Month: October 2012

Good News Out of Pakistan

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Yes, this is a phrase that I did not expect to say, but the fact that Pakistani law enforcement is beginning to enforce notorious blasphemy laws against Islamic extremists too:

Most people have heard of Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Carrying the death penalty of life imprisonment for anyone who criticises the Prophet Muhammed or the Qur’an, it gained renewed international scrutiny this year after Rimsha Masih, a young Christian girl apparently suffering from Down’s Syndrome, was arrested in Islamabad. She was subsequently freed and a Muslim cleric now stands accused of fabricating evidence against her.

………

But could that be changing? Here in Karachi, protests against the anti-Islam film that have caused rallies across the Muslim world turned violent. One of the incidents on 21 September was an attack on a Hindu Temple on the outskirts of the city. Protesters attacked the Sri Krishna Ram temple, breaking religious statues, tearing up the Bhagavad Gita (the holy book), and assaulting the temple’s caretaker.

Community leaders took the unusual step of going to the police, who have announced that the case against nine attackers has been registered under Section 295-A of the blasphemy laws. This lesser known section, which covers the “outraging of religious feelings”, can apply to any religion and carries a fine or imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Of course, this case does not represent a sea-change in attitudes just yet. For a start, no one has been charged, or even arrested. But it was a positive move by local police, if only because Pakistan’s religious minorities are frequently too frightened to speak out at all. Numbering about four per cent of the population, this small minority of Christians, Hindus and Islamic sects such as the Ahmadis (regarded as non-Muslims) translates to nearly ten million people, the equivalent of the population of Tunisia. It is not an insignificant number.

While this is not the same as the death penalty for defaming the Mohammad or Islam, I am tickled pink that the same people who are this law’s most vociferous supporters are now being targeted by this same law.

Nice Catch

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Lindsay Beyerstein has a very interesting analysis of Henry Wiencek’s essay The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson in Smithsonian magazine.

Some of the facts I knew, like the fact that George Washington made far more diligent efforts to free his slaves after his death than Thomas Jefferson ever did.

What I didn’t know, and now do know, is that he kept detailed records of slave beatings, and that Monticello’s primary cash crop was slaves:

The most disturbing revelation in this story is that Jefferson didn’t just keep slaves to work on his farm. He wrote that his real business model was “the increase” of his female slaves. He was raising human beings to be auctioned off like livestock. Jefferson calculated that the children of his slaves brought in a reliable 4% return per annum. It was a great business, he recommended it to everyone.

In the movies, we know someone’s a benevolent slave-holder if they “don’t break up families.” Well, those are the movies.

The revisionist fiction is that slavery was an unprofitable institution by Jefferson’s time. Wiencek explains how Jefferson breathed new economic life into bonded servitude by devising profitable models for slave labor in factories and wheat fields as tobacco farming was being phased out.

Jefferson spurned a golden opportunity to walk away from the slave trade. An old revolutionary comrade willed Jefferson a small fortune to pay for his slaves’ release and education, but Jefferson refused, even though he was the executor of the will.

George Washington freed his slaves upon his death, but Jefferson didn’t even go that far.

Some defenders will say that it’s unfair to judge Jefferson by the standards of our day, but the fact is, Jefferson fell short of the standards of his own time. He knew it was wrong to own slaves. In fact, his writings helped to set the standards of his day.

This explains much about the political culture of Virginia.

I had always wondered how the progressive (for his day) politics of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia became the reactionary bigotry one sees leading up to (and during, and a long time after) the Civil War.

It now appears that the Jefferson’s progressive positions, at least insofar as slavery was concerned, was nothing more than a mirage, which means that the change in Virginia’s political culture was far less extreme than one is commonly led to believe.

What a Surprise

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David Axe talks to a former USAF general who says that his career was destroyed, and his retirement delayed in an attempt to cover up his report that was critical of the V-22 Osprey:

Don Harvel thought he was cruising to a well-deserved retirement after 35 years flying cargo planes for the U.S. Air Force. Then in the spring of 2010 he was tapped to investigate the fatal crash of a high-tech Air Force tiltrotor aircraft – and everything changed.

What Harvel discovered about the controversial hybrid aircraft drew him into a battle of wills with his superiors at Air Force Special Operations Command. Harvel, then a brigadier general, uncovered evidence of mechanical problems — and resulting safety woes — in the V-22 Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter and flies like an airplane. These are issues the Pentagon has been eager to downplay. So when Harvel refused to alter his findings to match the Defense Department’s expectations, he knew that was the final chapter of his decades-long military service. Harvel’s long-planned retirement was held up for more than two years, effectively silencing him during a troubling chapter in the Osprey’s often-troubled history.

“I turned [my report] in and I knew that my career was done,” Harvel says.

