positions, will require a commander’s approval. (AP)
Excuse me, but we are ok with torturing prisoners so long as it doesn’t leave any marks?
Does President Bush understand the magnitude of the disaster at Abu Ghraib? We’ve lost whatever ability we had to maintain that we were occupying the high ground. We have given our enemies a powerful recruitment poster. We have handed them the rejoinder to those who want to argue on our behalf. Our country is at substantially greater long-term risk today. And our president treats it as something that is personally troubling, a matter of conscience rather than an issue of policy. He continues to talk about how we ended the “torture rooms” in Iraq, as if unaware of how hollow his words sound to the world.
All that is PR and perception, and it counts for an awful lot. But we also have to ask whether we as a nation are responsible for the torture of the prisoners. Of course every American is outraged – aren’t we? – but was it anything more than an isolated incident? And I’m afraid that the answer is yes. Even if it is the only time we’ve beaten prisoners, we are responsible for hiring mercenaries to mask the true cost of the war. Mercenaries are the second-largest force in the Coalition of the Willing and the Paid. Some of them have high security clearances from our government. We are outsourcing our dirty work. In the 21st century, the secret police work have corporate IDs. This is scary as shit.
What can we do about it? I’m not an expert in foreign relations, war, security or diplomacy, so I don’t know. But here are some things that make sense to me as a citizen:
Announce a full investigation. Punish those who are responsible. Treat it as a big deal. Show the world what the rule of law looks like.
Fire the mercenaries. Bring charges against them and the companies they work for. Don’t use mercenaries any more.
Bring the Guantanamo prisoners to trial and release the ones who are found innocent (or who can’t be charged).
Fire Ashcroft for not protecting our Constitution.
Re-think how we can make our country safer. Being a bully is going to get our cities blown up. What can we do in addition to hunting down terrorists? In twenty years, what is our vision of the world?
The use of mercenaries to do our dirty work is a turning point. We should treat it as such and go back…conspicuously and quickly.
MoveOn.org has a petition you can sign calling on our government to support a full investigation of the events.
And here’s a great op-ed by Bruce Schneier, and the usual brilliance from Krugman.
Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., whose district includes Kirkland, called it “absolutely astounding” that the FTC does not see a need for a new law “when we have hundreds of thousands of violations every day.” Inslee introduced a bill April 29 that would outlaw spyware programs designed to record web browsing habits and collect personal data without notice and consent of the user. (eSchoolNews)
“Me hammer. You must be nail. Bang!”
The FTC is, quite reasonably, suggesting that we wait to see if self-regulation emerges.
Every time Symantec AntiVirus 2003 (XP) encounters an incoming message with a virus, i.e. 10-20 times each time I download email, it puts up a dialogue box telling me what it’s found. It’s not asking me for advice or requiring me to make a decision. It’s just patting itself on its back. And it interrupts the download until I press the button to dismiss it, presumably with a muttered “Attaboy, Norton, I mean, Symantec!” Which means I have to sit and watch my screen while I’m downloading email. With 1,200 incoming spams a day, this gets to be a bother.
Anyone know how to tell it to turn off the screens? (Better, how about if Symantec were to pop up a non-modal screen at the end of the process, giving me a summary of how it’s saved my butt?)
May 3, 2004
JD Lasica has posted the first chapters of his book, Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music and Television, on a wiki for public editing. Cool!
Because you simply had to know, here’s a site that keeps track of how many times the F-Word is used in HBO’s Deadwood.
I’ve been watching Deadwood and sort of enjoying it. There’s some juicy acting in it — I especially liked Wild Bill, but, oh well — and an abundance of period color, but it suffers from sitting next to The Sopranos on the TiVo list.
May 17 is the first day same-sex marriages are allowed in Massachusetts. Anyone else feel like celebrating together?
How about this? We show up en masse at our local town halls. We each come with a bouquet of flowers or two. As the couples leave, we each give one flower to each couple.
Other ideas?
May 2, 2004
Care to answer a question for a city slicker? Why is it that about 10% of the “free range” eggs we buy have blood spots on their yolk? I thought a blood spot indicates that the egg is fertile. Are they letting the chickens run with roosters?
Or is this a case of parth-henhouse-ogenesis?
May 1, 2004
In response to my blogging about pages not saying what they’re about, Hanan Cohen points us to an exceptionally well-written article by Clara Yu, John Cuadrado, Maciej Ceglowski and J. Scott Payne about latent semantic indexing (not to be confused with latex cement and indenting).
Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant… Although the LSI algorithm doesn’t understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.
When you search an LSI-indexed database, the search engine looks at similarity values it has calculated for every content word, and returns the documents that it thinks best fit the query. Because two documents may be semantically very close even if they do not share a particular keyword, LSI does not require an exact match to return useful results. Where a plain keyword search will fail if there is no exact match, LSI will often return relevant documents that don’t contain the keyword at all.
For example: “In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president’s name at all.”
This is a very well-done article. And it even includes a link to an application of LSI: An automatic essay grader (which is temporarily down because a class is actually using it).
Last week, according to today’s Boston Globe (link breaks soon), Major General George W. Keefe of the National Guard received and forwarded a gag email about the Democratic convention that purported to be a schedule of events: “Opening flag burning ceremony,” a re-enactment of Kerry’s Tossing of the Medals, and “Sen. Kennedy proposes a toast” (six times).
Ok, so maybe it’s not the funniest gag email you’ve ever seen. But Keefe felt forced to apologize for forwarding it after Mayor Mumbles Menino fulminated against it: “It’s unfortunate that an adjutant general of the National Guard has the time on his hands to say things about the greatest senator America has ever had.” So, Menino’s complaint is that people who are worth their salaries don’t have time to forward an email. Oh, and people ought to not to be allowed to disagree with his hyperbolic assessment of his friend, Ted Kennedy.
The state rep from the proud city of Melrose was also furious, saying that Keefe “should be loyal only to the charge of keeping order…This is a serious breach, and he ought to be called on the carpet for it.” Then he manages to tie it to Iraq: “People are dying in Iraq. Don’t make fun of that and then pass it around.” (Fun Tip: Imagine those words coming from David Brent, the manager on the BBC’s The Office.)
The chair of the state Democratic party pretended to be outraged that Keefe lost work time forwarding the email: “It is embarrassing and ridiculous that a state employee would be spending his time sending nasty partisan e-mails, rather than doing his job.” Then he manages to tie this to the fact that the Democratic party in the most Democratic party state in the country can’t manage to get a Democratic governor elected: “The governor reappointed [Keefe] after he sent this foolish e-mail, and he ought to be reprimanded for doing it. This speaks volumes about what kind of administration this is.”
Hmm, so let’s weigh this out. On the one hand, we have the loss of approximately 60 seconds of work time and on the other we have the right to free speech. Clearly, the two sides of the balance are so evenly matched that there’s no way to figure out which to support. So, here’s my solution: Require General Keefe to stay a minute late one night, preferably wearing an orange jump suit. Only then can this great injustice be righted!
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