The below is a positive turn to a custody fight that I have been following with some sadness and anger:

Ruling Lets Women Share Rights Custody Fight – NYT

Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins had a child while joined in a same-sex civil union in Vermont.

The breakup of their relationship, and what it means for their daughter, Isabella, has for years been a source of tension between the Vermont courts, which recognize both women as Isabella’s mothers, and a Virginia judge who granted sole custody to Ms. Miller, Isabella’s biological mother, reasoning that Virginia law makes same-sex unions “void in all respects.”

But yesterday a three-judge panel of the Virginia appeals court unanimously accepted a ruling of the Vermont Supreme Court that conferred parental rights on both women.

[...]

The court ruled that a 1980 federal law, the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, required Virginia to defer to the Vermont court.

The law requires states to give full faith and credit to other states’ custody determinations. Because Ms. Miller filed papers in Vermont to dissolve her union to Ms. Jenkins in 2003, the appeals court said, the Vermont courts thereby gained sole jurisdiction over custody and visitation issues concerning Isabella.

[...]

[ Link ]

I have whined elsewhere extensively about the whole India Shining thing, primarily motivated by my own personal education, through my father, of the Indian freedom struggle and the values it drew on and hoped to build the new nation upon. The New York Times today has an excellent op-ed piece by Pankaj Mishra which voices my fears in an elegant way:

Gaining Power, Losing Values – New York Times

[...]

Upholding business interests above all in its foreign policy, as in its domestic policy, China at least appears to be internally consistent. The gap between image and reality is greater in the case of India, which claims to be the world’s largest democracy, with an educated middle class and a free news media.

And yet fundamental rights to clean water, food and work remain empty abstractions to hundreds of millions of Indians, whose plight rarely impinges on the news media’s obsession with celebrity and consumption. The country’s culture of greed partly explains why a woman is killed by her husband or in-laws every 77 minutes for failing to bring sufficient dowry.

Pundits in India deplore, often gleefully, American excesses in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and the inadequacies of the American news media in the run-up to the war in Iraq. But the Indian news media has yet to carry a single detailed report on the torture and extrajudicial killing of hundreds of civilians in Kashmir over the last decade.

Chinese nationalism is a tamed beast, occasionally unleashed by the Communist leadership to stir up mass protests against Japan and America. But in India, religious nationalists have run wild in the last 10 years, conducting nuclear tests, menacing minorities and threatening Pakistan with all-out war. In 2002, members of a Hindu nationalist government in the state of Gujarat, in western India, instigated and often organized the killing of as many as 1,600 Muslims.

Free markets and regular elections alone do not make a civil society. There remains the task of creating and strengthening institutions — universities, news media, human rights groups — that can focus public attention on the fate of the powerless and oppressed and spread ideas of human dignity, compassion and generosity.

[...]

For Western nations to criticize Chinese investments in Africa or Indian overtures to Myanmar may seem hypocritical in light of the West’s history of ruthlessly exploiting Africa while appeasing its brutal dictators. But, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

However tainted in practice, the idea of virtue cannot be discarded in policymaking. By treating it with contempt, the ruling elites of India and China may soon make the world nostalgic for the days when America claimed, deeply hypocritically, its moral leadership.

[ Link ]

The UCLA police, perhaps in an attempt to match their real world police counterparts at the LAPD, went freaky on an Iranian-American student, using a taser on him multiple times for his refusal to stand up even as they are tasering him. The incident started with the student allegedly showing some reluctance to leave when challenged for an ID. Those present report that he was on his way out when the police arrived. The college newspaper, The Daily Bruin, offers this today from a kid named David Lazar:

Beware of easy knee-jerk reactions

Police are here for our safety, so resist the urge to pass judgment until you know all the facts.

Hmm, the usual bit about let’s hold off on all opinions until we have enough time to direct your attention elsewhere. So, what is the first line of young Lazar’s Daily Bruin article:

In my opinion, he was asking for it.

Ah yes, no knee-jerk reaction or passing of judgement here!

Great article about the state of things in Australia:

Australia’s Other Great Sport By Haroon Buksh:

[...]

The Australian public is increasingly being served a smorgasbord of politically charged rhetoric, an outpouring of invective masquerading as public debate. From questions of loyalty, discussions over identity, sermons about values, or warnings against extremism, the current discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims is presented in the context of an existential threat to the Australian way of life.

[...]

We should be careful, however, not to disconnect the state of modern Australia from its global context. Since 9/11, Western governments have been relentlessly and unashamedly constructing public opinion in support of their brutal campaigns at home and abroad. A campaign that was ostensibly launched to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Centres has morphed into what George Bush calls ‘the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation’.

No longer is the objective the capture of Osama bin Laden or the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure. Rather we are told the primary objective of the ‘war on terror’ is now the defeat of ‘Islamo-fascism’, an ‘evil ideology’ that seeks to return the world to a dark 7th century medieval version of Islam – the aims of which are apparently shared by a ‘section’ of the Muslim community in Australia.

[...]

The real and tangible relationship between western foreign policy and its reactionary consequences has yet to be even mildly explored. The Australian government continues to persist in its absolute state of denial and refuses to entertain such a debate. But failing to address the most critical underlying grievances is a stance that sadly threatens the lives of every Australian.

In a speech to the Conference of Australian Imams on the 16th September 2006, Andrew Robb, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, reiterated the government’s official line of holding the Muslim community solely responsible for a set of conditions generated as a consequence of a brutal and oppressive foreign policy. He stated: “And, because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem”.

[...]

It seems what the world desperately needs today is a war on ignorance, not a war on terror. As the current debate serves only to close our minds, we all have a responsibility to keep them open.

