A bill will be introduced to the Russian legislature later this year that over the next several years will impose many of the same restrictions on smoking as in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. In fact, Russia intends to go even further than most, stopping just short of a total ban.
The restrictions, which include high taxation, graphic warnings about the dangers of smoking, the banning of sponsorships and most ads, and restrictions on where tobacco can be sold or used (tobacco could only be sold in large supermarkets and could not actively be displayed as being for sale), would bring Russia into compliance with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Currently, 174 countries are party to the convention and 168 are signatory; the most recent party is St. Kitts and Nevis. The United States, while progressing along the path, remains non-party along with 20 other nations.
10 have signed but not ratified: Argentina, Cuba, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Morocco, Mozambique, Switzerland and the United States.
11 others did not sign or ratify; the deadline to sign was June 29, 2004: Andorra, Dominican Republic, Eritrea, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Malawi, Monaco, Somalia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.
40% of Russia's population smokes, with 400,000 deaths in Russia per year being blamed on smoking. And while the ban is welcome among most everyone else, questions arise as to how stringently it will be enforced, given Russia's poor reputation for corruption. According to one Russian blogger quoted in the Moscow News, "In order to have doubts, one only has to walk through any train, where anyone who feels like it smokes right under the ‘no smoking’ signs. It is not a question of how heavy the punishment is, but of its inevitability. And we don’t have that. Who will enforce the law? The cops, of whom 99 per cent smoke like chimneys?”
Meanwhile in America, holdouts are getting creative. Reports indicate a rise in roll-your-own-tobacco stores, where a smoker dumps loose tobacco into a machine which then rolls it into cigarettes, one at a time. (One such store recently opened here in Watertown; I am not giving them free advertising.) Not only do they get the cigarettes, they get them cheaper, as roll-your-own-tobacco stores don't carry the high taxes prerolled cigarettes do. The anti-tobacco fight, as a result, is shifting towards closing that loophole; Arkansas banned roll-your-own-tobacco machines in April and more states are expected to follow.
Nobody said quitting smoking was easy.
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Your TV Is Not A Legal Advisor
I promise this is the only time we'll talk about Casey Anthony. Promise with sugar on top.
Now, full disclosure, I have barely followed a word of the trial. I quite honestly could not care less. I think it has something to do with someone dead, but that's it. However, my interest was piqued when I caught Erik Uliasz of Philly2Philly.com chalking Anthony's not-guilty verdict for whatever it is that he did- perhaps insider trading- to the CSI Effect.
That little phenomenon is something we can work with. The CSI Effect's been written about before, by a lot of people, but apparently, we need to go over it some more.
If you're ever on a jury, be advised that most evidence is circumstantial. That's evidence which you need to infer something in order to tie it to the case at hand. By itself, it's not too strong. But as circumstantial evidence builds, it becomes corroborating evidence: each piece of evidence helps the others build a case. It is very possible to make an ironclad case out of nothing but circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence, meanwhile, is something from which you have to infer nothing.
If a witness says "I saw Al shoot Bob", that's direct evidence. You saw Al shoot Bob. If a witness says "I saw Al grab a gun, go into Bob's house, then there was a bang and screaming", that's circumstantial. All signs point to Al shooting Bob, but you didn't actually see it. You have to infer it from all the signs.
Juries, though, tend to not be up on these things. A lot of them don't even want to be there. They just want to call a verdict and go home. All they know is what they see on TV. They're not in the legal world for a living. And what they know is that circumstantial evidence is a Bad Thing. They want direct evidence. In fact, if it's not direct evidence, sometimes they just plain won't convict.
The CSI Effect is an extension of this. Again, all the jurors often know is what they see on TV. And what they see on TV is CSI, where every case is solved with DNA evidence obtained in ways that, a good 40% of the time, are impossible. (The CSI effect has also been linked to other procedural of the era, such as NCIA, Bones and Cold Case.) What happens to the jury is that they demand DNA evidence, or else they won't convict. No matter how strong the rest of the case, if it's not DNA, they might as well replace the whole trial with episodes of the Muppet Show.
Not only that, but they demand absolute 100% slam-dunk conclusiveness. When a forensics expert mentions the 1-in-umpty-gazillion chance (and one does exist) that the DNA could give a false positive, that measurably harms the credibility of that DNA evidence in the minds of the jury, who has taken 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' to mean 'they better have found the killer standing over the victim cackling maniacally'.
This is not the first time a TV show has caused juries to be overly critical of the prosecution. TV's black-and-white era brought us a similar phenomenon called Perry Mason Syndrome. This, arguably, was even worse, because in every episode of Perry Mason, they would arrest the wrong guy, but at the end of the episode, the real culprit- who was always in attendance, whether they were called as a witness or not- would just leap up out of their chair and confess.
