Hope is not a plan

One of my major news sources is the BBC. A knock-on effect of this is that I keep getting exposed to the curious (read: crazy) panic about sharp objects that has swept through the UK, moving in parallel with the general fear of their own youth that seems to have swept the nation as well. Previously, I've reported on entirely rational plans like evicting families with problem kids, and the general manufacturing of a knife epidemic in the UK. In that latter post, I made a crack about how I'd just order my kitchen knives from Amazon to avoid the risk of being arrested for walking home with them from the local Tesco.

Well, apparently the fear is one up on me there, as a new BBC article reports that, in true scandal fashion, a teenager managed to order some machetes online.

Trading standards officers have called for a ban on online knife sales after a machete was sold to a 15-year-old for £1.50 over the internet.

"As knife crime remains a problem in many of our towns and cities, it beggars belief that so many traders are still prepared to sell potentially lethal weapons to children," said Ron Gainsford, chief executive of the Trading Standards Institute (TSI).

They're going to be awfully disappointed to learn that people can stab each other with screwdrivers and pointed sticks. I'm not sure what the game plan will be the next time someone is beaten to death with a cricket bat.

Clearly, knives (as with guns and pretty much any other weapon) raise the likelihood that violence will result in serious injury and death. That said, they don't cause the violence, and the increasing tendency to panic about kids and assume in advance that they are all criminals isn't going to help promote non-violent resolutions, nor will make those same kids feel like they can comfortably talk to their parents, the police, or other authorities if there's an issue.

Seen from a distance, the current panic in the UK about "those kids these days" is curious and a little sad.

BBC article

You may already be aware, as it's made a significant circuit around various social networking sites, of the current case of 1LT Dan Choi, who is about to be drummed out of the United States military because he violated the risible "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy by, effectively, telling. This is unfortunate since, as the text of circulating petitions tells us:

Lt. Dan Choi, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, an Iraq War veteran, Arabic translator and California native, is a capable soldier and leader who could continue to play a vital role in this time of war.

It's hard to imagine his gender proclivities playing a significant role in his ability to apply his skills to defending our country. Perhaps even more to the point, the military men and women I've been friends with were strongly ambivalent about this kind of trivia about their fellow soldiers and sailors. Admittedly, I've mostly spoken with members of the Navy and the Marine Corps, but I'm willing to use them as a representative sampling of our armed forces generally.

This link from Courage Campaign encourages you to sign a petition that Lieutenant Choi will bring with him when he goes to talk with Speaker Pelosi. The petition encourages the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," since as long as the law is on the books, our military is relatively hamstrung in dealing with these situations, whether the people involved care or not.

I encourage you to go a step beyond and contact your representative and senators. Let them know that this is important to you, and that it will impact your willingness to vote for them in the future.

You can click here to learn how to contact your representative and senators.

Call or write your legislators today. Let them know you want your country to use all its available resources to win our wars and maintain the peace.

First, a viable left must be clearly and strongly patriotic. This is distinct from nationalism, i.e. "my country right or wrong." Rather, patriotism implies a love of place and country. Patriotism may sometimes require us to strongly criticize our nation. Patriotic criticism is motivated by a desire to improve the American situation.

Tim Fong has written an excellent article on how to build a viable American left. You can read the full article here at 3QuarksDaily.

The British National Party, home to your UK version of the shrinking perimeter crew, likes to sling about the racism and tickle the fears of people in the UK. Consider this lovely pair of recent speeches from party chairman Nick Griffin (who must, we imagine, loath having a .eu extension on his url):

Establishment Parties Have Turned Britain into a Multicultural Bankrupt Slum, Says BNP Leader

Contrasted with:

"Not in Our Name" - BNP Leader Denounces Racist and Sectarian Vandalism.

Of course, the latter article includes this premium remark from dear Nick:

“Desecrating gravestones – whatever the opinions and even crimes of those who they commemorate – is beyond the pale. Even the guilty dead have innocent relatives...

We're discussing the desecration of Romanian gypsy graves here, so apparently they, like all those damned darkies and Poles, are "guilty." Lovely.

