Jumping To Conclusions

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed the fugitive accused planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who is hiding in Iraq. According to the suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin the World Trade Center wasn't the original target.

In an interview to be broadcast tomorrow on "60 Minutes," Mr. Yasin, 42, said that Mr. Yousef had told him, "I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn," but that after scouting Crown Heights and Williamsburg, Mr. Yousef had a new idea.

"Ramzi Yousef told us to go to the World Trade Center," Mr. Yasin said in the interview, recalling that Mr. Yousef had said: "I have an idea we should do one big explosion rather than do small ones in Jewish neighborhoods."

"The majority of the people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews," Mr. Yasin told Ms. Stahl.

I wonder how the apologists for terrorism, who claim that Islamofacists just hate Zionists, not Jews, will spin this one.

[Update: my father wanted me to point out that the word "hiding," above, should be in quotation marks, and noted that this is yet another good reason to oust Saddam Hussein.]

I think Max Power has it right about collaborative blogs. Even though blogging is s'posed to be just for fun, I feel guilty whenever I miss a day or two. And it would be nice if some of those who have something to say and who regularly email me offline could contribute to discussions.

Plus, someone else could assist in coming up with those witty titles for each entry.

Earlier this week, the New York Times portrayed George Bush's position on global warming as having undergone a "stark shift".

In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise. While the changes observed over the last several decades are likely due mostly to human activities, we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability.

The first sentence states that human activities ARE causing greenhouse gases to accumulate with no qualifications. The very next sentence then states that (1) "it is LIKELY due" which clearly weakens the first sentence, and (2) "We CANNOT RULE OUT natural variability" which again weakens the first sentence.

Reducing the wide range of uncertainty inherent in current model predictions will require major advances in understanding and modeling of the factors that determine atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and the feedback processes that deter-mine the sensitivity of the climate system.

This is exactly the point I have been making that we need "advances in understanding and modeling of the factors that determine atmospheric concentrations". What could be clearer than that statement that we currently lack the knowledge to make valid predictions?

Specifically, this will involve reducing uncertainty regarding:

• the future use of fossil fuels and future emissions of methane,
  
• the fraction of the future fossil fuel carbon that will remain in the atmosphere and provide radiative forcing versus exchange with the oceans or net exchange with the land biosphere,
  
• the feedbacks in the climate system that determine both the magnitude of the change and the rate of energy uptake by the oceans,
  
• the impacts of climate change on regional and local levels,
  
• the nature and causes of the natural variability of climate and its interactions with forced changes, and
  
• the direct and indirect effects of the changing distributions of aerosols.

The list states that we neither know the future amount of emissions nor the basic science on how these emissions affect the climate. Besides that we got the problem licked!

Knowledge of the climate system and of projections about the future climate is derived from fundamental physics, chemistry, and observations. Data are then incorporated in global circulation models. However, model projections are limited by the paucity of data available to evaluate the ability of coupled models to simulate important aspects of climate. To overcome these limitations, it is essential to ensure the existence of a long-term observing system and to make more comprehensive regional measurements of greenhouse gases.

And besides the lack of fundamental understanding of the science, we don't even have enough data for the models!

Evidence is also emerging that black carbon aerosols (soot), which are formed by incomplete combustion, may be a significant contributor to global warming, although their relative importance is difficult to quantify at this point. These aerosols have significant negative health impacts, particularly in developing countries.

Well, we are not sure of the effect of black carbon aerosols - "its relative importance is difficult to quantify" - i.e., we DO NOT KNOW how to model it, however it is bad for our health. I agree, breathing soot is bad for our health.

While current analyses are unable to predict with confidence the timing, magnitude, or regional distribution of climate change,

This sentence states that we currently are not able to make accurate predictions of when it will happen, where it will happen, and how much it will be. Do people really think we should take any action without this knowledge?

the best scientific information indicates that if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, changes are likely to occur.