Perry Mason ran from 1957-1966. No prizes for guessing what the juries of that era were looking for.
Perry Mason Syndrome hit the actual defendants as well. Perry Mason made such an oversimplified mess of the technicalities of the legal system that it caused some defendants to forgo lawyers, thinking that law was so easy they could do it themselves. This tended not to end well. (WARNING: It'll run you $12.50 to the LexisNexis people to read the full text of that linked piece.)
Let's just recap here: Perry Mason, CSI, and every other procedural and legal show out there are TV shows. They're not there to teach you about the legal system. They're there to entertain you. And if entertaining you means whooshy graphics and dramatic confessions and darkened crime labs that in no way resemble how the actual criminal justice system works, that's what you get.
If you would like to see actual TV coverage of how the legal system works, TruTV has it on from 9-3 Eastern on weekdays, called 'In Session'. It's a remnant of their earlier, less reality-intensive life as Court TV. How often do you watch it?
Yeah. Me neither.
Now let us never speak of Casey Anthony again or his acquittal of, I believe, public nudity.
Now, full disclosure, I have barely followed a word of the trial. I quite honestly could not care less. I think it has something to do with someone dead, but that's it. However, my interest was piqued when I caught Erik Uliasz of Philly2Philly.com chalking Anthony's not-guilty verdict for whatever it is that he did- perhaps insider trading- to the CSI Effect.
That little phenomenon is something we can work with. The CSI Effect's been written about before, by a lot of people, but apparently, we need to go over it some more.
If you're ever on a jury, be advised that most evidence is circumstantial. That's evidence which you need to infer something in order to tie it to the case at hand. By itself, it's not too strong. But as circumstantial evidence builds, it becomes corroborating evidence: each piece of evidence helps the others build a case. It is very possible to make an ironclad case out of nothing but circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence, meanwhile, is something from which you have to infer nothing.
If a witness says "I saw Al shoot Bob", that's direct evidence. You saw Al shoot Bob. If a witness says "I saw Al grab a gun, go into Bob's house, then there was a bang and screaming", that's circumstantial. All signs point to Al shooting Bob, but you didn't actually see it. You have to infer it from all the signs.
Juries, though, tend to not be up on these things. A lot of them don't even want to be there. They just want to call a verdict and go home. All they know is what they see on TV. They're not in the legal world for a living. And what they know is that circumstantial evidence is a Bad Thing. They want direct evidence. In fact, if it's not direct evidence, sometimes they just plain won't convict.
The CSI Effect is an extension of this. Again, all the jurors often know is what they see on TV. And what they see on TV is CSI, where every case is solved with DNA evidence obtained in ways that, a good 40% of the time, are impossible. (The CSI effect has also been linked to other procedural of the era, such as NCIA, Bones and Cold Case.) What happens to the jury is that they demand DNA evidence, or else they won't convict. No matter how strong the rest of the case, if it's not DNA, they might as well replace the whole trial with episodes of the Muppet Show.
Not only that, but they demand absolute 100% slam-dunk conclusiveness. When a forensics expert mentions the 1-in-umpty-gazillion chance (and one does exist) that the DNA could give a false positive, that measurably harms the credibility of that DNA evidence in the minds of the jury, who has taken 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' to mean 'they better have found the killer standing over the victim cackling maniacally'.
This is not the first time a TV show has caused juries to be overly critical of the prosecution. TV's black-and-white era brought us a similar phenomenon called Perry Mason Syndrome. This, arguably, was even worse, because in every episode of Perry Mason, they would arrest the wrong guy, but at the end of the episode, the real culprit- who was always in attendance, whether they were called as a witness or not- would just leap up out of their chair and confess.
Perry Mason ran from 1957-1966. No prizes for guessing what the juries of that era were looking for.
Perry Mason Syndrome hit the actual defendants as well. Perry Mason made such an oversimplified mess of the technicalities of the legal system that it caused some defendants to forgo lawyers, thinking that law was so easy they could do it themselves. This tended not to end well. (WARNING: It'll run you $12.50 to the LexisNexis people to read the full text of that linked piece.)
Let's just recap here: Perry Mason, CSI, and every other procedural and legal show out there are TV shows. They're not there to teach you about the legal system. They're there to entertain you. And if entertaining you means whooshy graphics and dramatic confessions and darkened crime labs that in no way resemble how the actual criminal justice system works, that's what you get.
If you would like to see actual TV coverage of how the legal system works, TruTV has it on from 9-3 Eastern on weekdays, called 'In Session'. It's a remnant of their earlier, less reality-intensive life as Court TV. How often do you watch it?
Yeah. Me neither.
