Massive infodump - 24-28 December 2010

Welcome back from holidays. Hopefully you all had a very good time. We begin with several statements about life.

Wikileaks continues to be front-page material. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression issued a statement expressing clear concern about governments stomping on those rights in their zeal to stop Wikileaks, recalling several internationally-recognized legal principles that prohibit or restrict many actions already undertaken by governments to prevent access to Wikileaks. Including attempting to enforce a blanket ban on Wikileaks content for computers in the United States, regardless of who they are, and then banning Pentagon journalists from reading the content. Not that the UN rapporteur's comment is going to stop the parade of people claiming that it's terrorism, even though nobody but comfortable elites has been terrorized, of course.

The scariest part is, even if governments couldn't shut things down, if the banking sector suddenly decided to deny Wikileaks any ability to access of process donations and monetary transactions, Wikileaks would die, a victim of censorship by finance, instead of by government.

Out in the world today, organic certification in Australia was revoked when GM seeds from another crop blew over and contaminated a particular farmer's organically-grown oats. Elsewhere, 31 United States cities' water supplies tested positive for a "probable carcinogen" in concentrations that could be unhealthy.

An attempt at launching a communications satellite from India failed critically forty-seven seconds into launch, exploding the rocket and the satellite.

Something to chew on - in the past, a smashing success of feeding the hungry was put on through the use of government organization, private business, and chariries. That was with higher unemployment numbers than now, and apparently when corporations and companies still had a heart to have its strings tugged. Still, it is clearly possible to feed the hungry en masse, whether with loaves and fishes or ham and potatoes. Why aren't we?

the Dead Pool claims Fred Hargesheimer, a pilot who spent his post-shot-down life raising money to help the Pacific Islander people who rescued him and brought him back to health, at 94.

Finally, there's all the terror and war stuff - Bellicosity between the Koreas, parcel bombs in Rome, alleged terrorists in Mumbai, more alleged terrorists in the Netherlands, fighting in Pakistan, in addition to suicide bombings in the area, Iranian officer captured in Afghanistan, where David Petraeus just was, and three men in Switzerland charged with smuggling nuclear materials out of the country.

Domestically, another spot where the Fed could have helped to stop the banking crisis before it got out of hand, and chose not to.

The revolving door works in the military as well, as defense firms and private contractors lure retired generals to work and lobby for them for fairly hefty pay.

A host of exemptions has been granted to United States companies to do business with places on the governmental blacklist. Many of them for good reasons, such as humanitarian aid, or because it serves the interest of the United States, but several others look more like corruption and favor-buying.

More security theater - Loaded handgun passes TSA security, in addition to several videos showing the shortcomings of airport security, and an ex-screener was indicted on charges of child pornography - but we assure you that the peopel manning the porno scanners are of the highest professional caliber.

Not that TSA screeners are the only people making stupid decisions - Police in Los Angeles shot and killed a Douglas Zerby, believing the water hose nozzle in his hand was a gun. They did not ask Mr. Zerby to drop the item in his hands, according to accounts, but assumed he had a gun and shot to kill. For ane xample on the proper procedure to follow, at least, observe the Utah police that repeatedly asked someone to drop their shotgun before firing upon him as he was moving toward a group of people.

A new program in New York hopes to make sanitation workers into police informants, because people out at the hours of their work are usually assumed to be criminals or committing criminal acts. This, combined with the idea of postal trucks becoming data collection units of various sorts, certainly makes it seem like the "spy on your neighbors and rat them out" idea is taking hold, both in people and in technology. Admittedly, the Postal Service project intends on collecting useful scientific and climate data, but it could just as easily have a Street View moment. Oh, and did we mention the Patriot App, which allows any iApp user to do all the reporting and spying they would like? Of course, such an app could be bent to truly patriotic purposes, if used truly for whistleblowing and leaking documents. Doing so would certainly doom such an app, I'm sure, considering how the Wikileaks app was downed.