"changes are likely to occur. " - What a forceful statement. I don't think any one expects otherwise. However, it would be nice it we knew what these changes are, before we cripple our economy.

The U.S. National Research Council has cautioned, however, that "because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warmings should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)."

"The US National research Council has cautioned that the magnitude of future warmings should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)!" That is exactly what I have been trying to explain. What about this statement can't people understand? We need to do more research. We do not currently have a fundamental understanding of the problem!

Moreover, there is perhaps even greater uncertainty regarding the social, environmental, and economic consequences of changes in climate.

And if the last statement was not bad enough, there is a GREATER uncertainty as to the "social, environmental, and economic consequences of changes in climate."

I agree 100% with this assessment. Now let's take the politics out of global warming and get back to doing the necessary research to understand the problem.

The administration knows no shame. Almost every other industrialized country is ratifying the Kyoto treaty, and yet the reactionary government simply refuses to go along with them.

The reason, according to reports? Well, the head of the country says, "For us to ratify the protocol would cost us jobs and damage our industry." And the "government has also opposed the protocol because it does not order developing countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming." And of course "industries that emit the gases will be forced out of business while similar producers will continue operating in developing nations."

What other decent nation would ever use these as excuses? How disgusting is George Bush?

Well, The Rest Of The Story (as Paul Harvey would say), is that this announcement was made, not by President Bush, but by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Could it be that these arguments aren't just used by puppets of American corporate interests? Perhaps there's some merit to the position?

(The New York Times, incidentally, thought this was barely worth a mention. Gee, I'm shocked.)

Dave Itzkoff, a former editor at Maxim magazine, just discovered, after two and a half years working there, that its editorial standards aren't quite those of, say, the New Yorker. Hey Dave, to save you some time pondering, I'll let you in on another well-kept secret: pro wrestling ain't real.

The Beijing Evening News reported that Congress is threatening to move from Washington if they don't get a brand new Capitol building. Unfortunately, they copied the story from The Onion, which isn't known for its fact-checking. Or fact-reporting. Fortunately, despite the lack of a tradition of a free press, the Chinese have learned the American approach to media criticism, which is simply to deny that there's a problem:

Yu Bin, the editor in charge of international news, acknowledged Thursday that he had no idea where the writer, Huang Ke, originally got the story. Yu said he would tell Huang to "be more careful next time."

But he adamantly ruled out a correction and grew slightly obstreperous when pressed to comment on the article's total lack of truth.

"How do you know whether or not we checked the source before we published the story?" Yu demanded in a phone interview. "How can you prove it's not correct? Is it incorrect just because you say it is?"

A California judge fined R.J. Reynolds $20 million for advertising that he said targeted teens.

''Over time, one of two things is going to happen,'' Sugarman said. ''One, they're going to reach a reasonable standard around the country.'' Or, he said, there could be a ''splintering'' of opinion. ''It's not beyond the realm of possibility that as a practical matter you'll have different standards in different places,'' he said.

In case you were upset that Fox had cancelled it, The Nation is bringing it back, issuing an "urgent call" to "End the nuclear danger." How are we going to do it? Well, sign a petition, of course:

WE THEREFORE CALL ON THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA TO FULFILL THEIR COMMITMENTS UNDER THE NONPROLIFERATION TREATY TO MOVE TOGETHER WITH THE OTHER NUCLEAR POWERS, STEP BY CAREFULLY INSPECTED AND VERIFIED STEP, TO THE ABOLITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. AS KEY STEPS TOWARD THIS GOAL, WE CALL ON THE UNITED STATES TO:

§  RENOUNCE the first use of nuclear weapons.

§  Permanently END the development, testing and production of nuclear warheads.

§  SEEK AGREEMENT with Russia on the mutual and verified destruction of nuclear weapons withdrawn under treaties, and increase the resources available here and in the former Soviet Union to secure nuclear warheads and material and to implement destruction.

