Northman's Fury

The map and rankings of Europe and other countries in regards to their safeguards and protection of privacy.


(Click for larger image)

Little surprise to me that the US ranks near the bottom. Canada does considerably better, but it is important to note that we have gotten worse over the last year, which is also no surprise given our governing party. The truly significant thing is that it seems to be part of a pattern. Looking at the table underlying the map, there are a whole host of countries where protection of privacy is decreasing or decaying, and only Slovenia showing any improvement.

We're becoming a much uglier world.

Worth a listen.



Via

The fact that the New York Times has decided, in their infinite(simal) wisdom, to hire Bill Kristol as an Op-Ed writer has caused quite a furor in the land of blogs. Granted, it is wrong to give someone with such a poor record a promotion, but I choose to see this as a great opportunity.

I remember reading a biography of Muhammad Ali, where someone commented that if you wanted to get rich, all you had to do was keep betting on him. Someone took the advice, and success was his.

Kristol is the flip side of that comment. he's been consistently wrong about everything for the last six years. To be a good prognosticator, you can simply read his weekly column and predict the opposite. This is going to be a goldmine for blogging posts.

Benazir Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal has been chosen to take over her Pakistan People's Party, after her assassination on Thursday.

He will become president in a ceremonial capacity while he finishes his studies at Oxford University.

Bilawal told journalists at the Bhutto family home: "My mother always said democracy is the best revenge".

Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who will run the party day-to-day, said it would contest January elections.

This is, as Cernig observes, oligarchy over democracy, and very much in keeping with the way politics in Pakistan works. Truly democratic parties don't remain family fiefdoms to be passed from one generation to the next as the PPP has for the last forty years.

In the larger picture, while Benazir Bhutto may not have been the best choice for a democratic Pakistan, she was an important figurehead for the democracy movement, and with her death, that movement suffers. As Eric Margolis notes, there really isn't anyone capable of reaching the masses as she could.

It will be impossible to fill Bhutto's shoes. Her adoring supporters saw her as a combination of saint, martyr and redeemer.

The martyr part became reality on Thursday. It is, I think, one of the reasons the PPP is willing to go with a dynastic succession; to play on that sympathy. It is also one of the many weaknesses of such successions. As monarchies uncountable have shown, no family consistently produces good leaders generation after generation. And if Bilawal turns out to be a good leader as well, he can always follow his mother into martyrdom.

Just the time to be without internet access for a couple of days. I'm still catching up and for coverage, I'd suggest going to the Newshoggers where I'll be spending the next couple of hours reading up myself.

There are a lot of questions about who was really responsible for the attack, and it seems unlikely to me that there is really any hope of ever determining the truth. Too many competing political interests are involved, which will ensure that any conclusions or claims put out by any of them will be highly suspect. To some degree, it really doesn't matter. It has been done, and it is the consequences that will have to be dealt with, since the perpatrators are unlikely to ever see justice.

My only real thought at this point comes as a follow-up to something I posted last month.

Reading the Pakistani authorities reaction to the planned protest,

He told the Associated Press there was a "strong threat" of another suicide bomb attack against Ms Bhutto, who survived an assassination attempt in Karachi on 18 October that killed more than 140 people.

almost makes you wonder where the threat is coming from.

It also got me thinking. The situation in Pakistan is clearly tense, passions are on the rise, and a quite popular figure is about to take to the streets with, if the crowds greeting her return are any indication, possibly hundreds of thousands of supporters. Any crackdown is likely to be quite nasty and bloody.

Musharraf is desperate, and its very hard to predict what a desperate man will do. But as ugly as a heavy-handed crackdown would be, what if the "strong threat" is real? And what if it succeeds?

With all the pent-up rage and frustration there right now, what happens if Bhutto becomes a martyr?

Sadly, it appears that I am going to learn the answer to that question, and by all accounts it isn't going to be pretty. John Robb sees things much as I do:

The assassination of Bhutto (a critical social systempunkt that rose in importance due to the evaporation of the Pakistani government's legitimacy) has plunge the country into chaos. Ethnic tensions are on the rise and critical infrastructure has been been sabotaged. The train system has been particularly hard hit -- trains burned, track destroyed, bridges burned -- such that major sections of it will be closed for a month (once repairs begin). 200 bank branches were looted and factories were torched. There are widespread shortages of gasoline, water, and food mostly due to a nationwide shutdown (a combo of strikes, fear, and a three days of mourning). Road transportation is very dangerous due to local rioters (mostly in Karachi). Paramilitary Sindh Rangers have been given "shoot to kill" orders against protesters in Karachi.

This may be the straw that causes Pakistan to disintegrate.

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in the wake of a suicide bombing that killed at least 14 of her supporters, doctors, a spokesman for her party and other officials said.