A judge is apparently complaining about how difficult it is to find juries to convict on cases involving small amounts of marijuana possession. Sounds like the War on (Some) Drugs isn't able to keep people Scared Straight anymore.

A State Senator in Oklahoma is planning to introduce a bill that would require the teaching of creationism as a valid scientific alternative to evolution, claiming that evolution is "a religion" and that both creationism and evolution need to be taught in science, or neither needs to be taught in science. If you would like to read the justification for such a bill, logical fallacies and the rest included, read it straight from the State Senator's own electronic pen.

Finally, the new appointee at the internal affaris office of the Department of Justice may have been someone snubbed when Monica Goodling was busily politicizing promotions at Justice during the previous administration. If there's a chip on her shoulder, we hope that she uses it to ensure that political appointment and promotion of that nature never happens again.

In technology and sciences, Plugbot, a computer designed to test and break security while looking like a standard wall wart plug. It will have lots of things to do, especially considering places like bus stops run Windows for much of their display material, which leaves them open to BSOD.

The Wall Street Journal notes that most of your smartphone apps are transmitting data, including potentially personally identifiable information, to advertisers and others without asking your consent.

At least one person is trying to take on the flood of spam, one lawsuit at a time, and we hope that he is eventually able to bring down big spammers and take their lists off the networks.

Those with scholarly interests, and who can unpack anthropology, could you have a gander at the study that suggests the change that brought about the Sahara changed human nature so as to be patriarchal, warlike, and violent in response to the possibility of starvation.

Where did the oil from Deepwater Horizon go? Perhaps the dispersant made it sink to the seafloor, where it would be hidden, yet deadly? And worse, Deepwater Horizon was not an isolated incident - a blast in Azerbaijan looks remarkably similar to the one here in the Gulf.

Data from the LHC particle smashing has disproven certain hypothesis of string theory. Others survive to be tested for another day.

And finally, an old message in a bottle from a Confederate General carried bad news about reinforcements for another Confederate General. A couple of cryptographers deciphered the code, after several people delicately handled the artifact itself to extract the message.

In opinions, O Little (Invisible) Town of Bethlehem, a place that has mythic dimensions to it to most Christians, which conveniently lets them ignore the geopolitical reality of the place.

Speaking of relations between Muslims and Christians, Mr. Mauro opines about how much the government of the United Kingdom needs to crack down on Muslims, treat prominent ones as being terrorist-connected, and force the moderates to speak a position against the extremists if they don't want to be lumped in with the extremists. And Mr. Solway considers the question of whether to bomb Iran's nuclear capabilities to be moot - bomb them or reap the consequences of them using nuclear bombs against allies like Israel.

The Media Bias Department notes conservatives often get more coverage than liberals when, theoretically, both candidates are known for the same thing. Part of that, though, may have to do with News Corp and its holdings more than anything else. After all, the higher-ups at News Corp ordered climate skepticism language be used by its hosts and moderators every time the topic came up, so there's plenty of other things they can be doing. And speaking again of News Corp, the editors of the WSJ, a NewsCorp publication, take issue with Politifact's declaration of the Lie of the Year to be "government takeover of health care", because they believe that government is taking over health care, and besides, those Politifact people are Biased, too, and they believe that their interpretation of the facts is the only truth allowed. Well, We Are Not Unbiased is the first rule of any publication, including this one, so pointing it out as if it were a zinger is not helping their case for the main thesis, that the government is, in fact, taking over health care through regulations designed to make insurers dance to the puppet strings of the regulators. This is wise, as arguing that the government was actually planning on seizing the whole health care apparatus and making it theirs would be a colossal lie - the lie that Politifact is arguing against, the one that takes the name "death panels" and "socialist health care" and "government bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies". By comparison, some mild regulations against the insurance industry that stop some of their most egregious practices in exchange for forcing the entirety of the population to buy into their system is downright mild, and certainly not the government takeover of health care the WSJ says is happening. For that, we would expect the regulations to make the insurance industry feel constricted to the point of not being able to sneeze without paying a fine for it. That insurers feel their profits threateend and that they might actually have to pay out on care claims has them shoting that they're being regulated too much, but it's kind of like making a scene over kicking a rock with a steel-toed boot.

