matterloaded

The Lorenzo's Oil Debate

2006-12-10T17:35:00.001+08:00

This house would grant terminally ill patients access to experimental medication.

Be warned, this is a debate that can get messy very easily with a bad setup.

On Fat Kids

2006-11-19T13:28:00.000+08:00

One of my favorite debate issues, unhealthy advertising for children's television, is being turned into a policy by Ofcom in the UK.

The reason why I like it so much is because it's one of the most balanced issues I've seen, not to mention one of the richest. On one hand, banning junk food advertisements might help stave off childhood obesity. On the other, childhood obesity should be something parents should pay attention to, and the burden and responsibility shouldn't be on the government, lest parents become complacent. There's also the "Joe Camel" principle, then again the consequences to children's programming might be dire considering who their major sponsors are.

In any case, the most interesting point about this new proposal is that it doesn't just cover children's programming, it also covers programming that has an audience composed primarily of children. That means shows such as Friends is also included in the ban.

If you're too lazy to read the two links above, here's the faq that the Guardian provided:

FAQ: Junk food advertising

Why is Ofcom taking action now?
In December 2003 the government asked the regulator to consider strengthening the regulation of food and drink advertising on children. It then embarked on a marathon research effort that sought to determine the effect of junk food advertising on children's eating habits and place it in the context of other influences including demographics, family eating habits, school policy, public education, food labelling and exercise.

Why has it taken so long?
It has been a long and exhaustive lobbying process, pitting the combined might of the food industry, advertising trade bodies and broadcasters against single issue health groups and consumer associations. The latter loose coalition saw their arguments gain traction as the Jamie Oliver-inspired healthy eating campaign and the debate around childhood obesity gathered pace.

How did we get here?
Having established that television advertising had a "modest" direct effect on eating habits and a larger indirect effect, Ofcom published a menu of potential options. However, none satisfied the health lobby, which wanted to see a complete ban on all junk food advertising before 9pm. Ofcom argued that would have a devastating effect on broadcasters, and came back with further proposals more draconian than its original ones but still stopped short of a complete ban.

Why has it proved controversial?
The debate over advertising junk food to children is a microcosm of the wider debate around obesity and the damaging effects of "pester power". The combined lobbying power of the food industry, added to the debate around obesity and a government taking a keen interest but not wanting to legislate in the area left Ofcom in a no-win situation.

In other news, there's also a proposal coming from the UK that wants severely obese children get gastric bypass surgery.

That is, the government should subsidize the gastric bypass surgery of severely overweight children.

Could be a good debate.

Myanmar and China

2006-11-17T12:33:00.000+08:00

The New York Times has an article explaining how China's wealth and relationship with Myanmar is keeping the military junta alive despite US sanctions.

Since the New York Times keeps their articles behind a firewall after a few weeks, I'm posting the entire article after the jump.

Despite Energy Wealth, Myanmar Is Mired in Dark
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 17, 2006

SITTWE, Myanmar — In the balmy waters of the Bay of Bengal, just off the coast, an Asian energy rush is on. Huge pockets of natural gas have been found. China and India are jostling to sign deals. Plans are afoot to spend billions on new ports and pipelines.

Yet onshore, in towns like this one, not a light is to be seen — not a street lamp, not a glow in a window — as women crouch by the roadside at dawn, sorting by candlelight the vegetables they will sell for two cents a bunch at the morning market.

Paraffin and wood are major sources of light and heat. People receive two hours of electricity a day from a military government that is among the world’s most repressive.

But attempts at outside pressure to prod the government to address its people’s needs and curb abuses have faltered, in large part because China’s thirst for resources has undermined nearly a decade of American economic sanctions. Critics say that Washington’s policy has handed Myanmar, formerly Burma, to China. Still, as President Bush prepares to meet with leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Vietnam on Nov. 17, one topic on his agenda will be how to keep up the pressure. He is not likely to find cooperation, not from rivals like China and Russia, or even countries like Singapore and Indonesia, which trade freely with Myanmar.

The Asian energy rush is the latest demonstration of how the hunt for oil and gas, and China’s economic leverage, are reshaping international politics, often in ways that run counter to American preferences.

In many respects, with the rise of China’s economic power and its unflagging support, the government here has become more entrenched than ever, people inside and outside the country say.

“What can we do about it?” said a well educated man here, when asked about the plans to sell the gas abroad in the face of the deprivation at home. “What good would it do to protest, what would we get?” People were too afraid of the 400,000-member strong army supplied by China, Russia and Ukraine to complain, he said.

In numerous encounters in Myanmar, where most speak with extreme caution to foreigners and almost always anonymously for fear of jail, people joked sardonically that China was the “big daddy” and that soon it would “own” Myanmar. “China is a good friend of the government, not of the people,” one woman said. “They are like brother and brother-in-law.”

The Bush administration has pledged that it will not let up on its sanctions against the government until it releases the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 11 of the past 17 years.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party won an overwhelming victory in elections in 1990, and Washington insists that the government recognize those results, and release an estimated 1,100 political prisoners.

The Bush administration says it plans to file a Security Council resolution at the United Nations in coming weeks condemning the government for its human rights abuses, and tightening sanctions further.

The United Nations under secretary general, Ibrahim Gambari, met with the junta leader, Gen. Than Shwe, on Nov. 11 in Myanmar and urged the government to mend its ways on forced labor and political prisoners. The meeting ended inconclusively, United Nations officials said.

With so much energy and other resources at stake, and given its preference to shun outside interference in internal politics, China’s leaders are seemingly unbothered by what is happening inside Myanmar.

China’s National Development Reform Commission approved plans in April to build a pipeline that would carry China’s Middle East oil from a deep water port off Sittwe across Myanmar to Yunnan, China’s southern province. This would provide China with an alternative to the Strait of Malacca, which it now depends on for delivering its oil from the Middle East.

Though no date has been announced for work on the new pipeline across Myanmar, the military appeared to be getting ready to build the deep sea port on the island of Ramree, to the south of here, local people said.

In another sign of the importance of Myanmar to China, the chairman of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, Fu Chengyu, said in a speech this year that the company would focus its investment in the medium term on two countries: Myanmar and Nigeria. Cnooc engineers are currently exploring for oil on Ramree, and the company has rights to other oil deposits in central Myanmar, according to Myanmar government reports.

India, thirsty for energy to fuel its own fast-growing economy, sees Myanmar as a place where it needs to contain China. In the late 1990s, democratic India switched its policy toward Myanmar from antagonism to friendship.

And Thailand, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, spends about $1.2 billion a year for Myanmar’s natural gas, giving the military government badly needed hard currency.

In conversations with people in a number of towns, a portrait emerged of a universally unpopular, deeply corrupt government. People told of worsening poverty, a collapsed education system and a health care system that could deal only with those who paid. Tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS were rampant, they said.

The government’s budget for its AIDS program in 2004 was $22,000, according to a recent health survey by John Hopkins University Medical School.

The junta leader, Gen. Than Shwe, 73, whose early military training was in psychological warfare, was described by many here as a master manipulator of his minions. He insisted, apparently out of fear of a coup, that the capital be moved this year from Yangon, formerly Rangoon, to a new site in the jungle, Naypyidaw.

The move, costing millions of scarce dollars, was in step with the general’s belief that he marched in the footsteps of the old Burmese kings — the name of the new capital means “Royal City.” Then, as now, there was a fierce line between the rulers and the ruled.

For the first time, health workers said they were discovering severe malnutrition among children in urban centers, a true anomaly in a lush country that was once the world’s biggest exporter of rice.

In Mandalay, the second-biggest city, almost naked children with distended stomachs scrounged on the riverfront. In one village on the Thwande River on the west coast, nomadic families were too strapped for food to offer any to visitors, a traditional courtesy in Myanmar.

“Why is there severe malnutrition in this Garden of Eden? Because people are poor,” said Frank Smithuis, a physician who has worked in Myanmar since 1994 and heads the Doctors Without Borders, Holland, medical programs. “People are going from three meals to two meals to one meal. One meal a day just isn’t enough.”

In the village of Leat Pan Gyunt, south of Sittwe, villagers said they could afford to send their girls to school for only three years. The local school consisted of one dirt-floored room for all grades from first to eighth. The desks were planks of wood supported on two bricks.

Afraid of protests by students, the government dispersed the University of Yangon to sites outside the capital.

At the new Magway University, the medical students were learning surgery from books and videos, without working on human corpses because the government refused to pay for formaldehyde, two people familiar with the situation said.

In contrast to the deepening poverty — Myanmar’s per capita income is calculated at $175 a year, far below neighboring Bangladesh — the military leaders were amassing fortunes, people said.

The latest evidence was a video leaked to a Web site, www.irrawaddy.org, based in Thailand, of the recent opulent wedding of General Than Shwe’s daughter, Thandar Shwe. The video showed the bride, with her father alongside her, decked out in a necklace of six ropes of large diamonds, her hair looped with diamonds as well.

For those educated people who want change, the path is treacherous.

“I don’t want to waste myself in jail,” said one woman, who had two relatives imprisoned. “They were not the same when they came out.”

In a similar vein to the dissidents in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, the woman said she believed change had to come from inside the country. But unlike Poland under Soviet rule, no unions are allowed in Myanmar, and most kinds of formal associations are considered suspect.

She said she held classes at her home on how to be more confident, how to strategize. She was trying to spread her classes to Buddhist monasteries and Christian churches, she said.

“Only education can change people because people don’t know anything,” she said. “Only about 10 percent of the people know what is going on.” Sometimes she was in such despair, she said, that she believed that the only way to win against the government was “to think like them.”

“But we can’t think like them,” she added, “nobody thinks like them.”

Not all opposition groups that work outside the country believe that Washington’s hard line is serving the best interests of Myanmar or the United States.

With its policy of isolation, the Bush administration was allowing China, and to a lesser extent, India, to have a free hand in Myanmar to the exclusion of the United States, said Aung Naing Oo, who spent a year at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and who is the author of several books on Myanmar.

“The geopolitical situation favors the Burmese military,” he said. “China and India both want to support it, and the Asian nations have no teeth.”

Still, on a recent trip to Vietnam, a delegation of Myanmar officials heard something that astounded them, he said. They went to find out why Vietnam had become so suddenly prosperous.

“The Vietnamese said one word: ‘The Americans.’ The Burmese could not believe that after fighting a war Vietnam was friendly with the United States.”

"Sex" Education

2006-11-17T11:27:00.000+08:00

Recently, the Boy Scouts of the Philippines announced that they will be accepting girls into the ranks of the BSP.

This, not surprisingly, pissed off the Girl Scouts of the Philippines.

Boy scouts cannot teach girl scouts to be “womanly women,” said the GSP

"We do as many challenges now as the boy scouts and we are part of an international organization, which is the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. We have relevant programs like in Africa about HIV-AIDS, and here in the country, we are also doing programs even in reproductive health, awareness of what a girl is. A girl is different from a boy in the first place, why are they saying too girly?" she [Dr. Cristina Yuson] said.

This brings up a good debate, do organizations such as the Boy Scouts have a right to choose who gets to be a member?

Raul Pangalangan gives some very good insights into this question, particularly the notion of the "right to expressive association".

Basically, the right to expressive association means that if your freedom of expression as an organization is linked to the kinds of people you allow to become members, then you essentially have a right to discriminate among your applicants.

This may seem a bit mindboggling, but the idea here is that if your organization is sending a specific message that requires a particular membership (say, the GOP for instance), your organization can exclude people from joining (say, card-carrying Democrats, if there are any).

This was the case when the US Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Boy Scouts of America to boot a homosexual from its ranks.

This kind of mindset might allow for a certain danger of discrimination, but then again, the burden of proof is that your membership has to exclude people to properly express its views.

Another thing that needs to be discussed regarding this development was, what is the difference between the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts in the first place? Aside from the obvious, of course.

It all boils down to the age-old question of whether or not there are inherent differences between genders that requires different activities and actions to be undertaken. Makes you wonder if there are any studies regarding this, doesn't it?

In that regard, there is also a movement in the United States that's demanding for single-sex public education to be provided.

The idea being, the government should provide diverse options when it comes to education, and since there are some parents who would prefer to have their kids go to single-sex schools but don't want to pay for an expensive private school, they should provide for this. I don't exactly know if this is reasonable.

But it certainly is debatable.

Single Mothers and their Sex Offender Boyfriends

2006-11-17T11:09:00.000+08:00

Single mothers will be able to ask the police to check the background of a new partner to find out whether he is a sex offender under moves being considered by the Home Office, the Guardian can reveal.

For those of you who like debating about registered sex offenders and pedophiles but are pretty tired of the same issue all over again, this might just be the issue for you.

It is a pretty interesting proposal, especially since single mothers are probably the no. 1 targets of child sex offenders.

At first glance this might seem like a pretty skewed motion. How can you possibly argue against protecting people from these registered sex offenders?

But as the article says (and as the proposal attempts to address), this kind of policy might be open to abuse. You might have these single mothers actively promoting and advertising that Mr. A is really a pedophile. In which case, you will have the whole 'right to privacy' debacle on your hands.

More importantly though, how about these sex offenders? What happens if you were a sex offender but you got help and now you don't stalk children anymore? Are you still considered a sex offender because of your past actions? If so, is it right to continue your punishment through the persecution you're going to get from this kind of policy?

My question is, if this can be the case, what's stopping the government from disclosing the same information schools and other public/private institutions that cater to children? Or do they do so already? I don't really know.

All in all, in a debate like this, you are inevitably going to have to give a discussion the same issues that any pedophile debate might entail. What you have to be careful about is being able to provide the proper nuance that would keep your debate from being generic.

More On Net Neutrality

2006-11-16T19:40:00.000+08:00

The Consumerist, a blog accounting the tales of woe suffered by the little man from the Big Bad Corporations, gives you more matter on the issue of net neutrality. You can go with why net neutrality is good, or you can go with why net neutrality is bad.

An Oldie but a Goodie

2006-11-10T23:51:00.000+08:00

The issue of criminals and their published memoirs is certainly nothing new, but the British government has come up with a new proposal to stop ex-convicts from being able to profit from published works about their crimes.

The operative word here being "profit", the current proposal doesn't seem to restrict these criminals from getting their life experiences published, just that they can't get any kind of profit from them.

Good thing Martha Stewart is American.

By virtue of the fact that this issue is ancient, you won't see this being debated anymore (certainly not in the last few tournaments). This issue is a good one for beginners to train on because it requires more logical thinking and argumentation rather than knowledge on technical matter (although being able to cite a few examples always helps).

For example, why is it so wrong for criminals to profit from publishing their criminal acts? By serving their sentences, they've already paid their debt to society. Why should additional, across-the-board, penalties be accorded to them after the fact?

On the other hand, as the article says, criminals being able to profit from their works goes against the very principles of natural justice, and justice isn't just measured by how much time is served in prison.

One can even argue that the proposal is trying to have its cake and eat it too - they recognize the value of these published memoirs (after all, they're not disallowing it) but they don't recognize the value of compensation for these criminals' experiences. What makes these two values so mutually exclusive? And wouldn't that be self-defeating since without any form of monetary compensation, criminals won't be inclined to share their life stories and thus destroying the value that they so want to protect?

Really good issue. People should start discussing this again.

Socializing Medicine

2006-11-10T22:14:00.000+08:00

As the Democrats take over the US Congress, the issue of health care becomes hot again. Slate has a good perspective on what's happening now. The basic idea being argued here is that the current system of health care in the US (that is, privatized health care) isn't working and it's time to start thinking of socializing health care the same way it is in Canada, UK and France. The clincher is this,

the United States spends about twice what Canada, France, and the United Kingdom do on health care (all three have socialized medicine) yet ranks lower than these countries on life expectancy and higher on infant mortality.

Read it.

Madonna's Madonna Complex

2006-11-10T21:58:00.000+08:00

In recent years, the "in" thing for celebrities has been to adopt orphans from third-world countries and display them to the paparazzi as if they were the latest piece of jewelry. Madonna has been the latest offender/defender of these orphans and has made this issue relevant again.

The issue in question? Not particularly having celebrities use people as ornaments, but the idea of trans-racial adopting, and whether or not that's an action that should be condoned.

This kind of activity isn't particularly new. This kind of practice has been going on for years, so much so that it has become part of Popular Culture already, as manifested in Arrested Development.

Certainly, there is a value to be had for trans-racial adoptions. Children who would have otherwise have grown up poor in a third world country without proper care or medication literally have a new world open to them.

Then again, it also has its own problems. What happens to that particular child's own culture? What about his identity? What happens if he/she's alienated in the predominantly White society that he/she's presumably going to be living in?

There's also the question of what the point of trans-racial adoption is. Why adopt people from another country if there are orphans in your own country that you can adopt as well? Adopting one child is certainly not going to alleviate poverty. What are the implications of trans-racial adopting, and should they be encouraged/discouraged?

In any case, the assessment of values in this debate probably boils down to two things - the child in particular and third-world children and the society in general.

Hacking Democracy

2006-11-07T23:06:00.000+08:00

To mark the US Midterm Elections and to partly explain why despite all evidence to the contrary, I think that the Republicans are going to maintain control of the US Legislature, this is an HBO documentary explaining almost point by point how the elections in the US HAVE been rigged and CAN be rigged in so many levels and how nobody in government is doing anything about it.

The best part is in the end, where they demonstrate the 21st century version of dagdag-bawas.

This is why I can't understand why a lot of people keep on insisting that we need to "modernize" our voting system. Any ten-year old with a computer will tell you that any digital system can be co-opted, the DRM wars is just the easiest example.

That's the entire movie by the way. One hour and twenty minutes, so it might take awhile.

Mercy Killing for Disabled Newborns

2006-11-05T22:26:00.000+08:00

Britain's Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecology are lobbying for the legalization of euthanasia for disabled newborns.

This seems to be a pretty interesting perspective on an old standby. It certainly has a different dynamic to it. It's one thing to talk about the killing of a terminally ill/disabled patient that's lived a long life, it's another thing to talk about the killing of one that has his/her whole life ahead of him/her. However, the same question of quality of life still applies. In protecting life, does the quality of that life factor in?

This debate gets even more complicated when you try to set it up. How would you define what a "disabled newborn" is? Does a crack baby qualify? How about if the baby is just genetically blind? You have to be careful in how you set this debate up lest you suddenly find yourself defending something you weren't exactly planning to, such as killing babies that just can't walk. What kind of disability you eventually choose to discuss has to be so bad as to warrant taking someone's life.

Sensitivity is also something you need to watch out for. You can't just talk about these babies as if they were statistics. Doing so only serves to turn off a lot of people. Be careful how you package your arguments.

In my opinion, this issue becomes harder if you're to oppose it. You have to justify why child barely alive has to live the next 40 years in life-support systems, never truly living.

One possible track is mentioned in the article, how such a policy only serves to promote bigotry for disabled people, as if they were lesser human beings.

If you can't make the connections for that argument, realize that the only other living beings killed for their disabilities are horses with broken legs.

The best strategy that an opposition team should take (at least I think so) would be to try and frame the issue as if it was a typical euthanasia issue.

Then again, in a debate, anything could happen.

For a Redrawn Middle East

2006-11-02T23:54:00.000+08:00

Ralph Peters from the Armed Forces Journal is making the case for a Middle East with borders that follow cultural/religious boundaries instead of the current borders that were made by the European empires of the 19th Century.

Now this would make for an interesting debate. Does a peaceful Middle East require redrawn territories? Or can we attain peace in the region in despite the current configuration?

This would also be a pretty complicated debate. How do you draw the borders? How can you make sure that every country in the region is satisfied? How do you deal with Israel?

On one hand, you have the Squiggly border theory, an NBER study done by a couple of Harvard economists that basically states that the more squiggly the borders, the better chances for growth while the less squiggly the borders, the more worse off the state is. This stems from the idea that straight borders indicate a state that was artificially determined (most of the time from some invading colonial/imperial power) whereas squiggly borders indicate a state that was more naturally determined. The straight bordered countries are worse off because the state was created without consideration of cultural, religious and/or ethnic conflicts within the region.

On the other hand, you have the example of Yugoslavia, proving that peace and development might not necessarily be accomplished by a state formed by ethnicity.

Then again, this is the Middle East, so who knows?

Linkblogging

2006-10-31T21:28:00.000+08:00

David Cameron and the Tories argue that the different rights that we get once we turn 18/21, such as getting a driver's license, being able to drink alcohol, being able to vote, should be contingent on the accomplishment of a national service program (read: NSTP/ROTC). The basic point that they're trying to make is that these rights shouldn't be linked to an arbitrary age requirement but rather to some proof that there's a sense of social responsibility inherent in the young person in question. Then again, doing such a thing removes the whole unalienability of those rights in the first place. Could be quite an interesting debate.

Steven E. Landsburg explains how exactly the existence of Internet Pornography prevents the people most likely to commit rape to go out in the streets and rape someone. It essentially boils down to "Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn."

This would be especially useful in debates such as the one regarding fictional child pornography, or actually pornography in general.

Another thing the article explains is how violent movies reduce the incidents of violent crime.

Juan Cole talks about the idea being talked about in the US Congress about partitioning Iraq to three separate regions of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. One side is arguing that such a move would be "balkanizing" the region. The other side is saying that that's exactly what Iraq needs, considering that the Balkans are pretty stable right now. Either way, the article sheds some light on an old debate.

Gary Kamiya argues that the US should apologize to the Iraqis. His basic point is, "When we smashed into their country, we in effect became their temporary guardians. We were responsible for their well-being. We needed to raise them, take care of them, until they could take care of themselves. And we failed them. This is a deeply shameful feeling."

Then again, is a US apology really what Iraq needs right now, or is it just going to make things worse? Such an apology undoubtedly will accomplish one thing - alleviate the shame that's supposed to be in every American regarding Iraq. But what else would an apology do? Maybe embolden the fundamentalists. Maybe discredit the US as an international mediator. In any case, this is a pretty interesting debate in the long line of "compensation debates".