One of the BNP's claims has been that immigrants get to "jump" public housing queues -- that is, somehow they get access to public housing before UK native-born residents. Of course, like any other public process, you could just check your goddamn facts before lying. Or, rather, making claims.

Fortunately, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has done the factchecking for them, and has discovered that they're lying. Or wrong. Whatever.

According to the study, 64% of people who arrived in the UK within the last five years live in private rented accommodation.

But after five years, when many immigrants are able to get residency and become entitled to government help, one in six live in social housing - exactly the same proportion as those who were born in Britain.

In other words, they act just like Brits. Sounds like assimilation to me (although, admittedly, everywhere in the world seems to do a poorer job of assimilation than the U.S.).

As the EHRC points out, the issue then is the perception that there is inequality. Which may, we imagine, come from the BNP straight-up lying about it.

BBC article

Shortly on the heels of the BNP demonstrating their willingness to lie in support of their long-term plan to be horrid people, party chief Nick Griffin has suggested that we ought to just start capping those immigrants. Unless you push him to be honest and say it, in which case he'll withdraw a little:

"But the only measure, sooner or later, which is going to stop immigration and stop large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans dying on the way to get over here is to get very tough with those coming over.

"But Europe has sooner or later to close its borders or its simply going to be swamped by the Third World."

This is, by the way, why I appreciate BBC interviewers, for their willingness to call people out on their bullshit. Griffin's revised "plan" would still be murder (yeah, good luck making it to either coast in your life raft). One could imagine recommending scuttling boats and deporting people, and then one might have the EU's current policy.

Apparently Nick fears having those damned immigrants even touch European soil.

BBC article

Following a resounding beating by the Russian armed forces, the military of Georgia subsequently faced the indignity of the Georgian parliament officially declaring that the military was entirely at fault. Now, in what is probably a more even-handed and neutral report, the Georgian military again faces an indignity, learning that it probably wasn't even as effective as it thought it was.

Specifically, a report from the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies suggests that the Russians accounted for exactly half of their own air unit losses.

Notably, this is not the first report CAST has released that is highly critical of Russian air power in the Ossetian conflict. Consider this earlier report that focuses on the operational success of Russian air power in the Ossetian war, without regard for the cause of its air casualties.

In this situation, the Russian Air Force — with its quick reaction times and powerful strike capability — was to provide immediate support to the surrounded peacekeepers and the weak South Os-setian armed groups. Ideally. Russian aviation should have suppressed the Georgian artillery and multiple-launch rocket system positions before the end of August 8. .Another urgent task was to deliver air strikes on the Georgian 4th Infantry Brigade, which was storming Tskhinvali.

Russian aviation attempted to accomplish these objectives, but immediately lost three Sukhoi Su-25 ground-attack aircraft to Georgian anti-air fire. After that, according to eyewitness accounts, there were no Russian aircraft over Tskhinvali on August 8 or the following day — that is. during the most critical period of the conflict. In effect, the Russian military command was forced to bring motor-rifle units into battle from the march, without first gaining superiority in numbers and firepower.

Incidentally, this older report suggests the Russians lost up to ten aircraft as mission kills (meaning they could no longer operate), although three or four of these at least managed to make it back to Russian air bases.

Naturally, a spokesman for the Russian military denies any friendly fire happened. That said, if Russian ground forces really did shoot down three of their own aircraft (and if they'd been going without air cover the majority of the time, who could blame them?), how much more often did Russian ground forces take fire from their own air units?

BBC article

Following a go ahead from a federal judge last week for a court case against him by a prisoner who alleges he was tortured, John Yoo is, unsurprisingly, looking to appeal.

As a reminder, Yoo penned the charming memo that described torture in very narrow terms, as only being torture if it caused pain equivalent to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

Fun fact - California law tells us that "The crime of torture does not require any proof that the victim
suffered pain." (Penal Code, section 206)

That said, Professor Yoo teaches International Civil Litigation at Cal, so perhaps he's not so hep to state and national torture laws. I'm curious if anyone's bothering to go and ask him; his office hours are Monday from 10-12 and 2-4 in 890 Simon Hall. I encourage Boalt students to go give him an ask about his ideas about torture and the ability to define it in the executive branch.