Mr. Pendry continues to comment on the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, this time insisting that soldiers will be known primarily as to whether they are gay or not before they are known as soldiers, whether they want to be known as gay or not, and that those who disapprove of gay people will be forced to lie and say they're okay with it or will be forced to leave the military. His first premise isn't true - we already know that most soliders have said knowing whether someone is gay or not won't affect how they interact and how they do their work. And I'm betting there are plenty of soldiers who haven't been asked and haven't told, and will continue to not tell. Now, at least, they can't be kicked out if someone else outs them, or if the military did, in fact, ask, and then covered it up. For those people who are affected by it, if they can't follow orders because they think their CO is immoral for being gay, then the soldier should leave, because they're no longer able to function as a soldier. I'm all for soldiers thinking about the ethics of their orders, but there's no reason for any soldier to base their devision to follow or not on the personal preferences of the commander giving the order. Mr. Pendry's mass desertions might happen, but the military that emerges from after that will be a much better force without the dead weight of homophobes.

Ms. Strassel devotes a column to why the health care bill should be picked apart by the courts, based on a ruling against one part of it (that has gone the other way in other places) and some crafty games and definition-switches. Those of us who wanted a robust public option are shaking our heads and wondering why we're not having that fight instead of this one, but one would hope that commentators thinking about how to take it apart are also thinking about how things could be made better (and status quo is not better, we assure you).

Dr. Duchesne requests better statistics and evaluation methods from academics claiming structural racism still exists in North American societies. That's the charitable interpretation, anyway, and what seems to be the actual point of the article, if you take away the layers of "progressives are in control and strangle conservative and contrary opinions, that happen to be the truth" away and lop off the "progressives beleive in racial and gender quotas instead of merely equal opportunity to succeed on one's own merits" stuff that pollutes the main point. Dr. Duchesne is skeptical of the claim that academia still has racist biases in it, considering the percentages of minorities already in academic positions and with PhDs, and thinks that methodology that ultimately relies on anecdata is shaky. We note that proving racism is much tougher these days, as most overt forms of it have been banned, and that the academics are usually talking about subtle racisms, like "A white-sounding name is more likely to be hired than a black-sounding name", which are definitely harder to prove in experimental settings and in widespread form. So Dr. Duchesne is right there - better experiments need to be designed to test these things. I wish that she didn't let the other things get in the way.

Because it's around the new year, there's also a preponderance of opinions on Why America Is So Awesome. Namely, the principles upon which it was founded (most of which are actually pretty awesome), the continued worship at the altars of Free Enterprise, Private Industry, and The Market (All Praise To Their Names), which allow one to mischaracterize the recent election as some sort of popular rebellion against a tyrannical and expanding government, instead of the triumph of corporate money and electioneering through overt means and fake grass-roots organizations rooting for the rich and against the poor, and further mischaracterize people who oppose that expanding government as people who give more charitably in money and other products/serivce and are more fundamentally honest and helpful than their redistriubtion-friendly comrades, and the way that America thoroughly sanctions religions attempting to meddle in public affairs and protects the rights of Pharisees to preach loudly on the street corners and feel offended if someone doesn't practice their particular brand of loud street preaching right back to them, or worse, asks them to tone it down out of respect for other religions. It also sanctions the government telling those meddlers to fuck off and to insist that loud preaching be restricted to private property and to not pollute the surrounding airspace with noise, a conveniently-overlooked fact that the War on Christmas types and the "Sharia's gonna get ya!" folks would rather you didn't know.

On that last point, Mr. Rove highlights the Ride 2 Recovery program, which furnishes veterans who have lost limbs with specially-constructed bicycles. He slides in a dig at how this was private individuals deciding to do soemthing, instead of a government decision, as if that made it Inherently Superior, but otherwise he leaves the focus on where it should be - the need to take care of the people who have given limbs as soldiers.

