Is it a Godwin if it’s accurate?

Yet another Republican has once again argued that the trauma of rape makes women infertile: Trent Franks of Arizona claimed “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are [sic] very low.” He’s just one more in a long line of thugs spouting pseudoscientific lies.

“In the aftermath of Akin’s statement, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a 1972 essay by an obstetrician named Fred Mecklenburg, who cited a Nazi experiment in which women were told they were on their way to die in the gas chambers—and then were allowed to live, so that doctors could check whether they would still ovulate. Since few did, Mecklenburg claimed that women exposed to the emotional trauma of rape wouldn’t be able to become pregnant, either. (He also argued that rapists are infertile because they masturbate a lot.) The essay was published in a book financed by A.U.L.”

A.U.L. is Americans United for Life, a pro-life advocacy group with increasing clout because of its success in drafting model state laws to restrict abortion. The line from the Nazis to Mecklenberg to Akin and Frank runs through Jack Wilke, a doctor who is the former head of the National Right to Life Committee. He said, "What is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s physical trauma." And he stuck with this when the Los Angeles Times called to ask him about Akin last year. When I asked A.U.L. head Charmaine Yoest about the claim that rape rarely results in pregnancy, she was smarter and called it “a distraction.” Abortion opponents sure do keep bringing it up, though.

Right, the “argument from hideously unethical evil Nazi experiment” is just what I’d expect Republicans to do.

I notice Mal Brough is rather flat-chested himself

OK, Australians, help me out here — I’m always getting confused by your political parties. Here in the US, the word “liberal” is strongly associated with the political left and progressive politics. Elsewhere in the world, it’s not: the Australian Liberal party refers to classical liberalism, which is actually center-right, rather conservative politics, right? And they’re in a coalition with the National Party, which is predominantly rural and conservative? I get so tangled up trying to sort these things out.

Aww, screw it. Let’s just identify them as the misogynist jerkwad party. It seems they have a unique way of sniping at the Labor Party (center left, ja? Like our Democrats?) which involves printing up sexist dinner menus.

The menu was presented at a dinner for former minister and Liberal National Party election candidate Mal Brough.

It offered up "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breasts, Huge Thighs and a Big Red Box".

Charming. Well, they just lost my vote, if ever I emigrated to Australia.

Perhaps we should all move to Sweden

It’s always the lies. With the revelation that the US is collaborating with various big name internet companies like Google and Apple to spy on everyone comes round after round of denial, and I don’t know which bugs me more. The latest is the claim that we’re only snooping on foreigners, not US citizens (as if that makes it OK, anyway).

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Oh, yeah? Here’s a screenshot from the NSA datamining tool, called BoundlessInformant (just the name is revealing, isn’t it?). Color is a measure of the degree of surveillance, with red the most and blue the least. What’s that country in the lovely goldenrod somewhere in the middle of the western hemisphere? Oh, that’s us.

boundless heatmap large

Relax, though. All those companies collaborating with the NSA are swearing on a stack of Bibles that they have nothing to do with it.

On the heels of media reports that the NSA has gained access to the servers of nine leading tech companies — enabling the spy agency to examine emails, video, photographs, and other digital communications — Google has issued a strongly worded statement denying that the company granted the government "direct access" to its servers. That statement goes so far as to say that the company hasn’t even heard of "a program called PRISM until yesterday." 

It’s Google. It’s their company policy to not be evil. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

According to Chris Soghoian, a tech expert and privacy researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, the phrase "direct access" connotes a very specific form of access in the IT-world: unrestricted, unfettered access to information stored on Google servers. In order to run a system such as PRISM, Soghoian explains, such access would not be required, and Google’s denial that it provided "direct access" does not necessarily imply that the company is denying having participated in the program. Typically, the only people having "direct access" to the servers of a company like Google would be its engineers. (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has issued a similarly worded denial in which he says his company has not granted the government "direct access" to its servers," but his language mirrors Google’s denial about direct access.)

No, not Facebook, too!

I like the point made by Cenk Uygur in this video: it’s a clear violation of the fourth amendment to the US constitution. Isn’t it cute how people are absolutists about the right to bear arms, but prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures? That we can wobble on.

I want fewer crimes, not better coverups

Glenn Greenwald has been right on top of this NSA story from the very beginning. He published a damning overview in The Guardian.

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The NY Times has published an article that’s more on Greenwald than the privacy breeches. It mentions that he begin his blog in 2005 covering news of warrantless surveillance by the Bush administration…and now here he is, discovering that the Obama administration is doing exactly the same things.

But it also gives the last words to his ideological oppenents.

His writing has made him a frequent target from ideological foes who accuse him of excusing terrorism or making false comparisons between, for example, Western governments’ drone strikes, and terrorist attacks like the one in Boston.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is often on the opposite ends of issues from Mr. Greenwald, called him, “a highly professional apologist for any kind of anti-Americanism no matter how extreme.”