§  STRENGTHEN nonproliferation efforts by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, finalizing a missile ban in North Korea, supporting UN inspections in Iraq, locating and reducing fissile material worldwide and negotiating a ban on its production.

§  TAKE nuclear weapons off hairtrigger alert in concert with the other nuclear powers (the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel) in order to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.

§  INITIATE talks on further nuclear cuts, beginning with US and Russian reductions to 1,000 warheads each.

New York City agencies are helping to train landlords as to what to look for in identifying potential terrorists. Or at least, that's the theory.

Landlords should be suspicious of tenants who insist on first-floor apartments, have little furniture, use cash, prefer pay phones and try to hide their identities, New York Police Department officials said yesterday at a briefing on fighting terrorism.

Nobody is suggesting rounding up all Arabs and Arab-Americans into internment camps. But as long as the government continues to pretend that the single most important identifying characteristic isn't religion/ethnicity, we're going to be faced with the spectacle of 90-year old grandmothers and 5-year old kids being randomly screened at airports, while civil servants ignore Arab immigrants who talk about blowing up American cities.

When an appeals court ruled last month in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan's affirmative action/quota policy was constitutional, a basic rationale was the need to promote diversity. But as the dissent noted, "diversity," as used by the university, simply meant that more black people were needed to fill a quota.

Unfortunately, if predictably, that's what the word "diversity" seems to have evolved to mean, in public as well as in legal contexts. In an otherwise bland story about my hometown, the Baltimore Sun provided this little gem:

Diversity is lacking at River Hill High School, where 78 percent of the students are white, 6 percent are black, 15 percent are Asian and 1 percent are Hispanic.

With all due respect to Max Power, his evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent seems awfully unconvincing to me.

In my mind, the proof that it does deter (at the margins) is the habeas litigation levels in the United States. The ratio of convicted murderers on death row who litigate like the dickens to have a death penalty commuted to a life sentence to the convicted murderers who give up appeals and accept their execution must be at least 100:1. Even if you include suicides and indirect suicides by murderers who get into shootouts with police rather than surrender (though if you include death row and jailhouse suicides, you should also include the thousands of life-without-parole prisoners who don't commit suicide in the ratio), and discount some to account for the costlessness of death sentence appeals thanks to tireless "pro bono" efforts by attorneys to nullify the death penalty through litigation, the ratio is sufficiently huge to suggest that the vast majority of murderers prefer life imprisonment to an execution.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that the death penalty can have a deterrent effect; I just don't think that the behavior of those already facing guaranteed punishment tells us much about the behavior of those who haven't committed a crime yet.

Having defeated terrorism, eliminated poverty, cured AIDS and cancer, and eliminated illegal narcotics, Congress is ready to tackle the pressing national issue of steroids and Major League Baseball.

Congress is going to look into steroid use in baseball, following the recent disclosure that two former most valuable players used the muscle-building drugs.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said Monday he plans to hold a hearing that also will look at steroid use in the Olympics and among college athletes. Dorgan is chairman of the consumer affairs, foreign commerce and tourism subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee.

On balance, this will probably turn out to be harmless -- a politician trying to get his name in the headlines by jumping on a safe, noncontroversial issue which is already in the news. And yet, the mere fact that the government has the time and taxpayer money to waste on such hearings, and that nobody is upset about that, is extremely depressing.

A federal judge threw out one of the charges against the Alleged Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, on the grounds that the judge is absolutely senile.

A judge threw out one of nine charges Tuesday against a man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner with explosives in his shoes, ruling that an airplane is not a vehicle under a new anti-terrorism law.

The charge — attempting to wreck a mass transportation vehicle — was filed under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

U.S. District Judge William Young said that although an airplane was engaged in mass transportation it is not a vehicle as defined by the new law.

Either it's just getting more press coverage than it used to, or it's actually happening more frequently: North Koreans are seeking asylum in South Korea, by way of various western embassies in Beijing. Now, nine more North Koreans managed to evade the Chinese police and reach the South Korean embassy.