Finally, out of opinions, Nichole Henderson seesm almost giddy that a ban preventing the moving of detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the United States for any reason passed in the Defense Authorization Bill, jumping for joy at the death knell of the promise to close the extralegal facility. Properly highlighting that the opposition from Congress has been a major hurdle to the President's promise, and then talking about a proposed Executive plan that might yet manage to allow Guantanamo residents to properly challenge their detention fairly, the column then goes on to trip over itself and take a swan dive from the Cliffs of Logic by saying that if Congress or the people believe that some people are too dangerous to move from Guantanamo Bay, whether for further incarceration or for civilian trial, then the guilt of those detainees has already been established. Trial proceedings, military or otherwise, will be just for show, so why bother with them? Indefinite detention and military commissions for all, where the results can be guaranteed and the sentences swift and harsh. And the United States will continue to violate its own laws and the Conventions to which it is a signatory to.

Last for tonight, It's lkely that you have been designated a terror suspect by a government organization. Mind you, you probably won't ever be as effective a fear weapon as Osama bin Laden or Anwar al-Awaki, but there's someone probably watching you, possibly leaving rude comments in your blog if you criticize them, or sending the police after you for being part of a feaceful demonstration and protest against the government's policies.

That said, there is a bright spot - the case against the Church of the SubGenius Reverend is finished. She gets to keep her son, assuming that she keeps no SubGenius materials in her house. Apparently, J.R. "bob" Dobbs is still a corrupting, cultish influence on the young.

Sforzando: When complaining about education, demonstrate you Paid Attention and Learned Something

One of the rules of blogging and columning and writing says that if you Did Not Do The Research, expect to be hammered for it - in peer-reviewed journals, they may very well deny publication of your work if you're lacking in the scholarship. In syndicated columns, they have a lower threshold, of course, and depending on where you're syndicated, that threshold may be lower still. It's pretty well the only reason why someone would let the following see any sort of publication.

Mr. Williams brazenly claims education for blacks is fraudulent, with no evidence to back this up by standardized test score disparities and assessment results that consistently place black students behind white ones in reading and maths, then claims the solution to such things is charter schools, school vouchers, and the election of anti-union school administrators. To call this piece a "hack job" would be an offense to hacks everywhere. This is a primary-school essay that lacks support for all of its major theses. It is perhaps the germ of an idea that requires itself to be more fleshed out with support and research, rather than treated as a complete thought and thesis.

Let's start with a definition:

Fraud - deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage. (Def 1, Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2010, available at http://dictionary.reference.com)

So, for education for blacks to be "fraudulent", it would have to be proven to be fraud - the education for blacks would have to be provably different than that for other groups, and it would further have to be proven that such disparity was done intentionally to disadvantage black people. Test scores do not a fraud proof make. Based solely on the scores mentioned, one could claim that white education is fraudulent because they don't do as well as Asian students in certain subjects (remember that piece from some time ago where the authors basically said universities were becoming "too Asian", by which they meant that the mostly-meritocratic process of university admissions was apparently biasing toward Asians, because they tended to have stronger admissions profiles, and that such a thing was bad because it meant the students would study at school instead of having fun on their parents' dime? Yeah...). There's still a line of thought that says standardized tests have inherent cultural biases that need to be overcome, for one thing. That should be fairly simple. There are social issues involved - do white culture and black culture have different values regarding the value of education? Do we, as a society, expect white people to get college degrees and CEO jobs and black people to get multimillion-dollar athletic contracts, degree optional? What other factors than the education system might be influencing how education happens in the United States?

Besides, as Mr. Wiliams knows, because it will become the means by which he seeks to fix this "fraud", not all schools are chartered equal. Since public schools are funded by local property taxes in the United States, with occasional supplements from the federal and state governments, the amount of money available to public schools depends entirely on the affluence of the area surrounding that school.Poor areas generate little taxes and the school is underfunded. Rich areas generate more taxes, which generally results in better school funding and a better school system. There are exceptions, of course, and they're usually held up as examples of how you can starve a school system and it will still function just fine, honest, so lower those taxes more, but they are exceptions.