No time for deep analysis, but with everything else going on in Pakistan, this is very, very bad.

Recently, there was a bit of a furor over Time making Putin, Person of the Year. I didn't have any issue with the choice, and it is because of moves like this that he's actually earned the title.

Russia's delivery of nuclear fuel to the Bushehr power station makes it unnecessary for Iran to pursue its enrichment program, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

Lavrov, interviewed by the Moscow daily Vremya Novostei, also said any suggestion of "regime change" in Tehran had to be ruled out in discussions on verifying Iran's nuclear program.

"We believe that Iran has no economic need to proceed with its program of uranium enrichment," Lavrov told the daily.

"We are trying to persuade the Iranians that freezing the program is to their advantage as it would immediately lead to talks with all countries of the "six," including the United States."

Such talks, he said, would aim to end any suspicion that Iran had any secret aim to produce nuclear weapons. "Iran's agreement to this proposal is in everyone's interest."

Iran was aware, he said, that should there be any deviation from agreements to build Bushehr under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "we will freeze our cooperation."

The situation is a win-win for Moscow. They've set up a quite reasonable middle path between the Iranians and the US and put themselves in place right on the forks, where the actions of the two adversaries will be seen as choosing their actions. It reminds me of the brilliant ploy Putin used on missile defence earlier this year. There as here, he maneuvered his opponents into a position where he appeared to be the reasonable and conciliatory one, and left them scrambling to find some manner of continuing towards their goals that didn't appear like a total admission of those goals.

In this situation, Russia has set itself up to continue as a block to US ambitions for regime change in Iran, while at the same time demanding that Iran tie itself more closely to Russia and remain dependent on Russia for its energy needs.

Even if both sides remain obstinate, (which seems likely), Russia comes out looking good for trying to be the peacemaker.

It is the main reason I have always respected Putin. While he may not have the best hand, he is a master strategist who knows how to play it beautifully.

In short, he's fun to watch, particularly when he plays against the diplomatically-challenged Bush administration.

While the Iranian Christian population is celebrating the season, our defence minister is doing his Bush-minion best to ruin the holiday with a Merry Fuck-you from Kandahar.

Canada's defence minister has accused Iran of providing weapons to the Taliban and fuelling the conflict in Afghanistan, where thousands of Canadian troops are involved in military operations.

As per usual when accusations about the mullahs are being bandied about, no evidence is provided. We'll just have to trust them, I guess.

Apparently the latest poll show John McCain is picking up support.

McCain has somehow become the second choice of both Rudy and Huckabee supporters. He appears to be everyone's candidate of last resort.

Ouch! How would you like to be known as the candidate people support because everybody else sucks? And what does that say about the rest of the field?

[Via]

A couple days ago, Scott Adams posted the following:

The December 17th issue of Time had some interesting statistics on voters. When asked the “most important quality” for a candidate, Democrats picked “good judgment” 33% of the time, and Republicans picked it 21%. The other choices were caring about people, leadership, character, and experience.

Does it bother you that good judgment wasn’t the top choice for three-quarters of all voters?

Obviously experience doesn’t help if you have bad judgment. But a person with good judgment would consult with people who have experience. Clearly, judgment is more important than experience.

. . .

Clearly, good judgment should be the most important quality in a president. But how often do you hear someone say that a candidate “has good judgment”?[emp. mine]

What brought that to mind was reading that Ken Burns has thrown his support behind Obama, and at least part of the reasoning behind it:

He also said he appreciated Obama's stand against the war when other candidates supported it.

"I think this is a human being who knew in advance how unnecessary and foolish this war was," Burns said, adding that Obama knows how to distinguish between "fraudulent wars," and "those that really need to be fought."

As a state senator, Obama spoke out against the invasion of Iraq, while Clinton voted for the use of force resolution.

"His record is utterly clear and unassailable on this point," said Burns.

Particularly when matched up against Clinton, Obama has shown better judgement and foresight regarding Iraq before the war and recently regarding Iran, and yet he is attacked for his lack of experience.

Which quality should trump the other?

A rare copy of the Magna Carta has been sold for £10.6m ($21.3m) in an auction at Sotheby's in New York.

. . .

Its most notable legacy in present-day English law is the principle of Habeas Corpus, which protects people against unlawful imprisonment.

It was an important legacy in the US as well. The Bush administration just made sure it's no longer part of present-day American law.

Since I'm a Canadian, I can't endorse any of the candidates, (well, now that Colbert is out), but I am of course following the races relatively closely given the overarching impact the US has on Canadian and world politics. As the race closes on the first primaries, the mud-slinging is starting in earnest. I came across two posts today regarding the Clinton campaign and her allies going after Obama. Interesting reading, to say the least.

