From this year's MSF (Doctors Without Borders) top ten humanitarian crises list:

"There is no question that civilians are increasingly victimized in conflicts and further cut off from lifesaving assistance, often deliberately. In places like Sri Lanka and Yemen, where armed conflicts raged in 2009, aid groups were either blocked from accessing those in need or forced out because they too came under fire. This unacceptable dynamic is becoming the norm. Our teams on the ground are witnessing the very tangible human consequences of these crises directly, either in war zones or in the AIDS and nutrition clinics in which they work. We're therefore compelled and obligated to speak out.”
Dr. Christophe Fournier
MSF International Council President

Ignoring the academic rivalry and usual partisan venom infesting the blogosphere on this topic, I spent last night acquiring and analyzing some supporting data as a lens through which to review the IDL source code that the East Anglia researchers were accused of altering to manipulate global climate temperature statistics.

I'll post code snippets and descriptions later when I have time, but the short version is as follows: Everyone stop, they weren't doing what you think they were doing, and people on the Right are taking the chatter in the README files way out of context. The shifts inserted into the functions in question were put there to compensate for supporting datasets that had been congruous up until 1960 when they sharply diverged. The shifts affected interpolated data in a statistically insignificant manner, only inserting a "fudge factor" to account for the divergence, not to skew existing data in a direction that it didn't naturally go. The code was later superceded by better algorithms that duly represented more complete datasets acquired later.

I don't know if they were hiding source data or dodging FOIA requests or whatever, but if they intended to publish this research in a peer-reviewed academic journal (and influence the IPCC) they had to have every T crossed and every I dotted. This source code tells a story of scientists practicing due diligence, not of political hacks manipulating information. The rest of it I leave to the talking heads.

Props to Pyr0 for the link to the report. The American Medical Association. a longtime force for reason and caution in the convoluted health/pharmaceutical landscape of the United States, has issued a 30-page report on the use of Cannabis for medical purposes which concludes, in part, that the

Results of short term controlled trials indicate that smoked cannabis reduces neuropathic pain, improves appetite and caloric intake especially in patients with reduced muscle mass, and may relieve spasticity and pain in patients with multiple sclerosis. However, the patchwork of state-based systems that have been established for “medical marijuana” is woefully inadequate in establishing even rudimentary safeguards that normally would be applied to the appropriate clinical use of psychoactive substances. The future of cannabinoid-based medicine lies in the rapidly evolving field of botanical drug substance development, as well as the design of molecules that target various aspects of the endocannabinoid system. To the extent that rescheduling marijuana out of Schedule I will benefit this effort, such a move can be supported.

Or something.

Effective December 19th, citizens of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia can travel visa-free throughout the borderless Schengen area of the EU, which includes most of mainland Europe. These newest three states were preceded by Slovenia and Croatia, while Bosnia and Albania will be reviewed next year. Kosovo is not currently slated for inclusion in the Schengen agreement and has as yet been given no visa roadmap by the EU.

Selahattin Demirtas, the Deputy Chairman of the Kurdish party in Turkey's parliament, took the floor of the Turkish Grand National Assembly and spoke words that would have gotten him arrested and probably killed just a few years earlier.

During the last period of the Ottoman Empire, in 1915-16, the Union and Progress Party systematically pursued a policy of extermination of the Christians who had been the native peoples of the country for centuries.

No national security considerations can be an excuse for the annihilation of a population by means of forced displacement and massacres. Governments, in an effort to clear themselves of the guilt, resorted to denial and to distortion of historical facts to conceal the truth. They rewrote the history. In school books, Armenians are portrayed as hostile figures, exaggerating the incidents of violence by Armenian activists and never telling the truth about the massacred Armenians.

So it contains suggestive language that seeks to cement undue authority from power-grab laws, The Big Memo at least gives states some breathing room as regards their own intrastate regulation of Cannabis use. It's a step.

The jackass con-man trying to scam a Montana town with his American Police Force antics has received demands from the Serbian Government to remove the Serbian national emblem from all his equipment, uniforms, and web site.

While the world around me persists with the infantile Time of My Life and Sparkle Motion jokes, I note with sadness the passing of Irving Kristol this weekend at the age of 89. I remember when he caught my complete and undivided attention with his Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea whilst I was adrift in Denver in the late 90s. The greater body of his work was already behind him by then, but I enjoyed his occasionally snarky Wall Street Journal columns immensely.

His subtle contributions to the political landscape of the 70s are gifts to admire and appreciate, for all their occasional stumbles. His prying open doors bolted shut by intellectual homogeneity did more than merely redefine and dress up Harrington's intended pejorative. He helped to lend a new respectability to would-be radicals of all stripes in showing that there lay in store brighter rewards for independent non-party thought and action than the lonely, broken existence to which the politically brave were consigned in Richard Nixon's America. Unfortunately, the movement he so vocally supported gained a different kind of momentum and was given its own pernicious, arbitrary stereotype complete with an erstwhile figurehead of a Conservative president, and it is unlikely Kristol will ever receive the credit he deserves from any corner of the ideological mosh pit.

Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family, and I will follow his son William's career with a keen interest.

I wonder how far I could get by sarcastically pushing all these aging technophobic Democrats into establishing an IEPA. The Internet Environmental Protection Agency would enforce Federal standards for 'net pollution, including fines for excessive twittering, worthless blog posts, spelling "more" as "moar", unnecessary use of the word "pooper" -- hell all of 4chan could be made to disappear in a week.

Above all the IEPA would protect precious endangered websites that are threatened with disappearing off of DNS entirely due to mega-site encroachment, netblock battles and IANA corruption, lack of browser backward-compatibility with beta HTTP versions and obsolete scripting languages, or simple lack of public interest.

I think we could pull it off. Seriously.

What kills me most about the supposed newsworthiness of Ron Paul's "audit the Fed" bill isn't that it's worthwhile, or even that it makes any sense whatsoever. It is that it is actually garnering support in the House of Representatives in the form of about half of the elected congresspersons in the lower house. Now ignoring for a moment how oblivious some of our elected representatives seem to be regarding the evolution of our currency system and monetary policy, this bill stands about as much a chance of getting through the Senate as I do of getting through the Sound of Music. This is nowhere more evident that in that the mere fact that Rep. Paul wrote a bill that has supporters is now considered newsworthy.

That's not to say I dislike the guy, I rather like him as a person and think he has good ideas and even greater intent. A former Obstetrician from Pittsburgh, he was an Air Force flight surgeon during Vietnam, has been married to the same woman for 52 years, and is a practicing Episcopalian. His failing comes from his having read Hayek's excellent Road to Serfdom at an impressionable age when it was thought that Hayek had all the answers, and subsequently falling under the influence of the rather stone-age monetary ideas of the Von Mises school.

The problems caused by his misguided ideas about values and currency systems are compounded by the fact that he wastes taxpayers' time authoring and introducing legislation that he knows damned well will go nowhere. Ron Paul has such a reputation for introducing worthless, throwaway legislation for the House to shoot down that his nickname is "Dr. No." He has sponsored acts to repeal the personal income tax, pull out of the UN, close all overseas military bases, and other rather cold shower bills. It is terribly difficult to take such a person seriously in any legislative context, and it is beyond me that Rep. Paul hasn't figured this out yet. Getting anything done in Congress requires infinite patience, subtlety, capacity for compromise, and above all the ability to build consensus. That Ron Paul does not exhibit these characteristics in great measure make him admirable as a human being in an age where honesty and forthrightness blur all too easily into hypocrisy and appeasement, but make his effectiveness as a legislator questionable at best, and a caricature at worst.

What I was talking about here is now creeping to the forefront, approached so far only by journalists who apparently don't mind sparing our fearless Congresspersons the embarrassment of bringing it up themselves.

Kennedy’s Death Raises Issues of Succession
New York Times

Kennedy's Seat May Remain Empty for Months
CNN

Fate of Kennedy's Senate Seat Unknown
Wall Street Journal Blogs

Kennedy's Death Leaves Critical Vacancy
Chicago Tribune

With Open Senate Seat, a Long List of Hopefuls
Boston Globe

etc etc etc. Naturally the indignant posture taken by the Dems when they ran the risk of Romney appointing a Republican to stand in for John Kerry has been replaced by a frantic rush to permit their new Dem governor to appoint a Democrat before the big Health Care vote. Their only obstacle has ever been themselves.

So a certain political party in State X pushes a 2004 law through to prevent Gubernatorial appointments of a Senate replacement in State X (since one of their own left his Senate seat to enter the race for the presidency), on the grounds that the Governor is from the other party and likely to appoint a replacement from that same other party. Then later, when it looks like one of their Senators is about to die, they begin to clamor for a law allowing this same thing in State X, but this time because under the current system it takes five months to elect a replacement instead of appoint one. And this time the Governor is from their party. And this time there are votes coming up for which they desperately want to have as many voices on their side as possible.

You probably know who and what I'm talking about, and both sides would get away with it if they could, but there is still a word for that.

I mean, screw the Afghanistan vote and the health care debate, THIS IS NEWS! The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from Blackwater as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials. Executives from Blackwater helped The Company with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which allegedly did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

In the massive rush to cut costs and outsource so much of our nation's military and intelligence operations (if not analysis or management yet), is this a surprise to anyone? I mean, whether you're scared and indignant like some or "right tool for the right job" like me, this is ancient history by now. The program went nowhere, Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq has been long since revoked, they changed the company name to Xe Services, and they're concentrating on law enforcement and military training stateside now. The only -- and I mean ONLY -- reason that this is even considered newsworthy is because it involves two of the Times' favorite targets: the CIA and military contractors.

This should be easy enough for most of you. Below are five headlines from today's news, and then the five news sources listed in different order. Now without peeking at the news or cheating and looking behind the cut, see if you can (in your head, I have no time for quiz applets) match the headline to the news source. Extra credit if you avoid reading the hint that follows.