S.F. Chronicle article

This week met the curious news that Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan had suggested that the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to genocide. Here are the words:

Mr Erdogan made the controversial comments last Friday, telling NTV television: "The incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There's no point in interpreting this otherwise."

This is curious, of course, since the Turkish government has, to some extent rather notoriously, rejected the suggestion that Ottoman Turkey committed genocide back in 1915. This has been a big problem for Turkey both in terms of EU entry and in terms of rapprochement with neighboring Armenia.

Naturally, Chinese officials seized on this disjunction between Erdogan's words and his country's official stance. State vehicle Xinhua took a moment out to highlight statements in the EU parliament made against Erdogan's statement, right before going on to talk about how peaceful and harmonious life resumes in Xinjiang (for definitions of "peaceful" that involve pipe beatings of Uighurs by Han Chinese).

Although Erdogan's remark is frankly silly in context, it also gave the PRC a new way to point to the outside world and shout "Bad man!" while vigorously suppressing those within its own borders.

This is, of course, the normal pattern. Or, to paraphrase a friend, "It's only okay for China to kill Chinese people."

BBC article

Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped from her Chechen home and murdered this week. Ms. Estemirova was investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya as part of the human rights group Memorial.

In recent months, she had been gathering evidence of a campaign of house-burnings by government-backed militias.

There is some depressing mirroring here, as Ms. Estemirova was awarded the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Prize in 2007, that prize being named after journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was murdered while she was also investigating Russian abuses in Chechnya.

This is, in fact, a terrible time for activists in Russia. As the BBC article reminds us, another activist with whom Ms. Estemirova had worked, one Stanislav Markelov, was killed on January 19th. Although the BBC article does not mention this, journalist and anti-fascist investigator Anastasia Baburova was also killed by the same attack. And, as I've mentioned before, Magomed Yevloyev was "shot while resisting arrest" in the troubled Russian province of Ingushetia.

It is hard to be optimistic about the likelihood of an actual investigation into this latest murder.

BBC article

I'm in my home town of San Diego at the moment, rather than my current home in the Bay Area, which gave me the opportunity to run into a canvasser for Equality California at a local mall. I stopped and chatted with her, and learned about EC's mission in the area, which is to bring grass-roots awareness of issues of marriage equality into the areas of the state that voted most heavily for Proposition 8, leading to our current constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

I've already discussed my own objections to the ban (again, here). Briefly, it's a fixing in law of a religious idea. As laws are functionally about the setting of community standards, I'm simply asserting that I think this is a community standard that is far from universal, and on the way out.

If you are in, say, a mall in Orange or San Diego county, you may run into an EC canvasser. You have the opportunity to give them money, but their main point is to spread the idea of equality to people who may not really have given the topic enough thought before they voted (or didn't!) on Proposition 8. From my own experience with San Diego as a home town, I think many, many people simply haven't put themselves in the position of personalizing the people involved. It's different to say "Of course marriage is always heterosexual" than it is to say, "You, Bob and Tom, can not say that you are committed to each other for life." A lot of us just like things to stay the way they are, but when we face a specific case, realize that we're cool with the change. So it goes.

You can learn more about EC at their site. If you see an EC canvasser at the mall, take the time to say hello. They're probably having a pretty long, if rewarding, day.

Apparently we have a state budget.

The condition of California's state budget is world news. That's not so surprising, given the scale of our state economy.

We'll have to see the full spread of budget cuts in the coming week. There was never going to be a pretty solution to this one, but it looks like the pressure against raising taxes won out, so it's all cuts.

As I've discussed previously, there's some irony here, as the ostensibly conservative and self reliant counties whose residents most vigorously oppose any tax increases stand to benefit the most, as they're being floated by counties like mine. This was, if anything, an opportunity to tax us at their benefit. I suppose I could be grateful that they've decided to take a hit rather than cost me money, but I think that's a dysfunctional way to face a financial crisis.

There are a number of untested beliefs at work here. One is that there is cruft to cut from our state budget. This is demonstrably false, and we're seeing the continuing consequences as education and health care take hits. A second is that if we do anything to raise taxes at all, businesses will abandon the state. To this, we have to say, "Well, if there's a tax rate that drives businesses out, let's actually test that." California is already widely rated as a terrible business environment, yet we're still a gigantic, world-scale economy with some of the most important businesses in the world headquartered here. Given that, we clearly have not yet hit the drive-out limit on taxes.