………

But the stats reflect altered and miscategorized data. Engine fires clearly costing millions of dollars to fix were downgraded in the paperwork. One malfunction that resulted in a V-22 accidentally taking off uncommanded before crashing to the ground was labeled a ground incident and left off the record. Even leaving out the 1991-2000 crashes, the Osprey’s crash rate before this year’s accidents was roughly double the officially stated figure, making the V-22 no safer than the Marines’ conventional helicopters and far, far more dangerous than its fixed-wing cargo planes.

And that’s mostly due to inadequate testing, Harvel claims. “In their hurry to get this thing painted in a positive light for Congress, some things are coming back to haunt them,” he says of the V-22′s supporters.

We need to understand that the military establishment of the United States is completely captured by the defense industry, and this does not serve either our military needs or the interest of the taxpayers.

A Good Primer on Why the US Patent System is F%$#ed Up

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Over at Ars Technica, Timothy Lee has a couple of very good articles on what was wrong with our patent system.

The first is about how the Federal Circuit Appeals Court, which set up to be the sole appellate court for patent matters, and how is has gone completely off the rails ). He calls it a rogue court:

“It is not common in the life of the law in America for a lower court and a major segment of its bar to take on the nation’s highest court, effectively reversing some major precedents or at least substantially mitigating their impact,” notes Steven Flanders in a recent history of the patent court. “Yet this was done.”

 The Federal Circuit, he said, also took on “the quieter and subtler effort to re-educate trial judges throughout the judiciary, to make them friendlier to patent-holders (or at least to the system of patents) as well.” (Flanders, it should be noted, is an avowed supporter of the Federal Circuit and its efforts to reshape patent law).

 This dismissive attitude toward Supreme Court precedents apparently survives to this day among patent lawyers. In the wake of this year’s decision limiting patents on the practice of medicine, patent attorney Gene Quinn wondered, “How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this inexplicable nonsense?” Obviously, the Federal Circuit can’t “overrule” a Supreme Court decision. But with enough persistence, it can, and often does, subvert the principles enunciated by the nation’s highest court. And when it does so, it almost always works in the direction of making patents easier to obtain and enforce.

It’s a good description of how and why our patent system has gone nuts. 

He gives a good summary of how we got there, and why the Supreme court is increasingly willing (perhaps eager) to bitch slap this court.

My only complaint is that he did not cover the seminal patent trolling case, NTP v. RIM (Blackberry), which was crucial in making both SCOTUS, and increasingly larger segments of the “Very Serious People”.  (You are seeing this in legislation about patents floating around Congress)

As some background, when NTP got an injunction against RIM, they asked RIM to cut off all commercial and residential users in the United States, and RIM’s response was that this wasn’t possible, so they would cut off all their users, including the government.

This would mean is that people like Congressmen, their aides, and Supreme Court Justices and their clerks would lose access to their “Crackberries”.

As a result, the consequences of patent trolling suddenly got real for them, and they realized that the Federal Circuit Appeals Court is full of a bunch of extremist nutcases.  (I’m sure that there is an obscure legal term for this in Latin, but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.*)

I emailed him about this and he noted that he had included a number of injunctions from patent trolls, including the Blackberry case, but ended up on the cutting room floor.

Additionally, he writes a good article on the International Trade Commission, which routinely prevents products from being imported on the basis of (frequently bogus) patent claims:

If you follow the smartphone patent wars, you’ve probably heard of the International Trade Commission (ITC), which seems to get dragged into every high-profile patent dispute over the devices. Just this month, Motorola asked the ITC to ban various Apple products from the US, and the ITC separately ruled that Apple doesn’t infringe some Samsung patents. But how did this obscure Washington bureaucracy become a major front in the patent wars?

The ITC has the authority to police “unfair methods of competition” by importers, a phrase interpreted to include patent infringement. Because virtually all mobile devices are manufactured overseas, getting the ITC to ban the importation of a device can be just as effective as getting an injunction from a regular court.

A new study from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggests that the ITC’s patent-enforcement process is tilted in favor of patent holders—and especially patent trolls. The author, K. William Watson, argues that the inherently discriminatory nature of ITC patent enforcement—ITC cases can only be brought against imported products, not domestically produced ones—violates America’s obligations under World Trade Organization rules not to discriminate against foreign products. He says Congress should eliminate the provision of trade law, known as Section 337, that gives the ITC authority over patent issues.

Go read both articles.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Woot!

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The Federal Appeals court of the 6th circuit has ruled that Ohio must provide early voting in the last days before the election:

President Barack Obama’s campaign won a federal appeals court ruling that requires every citizen in Ohio be offered the same number of early voting days as members of the U.S. military.

 The U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati today rejected a bid by Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general, both Republicans, to overturn a lower-court order that blocked a law ending pre-election voting three days earlier for civilians than for service-members and overseas citizens.

