The McWetlog

People are pointing to last week’s attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight as evidence that the aviation security system failed. Narrowly defined, it did fail, in that someone with explosives managed to get on board a plane and tried to set them off. But I would suggest that we’re defining the subject too narrowly.

The fact that the airport screening system failed does not mean that Al Qaeda therefore succeeded — because, obviously, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did not blow up the plane. If you consider passengers and flight crew part of the air security system, then the system worked, because they subdued him before he could carry out his plan. (Since 9/11, passengers have known that they have to resist terrorists, not cooperate with them, in order to survive.)

It comes down to what your security system’s goal is. Are you trying to prevent terrorists from commandeering or blowing up planes in mid-flight? Then it’s okay if they’re stopped in the plane by the flight crew, other passengers or air marshals. But if your goal is to prevent them from even boarding the aircraft, then you’ve got a much taller order. You can’t harden every target in the aviation sector.

So instead we get the latest round of lunacy applied to every passenger, and argue whether keeping everyone seated or shutting down all their electronic devices an hour after takeoff or an hour before landing, or banning carry-on bags, will make any difference at all. It won’t, if only because terrorist attacks are so profoundly rare. And because, as Bruce Schneier points out, we’re spending all our time trying to prevent a recurrence of the specific tactics of the last attempt — about which see this Globe and Mail article and this opinion piece by Schneier. Lots of individual freedom taken away for hardly any benefit.

We’re making a big mistake by focusing on airport screenings and no-fly lists. (You might have noticed that the bombings in London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai had nothing to do with airplanes.) Counter-terrorism is more than that.

The point is to stop them. Does it matter that the passengers and flight crew stopped him, so long as he was stopped?

If we freak out because we foiled a bombing attempt, then the terrorists don’t have to succeed in their plots to win. They don’t even have to try very hard.

From the sound of it, children are getting assigned a lot more homework than they were when I was going through school. (Not that I ever did any significant amount of it anyway: the problem with being a smart kid is that you end up lazy and unmotivated.) This week, the Globe and Mail’s Erin Anderssen had two pieces on parents — yes, parents — who are fed up with the quantity and apparent repetitive pointlessnesses of their kids’ homework assignments, and are pushing back. Shelli and Tom Milley negotiated a “differentiated homework plan” for two of their children (not surprisingly, the Calgary couple are both lawyers). This article has more parents’ stories and gives a bit of the big picture:

There’s growing evidence that homework may hinder rather than help academic performance especially in early grades, and school boards have been revisiting their approach to it. But parents remain conflicted about how much their kids should do and how hard to push them — trying to balance a desire to see their child succeed against homework hostilities at the kitchen table.

While a survey by the Canadian Council on Learning found that the majority of parents felt that homework enhanced learning, more than 60 per cent said it was a source of stress in their homes. Many parents also quietly admit to offering more than just moral support — in a U.S. survey released last year, 43 per cent of parents (dads more often than moms) admitted that they had done their children’s homework.

One gets the impression that, when you factor in homework and extracurricular activities (team sports, music lessons, what have you), children today are expected to work longer hours than their parents.

The U.S. Department of Justice has made public four classified memos, issued to the CIA between 2002 and 2005, that provided the legal basis for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — applied to terrorism suspects in their custody. The memos are available, in PDF format, on several Web sites (see, for example, the ACLU and the New York Times). Coverage: CBC, CNN, Marc Ambinder, New York Times.

One technique, from the memorandum of August 1, 2002, relating to the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative who had been captured in Pakistan earlier that year, immediately grabbed my attention. Abu Zubaydah had a fear of insects that interrogators wanted to exploit:

In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death.

[redacted] so long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position. An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box. Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects, and you have not informed us of any other factors that would cause a reasonable person in that same situation to believe that an unknown insect would cause him severe physical pain or death. Thus, we conclude that the placement of the insect in the confinement box with Zubaydah would not constitute a predicate act.

The New York Times reports that this particular tactic was not, in the end, used. But as someone who has an irrational fear of insects myself, I still have a thing or two to say about this.

Continue reading this entry »

If Dr. Sanjay Gupta is in line to become the next Surgeon General of the United States, then why not fellow CNN talking head Miles O’Brien for NASA Administrator? I mean, he’s probably available.

Maybe you thought the Canadian economy was relatively shielded from the panic and nonsense going on in the U.S. right now, because our financial services sector and our mortgage lending policies weren’t quite as batshit insane as they have been south of the border. If you did, you thought wrong: the commodities sector — stuff like mining, oil and other natural resources, i.e., the backbone of the Canadian economy — took a shellacking on the markets Thursday on fears that an economic downturn would dry up demand. Even oil prices could be affected: one analyst thinks that the price of oil could drop below US$50 a barrel. (It’s still above US$90 now.)

Now that’s interesting, because, according to the Wikipedia article on the Athabasca oil sands, it costs between $36 and $40, Canadian, to turn bitumen into a barrel of synthetic crude. Profits at US$50 a barrel would be something on the order of 16 to 27 percent. At some point near or below US$50 a barrel, oil sands production would cease to be profitable. And then things would get very interesting in Alberta.