Bill O'Reilly vs. David Letterman

2006-10-31T00:59:00.001+08:00

Most of the time (in fact almost 99% of the time), David Letterman isn't funny. His jokes are tired and forced, and his band leader is more annoying than Jar Jar Binks. Sometimes however, sometimes, he gets a guest over and THIS happens:

One thing you can say about Letterman, he doesn't just babysit the guests, especially when he has guests like Bill O'Reilly.

Watch the two clips. Watch how both sides debate with each other. From the start you can see O'Reilly trying to beat around the bush and avoid the issue of Iraq and the Bush Administration as best as he can. Each and every time though, Letterman forces him back onto the course. Then, a few ad hominems from both sides get thrown around, rinse and repeat.

What I find interesting about the interview is how Letterman tries to frame the Iraq issue initially in a way that's accomodating to O'Reilly's perspective - that is that the US basically pulled a 'Batman', they invaded Iraq because they wanted to stop something horrible that was already happening to them. Later on during the interview, he shifts from this perspective when he calls Bill O'Reilly on the original reasons for invading Iraq, which was the WMDs. He shifts back later on in the interview.

Other than that, (and other than that time O'Reilly takes a slight advantage when he pulls the 9/11 card) he argues the case pretty well. Take into consideration the fact that Letterman doesn't probably have a comprehensive knowledge about the history of the problem with Iraq, and it goes beyond just 'pretty well'.

He was right when he said that O'Reilly "puts artificial facts into his head". A lot of what O'Reilly said during the interview can very well be considered false matter. Is the status quo in Iraq right now really not that much different from the status quo in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's regime? No. Saddam killed around 300,000 people. The US Occupation in Iraq has so far killed at least 650,000. That's hardly a tie. Before the war, Iraqis (at least according to the IHT article I read way back then) were able to start their own Internet Coffee Shops. I doubt they have the same liberty now. Iraq under Saddam may have been horrible, but at least it wasn't as horrible as it is now, and at least it was stable.

More importantly and much more offensive (at least for me) was the comment O'Reilly said in the latter half of the interview - that "the intent was noble". As if that excuses everything that the Republicans have done wrong in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Even worse, he seems to think it's perfectly fine that this rationalization harks back to Western Imperialism and the 'White Man's Burden', as if there's nothing wrong with it.

What a lot of people (particularly the Americans apparently) keep on forgetting however is that US & UK intelligence wasn't wrong only once. It was completely wrong in TWO occasions. First it was wrong with its claim of WMDs in Iraq. Second it was wrong wit h its non-claim of WMDs in North Korea. George Bush and Tony Blair dropped the ball in the biggest crisis to hit the international community since World War 2. And so far, no one's taking them completely to task with that. If they actually had their intelligence right, the world wouldn't be where it is right now, back in the Cold War.

In any case, galing lang, how Letterman completely owns O'Reilly, and all O'Reilly could do was hide himself behind a pillow.

Linkblogging

2006-10-19T00:50:00.000+08:00

The Diary of a Sex Slave - a four part series by SFgate.com about global sex trafficking.

Charity is Selfish - the economic case against philanthropy - Slate economist Tim Harford argues that charity isn't all that altruistic.

The War on Water - How the shortage in water, privatization, and the World Bank contribute to the poverty in Bolivia.

Non-Resident Mayors - Bong Austero of the Manila Standard talks about the problem with mayors who don't reside in the towns they're governing.

Further discussions on intellectual property and copyright law.

2006-10-12T00:38:00.000+08:00

As you will read, the discussion on intellectual property and copyright law goes way beyond mp3s and AIDS cocktails.

Can fashion be copyrighted? - the Wall Street Journal talks about the infamous practice of producing knockoffs.

New Era of the Recipe Burglar - the magazine Food and Wine deals with the latest trend of copyrighting recipes.

For a time, people were also discussing plagiarism in the context of Architectural Design. One famous case is the one against David Childs for his design of the Freedom Tower.

Considering all of this, I'm starting to think that the entertainment industry's obssession with DRM (digital rights management, you should know this) has made the idea of intellectual property trendy. Which wouldn't be that bad, until you realize that it has come to the point where people are already copyrighting phrases (read: Donald Trump).

What One Fewer Planet Means to Our Worldview

2006-09-02T00:45:00.000+08:00

Because of the recent brouhaha regarding Pluto's non-planetary status, an editorial at the Washington Post posits the question why defintions are so important.

Some choice exerpts:

Definitions and categories are the handles by which we grasp the world. If we change the handles, we change how we see the world.

The reason people care so much about one definition rather than another is because definitions are markers for group identity, said Barbara King, a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary who studies social behavior in primates. Wanting to see the world a particular way is an extension of our innate tendency to form groups, coalitions and tribes.

The moral lesson is: be more careful with your definitions.

A Fresh Take On The Death Penalty

2006-08-26T21:52:00.001+08:00

The Scientific Activist questions the humaneness of lethal injections.

Specifically, the fact that most people in the medical community refuse to participate in executions for the simple reason that is the Hippocratic Oath.

As a result, non-medically trained technicians are the ones that perform the executions.

Which wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that if you don't know how to execute them properly, they will die the most horrible death possible - paralyzed and in pain.

There's the dilemma. The question (and therefore, the debate) is, given the large possibility of inhumaneness that might occur with a non-medico, should the medical community be forced to cooperate with lethal injections, or do they reserve the right to refuse to cooperate?

Thoughts?

This Week in Status Quo

2006-08-25T13:38:00.000+08:00

Women can buy the morning-after pill without a prescription, the government declared Thursday, a major step that nevertheless failed to quell the politically charged debate over access to emergency contraception.

That being said, I guess that means that debate is dead. Only way now is to discuss it in terms of minors since you still have to be of age to purchase the drug.

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Astronomers have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

This brings up an interesting new science debate. Should science conform to societal standards? I haven't figured out how to word it properly yet, but the idea here is when it comes to certain things, should scientists disregard objective standards and follow what, dare I say it, emotionally resonates with society?

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Human embryonic stem cell lines have been generated without embryos being destroyed, according to researchers.

This also brings an interesting development in this debate. Now that 'ethical' stem cell generation has been developed, should 'unethical' stem cell research continue?

On Pedophilia

2006-08-23T00:58:00.000+08:00

The New York Times currently has two articles up with regards to Pedophilia, Child Pornography and its relation to the Internet. Read it if you want to have a more comprehensive understanding of how this particular community works, it's probably going to help you in a debate one of these days.

Motions that I've thought of concerning this topic:

This House would extend child pornography laws to sexualized imagery of minors. (most balanced, I think)

This House would hold Internet Service Providers liable for the distribution of child pornography. (also balanced, and it SHOULDN'T be the same debate as that of filesharing)

This House celebrates the formation of Pedophilic Political Parties. (Just so you know, a Dutch Court upheld the formation of that Netherlands one)

Since their website restricts access to the articles after two weeks, I'm posting the full articles after the jump.

On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach
By KURT EICHENWALD

At first blush, the two conversations — taking place almost simultaneously in different corners of the Internet — might have seemed unremarkable, even humdrum.

In April, with summer fast approaching, both groups of online friends chatted about jobs at children’s camps. Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp.

But participants in the conversation did not focus on the work. “Hope you see some naked boys in your cabin,” a man calling himself PPC responded. “And good luck while restraining yourself from doing anything.”

The two groups were made up of self-proclaimed pedophiles — one attracted to under-age girls, the other to boys. Their dialogue runs at all hours in an array of chat rooms, bulletin boards and Web sites set up for adults attracted to children.

But it is no longer just chatter in the ether. What started online almost two decades ago as a means of swapping child pornography has transformed in recent years into a more complex and diversified community that uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one.

Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children — at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors. And they make use of technology to help take their arguments to others, like sharing online a printable booklet to be distributed to children that extols the benefits of sex with adults.

The community’s online infrastructure is surprisingly elaborate. There are Internet radio stations run by and for pedophiles; a putative charity that raised money to send Eastern European children to a camp where they were apparently visited by pedophiles; and an online jewelry company that markets pendants proclaiming the wearer as being sexually attracted to children, allowing anyone in the know to recognize them.

These were the findings of a four-month effort by The New York Times to learn about the pedophiles’ online world by delving into their Internet communications. In recent months, new concerns have emerged about whether the ubiquitous nature of broadband technology, instant message communications and digital imagery is presenting new and poorly understood risks to children. Already, there have been many Congressional hearings on the topic, as well as efforts to write comprehensive legislation to address the issue.

But most of those efforts have focused on examining particular instances of harm to children. There have been few, if any, recent attempts to examine the pedophiles themselves, based on their own words to one another, to gain a better recognition of the nature of potential problems.

Last week, that world attracted new attention after reports that John M. Karr, who was arrested last Wednesday as a suspect in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, apparently used Internet discussion sites intensively in efforts to communicate with children, sometimes about sex. In e-mail messages to a journalism professor that investigators believe were written by Mr. Karr, statements about children seemed to echo the online dialogue among pedophiles.

“Sometimes little girls are closer to me than with their parents or any other person in their lives,’’ the e-mail messages say. “I can only say that I can relate very well to children and the way they think and feel.’’

The recent conversations among pedophiles that were examined by The Times took place in virtual rooms in Internet Relay Chat, a text-based system allowing for real-time communications; on message boards on Usenet, which has postings by topic; and on Web sites catering to pedophiles.

In this online community, pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws. They portray themselves as battling for children’s rights to engage in sex with adults, a fight they liken to the civil rights movement. And while their effort has brought little success, they celebrated online in May when a small group of men in the Netherlands formed a pedophile political party, and they rejoiced again last month when a Dutch court upheld the party’s right to exist.

The conversations themselves are not illegal. And, given the fantasy world that the Internet can be, it is difficult to prove the truth of personal statements, or to demonstrate direct connections between online commentary and real-world actions. Nor can the number of participants in these conversations, taking place around the Internet, be reliably ascertained.

But the existence of this community is significant and troubling, experts said, because it reinforces beliefs that, when acted upon, are criminal. Repeatedly in these conversations, pedophiles said the discussions had helped them accept their attractions and had even allowed them to have sex with a child without guilt.

Indeed, law enforcement officials say that the refrain of justification from online conversations is frequently voiced by adults arrested for molestation, raising concern that such conversations may lower pedophiles’ willingness to resist their temptation.

“It is rationalization that allows them to avoid admitting that their desires are harmful and illegal,” said Bill Walsh, a former commander of the Crimes Against Children Unit for the Dallas Police Department, who founded the most prominent annual national conference on the issue. “That can allow them to take that final step and cross over from fantasy into real-world offenses.”

Still, in their conversations, some pedophiles often maintain that the discussion sites are little more than support groups. They condemn violent child rapists and lament that they are often equated with such criminals. Many see themselves as spiritually connected to children and say that sexual contact is irrelevant. Yet the pedophiles consistently return to discussions justifying sex with minors and child pornography.

Many of these adults described concepts of children that veered into the fantastical — for example, at times depicting themselves as victims of predatory minors. A little girl in a skirt reveals her underwear by doing a cartwheel; a boy in a bathing suit sits on a bench with his legs spread apart; a child playfully jumps on a man’s back — all of these ordinary events were portrayed as sexual come-ons.

“It really is like going through the rabbit hole, with this entire alternative reality,” said Philip Jenkins, a professor of religious studies at Pennsylvania State University who wrote “Beyond Tolerance,” a groundbreaking 2001 book about Internet child pornography.

The conversations also demonstrated technological acumen, with frequent discussions about ways to ensure online anonymity and to encrypt images. That underscores a challenge faced by the authorities who hope to combat online child exploitation with technology. For example, in June, Internet service providers announced plans for an alliance that will use new technologies to locate child pornography traders.

Pedophiles were undaunted. Within hours of the announcement, their discussion rooms were filled with advice on how to continue swapping illegal images while avoiding detection — months before the new technologies were to be in full operation.

Portraits of Pedophilia

In a sense, the creation of the pedophiles’ online community was a ripple effect from the success of government efforts to crack down on them.

Washington’s efforts in the late 1970’s to stamp out child pornography by declaring it illegal were enormously effective, closing off traditional outlets for illicit images.

But the Internet soon presented an alternative. In the early 1980’s, through postings on bulletin board systems, pedophiles went online to swap illegal images. From there, they could easily converse with others like themselves, and they found theirs to be a community of diverse backgrounds.

In the conversations observed by The Times, the pedophiles often discussed their personal lives. Their individual jobs were described as being a disc jockey at parties (“a high concentration of gorgeous” children, a man claiming to hold the job said); a pediatric nurse (“lots of looking but no touching”); a piano teacher (“I could tell you stories that would make you ...well... I’ll be good”); an employee at a water theme park (“bathing suits upon bathing suits!!!!!”); and a pediatrician specializing in gynecology (“No need to add anything more, I feel”).

The most frequent job mentioned, however, was schoolteacher. A number of self-described teachers shared detailed observations about children in their classes, including events they considered sexual, like a second-grade boy holding his crotch during class.

The man relating that story held up that action as an expression of sexuality; he was not dissuaded when another participant in the conversation suggested that the boy might have just needed to go to the bathroom.

Some pedophiles revealed that they gained access to children through their own families. Some discussed how they married to be close to the children from their wives’ previous marriages. Pedophiles who said they were fathers described moments involving their own children, such as a man who told of watching his sons change for swimming in a locker room, complete with details about the older boy’s genitals and emerging pubic hair. Others insisted they would never feel any interest in their own children, but commented on the benefits presented by parenthood.

“I have a daughter and have never been attracted to her,” a man with the screen name of jonboy wrote. But, he added, “I did find her friends very attractive.”

Pedophiles chafe at suggestions that such comments reflect risks to minors. They point out, correctly, that family members and friends — not strangers — are the most frequent perpetrators of child sexual abuse. They never note, however, that the minors mentioned in their online discussions are most frequently those they know well, like relatives and children of friends.

Justifications Online

In the pedophiles’ world view, not all sexual abuse is abuse. There is widespread condemnation and hatred of adults who engage in forcible rape of children. But otherwise, acts of molestation are often celebrated as demonstrations of love.

“My daughter and I have a healthy close relationship,” a person with the screen name Sonali posted. “We have been in a ‘consensual sexual relationship’ almost two months now.”

The daughter, Sonali wrote, is 10. Whatever guilt Sonali felt for the relationship was eased by the postings of other pedophiles. “I am so happy to find this site,” Sonali wrote. “I thought having a sexual attraction to my daughter was bad. I now do not feel guilty or conflicted.”

In that, Sonali was demonstrating what experts said is the most dangerous element of the pedophile Internet community: its justification of illegal acts. Experts described the pedophiles’ online worldview as reflective of “neutralization,” a psychological rationalization used by groups that deviate from societal norms.

In essence, the groups deem potentially injurious acts and beliefs harmless. That is accomplished in part by denying that a victim is injured, condemning critics and appealing to higher loyalties — in this case, an ostensible struggle for the sexual freedom of children.

Pedophiles see themselves as part of a social movement to gain acceptance of their attractions. The effort has a number of tenets: that pedophiles are beneficial to minors, that children are psychologically capable of consenting and that therapists manipulate the young into believing they are harmed by such encounters.

“Every human being, no matter the age, should be allowed to have consenting mutual sexual relations with anyone they wish,” a man calling himself Venn wrote. “All age of consent laws must, and forever, be abolished.”

Those same types of comments online are now turning up in court. For example, a man known by the screen name Brother Peteticus is among those who have argued online for legalizing sex with children. In real life, he is Phillip J. Distasio of Rocky River, Ohio, who was arrested last year on charges of raping two autistic boys who were his students. In court this month, Mr. Distasio, 34, portrayed himself as following the dictates of his own religion, and made arguments frequently expressed by the online community.

“I’ve been a pedophile for 20 years,” Mr. Distasio said at the pretrial hearing. “The only reason I’m charged with rape is that no one believes a child can consent to sex. The role of my ministry is to get these cases out of the courtrooms.”

In the days that followed, some pedophiles supported that position online, agreeing with Mr. Distasio that mentally handicapped, prepubescent boys could consent to sex with their teacher.

That same logic is applied by the pedophiles to child pornography, which many of them said should be legalized. “Where is the problem?” from child pornography, a pedophile who used the screen name Writer said in an online posting. “Once again, the underlying issue is the repressive belief that sex is intrinsically sinful.”

In making these arguments, pedophiles often demonize parents and other adults as cruel, unloving people who exert authoritarian control over children and stand in the way of minors’ sexual freedom. “Anti-pedophiles are NOT about protecting children,” a man who called himself Christopher wrote. “They are usually the ones who are beating (they call it spanking) or emotionally neglecting their children.”

But their arguments often seem contradictory. While maintaining that they can be trusted with children, some pedophiles said they would not allow minors in their lives to be with other adults attracted to children. “I guess coming from the inside, I know a bunch of the bad stuff that can happen,” one man wrote.

Many pedophile sites conduct surveys to learn about the attitudes of their contributors. While none of these surveys are scientifically valid, they do reflect the thinking of some people who traffic in these sites. And not surprisingly, a large number of the surveys are about sex.

For example, on one site, pedophiles were asked if they would “have full intercourse with a little girl.” Seventy-four members responded. Only 17 replied no. The same number said that they might. The largest group — over 54 percent — said that they would.

Some attached comments to their survey response. One man provided descriptions of the acts he would repeatedly perform on an 8-year-old to prepare her. The words — too graphic to be printed here — raised no criticism on the site.

But in other discussions, pedophiles cautioned that some comments were too dangerous. When one man described in lurid terms his fantasies about molesting an infant girl, the response was quick. “This is best not discussed,” a man calling himself garvy wrote, adding that someday, pedophiles would need evidence proving that they cared only about children’s best interests.

“Such posts,” garvy concluded, “will be very damaging to the Cause.”

A Web of Deception

The booklet — recently circulated through a Web site for pedophiles — had been written, it said, “for any boy who is old enough to be able to read it.”

Called “Straight Talk for Boys,” it is an 18-page discussion of sex, particularly between children and adults, from the pedophiles’ viewpoint. Such encounters are depicted as harmless, even beneficial. The document criticizes parents and therapists. And it encourages boys to wear Speedo bathing suits and shower naked in public places.

But it repeatedly returns to one message: boys should never tell about sex with adults. “Older boys and men may be frightened about getting caught having sex play with you, because they can be put in jail,” it says. “So you have to think of ways to ‘signal’ your interest in another person without openly saying what you want,” adding that “nobody else can know about what you agree to do.”

The booklet comes with instructions, advising pedophiles on how to distribute it. “The best and safest way is to leave quantities of the booklet in places where boys in the 8 to 14 range can find them, and where adults will not discover them too quickly,” the instructions read. “Obviously, you don’t want to be observed placing the booklets in your chosen locations.”

The booklet reflects how pedophiles can use the Internet to advance their interests in the real world. Like many of those efforts, this one involved deception: the booklet does not reveal, for example, that it has been written and distributed by men who are sexually attracted to children, but instead portrays itself as objective fact.

Using deception to gain access to children is a recurring theme. For example, on a site for adults attracted to boys, someone calling himself Vespucci asked in June whether a single man could become a foster father. The respondents cautioned Vespucci to disguise his pedophilia.

“You better have a darned good excuse why you never married, such as your fiancée died in a car wreck,” replied a man calling himself simply “d.” “I highly recommend you date women for several years and keep at least a couple of those relationships going for at least a couple of months. Around the women, make a point of being nice to children.”

The deception would be worthwhile, d wrote. “It will help out in the reference-check dept. when you apply.”

Pointers on ways to get close to children were frequent topics. One man posted an Internet “help wanted” advertisement from a single mother seeking an overnight baby sitter for her 4-year-old daughter; another recommended shopping at weekend estate sales, since plenty of bored minors showed up accompanying inattentive parents.

Some participants in these conversations claimed to have established charitable efforts that put them in contact with children. For example, an organization called BL Charity said it was seeking money to send Eastern European children to camp.

The charity’s site, which recently closed, showed scores of images of children at camp and in their homes, supposedly taken by the men running the site. The effort was organized by pedophiles; BL is the online term for “boy-lover.” It eventually shut down, largely from a lack of money, according to a posting from the site’s operators. After the site closed, further details of BL Charity could not be learned. Not every organization and effort of the pedophiles is directly tied to trying to reach children. For example, pedophiles have created Internet radio stations for the purpose of providing support for one another and encouraging their perceived social movement.

It is not known how many such stations exist, nor the size of the audience. The most prominent station appears to be Sure Quality Radio, which on its home page proclaims, “From all levels of society you will find us, not as predators but as human beings, loving and caring for boys or girls or both.” The site has a program schedule and an online store selling mainstream music and movies featuring children.

People who work with Sure Quality Radio did not respond to questions e-mailed to them from The Times, although one person with the online name of boystory replied by saying he was immediately severing all ties with the station.

There are also online podcasts, recorded talk shows of 60 to 90 minutes featuring discussions among pedophiles. The discussions, as described online, deal with topics like “benefits of age difference in sexual relationships”; “failure of sex offender registries”; “children’s sexual autonomy, practices and consequences” and “the misrepresentation of pedophilia in the news media.”

With the chat rooms, radio stations and other organizations, pedophiles’ views are continually reinforced. But some realize that this online echo chamber can warp reality. For example, a man calling himself AtosW reported to fellow pedophiles that he had been chatting on a game site frequented by boys. A conversation began about the Dutch pedophile party, AtosW said, and the minors reacted with threats of violence.

AtosW was perplexed. “Why are posters THAT young so angry about it?” he asked. “It is after all THEIR rights that they are pushing for.”

A man calling himself Ritter responded. “Your post is a typical example of what happens when you spend too much time in the online BL community,” he wrote. “Believe it or not, most young children are NOT anxious to have sex with adult men.”

With Child Sex Sites on the Run, Nearly Nude Photos Hit the Web
By KURT EICHENWALD

In the photograph, the model is shown rising out of a bubble bath, suds dripping from her body. Her tight panties and skimpy top are soaked and revealing. She gazes at the viewer, her face showing a wisp of a smile that seems to have been coaxed from off-camera.