Mr. [Andrew] Sullivan wrote in an e-mail: “I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war. He’s a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work.”

“Purist” is one of those code words for “principled and honest”; “apologist for anti-Americanism” means he expects better of our own government’s administration. I really detest these lying conservative weasels who think it is in our country’s best interests to hide the underhanded crap our shadier elements perpetrate; these people make excuses for criminal activities that undermine our nation’s effectiveness and corrupt the goals towards which we should be working. You want to find a true anti-American? Look for someone who rejects any effort to uncover its flaws and correct them.

A perfect example: Barack Obama is meeting with President Xi Jinping of China. I’m sure Jinping welcomes the news that he’s negotiating with a country that has as little respect for individual liberty as his does.

The timing for Barack Obama couldn’t be worse. Just as he meets for the first time to forge a new diplomatic relationship with his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, a series of exposes on the secret surveillance programs of the US National Security Agency has presented a major distraction and eroded America’s moral high ground.

The meeting at a gigantic estate in California called Sunnylands is a chance for the two world leaders to establish personal rapport and find common ground, but it’s also inevitably a joust for diplomatic leverage. After months of leaked reports about Beijing’s cyber espionage campaign against US corporations and military targets in the lead-up to the Sunnylands meeting, Obama was expected to put cyber-security near the top of the agenda—and he probably will still do so.

But now Xi has an easy rejoinder to any criticisms from  Obama: how can the US complain when has been caught running a large-scale data harvesting program? The NSA’s inclusion of Americans among its targets has raised the most controversy, but don’t forget that the program is purportedly aimed at foreigners—surely many Chinese among them.

As is common, I expect the superficial ideologues of both the right and the left to complain bitterly that the problem isn’t the crime of compromising American privacy, but the exposure of the rotten behavior by our government.

Only rapists are allowed privacy now

The hacker who exposed the rot in the Steubenville rape case has been arrested by the FBI and faces serious jail time.

At first, he thought the FBI agent at the door was with FedEx. "As I open the door to greet the driver, approximately 12 FBI SWAT team agents jumped out of the truck, screaming for me to "Get the fuck down!" with M-16 assault rifles and full riot gear, armed, safety off, pointed directly at my head," http://www.projectknightsec.com/Lostutter wrote today on his blog. "I was handcuffed and detained outside while they cleared my house."

He believes that the FBI investigation was motivated by local officials in Steubenville. "They want to make an example of me, saying, ‘You don’t fucking come after us. Don’t question us."

If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up to 10 years behind bars—far more than the one- and two-year sentences doled out to the Steubenville rapists. Defending himself could end up costing a fortune—he’s soliciting donations here. Still, he thinks getting involved was worth it. "I’d do it again," he says.

Rape a girl, get a sympathetic press and a light jail sentence in the juvenile system. Expose the rape of a girl, get a decade of prison time. Anyone else find this a little bit out of balance?

To compound the hypocrisy, Lostutter is being criminalized for cracking open supposedly private data. At the same time, it has been announced that the Obama administration has authorized the NSA to snoop on private email, chats, file storage—everything we put on the net. If the data has already been compromised to hell and gone by our own government, how can our government make a case against Lostutter? Can we expect a SWAT team to nab Barack Obama now?

What? No! Really?

I can’t believe…YOU CAN DO WHAT IN TEXAS? Jesus Fuck, but it’s time for a national intervention in that goddamn state. Redirect the drones from Afghanistan to this bloated tumor in our own country now, or if that’s politically untenable, rip out their rotten political core and replace it with something decent.

Decent Texans are bowing their heads in shame right now. Or planning to move.

South Africa’s strange fisheries policies

This set of objectives for South African fishing policy contains a very strange phrase.

(c) Co-manage oyster fishery with other spheres of government and the fishing industry in a manner that recognizes government priorities, strategic objectives of the spheres of government, the interests of fishing industry and most importantly in a manner that would please, praise and glorify that one who provided and gave man the power to rule over the fish (including oysters)

All the fish, including oysters? You mean molluscs are fish too? Those scale and fin-less ocean-dwellers that Leviticus 11:10-12 tells us are an abomination? South African molluscs will no doubt be relieved to hear that they’ve been upgraded – perhaps oysters from your part of the world will be equally blessed in the near future. And instead of managing the industry to do things like make a profit, feed people, or keep the “fish” population sustainable, it’s all about pleasuring Jesus?

I’m not bothered by the inclusion of molluscs in “fish” here: folk taxonomies twist biological taxonomies all the time, and it’s traditional to include anything in the sea, including whales, anemones, sea urchins, and squid, in the category “fish” (see also all the grains that get included in the generic term “corn”).

But specifying that their policies are for the purpose of pleasing, praising, and glorifying a god? I would like to see the metrics they’re using to determine whether their policies are meeting that goal. I think God told me that he really, really loves all molluscs, including oysters, and the only actions that would please him are a complete prohibition on killing and eating them. I’ve even got Biblical support on that one!