Now let us never speak of Casey Anthony again or his acquittal of, I believe, public nudity.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Petty Theft And Highway Robbery
I'm of the philosophy that a diploma doesn't tell the whole story about your education or your level of intelligence. Often, of course, they do, or else they would be functionally worthless. But they're not a be-all-end-all, either. There are people that basically buy their way into the Ivy League and the diploma within, and then pretty much sit back and wait for the world to come to them, waving the diploma around as proof of an education that they only technically have. There are people from decidedly lesser colleges that, head-to-head, will think circles around the aforementioned Ivy Leaguers. Where an underachieving Ivy Leaguer may be so overconfident in their diploma that they fail to think things through and make some astoundingly bad moves, an overachieving small-college grad can realize they have ground to make up, and make that little extra crucial bit of analysis.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
And then there's the occasional story of someone who doesn't have a college degree at all but nonetheless is one of the smartest people around.
Now, part of why I bring this up is a bit of a defense of my alma mater. Let's be honest. Madison Area Technical College- or Madison College; I think they changed the name recently- isn't exactly turning away perfect SAT scores left and right. But college is done and gone. MATC can only supply knowledge, and only while I'm enrolled. It's on me to make as much of what I was taught as I possibly can. I won't sit around and wait for people to be attracted to the MATC diploma, because MATC diplomas don't have that kind of drawing power. An MATC grad has a college degree, but they still have to go out and scratch and claw their way through, and put up a ferocious fight just to have the right to take on the Ivy Leaguers.
There are, however, worse degrees to have than that of a tech school.
You could have one from a diploma mill.
In 1989, an application for accreditation by Eastern Missouri Business College came to the International Accrediting Commission in Missouri. The catalog that showed up at the IAC, among other things, listed faculty members such as Arnold Ziffel, Edward J. Haskell, M. Howard, Jerome Howard, and Lawrence Fine; the college seal read "Solum pro Avibus Est Educatio"; the motto was "Latrocina et Raptus", and the marine biology textbook (offered through the mail, along with degrees in genetic engineering and aerospace science) was "The Little Golden Book of Fishes".
For those that didn't catch on already, those faculty members were from Green Acres and the Three Stooges, and the respective translations are "Education is only for the birds" and "Everything from petty theft to highway robbery." This was not a real college. It was a teeny little office in St. Louis, staged with a little bit of fake paperwork, a whole lot of blank papers, and no accounting records or actual classrooms. (Nowadays, the lack of classrooms wouldn't be a dead giveaway, given the proliferation of online colleges, but in 1989, that was a thing worth noting.)
Any accreditor worth their salt would have busted the Fightin' Eastern Missourians in about five seconds. Any accreditor worth their salt would have been tipped off at some point over the course of the catalog, maybe passed it around the office for laughs.
Instead, the head of the IAC, George Reuter, stopped by, wandered around for half an hour and noted how impressed he was. He then went out to have a steak dinner with the head of the college. Although they would pose for a picture of the "official passing of the accreditation check", which amounted to $500.
After later indicating that accreditation would be granted, and selling Eastern Missouri Business a "fancy plaque" for another $25, the faculty of Eastern Missouri Business sprung. They were in fact working for the state attorney general, and quickly got the International Accrediting Commission shut down.
Meet Accrediting Commission International. They popped up in Arkansas shortly thereafter, a state famous for not being Missouri. The fact that the name is the same as "International Accrediting Commission" with the words rearranged is surely coincidental. Them spelling 'commission' with three M's on the topline of your window when you go visit is presumably just a test and not to be read into at all.
And ACI is adamant that you don't read into it, or any other similarities to IAC. In a page entitled 'ACI Answers To Critics', they admit that from "the older organization" (they never state "the older organization's" name outright, although they do say that "most of the stories told about the other organization are only half-truths and outright falsehood"), about 25 colleges were carried over to ACI, as opposed to all of them.
Quackwatch, however, disagrees. They charge that ACI did in fact invite all the colleges under the auspices of ICA to be automatically accredited, which numbers about 250. Go to ACI, though, and you would never know, because they don't list the colleges they've accredited. (Unlike any accreditor worth their salt-- for instance, the Higher Learning Commission, a branch of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which will tell you that it's the one that accredited just about every college of note from West Virginia to Wyoming... including Madison Area Technical College.)
With a fair degree of legwork, though, some guys on the boards of DegreeInfo managed to track down about 100 of the places accredited by ACi. They are mostly Bible colleges. One of the ACI colleges, Wisconsin International University, is quite international indeed, because it has no campus in Wisconsin, or for that matter anywhere else in the United States.
Luckily, there is a simple way to avoid these places. In the United States, there are two institutions that approve accreditors: the Department of Education, and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. In effect, they accredit the accreditors. If neither of those two places think an accreditor is legit, it stains any college that's approved by that accreditor, to the point where people looking to transfer to a place the DoE or CHEA do approve of may have to start their college education again from scratch.