 “There is no relevant distinction between the two groups,” the three-judge panel said. “The state argues that military voters need extra early voting time because they could be suddenly deployed. But any voter could be suddenly called away and prevented from voting on Election Day.”

 Ohio controls 18 of the 270 Electoral College votes Obama or his challenger, Mitt Romney, needs to win the presidency and no Republican has won the office without carrying the state. Obama took Ohio with 51.5 percent of the vote in 2008 when more than 100,000 people, out of a total of 5.77 million, cast ballots in the last three days, according to today’s opinion.

Theoretically, it seems to me that the ‘Phants could shut down the early voting if they were to strip early voting rights from active duty servicemen, but I’m inclined to believe that the the political repercussions of doing this would be too much for them to try this.

Eric Falkenstein’s Rule Suggests that Janet Napolitano is Corrupt

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I have discovered that Janet Napolitano has eschewed email as a matter of policy:

The woman in charge of U.S efforts to make email secure doesn’t use it herself.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Friday copped to keeping her own communications off the grid.

“I don’t have any of my own accounts,” she told a cybersecurity conference hosted by National Journal. “I’m very secure.”

Asked if her reasons for sticking to other forms of communication had to do with concerns about email security, she hedged and said she avoids email for “a whole host of reasons.”

I have, on a number of occasions used the rule of thumb that people who do not are note to be funded:

As Eric Falkenstein observes:

People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

I applied this to Hank Paulson, and it seems to me that it’s only fair to apply it to Ms. Napolitano as well.

Fred Hiatt Goes Rogue

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The Washington Post editorial board called out Paul Ryan’s budget proprosal as 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:

Finally, if you heard a glimmer of responsibility from Mr. Romney lately, think again: Mr. Ryan pulled back on it. Mr. Romney has been saying that middle-class families shouldn’t expect their tax bills to go down very much, if at all, because their lower rates would be offset by, yes, curtailing deductions. Fox News’s Neil Cavuto pressed Mr. Ryan on that score. “Was he trying to brace us for some bitter news?” Mr. Cavuto asked. Mr. Ryan: “No, not at all. . . . Middle income taxpayers get higher take-home pay.”

Mr. Wallace asked what Mr. Romney’s priority would be if his numbers didn’t add up and the reduction in tax rates couldn’t be done without losing revenue. Mr. Ryan didn’t flinch. “Keeping tax rates down,” he replied.

In other words, revenue-neutral would be nice. Lowering tax rates is the Republican priority, deficits be damned.

I am stunned. The Washington Post editorial board is ground zero of “very serious people” inside the Beltway wankertude, and they love people who want to sh%$ on the poor and elderly.

I’m wondering whose cheerios that Ryan pissed in.

H/t Paul Krugman.

If Those People Made Me This Offer, I Would Be Worried That They Would Whack Me

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Joe Conason is reporting that Republican political operative Roger Stone is alleging that Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan because the Koch brothers promised to spend $100 million on his campaign in exchange:

Veteran Republican political consultant, unrepentant dirty trickster, and recently reborn libertarian Roger Stone yesterday published a startling accusation against Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on his personal website, The Stone Zone. According to Stone, the billionaire Koch brothers purchased the Republican vice presidential nomination for Ryan from Romney in late July by promising to fork over an additional $100 million toward “independent expenditure” campaigning for the GOP ticket.

 Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.

If this is true and Roger Stone’s biography is not something that convinces me of his reliability, thenMitt Romney is a fool.

When someone offers you a lot of money to take on a potential successor, it is because they are thinking about getting rid of you.

I’m not sure though that this is true though. The source, Roger Stone, was one of the leading rat-f%$#ers (that’s what they called themselves) in the Nixon administration, and if reports are true, he has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.

He could be telling the truth, but his background does not convince me that places a high value on the truth in the context of politics, and he is supporting Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, so YMMV.

About Bloody Time

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Wal-Mart workers on strike – Salon.com:

Today, for the first time in Walmart’s fifty-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours, they’ll join supporters for a mass rally outside a Pico Rivera, CA store. This is the latest – and most dramatic – of the recent escalations in the decades-long struggle between organized labor and the largest private employer in the world.

“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Walmart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tried of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.”

Walmart is entirely union-free in North America, and has worked aggressively to stay that way. Today’s strike is an outgrowth of a year of organizing by OUR Walmart, an organization of Walmart workers. OUR Walmart is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, but hasn’t sought union recognition from Walmart; its members have campaigned for improvements in their local stores and converged at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting.

They say their efforts have won some modest improvements, but also inspired a wave of illegal retaliation by the retail giant, which they charge is more concerned suppressing activism than complying with the law. I reported in July on three workers’ allegations that Walmart retaliated against them for their activism. Since then, OUR Walmart has filed many more Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging further punishment of activists.