At least that simplifies South African fishing policy. Oh, yeah, also God told me that all violators are to be turned into chum and used to help replenish shark stocks.

Who’s afraid of the big bad GMO?

I don’t get it.

I really don’t get the opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). We’re all genetically modified organisms — the only difference between us and the ‘objectionable’ ones is the mechanism, whether the molecular novelty was inserted by intent or inserted by chance. Much of the dissent with GMOs is based either on ignorance, or is misdirected.

From Biofortified, an excellent blog on agriculture, genetics, and molecular biology, here is a good video on the subject.

Watch Next Meal: Engineering Food on PBS. See more from QUEST.

Yet there is established policy in many countries and states to prohibit use of GMO crops. When a small patch of GMO wheat was found in Oregon, Japan responded by shutting down all wheat imports from Oregon. That’s nothing but fear based in ignorance. All of our crops, everyone’s crops, are heavily modified genetically. Wild strawberries are tiny little things. Corn is a hybrid monster shaped by centuries of selection, twisted from a seedy little grass into this weird elaborate conglomeration. Wheat and barley and rye are the product of thousands of years of genetic reshuffling and selection. Walk into the produce section of your grocery store — do you really think all those fruits and vegetables are unshaped by human hands?

This strange unfounded fear of GMOs is unfortunately most strongly expressed in the political left. It’s embarrassing that political progressives are being made to look bad by raging superstition and unscientific claims.

I was interested to see in the link above that this fear is traced back to the magic word “natural”, and specifically that awful website full of woo, Natural News. “Natural” is nonsense: everything is natural. “Natural” is a non-specific modifier attached to anything a crackpot things is good, in opposition to new-fangled technology that is different from what their grandparents did. If it helps, modern genetic modification techniques are simply directed versions of horizontal gene transfer, a process that happens “naturally”, without human assistance. We’re just doing it faster and more efficiently and selecting the genes we want to move around. The current controversial crop of genetically modified wheat simply takes a natural enzyme from a natural bacterium and transfers it to the genome of a natural grass. There’s nothing supernatural about any of it.

You want to complain about something, aim a little more accurately and target real problems in modern agribusiness.

  • The ongoing concentration of control of agricultural products into the hands of just a few corporations. These corporations lock up their products and are intent on retaining control…and this isn’t just GMOs. Hybrid seed produced by standard genetic techniques has also been a tool.

  • The corporatization of farms. The family farm is fading, it’s all giant conglomerates — and the economies of scale depend on ignoring the environmental costs of the megafarm.

  • The blandness of monocultures. Try driving through my part of the world — the old, biologically diverse prairie has been almost totally replaced by endless fields of corn and soybeans, nothing but corn and soybeans.

  • The industrialization of food. What’s being done with most of that corn? It’s being processed into high fructose corn syrup and ethanol. We take food which is rich and complex and process the heck out of it to reduce it to something more convenient for industry.

Sometimes I wonder if the GMO controversy isn’t just a giant red herring thrown into the debate about the future of agriculture just to distract us from what should be real concerns.

Malls and mosques

Turkey has erupted in demonstrations and protests over the last few days. The precipitating event was an effort to demolish an historic town square to build commercial properties, but it seems to be an expression of long resentment over a corrupt and autocratic leadership, and the growing tension within a country that was founded as a secular nation but is facing a rising Islamist faction. What happens when you try to mix capitalism and theocracy, modernism with traditionalism? We’re finding out.

The scenes carried the symbolic weight of specific grievances: people held beers in the air, a rebuke to the recently passed law banning alcohol in public spaces; young men smashed the windshields of the bulldozers that had begun razing Taksim Square; and a red flag bearing the face of modern Turkey’s secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was draped over a destroyed police vehicle.

turkishdeclaration

The people are more than a little annoyed with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Many of the protesters, some of whom voted for Mr. Erdogan, said his leadership had become increasingly dictatorial. In a Twitter message late Saturday, Mr. Erdogan appeared to mock the protesters, saying he could mobilize a million people to support him in Taksim Square, while putting the number of protesters at 100,000.

“When he first came to power, he was a good persuader and a good speaker,” said Serder Cilik, 32, who was sitting at a tea shop watching the chaos unfold. Mr. Cilik said he had voted for Mr. Erdogan but would never do so again.

An older man standing nearby, overhearing the conversation, yelled, “Dictator!”

Mr. Cilik, who is unemployed, continued: “He brainwashed people with religion, and that’s how he got the votes. He fooled us. He’s a liar and a dictator.”

Now it’s tear gas and bullets and angry mobs swarming the streets.

defiance

teargasistanbul

I think I love these people. 90 demonstrations in 48 cities, hundreds injured or arrested, two have been killed, all in the face of extreme police action, and they keep on fighting for what is right. They are actually standing against an increasingly authoritarian, conservative, and religious government.

I wish we Americans had that kind of courage.