They don't approve of ACI.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Life Of A Birth Control Pill: A Play In Four Acts
There will be a brief intermission between acts two and three.
ACT ONE
ACT TWO
HEY FOLKS! IT'S INTERMISSION TIME!
ACT THREE
ACT FOUR
Thank you for your patronage of tonight's program.
ACT ONE
ACT TWO
HEY FOLKS! IT'S INTERMISSION TIME!
ACT THREE
ACT FOUR
Thank you for your patronage of tonight's program.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Wikileaks Update
I may not know what to do with Julian Assange, but Interpol sure does: they have arrested him. He is being held without bail, facing extradition to Sweden on those disputed sex charges, now further disputed from the left because Assange's accuser has been newly connected to the CIA.
He'll spend the next week remanded in British custody; I imagine the next step is to see what happens with that insurance file Assange has threatened to decrypt, and to see if any new leak sites spring up to serve Wikileaks' purpose.
He'll spend the next week remanded in British custody; I imagine the next step is to see what happens with that insurance file Assange has threatened to decrypt, and to see if any new leak sites spring up to serve Wikileaks' purpose.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Wikiplexed
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
What am I going to do with you?
Anyone who doesn't know the name Julian Assange by now is hiding under a rock. He's the Wikileaks guy, for the two of you that applies to. He takes leaks provided by a range of whistleblowers, and after a period of time spent X-ing out the informant's name, releases the leaks to the general public. For a while, this worked out pretty well. The leaks had a place to go, once in a while they'd get major media airtime, Wikileaks got a free plug, everyone ends up happy (aside from whoever's information got leaked.)
Recently, though, it's all gone wrong. Half the world's governments would love nothing more than to see a bullet through Assange's head, with much of the general public none to fond of him either, generally those from countries Assange has targeted. Interpol knows where he is and is one order away from moving on him. Sweden wants him on (disputed) sexual charges. Some Americans want to try him as a spy. Ecuador offered, then rescinded, an offer of safe haven. Wikileaks is losing places to host a server, as well as sources of financial support.
Things began to fall apart, at least from my vantage point, right around the time of the leak of the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, obviously NSFW, which was leaked back in April. Wikileaks, at this point, went from an in-the-background place to do your leaking to a news item in and of itself, placing its own practices in the spotlight. They came to a head just recently, when the first of the 251,287 diplomatic cables began to see light. So what of it all? What can we learn from all this?
Not all that much, actually. At least, not much that Assange has been intending to teach.
You see, a lot of his previous leaks never really drew much attention. Part of the reason, I think, has to do with the sheer size of the information dump being conducted. Remember the healthcare debate? Remember how many teeth had to be pulled to get people to read a 2,000-page bill? Remember how much hay was made of the size of said bill? People often made it onto the news simply for having read the entire bill front to back. 2,000 pages is a tiny, pint-sized Wikileak. Again, the diplomatic cables number 251,287. Assange himself has readily admitted that he receives more material than he can sift through on his own. Which is the thing. If he can't do it, the average person has no chance. No matter how much info is presented, one person can only get through so much. If the important bits are hidden among pages and pages of detritus, the important bits tend to go unnoticed, as if they were never leaked at all. In journalism, this is called 'burying the lede', and considering that Assange believes himself to at some level be a journalist, he ought to know this. When the important information is easily findable by a visitor, things run smoothly. When not, it has less impact.
With the diplomatic cables, he has reversed this and resolved not to bury the lede. However, he has gone too far in the other direction. He has made everything a lede. News cycle after news cycle sees only a small easily-digestible handful of the quarter-million cables released, with each and every one devoured. So far, only about 1,100 have seen air.
But there's a problem. 251,287 cables does not mean 251,287 bombshell revelations. Far from it. There is the assorted useful piece of information. There almost has to be. You take any random group of 251,287 diplomatic cables, there's bound to be something new and interesting. The knowledge that China is not as warm towards North Korea as originally thought, the plan by Hillary Clinton concerning spying at UN headquarters, these can be of use. But other things Assange may have intended as bombshells are really nothing that someone paying sufficient attention to the news might already have figured out independently. China's cavalier attitude and hacking of Google shouldn't come as a large shock if you had been paying attention to Google's early adventures in China, where they came perilously close to pulling out of the country entirely. Google had suspected as much. Corruption in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not big surprises if you had been paying attention to previous reports on same that did not require Assange's assistance to find out. Vladimir Putin knew of the death of Aleksander Litvinenko, we've learned, but then, this was merely a confirmation of something just about everybody had reckoned from day one. The cables show China as flexing their muscle in diplomacy to the point of irritation by much of the rest of the world, but then, this is about as easily seen as the sun. The part about China's irritation with Norway was already found out when the Norwegian-based Nobel committee awarded Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, to where people came away knowing that if China wasn't aggressive towards Norway before, they certainly are now. We learn from the cables that the United States is doubtful of Mexico's ability to fight the drug cartels, but then, who isn't? Any news value is merely concerning tone and scale. Even the China/North Korea leak is seen as some as overstating the case.