Because of economic policies and bad weather, North Korea has suffered a famine since 1995, during which as many as 2 million people, or 10 percent of its population, have died from hunger-related problems, according to Western aid organization estimates. Western countries, including North Korea's biggest donor, the United States, have provided thousands of tons of food. But much of the aid, distributed by the World Food Program, UNICEF and other agencies, is believed to go to members of the ruling Workers Party, soldiers, and workers and families deemed useful to the government.

Several Western aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders and Medecins du Monde, have pulled out of North Korea because they said the North Korean government did not allow them to serve North Korea's most vulnerable citizens.

[...]

The North Korean government punishes illegal emigration harshly, sometimes with execution or incarceration in brutal labor camps. Refugees have described harsh conditions, beatings, starvation and hopelessness in the camps.

Apparently it's not quite as easy to win the drug war as some might have you believe:

Mexico's attorney general said today that the country's largest drug gang remained strong despite the arrests of more than 2,000 of its members, including its operations chief, and the death of its fearsome enforcer.

Speaking at the 12th annual National Attorney Generals meeting, which is attended by top state prosecutors, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said the Arellano Félix organization's business holdings also appeared intact.

Colin Powell announced that the United States was considering the idea of supporting an interim Palestinian state. I've read the story three times, though, and I can't figure out how this differs in any substantial way from current U.S. policy. Perhaps the problem isn't my reading skills, but the fact that Powell doesn't really know what he's talking about.

He repeatedly said it was premature to talk about who would lead such a state, what its borders or capital would be, or whether it would be viable on land already under Palestinian control. All are questions that could lead to a breakdown in negotiations, as ultimately happened when the parties reached agreement on broad outlines for peace in the 1993 Oslo accords, then foundered on details

I shouldn't mock him too much; he does have some thoughts on the matter:

But he noted: "If it's going to be a state, it will have to have some structure. It will have to have something that looks like territory, even though it may not be perfectly defined forever. And it will have to have institutions within it to be a state."

Richard Cohen doesn't like John Ashcroft. At least he's open and honest about that. Still, it might be nice if he tried something resembling objectivity.

First, he explains that John Ashcroft is just like J. Edgar Hoover. (Which is, of course, one of the worst insults a liberal can throw.) How is John Ashcroft just like J. Edgar Hoover? Well, they both like publicity. This clearly sets these two apart from all other denizens of Washington, D.C. -- including, of course, Richard Cohen, who shuns publicity, keeping his name out of the paper as much as possible.

But the conspiracy theorizing is the best:

But Ashcroft's incessant grandstanding makes me wonder if sometimes some of what goes on is more about politics than national security. He personifies the suspicion that terrorism alerts, even arrests, are being timed and manipulated for the nightly news. It seems every revelation of some FBI or CIA screw-up is followed by yet another terrorism alert of one color or another.

It was supposedly sheer coincidence that the testimony of FBI agent Coleen Rowley was virtually obscured by the announcement that the new homeland security Cabinet post was being proposed. Maybe so, but the announcement was clearly rushed and made with insufficient consultation.

I wonder, too, why al Muhajir was busted at O'Hare International Airport and not followed to see what he did and whom he talked to. (He was a long way from getting a bomb of any kind.)

What exactly is Cohen's real complaint here? Oh yeah: nothing John Ashcroft does could possibly be correct. Hey, there are plenty of things to criticize the government over so far -- but arresting someone before he gets a bomb?

An airplane dispatcher who works for American Airlines is claiming that she was ordered not to report the Shoe Bomber.

The American Airlines dispatcher who was monitoring a trans-Atlantic flight when the captain reported that a passenger had a shoe bomb said today that her supervisor tried to prevent her from notifying the authorities.