Because of this, parents naturally complained that their poor schools were not preparing their students for the world around them. (Notice, if you will, how many of those "poor" schools are also in heavily-minority areas - all those years of Jim Crow and other minority-unfriendly official and unofficial policies continue to influence us, even though we're supposed to be past the idea that minorities are inherently stupid or poor decision makers or some other nonsense.) Instead of finding ways to boost funding to the poorer schools, possibly through redistribution of the excesses of rich schools, the idea of "School choice" appeared - if your school sucks, then you deserve to be able to move to another school that's doing better. Assuming they have an open spot and they're willing to take you, that is. Or there are charter schools and vouchers, where a student's governmental spending goes with them, wherever they choose to go, be it public or private schooling.

Would it surprise you that the effect of these options is that the poor schools only get poorer and the rich schools get to pick and choose who they want to have in their schools, so they can look good and have good test scores? All the students who don't win the lottery to go to some other school get the public education that a poor area's taxes can buy. And their scores suffer, because they have no funding to provide anything other than the Core, they can't afford the extra things the richer schools do, they have hungry students, they have students whose parents are not at home because they have to work, they have the students who have learning challenges, but who can't get learning that works for them because there's no money for teachers who can teach it to them, and they have large class sizes on top of all of this. The environment they get is not conducive to learning, and the salaries paid to the teachers make the teachers ready to jump ship when a better offer arises, and more often than not, there are administrators and legislators breathing down the teachers' necks to prevent them from being innovative, because if things slide further, then the funding gets cut even more, and the spiral continues.

If there's a farud being committed here, it's not specifically aimed at black people, it's being aimed at poor people. That poor people tend to be minority says things about society at large, not just an education system that bases your chances of success on whether the houses in your neighborhood sell for enough money.

Which makes the proposed "solution" all that much more bullpucky. Charter schools and school vouchers let the lucky go to better places and the unlucky get nothing. Not to mention, those charter schools charge tuition, meaning on top of the vouchers, those students that want to go either have to find more money or fight for scholarships. That's the major part of the solution Mr. Williams proposes - take away the money from the poor schools and give it to the rich ones, possibly with a little extra.

His other part is based on a strain of thinking that is generally rife in conservatism, but really entrenched when it comes to education. Teachers are usually represented by a union, and whenever unions are involved, there's almost an automatic assumption by their opponents that unions prevent or make it obscenely difficult to fire people who are no longer productive to the organization, because they require such things as discipline processes and grievance resolution. Instead of just being able to say "Your students were the worst in the school on the tests, so you're fired", you actually have to go through trying to make things better, and that's just unacceptable delay when THE CHILDRENS are at stake. Unions are also bad because they generally bargain for livable and better wages for the people they represent, so the poor school systems that already don't have enough money are being roughed up by the mean unions to put more of their budget into staff salaries instead of education. The solution to both of these problems is to hire someone to be in charge that will tell the union that they can accept easier discipline procedures and less wages or they can go hang, if not someone who will break the union and try to make it so that it no longer represents the faculty, so they can fire easily and keep salaries down without being accountable to anyone.

Neither of these "solutions" actually does anything about the problem of sinking test scores and poor education. Structural components of funding will likely require revision to bring baseline funding to parity. Then experimenting with class sizes, instruction methods, and other possible solutions will have some sort of comparable effectiveness, because they'll all be starting from a relatively level playing field. At least, in the school. The society around the school has great influence on its success and failure, as do parents at home. Social settings will have to be accounted for, and perhaps the best fix for bad schooling is in doing something about the society around it so that parents don't have to work sixteen-hour days just to have enough to get by, so they can be there to help with nutrition and homework.

Each citizen of the country is guaranteed an education. Why Mr. Williams seems more than willing to abandon large swaths of that country from getting a good education, in contradiction to his assertion that education is currently defrauding large swaths of people out of their good education, is a mystery to me.