Or, more concisely, I'm sad to see that we'll have more people undereducated and uncared for because we magically believe what we believe.

I strive to be a good citizen. This includes being aware of local and world affairs, voting in each election, giving to local and global charities, and, notably, giving blood.

Giving blood is a remarkably simple, low-effort way to actually save someone's life. This is an opportunity most of us aren't accorded in our daily lives or in our workplaces. By putting aside roughly one hour every two months, you give one of your fellow Americans a chance at something more concrete than simply "a better life" - you give them a chance at life.

Many blood donation centers are run by the American Red Cross. You can find a nearby donation center by going to their site. You may also have non-ARC centers nearby. I personally give at the Stanford Blood Center.

Giving blood is super easy. One hour every two months, and they give you cookies and juice at the end (along with t-shirts, movie tickets, and all sorts of other stuff, really). It's by far the easiest and laziest way to save a life and be a good citizen, and other than that hour, it doesn't cost you one dime.

Give blood, save a life. Easy enough.

The RNC is in full-on shill mode at the moment, pushing a heavy duty ad campaign against health care reform. This is a topic I've been discussing with a lot of friends lately, as we think that people who object to health care reform fundamentally don't understand what's at risk here. The risk is not so much "I'll have to wait longer for a doctor if health care reform passes" as it is "I will be killed by a young man whose wife needs an operation they can't afford if reform fails."

Just to put that in stark terms for those of you who aren't necessarily motivated by altruism toward your fellow Americans.

Over at factcheck.org, they've taken a look at the latest RNC ad campaign that tries to scare Americans into thinking an attempt to generate affordable health care is a horrible, horrible thing. Consider these hilarious excerpts:

In “Ad Facts” released with the TV spot, the RNC states that the plan “Could Drive Doctors Out Of Business” in rural areas, but supports that claim with a news article that quotes a handful of doctors stating their personal opinion. It also cites a July 14 estimate by the Congressional Budget Office (updated July 17) that the House bill would leave 17 million without health insurance. Is that really a risk? About half of those 17 million would be illegal immigrants, according to the CBO, and nobody is proposing that they should be eligible for coverage, least of all the RNC. And anyway, the same estimate projects that 37 million otherwise uninsured persons would gain coverage.

That is to say that the RNC is complaining that we'd be preventing illegal immigrants from getting government-funded health care. Who knew they were so interested in handing out federal money to illegal immigrants?

The RNC is also noting a potential drop off in some coverage but not a massive contrasting gain in coverage. Or, even more briefly, you're looking at a net 30 million-person gain here.

What about this lovely bit?

Similarly, the “Ad Facts” also claim that the Obama plan “Could Lead To [an] Estimated 113 Million People Losing Private Health Insurance.” But they wouldn’t “lose” coverage altogether. The RNC cites House testimony by John Sheils of the Lewin Group. What Sheils actually said is that if a proposed new federal health insurance program is opened to everybody (which is permitted, but not required in the House legislation) then 122.9 million Americans would sign up for it, including 113.5 million projected to switch over from private coverage.

Basically, the advertisement looks at 113.5 million people switching from private coverage to more affordable federal coverage and count that as "lost" coverage.

Nothing could more clearly show that the RNC are full-on shills for health insurance companies. If you switch away from Blue Cross to more affordable coverage, they count that as "lost" coverage? That's like saying that people who choose to ride the bus have "lost" their cars.

If you have a Republican representative or senator, it's time to give them a talking to. Their party is representing companies that revoke coverage from cancer victims rather than representing you, and that's a bad, bad deal for you.

Much to my dismay, torture facilitating hack (and, hey, likely war criminal) John Yoo continues to be Berkeley faculty. Right now, I'm rooting for disbarment so Cal can dump him.

Last time I wrote about Yoo, I hoped that some Cal students might go question him directly about justifying torture. As it happens, some highly motivated BBC folks did the job:

I am so pleased. I'd really love each of his lectures to go this way. I may need to take a day off once he's actively lecturing again.