The supervisor worried that law enforcement officials would delay the plane on the ground, the dispatcher said. In a complaint filed with the Federal Aviation Administration, the dispatcher said her supervisor "instructed me to hold off informing the authorities because the flight would be remotely parked, and `it would be forever before we could get the plane out of there.' "

The Senate voted down President Bush's proposal to make the estate tax repeal permanent. The vote was 54-44 in favor of repeal. Of course, the vote isn't very important right now, since it wouldn't have any effect until 2011, but the Republican plan is to lock in the repeal now, in case the Democrats are back in power then. And failing that, to be able to use this as a campaign weapon.

But what I want to know is, when did this sort of "virtual filibuster" come into existence? A bill, of course, needs 50 votes to pass, which this one had; it needed 60 votes only because that's the total needed to end a filibuster. But what happened to the Good Old Days, when a Senator who wanted to block a particular bill had to actually stand up on the Senate floor and read from a phone book for hours, until 60 Senators voted for cloture or until supporters of the bill gave up? Now, they don't even bother going through the motions; if the proponents can't get the 60 votes, they simply stop trying. What happened to accountability, where the public could see who was being obstructionist?

Can you imagine Mr. Smith Goes To Washington being shot today? Jimmy Stewart would just say, "Oh yeah? Where's your 60 percent?" and sit down. It might not have been quite as dramatic.

From a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re "Global Warming Follies" (editorial, June 8):

The main reason President Bush rejects the Kyoto Protocol is based on faulty reasoning; he believes that it would hurt the American economy. In fact, the opposite is true.

What is bad for Exxon is not necessarily bad for the United States economy. Ratifying Kyoto would spur new technologies and create millions of new jobs. This is just what our economy needs.

From the Washington Post:

"Obviously, we cannot envisage circumstances under which the United States would need to resort to military action against the Netherlands or another ally," the statement said.

Hoping to cash in on the recent publicity, a jackassCalifornia state senator plans to introduce a bill which would mandate that Major League Baseball test its players for steroids.

"We will use the powers of the state to notify any professional sport -- we're not singling out baseball -- that they must have policy and they must show evidence that their athletes are tested once a year," Perata said.

Teams would be required to file a steroid-testing plan with the state Athletics Commission. Athletes would be tested for the presence of steroids, which are illegal without a doctor's prescription.

The Athletics Commission was founded in 1924 to look out for the welfare of boxers and has expanded to include martial arts but has no role over baseball.

The bill states that professional athletic associations could not hold events in the state without an approved steroid plan, but details on how that provision would be enforced are still be developed.

Aside from the sheer stupidity, it seems to me that there's a constitutional problem here; if the state can't drug test people without probable cause -- and in general, that's the case under the fourth amendment -- then can they mandate that it be done by a sports league? This is framed as a regulation of an industry, but I don't know that the state should be able to circumvent the constitution by so doing.

I don't generally go in for promoting specific action on this site, but in this case, I'll make an exception. Go to this moron's website and fill in his feedback form to tell him what you think of him and his idea (which you can track here).

And since I'm being critical, I suppose I ought to give kudos where they're appropriate:

Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas, called the idea "clearly bad public policy."

"I would go for it if also all public officials -- including the Legislature, the attorney general and the governor -- were required to submit to drug testing," Oller said. "This is a tremendous overreach. These people are not even California citizens. There is a certain arrogance to not only regulate every aspect of California citizens' lives, but also to regulate those who are not citizens of the state."

The Rancho Bernardo High School vice principal who forcibly checked the underwear of students at a dance has been disciplined. They solved the problem by making her a teacher. That's what passes for accountability in the public school system. And why did the school district take two months to mete out this non-punishment?

The district had few options for disciplining Wilson because she is tenured, Phillips said. Removing her credential or firing her could open the district to the threat of a wrongful termination lawsuit and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tenure guarantees Wilson a teaching position within the district until she retires.

I'll be out of town for a few days, and blogging will be very intermittent. (Yeah, yeah, I know: what else is new. Shaddup.)