And then there's the chatter behind each other's backs. The insults. The gossip, as it's been so frequently called. These are functionally worthless. Less than worthless, even. Sure. Diplomats are catty behind each other's backs. So are workers in just about any field of employment ever. This is nothing compared to what often happens in the diplomatic world. Spies are frequently sent into that field; it's easy to spy and easy to pull the spy out if something goes wrong. Duplicity is a grand, time-honored tradition in the diplomatic universe, of which you can find examples all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome; the Bible; the time of Hammurabi. People talking derisively about other people in the State Department? Well, I never! All that is likely to happen by releasing these is that it makes people less likely to talk to these diplomats, and go to other methods, potentially war, to achieve their goals concerning the countries involved. Diplomats also engage in diplomacy- trying to get along with each other. Why engage in conversation with another country if this is going to be the result of discussing things in their country (these are all cables from embassies in the US)? Forget talk. Might as well take the more direct and forceful route. And in moments of particularly high tension, one wrong word can sometimes be all it takes to light the powder keg. Go and look at all the duplicity that went on over the course of the Cold War, spying, name-calling and everything. How much of it that was not public at the time of its occurrence do you think could have been leaked without either the Americans or Soviets pushing the button in response? Not a whole lot, really.
That is, if it's only one target. A curious thing about blame is that when everybody is guilty, frequently, nobody is. Governmental investigations of lobbyists and corporations and such more frequently claim a scalp when someone is singled out for blame. When someone wants people not to 'play the blame game', this is what they're trying to do: make everybody guilty so that individuals- or, more to the usual point, they themselves- don't actually suffer consequences.
This is the phenomenon that Assange, in his zeal, has seemingly triggered. Though he may hate Hillary Clinton and want her to step down, he has created so many other guilty parties that few are in a moral position to press for her ouster, not that one would do so over such trifling things anyway, and the ones that have not been targeted have ample reason to believe they will be soon enough and any attempt to go after Clinton will end up blowing back on them. There will be a black eye for a while, yes, but eventually, all will be forgiven.
There is a debate that exists over whether we have a right to know about the content of these cables or whether they should remain secret. The first thing we must establish is that, either way, the debate does not apply to Assange. His informant, perhaps, who's surely in for a world of hurt because Assange's technique of simply X-ing out the informant's name is absolutely boneheaded, but not Assange. (Any interested party with a copy of the information can just look to see what got X'ed out, see what name is there, and go after that person; the informant would actually be better hidden if Assange didn't X out anything at all. It's the anonymity equivalent of giving the informant a large neon sign saying "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS MAN".) The cables originate in the United States. Assange is Australian and does not answer to American authority. (Not that he answers to Australian authority either, but you get the point.)
We've covered this particular mentality in a previous piece. Foreign nongovernmental entities don't really care what you think of them. And when an empire declines, as the piece exposits, everybody wants to get their licks in. Assange could, in a sense, be compared to the Visigoths sacking Rome, accelerating the empire's decline by making off with things of importance to the empire- in this case, the empire's secrets, privacy and reputation. An actual sacking of Washington DC, or any major world capital, would be unfeasible in this particular day and age, but what one can do is, instead of taking objects of value directly, take the ability to earn those objects or be able to afford to keep the objects they have. This being an age of information, every time a secret is divulged against one's will, every time one's dirty laundry is forced out into the open, it's like another gold coin, another gemstone, another crown jewel out the door.
Anyway. Do we have a right to know about these things? It's in the eye of the beholder as to the exact amount, really, but there is a line somewhere. You wouldn't divulge nuclear launch codes, for example. Obviously to suggest that you should is ridiculous, but that's just to establish the fact that a line exists somewhere- somewhere, anywhere. Any secret less important than that which you'd want to keep is merely helping to establish the location of the line. And the line, at least to me, does come well before that. Obviously there are things we need to know as well. I mean, look what I deal in around here. I want to know a whole bunch of stuff too. But I'm willing to wait if that knowledge is of the type where the downsides of having it be public knowledge outweigh the upsides. It's the political equivalent of a football playbook. You would not ask a football team to divulge, for public consumption, the contents of the playbook they are using this season. For them to do so would be to virtually guarantee that they lose their games. When a football player is called into the coach's office to be cut, they're told to take their playbook with them. You don't want them running off with it after they're no longer on the team.