So what was that about the fundamentals of the Canadian economy again?

Let me see if I get this straight:

John McCain says that Barack Obama is too inexperienced to be president, and then picks as his running mate someone with substantially less experience.

He implies that Obama is insufficiently patriotic, and then picks as his running mate someone with ties to an Alaskan separatist organization.

He mocks Obama as a celebrity, and then picks as his running mate a governor who trades, in part, on her appearance (“America’s hottest governor” and all that).

I understand that the pool of choices for McCain — maverick reformers who were still acceptable to the social conservative base — was rather shallow, but still. This wasn’t an inspired pick; it wasn’t a desperate pick; it was a bipolar pick.

Andrew Sullivan:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I’m not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture — “enhanced interrogation techniques” — is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

Something’s happened in downtown Ottawa. When I lived there, from 1999 to 2003, its streets never struck me as particularly mean, but since I come from Winnipeg, where the streets are considerably meaner — I regularly parked outside crack houses when going to evening university classes — my perspective is, shall we say, jaded. But even I had to stop and wonder what the hell has gone wrong when I read this harrowing article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail: crack cocaine use has exploded in downtown Ottawa, with junkies begging like crazy to get the few dollars needed for their next hit. It’s to the point where even homeless advocates are advising people not to give money to panhandlers: it invariably gets spent on crack. (This takes me back to my time in Winnipeg, where I was hit up by panhandlers about half a dozen times a day, and I turned them down every time. Odds were, no matter how hungry or homeless they were, the money was going to be spent on solvents.) Crack is ugly shit.

I’ve been spending a good part of this week on The Map Room, posting links to maps and satellite photos of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. While my focus has been on the view from the sky, it’s the reports from the ground that disturb me. From all accounts, New Orleans has descended into anarchy; the wide-scale suffering beggars belief and fills me with fury. More so when bureaucrats and politicians seemed utterly unaware of the problem and completely tone-deaf to compassion. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s anger and frustration is all too evident in this radio interview (3.2 MB MP3), and all too understandable; you simply must listen to it (via MetaFilter).

It angers me that the U.S. has done such a piss-poor job of handling a city-wide disaster; how would this have been any different if terrorists had set off a small nuclear bomb? It angers me that “homeland security” has more to do with token security measures at airports, the systematic stripping away of civil liberties, and generating a politically useful climate of fear than it does with disaster readiness. It angers me that the reason, I suspect, that so little was done for people on the ground on New Orleans was because they’re mainly poor and black. And it angers me that arrogant twerps — from the Speaker of the House on down — have been blaming the residents for living where they do. (As though other places aren’t vulnerable to disasters.) Blaming the victims — for being poor, or infirm, or living in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Or it’s because God is punishing them for their wickedness. Oy.)

The inhumanity this week extends far beyond the looters and bandits in the flooded areas.

Tart Cider amplifies this Guardian column; the point of each is to challenge the notion that teen pregnancies represent a loss of opportunity. It turns out it’s the other way around: teens who get pregnant never had many opportunities to begin with, and so, the logic goes, have nothing to lose by getting knocked up. Their socioeconomic status would have been unchanged had they not gotten pregnant. Teen pregnancy isn’t a cause of poverty, but it’s a definite indicator of it.

When I was editing regulations at the Justice department, one of the earliest files I was handed made it illegal to point a laser beam at an aircraft. At the time I thought it was hilarious: don’t fire a fricking laser beam at a plane! The Dr. Evil Regulation. Not laughing any more. Holy shit.

The CBC has RSS feeds. Go nuts. Laugh at the clueless EULA. Via Boing Boing.

Two thoughts, now that I’ve subscribed to a few:

• There aren’t any descriptions; it’s just the headlines. That’s not very useful: it forces you to load the web page. It’s not like the Holy Mother Corp is relying on ad revenue from those pages. Not having at least a summary or an excerpt is quite dated.
• A single news feed for their non-local news would really be handy; I have to download five separate feeds to get it all.

The verdict: surprisingly lame, but it’s better than nothing.

No surprise: the Olympics are a two-week long, alcohol-fuelled fuckfest for athletes — especially those who’ve been eliminated or who’ve finished early and have nothing left to do …

At the Albertville winter Olympics, condom machines in the athletes’ village had to be refilled every two hours. And in Sydney the organisers’ original order of 70,000 condoms went so fast that they had to order 20,000 more. Even with the replenishment, the supply was exhausted three days before the end of the competition schedule. (For the record, athletes who were in Sydney report that the Cuban delegation was the first to use up its allocation.) Salt Lake City in 2002 went even bigger: 250,000 condoms were handed out, despite the objections of the city’s Mormon leadership.

“There’s a lot of sex going on. You get a lot of people who are in shape, and, you know, testosterone’s up and everybody’s attracted to everybody,” says Breaux Greer, a shaggy-blond Californian who competed in the javelin at the Sydney Games.