In just over seven months, the model has become an online phenomenon. She has thousands of fans from around the world, membership lists show, who pay as much as $30 a month to see images of her. According to the posted schedule, new photographs of her — many clearly intended to be erotic, all supposedly taken that week — are posted online every Friday for her growing legions of admirers.

The model’s online name is Sparkle. She is — at most — 9 years old.

Sparkle is one of hundreds of children being photographed by adults, part of what appears to be the latest trend in online child exploitation: Web sites for pedophiles offering explicit, sexualized images of children who are covered by bits of clothing — all in the questionable hope of allowing producers, distributors and customers to avoid child pornography charges.

In recent months, an array of investigations of the child pornography business — by the Justice Department, state and local law enforcement and Congress — have contributed to wholesale shutdowns of some of the most sexually explicit Internet sites trafficking in child images. But they have been rapidly replaced by a growing number of these so-called model sites, Internet locations that offer scores of original photographs of scantily clad under-age children like Sparkle, often posed in ways requested by subscribers.

More than 200 of the sites have been found by The New York Times through online advertising aimed at pedophiles, and a vast majority focus mostly on one child. Almost all the children appear to be between the ages of 2 and 12.

Based on descriptions in online customer forums and in Web pages showing image samples, the children are photographed by people who have frequent access to them. The sites often include images of “guests”: children who are described as a friend of the featured child, but who appear for only a day. The sites say the children come from different parts of the world, including the United States.

Based on the images and wording from online advertisements, the sites show toddlers wearing tight thongs, and slightly older children posing evocatively while wearing makeup and feather boas. There is even a site that offers images of girls and boys who appear to be 5 or 6 years old, wearing just diapers.

In online conversations observed by The Times over four months, pedophiles portrayed model sites as the last of a shrinking number of Internet locations for sexual images of minors.

”I considered the authors of those sites as leaders of a rebellion movement for child porn,” a man calling himself Heartfallen wrote in an online site for pedophiles, discussing the decline in the number of sites featuring images of naked minors. “They’ve vanished. There is much less freedom on the Internet now. We still have a rebellion made up of nonnude child modeling sites. But are they going to suffer the same fate as their predecessors?”

Insight to the Ramsey Case

The secretive world of child exploitation is in the spotlight because of an arrest last week in the 1996 murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a 6-year-old beauty pageant princess. The suspect was a fugitive from charges of possessing child pornography and had exhibited a fascination with the sexual abuse of children.

While many of the recently created sites are veering into new territory, the concept of for-pay modeling sites using children has been around for years. They first appeared in the late 1990’s, when entrepreneurs, and even parents, recognized that there was a lucrative market online for images of girls and boys.

Sites with names like lilamber.com emerged, showing photographs of children, usually modeling in clothes or swimsuits. Their existence set off a fury of criticism in Congress about possible child exploitation, but proposed legislation about such sites never passed.

The sites that have emerged in recent months, however, are markedly different. Unlike the original sites, the newer ones are explicit in their efforts to market to pedophiles, referring to young children with phrases like “hot” and “delicious.” The children involved are far younger, and the images far more sexual, emphasizing the minors’ genitals and buttocks.

Some modeling sites have already attracted the attention of law enforcement. Earlier this year, prosecutors obtained a guilty plea on child pornography charges from Sheila L. Sellinger, then of Shoals, Ind., who had been selling illegal photographs of her 10-year-old daughter on a modeling Web site. Last month, Ms. Sellinger was sentenced to almost 12 years in prison.

Ms. Sellinger, who earned thousands of dollars a week from the pornographic yet clothed images of her daughter, cooperated with law enforcement, leading to the arrest of two men who had been assisting her with her site and had been running several more, court records show.

To attract subscribers, central marketing sites, called portals, list scores of available modeling sites that accept money in exchange for access to children’s images. The portals promote the busiest sites, ranking them by the number of hits they receive.

Such a marketing approach proved effective for some online child pornography businesses that have disappeared over the last year, including those that offered illicit videos of children generated by Webcams.

The Times did not subscribe to any sites, which it first saw referenced in online conversations among pedophiles. The Times followed a link posted in those conversations to forum postings and images on freely accessible pages of the modeling sites. Because those sites appeared to be illegal, The Times was required by law to report what it had found to authorities. Federal law enforcement officials were notified in July about the sites.In contrast to their advertising, many of the sites portray themselves on their main pages as regular modeling agencies trying to find work for their talent. But executives in the legitimate modeling business said that virtually everything about the sites runs contrary to industry practice. Most child images for genuine agencies are password-protected, the executives said, with access granted to companies and casting agents only after a check of their backgrounds.

These executives said that real modeling agencies would refuse to use the types of sexualized images of children sought by pedophiles, not only because they are exploitative and illegal, but also because they would be bad business.

Such images on an agency Web site would drive away many parents who might be seeking representation for their child, executives said; indeed, most photographs of child models are nothing more than head shots. And the legitimate agents provide the phone numbers, addresses and names of their executives so potential clients can contact them; most of the sites aimed at pedophiles not only provide little or no means of contact, but even hide the identities of the owners behind anonymous site registrations.

“These are clearly not bona fide companies, and it’s obvious these are just Web sites for people to go on and view children in an unhealthy manner,” Bonnie Breen, chief booker for the Bizzykidz Agency, a prominent modeling agency for children based in London, said when provided with a description of the emerging modeling sites.

Despite repeated statements on the sites that they are lawful, they may well run afoul of American law. While the issues are far from settled — thus leading to the attempts by Congress to clarify the law — courts have worked over the last two decades to define standards for what constitutes potentially illegal images of children.

‘Lascivious Exhibition’ Standard

Under law, for an image that does not involve a child engaged in a sex act, a court must find that it entails “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area” of a minor to determine that it is child pornography. As a result, courts have ruled that images of naked children were not automatically pornographic, and thus not illegal, while also holding that the mere presence of clothing on a photographed child was not, in itself, adequate to declare the image lawful.

Instead, the courts often apply a six-pronged test, developed in a 1986 case called United States v. Dost, to determine whether an image meets the “lascivious exhibition” standard. That test — which requires a court to examine the child’s pose and attire, the suggestiveness and intent of the image and other factors — includes one standard on whether the child is naked. However, no single standard under Dost is absolute, and courts must continuously examine potentially illegal images while considering each part of the test.

The leading precedent on child pornography involving clothed minors is a federal case known as United States v. Knox, which involved a pedophile who obtained erotic videos of girls. In that 1994 case, the Federal Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of the pedophile, Stephen Knox, saying explicitly that clothing alone did not automatically mean that images of children were legal.

“The harm Congress attempted to eradicate by enacting the child pornography laws is present when a photographer unnaturally focuses on a minor child’s clothed genital area with the obvious intent to produce an image sexually arousing to pedophiles,” the court’s ruling says. “The rationale underlying the statute’s proscription applies equally to any lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area whether these areas are clad or completely exposed.”

While adult pornography has some First Amendment protections, there are no such protections for child pornography. Still, some experts have expressed discomfort, in general, at criminalizing clothed pictures of minors.

“This is a difficult area,” said Michael A. Bamberger, a First Amendment specialist at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, based in New York, who filed a brief on behalf of a booksellers’ group in the Knox case. “The whole history of the exception from First Amendment protections for child pornography is based on the harm to the child. But there is in my view a free speech issue with respect to designating photographs of persons under the age of 18 who are clothed as child pornography.”

But Mr. Bamberger expressed uncertainty about whether his concerns applied when told details of the model sites found by The Times. “To me, it sounds as if you are really talking about nude equivalents, almost like cellophane clothing, and that’s not clothing at all.”To distinguish between illegal images and, say, photographs of children posing in underwear for a store catalog, the court said it had to apply the Dost standards and review a range of facts, like the nature of the images and whether the marketing was intended to appeal to pedophiles.

For example, the court noted, a potential customer could know the images of minors were illegal if they were marketed with statements proclaiming that they would “blow your mind so completely you’ll be begging for mercy.” Explicit listing of the children’s ages, along with sexually loaded terms like “hot,” could also be used as evidence of illegality, the court said.

The modeling sites reviewed by The Times incorporated many such references to encourage viewers to subscribe.

That is true for one of the most successful collections of sites, according to some portal rankings, run by an entity called PlayToy Entertainment. On its central site, PlayToy holds itself out as a company that helps children start modeling careers. There is, however, no phone number, address or prominent e-mail address available for companies that might seek to hire the girls or for parents who might want their children to be models.

The central PlayToy site originally located by The Times contained links to as many as six sites featuring little girls. In recent days, the central site has been redesigned, removing the links to the girls’ individual sites.

Those sites still exist, however, including the one for the girl called Sparkle. Another site features a prepubescent girl named Lolly — a widely used online code word for pornographic images of girls. There are even sexualized images of a girl called Baby, who appears younger than 5 and whose photographs seem to go back as far as her second birthday or earlier, when she was still in diapers.

The marketing makes clear that this is no typical modeling company.

“Call 911 before viewing!!!” proclaims the site for Sparkle, which shows her in a thong so revealing that she appears to be naked below the waist. The ad for the site uses words that echo those cited in the Knox decision, reading, “Only 9 years old! Hot!”

Other PlayToy sites are more explicit. “Feel her breathe on your face, take a gentle touch from your screen, open your mind and push the limits,” reads the site for the girl called Lolly. “If you are ready to handle this trip, PlayToy Lolly is calling.”

An advertisement for another PlayToy site, featuring a girl called Peach, declares, “A peach has never looked so delicious.**8 years old**.”

The site includes a picture of the young girl wearing a tank top pulled off one shoulder. Directly below that is a purple emblem with the company name and the words, “Nonnude website: 100% legal.”

But experts said that assurance was almost certainly not true. Based on the ages of the children, the marketing words and customer comments on the PlayToy sites described to him by The Times, a lead lawyer in the Knox case said that the subscribers had plenty of reason to worry.

“They shouldn’t have any comfort that they are not breaking the law,” said Edward W. Warren, a partner from the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis who helped to argue Knox as a representative of 234 members of Congress who joined the case. “This sounds worse and more graphic and more grotesque than what we were dealing with, particularly given how young the children are.”

The assurance by the company that the sites are lawful is irrelevant to any potential prosecution, experts said. Indeed, in the Knox decision, the court held that defendants could be found guilty if they were aware of the “general nature and character” of images that they bought involving clothed children in sexual poses.

“The child pornography laws would be eviscerated if a pedophile’s personal opinion about the legality of sexually explicit videos was transformed into the applicable law,” the court held.

In their comments on PlayToy’s site, which can be viewed without registering with the company, the subscribers make clear that they are aware these are sites for pedophiles, not legitimate modeling clients.

“I think it would be awesome to have the models start off fetchingly clothed, and then strip down to tops or panties (or thongs!!),” a customer calling himself head2fat wrote on the forum.

Another client, calling himself ludwig66, instead requested that the girls appear in stockings, “ending up removing them to reveal bare feet and legs.” And still another customer, calling himself littlefeet, asked the site owners to pose the girl known as Baby in bare feet with her toes pointed, “so all of those beautiful wrinkles show!!!”

While PlayToy’s management and its members repeatedly assure themselves online about the legality of their images, they did not hesitate to post images from known child pornography sites. For example, when Ms. Sellinger was arrested this year for selling photos of her daughter, PlayToy members — and even the site operator — posted messages of dismay, referring to both mother and daughter by name. They also composed a photographic homage to the girl in the forum discussion, using images from the site that had been deemed illegal.

PlayToy’s sites have been online since October, company records show. But in that short time, the records show, 6,000 people have subscribed to view the images of the girls. Each subscriber is paying $30 a month for each site; that means the operators have collected a minimum of $180,000 in that short time, assuming every subscriber bought only one site for one month.

The cash has been collected either by credit card — processed through a company called Advanced Internet Billing Services, or through Western Union payments — as well as through an online money system called e-gold. A Tortuous Digital Trail

Attempts to learn the identities of the people behind PlayToy suggested many possible locations. Payments through Western Union were processed through Ukraine. An administrative e-mail address suggested the company was based in Russia. Using a commercial software program, The Times traced messages sent by the PlayToy sites back to servers in Germany and obtained what is known as the Internet protocol address of that online host.

An examination of the registration documents for the sites’ names led to a company that is essentially a front, permitting its name to be used as the registrant by people who wish to remain anonymous.

The Times then obtained business records about the site prepared by someone involved in its operation.

If true, the records show the name, address, telephone number and other personal information of a man in Florida who is involved in running the site. An e-mail address listed in the records was traced to postings that appeared in pedophile conversation sites, including comments praising child pornography and images of young girls in thongs. Because of the possibility of identity theft, The Times has elected not to publish the name of that man or of associates who also appear to be involved in the business.

The Florida man did not return a voice mail message left on his cellphone or respond to an e-mail message.

Still, even if the operators of PlayToy are positively identified and compelled to shut their sites, the growing business of model sites would probably continue to thrive. PlayToy’s many subscribers, a large number of whom identify themselves on the site as living in America, could simply drift over to other model sites, all offering similar fare.

There, on each of those hundreds of competing sites, the subscribers will find at least one other little girl who, every few days or so, is dressed in panties or thongs, placed in a bathtub or posed on a bed, while a nearby adult snaps pictures for the delight of a paying audience of thousands.

Addressing Security Concerns

2006-08-15T00:05:00.000+08:00

All of you probably already know that security guards in front of malls inspecting your bags, a national ID system, arming the barangay tanod as well as the recent ban of liquids on aircrafts are all ridiculous ways to prevent terrorist acts from happening.

This essay by far articulates it best.

Excerpts,

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Security theater. Best packaging of it yet.

Also, the concrete repercussions of such policies in airports.

Filler

2006-07-28T01:21:00.000+08:00

If you've ever been the type of person to use fillers during a speech. Here's something that might help you.

I don't know if it will actually work, but it's worth a shot.

Better than seeing everybody in the room counting to your 'ums' and 'ahhs'.

Hell March

2006-07-25T02:42:00.000+08:00

If you like Hunter S. Thompson and his gonzo journalism, here's a pretty good piece on the current state of the mail order bride industry.

Actually, if you've ever wondered what exactly the mail order bride industry was all about, this is a good place to start as any.

An excerpt:

Again and again, my companions declared that they weren’t looking for a sex tour, and that neither were they simply looking for a servant to cook for them and clean their home—that it was a real companion they sought. Each consistently made a point of saying how intelligent their dates were, even if their outing had only lasted for half an hour and had taken place without a common language between them. One, a California contractor with a seething, hostile energy and the blue-eyed, mustachioed handsomeness of a 1970s porn star, summed it up thusly: “I don’t want someone that I’m going to run; I need somebody’s help. I need an opinion. I’m not out to pound a bunch of pussy. If that’s what I want, I’ll go down to the whorehouse.”

But what they really wanted, and what most imagined they would find in Ukraine, was a fusion of 1950s gender sensibilities with a twenty-first-century hypersexuality. Along with everything else, the men had heard that the women here were “wild,” “uninhibited,” that being with them was “a whole different ball game.” As always, Dan the Man had done his part to stoke this fantasy, peppering his talk of traditional values and wifely devotion with just the right amount of lasciviousness. “I’ve heard stories from all the guys who have been married to them, and they all say the same thing: they definitely are much, much, much more passionate, much more open-minded,” he told us at one point. “This guy, he’s been married for six, seven years and his wife is just as crazy, they have threesomes all the time.” The vision was Madonna and puttana rolled together, an American male desire shaped in equal parts by the Promise Keepers and Internet porn.

Weird Science

2006-07-23T19:40:00.000+08:00

Some science issues that might lead to interesting debates.

Just remember, when debating on science, be careful not to deal too much with specifics. When that happens, the debate tends to go to shit.

Some science bloggers wonder out loud about the dangers of researching on the possible biological origins of homosexuality. Which, in a debate, may be discussed with a motion like,

This house condemns the continued scientific research on the possible biological origins of homosexuality.

Another blog talks about the current double standards that the US administration has with regards to being "pro-life". And no, it's not just a picking between embryos who can potentially become babies and the people who have diseases that might be cured by embryonic stem cell research. It's also to do with the US government completely ignoring the thousands of embryos currently in frozen storage waiting to be discarded the moment the couples who made them stop their payment for their storage. This therefore begs the question: if the Republicans are so pro-life, why aren't they doing anything to 'save' the potential lives of these thousands of embryos?

Which leads us to a motion that might be something like,

This house believes that the government has the responsibility to take care of all unused embryos in storage.

This has the underlying logic that in a country much like George Bush's United States where embryos and unborn children are increasingly acquiring the rights we accrue to actual living minors, then in the same way that the government has children of the State, the government should also have embryos of the State.

After all, as Karl Rove said, "we were all embryos once..." and young.

Lastly, this might seem old, but I never recalled debating on this in the 5-6 years I've been debating, so I think it's a good time to start discussing this. Especially since it's becoming a hot topic once again.

This house supports the testing of animals for scientific progress.

If you want to make it harder for the opposition, make it "the ethical testing".

And for those of you wondering where to get more scientific political goodness, there's The Scientific Activist for you.

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

2006-07-21T22:26:00.000+08:00

By far the easiest and simplest explanation of how the internet works and what net neutrality is. If you can't be bothered to read up on the stuff, at least watch this.

On Divorce

2006-07-07T21:20:00.000+08:00

Here's a situation: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl gets married, boy and girl start to hate each other and separate, boy (or girl) start divorce proceedings, during divorce proceedings boy (or girl) die. What happens?

That's the new question people are asking. Do you allow for posthumous divorces to take place?

You might ask yourself, what's the point? They can't get any more divorced than THAT!

Then again, there are other things that need to be considered. To summarize what's said in the article, what happens to deceased spouse's estate if said spouse died before signing divorce papers or updating his/her will?

That's basically the problem. Under current law (but correct me if I'm wrong here), since they're still married, surviving spouse gets everything, unless specified in the will. Posthumous divorces address that problem by allowing the division of assets that would otherwise have happened had deceased spouse wasn't actually deceased.

The question is, should that happen in the first place?

In this debate, much like any other debate concerning dead people, you have to prove whether or not dead people have rights in the first place. If they don't prove that they should.

On the other side of the coin, you need to prove why they shouldn't, or barring that, why the rights of the living need to be prioritized. Corollary to that, you also need to prove that the rights of the living and the rights of the dead are actually in conflict.

Be careful though, as opposition in a debate like this, it's very very easy to come across as cold and insensitive. Be very careful with what you say.

English as a First Language

2006-07-06T22:19:00.000+08:00

One of the stranger issues that've come out of the United States is Lobbyists who are advocating for English Langauge reform. By English Language reform, they mean they want to change how English is spelled from the current status quo to being spelled phonetically.

However, there HAS been precedent for this. Not in the last fifty years or so, sure, but it's been done before. The last time, If my knowledge of history is correct, was to take out redundant letters (e.g. doughnut becomes donut) to save on space when it comes to publishing.

It's basically a practicality vs. principle debate. And like most practicality vs. principle debate, you either have to prove which side has both, or if your side (be it more practical or more principled) is the higher value.

On Argumentation

2006-07-02T20:18:00.000+08:00

I read this commentary on today's issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and I just had to laugh. Hard. The arguments that this person had to say about death penalty were that ridiculous, I couldn't believe that he was a former justice of the Sandiganbayan. Read it, and I hope I need not explain to you how exactly almost everything he said was patently absurd as arguments supporting the death penalty.

Reflections on the death penalty abolition

By Manuel R. Pamaran
Inquirer
Last updated 02:06am (Mla time) 07/02/2006

Published on Page A11 of the July 2, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

WITHOUT much debate and public hearing, Congress passed the bill abolishing the death penalty and the President signed it into law. In these times when heinous crimes imperil the daily lives of peaceful citizens, and unabated graft and corruption hinders the country’s economic growth, the justifications for the abolition are flimsy.

Among the main reasons given for the abolition of the death penalty are: (1) it is not an effective deterrent to crimes; (2) human life is God-given, therefore, it must be respected and only God has the right to take it; (3) a death sentence that has been executed can no longer be remedied; and (4) it deprives a convict the opportunity to reform.

On the first reason, let it be stressed that the death penalty was re-imposed by Republic Act 7659 only on Jan. 1, 1994. Since then, not more than 10 convicts have been executed despite the fact that there are more than a thousand death convicts. Besides, most of the death sentences have been commuted to life imprisonment, if not indefinitely suspended. In short, there had been no real implementation of the death penalty law; therefore, there is not enough basis to say whether or not the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crimes.

To be an effective deterrent, the “threat” of death penalty should be complemented with the efficient and speedy administration of justice in the arrest, investigation and trial of the accused. Without this complement, death penalty would be a lonely scarecrow. Worse, in the absence of both—death penalty and efficient, speedy justice—our country will not be a wholesome place to live in.

On the second issue, the purpose of the death penalty is to uphold the sanctity of life. The taking of human life is justified by necessity under certain circumstances. One such situation is “self-defense.” Another is the defense of the person or right of one’s wife, ascendants, brothers and sisters, or relatives by affinity in the same degree, and those by consanguinity within the fourth civil degree; and of the person or right of a stranger under circumstances analogous to self-defense. (Art. 11, Par. 1, Revised Penal Code)
Under the law, the author thereof is freed from any and all liability, it being understood that had he not done the act, he or the person he defended would have been killed.

If under such circumstances -- where at stake is only the life of the person defending or being defended -- killing is justified, the more reason that the State is justified to take human life in defense of thousands of other lives and of the community itself. This, undoubtedly, gives greater meaning to the sacredness of human life.

Viewed from another angle, the abolition of the death penalty seriously sets back our fight against graft and corruption, especially against plunder which is punishable by death. It puts in serious doubt our thrusts toward and avowals for a clean and honest government.

As to the third issue, it is unlikely that someone innocent could be a “victim of execution.” The victim of a crime or his heir -- knowing that accusing an innocent person will set free the real wrongdoer and, therefore, he will not get justice -- will in all likelihood see to it that he accuses only the person who has wronged him. This is human nature and is not debatable.

