All the lies about Iraq

The Centre For Public Integrity have compiled a report on all of the lies told by U.S. officials about Iraq. They even have pretty graphs of the number of lies over time!

The peak there is Colin Powell lying to U.N.

Guy Kawasaki mocks the blogsphere

At a recent Xerox Parc Forum (lots of good stuff in that archive), Guy Kawasaki talked about starting a website on the cheap. He also spent a fair amount of it taking the piss out of the blogosphere (he got lots of negative feedback about his site Truemors). Anyone with that level of disrespect for the blogosphere is OK by me and his talk was pretty entertaining (the audience found it hysterical, I guess you had to be there). That's why I have bothered to link to his site (which appears to be very very slow).

Media Lens take David Aaronovitch to the cleaners

There's not much more to say. The article has a has quite a lot of condemning material. Particularly silly is Aarononvitch's criticism of the Lancet's studies as "absurd" and referring to them as "based, it was claimed, on standard epidemiological methods". Around the same time, he wrote that there were "three million might have died in the Congo" - this figure was produced by Les Roberts, who was of course the man behind the 2 "absurd" Iraqi studies!

Hardly the man to get the truth out of Blair in his exclusive interview but that's presumably why he got to do it.

Media Lens: Guardians of Power

The loveable rogues behind Media Lens have a book out called Guardians of Power. I think I knew this already but I just found a long review of it that I should probably read and I'm ordering the book (I might even get get around to reading it one day). The reviews on Amazon are also extremely positive.

Jon Pilger on Afghanistan

Here's an article by Jon Pilger with a great line in it

Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".

The article talks about how the fight for women's rights before 9/11 was undermined by the Clinton administration's desire to do business with the Mullahs and get an oil pipeline for Unocal

It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)

Of course once they became the enemy, women's rights became one of the reasons for the invasion. I suppose we should be grateful that women's rights were well established in the west before the advent of high-altitude saturation bombing or we might have had to blow the shit out of ourselves too.

What have the Nazis ever done for us?

Funny article (I found it from the still great pointlesswasteoftime.com) on various modern-day brands and their association with the Nazis. Just concentrate on the kittens.

Israel using Arab-Israeli citizens as human shields

Jonathon Cook reported on this before but now The Human Rights Association (who Cook says is a reputable groups) have published a report analysing the siting of soldiers, artillery, tanks, weapons factories etc in Arab villages. In his article Cook talks about the strong correlation between Lebanese rocket strikes in civilian areas and the presence of Israeli military in those areas, although it was not limited to Arab villages.

Particularly interesting is the fact that Arabs may not work in arms factories, so there is no good legitimate reason to build them in Arab towns. Illegitimate reasons could include the appropriation of Arab lands and the use of Arabs as human shields.

Charlie Wilson's War... led to 9/11

This article talks about the arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan by the CIA and their use as pawns in the cold war. This is now celebrated in Tom Hanks' new movie Charlie Wilson's War. The plan was to give the USSR it's own Vietnam which sounds like a great idea and apparently damaged the USSR significantly. Of course it's not so much fun for those playing the role of the Vietnamese. Despite receiving training and funding, they weren't too happy to be used in this way and to have their country fucked over. They went on to form Al Qaeda and bomb US embassies and barracks in several locations around the world and finally the World Trade Centre. Doh!

This is described by Charlie Wilson, in the book of the same title, as "And then we fucked up the endgame.", something of an understatement I would have thought.

The film apparently skips all this nastiness because apparently Tom Hanks "just can't deal with this 9/11 thing" (second page). This despite Wilson appearing on Fox News after 9/11 and saying "This was as much my fault as anybody's." (first page of that link).

I'm probably not going to get to see the movie anyway...

I have no interest in baseball but...

This article makes me want to read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

The article makes an interesting point about free market ideology. The baseball market is extremely competitive and accurate metrics are available and widely publicised yet it was operating so inefficiently that Billy Beane was able to rip it to pieces by being the only rational actor. Why did it take so long? What other "free markets" are in an inefficient equilibrium due to all actors operating irrationally?

Whitespace separated lists

I'm trying to figure out a nice way to do lists in F++ while not requiring commas as separators and also taking advantage of the difference between \n and " " to avoid a layer of parens. By lists I really mean function argument lists and elements (I won't call them statements) in blocks of code. It seems like I should be able to make \n mean "next item in implicit list" but it's a bit tricky figuring out which list is the implicit list. Below are some examples of what I'd like to be able to write and what I'd like it to be equivalent to.

With whitepsace	Explicit	Notes
f 1 2 3	f(1, 2, 3)	Nothing special.
f(1 g 2 3 4)	f(1, g(2, 3), 4)	The \n at the end of the "g" line terminates the g() function call and moves us onto the next argument for f().
{ x = f 1 y = f 1 2 3 z = f 1 2 \ 3 w = f g 2 3 v = f g 2 3 }	{ x = f(1); y = f(1, 2, 3); z = f(1, 2, 3); w = f; # still not sure if that's f or f() g(2, 3); v = f; g(2, 3); }	Here the "z" line uses \ for continuation and so the \n is treated as just as list-separator space. The "w" line does not grab the "g". Neither does the "v" line because indentation is irrelevant!.