WaPo says:

Worried CIA Officers Buy Legal Insurance

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others with knowledge of the program.

The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They worry that they will not have Justice Department representation in court or congressional inquiries, the officials said.

The anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA prisons in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods, including temperature extremes and simulated drowning. The White House contends the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes.

[...]

Isn’t government funded private insurance a wonderful thing? Perhaps they offer similar plans for al Qaeda?

[ Link ]

Boing Boing:

Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists:

In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University’s John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism’s risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage — this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I’ve read since September 11th, 2001.

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

[...]

Direct link (PDF).

USA Today/Gallup July 28-30:

%s who favour:

Requiring Muslims, including those who are U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID:
39%

Requiring Muslims, including those who are U.S. citizens, to undergo special, more intensive security checks before boarding airplanes in the U.S:
41%

A simple resolution to the old paradox about the conflict between one’s security and one’s liberty: sacrifice someone else’s liberty!

[via Polling Report]

At first blush, a lot of the surveys regarding the Israeli attack on Lebanon are discouraging in that they reflect the effects of media propaganda, but if you look closer there is evidence that the public is not entirely buying the single side. Here are some polling results:

• 65% think the U.S should not support either side (USA/Gallup)
• 45% blame Israel a great or moderate aount (USA/Gallup)
• 43% (to 39%) want Israeli cease-fire (CNN)

Of course this is all co-existant (in the polls) with huge sympathy for Israel, and it probably looks like I am clutching at straws here.

At CounterPunch, Floyd Rudmin (who I hope to quote a lot of, from what I have seen of his writing) provides a great lesson on Bayes Theorem to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of NSA monitoring with regard to identifying terrorists. But I have some comments, which can be found after the quote below.

Floyd Rudmin: the Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation

[...]

The US Census shows that there are about 300 million people living in the USA.

Suppose that there are 1,000 terrorists there as well, which is probably a high estimate. The base-rate would be 1 terrorist per 300,000 people. In percentages, that is .00033% which is way less than 1%. Suppose that NSA surveillance has an accuracy rate of .40, which means that 40% of real terrorists in the USA will be identified by NSA's monitoring of everyone's email and phone calls. This is probably a high estimate, considering that terrorists are doing their best to avoid detection. There is no evidence thus far that NSA has been so successful at finding terrorists. And suppose NSA's misidentification rate is .0001, which means that .01% of innocent people will be misidentified as terrorists, at least until they are investigated, detained and interrogated. Note that .01% of the US population is 30,000 people. With these suppositions, then the probability that people are terrorists given that NSA's system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.0132, which is near zero, very far from one. Ergo, NSA's surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.

Suppose that NSA's system is more accurate than .40, let's say, .70, which means that 70% of terrorists in the USA will be found by mass monitoring of phone calls and email messages. Then, by Bayes' Theorem, the probability that a person is a terrorist if targeted by NSA is still only p=0.0228, which is near zero, far from one, and useless.

[...]

I believe this is honest and valid reasoning. However it has to be read closely because Rudmin does not use more familiar terms such as 'false postive' and 'false negative'.

He points out that the chance is very low that a person is actually a terrorist if so identified by NSA. The if-then order here is important to note. Another way to say it is to say that (simply because of the extremely low incident rate of terrorists) there will be a lot of false positives. A lot of people who are not terrorists will be wrongly labelled so by the NSA.

What he does not say or imply, but is not clear (at least in my reading, to a layperson) is that given a high accuracy rate (of the NSA test for terrorist) the chance of a false negative is quite low. In other words, the NSA monitoring (if accurate) will not miss a real terrorist. The if-then here is reversed.

IMHO, this is a crucial difference for two reasons:

1. A high false positive rate, given a low false negative rate, is an acceptable outcome for screening tests. Further tests/filters can be applied to narrow the count and eliminate false positives. The monitoring here serves as a first, coarse, red flag.
2. To the public (to whom I assume Rudmin is addressing his argument), this is of utmost relevance. Their concern is not so much with being swept up as a false positive (for they are sure they can easily exonerate themselves in further tests), but with making sure that no terrorist gets away unnoticed (false negative).

The public has demonstrated many times over that they are willing to swallow the fear-mongering and sacrifice significant chunks of liberties (especially if they believe it to be those of others) in return for perceived security and toughness. While Rudmin makes a powerful argument in pointing out that the monitoring does a poorer job than the toss of a coin (given his assumptions on accuracy rate, etc), this argument falls on mostly deaf ears.

So the LTTE is in a bad spot now and wants the Indian govt to step back into the conflict in Sri Lanka. And just as in Kashmir, the people are stuck in the middle of this terrorism from all sides, and I doubt any new IPKF will do better than the previous one. A weakened LTTE, in the absence of all other Tamil representation which they so meticulously eliminated, will be only more encouragement for the Sri Lankan government.

I can remember the headier days of the LTTE, when Prabhakaran and his entourage lived in upscale houses in the street adjacent to my own, and the occasional bloody streetfights in Pandi Bazaar or elsewhere (not to forget the bomb threat we received by postcard, one fine day!)… and wondering how this would all end 20 years later. And it is now 20 years later, and it seems to be much the same.

FT.com – Sri Lanka rebels express regret over slaying of Rajiv Gandhi
By Jo Johnson in New Delhi

Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas last night expressed "deep regret" over the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi, then Indian prime min-ister, and called for a "new relationship" with India in which New Delhi would play an active role in resolving the island's ethnic conflict.

The unprecedented statement, made in a televised interview by Anton Balasingham, the Tamil Tigers' chief negotiator, reflects the separatist group's increasing isolation following the European Union's decision last month to follow India, the UK and the US in putting it on a list of banned organisations.

[...]