However, the downsides diminish over time, as the information becomes outdated, so eventually just about everything becomes safe to release. Including playbooks. Any random fan can go out and find books containing diagrams of old plays. Most Packers fans will be able to tell you about a particular old play of Vince Lombardi's, the power sweep. Someone made a Broadway play to tell you all about it. It's a matter of what is okay to release and when, and it can be very tricky sometimes to establish the threshold.
As a whole, Assange has selected cables for which the downsides have been deemed by most to outweigh the upsides, in particular the catty insults. The questionability of the value of the leaked cables has done a strange thing: it's made this all less about the rights of the people to know, and more about Assange and his motives than is healthy for one who purports to engage in journalism. And his motives are plain as day: he describes himself as "a combative person" who enjoys "crushing bastards." Crushing bastards, as he puts it, is well and good, and a lot of people get into the industry with visions of the day they get to crush a bastard dancing in their head like sugar plums. But it is not something where you should be waking up and saying 'So which bastard am I going to crush today?' You try not to make the story about you. Sometimes you can't help but insert yourself into the story, but even so, you are trying to be merely a part of the story, not the story itself. And if you do become the story, you want to try to get the story off of you and back onto the original topic. Assange has become the story and is making no efforts to change that, and in the process a budding debate over how some governments are reacting to the content- the United States with warning people in an official government capacity away from reading the leaks, China opting for a straight blackout- has been to a degree choked out by stories about Assange. The debate here is peppered with frustration that while Wikileaks goes to considerable lengths to force out the information of others, they themselves remain deeply in the shadows. Considering the amount of people after them, this seems necessary if they want to remain able to do any leaking, but it smacks of hypocrisy to some who disagree to one degree or another.
He does, however, have an out. Maybe not out of his problems with the authorities, but out of his problems with the public. If there's one entity people tend to hate these days more than the government, it's banks. Assange has made note that among his cache of yet-to-be-released information is a "mega-leak" from a major American bank. Which one, he will not say. This fact has caused the ears of many to perk up, eager to find out what this leak contains. Arguably, there's more interest in the prospective bank leak than in the diplomatic cables. Assange, by releasing this, would get a significant segment of the public back on his side, carrying the dual advantage of being a popular and worthwhile target. The fact that he also has information on BP (he doesn't know if it's unique) helps his cause further. And if apprehended by Interpol or someone else, he has a contingency plan, namely, tens of thousands of other people who went to the Pirate Bay, a sympathetic site, and downloaded an 'insurance' file which includes, among other things, the remaining cables and the BP files, who will all recieve decryption codes in the event of his capture or death and put everything out in one gigantic tsunami of information dumping. This brings us back to the first problem of some important information flying under the radar, but at that point it can't really be avoided.
Assange has what is surely some extremely useful information, somewhere in all of that, and has taken great pains to ensure its eventual release. But he has no sense of what information is useful and what information is filler, or alternatively, he doesn't care. He has the potential to change the world in profoundly positive ways, and has provided a vehicle for this to be facilitated with an ease not previously seen anywhere, but has let it go to his head such that the vehicle has been damaged.
Julian Assange.
What am I going to do with you?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
COURT HATES PHELPS
Fred Phelps has no friends on the bench of the Supreme Court. And he doesn't think he needs them. As you may be aware, Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church has for some years now been going around to military funerals- a singular event in which the family has only one chance to bury a loved one- and utterly runing them with signs such as 'YOU'RE GOING TO HELL', 'THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS', 'GOD HATES THE USA', and like-minded rhetoric.
One of their victims, Albert Snyder, has brought them to the Supreme Court, where a $5 million ruling against the church hangs in the balance, but also some very tricky free speech questions.
And that's where Phelps thinks they don't need any friends. As far as he's concerned, they're exercising free speech and that's that; to rule against them would be stomping on the First Amendment. Snyder begs to differ; to him this is not about free speech but rather harassment, an argument that can be seen in all its glory right outside the Court's door, as Westboro has shown up in force outside the Court with the same signs they carry to the funerals. To Snyder, this is somewhere along the lines of yelling fire in a crowded theater, except you can watch the movie again, but you can't do the funeral over.
The Court itself, for their part, has made their personal opinion perfectly clear, even though they could be weighing the case well into next year: they are looking high and low for a reason to rule against Phelps. In the article, you will see Ginsburg, Kagan, Roberts, Alito and Scalia all trying to rule for Snyder, which is the needed five right there. The question isn't where the court wants to side. The question is, can they find a way to do it.