Moreover, our judicial system practically reduces to zero any error of judgment: A criminal complaint is first filed with the police officer who conducts an investigation to determine if there is a reasonable ground to charge the suspect. If such ground is found to exist, the case is forwarded to the prosecutor who in turn conducts a preliminary investigation to determine if there is probable cause showing a crime has been committed and the suspect is probably guilty thereof. In the event of a positive finding, the case is filed with a regional trial court. If the accused is convicted and sentenced to death, his case is reviewed by the Court of Appeals and if affirmed, it goes up to the Supreme Court for automatic review. The votes of at least eight of the 15 justices are needed to affirm a death sentence. All these proceedings are done in succession and are adversarial in nature: the accused, assisted by counsel, is given his day in court to confront the witness(es) against him and to present witness(es) in his behalf. If there is even just an iota of doubt about his guilt, he is absolved or acquitted of the crime.

In the event that the death sentence is affirmed by the Supreme Court and becomes final, the accused has still a chance to have his case reviewed, this time by the President who decides whether or not the accused deserves to be granted executive clemency.

Lastly, the claim that the death penalty offers the criminal no room for reform is not accurate. On the contrary, it is the best way to reform criminals. In a limited sense, it may be said that the executed criminal will never have a chance to reform; but from a wider perspective, we can say that reformation occurs when criminals avoid suffering the same fate by not persisting in their evil ways. If they do, they have only themselves to blame if they end up with the death penalty.

Montaigne, a French essayist, once said: “We do not aim to correct the man we hang; we correct and warn others by him.” Voltaire, another French poet, said it another way: “Life resembles the banquet of Damocles; the sword is ever suspended.”

At this point, all I can really do is shake my head.

Again, THIS is a Justice of the Sandiganbayan.

The most uncomfortable post I've ever had to write.

2006-06-13T22:55:00.000+08:00

I was never an expert in the social sciences. Sure, I took a few courses of sociology, but I mostly just slept through those classes (as I am notoriously wont to do) and got by on my charming good loo- I mean, stock knowledge and rational thinking. Same thing went for debate, especially the socio-legal ones. You won't see me debating higher theory or referencing Focault or Stiglitz or whoever great mind is in vogue this particular season. I'm what I'd like to call a blue-collar debater.

Which explains the glass ceiling that I've already reached in debating (and no, Nicolo, I'm not pulling a Cabrera).

In any case, my limitations being what they are, that doesn't stop me from reading up on issues and making up motions and basically just thinking what kind of things would make for a good, balanced, interesting debate. It just stops me from participating in the more complex ones that I think about.

And if there ever was a complex socio-legal debate that is way over my head, it's this one.

Horrible mutations aside, what are the arguments for/against consensual incest?

Possible motion being,

"This house sees nothing wrong with non-reproductive, consensual incestuous relationships."

Here's a good point,

To prohibit two people from having sex because their offspring may be "defective" or "inferior" is to adopt the standpoint of a eugenicist.

My brain cannot go deeper than seeing the issue though. Hell, I feel dirty just posting this.

Bill Bennet and the Daily Show

2006-06-08T15:09:00.000+08:00

for those of you that I've bugged to watch this particular episode of the Daily Show since last night, you'll understand why after watching this clip.

Bill Bennett (your traditional Republican personality) was the guest on last night's episode promoting his book, 'America: The Last Best Hope', and the discussion goes towards gay marriage.

Jon Stewart then embarasses Bill Bennett live on tv.

The discussion itself was good. Bill Bennett, complete and total humiliation notwithstanding, gave decent points to ponder. Jon Stewart just had better ideas that were better explained. Nevertheless, the whole gay marriage debate was able to get the proper framing and nuancing that it was supposed to get.

Some choice quotes:

Jon Stewart: ...why not encourage gay people to join in on that family arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?

Bill Bennett: Gay people are members of families... they already are members of families. They're sons and daughters-

Jon Stewart: -And that's where the buck stops? That's the gay ceiling?

Bill Bennett: Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man or a woman.

Jon Stewart: I disagree, it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Take note of that point. In a debate, that's an issue that you have to establish early on. Otherwise, the debate gets bogged down in technicalities and tangents, much in the same way an abortion debate can get bogged down on the question of whether or not a fetus is a living person or not.

More to the point, homosexuality as a human condition takes you on a very different path of argumentation as compared to homosexuality as a random fetish (which, I reccommend no one takes as a premise).

Nevertheless, both are arguable at this time, so either way can go depending on the debate. Makes you wish there was actually some evidence about this, huh?

Which brings us to my favorite part of the discussion:

Bill Bennett: How do you define marriage? Where do you draw the line? Immediately on the heels of this debate, Jon..

Jon Stewart: Don't go slippery slope with me, that's ridiculous.

Bill Bennett: No it isn't. What do you say to the polygamous?

Jon Stewart: You don't say anything to the polygamous... That is a choice to get three or four wives, that is not a biological condition that 'I gots to get laid by different women that I'm married to', that is a choice. Being gay is part of the human condition, there's a huge difference.

Bill Bennett: Well, some people regard their human condition as marrying three women...

Jon Stewart: ...Then let's go slippery slope the other way. If government says I can define marriage as between a man and a woman, what says that they can't define it as between people of different income levels, or they can decide whether or not you are a suitable husband for a particular woman.

Bill Bennett: Because gender matters in marriage. It's mattered in every human society, it matters in every religion...

Jon Stewart: Race matters in every society as well.

Barado. Another reason to develop a man-crush on Jon Stewart.

This particular discussion also gives me an idea for a possible motion for gay marriage with its own nuances (in other words a stock motion... with at twist!),

This house believes that marriage should be defined by governments.

What's particularly tricky about this motion is that it leaves opposition vulnerable to those infamous 'strategic' set-ups people keep talking about.

America's turning into the Philippines one day at a time.

2006-06-04T13:40:00.000+08:00

Was the 2004 election stolen?

Read the article closely. You'll notice how some of the ways in which Bush (allegedly) stole the 2004 election are variations of the Philippine tradition of dagdag bawas. The Republicans are turning America into a republic... a Banana Republic. Better start wearing khakis (corny, I know. So sue me).

It's counter point.

Some further analysis on the US Election System here, here and here.

Lions led by Donkeys.

2006-05-30T23:58:00.000+08:00

Because you just have to read this piece to see how brilliant the guy is.

There is truth in the idea that soldiers are our designated warriors. But the accidental revelation in these attitudes is the bizarre concept that by soldiers choosing a life of taking risks on our behalf, these war supporters are somehow absolved of any responsibility to them other than emotional support and approval. There is the stink of ... the troops as employees. Like, say, gardeners. Not that I would ever make such a crude comparison.

But the fact is that soldiers make this choice in a specific context. They are not just entering a job. They are, to pull up my Catholic high school education, entering into a covenant with us. They take an oath to sacrifice their lives, if need be. That is, in my faith anyway, the holiest thing a person can do. In return, the civilian side of the covenant is a deep responsibility, a responsibility far beyond the emotional support one gives a sports team, or the minimal responsibility one has with employees. Our oath is simple:

We will make sure you have the equipment you need.

We will make sure have a clearly defined mission.

We will make sure that such missions are as well-planned as possible.

We will take care of your families while you are gone.

We will take care of you when you come home.

Net Neutrality and the COPE Act.

2006-05-17T19:17:00.000+08:00

One of the worst things that can happen to a debater is to be caught unawares with a motion that's about an issue that is although relevant, is so out of left field as to leave said debater talking gibberish when it's his/her turn to speak. You're shit-out-of-luck because you don't know anything, and you can't really complain because it is a relevant and current issue (actually even if it's not you CAN complain, except you'd just sound like a whiny ass if you do). Refer to notorious ICANN and lawyer advertising debates in the last NDC as recent examples of this. Of course, every debater already knows the only way to prevent such a thing from happening, especially since every debate seminar almost always hammers in the point - matterloading. Problem is, you can't realistically matterload on EVERYTHING and still remain sane, so the chances of being caught with your pants between your legs is almost always a possibility.

Net Neutrality is one of those issues.

In simple terms, Net Neutrality is a state wherein there is no discrimination of data across the network. In more relevant terms, this means that the largest network in existence, the Internet, flows freely from one user to another. No body, be it your ISP or your government, gets to decide what you do or do not do in the internet. They can't stop you from going to any particular site, nor can they stop you from downloading anything you want. On the other hand, they can't stop you from acquiring viruses either. Filtration of the Internet is completely in the hands of the end user. This is the way the internet has worked since its inception.

The COPE (Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement) Act is an act currently in the US Congress which aims to stop net neutrality. It wants the telecommunications industry to have the power to decide what you can or cannot do on the Internet.

As always, it boils down to a question of right and the extent of it.

More key concepts you need to google for:

"Crowdsourcing"

and

"User-generated Content"

The future of Internet debates will be about these issues.

This week in status quo

2006-03-17T21:17:00.000+08:00

Hungarian researchers find H5N1 bird flu vaccine for humans.

Falun Gong Concentration Camp in China Discovered.

Iran to hold talks with US over Iraq.

UN creates new Human Rights panel.

in other news,

What does the beer industry and the news media have in common?

Pregnancy through evolution's eyes.

What is an Internally Displaced Person(IDP)?

This week in status quo:

2006-03-10T20:58:00.000+08:00

Hoping to do a regular feature here, where every Friday I list down what happened over the week that changed the status quo somewhere in the world. I'm not planning to scour the entire world wide web for every news article that reports on some change or other, rather I just plan to post those changes that might be helpful to you (either as analysis or as an example) in debate.

So for this week:

Google Acquires Web Word Processor Firm

South Dakota has made abortion illegal

Dubai Company Backs Off Port Deal

UK and US to withdraw forces in Iraq early 2007

US to quit Abu Ghraib

In other, related news, some other articles that might be useful:

Why US should back out of the India nuclear deal c/o the Economist

the do-it-yourself abortion: a how-to guide

Truth and reconciliation vs. Justice - an assessment on War Crimes Tribunals c/o the Economist

Stop force-feeding Guantamo Prisoners on hunger strike, doctors say

Destruction of Architecture as a War Crime

2006-03-08T23:57:00.000+08:00

The wanton destruction of culturally important buildings is now a war crime.

As is explained in this article, one of the crimes charged against Slobodan Milosevic is the "The intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings of the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat communities.”

Which begs a very interesting question, particularly for debates - should the destruction of culturally significant architecture be considered a war crime? Something similar to this has been debated before in previous tournaments, should the destruction of heritage sites be considered a Crime Against Humanity. It was a debate that used the destruction of the giant buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban (a long long time ago before 9/11 happened) judiciously as an example. Take note of the differences, however, between a Crime Against Humanity, and a War Crime. Also take note of the difference between cultural heritage sites, and architecture. The differences might not be much, but the nuances have been known to make a difference in a debate. For example, the destruction of the Buddha Statues have a different cultural effect to that of, say, the attack on the World Trade Center.

One of the most important ideas presented by the article is how, if 'architectural creation' is a weapon of authority, the converse is also true - architectural destruction is as effective.

Architectural destruction is like a drug. It’s addictive. It’s instant proof of change, of authority. That’s why it is so popular. And that’s why it can become so rabid.

One last thing to take note of is the way that the article packaged architectural destruction that would probably be effective in debate - architectural destruction as cultural genocide.

Why Figure Skating Is Not A Sport

2006-02-26T14:47:00.000+08:00

A sport needs to have a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser. There can be no debate about the scoring system. A ball must go into a goal or through a hoop; a runner must reach home or finish before the others. The winners run faster, jump higher, score more.

this column makes a pretty good point against ice skating (as well as most other Olympic sports that require human judges) being part of the Olympics. The basic gist is just that, a sport needs to have a quantifiable way to determine a winner and a loser and obviously, judged competitions don't exactly have that. It goes on further to say how other factors (such as appearance) plays a factor in ice skating when, how you look shouldn't even be considered in determining who gets the gold medal.

This makes for a pretty interesting sports debate. One that doesn't require you to have specific knowledge on sports, but rather general knowledge that most of you should know anyway. Simplest motion I could think of with regards to this issue would be This house believes that human evaluated competitions should be banned from the Olympics.

If you're wondering how exactly you can argue against a motion like that, think about it in terms of what the Olympics should be and whether or the characteristic of human judges really disqualify competitions like that from the Olympics. Compare and contrast that to other sports which are quantifiable (such as baseball) and determine what really qualifies a sport/competition to be in the Olympics.

Any other suggestions?

Islamic Editorial Cartoon Issue

2006-02-07T19:57:00.000+08:00

http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/

12 satirical drawings, published by the danish newspaper JP, has reached worldwide attention as well as outrage, violence and condemnation in the muslim world (note: terror has not). The drawings have become a symbol of the muslim threat to free speech. Papers all over the world have re-published the drawings, politicians around the globe have expressed their support, and websites all over hyperspace use and display the images in sympathy.

For those of you wondering what the whole brouhaha is, this is a good place to start. From the looks of it, this will be the face of 'debating Islam as an issue' for the next few months.

Being an Internet Troll is now illegal

2006-01-10T19:20:00.000+08:00

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

Given that most Internet debates are now tired and unoriginal (how many variations to filesharing motions can you have?), this is a fresh issue that can be discussed and debated on without necessarily forcing anyone to go into the technical details of the Internet and computers.

Possible motion: This house would ban anonymity from the Internet.

The basic question you need to ask yourself regarding this issue is, is there anything wrong with being anonymous on the Internet? If yes, is this the only way to address the problem? If no, what is the value of anonymity on the Internet?

Dissecting the Anti-Terrorism Bill

2005-12-10T16:07:00.000+08:00

after almost a month of no updates, here's some local matter for a change.

Dissecting the Anti-Terrorism Bill

from a local blogger no less! It gives pretty useful insights on what the Anti-Terrorism bill does and what exactly is wrong with it. An excerpt:

No anti-terrorism law can be Constitutional because, in any form, it will be a bill of attainder, something that the Constitution says the Congress shall never pass.

What is a bill of attainder? It is a law that punishes a person for a status or association rather than for the commission of any criminal act. A similar law outlawing the Communist Party of the Philippines was passed decades ago and was attacked exactly on that ground. Believing in communism is not a crime. Communism is a political ideology in the same way that parliamentarism, republicanism and federalism are. When, however, a communist commits an act that violates an existing law--rebellion, insurrection, sedition--then, the commission of the act is punishable. But that is because of the act, not because of his status as a believer in communism.

It is the same thing with the anti-terrorism law.

Religious Representation in the Armed Forces

2005-11-16T22:57:00.000+08:00

No, this isn't a 'women/gays in the military' debate with a twist. This isn't about muslim soldiers in the army, or buddhist, or jewish, or whatever. It goes without saying that in first world liberal democracies, religion doesn't matter in signing up for the army. The issue in question here is the presence of chaplains.

The British Armed Forces recently appointed Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh Chaplains as part of the miltary.

The status quo for most first world military is (at least as far as I know) is to have a Christian/Catholic Chaplain.

Possible questions would be, should we even have chaplains in the military in the first place?
If so, should we have different chaplains according to the demographics of soldiers in the military?

Second question is kind of one-sided. You can worm yourself out of it, but it's going to be sneaky, and unfair.

Internet matter

2005-11-06T09:29:00.000+08:00

A series of articles in the Observer about Internet issues. Simple and direct, they're a good way to understand what exactly is happening in the Internet without necessarily getting bogged down by the technical aspect of it.

True enough, since people absolutely HATE Internet debates, there probably won't be as much Internet debates where you're going to need this. But hey, they're fun to read.

Countries turn backs on Hollywood

2005-10-21T00:28:00.000+08:00

Unesco member states have formally voted to support their own film and music industries against globalisation.

The United Nations cultural body voted in favour of a cultural diversity convention, backed by France, Canada and the UK.

The US had said the "deeply flawed" convention could be used to block the export of Hollywood films and other cultural exports.

The vote follows French moves to protect its film and music industries.

Strict quotas

France already awards large subsidies to its own film, music, theatre and opera industries to support its cultural heritage.

It also imposes strict quotas on the level on non-French material broadcast on radio and television.

The new convention on cultural diversity aims to recognise the distinctive nature of cultural goods and services.

It enables countries to take measures to protect what it describes as "cultural expressions" that may be under threat.

The majority of Unesco's 191 member states voted for the convention.

Britain's representative to Unesco, Timothy Craddock, said the wording was "clear, carefully balanced, consistent with the principles of international law and fundamental human rights".

But it was opposed by the US, which said the convention was unclear and open to wilful misinterpretation.

French culture minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres said nations had a right to set artistic quotas because 85% of the world's spending on cinema tickets went to Hollywood.

The US suggested 28 amendments to the convention, which were almost unanimously rejected by Unesco delegates.

It was feared that Thursday's vote could isolate the US, which rejoined Unesco in 2003 after a 19-year absence.

The convention will need to be ratified by 30 member states in order to take effect.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/4360496.stm

Stem cell strides may help resolve ethical dilemmas

2005-10-17T21:03:00.000+08:00

New methods preserve viable embryos, but some opponents skeptical of tactics New processes don't kill viable embryos -- opponents say moral issue s
- Carl T. Hall, Cornelia Stolze, Chronicle Staff Writers
Monday, October 17, 2005

Scientists are reporting two new ways of creating embryonic stem cells without killing viable embryos, potentially reshaping the biggest bioethical debate of the Bush administration.

In one case, embryonic stem cells were made from a genetically abnormal embryo designed to be incapable of developing. The other method was an attempt to fashion stem cells from an embryo without damaging it.

The new methods, detailed in separate research reports released online Sunday by the British journal Nature, are intended as laboratory answers to the moral questions raised by the destruction of human embryos. If the strategies work, one result could be the availability of more federal grants for one of the most promising fields of biomedical research.

A White House spokesman said it was premature to speculate on any potential change in administration policy. But William Hurlbut of Stanford University, a member of a White House bioethics advisory council, called it "a starting point for an important new dialogue" on possible "technological solutions for the moral problems surrounding human embryonic stem cell research."

The new techniques raise their own questions about just what sorts of laboratory creations deserve human status. The latest research is "right there on that boundary between what I would consider ethically permissible and potentially ethically troubling," said biochemist Fazale Rana at Reasons to Believe, a Christian group in Southern California opposed to human embryonic stem cell research.

Much of the debate centers on the precise definition of "embryo," because it is considered by some people to have the same moral status as a human being. In one of the new sets of experiments, researchers crafted stem cell lines from lab creations characterized as "nonviable" entities.

Others dismissed such arguments as semantic quibbling.

"This is an attempt to solve an ethical issue through a scientific redefinition that really doesn't solve the issue," said Jaydee Hanson, director of human genetics at the International Center for Technology Assessment, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization that opposes some kinds of cloning and stem cell research on moral grounds.

In August 2001, President Bush made the production of any new stem cell lines ineligible for federal grants because such work involves the destruction of human embryos. Bush also objects to cloning embryos, which scientists advocate as a way of creating specialized stem cell lines carrying disease genes or the DNA of an individual patient.

Those restrictions helped inspire California's $3 billion Proposition 71 initiative, which state voters approved in the 2004 general election specifically to pursue research banned from receiving federal support.

On Sunday, stem cell researchers Rudolf Jaenisch and Alexander Meissner of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed how embryonic stem cells -- the flexible early-stage cells that can mature into all the cell types of the body -- can be produced from a type of research cloning known as "alternate nuclear transfer."

The researchers devised a way to block the activity of a gene from an adult cell that would have allowed the cell to develop into an embryo once in the uterus. With that activity blocked, the cell is nonviable because it lacks the ability to "establish the fetal-maternal connection" in the uterus. This abnormal DNA then was inserted into the nucleus of an egg whose own DNA had been removed.

The idea was to create something akin to a cloned embryo but that would be inherently incapable of developing beyond the pre-implantation stage. But the researchers showed they could still generate a specialized stem cell line, which would have the same DNA as that of the adult cell used to produce the cloned embryo. Thus, it could be considered a strategy to make "patient-specific" embryonic stem cells without destroying any potential life.

A separate team of researchers led by Robert Lanza and Young Ching of Advanced Cell Technology, a Massachusetts biotech company, used yet another method to obtain stem cells.

Experimenters used a single cell, known as a "blastomere," snipped from a developing embryo at the eight-cell stage. This is sometimes done as a type of biopsy in fertility clinics when would-be parents are concerned about implanting an embryo carrying a genetic disorder. Known as "pre-implantation genetic diagnosis," the goal is to screen out disease-carrying embryos. Previous clinical evidence suggests that removing one or sometimes even two cells for diagnosis leaves a viable embryo.

The latest study showed that a cell removed for diagnosis can be coaxed into replicating itself overnight. The copy then can be used to generate a line of stem cells, the researchers reported, while allowing the original cell to be subjected as usual to pre-implantation analysis.

The new approaches so far have only been tried in laboratory mice, and there's no guarantee similar results can be obtained in humans. They were described as proof of principle for ideas long championed by those opposed to embryo destruction.

He insisted that an entity such as that produced in the MIT experiments has "no inherent principle of unity, no coherent drive in the direction of the mature human form."

But the new methods do not assuage all ethical concerns.

"The tinkering doesn't change the essential nature of the cloned entity," said Hanson, of the International Center for Technology Assessment. "The only reason it's not an embryo is definitional."

Douglas Melton, a renowned stem cell scientist at Harvard University, said he doubted critics of stem cell research will be placated by the alteration of a single gene. An altered embryo, he said, may still be considered an embryo.

As for using a biopsied cell, several studies in mice, rabbits, sheep, swine and primates have shown that single cells transplanted into the uterus of the respective species are capable of propagating viable offspring. Thus, even if removing a single cell doesn't interfere with the developmental potential of the embryo, the isolated cell itself could be considered capable of embryo status.

Jaenisch said this human potential argument shows how "absurd" the theoretical discussions can get in stem cell biology.

"If one used this argument to protect cells developed through nuclear transfer because with further manipulation they might become a living clone, then every cell of our body would deserve the chance to become a human being," he said. "In not cloning them, each of us would be barring millions of individuals from getting a chance to live."