Let’s be clear about the continual smears from the Clinton surrogates: “Hey, this guy is a Muslim, black, drug-dealing, madrassah-going, unelectable, scary brown Hussein — but we didn’t mean it the way you took it.”

The Clinton campaign, like any county sheriff from the Deep South in the Jim Crow era, is making this campaign about one thing: “N***er, N***er, N***er.” It’s repulsive and inexcusable. 1 To put this in context, Atrios uses a phrase “scary brown people,” when he justifiably points out some Republican appealing to racism and xenophobia. Appeals to fear conflate all of these: Muslims, black people, madrassah-attenders, brown people, various Husseins, inner city drug dealers, etc. The Clintonistas are doing the same thing right now. Every day this month.

And that's pretty tame compared to Jill Tubman's translation of Bob Kerrey's comments.

And on the Republican side, Ron Paul's shot at Huckabee over his Christmas ad is, well, certainly not mincing words.

Sadly, No! has a sneak peek at history’s greatest book, where Jonah Goldberg will explain to us all how all the historians of the past six decades were wrong and how fascism is truly a liberal philosophy.

From the front flap

Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term, “National Socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

God, the crimes of the Nazis just grow worse and worse! Money used to educate their population! Free health care and jobs for everyone! Pensions for the elderly! Will the horrors never cease!

Of course, there’s little question that the Nazis racial quota system was pretty harsh, though comparing it to something like affirmative action takes a considerable amount of chutzpah.

It should be truly amusing to watch Goldberg’s ideological brethren argue that all of the above are far more significant identifiers for fascism than things like massive no-fly lists, torture, denial of habeas rights, warrantless wiretapping and data-mining, giving their mercenaries immunity from prosecution, and invading other countries.

Oh, and one other important note from this brilliant purveyor of conservative knowledge:

The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Beware the educated woman! There's a reason they call them feminazis!

Expanding a little on what I said in this morning's post, I came across this article a couple days back:

A Who's Who of America's top scientists are launching a quixotic last-minute effort this week to force presidential candidates to detail the role science would play in their administrations -- a question they say is key to the future of the country, if not the world.

"Right now we have a confluence of issues facing candidates: embryonic stem cell research, global warming, science and technology education, biotechnology and energy policy -- it's just becoming an avalanche," says Lawrence Krauss, a physics professor at Case Western University, and author of the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. "I think at some level, you have to get some insight into what the candidates know, or what they're willing to learn."

Behind the call is a growing fear that the United States is falling behind in science and technology education, and that a leader who is scientifically illiterate won't be able to keep the United States ahead in the global economy.

It is a measure of just how bad the science situation in the US is that such an effort should be judged quixotic. And for me, it is not just that bad science makes for bad decisions, because most of the bad decisions the Bush administration has made aren't even based on science. It is the whole way of scientific thinking that needs to be promoted.

Even how we discuss topics like evolution is interspersed with faith. One shouldn't "believe" in evolution, one should simply accept that the available evidence supports the theory. The Vatican, for all its faults, takes the right tack on this; accepting evolution and the science behind it, while believing that its part of God's plan. I have no issues with that view because it doesn't try to interfere or argue against the science as the Intelligent Design crowd does.

Take the issue of abstinence-only sex education programs. If they actually produced the desired results, then the argument could be about the ideological morality behind them. As it stands, it should be just a simple viewing of empirical data showing that comprehensive sex education works better, but if you don't have the capacity to accept empirical data, then you'll continue to argue for the program on moral grounds despite it's ineffectiveness.

Ultimately, that is what this issue means to me. I generally don't care what people believe, in either the faith or ideological realms, but I can't support someone who proves unwilling to change their viewpoint when presented with factual evidence to the contrary. In this, topics like evolution and climate change are litmus tests. If you can't accept the evidence for them, then I have little faith that you'll accept evidence for anything else that challenges your worldview, and I wouldn't want somebody like that in a powerful leadership role.

The number of states refusing federal money for "abstinence-only" sex education programs jumped sharply in the past year as evidence mounted that the approach is ineffective.

It's nice to see that there are at least some people in government who have the ability to accept empirical evidence and not base their policies purely on ideological grounds.

Of course for those who are ideologically based, the answer is the same as their answer for everything else; throw more money at the ineffective program and believe harder.

"We're talking about the health of millions of youth across the United States," said Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association. "We know abstinence education offers the best for them. Now is the time to put more emphasis on that message, not less."

And if there is anything the US Congress is good for, it's throwing more money into ineffective programs. (See: War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror. Add: War on Sex)

Congress is considering boosting the $176 million in annual funding for abstinence programs by $28 million.

And so the war between rationality and ideology continues.