Interviewed yesterday about OUR Walmart, Walmart spokesperson Dan Fogleman emphasized the group’s funding from unions, which he charged “are focused on their own agenda…getting more members to join their unions. That gives them more revenue to help fund the political agendas that they have.” He suggested that today’s rally might have been organized as a stunt to impress visiting leaders from the UNI global union federation, who are currently visiting Los Angeles to launch a global Walmart labor alliance. Fogleman denied the allegations of retaliation: “Unfair Labor Practice charges are similar to lawsuits. Anyone can file them, regardless of whether it’s a valid claim or not. We disagree with those assertions.”

Obviously this is a high risk strategy, but one hopes that it pays dividends.

Yet Another Example of How Financializing Policy Screws Things Up

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Case in point, the collapse of the UN’s global cap and trade system:

The world’s only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has “essentially collapsed”, jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.

Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations’ system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.

A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon.

Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: “The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It’s extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously.”

The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves.

Yep, we need to bail out the banksters in order make this policy work.  Our government has to manipulate the market for their benefit.

The real reason that the “very serious people” support cap and trade over a carbon tax is because they went to the same elite schools as the people at the big banks, so they have to structure this policy so to allow their friends to stand athwart the goal of reducing emissions and extract rents.

If you applied a carbon tax, and applied it to imports in the same way that the VAT is applied to imports, you would get the same result, only you would not have the parasites in Wall Street and the City taking a slice from the rest of us.

From the Department of Well, Duh

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It’s the truth, and it is something that our political elites refuse to say, which means that it is a good thing to say, but Glenn Greenwald’s observation that the real problem with Iran having the bomb is that it would prevent us attacking them on our whim:

Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. The latest person to unwittingly reveal the real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US’s most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.

 On Monday, Graham spoke in North Augusta, South Carolina, and was asked about the way in which sanctions were harming ordinary Iranians. Ayman Hossam Fadel was present and recorded the exchange. Answering that question, Graham praised President Obama for threatening Iran with war over nuclear weapons, decreed that “the Iranian people should be willing to suffer now for a better future,” and then – invoking the trite neocon script that is hauled out whenever new wars are being justified – analogized Iranian nukes to Hitler in the 1930s. But in the middle of his answer, he explained the real reason Iranian nuclear weapons should be feared:

“They have two goals: one, regime survival. The best way for the regime surviving, in their mind, is having a nuclear weapon, because when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you.”

Graham added that the second regime goal is “influence”, that “people listen to you” when you have a nuclear weapon. In other words, we cannot let Iran acquire nuclear weapons because if they get them, we can no longer attack them when we want to and can no longer bully them in their own region.

Let me be clear here:  I do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons.  I also don’t want Israel to have nuclear weapons, or India, or Pakistan, or China, or the UK, or France, or Russia, or the United States of America.

The desire for a credible deterrent is a rational response to US hegemony:

Whatever one thinks of Iran, the signal the US has sent to the world is unmistakable: any rational government should acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranians undoubtedly watched the US treatment of two dictators who gave up their quest for nuclear weapons – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi – and drew the only reasoned lesson: the only way a country can protect itself from US attack, other than full-scale obeisance, is to acquire nuclear weapons.

I Won’t Be Liveblogging the Debate

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I have an appointment at 9:15, so I won’t be watching the debate.

I truth be told, the real meaning of the debates will be how it gets called by the press anyway.

As to my advice to the candidates, it is as follows:

  • Obama, don’t hippie punch. It will be tempting, because you hate the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, but it won’t convince the undecideds, and it would serve to demoralize your base.
  • Mitt, you have to go off the reservation. You need to attack Obama for not going after the banksters. Note that, despite clear evidence of fraud, there has been zero prosecutions of big bankers and no meaningful prosecutions of big banks.

FWIW, I predict that neither of them will do this.

Obama will go after liberal strawmen, and Rmoney won’t go after the banksters.

Scott Brown Lets the Mask Slip

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Scott Brown was asked by Dick Gregory who his favorite Supreme Court Justice, and he answers “Scalia.”

As boos rise from the crowd, he realizes that he just said a bad thing, and he proceeds to over half the other justices on the court, saying that he could not chose from all those wonderful jurists.

As you can plainly see, Warren is trying hard not to burst out laughing.

I’m having a problem not bursting out laughing.

The vid is here.

H/t Americablog both for the story and the GIF.

My Little Boy is Growing Up!

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We were watching The Science Channel, and Kari Byron, of Mythbusters, was on an ad for LDRS, Large Dangerous Rocket Ships, (basically extreme hobby model rocketry) which she will be hosting.

I turned to Charlie, and said, “She is hawt.”

Then I explained myself. I said, “I have a weakness for read heads.”

Charlie replied, “It must run in the family.”

My little boy is growing up.