Despite all the arguments, Jaenisch said it's still conceivable that special cloning or other techniques might be an acceptable compromise to allow expanding the federal role in stem cell research.

If so, he said, "We would have made a big step forward."

So far it is not clear if stem cells created by either of the new methods would qualify for federal grants, according to James Battey, head of a stem cell task force at the National Institutes of Health.

Bernard Lo, a prominent bioethics expert at UCSF who also advises the California Prop. 71 program, called on those who object to stem cell research to make their views on the alternative derivation methods clear at the outset.

"This work is really driven by a desire on the part of scientists to address the moral concerns some people have. So those people should say now if it doesn't settle the problem," to avoid a lot of wasted effort, he said.

E-mail the writers at chall@sfchronicle.com and cstolze@sfchronicle.com.

The one and three-quarter-state solution?

2005-10-13T23:10:00.000+08:00

So much for those who thought Israel's withdrawal from Gaza would trigger rapid progress toward peace.

By Jonathan Freedland

Oct. 12, 2005 | For Britons who managed to tear themselves away from the David Blunkett saga on TV Monday night, there was drama of a different kind on BBC2. "Elusive Peace" charted the story of Bill Clinton's failed attempt to resolve the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, a struggle that reached its dismal climax at Camp David in 2000. This latest effort by remarkable filmmaker Norma Percy, who has created her own subgenre of TV diplomatic history, featured interviews with all the key players -- Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, Clinton himself -- telling the inside story of midnight talks, eavesdropped conversations, last-minute panics and, tragically, the inability to move that final inch toward what might have been a deal.

It was compelling television, but also instructive. For it showed just how much has changed in the intervening five years. Arafat is dead; Sharon is no longer the rabble-rouser whose walkabout on the Temple Mount did so much to derail the peace process, but prime minister; Clinton is the elder statesman, his former residence occupied by a man whose Middle East focus has not been peace in Israel-Palestine but war in Iraq.

It's not just the personalities who have changed. The past five years have also seen a wider shift, away from the across-the-table negotiations of the Clinton era toward a newer, more enigmatic model. The days of bilateral talks and mutuality have gone. Now we are in the age of unilateralism.

As if to underline the point, Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas were due to meet Tuesday for a summit. For the second time in as many weeks, they called it off. So much for those who thought that Israel's August withdrawal from Gaza -- the prime example of the new unilateralism -- would trigger a return to the negotiating table and rapid progress toward a signed agreement.

That's not how it is anymore. Yes, Gazans are relieved to be rid of the Israelis at last. And yes, Israelis -- despite some persistent violence, with Palestinian rockets fired across the new "border" -- still believe the pullout was the right move. But that does not mean the two sides are about to reach across the divide and touch each other. Instead they are looking inward.

For the Israelis, that's a matter of politics. Sharon's concern now is not Abbas, but his Likud rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. A fortnight ago he successfully fought off a leadership challenge from Bibi, and he wants to preserve that advantage; he will do nothing that might hand his rival ammunition. He will not release Palestinian prisoners, nor bow to Abbas' request for more weapons for his security forces -- nothing, in other words, that would allow Bibi to accuse Sharon of treachery. That's why the summit with Abbas could not go ahead: There was nothing Sharon was willing to give his Palestinian counterpart.

Meanwhile, Abbas (or Abu Mazen) is in a strikingly similar hole. Challenged by Hamas, which pulled in a quarter of the vote in recent municipal elections on the West Bank -- a creditable score, given that their political base is Gaza -- Abbas could not afford to return from a summit empty-handed. He has a genuine fight on his hands with Hamas -- one that could explode into a civil war that his own threadbare forces could lose. The sense that the Palestinian Authority writ does not run in Gaza, that either anarchy or Hamas rules there, is proving deeply damaging, suggesting the Israeli withdrawal has not helped the Palestinian Authority but undermined it. The result is that Abbas too is devoting the post-Gaza lull to securing his own internal position, rather than hatching grand schemes for an accord with the enemy.

This phase of introspection reflects the broader trend. I spoke Tuesday with Eival Gilady, who served as a close advisor to the Israeli prime minister on the Gaza disengagement. His message was clear: The ball is now in the Palestinians' court. Under the internationally endorsed road map, the next step is for the Palestinians to put their own house in order, starting with a crackdown on terrorism.

If that were to happen, then Israel might make a further move. Revealingly, Gilady cites the unilateral disarmament steps taken by Mikhail Gorbachev, which paved the way for a mutually agreed arms pact later. "When you act unilaterally, it doesn't stay unilateral," he says. In other words, Israel moves first on Gaza. Then Abbas stabilizes the P.A. Then Israel will act again. Not a peace process exactly, but a series of one-sided moves: Call it sequential unilateralism.

Under that logic, what would Israel's next act be? In the past few days, the Israeli press has been bubbling with hints from key officials at further unilateral pullouts, this time from the West Bank. The scenario seems to be that Sharon sits tight for now, sees off Bibi, fights, wins an election next year -- and then stages a series of mini-disengagements. Gary Sussman, an analyst at Tel Aviv University, says the map for those withdrawals is already laid out. "The fence is the border," he says, confident that Israel would pull back, more or less, to the line traced by the wall, or security barrier, it has built through the West Bank. That would entail dismantling a few isolated settlements and keeping the large settlement blocs.

Such a move would see Israel out of, perhaps, 50 percent or 60 percent of the West Bank. Combined with Gaza that would represent the de facto Palestinian state, promised by the road map and now routinely demanded by George W. Bush, Tony Blair and everyone else.

The old guard of Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, are said to be deeply depressed at this prospect. For such an entity would leave them no access to Jerusalem and would represent substantially less territory than the Clinton parameters promised in December 2000. It would not be the two-state solution they sought for two decades but, says Sussman, something less: "A one and three-quarter state solution."

What's more, Sharon would make this move and win not just international acceptance but praise. The Gaza withdrawal won plaudits from the United Nations and the European Union; even Pakistan broke Muslim ranks to start a diplomatic engagement with Israel last month. If there were to be more pullouts in the West Bank, Sharon would be a hero once more. There would be no pressure on him; it would all be on the Palestinians, who would rapidly be cast as grudging and difficult for not receiving these chunks of the West Bank with gratitude.

No wonder the likes of onetime peace negotiators Saeb Erekat and Hanan Ashrawi are said to be glum. They must realize that in the new game of sequential unilateralism they are being outplayed by an Israeli prime minister who is proving a far cannier strategist than anyone expected. They should avoid watching "Elusive Peace"; it will only make their moods darker. There they will see how much better they might have fared under the old game.

Clinton recalls a proposal he made in late 2000 that would have split Jerusalem and given the Palestinians sovereignty over the upper Haram al-Sharif, with Israeli control over the lower Temple Mount. "Who could accept this?" says Arafat, from the grave. Now his people may have to brace themselves for accepting much less.

This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian's Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

-- By Jonathan Freedland

Battle blogging for profit

2005-10-12T21:10:00.000+08:00

By Xeni Jardin
Xeni Jardin is co-editor of the blog BoingBoing and a contributor to Wired magazine and National Public Radio.

October 9, 2005

AS BLOGS become big business, Internet giants have begun trying to profit from new forms of journalism, including war coverage. The results are not encouraging.

Yahoo's latest experiment reveals that it considers war news just another form of entertainment. This from an online giant that has already shown it is cavalier about press freedom and a friend of oppression.

Look back to 2004, when reporters at a Hunan province newspaper listened as their editorial director read a statement from the Communist Party's Propaganda Department about the upcoming 15-year commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It warned that dissidents may use the Internet to spread "damaging information."

One reporter used an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account to ask a colleague in New York to post a report about the statement on pro-democracy website Minzhu Tongxun (Democracy Newsletter).

But as the 37-year-old married reporter behind the numeric pseudonym "198964" learned, he shouldn't have assumed that Yahoo defends press freedom. When Chinese security agents asked executives at Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) to identify the man, they did so. Police grabbed him on a street, searched his house and seized his computer and other belongings, according to documents filed in his defense.

Mr. "198964," whose real name is Shi Tao, is serving a 10-year jail sentence for "divulging state secrets abroad." Bloggers, human rights groups and journalism organizations, including PEN and Reporters Without Borders, condemned the action.

Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang brushed off responsibility. At an Internet conference Sept. 10 in Hangzhou, China, Yang said Yahoo and other U.S.-based multinationals "have to comply with local law."

Or else what? They lose access, that's what, which means losing profits.

Shi Tao's attorney, Guo Guoting — who was detained, placed under house arrest and shut out of his office before his client's trial — argues that the company has a greater obligation to international law than to local law. "China is a signatory of the [U.N.] International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights," Guo told the Hong Kong independent daily Epoch Times. "Shi Tao … was legitimately practicing his profession, not committing a crime. The legal entity of Yahoo Holdings [Hong Kong] is not in China, so it is not obligated to operate within the laws of China or to cooperate with Chinese police."

As morally repugnant as Yahoo's actions may be, other tech vendors before it have acted similarly. "Many big companies, such as Microsoft and Nortel, in their quest to gain shares of the large Internet market in China, transform China into an information prison by collaborating with the Chinese regime on questions of censorship," Guo said. "They should not forget all moral principles under the temptation of financial gain."

Yahoo's hypocrisy is even more shameful because it is also in the news business. The company recently opened a news production division with promises of hard-hitting stories that U.S. mainstream media are afraid to report.

Yahoo launched "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," pledging to send the former television reporter to "every armed conflict in the world within one year" and dispatch blog-sized "bites" of war.

Several years ago, I introduced Sites to the world of blogs, collaborating with geek friends to launch kevinsites.net. I helped him publish his firsthand impressions of the Iraq war as a not-for-profit project. But as the war heated up, Sites' employer, CNN, forced him to shut down the blog. Sites later joined NBC and videotaped the shooting by a Marine of an unarmed Iraqi. As a way to explain why that piece of truth mattered, he reopened his blog. (Last November, these pages excerpted his explanation of the shooting.) Another "warblogger" is BBC news producer Stuart Hughes, who stepped on a landmine while covering the Iraq war. On his blog, he documented the amputation of his right leg and his recovery. Like me, he is troubled about "Hot Zone."

"It seems like the journalistic equivalent of a Simpson and Bruckheimer high-concept movie — all concept and very little content," Hughes said from London. "I've lost too many friends in war zones — and come too close myself — to have any time for this 'stamp-collecting' approach to conflict. The presentation is distasteful — war reporting comes with a strong public service agenda, and it's cheapened by this 'Geraldo Rivera' presentation. This goal of covering every armed conflict in the world — so what? At what cost? It leaves a very nasty taste in my mouth."

The launch of Yahoo's corporate-powered warblog, and its promise of more newsertainment to follow, raises anew the question how to define journalism.

One obvious answer: Real journalists don't treat war as entertainment, and real news companies don't help imprison a man for reporting the truth — even if that would ensure profits.

Treating China's online addicts

2005-10-11T22:11:00.000+08:00

By Daniel Griffiths
BBC News, Beijing

The internet is taking China by storm, with millions of people logging on in record numbers and web cafes busier than ever.

Rising personal wealth means more people are able to buy computers or pay to go online. The vast majority are young people using the net to chat or play games.

But behind the boom, there is a downside.

Wang Yiming, 21, is a self-confessed internet addict, one of a growing number in China. He used to spend hours online each day, often going without food or sleep. His face is drawn and sallow.

He said addiction changed his whole life:

"A month or two after I started surfing the internet, I failed some of my school tests, but I was too afraid to tell my parents. When my father found out, he was very angry.

"But I couldn't control my addiction. Friends were also telling me that I was on the net too long, but I thought: 'It's my life, I can do what I want.' I became a real loner, was withdrawn, and wouldn't listen to anyone."

For help, Wang Yiming went to China's first internet clinic, a low-rise, anonymous building in central Beijing.

All 15 patients when I visited were young men - the main social group affected by this problem - and they all told a similar story of how their addiction to the net destroyed their lives.

The clinic itself is part of a bigger addiction centre also treating those hooked on alcohol or drugs. The internet addicts go on a two-week course involving medical treatment, psychological therapy, and daily workouts.

The latter are a key part of the programme. Many of the men have spent every waking moment in front of a computer screen and have never experienced regular exercise.

Dr Tao Ran, head of the clinic, said the scale of the problem in China was enormous:

"Every day in China, more than 20 million youngsters go online to play games and hit the chat rooms, and that means that internet addiction among young people is becoming a major issue here.

"And it's only recently that the authorities have started to wake up to the seriousness of the problem with more articles in the papers highlighting the dangers of going online for too long," he said.

Rising demand

The clinic is getting an extra 200 beds next year to meet demand and new centres are due to open in other major cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou.

But the programme only lasts two weeks, followed by minimal after-care. Many have their doubts about the long term, like one patient's mother.

"The work of the doctors here at the centre has been very important, but of course I'm still worried," she said.

"I admire the doctors for what they have done so far and all we can do is follow their advice and knowledge to help our son," she said.

All the men know this centre is just the beginning. Now they must return to the outside world and the real test for these computer addicts.

And with millions of Chinese logging on every day, it is likely that the country's first internet clinic is going to have its hands full.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4327258.stm

Published: 2005/10/10 14:06:17 GMT

Just Enough Piracy

2005-10-11T21:56:00.000+08:00

It's not news that the main reason the movie and television industries are wary of BitTorrent is that they're freaked out by the music industry's experience with piracy. Although they see the economic advantages of P2P distribution, they're concerned that once they put their stuff out there, even wrapped in triple layers of kryptonite DRM, it might be cracked and then circulate in unprotected form. For movies, that's lost revenues. For TV shows, that means ads could be stripped out, expiration routines could be removed and (gasp!) content could be modified or remixed.

All that counts as Very Scary Stuff to industry executives, and as a result they're looking for "strong" DRM before they consider letting their premier content circulate online. This is a mistake, for two reasons:

The first is about the user experience: Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers.

We've seen all sorts of failures of this sort before, from dongles to laborious and confusing registration schemes. Each seems better at annoying consumers than at building markets. The lesson from these examples is that zero-percent piracy is not only unattainable, it's economically suboptimal. If your content is uncrackable, it means you've probably locked the market down so tight that even honest consumers are being inconvenienced.

Instead, efficient software and entertainment markets should exhibit just enough piracy to suggest that the industry has got the balance of control about right: not too loose and not too tight. That number is not zero percent (which requires protection methods so invasive they kill demand), and it's not 100% (which kills the business). It's somewhere in-between.

The second reason the quest for zero-piracy is a mistake is an economic one: piracy can actually let you raise your prices.

I'll give you a surprising example. I was chatting with a former Microsoft manager the other day and he revealed that after much analysis Microsoft had realized that some piracy is not only inevitable, but could actually be economically optimal. The reason is counterintuitive, but intriguing.

The usual price-setting method is to look at the entire potential market, from the many at the economic lower end to the few at the top, and set a price somewhere in between the top and bottom that will maximize total revenues. But if you cede the bottom to piracy, you can set a price between the top and the middle. The result: higher revenues per copy, and potentially higher revenues overall.

(This is, by the way, the opposite of the conventional economic approach to developing-world piracy, which is to lower the cost of a product closer to the pirate version, closing the pricing gap to try to win customers over to the official version. In practice, however, the pirate price is so low that it's rarely possible to close that gap enough to make much of a difference.)

Add to this the familiar (if controversial) argument that piracy helps seed technology markets, and can be a net benefit. Especially in fast-developing countries such as China and India, the ubiquity of pirated Windows and Office have made them de-facto national standards. Few users could have paid for the retail versions at the start, but now that the spread of cheap technology, including free software, has led to an economic boom, Microsoft is finding a nice market for commercial software at the very top, in big companies and government offices.

When all these effects are considered, it appears that there actually is an optimal level of piracy. That right level would vary from industry to industry. Today the estimated piracy rates are 33% for CDs and 15% for DVDs. The industries say that's too high, but most anti-copying technologies they've brought in to lower that figure have proven unpopular. Would even tighter lock-downs help? Probably not. Maybe 15%-30% is simply the market saying that this is the optimal rate of piracy for those industries, and any effort to lower that significantly would either choke demand or push even more people to the dark side.

So the moral for video content holders and others considering DRM: be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. "Uncrackable" DRM could make the P2P problem worse, by driving more users underground and depressing prices. Don't imagine that if you release content in a relatively weak DRM wrapper (like today's DVDs) and copies get out that the whole market will collapse. Instead, you may find that piracy stays constant at relatively low levels, leaving the rest of the market happier and more profitable.

The lesson is to find a good-enough approach to content protection that is easy, convenient and non-annoying to most people, and then accept that there will be some leakage. Most consumers see the value in paying for something of guaranteed quality and legality, as long as you don't treat them like potential criminals. And the minority of others, who are willing to take the risks and go to the trouble of finding the pirated versions? Well, they probably weren't your best market anyway.

http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/just_enough_pir.html

'Glorifying' terror plan revised

2005-10-09T13:23:00.000+08:00

'Glorifying' terror plan revised
A proposed law banning the "glorifying" of terrorist acts has been revised, following criticism of the proposals.

People would have to "intend to incite" further acts of terror to be convicted, Home Secretary Charles Clarke has said.

Opponents had said the original proposal was unclear and could threaten civil liberties. Mr Clarke denied plans were being "watered down".

The plan to detain terror suspects for up to three months without charge would stay, the home secretary said.

Mr Clarke also published new plans to give police powers to temporarily close down places of worship being used by extremists.

Failure of the trustee or registered owner of the place of worship to take steps to stop such behaviour would be a criminal offence.

On the "glorifying" offence, Mr Clarke said: "We believe that glorification of terrorism is wrong and should be outlawed in law - we have made that clear all the way through.

THE NEW OFFENCE
To make a statement glorifying terrorism if the person making it believes, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that it is likely to be understood by its audience as an inducement to terrorism
"But a number of people have made observations to the effect that there were difficulties in the wording we originally suggested, and so we thought bringing together the glorification and incitement clauses in the bill would be the best way to deal with that."

He said it was not a case of "watering down" the new Terrorism Bill.

It would, he said, make it an offence to "make a statement glorifying terrorism if the person making it believes, or has reasonable grounds for believing, that it is likely to be understood by its audience as an inducement to terrorism".

Kevin Martin, the head of the Law Society, which represents solicitors, said the government had been right to amend the "poorly drafted legislation which would have put free speech at risk".

But John Cooper, a criminal barrister, said the legislation remained "totally and utterly unworkable".

"The courts are going to have a great deal of difficulty in establishing what intent is," he said.

'Climb-down'

Dominic Grieve, the Conservative shadow attorney general, said: "It's a climb-down - common sense has finally prevailed."

He said it had been "immediately apparent" when the plans were published three weeks ago that the one relating to glorification of terrorism was "completely unworkable".

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said: "The new definition is a major improvement.

"It means that cases where people are deliberately trying to provoke terrorism are more likely to stand up in court."

But he said the "case still has not been made" for the detention without charge of suspects beyond 14 days.

'Moderation'

Mr Clarke said he remained convinced the maximum time limit for detention of terror suspects should be increased to three months.

He said that under existing laws, the police were using the maximum 14 day period only in exceptional circumstances - with the suspects charged in all cases.

"The police use their existing detention powers cautiously and in moderation, and I am confident that they would use an amended power in the same careful fashion," he said.

"There would also be proper judicial oversight of detention. Such powers already operate successfully in other European countries - in France and Spain suspects can be detained for up to four years before trial."

The Home Office issued a seven-page Metropolitan Police document defending the three-month detention plan - it contained details of three terror cases yet to come to court, including one described as the largest mounted in the UK.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/4316326.stm

Published: 2005/10/08 14:53:27 GMT

Schenck v. United States

2005-10-06T23:56:00.000+08:00

from Wikipedia:

Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), was a United States Supreme Court decision concerning whether the defendant possessed a First Amendment right to free speech against the draft during World War I. The defendant, Charles Schenck, a Socialist, had circulated a flyer to recently drafted men. The flyer, which cited the Thirteenth Amendment's provision against "involuntary servitude," exhorted the men to "assert [their] opposition to the draft," which it described as a moral wrong driven by the capitalist system. The circulars proposed peaceful resistance, such as petitioning to repeal the Conscription Act.

Schenck was charged with conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act by attempting to cause insubordination in the military and to obstruct recruitment. The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that Schenck's conviction was constitutional. The First Amendment did not protect speech encouraging insubordination, since, "[w]hen a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight." In other words, the court argued, the circumstances of wartime permit greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowable during peacetime.

In the opinion's most famous passage, Justice Holmes sets out the "clear and present danger" standard:

"The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

This case is also the source of the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater", a paraphrase of Holmes' view that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Critics of the decision argued that a more apt analogy for Schenck's actions would have been someone getting up between the acts and declaring that there were not enough fire exits, or shouting, not falsely, but truly that there was a raging inferno inside to people about the enter the theater.

As a result of the decision, Charles Schenck spent six months in prison. The "clear and present danger" test was later strengthened to the more inclusive "bad tendency" test in "Whitney v. California". Justices Holmes and Brandeis shied from this test, but concurred with the final result. Both of these cases were later narrowed by Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which replaced the "bad tendency" test with the "imminent lawless action" test.

Search and Rescue

2005-09-29T23:42:00.000+08:00

By TIM O'REILLY

Sebastopol, Calif.

AUTHORS struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies. Against this backdrop, the recent Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project is poignantly wrongheaded.

The Authors Guild claims that Google's plan to make the collections of five major libraries searchable online violates copyright law and thus harms authors' interests. As both an author and publisher, I find the Guild's position to be exactly backward. Google Library promises to be a boon to authors, publishers and readers if Google sticks to its stated goal of creating a tool that helps people discover (and potentially pay for) copyrighted works. (Disclosure: I am a member of the publisher advisory board for Google Print. As the name implies, it is simply an advisory group, and Google can take or leave its suggestions.)

What's causing all the fuss? Google has partnered with the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. Google will scan and index their library collections, so that when a reader searches Google Print for, say, "author's rights," the results point to books that contain that term. In a format that resembles its current Web search results, Google will show snippets (typically, fewer than three sentences of text from each page of each book) that include the search term, plus information about the book and where to find it. Google asserts that displaying this limited amount of content is protected by the "fair use" doctrine under United States copyright law; the Authors Guild claims that it is infringement, because the underlying search technology requires a digitized copy of the entire work.

