SOTU open thread

The State of the Union is tonight (starts at 9 pm ET). What are you hoping for/predicting (if you’re reading this pre-SOTU)? What did you think (if you’re reading this post-SOTU). [insert lame joke about "live blogging" here]

further evidence for things already known

This is a pretty stunning and clear cut example of Fox News becoming an extension of the Bush Administration’s PR campaign.

Don’t Be Evil

Speaking of stifiling information, Google has just launched its Google.cn version to be used in China. While the company proudly declares that its “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google has made the decision to censor the results produced on Google.cn by searches of various “sensitive terms,” (and not-so-sensitive sites like bacardi.com) such as “democracy,” “human rights,” “falun gong,” “Tibet” or “Taiwan”. Until now, Google could be accessed by those in China via servers based in California, but its content was filtered by the Chinese government’s internet filters, also known as “the great firewall of China”. China employs 30,000 police officers to monitor the internet full-time. With regards to this very criticized decision, in an interview with co-founder Brin, Reuters quotes him as saying, “I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.” (more in expanded post)

But while Google has said that it is simply blocking sensitive information, searches of these “sensitive” terms direct users to government-run propaganda sites that disseminate incorrect or misleading information, and only the official government’s stance on these issues. As many have noted, their half-truth “justification” is eerily Orwellian. Strangely enough, all this came less than one week after Google refused a US Department of Justice supoena which requested the company provide every website address produced and search term used on Google between June and July 2005. A Times article sums it up:

The government was looking to assess the prevalence on the internet of what it calls HTM — harmful to minor — not child pornography, but pornography that children can accidentally access. It turned out that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! had all already complied with similar requests. [...] It is an incredibly worrying sign, not least because it shows the way governments might come to use search engines as a form of privatised surveillance.

Google has an extraordinary amount of information about its users. It logs all the searches made on it and stores this information indefinitely. Because every computer has a unique IP (internet protocol) address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it [...]. (Shi Tao, the Chinese journalist, was given 10 years in jail last April for “leaking state secrets” after Yahoo! in Hong Kong handed over information linking his IP address and his e-mail to the Chinese authorities.) Users of Google’s Gmail service, who are already having their e-mails scanned to place targeted ads, have given the company their identity, a full record of all their searches and copies of all their e-mails, stored indefinitely. [...] As the lawsuit makes clear, all this information is potentially vulnerable to subpoena.

While it is in some ways comforting news that Google has refused to comply, it’s sadly most likely to hide trade secrets. These two events, though they may seem contradictory, were both money-driven decisions. People freaked out when they found out their surfing might no longer be untouchable and anonymous; Google’s shares dropped 8.5% when the news of the subpoena came out (that means they’re worth $20 billion less now than they did a while ago). Call me naive, but I, and many Google fans, had held out hope that in this money-driven world, the “users-first”-minded Google would show that ultimately humanity could triumph. But the potential to caplitalize on China’s enormous population trumped the warm fuzzies. Even for a company whose motto is “don’t be evil,” when it comes to cashing in on a billion people’s internet use, complying with a government whose ideals are directly contradictory to its founding vision, whose secretive practices have exacerbated world problems and whose demands require the obfuscation of truth, the definition of “evil” is bendable.

The Truth

Today as I continued my recent obsession with Middle Eastern politics I came across a very eye-popping interview from the Daily Ummat, the second-largest newspaper in Pakistan. After going to the site for the Daily Ummat my inability to read Urdu prevented me from searching their online archives for the interview. It was conducted in the weeks after the September 11th Attacks and, in it, Osama bin Laden denies responsibility for the events of that day. The fact that this interview was the first granted by bin Laden after September 11th and was NOT AT ALL covered by major U.S. news outlets and publications should cause one to wonder why when, during the fall of 2001, just about every newspaper in the country was focused on this man and his organization.

If you all get a chance, I ardently encourage you to visit three websites on this issue:

1) 911Review.Com: A Resource for Understanding the 9/11/01 Attack

2) ThePowerHour.Com: A radio show that focuses on “subjects that inform and educate people every day to the real challenges that face this country”.

3) 911InPlaneSite.Com: A completely fact-based movie that the world generally and the U.S. people more specifically absolutely MUST see.

political science, part II: this ain’t a game

According to a Washington Post article today (which mentions the Bush admin v. NASA scientist tension I talked about in the post below this one), while many leading climatologists are becoming increasingly convinced that a “tipping point” in global warming is quickly approaching, after which these climate changes resulting from human activity will be impossible to slow or reverse, there is still some controversey over how concerned we should be about it.