I think they will. The ETA on their ruling, according to the article, is "late spring". That's six, seven months from now. If there is any way to get a ruling against Westboro, surely, they will have found it by then. They can rule as broadly or as narrowly as they choose, and if a ruling is to be made against Westboro, the Court is sure to do it in a way that screws over Phelps and only Phelps, if at all possible. (Not that Phelps will care; Westboro has announced that they're going to keep doing what they're doing regardless of the Court's decision.) I predict something along the lines of 'you can't show up at someone's funeral and bad-mouth the dead to the point of public nuisance unless invited to attend'. And make no mistake; I'm rooting for them to find it. It would make my day to see Phelps lose this in a way that is unlikely to affect anyone else.
(Of course, my predictions are to be taken with a grain of salt; I also predicted back in April that Russ Feingold would be fine against Ron Johnson, who I seem to have dismissed as one more random ballot-filler in favor of Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake, who were little better, and 538 currently has Feingold at only an 11% chance of survival against Johnson. Unfortunately.)
Let's be clear: this is a tricky one. It's easy to rule in favor of free speech when it's popular. The true test is what you do when it's unpopular. People keep having to remind themselves of this every time the Ku Klux Klan wants to hold another rally. But this is not a rally; this is a funeral. No permits are ever sought, the occasion is normally supposed to be friends and family only, and again, you can always hold another rally. And there is the aforementioned 'fire in a crowded theater' precedent; you never know when one of the families might snap under all the stress, knee Phelps in the groin, and set off half a riot.
We'll have to wait and see.
One of their victims, Albert Snyder, has brought them to the Supreme Court, where a $5 million ruling against the church hangs in the balance, but also some very tricky free speech questions.
And that's where Phelps thinks they don't need any friends. As far as he's concerned, they're exercising free speech and that's that; to rule against them would be stomping on the First Amendment. Snyder begs to differ; to him this is not about free speech but rather harassment, an argument that can be seen in all its glory right outside the Court's door, as Westboro has shown up in force outside the Court with the same signs they carry to the funerals. To Snyder, this is somewhere along the lines of yelling fire in a crowded theater, except you can watch the movie again, but you can't do the funeral over.
The Court itself, for their part, has made their personal opinion perfectly clear, even though they could be weighing the case well into next year: they are looking high and low for a reason to rule against Phelps. In the article, you will see Ginsburg, Kagan, Roberts, Alito and Scalia all trying to rule for Snyder, which is the needed five right there. The question isn't where the court wants to side. The question is, can they find a way to do it.
I think they will. The ETA on their ruling, according to the article, is "late spring". That's six, seven months from now. If there is any way to get a ruling against Westboro, surely, they will have found it by then. They can rule as broadly or as narrowly as they choose, and if a ruling is to be made against Westboro, the Court is sure to do it in a way that screws over Phelps and only Phelps, if at all possible. (Not that Phelps will care; Westboro has announced that they're going to keep doing what they're doing regardless of the Court's decision.) I predict something along the lines of 'you can't show up at someone's funeral and bad-mouth the dead to the point of public nuisance unless invited to attend'. And make no mistake; I'm rooting for them to find it. It would make my day to see Phelps lose this in a way that is unlikely to affect anyone else.
(Of course, my predictions are to be taken with a grain of salt; I also predicted back in April that Russ Feingold would be fine against Ron Johnson, who I seem to have dismissed as one more random ballot-filler in favor of Terrence Wall and Dave Westlake, who were little better, and 538 currently has Feingold at only an 11% chance of survival against Johnson. Unfortunately.)
Let's be clear: this is a tricky one. It's easy to rule in favor of free speech when it's popular. The true test is what you do when it's unpopular. People keep having to remind themselves of this every time the Ku Klux Klan wants to hold another rally. But this is not a rally; this is a funeral. No permits are ever sought, the occasion is normally supposed to be friends and family only, and again, you can always hold another rally. And there is the aforementioned 'fire in a crowded theater' precedent; you never know when one of the families might snap under all the stress, knee Phelps in the groin, and set off half a riot.
We'll have to wait and see.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
I Voted (And I'm About It)
This is a list of reasons given by various people to me at work today as to why they failed to vote in today's Wisconsin primaries. These are all actual reasons.
*Slept in (x3)
*Working two jobs (x2)
*Too busy (x2)
*At work all day (x2) (note: the law requires an employer to provide sufficient time away from work to cast a vote)
*Never voted before, juggling three kids
*Driving mother to hospital
*Didn't know any of the candidates
*Registered to vote in Alabama (note: this person did not vote in Alabama either)
*Didn't know they were today
*Didn't know there was such a thing as primaries
*Not registed to vote (note: in Wisconsin, one can register to vote right there at the polls)
*Politics not important (note: this person proceeded to explain that proposed high-speed rail line set to pass through town, municipal elections, city budgets, police, fire, roads, electrical grid were also not important to him re: politics)
Two additional people had not voted yet but intended to, two people did not vote and gave no reason, and five people actually, you know, voted. That figure of five includes myself.