“It’s not an orgy,” says one alpine skiing champion, Carrie Sheinberg, “but it is socially vigorous.”

Via MetaFilter. Back in Edmonton the then-husband of a friend regaled us with tales of the sexual escapades of Olympic athletes during the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary — he was working security at the athletes’ village — and mentioned some famous medal winners who paired up with one another, whose names I will not repeat here for obvious reasons.

Starbucks: not evil. Or, to elaborate: according to this Willamette Week article, it does not destroy local coffee businesses, but rather stimulates demand; it does not pay its suppliers or its employees badly, all things considered; it enhances, rather than hurts, neighbourhoods. You’re thinking of Wal-Mart. Carry on. This bit of counterintuitiveness brought to you via Jerry Kindall.

The Canadian Transportation agency has slapped down VIA Rail for its shoddy treatment of a blind passenger. Despite codes on John Benjamin’s ticket that indicated that he was blind and required assistance, VIA personnel left him to fend for himself — even pointing (!) to show him when he asked for assistance, and dismissed his disability as minor.

The full text of the decision is here, and bears reading. Here’s the money quote:

The Agency notes VIA’s statement that “VIA hopes that if this situation should ever arise in the future, that Mr. Benjamin will make his disability known to the person to whom he is speaking so that there will be no confusion as to the assistance that he needs”. In view of the evidence submitted by Mr. Benjamin, the fact that he requested services in advance of his travel and the fact that Mr. Benjamin was using a white cane, the Agency finds that the notion implied in VIA’s statement that Mr. Benjamin is somehow responsible for VIA’s failure to provide appropriate assistance is totally unacceptable. In this regard, the fact that Mr. Benjamin was using a white cane should have clearly demonstrated to VIA’s personnel the nature of his disability and the assistance he required. Also, the Agency finds that there was nothing more that Mr. Benjamin could have done to ensure that VIA’s personnel received the information that they required concerning the assistance he required due to his disability. The Agency also finds that VIA did not provide any evidence to justify why Mr. Benjamin was not provided with the appropriate assistance but was instead left unattended and uninformed despite repeated requests for assistance.

The CTA has ordered an apology, training and procedural changes, but it seems to me that dismissals ought to be in order for the staff who pointed things out to a man with a white cane. I mean, really. Come on.

In Toronto, low-income neighbourhoods are increasingly in the suburbs — i.e., North York and Scarborough, not “exurbs” like Aurora or Richmond Hill — rather than in the inner city. In other words, Toronto is beginning to replicate European cities: in Paris, the no-go areas are the suburbs; it’s central Paris — Paris proper — that is the chic and expensive place to be.

It’s long been established that the U.S. right wing knows little and cares less about the intricacies of foreign politics (see previous entry), so it’s no surprise that the pundits’ condemnation of Spanish voters’ spineless for voting in the Socialists in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on commuter trains is, well, wrong. As Paul Wells argues in his latest Macleans column — and damn it if he isn’t required reading again — Spanish voters voted against a government that was lying to them about the attacks. Aznar’s government went to extraordinary lengths to pin the attacks on ETA despite evidence to the contrary, and people caught on that they were being lied to: it was more politically expedient to the ruling party that Basque separatists, rather than Islamic terrorists, were responsible. And voters, no dummies, got them for it.

This, of course, has nothing to do with governments trying to link Al Qaeda attacks with Iraq because it was politically expedient to do so. Nothing at all.

It’s déjà vu all over again. In 1912, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced that would ban interracial marriage. Not that that has any bearing on current events, oh no. (via Matt)

Andrew Sullivan, writing — with what Josh Marshall calls “great eloquence and fury” — on Bush’s call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages:

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. … He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens — and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth… .

It’s not about how many contests you win, it’s about how many delegates you get. While John Kerry has won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, as of this moment he still trails Howard Dean in delegates by 113 to 94. That’s because of the “superdelegates” — elected representatives and party officials — some of whom have announced their support for various candidates, and Dean has a lead in those endorsements right now. It’ll be worth keeping track of CNN’s delegate scorecard to keep track of who has how many so far.

Ikram makes the following interesting argument regarding the French government’s decision to ban Muslim headscarves: “Why do those who wish to promote religious coercion target women first?” He’s thinking in terms of Christian fundamentalists whose first target is invariably women’s morality, sexuality and income-earning. In these contexts it makes sense, and there’s certainly something to it in the French case, where the concern is the hijab and women refusing to be examined by male doctors.

But the counter-example is indicated in the post’s comments: Sikh men, who, in Canada, have been a target of racism when their turbans have gotten in the way of certain Canadians’ sensibilities.

Ikram also goes on to argue that the end result will be to remove Muslim girls from school, an end result to warm the cockles of a Taliban heart. But I think it will mean that Muslim girls will end up in private religious schools instead, and end up less integrated into French secular society, rather than more, which defeats the government’s intent.