Some scientists, including President Bush’s chief science adviser, John H. Marburger III, emphasize there is still much uncertainty about when abrupt global warming might occur. “There’s no agreement on what it is that constitutes a dangerous climate change,” said Marburger, adding that the U.S. government spends $2 billion a year on researching this and other climate change questions. “We know things like this are possible, but we don’t have enough information to quantify the level of risk.”

Setting aside for the moment my feelings on why we should be concerned with environmental protections even in the absence of crisis, it seems to me that if we don’t know exactly how dangerous or imminent “abrupt global warming” might be, but we do believe that once it happens we may be helpless to stop it, then maybe we should take a cue from the Boy Scouts and be prepared. Behave as though the worst-case scenario is looming. (more in expanded post)

The article notes that some, like Britain, seem to be adopting the prudent path, having already reduced its emissions by 14% since 1990 and aiming to cut them by 60% by 2050. Of course, we can’t gauge worldwide progress by the efforts of one or a few nations; this is a serious problem for everyone. Controversey abounds on the best way of holding everyone accountable to pulling their weight. But whether we favor independent goal-setting, international agreements, or, as some economists have suggested, privatizing emmissions rights worldwide, we need to recognize the urgency of the situation. As Stanford University climatologist Stephen H. Schneider explains in the article, the urgency is greater for some than for others:

The small island nation of Kiribati is made up of 33 small atolls, none of which is more than 6.5 feet above the South Pacific, and it is only a matter of time before the entire country is submerged by the rising sea.

“For Kiribati, the tipping point has already occurred,” Schneider said. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s tipped, but they have no economic clout in the world.”

political science

The Bush administration’s attempts to stifle environmental science information made the front page of the New York Times today:

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Didn’t they get the memo? Evangelicals are now in favor of reducing humans’ degradations of the world’s ecosystems. The administrators might be getting their main man in trouble with some of his base. (more in expanded post)

I find this part of it especially ludicrous and indicative of a dangerous prevailing mentality:

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA,” he said. “We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”

Mr. Acosta said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

So scientists are only allowed to report the ‘facts’ of the problem, not suggest practical potential remedies? To behave as though science were absolutely separate from politics is not only laughable, given, for instance, recent political fights over teaching intelligent design in schools, it also effectively reduces scientists to opinion-less workhorses, whose only job is to report on ‘the facts,’ never to interpret them. This is the kind of thinking that had contributed to the Pentagon’s hold over universities’ science departments across the nation, a situation that developed during World War II when the government first began to collaborate with universities which helped with designing weapons technology.

Einstein once observed, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” He was speaking to the same trend of separating science and politics rhetorically and ideologically while at the same time purposely moving them ever closer so that science is militarized and used as a tool to fulfill only certain political ends.

It’s especially important that we question this trend here at Harvard, given that the university’s capitulation to the Pentagon’s threat of revoking funding (the whole ROTC deal) reflects just how dependent our science research departments have become on the government’s military. Additionally, we need to try to reverse the efforts to paint scientists as mere fact-finding robots by insisting on ethical/political education for the scientists being trained here (not indoctrinary ethical education; just something like along the lines of History of Science classes).

HAMAS

I’m not sure how many of you all have been following (or are aware of) the situtation in Palestine right now but, two days ago, Hamas captured a majority of seats in the national (if that word can accurately describes present-day Palestine) parliamentary elections. The fact that Hamas is currently recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, the E.U., and others makes the situation between Israel, Palestine, and the West really volatile right now. Seeing as how the U.S.-led “Coalition of the Willing” invaded Afghanistan and Iraq partly on the premesis of these nations harboring “terrorists” what will they do now to Palestine that is, to them, run by terrorists? Anyone have thoughts and what the course of action for the U.S. and others might be? What type of governments Hamas will look to erect? Why the Prime Minister and his cabinet immediately resigned?

Has Ariel Sharon woken up from his coma yet? Talk about receiving bad news…

King George

A great piece from Slate was sent out over Dems-talk. For those of you who aren’t on it, I figured I’d post it here. The thesis paragraph responds to the contention that the issue is simply one of national security vs. civil liberties:

Would that so little were at stake. In fact, the Senate hearings on NSA domestic espionage set to begin next month will confront fundamental questions about the balance of power within our system. Even if one assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend that the president’s national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they’re asserting won’t be a temporary condition.

I recommend the whole thing, but it strikes me that we’re living in pretty extraordinary times. Of course, I’m just a youngster, maybe things are always this interesting…

guns don’t shoot, people do!

Via quenchzine:

This is what makes it hard to be proud to be a Virginian.

This state congressman accidentally discharged his firearm but lucky for everyone else in the state capital, he also happenned to have a bulletproof vest hanging from the door which absorbed it.

Brought to you by the state that upholds adults’ rights to bear arms in public schools.

Such a weird incident. Good catch quench!

state of the union parody

via crooks and liars. Check it out.