Which makes for 5 votes, 2 maybes, and 19 nonvoters. Not counting the maybes, that is a 20.8% turnout. It could be anywhere from 19.2%-26.9% depending on the final fate of the maybes.
In conclusion, mandatory voting is enforced in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Fiji, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Nauru, Peru, Singapore, part of Switzerland, Turkey, and Uruguay.
It's mandatory, but not enforced, in Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Gabon, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Thailand, and the state of Georgia.
The linked agency, International IDEA, isn't really sure about DR Congo, Lebanon or Panama.
*Slept in (x3)
*Working two jobs (x2)
*Too busy (x2)
*At work all day (x2) (note: the law requires an employer to provide sufficient time away from work to cast a vote)
*Never voted before, juggling three kids
*Driving mother to hospital
*Didn't know any of the candidates
*Registered to vote in Alabama (note: this person did not vote in Alabama either)
*Didn't know they were today
*Didn't know there was such a thing as primaries
*Not registed to vote (note: in Wisconsin, one can register to vote right there at the polls)
*Politics not important (note: this person proceeded to explain that proposed high-speed rail line set to pass through town, municipal elections, city budgets, police, fire, roads, electrical grid were also not important to him re: politics)
Two additional people had not voted yet but intended to, two people did not vote and gave no reason, and five people actually, you know, voted. That figure of five includes myself.
Which makes for 5 votes, 2 maybes, and 19 nonvoters. Not counting the maybes, that is a 20.8% turnout. It could be anywhere from 19.2%-26.9% depending on the final fate of the maybes.
In conclusion, mandatory voting is enforced in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Ecuador, Fiji, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Nauru, Peru, Singapore, part of Switzerland, Turkey, and Uruguay.
It's mandatory, but not enforced, in Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Gabon, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Thailand, and the state of Georgia.
The linked agency, International IDEA, isn't really sure about DR Congo, Lebanon or Panama.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
A Shameless Excuse Post
According to the most recent available figures, one in every 31 people is either incarcerated, on parole or on probation in the United States. So it's entirely possible someone in the audience will be arrested at some point.
So if you are, please note that the police, such as this cop which another video on the topic identifies as Tom Mumford of San Miguel County, New Mexico, hate it when you do this after they have arrested you for starting a bar fight:
According to another show that interviewed Mumford, the assault-for-spitting charge wasn't pursued. An unedited clip shows that the bleeped words included the F-word for 'gay', and the N-word (which he used on a white officer).
Of course, if the clip shown here isn't enough, apparently you can purchase the entire 28-minute session, with an optional six bonus minutes. If that's how you want to spend your money.
So if you are, please note that the police, such as this cop which another video on the topic identifies as Tom Mumford of San Miguel County, New Mexico, hate it when you do this after they have arrested you for starting a bar fight:
According to another show that interviewed Mumford, the assault-for-spitting charge wasn't pursued. An unedited clip shows that the bleeped words included the F-word for 'gay', and the N-word (which he used on a white officer).
Of course, if the clip shown here isn't enough, apparently you can purchase the entire 28-minute session, with an optional six bonus minutes. If that's how you want to spend your money.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Boycotts For All!
As long as we're already boycotting Arizona, it's probably long past time to add BP to the pile in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which has been going for something on a month now. There was a live feed activated yesterday, which can be found, really, pretty much anywhere (all one must do is type 'bp' into Google to get an option of 'bp oil spill live feed'), but according to BP, it had been available for two weeks prior, not released to the public but rather to Congress. So we know they had the video, we know we would have been able to see just how big the gash was, but they sat on it for two weeks. At least.
And that's BP's version of events.
In the wake of it all, if you're not already doing so, it's a simple thing to stop at gas stations other than BP. It's not 'reduce gas consumption', granted, though you should be doing that too if possible. It also, granted, gives additional business to other oil companies.
Those other oil companies, at least in this specific case, are not the ones at fault. Chevron didn't have anything to do with this. Shell had nothing to do with the leak. It's BP and BP alone. All you have to do is skip the BP stations and stop at the next place down the road.
If you want to, you can skip the Exxon stations too, as we're still trying to get them to properly pay up for the Valdez spill. From 1989.
And that's BP's version of events.
In the wake of it all, if you're not already doing so, it's a simple thing to stop at gas stations other than BP. It's not 'reduce gas consumption', granted, though you should be doing that too if possible. It also, granted, gives additional business to other oil companies.
Those other oil companies, at least in this specific case, are not the ones at fault. Chevron didn't have anything to do with this. Shell had nothing to do with the leak. It's BP and BP alone. All you have to do is skip the BP stations and stop at the next place down the road.
If you want to, you can skip the Exxon stations too, as we're still trying to get them to properly pay up for the Valdez spill. From 1989.
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