I'm with Google on this one. It would certainly be considered fair use, if, for example, I circulated a catalog of my favorite books, including a handful of quotations from each book that helps people to decide whether to buy a copy. In my mind, providing such snippets algorithmically on demand, as Google does, doesn't change that dynamic. Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them. Even online sellers like Amazon offer only a small fraction of the university libraries' titles. While there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they've found through a search engine for printed materials that is as powerful as Google's current Web search, there's great likelihood that Google Print's Library Project will create new markets for forgotten content. In one bold stroke, Google will give new value to millions of orphaned works.

I'm sorry to see authors buy into the old-school protectionism of the Authors Guild, not realizing they're acting against their own self-interest. Their resistance can come only from a failure to understand the nature of the program. Google Library is intended to help readers discover copyrighted works, not to give copies away. It's a tremendous service to authors that will help them beat the dismal odds of publishing as usual.

Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books, is the co-producer of theWeb 2.0 conference.

Storm Warnings

2005-09-13T21:44:00.000+08:00

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, founded in 1871 and headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, bills itself as the “oldest association of state officials” in the country. Every three months, its members, who include the chief insurance regulators of all fifty states plus the District of Columbia, hold a four-day meeting to discuss issues of common concern. The association’s fall, 2005, meeting was scheduled for this past weekend, and, in addition to seminars on such perennial favorites as “Property Casualty Reinsurance” and “Receivership and Insolvency,” the event’s planners had organized a session on a new topic: global warming. Given recent events in Louisiana and Mississippi, a session on weather-related disasters would surely have been well attended. Unfortunately for the association, the meeting was booked into the Sheraton in downtown New Orleans.

Katrina was so destructive—whole towns and cities devastated, and their traditions swept away—that anyone who would presume to comment on it has a heavy burden. A disaster of this magnitude seems to demand not dispassionate analysis but simple human empathy. To use it as an occasion to point out the folly of U.S. energy policy, as, for example, the German environmental minister, Jürgen Trittin, did, is to invite the charge of insensitivity, or even worse. “The American president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that the failure to protect the climate inflicts on his country and the world economy through natural catastrophes like Katrina,” Trittin wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau. An editor for the London Times online accused Trittin of “intellectual looting,” while the Web version of Der Spiegel announced “another low point for transatlantic relations—and set off by a German minister. How pathetic.” But, callous as it may seem to say so, America’s consumption of fossil fuels and catastrophes like Katrina are indeed connected.

Though hurricanes are, in their details, extremely complicated, basically they all draw their energy from the same source: the warm surface waters of the ocean. This is why they form only in the tropics, and during the season when sea surface temperatures are highest. It follows that if sea surface temperatures increase—as they have been doing—then the amount of energy available to hurricanes will grow. In general, climate scientists predict that climbing CO2 levels will lead to an increase in the intensity of hurricanes, though not in hurricane frequency. (This increase will be superimposed on any natural cycles of hurricane activity.) Meanwhile, as sea levels rise—water expands as it warms—storm surges, like the one that breached the levees in New Orleans, will inevitably become more dangerous. In a paper published in Nature just a few weeks before Katrina struck, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that wind-speed measurements made by planes flying through tropical storms showed that the “potential destructiveness” of such storms had “increased markedly” since the nineteen-seventies, right in line with rising sea surface temperatures.

The fact that climbing CO2 levels are expected to produce more storms like Katrina doesn’t mean that Katrina itself was caused by global warming. No single storm, no matter how extreme, can be accounted for in this way; weather events are a function both of factors that can be identified, like the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth and the greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, and of factors that are stochastic, or purely random. In response to the many confused claims that were being made about the hurricane, a group of prominent climatologists posted an essay on the Web site RealClimate that asked, “Could New Orleans be the first major U.S. city ravaged by human-caused climate change?” The correct answer, they pointed out, is that this is the wrong question. The science of global warming has nothing to say about any particular hurricane (or drought or heat wave or flood), only about the larger statistical pattern.

For obvious reasons, this larger pattern is also of deep interest to the insurance industry. In June, the Association of British Insurers issued a report forecasting that, owing to climate change, losses from hurricanes in the U.S., typhoons in Japan, and windstorms in Europe were likely to increase by more than sixty per cent in the coming decades. (The report calculated that insured losses from extreme storms—those expected to occur only once every hundred to two hundred and fifty years—could rise to as much as a hundred and fifty billion dollars.) The figures did not take into account the expected increase in the number and wealth of people living in storm-prone areas; correcting for such increases, the losses are likely to be several hundred per cent higher. A report issued last week, which was supposed to have been presented at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ meeting in New Orleans, noted that, even before Katrina, catastrophic weather-related losses in the U.S. had been rising “significantly faster than premiums, population, or economic growth.”

Since President Bush announced that the country was withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, in March, 2001, the Administration has offered a variety of excuses for why the U.S., which produces nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, can’t be expected to cut back. On the one hand, Administration officials have insisted that the science of global warming is inconclusive; on the other, they’ve cited this same science to argue that the steps demanded by Kyoto are not rigorously enough thought out. As the rest of the world has adopted Kyoto—earlier this year, the treaty became binding on the hundred and forty nations that had ratified it—these arguments have become increasingly indefensible, and the President has fallen back on what one suspects was his real objection all along: complying with the agreement would be expensive. “The Kyoto treaty didn’t suit our needs,” Bush blurted out during a British-television interview a couple of months ago. As Katrina indicates, this argument, too, is empty. It’s not acting to curb greenhouse-gas emissions that’s likely to prove too costly; it’s doing nothing.

Apocalypse Soon

2005-09-05T19:39:00.000+08:00

by Robert McNamara

Robert McNamara is worried. He knows how close we’ve come. His counsel helped the Kennedy administration avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, he believes the United States must no longer rely on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. To do so is immoral, illegal, and dreadfully dangerous.

It is time—well past time, in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous. The risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch is unacceptably high. Far from reducing these risks, the Bush administration has signaled that it is committed to keeping the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a mainstay of its military power—a commitment that is simultaneously eroding the international norms that have limited the spread of nuclear weapons and fissile materials for 50 years. Much of the current U.S. nuclear policy has been in place since before I was secretary of defense, and it has only grown more dangerous and diplomatically destructive in the intervening years.
Today, the United States has deployed approximately 4,500 strategic, offensive nuclear warheads. Russia has roughly 3,800. The strategic forces of Britain, France, and China are considerably smaller, with 200–400 nuclear weapons in each state’s arsenal. The new nuclear states of Pakistan and India have fewer than 100 weapons each. North Korea now claims to have developed nuclear weapons, and U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Pyongyang has enough fissile material for 2–8 bombs.

How destructive are these weapons? The average U.S. warhead has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. Of the 8,000 active or operational U.S. warheads, 2,000 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be launched on 15 minutes’ warning. How are these weapons to be used? The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so. For decades, U.S. nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict “unacceptable” damage on an opponent. This has been and (so long as we face a nuclear-armed, potential adversary) must continue to be the foundation of our nuclear deterrent.

In my time as secretary of defense, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) carried with him a secure telephone, no matter where he went, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The telephone of the commander, whose headquarters were in Omaha, Nebraska, was linked to the underground command post of the North American Defense Command, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, and to the U.S. president, wherever he happened to be. The president always had at hand nuclear release codes in the so-called football, a briefcase carried for the president at all times by a U.S. military officer.

The SAC commander’s orders were to answer the telephone by no later than the end of the third ring. If it rang, and he was informed that a nuclear attack of enemy ballistic missiles appeared to be under way, he was allowed 2 to 3 minutes to decide whether the warning was valid (over the years, the United States has received many false warnings), and if so, how the United States should respond. He was then given approximately 10 minutes to determine what to recommend, to locate and advise the president, permit the president to discuss the situation with two or three close advisors (presumably the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and to receive the president’s decision and pass it immediately, along with the codes, to the launch sites. The president essentially had two options: He could decide to ride out the attack and defer until later any decision to launch a retaliatory strike. Or, he could order an immediate retaliatory strike, from a menu of options, thereby launching U.S. weapons that were targeted on the opponent’s military-industrial assets. Our opponents in Moscow presumably had and have similar arrangements.

The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any given day, as we go about our business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes’ deliberation by the president and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40 years. With very few changes, this system remains largely intact, including the “football,” the president’s constant companion.

I was able to change some of these dangerous policies and procedures. My colleagues and I started arms control talks; we installed safeguards to reduce the risk of unauthorized launches; we added options to the nuclear war plans so that the president did not have to choose between an all-or-nothing response, and we eliminated the vulnerable and provocative nuclear missiles in Turkey. I wish I had done more, but we were in the midst of the Cold War, and our options were limited.

The United States and our NATO allies faced a strong Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional threat. Many of the allies (and some in Washington as well) felt strongly that preserving the U.S. option of launching a first strike was necessary for the sake of keeping the Soviets at bay. What is shocking is that today, more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the basic U.S. nuclear policy is unchanged. It has not adapted to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Plans and procedures have not been revised to make the United States or other countries less likely to push the button. At a minimum, we should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from “hair-trigger” alert, as others have recommended, including Gen. George Lee Butler, the last commander of SAC. That simple change would greatly reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear launch. It would also signal to other states that the United States is taking steps to end its reliance on nuclear weapons.

We pledged to work in good faith toward the eventual elimination of nuclear arsenals when we negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. In May, diplomats from more than 180 nations are meeting in New York City to review the NPT and assess whether members are living up to the agreement. The United States is focused, for understandable reasons, on persuading North Korea to rejoin the treaty and on negotiating deeper constraints on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those states must be convinced to keep the promises they made when they originally signed the NPT—that they would not build nuclear weapons in return for access to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. But the attention of many nations, including some potential new nuclear weapons states, is also on the United States. Keeping such large numbers of weapons, and maintaining them on hair-trigger alert, are potent signs that the United States is not seriously working toward the elimination of its arsenal and raises troubling questions as to why any other state should restrain its nuclear ambitions.

A Preview of the Apocalypse
The destructive power of nuclear weapons is well known, but given the United States’ continued reliance on them, it’s worth remembering the danger they present. A 2000 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War describes the likely effects of a single 1 megaton weapon—dozens of which are contained in the Russian and U.S. inventories. At ground zero, the explosion creates a crater 300 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter. Within one second, the atmosphere itself ignites into a fireball more than a half-mile in diameter. The surface of the fireball radiates nearly three times the light and heat of a comparable area of the surface of the sun, extinguishing in seconds all life below and radiating outward at the speed of light, causing instantaneous severe burns to people within one to three miles. A blast wave of compressed air reaches a distance of three miles in about 12 seconds, flattening factories and commercial buildings. Debris carried by winds of 250 mph inflicts lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of people in the area die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or the developing firestorm.

Of course, our knowledge of these effects is not entirely hypothetical. Nuclear weapons, with roughly one seventieth of the power of the 1 megaton bomb just described, were twice used by the United States in August 1945. One atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Around 80,000 people died immediately; approximately 200,000 died eventually. Later, a similar size bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. On Nov. 7, 1995, the mayor of Nagasaki recalled his memory of the attack in testimony to the International Court of Justice:

Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the sound of insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the banks of nearby Urakami River, their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging off in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after another in the water or in heaps on the banks.… Four months after the atomic bombing, 74,000 people were dead, and 75,000 had suffered injuries, that is, two-thirds of the city population had fallen victim to this calamity that came upon Nagasaki like a preview of the Apocalypse.
Why did so many civilians have to die? Because the civilians, who made up nearly 100 percent of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were unfortunately “co-located” with Japanese military and industrial targets. Their annihilation, though not the objective of those dropping the bombs, was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets. It is worth noting that during the Cold War, the United States reportedly had dozens of nuclear warheads targeted on Moscow alone, because it contained so many military targets and so much “industrial capacity.”

Presumably, the Soviets similarly targeted many U.S. cities. The statement that our nuclear weapons do not target populations per se was and remains totally misleading in the sense that the so-called collateral damage of large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilian dead.

This in a nutshell is what nuclear weapons do: They indiscriminately blast, burn, and irradiate with a speed and finality that are almost incomprehensible. This is exactly what countries like the United States and Russia, with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, continue to threaten every minute of every day in this new 21st century.

No Way To Win
I have worked on issues relating to U.S. and NATO nuclear strategy and war plans for more than 40 years. During that time, I have never seen a piece of paper that outlined a plan for the United States or NATO to initiate the use of nuclear weapons with any benefit for the United States or NATO. I have made this statement in front of audiences, including NATO defense ministers and senior military leaders, many times. No one has ever refuted it. To launch weapons against a nuclear-equipped opponent would be suicidal. To do so against a nonnuclear enemy would be militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible.

I reached these conclusions very soon after becoming secretary of defense. Although I believe Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson shared my view, it was impossible for any of us to make such statements publicly because they were totally contrary to established NATO policy. After leaving the Defense Department, I became president of the World Bank. During my 13-year tenure, from 1968 to 1981, I was prohibited, as an employee of an international institution, from commenting publicly on issues of U.S. national security. After my retirement from the bank, I began to reflect on how I, with seven years’ experience as secretary of defense, might contribute to an understanding of the issues with which I began my public service career.

At that time, much was being said and written regarding how the United States could, and why it should, be able to fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviets. This view implied, of course, that nuclear weapons did have military utility; that they could be used in battle with ultimate gain to whoever had the largest force or used them with the greatest acumen. Having studied these views, I decided to go public with some information that I knew would be controversial, but that I felt was needed to inject reality into these increasingly unreal discussions about the military utility of nuclear weapons. In articles and speeches, I criticized the fundamentally flawed assumption that nuclear weapons could be used in some limited way. There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike—to keep it from inflicting enormous destruction on civilian life and property, and there is no guarantee against unlimited escalation once the first nuclear strike occurs. We cannot avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize these facts and base our military plans and policies upon this recognition. I hold these views even more strongly today than I did when I first spoke out against the nuclear dangers our policies were creating. I know from direct experience that U.S. nuclear policy today creates unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own.

What Castro Taught Us
Among the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons is the risk—to me an unacceptable risk—of use of the weapons either by accident or as a result of misjudgment or miscalculation in times of crisis. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that the United States and the Soviet Union—and indeed the rest of the world—came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear disaster in October 1962.

Indeed, according to former Soviet military leaders, at the height of the crisis, Soviet forces in Cuba possessed 162 nuclear warheads, including at least 90 tactical warheads. At about the same time, Cuban President Fidel Castro asked the Soviet ambassador to Cuba to send a cable to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stating that Castro urged him to counter a U.S. attack with a nuclear response. Clearly, there was a high risk that in the face of a U.S. attack, which many in the U.S. government were prepared to recommend to President Kennedy, the Soviet forces in Cuba would have decided to use their nuclear weapons rather than lose them. Only a few years ago did we learn that the four Soviet submarines trailing the U.S. Naval vessels near Cuba each carried torpedoes with nuclear warheads. Each of the sub commanders had the authority to launch his torpedoes. The situation was even more frightening because, as the lead commander recounted to me, the subs were out of communication with their Soviet bases, and they continued their patrols for four days after Khrushchev announced the withdrawal of the missiles from Cuba.

The lesson, if it had not been clear before, was made so at a conference on the crisis held in Havana in 1992, when we first began to learn from former Soviet officials about their preparations for nuclear war in the event of a U.S. invasion. Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a U.S. invasion, and if so, how he thought the United States would respond. “We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt,” Castro replied. “We were certain of that…. [W]e would be forced to pay the price that we would disappear.” He continued, “Would I have been ready to use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons.” And he added, “If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded, or their country was going to be occupied … I believe they would have used tactical nuclear weapons.”

I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro suggested we would have. His decision would have destroyed his country. Had we responded in a similar way the damage to the United States would have been unthinkable. But human beings are fallible. In conventional war, mistakes cost lives, sometimes thousands of lives. However, if mistakes were to affect decisions relating to the use of nuclear forces, there would be no learning curve. They would result in the destruction of nations. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons carries a very high risk of nuclear catastrophe. There is no way to reduce the risk to acceptable levels, other than to first eliminate the hair-trigger alert policy and later to eliminate or nearly eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States should move immediately to institute these actions, in cooperation with Russia. That is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A Dangerous Obsession
On Nov. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that he had told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would reduce “operationally deployed nuclear warheads” from approximately 5,300 to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade. This scaling back would approach the 1,500 to 2,200 range that Putin had proposed for Russia. However, the Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, mandated by the U.S. Congress and issued in January 2002, presents quite a different story. It assumes that strategic offensive nuclear weapons in much larger numbers than 1,700 to 2,200 will be part of U.S. military forces for the next several decades. Although the number of deployed warheads will be reduced to 3,800 in 2007 and to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012, the warheads and many of the launch vehicles taken off deployment will be maintained in a “responsive” reserve from which they could be moved back to the operationally deployed force. The Nuclear Posture Review received little attention from the media. But its emphasis on strategic offensive nuclear weapons deserves vigorous public scrutiny. Although any proposed reduction is welcome, it is doubtful that survivors—if there were any—of an exchange of 3,200 warheads (the U.S. and Russian numbers projected for 2012), with a destructive power approximately 65,000 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, could detect a difference between the effects of such an exchange and one that would result from the launch of the current U.S. and Russian forces totaling about 12,000 warheads.

In addition to projecting the deployment of large numbers of strategic nuclear weapons far into the future, the Bush administration is planning an extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the existing nuclear force and to begin studies for new launch vehicles, as well as new warheads for all of the launch platforms. Some members of the administration have called for new nuclear weapons that could be used as bunker busters against underground shelters (such as the shelters Saddam Hussein used in Baghdad). New production facilities for fissile materials would need to be built to support the expanded force. The plans provide for integrating a national ballistic missile defense into the new triad of offensive weapons to enhance the nation’s ability to use its “power projection forces” by improving our ability to counterattack an enemy. The Bush administration also announced that it has no intention to ask congress to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and, though no decision to test has been made, the administration has ordered the national laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons designs and to prepare the underground test sites in Nevada for nuclear tests if necessary in the future. Clearly, the Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of U.S. military forces for at least the next several decades.

Good faith participation in international negotiation on nuclear disarmament—including participation in the CTBT—is a legal and political obligation of all parties to the NPT that entered into force in 1970 and was extended indefinitely in 1995. The Bush administration’s nuclear program, alongside its refusal to ratify the CTBT, will be viewed, with reason, by many nations as equivalent to a U.S. break from the treaty. It says to the nonnuclear weapons nations, “We, with the strongest conventional military force in the world, require nuclear weapons in perpetuity, but you, facing potentially well-armed opponents, are never to be allowed even one nuclear weapon.”

If the United States continues its current nuclear stance, over time, substantial proliferation of nuclear weapons will almost surely follow. Some, or all, of such nations as Egypt, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Taiwan will very likely initiate nuclear weapons programs, increasing both the risk of use of the weapons and the diversion of weapons and fissile materials into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. Diplomats and intelligence agencies believe Osama bin Laden has made several attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or fissile materials. It has been widely reported that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of Pakistan’s nuclear reactor complex, met with bin Laden several times. Were al Qaeda to acquire fissile materials, especially enriched uranium, its ability to produce nuclear weapons would be great. The knowledge of how to construct a simple gun-type nuclear device, like the one we dropped on Hiroshima, is now widespread. Experts have little doubt that terrorists could construct such a primitive device if they acquired the requisite enriched uranium material. Indeed, just last summer, at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry said, “I have never been more fearful of a nuclear detonation than now.… There is a greater than 50 percent probability of a nuclear strike on U.S. targets within a decade.” I share his fears.

A Moment of Decision
We are at a critical moment in human history—perhaps not as dramatic as that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a moment no less crucial. Neither the Bush administration, the congress, the American people, nor the people of other nations have debated the merits of alternative, long-range nuclear weapons policies for their countries or the world. They have not examined the military utility of the weapons; the risk of inadvertent or accidental use; the moral and legal considerations relating to the use or threat of use of the weapons; or the impact of current policies on proliferation. Such debates are long overdue. If they are held, I believe they will conclude, as have I and an increasing number of senior military leaders, politicians, and civilian security experts: We must move promptly toward the elimination—or near elimination—of all nuclear weapons. For many, there is a strong temptation to cling to the strategies of the past 40 years. But to do so would be a serious mistake leading to unacceptable risks for all nations.

Robert S. McNamara was U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 and president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.

A Rocket To Nowhere

2005-09-05T00:40:00.000+08:00

The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft friends) because that pesky foam on the fuel tank keeps falling off.

There are 28 Space Shuttle flights still scheduled, firmly or tentatively, through 2010, when the current orbiter is supposed to retire in favor of a yet-to-be-designed replacement (which will not fly until 2014). On the eve of this launch, NASA put the likelihood of losing an orbiter at 1 in 100, a somewhat stunning concession by an agency notorious for minimizing the risk of its prize program. Given the track record, and the unanticipated foam problems, it's probably reasonable to assume a failure rate approaching 2%, a number close to the observed failure rate (1 in 57) and one likely to fall on the conservative side as the orbiters age.

For all the talk of safety improvements, there really isn't a way to make the Shuttle much safer. The changes made with so much fanfare after the Columbia loss have been marginal, serving to prevent the psychologically untenable situation of watching damage occur at launch and being unable to do anything about it before re-entry, many days later. Actual safety improvements to the Shuttle - putting the orbiter on top of the launch stack, installing a crew escape system - would be so hideously expensive that they have been consistently vetoed.

With 28 launches to go, probability tells us that the chance of losing another orbiter before the program's scheduled retirement is about 50-50. But past experience suggests that NASA will continue flying these things until one of them blows up again (note that suspicious four-year gap in manned flight capability right around the time the Shuttle is supposed to retire). This seems like as good a time as any to ask: why are we doing this?

Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle was for are going to have a mess on their hands. Why was such a powerful rocket used only to reach very low orbits, where air resistance and debris would limit the useful lifetime of a satellite to a few years? Why was there both a big cargo bay and a big crew compartment? What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload? Why was the Shuttle intentionally crippled so that it could not land on autopilot? 1 Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick? Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust? Why use a glass thermal protection system, rather than a low-tech ablative shield? And having chosen such a fragile method of heat protection, why on earth mount the orbiter on the side of the rocket, where things will fall on it during launch?

Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process. That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War.

By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support. So NASA concentrated on building only the first component of its vision, a reusable manned spacecraft that could reach low earth orbit. Since NASA assumed it would be able to fly Shuttle missions with a turnaround time as low as two weeks, this left the vexing question of what to do with all that spare launch capacity. The tiny commercial launch market was in no shape to supply such a wealth of satellites, so NASA turned to the one agency that had an abundance of things requiring shooting into space - the Air Force - and asked it to abandon its unmanned rocket programs, instead committing all future satellite launches to the Shuttle.

The Air Force was only too happy to agree, but at a crippling price. What the Air Force wanted to launch was spy satellites - lots of them, bulky telescopes with heavy mirrors, the bigger the better - and it wanted to launch them in an orbit over the Earth's poles, so they could snoop over the maximum amount of Red territory. This meant NASA had to go back to the drawing board, since polar orbits would require a heavier orbiter than the Shuttle design had anticipated 2 , which in turn meant using a bigger rocket at launch, and dissipating more heat during re-entry.

Moreover, there was no way to launch a polar mission safely from Kennedy Space Center - it would mean overflying either heavily populated areas in the Carolinas or risking capture of a fuel tank by the wily Cubans. So the Air Force also demanded, and got, billions in funding to build a new Shuttle launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force base in California. And because some of the Air Force's military missions involved capturing a Soviet satellite on the sly and landing after one orbit, the Air Force demanded that the Shuttle be capable of gliding over a thousand miles cross-range during re-entry, so that it could catch up with the rapidly eastbound Air Force base underneath it. This meant bigger wings, which in turn meant more weight, an even more powerful rocket, and again a more complicated heat shield.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system - the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection - were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program.

To further cut costs, and keep the weight from growing prohibitive, the Shuttle became the first manned spacecraft to fly without any kind of crew escape system, relying on certain components (solid rockets, wing tiles, landing gear) to function with complete reliability 3 . NASA also decided not to make the Shuttle capable of unmanned flight, so that the first test flight of the vehicle would have astronauts on board. This was a major departure for the traditionally conservative agency, which had relied on redundant systems wherever possible, and always tested unmanned prototypes of any new rocket. It showed how confident NASA had grown in its ability to correctly predict, simulate, and design for high reliability 4 .

The final Shuttle design, incorporating all of the budgetary and Air Force design constraints, was impressive but not particularly useful. Very soon after the start of the program, it became clear that Shuttle launches would not be routine events, that it would cost a great deal of money to repair each orbiter after its trip to space, and that estimates of launch cost and frequency had been wildly optimistic. At the same time, the Air Force proved unable to get the Vandenberg base ready for use, negating much of the reason for the extensive Shuttle redesign. After the Challenger explosion, the Vandenberg base was quietly mothballed. Not once did the Shuttle fly a mission to polar orbit.

Having failed at its stated goal, the Shuttle program proved adept at finding changing rationales for its existence. It was, after all, an awfully large spacecraft, and it was a bird in the hand, giving it an enormous advantage over any suggested replacement.

As the Strategic Defense Initiative took off, the Shuttle played a central role, envisioned both as a way of launching the complex components of SDI and snatching away whatever Soviet satellites might be sent up to interfere. The Shuttle even helped Reagan inadvertently bankrupt the Soviet Union, as the Soviets decided they needed a rival orbiter, and cloned the vehicle at terrific expense 5 .

When the Cold War fizzled out towards the end of the eighties, NASA rebranded the Shuttle as a way of jump-starting the leap of capitalism from the Earth's surface to outer space, offering a variety of heavily subsidized research platforms for the private sector (which proved remarkably resistant to the allure of a manufacturing environment where raw materials cost $40,000/kg). And it stressed the scientific value of manned space flight, with each Shuttle mission now bespangled in a dazzling assortment of scientific experiments, like so many talismans against budget reduction. Suddenly it seemed you could not change your socks in space without doing valuable scientific research that would contribute directly to improving the lives of the American taxpayer.

This period of Shuttle-as-cancer-cure found its apotheosis in the brilliantly cynical return of John Glenn to space. While legislators had been accelerated to orbital velocity before, Glenn was both a Senator and a sixties space hero, making him an ideal public relations cargo. Naturally, the slightest hint that the Senator had been launched into space for reasons other than the urgent demands of medical science was indignantly dismissed by the mission planners. At the now-usual cost of around a billion dollars 6 , STS-95 spent ten days engaged in the following experiments:

* Sent cockroaches up to see how microgravity would affect their growth at various stages of their life cycle
* Studied a "space rose" to see what kinds of essential oils it would produce in weightless environment. (in a triumph of technology transfer, this was later developed into a perfume).
* At the suggestion of elementary school children, monitored everyday objects such as soap, crayons, and string to see whether their inertial mass would change in a weightless environment. Preliminary results suggest that Newton was right.
* Monitored the growth of fish eggs and rice plants in space (orbital sushi?)
* Tested new space appliances, including a space camcorder and space freezer
* Checked to see whether melatonin would make the crew sleepy (it did not)

And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission.

Along with these craggy summits of basic research, the astronauts performed a raft of prepared experiments in metallurgy, medicine, fluid mechanics, embryology, and solar wind detection, all of which had one thing in common - they were designed to minimize crew interaction, in most cases requiring the astronauts to do little more than flip a switch 7 .

This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each 'pure science' Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere.

Given this shaky ground, NASA has been understandably eager to put up its true brilliancy, part of the original STS plan that would not just create a need for Shuttle missions into the forseeable future, but make it practically impossible to cancel the manned space program: the International Space Station.

The ISS was another child of the Cold War: originally intended to show the Russians up and provide a permanent American presence in space, then hastily amended as a way to keep the Russian space scientists busy while their economy was falling to pieces. Like the Shuttle, it has been redesigned and reduced in scope so many times that it bears no resemblance to its original conception. Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.

Of course, the ISS has also been preemptively armed with science, but NASA has found much more effective safeguards against potential budget cuts. The station's inordinately expensive modules have mainly come from foreign space agencies, ensuring that even a NASA administrator foolhardy enough to let the thing drop into the sea would contravene a fistful of international treaties. And the station requires a permanent crew, a trick NASA learned from the Shuttle, so that there can be no question of mothballing it or converting it into an unmanned research platform.

In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong.

This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.

There is no satisfactory answer for why all this commotion must take place in orbit. To the uneducated mind, it would seem we could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all - leaving the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings without the slighest impact on basic science, while also increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude. It might even bring mission costs within the original 1970's estimates, and allow us to continue the Shuttle program well into the middle of the century.

But NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration', likening critics of manned space flight to those Europeans in the 1500's who would have cancelled the great voyages of discovery rather than face the loss of one more ship.

Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, nor did they construct a massive artificial island they could repair to if their boat sprang a leak. And we must remember that space is called space for a reason - there is nothing in it, at least not where the Shuttle goes, save for a few fast-moving pieces of junk from the last few times we went up there, forty years ago. The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972. In fact, despite an ambitious "Vision for Space Exploration", there seems to be no mandate or interest in pursuing this kind of exploration, and all the significant deadlines are pushed comfortably past the tenure of incumbent politicians.

Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board. And therein lies another awkward fact for NASA. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by the manned space program, the other half is quietly spent on true aerospace work and a variety of robotic probes of immense scientific value. All of the actual exploration taking place at NASA is being done by unmanned vehicles. And when some of those unmanned craft fail, no one is killed, and the unmanned program is not halted for three years.

Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio 8 .

NASA is convinced that stopping the Shuttle program would mean an indefinite end to American manned space flight, and so it will go to almost any length to make sure there is a continuous manned presence in space. The arguments in its defense may be disingenuous, this reasoning goes, but the manned program is an irreplaceable asset in itself, as well as a high-profile mission that keeps funding flowing in for worthy but less glamorous NASA activities.

But this attitude is actually doing damage to the prospects of real manned space exploration. Sinking half the NASA budget into the Shuttle and ISS precludes the possibility of doing truly groundbreaking work on space flight. As the orbiters age, their upkeep and safety requirements are becoming an expensive antiquarian exercise, forcing engineers to spend their ingenuity repairing obsolete components and devising expensive maintenance techniques for sclerotic spacecraft, rather than applying their lessons to a new generation of rockets. The retardant effect the Shuttle has had on technology (like the two decades long freeze in expendable rocket development) outweighs any of its modest initial benefits to materials science, aerodynamics, and rocket design.

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it. But the Shuttle program has shown the flip side of NASA, as rational goals detach from reality under constantly changing political and funding pressures. NASA has learned valuable bureaucratic lessons - it knows to spread its work over as many jurisdictions as possible, it has learned that chronic funding is always better than acute funding, however much money a one-time outlay might save in the long run, and it has demonstrated that ineffectual projects can be sustained indefinitely if cancelling them is sufficiently awkward. But these are lessons we have already learned for far less on the ground, with Amtrak, and building a more photogenic, spaceborne version of the Sunset Limited in orbit hardly seems like a space policy for the 21st century.

The people who work at and run NASA are not cynical, but the charade of manned space flight is turning NASA into a cynical organization. For all the talk of building a culture of safety, no one has pointed out the inherent contradiction in requiring that a program justified on irrational grounds be run in a rational manner. In an atmosphere where special pleading and wishful thinking about the benefits of manned flights to low earth orbit are not just tolerated, but required of astronauts and engineers, how can one demand complete integrity and intellectual honesty on safety of flight issues? It makes no sense to expect NASA to maintain a standard of intellectual rigor in operations that it can magically ignore when it comes to policy and planning.

The goal cannot be to have a safe space program - rocket science is going to remain difficult and risky. But we have the right to demand that the space program have some purpose beyond trying to keep its participants alive. NASA needs to take a lesson in courage from its astronauts, and demand either a proper, funded mandate for manned exploration, or close down the program. By NASA's own arguments, the commercial, technological and intellectual allure of manned space exploration are so great that it will not be a hard case to make. But even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed, with the the ISS left abandoned, the loss to science will have been negligible. That is the great tragedy of the current 'return to flight', and the sooner we force the agency to confront its failure, the greater our chances of salvaging a space program worth keeping out of the current mess.

Many source links for this article are available on my del.icio.us page.

1 The landing gear switch on the Shuttle is not connected to the flight computer by special request of the astronauts. This is the only impediment to fully automated landing. (up)

2 Launching a shuttle due east from the Kennedy space center steals a 900 mph boost from the Earth's rotation. Launching a shuttle over the poles requires cancelling out this eastward component before accelerating to the usual orbital velocity.(up)

3 The Columbia flew its first four missions with conventional ejection seats, which would have allowed the two pilots to bail out shortly before touchdown, though not during launch. The ejection seats were removed in later missions since it was impossible to provide them to the full crew. The current escape system on the shuttle comprises a set of parachutes, a hatch, and a long stick for the astronauts to slide along; it is only operable during sustained gliding flight below 40,000 feet, and is mainly there in case the crew needs to ditch the orbiter at sea during a launch abort. More elaborate escape systems have repeatedly been considered, but have proven prohibitively heavy and expensive. (up)

4 In a narrow sense, they succeeded. In both cases where a shuttle was lost, NASA had extensive warning of the failure mode in question, and had not addressed it for systemic and organizational reasons. But those organizational failures themselves represent a point of failure, one that lies outside the scope of an engineering analysis, which has to assume that procedures for checking critical components will work as reliably as the components whose reliability the procedures are supposed to safeguard. (up)

5 The Soviet Shuttle, the Buran (snowstorm) was an aerodynamic clone of the American orbiter, but incorporated many original features that had been considered and rejected for the American program, such as all-liquid rocket boosters, jet engines, ejection seats and an unmanned flight capability. You know you're in trouble when the Russians are adding safety features to your design. (up)

6 The original Shuttle plan called for launch costs in the range of $10 - $20 million. A commonly cited figure puts the actual cost at $400 million. (up)

7 The experiments could not be made fully automatic because NASA policy requires that experiments on manned missions involve the crew (up)

8 The NASA obsession with elementary and middle school participation in space flight is curious, and demonstrates how low a status actual in-flight science has compared with orbital public relations. You are not likely to hear of CERN physicists colliding tin atoms sent to them by a primary school in Toulouse, or the Hubble space being turned around to point at waving middle schoolers on a playground in Texas, yet even the minimal two-man ISS crew - one short of the stated minimum needed to run the station - regularly takes time to talk to schoolchildren. (up)

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

What Makes People Gay?

2005-09-05T00:39:00.000+08:00

The debate has always been that it was either all in the child's upbringing or all in the genes. But what if it's something else?
By Neil Swidey | August 14, 2005

With crystal-blue eyes, wavy hair, and freshly scrubbed faces, the boys look as though they stepped out of a Pottery Barn Kids catalog. They are 7-year-old twins. I'll call them Thomas and Patrick; their parents agreed to let me meet the boys as long as I didn't use their real names.

Spend five seconds with them, and there can be no doubt that they are identical twins - so identical even they can't tell each other apart in photographs. Spend five minutes with them, and their profound differences begin to emerge.

Patrick is social, thoughtful, attentive. He repeatedly addresses me by name. Thomas is physical, spontaneous, a bit distracted. Just minutes after meeting me outside a coffee shop, he punches me in the upper arm, yells, "Gray punch buggy!" and then points to a Volkswagen Beetle cruising past us. It's a hard punch. They horse around like typical brothers, but Patrick's punches are less forceful and his voice is higher. Thomas charges at his brother, arms flexed in front of him like a mini-bodybuilder. The differences are subtle - they're 7-year-old boys, after all - but they are there.

When the twins were 2, Patrick found his mother's shoes. He liked wearing them. Thomas tried on his father's once but didn't see the point.

When they were 3, Thomas blurted out that toy guns were his favorite things. Patrick piped up that his were the Barbie dolls he discovered at day care.

When the twins were 5, Thomas announced he was going to be a monster for Halloween. Patrick said he was going to be a princess. Thomas said he couldn't do that, because other kids would laugh at him. Patrick seemed puzzled. "Then I'll be Batman," he said.

Their mother - intelligent, warm, and open-minded - found herself conflicted. She wanted Patrick - whose playmates have always been girls, never boys - to be himself, but she worried his feminine behavior would expose him to ridicule and pain. She decided to allow him free expression at home while setting some limits in public.

That worked until last year, when a school official called to say Patrick was making his classmates uncomfortable. He kept insisting that he was a girl.

Patrick exhibits behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn't describe a boy who has a doll somewhere in his toy collection or tried on his sister's Snow White outfit once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding boy-typical behavior like rough-and-tumble play. There's been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance Patrick will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them - perhaps more - turn out to be gay or bisexual.

What makes the case of Patrick and Thomas so fascinating is that it calls into question both of the dominant theories in the long-running debate over what makes people gay: nature or nurture, genes or learned behavior. As identical twins, Patrick and Thomas began as genetic clones. From the moment they came out of their mother's womb, their environment was about as close to identical as possible - being fed, changed, and plopped into their car seats the same way, having similar relationships with the same nurturing father and mother. Yet before either boy could talk, one showed highly feminine traits while the other appeared to be "all boy," as the moms at the playgrounds say with apologetic shrugs.

"That my sons were different the second they were born, there is no question about it," says the twins' mother.

So what happened between their identical genetic starting point and their births? They spent nine months in utero. In the hunt for what causes people to be gay or straight, that's now the most interesting and potentially enlightening frontier.

WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHERE HOMOSEXUALITY COMES FROM? Proving people are born gay would give them wider social acceptance and better protection against discrimination, many gay rights advocates argue. In the last decade, as this "biological" argument has gained momentum, polls find Americans - especially young adults - increasingly tolerant of gays and lesbians. And that's exactly what has groups opposed to homosexuality so concerned. The Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank in Washington, D.C., argues in its book Getting It Straight that finding people are born gay "would advance the idea that sexual orientation is an innate characteristic, like race; that homosexuals, like African-Americans, should be legally protected against 'discrimination;' and that disapproval of homosexuality should be as socially stigmatized as racism. However, it is not true."

Some advocates of gay marriage argue that proving sexual orientation is inborn would make it easier to frame the debate as simply a matter of civil rights. That could be true, but then again, freedom of religion enjoyed federal protection long before inborn traits like race and sex.

For much of the 20th century, the dominant thinking connected homosexuality to upbringing. Freud, for instance, speculated that overprotective mothers and distant fathers helped make boys gay. It took the American Psychiatric Association until 1973 to remove "homosexuality" from its manual of mental disorders.

Then, in 1991, a neuroscientist in San Diego named Simon LeVay told the world he had found a key difference between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men he studied. LeVay showed that a tiny clump of neurons of the anterior hypothalamus - which is believed to control sexual behavior - was, on average, more than twice the size in heterosexual men as in homosexual men. LeVay's findings did not speak directly to the nature-vs.-nurture debate - the clumps could, theoretically, have changed size because of homosexual behavior. But that seemed unlikely, and the study ended up jump-starting the effort to prove a biological basis for homosexuality.

Later that same year, Boston University psychiatrist Richard Pillard and Northwestern University psychologist J. Michael Bailey announced the results of their study of male twins. They found that, in identical twins, if one twin was gay, the other had about a 50 percent chance of also being gay. For fraternal twins, the rate was about 20 percent. Because identical twins share their entire genetic makeup while fraternal twins share about half, genes were believed to explain the difference. Most reputable studies find the rate of homosexuality in the general population to be 2 to 4 percent, rather than the popular "1 in 10" estimate.

In 1993 came the biggest news: Dean Hamer's discovery of the "gay gene." In fact, Hamer, a Harvard-trained researcher at the National Cancer Institute, hadn't quite put it that boldly or imprecisely. He found that gay brothers shared a specific region of the X chromosome, called Xq28, at a higher rate than gay men shared with their straight brothers. Hamer and others suggested this finding would eventually transform our understanding of sexual orientation.

That hasn't happened yet. But the clear focus of sexual-orientation research has shifted to biological causes, and there hasn't been much science produced to support the old theories tying homosexuality to upbringing. Freud may have been seeing the effect rather than the cause, since a father faced with a very feminine son might well become more distant or hostile, leading the boy's mother to become more protective. In recent years, researchers who suspect that homosexuality is inborn - whether because of genetics or events happening in the womb - have looked everywhere for clues: Prenatal hormones. Birth order. Finger length. Fingerprints. Stress. Sweat. Eye blinks. Spatial relations. Hearing. Handedness. Even "gay" sheep.

LeVay, who is gay, says that when he published his study 14 years ago, some gays and lesbians criticized him for doing research that might lead to homosexuality once again being lumped in with diseases and disorders. "If anything, the reverse has happened," says LeVay, who is now 61 and no longer active in the lab. He says the hunt for a biological basis for homosexuality, which involves many researchers who are themselves gay or lesbian, "has contributed to the status of gay people in society."

These studies have been small and underfunded, and the results have often been modest. Still, because there's been so much of this disparate research, "all sort of pointing in the same direction, makes it pretty clear there are biological processes significantly influencing sexual orientation," says LeVay. "But it's also kind of frustrating that it's still a bunch of hints, that nothing is really as crystal clear as you would like."

Just in the last few months, though, the hints have grown stronger.

In May, Swedish researchers reported finding important differences in how the brains of straight men and gay men responded to two compounds suspected of being pheromones - those scent-related chemicals that are key to sexual arousal in animals. The first compound came from women's urine, the second from male sweat. Brain scans showed that when straight men smelled the female urine compound, their hypothalamus lit up. That didn't happen with gay men. Instead, their hypothalamus lit up when they smelled the male-sweat compound, which was the same way straight women had responded. This research once again connecting the hypothalamus to sexual orientation comes on the heels of work with sheep. About 8 percent of domestic rams are exclusively interested in sex with other rams. Researchers found that a clump of neurons similar to the one LeVay identified in human brains was also smaller in gay rams than straight ones. (Again, it's conceivable that these differences could be showing effect rather than cause.)

In June, scientists in Vienna announced that they had isolated a master genetic switch for sexual orientation in the fruit fly. Once they flicked the switch, the genetically altered female flies rebuffed overtures from males and instead attempted to mate with other females, adopting the elaborate courting dance and mating songs that males use.

And now, a large-scale, five-year genetic study of gay brothers is underway in North America. The study received $2.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, which is unusual. Government funders tend to steer clear of sexual orientation research, aware that even small grants are apt to be met with outrage from conservative congressmen looking to make the most of their C-Span face time. Relying on a robust sample of 1,000 gay-brother pairs and the latest advancements in genetic screening, this study promises to bring some clarity to the murky area of what role genes may play in homosexuality.

This accumulating biological evidence, combined with the prospect of more on the horizon, is having an effect. Last month, the Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent Washington, D.C., evangelical leader, told a large gathering of young evangelicals that he believes homosexuality is not a choice but rather a predisposition, something "deeply rooted" in people. Schenck told me that his conversion came about after he'd spoken extensively with genetic researchers and psychologists. He argues that evangelicals should continue to oppose homosexual behavior, but that "many evangelicals are living in a sort of state of denial about the advance of this conversation." His message: "If it's inevitable that this scientific evidence is coming, we have to be prepared with a loving response. If we don't have one, we won't have any credibility."

AS THE 21-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE JUNIOR IN A HOSPITAL JOHNNY slides into the MRI, she is handed controls with buttons for "strongly like" and "strongly dislike." Hundreds of pornographic images - in male-male and female-female pairings - flash before her eyes. Eroticism eventually gives way to monotony, and it's hard to avoid looking for details to distinguish one image from the rest of the panting pack. So it goes from "Look at the size of those breasts!" to "That can't be comfortable, given the length of her fingernails!" to "Why is that guy wearing nothing but work boots on the beach?"