So what rules will result in parsing the above the way I want? Perhaps any explicitly delimited list containing a raw \n (ie not preceded by \) gets treated as 1 element per line and that's that. Or I could make function calls special. I think that's mainly where the fun is. Since they always start with a symbol, you know when you've encountered a function and if the symbol isn't followed by "(" then it ends at the next raw "\n". I can say a function call is symbol "(" args* ")" # separated by any kind of whitespace or symbol args* # separated by any whitespace except raw \n

Bjorn Lomborg - climate denier

Interesting article about Bjorn Lomborg, pointing out many (seemingly respectable) people's opinion that he is a deliberate bullshitter. While I have no reason to doubt it, it seems odd that someone who seems so scientifically dubious would be asked to give the first "Opinion" segment in Nature's podcast (4th Oct 2007, mp3, transcript). They did say in the introduction that they were interested in giving a platform to interesting voices but still...

Letter to the editor: bio-fuels vs food

Most of this comes from George Monbiot's recent article entitled "An Agricultural Crime Against Humanity".

Sir,

James Gleason repeats his usual points about climate change (Monday
December 3rd) but for a change, I find we something to agree with -
the impact of bio-fuels on food supplies for the poorest people in the
world.

The use of bio-fuel made from organic waste or grown on idle
agricultural land might have helped to reduce our use of oil but that
is not what is happening. Instead, land previously used to grow food
is being converted to grow fuel crops, in some countries, tropical
forests are being slashed and burned for the same purpose.

When you factor in the energy needed to farm and refine them with
current technologies, the environmental benefits of bio-fuels are
quite slim. Burning a forest to plant fuel crops eliminates the
benefit entirely and turns the whole thing into a net loss for the
environment.

Some foods can also be fuel crops, for example Swaziland is now making
fuel from casava while 40% of its people are facing food shortage.

Even the IMF is warning that demand for bio-fuel is pushing up food
prices for those who can least afford it.

Western governments must reevaluate their policies and targets for
bio-fuels and at the very least end subsidies,

Update:Published without edits I think.

Letter to the editor: more climate change

Sir,

Robert O'Sullivan complains about the "non-solution put forward" in my
letter. I put forward no solution at all in my letter, I am simply
trying to show that there is a real and urgent problem. He calls me an
"alarmist" but has yet to make any real argument that this is a false
alarm.

Mr O'Sullivan brings up Homer Simpson's again. I agree that Homer has
something valuable to contribute. How we will have hamburgers if we
have to kill all of the farting cows? A funny question but with a
serious side to it.

I believe many people who deny the reality of man-made climate change
do not do so on the basis of scientific argument. They deny the
reality because they do not want to face questions like Homer's or
questions like "how will I have my holidays in the sun if I have to
pay for the full impact of the pollution it will cause?".

The fact is that someone must pay for it. Maybe it's someone in a
flood in Bangladesh or someone in California who's house has been
incinerated or someone in Tuvalu who's home disappeared below below
sea-level a few years ago. Or maybe it's a member of your family in
the Ireland of the future.

These are hard questions and we might not like the answers but the
longer we avoid them the greater the pain we will have to endure when
we are finally forced to deal with them.

I enjoy hamburgers and I enjoy travel, although I have already cut
back on my travel. I hope we can all continue to enjoy them but this
requires immediate action, not prevarication and denial,

Update:Published with some edits that probably improved it. Some fun going on in the comments on that page too. Next day, someone else calls Robert O'Sullivan clueless.

Debate on academic boycott of Israel

Justin Podur covers a debate on whether an boycott of Israeli academic institutions is a good idea. This was held in a Canadian university, I get the impression that this debate simply couldn't take place in the US. Those opposed don't make a very good case and the question of where is the academic freedom of the Palestinians is a very strong counter to many of the anti-points.

Letter to the editor: there is no debate on climate change

Sir,

Robert O'Sullivan complains complains that the "save the planet" squadron only
quote from scientific sources with which they agree. He himself does
not quote from any scientific source, the best he can manage is a
quote from Homer Simpson.

What else can he do? The only explanation for climate change that has
stood up to scrutiny is that it is caused by man-made emissions of
greenhouse gases. It's a pretty simple. Greenhouse gases trap the heat
of the sun and humanity is pumping out greenhouse gases like never
before, while at the same time slashing and burning the forests that
might have soaked them up.

If you do the calculations based on what have burnt and what the Earth
can absorb, it all fits with what we observe in reality.

The few other explanations that have any scientific basis at all have
been debunked.

Every now and then someone puts forward a new possible cause,
frequently with much media coverage. Then over the course of a few
months the results are analysed, mistakes are found and the idea is
put to rest. Of course the debunking never gets the same news
coverage.

There have been "natural" climate changes in the past but this time
around we have a smoking gun and a bullet wound - declaring it to be
"natural causes" would require some extraordinary evidence and that
evidence simply has not been found,

Update: Published without my reference to the media's lack of interest in debunking theories and some other minor tweaks. Update: Another round, although I don't think he actually read my letter!