Okay first, the headlines:

• 75 Killed in Baghdad Blasts
• From Prison, Karadzic Does Not Regret War Role
• EIB provides EUR 25mn for West Balkan Energy Efficiency Fund
• Body in Suitcase ID'd as Missing Swimsuit Model
• Swiss Bank UBS to Divulge at Least 4450 Account Names

• Voice of America
• Washington Post
• FOXNews
• New York Times/Reuters
• ISI - Emerging Markets

Amnesty International has published a report on Saudi Arabia detailing what we all know but what our leaders prefer to ignore, due to the U.S.' precarious mutually beneficial relationship with the kingdom over the last thirty years.

Kids, it's a functional Kingdom, as in "the year 1245 chasing dragons with catapults" kingdom, with few meaningful democratic processes and a monarch wielding utter and complete authority over his subjects. What were you looking for, some Schweitzerian Utopia? Unless and until the king relinquishes control of his economy, military, judiciary, and legislature to the residents of his country, the liberty and lives of these same citizens will be utterly dependent on His Highness' whim for their very sustenance. No political pressure, no bad PR, no economic sanctions will ever accomplish this.

Take a big guess what, historically, does.

Few things infuriate me more than how blind each end of the political spectrum is to its own hypocrisy, and the controversial Obama health care bill is leeching contradictions out of the very stone.

Conservatives are all about mistrusting politicians' ability to make medical decisions! Until we recall conservatives' blind allegiance to the lies that built and sustain certain components of the Controlled Substances Act, their dark-ages ideas about teen sex education, and any pet mandatory vaccine initiative their big pharma buddies talk them into pushing.

Liberals are compassionate and want taxpayer dollars to prop up government social programs like universal healthcare, easy-to-acquire housing for people with bad credit, and free needles for addicts! Liberals just don't want the taxes to come from their income bracket, they sure the hell don't want to be the ones to pay for the fallout when their mortgage house of cards falls apart, and they don't want the needle programs in their neighborhood clinics, oh hell no.

You're all full of shit. Every goddamned one of you. Get the fuck off my radio and out of my news and collectively kill yourselves.

By Martin Amis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/17/martin-amis-iran/print

Tasty read, even tastier re-read. I love the way he writes.

On October 10th 2007, journalist and harsh Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death as she left her Moscow apartment. She was almost finished authoring a stinging exposé on the Russian military's excesses and atrocities in Chechnya, and had already been kidnapped, poisoned, and subjected to mock executions in punishment for her humanitarian work.

On January 19th 2009, Politkovskaya's legal advocate and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot to death as he left a news conference in Moscow.

In 2007 the Reach All Women In War organization established the Anna Politkovskaya Award for women human rights defenders in conflict zones who, like Anna, stand up for the victims of this conflict, often at great personal risk.

The first such award was presented on the first anniversary of Anna's death by Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire to Natalia Estemirova, a colleague of Anna's who carried on her work in the same dogged, fearless manner.

I suppose it was only a matter of time.

Наталья Хусаиновна Эстемирова
1959-2009

Abdul Qayum Zakir, also known as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is from Helmand Province, the massive district in southwestern Afghanistan from which 42% of the world's opium originates. He joined the Taliban in 1997 when he felt "called" to take part in Jihad. His exceptional organizational skills propelled him up the ranks until he found himself a senior fighter in the Taliban in 2001 facing the world's most advanced and capable armed forces, frothing mad and hot on the heels of the masterminds of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As the Taliban regime crumbled under the coalition onslaught he quietly surrendered to U.S. forces in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Shuffled between various detention facilities under military custody, he eventually landed in Guantanamo Bay in 2006. His tenure in prisons hadn't softened his zeal one bit. During an administrative review a memorandum was submitted that stated Zakir had made it clear that "it would be fine to wage jihad against Americans, Jews, or Israelis if they were invading his country." He was eventually transferred to the custody of the Karzai administration in Afghanistan in 2007.

And then, for some reason, a little over a year ago he was released.

Intelligence sources have indicated that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar appointed Zakir as a senior military commander in mid-2008, which would suggest that he was drawn directly into the ranks of the trusted upon his release, and that his freedom may have in fact been negotiated by Taliban sympathizers within Karzai's government.

He has since reappeared on the radar of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, according to a recent NY Post article. Zakir's ongoing efforts to restructure the Taliban to his liking has resulted in the firing of a number of incompetent or corrupt Taliban commanders, creating a flood of disgruntled former employees that coalition intelligence organizations hope to exploit for solid information. Information on Taliban troop movements, resources, the whereabouts of Mullah Mohammed Omar, or perhaps Osama Bin Laden himself.

None of which is relevant to the most pressing question that comes to mind: why did the U.S. turn him over to Karzai (this was on Bush's watch), and why the hell did Karzai let him go?

What

I

Wouldn't

Pay ...

So we at least have some information on the meeting, which is being downplayed by the official Russian state news organs.

( Kasparov's statement to Obama, with subsequent interview )

NOTE: What some of you may be unaware of is that Garry Kasparov left professional chess four years ago to support the United Civil Front, a progressive movement opposed to Putin's administration.