Regardless of which buttons the student presses, the MRI scans show her arousal level to each image, at its starting point in the brain.

Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. "I'm not suggesting that most women are bisexual," says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. "I'm suggesting that whatever a woman's sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation." That's fundamentally different from men. "In men, arousal is orientation. It's as simple as that. That's how gay men learn they are gay."

These studies mark a return to basics for the 47-year-old Bailey. He says researchers need a far deeper understanding of what sexual orientation is before they can determine where it comes from.

Female sexual orientation is particularly foggy, he says, because there's been so little research done. As for male sexual orientation, he argues that there's now enough evidence to suggest it is "entirely in-born," though not nearly enough to establish how that happens.

Bailey's 1991 twin study is still cited by other researchers as one of the pillars in the genetic argument for homosexuality. But his follow-up study using a comprehensive registry of twins in Australia found a much lower rate of similarity in sexual orientation between identical twins, about 20 percent, down from 50 percent. Bailey still believes that genes make important contributions to sexual orientation. But, he says, "that's not where I'd bet the real breakthroughs will come."

His hunch is that further study of childhood gender nonconformity will pay big. Because it's unclear what percentage of homosexuals and lesbians showed CGN as children, Bailey and his colleagues are now running a study that uses adult participants' home movies from childhood to look for signs of gender-bending behavior.

Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem has proposed an intriguing theory for how CGN might lead to homosexuality. According to this pathway, which he calls "the exotic becomes erotic," children are born with traits for temperament, such as aggression and activity level, that predispose them to male-typical or female-typical activities. They seek out playmates with the same interests. So a boy whose traits lead him to hopscotch and away from rough play will feel different from, and ostracized by, other boys. This leads to physiological arousal of fear and anger in their presence, arousal that eventually is transformed from exotic to erotic.

Critics of homosexuality have used Bem's theory, which stresses environment over biology, to argue that sexual orientation is not inborn and not fixed. But Bem says this pathway is triggered by biological traits, and he doesn't really see how the outcome of homosexuality can be changed.

Bailey says whether or not Bem's theory holds up, the environment most worth focusing in on is the one a child experiences when he's in his mother's womb.

LET'S GET BACK TO THOMAS AND PATRICK. BECAUSE IT'S UNCLEAR why twin brothers with identical genetic starting points and similar post-birth environments would take such divergent paths, it's helpful to return to the beginning.

Males and females have a fundamental genetic difference - females have two X chromosomes, and males have an X and a Y. Still, right after conception, it's hard to tell male and female zygotes apart, except for that tucked-away chromosomal difference. Normally, the changes take shape at a key point of fetal development, when the male brain is masculinized by sex hormones. The female brain is the default. The brain will stay on the female path as long as it is protected from exposure to hormones. The hormonal theory of homosexuality holds that, just as exposure to circulating sex hormones determines whether a fetus will be male or female, such exposure must also influence sexual orientation.

The cases of children born with disorders of "sexual differentiation" offer insight. William Reiner, a psychiatrist and urologist with the University of Oklahoma, has evaluated more than a hundred of these cases. For decades, the standard medical response to boys born with severely inadequate penises (or none at all) was to castrate the boy and have his parents raise him as a girl. But Reiner has found that nurture - even when it involves surgery soon after birth - cannot trump nature. Of the boys with inadequate penises who were raised as girls, he says, "I haven't found one who is sexually attracted to males." The majority of them have transitioned back to being males and report being attracted to females.

During fetal development, sexual identity is set before the sexual organs are formed, Reiner says. Perhaps it's the same for sexual orientation. In his research, of all the babies with X and Y chromosomes who were raised as girls, the only ones he has found who report having female identities and being attracted to males are those who did not have "receptors" to let the male sex hormones do their masculinizing in the womb.

What does this all mean? "Exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically raises the chances of being sexually attracted to females," Reiner says. "We can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure may have something to do with attraction to males."

Michael Bailey says Reiner's findings represent a major breakthrough, showing that "whatever causes sexual orientation is strongly influenced by prenatal biology." Bailey and Reiner say the answer is probably not as simple as just exposure to sex hormones. After all, the exposure levels in some of the people Reiner studies are abnormal enough to produce huge differences in sexual organs. Yet, sexual organs in straight and gay people are, on average, the same. More likely, hormones are interacting with other factors.

Canadian researchers have consistently documented a "big-brother effect," finding that the chances of a boy being gay increase with each additional older brother he has. (Birth order does not appear to play a role with lesbians.) So, a male with three older brothers is three times more likely to be gay than one with no older brothers, though there's still a better than 90 percent chance he will be straight. They argue that this results from a complex interaction involving hormones, antigens, and the mother's immune system.

By now, there is substantial evidence showing correlation - though not causation - between sexual orientation and traits that are set when a baby is in the womb. Take finger length. In general, men have shorter index fingers in relation to their ring fingers; in women, the lengths are generally about the same. Researchers have found that lesbians generally have ratios closer to males. Other studies have shown masculinized results for lesbians in inner-ear functions and eye-blink reactions to sudden loud noises, and feminized patterns for gay men on certain cognitive tasks like spatial perception and remembering the placement of objects.

New York University researcher Lynn S. Hall, who has studied traits determined in the womb, speculates that Patrick was somehow prenatally stressed, probably during the first trimester, when the brain is really developing, particularly the structures like the hypothalamus that influence sexual behavior. This stress might have been based on his position in the womb or the blood flow to him or any of a number of other factors not in his mother's control. Yet more evidence that identical twins have womb experiences far from identical can be found in their often differing birth weights. Patrick was born a pound lighter than Thomas.

Taken together, the research suggests that early on in the womb, as the fetus's brain develops in either the male or female direction, something fundamental to sexual orientation is happening. Nobody's sure what's causing it. But here's where genes may be involved, perhaps by regulating hormone exposure or by dictating the size of that key clump of neurons in the hypothalamus. Before researchers can sort that out, they'll need to return to the question of whether, in fact, there is a "gay gene."

THE CROWD ON BOSTON COMMON IS THICK ON THIS SCORCHER of a Saturday afternoon in June, as the throngs make their way around the 35th annual Boston Pride festival, past booths peddling everything from "Gayopoly" board games to Braveheartian garments called Utilikilts. Sitting quietly in his booth is Alan Sanders, a soft-spoken 41-year-old with a sandy beard and thinning hair. He's placed a mound of rainbow-colored Starbursts on the table in front of him and hung a banner that reads: "WANTED: Gay Men with Gay Brothers for Molecular Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation."

Sanders is a psychiatrist with the Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute who is leading the NIH-funded search for the genetic basis of male homosexuality (www.gaybros.com). He is spending the summer crisscrossing the country, going to gay pride festivals, hoping to recruit 1,000 pairs of gay brothers to participate. (His wife, who just delivered their third son, wasn't crazy about the timing.) When people in Boston ask him how much genes may contribute to homosexuality, he says the best estimate is about 40 percent.

Homosexuality runs in families - studies show that 8 to 12 percent of brothers of gay men are also gay, compared with the 2 to 4 percent of the general population.

Sanders spends much of the afternoon handing out Starbursts to people who clearly don't qualify for a gay brothers study - preteen girls, adult lesbians wearing T-shirts that read "I Like Girls Who Like Girls," and elderly women in straw hats who speak only Chinese. But many of the gay men who stop by are interested in more than free candy. Among the people signing up is James Daly, a 31-year-old from Salem. "I think it's important for the public - especially the religious right - to know it's not a choice for some people," Daly says. "I feel I was born this way."

(In fairness, there aren't many leaders of groups representing social and religious conservatives who still argue that homosexual orientation - as opposed to behavior - is a matter of choice. Even as he insists that no one is born gay, Peter Sprigg, the point person on homosexuality for the Family Research Council, says, "I don't think that people choose their sexual attraction.")

In the decade since Dean Hamer made headlines, the gay gene theory has taken some hits. A Canadian team was unable to replicate his findings. Earlier this year, a team from Hamer's own lab reported only mixed results after having done the first scan of the entire human genome in the search for genes influencing sexual orientation.

But all of the gene studies so far have been based on small samples and lacked the funding to do things right. Sanders's study should be big enough to provide some real answers on linkage as well as shed light on gender nonconformity and the big-brother effect.

There is, however, a towering question that Sanders's study will probably not be able to answer. That has to do with evolution. If a prime motivation of all species is to pass genes on to future generations, and gay men are estimated to produce 80 percent fewer offspring than straight men, why would a gay gene not have been wiped out by the forces of natural selection? This evolutionary disadvantage is what led former Amherst College biologist Paul Ewald to argue that homosexuality might be caused by a virus - a pathogen most likely working in utero. That argument caused a stir when he and a colleague proposed it six years ago, but with no research done to test it, it remains just another theory. Other scientists have offered fascinating but unpersuasive explanations, most of them focusing on some kind of compensatory benefit, in the same way that the gene responsible for sickle cell anemia also protects against malaria. A study last year by researchers in Italy showed that female relatives of gay men tended to be more fertile, though, as critics point out, not nearly fertile enough to make up for the gay man's lack of offspring.

But there will be plenty of time for sorting out the evolutionary paradox once - and if - researchers are able to identify actual genes involved in sexual orientation. Getting to that point will likely require integrating multiple lines of promising research. That is exactly what's happening in Eric Vilain's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Vilain, an associate professor of human genetics, and his colleague, Sven Bocklandt, are using gay sheep, transgenic mice, identical twin humans, and novel approaches to human genetics to try to unlock the mystery of sexual orientation.

Instead of looking for a gay gene, they stress that they are looking for several genes that cause either attraction to men or attraction to women. Those same genes would work one way in heterosexual women and another way in homosexual men. The UCLA lab is examining how these genes might be turned "up" or "down." It's not a question of what genes you have, but rather which ones you use, says Bocklandt. "I have the genes in my body to make a vagina and carry a baby, but I don't use them, because I am a man." In studying the genes of gay sheep, for example, he's found some that are turned "way up" compared with the straight rams.

The lab is also testing an intriguing theory involving imprinted genes. Normally, we have two copies of every gene, one from each parent, and both copies work. They're identical, so it doesn't matter which copy comes from which parent. But with imprinted genes, that does matter. Although both copies are physically there, one copy - either from the mom or the dad - is blocked from working. Think of an airplane with an engine on each wing, except one of the engines is shut down. A recent Duke University study suggests humans have hundreds of imprinted genes, including one on the X chromosome that previous research has tied to sexual orientation.

With imprinted genes, there is no backup engine. So if there's something atypical in the copy from mom, the copy from dad cannot be turned on. The UCLA lab is now collecting DNA from identical twins in which one twin is straight and the other is gay. Because the twins begin as genetic clones, if a gene is imprinted in one twin, it will be in the other twin as well. Normally, as the fetuses are developing, each time a cell divides, the DNA separates and makes a copy of itself, replicating all kinds of genetic information. It's a complicated but incredibly accurate process. But the coding to keep the backup engine shut down on an imprinted gene is less accurate.

So how might imprinted genes help explain why one identical twin would be straight and the other gay? Say there's an imprinted gene for attraction to females, and there's something atypical in the copy the twin brothers get from mom. As all that replicating is going on, the imprinting (to keep the copy from dad shut down) proceeds as expected in one twin, and he ends up gay. But somehow with his brother, the coding for the imprinting is lost, and rather than remain shut down, the fuel flows to fire up the backup engine from dad. And that twin turns out to be straight.

IN THE COURSE OF REPORTING THIS STORY, I EXPERIENCED A good deal of whiplash. Just when I would become swayed by the evidence supporting one discreet theory, I would stumble onto new evidence casting some doubt on it. Ultimately, I accepted this as unavoidable terrain in the hunt for the basis of sexual orientation. This is, after all, a research field built on underfunded, idiosyncratic studies that are met with full-barreled responses from opposing and well-funded advocacy groups determined to make the results from the lab hew to the scripts they've honed for the talk-show circuit.

You can't really blame the advocacy groups. The stakes are high. In the end, homosexuality remains such a divisive issue that only thoroughly tested research will get society to accept what science has to say about its origin. Critics of funding for sexual orientation research say that it isn't curing cancer, and they're right. But we devote a lot more dollars to studying other issues that aren't curing cancer and have less resonance in society.

Still, no matter how imperfect these studies are, when you put them all together and examine them closely, the message is clear: While post-birth development may well play a supporting role, the roots of homosexuality, at least in men, appear to be in place by the time a child is born. After spending years sifting through all the available data, British researchers Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman come to an even bolder conclusion in their forthcoming book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, in which they write: "Sexual orientation is something we are born with and not `acquired' from our social environment."

Meanwhile, the mother of twins Patrick and Thomas has done her own sifting and come to her own conclusions. She says her son's feminine behavior suggests he will grow up to be gay, and she has no problem with that. She just worries about what happens to him between now and then.

After that fateful call from Patrick's school, she says, "I knew I had to talk to my son, and I had no clue what to say." Ultimately, she told him that although he could play however he wanted at home, he couldn't tell his classmates he was a girl, because they'd think he was lying. And she told him that some older boys might be mean to him and even hit him if he continued to claim he was a girl.

Then she asked him, "Do you think that you can convince yourself that you are a boy?"

"Yes, Mom," he said. "It's going to be like when I was trying to learn to read, and then one day I opened the book and I could read."

His mother's heart sank. She could tell that he wanted more than anything to please her. "Basically, he was saying there must be a miracle - that one day I wake up and I'm a boy. That's the only way he could imagine it could happen."

In the year since that conversation, Patrick's behavior has become somewhat less feminine. His mother hopes it's just because his interests are evolving and not because he's suppressing them.

"I can now imagine him being completely straight, which I couldn't a year ago," she says. "I can imagine him being gay, which seems to be statistically most likely."

She says she's fine with either outcome, just as long as he's happy and free from harm. She takes heart in how much more accepting today's society is. "By the time my boys are 20, the world will have changed even more."

By then, there might even be enough consensus for researchers to forget about finger lengths and fruit flies and gay sheep, and move on to a new mystery.

Neil Swidey is a member of the Globe Magazine staff. He can be reached at swidey@globe.com.

A War to Be Proud Of

2005-09-05T00:32:00.000+08:00

From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue: The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?
by Christopher Hitchens
09/05/2005, Volume 010, Issue 47

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

I once tried to calculate how long the post-Cold War liberal Utopia had actually lasted. Whether you chose to date its inception from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, or the death of Nicolae Ceausescu in late December of the same year, or the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, or the referendum defeat suffered by Augusto Pinochet (or indeed from the publication of Francis Fukuyama's book about the "end of history" and the unarguable triumph of market liberal pluralism), it was an epoch that in retrospect was over before it began. By the middle of 1990, Saddam Hussein had abolished Kuwait and Slobodan Milosevic was attempting to erase the identity and the existence of Bosnia. It turned out that we had not by any means escaped the reach of atavistic, aggressive, expansionist, and totalitarian ideology. Proving the same point in another way, and within approximately the same period, the theocratic dictator of Iran had publicly claimed the right to offer money in his own name for the suborning of the murder of a novelist living in London, and the génocidaire faction in Rwanda had decided that it could probably get away with putting its long-fantasized plan of mass murder into operation.

One is not mentioning these apparently discrepant crimes and nightmares as a random or unsorted list. Khomeini, for example, was attempting to compensate for the humiliation of the peace agreement he had been compelled to sign with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein needed to make up the loss, of prestige and income, that he had himself suffered in the very same war. Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism. It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

The balance sheet of the Iraq war, if it is to be seriously drawn up, must also involve a confrontation with at least this much of recent history. Was the Bush administration right to leave--actually to confirm--Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Was James Baker correct to say, in his delightfully folksy manner, that the United States did not "have a dog in the fight" that involved ethnic cleansing for the mad dream of a Greater Serbia? Was the Clinton administration prudent in its retreat from Somalia, or wise in its opposition to the U.N. resolution that called for a preemptive strengthening of the U.N. forces in Rwanda?

I know hardly anybody who comes out of this examination with complete credit. There were neoconservatives who jeered at Rushdie in 1989 and who couldn't see the point when Sarajevo faced obliteration in 1992. There were leftist humanitarians and radicals who rallied to Rushdie and called for solidarity with Bosnia, but who--perhaps because of a bad conscience about Palestine--couldn't face a confrontation with Saddam Hussein even when he annexed a neighbor state that was a full member of the Arab League and of the U.N. (I suppose I have to admit that I was for a time a member of that second group.) But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.

Notwithstanding this prescience and principle on his part, one still cannot read the journals of the 2000/2001 millennium without the feeling that one is revisiting a hopelessly somnambulist relative in a neglected home. I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United Nations, in this crisis, faced with regular insult to its own resolutions and its own character, had managed to set up a system of sanctions-based mutual corruption. In May 2003, had things gone on as they had been going, Saddam Hussein would have been due to fill Iraq's slot as chair of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. Meanwhile, every species of gangster from the hero of the Achille Lauro hijacking to Abu Musab al Zarqawi was finding hospitality under Saddam's crumbling roof.

One might have thought, therefore, that Bush and Blair's decision to put an end at last to this intolerable state of affairs would be hailed, not just as a belated vindication of long-ignored U.N. resolutions but as some corrective to the decade of shame and inaction that had just passed in Bosnia and Rwanda. But such is not the case. An apparent consensus exists, among millions of people in Europe and America, that the whole operation for the demilitarization of Iraq, and the salvage of its traumatized society, was at best a false pretense and at worst an unprovoked aggression. How can this possibly be?

THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki's short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don't credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:

"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.
Childishness is one thing--those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. "You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire." I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam's agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and--this is the really rich bit--a rational and calculating one.)

There's no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness. It has also induced him to give hostages to fortune. The claim that if we fight fundamentalism "over there" we won't have to confront it "over here" is not just a standing invitation for disproof by the next suicide-maniac in London or Chicago, but a coded appeal to provincial and isolationist opinion in the United States. Surely the elementary lesson of the grim anniversary that will shortly be upon us is that American civilians are as near to the front line as American soldiers.

It is exactly this point that makes nonsense of the sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates. But in reply, why bother to call a struggle "global" if you then try to localize it? Just say plainly that we shall fight them everywhere they show themselves, and fight them on principle as well as in practice, and get ready to warn people that Nigeria is very probably the next target of the jihadists. The peaceniks love to ask: When and where will it all end? The answer is easy: It will end with the surrender or defeat of one of the contending parties. Should I add that I am certain which party that ought to be? Defeat is just about imaginable, though the mathematics and the algebra tell heavily against the holy warriors. Surrender to such a foe, after only four years of combat, is not even worthy of consideration.

Antaeus was able to draw strength from the earth every time an antagonist wrestled him to the ground. A reverse mythology has been permitted to take hold in the present case, where bad news is deemed to be bad news only for regime-change. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of Iraq knows that its society and infrastructure and institutions have been appallingly maimed and beggared by three decades of war and fascism (and the "divide-and-rule" tactics by which Saddam maintained his own tribal minority of the Sunni minority in power). In logic and morality, one must therefore compare the current state of the country with the likely or probable state of it had Saddam and his sons been allowed to go on ruling.

At once, one sees that all the alternatives would have been infinitely worse, and would most likely have led to an implosion--as well as opportunistic invasions from Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on behalf of their respective interests or confessional clienteles. This would in turn have necessitated a more costly and bloody intervention by some kind of coalition, much too late and on even worse terms and conditions. This is the lesson of Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, and of Darfur today. When I have made this point in public, I have never had anyone offer an answer to it. A broken Iraq was in our future no matter what, and was a responsibility (somewhat conditioned by our past blunders) that no decent person could shirk. The only unthinkable policy was one of abstention.

Two pieces of good fortune still attend those of us who go out on the road for this urgent and worthy cause. The first is contingent: There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side. So that's easy enough.

The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism. The more temperate anti-warriors, such as Mark Danner and Harold Meyerson, like to employ the term "a war of choice." One should have no problem in accepting this concept. As they cannot and do not deny, there was going to be another round with Saddam Hussein no matter what. To whom, then, should the "choice" of time and place have fallen? The clear implication of the antichoice faction--if I may so dub them--is that this decision should have been left up to Saddam Hussein. As so often before . . .

DOES THE PRESIDENT deserve the benefit of the reserve of fortitude that I just mentioned? Only just, if at all. We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves. But a positive accounting could be offered without braggartry, and would include:

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. A recent essay of his appears in the collection A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, newly published by the University of California Press.

matterloaded

The Lorenzo's Oil Debate

On Fat Kids

Myanmar and China

"Sex" Education

Single Mothers and their Sex Offender Boyfriends

More On Net Neutrality

An Oldie but a Goodie

Socializing Medicine

Madonna's Madonna Complex

Hacking Democracy

Further reading on disabled newborns.

Mercy Killing for Disabled Newborns

For a Redrawn Middle East

Linkblogging

Bill O'Reilly vs. David Letterman

Linkblogging

Further discussions on intellectual property and copyright law.

What One Fewer Planet Means to Our Worldview

A Fresh Take On The Death Penalty

This Week in Status Quo

On Pedophilia

Addressing Security Concerns

Filler

Hell March

Weird Science

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

On Divorce

English as a First Language

On Argumentation

The most uncomfortable post I've ever had to write.

Bill Bennet and the Daily Show

America's turning into the Philippines one day at a time.

Lions led by Donkeys.

Net Neutrality and the COPE Act.

This week in status quo

This week in status quo:

Destruction of Architecture as a War Crime

Why Figure Skating Is Not A Sport

Islamic Editorial Cartoon Issue

Being an Internet Troll is now illegal

Dissecting the Anti-Terrorism Bill

Religious Representation in the Armed Forces

Internet matter

Countries turn backs on Hollywood

Stem cell strides may help resolve ethical dilemmas

The one and three-quarter-state solution?

Battle blogging for profit

Treating China's online addicts

Just Enough Piracy

'Glorifying' terror plan revised

Schenck v. United States

Search and Rescue

Storm Warnings

Apocalypse Soon

A Rocket To Nowhere

What Makes People Gay?

A War to Be Proud Of