Ken MacLeod (Trotskyist winner of Libertarian SF awards) has a long article about why he isn't one of the pro-war left.

Massive fraud by the pharmaceutical industry

Corporate sponsored science has been a problem for a while, leading to serious questions both about openness and the independence of the results. The pharmaceutical industry has long been the biggest culprit here, paying for studies and then leaning on researchers to ensure that results are cast in the best possible light (and refusing publication and embargoing the data if it is unfavourable). But I never thought they would be this blatant:

[Medical] journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered evidence that many articles written by so-called independent academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.

Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters. While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for 'lending' their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed.

These papers endorsing certain drugs are paraded in front of GPs as independent research to persuade them to prescribe the drugs.

In other words, rather than being filled with scientific studies, medical journals are filled with bought-and-paid-for infomercials; it's not science, it's marketing.

This is probably the most widespread and egregious case of scientific fraud in history. It makes every article about pharmaceuticals in every journal questionable, and undermines the output of an entire discipline - and everyone who depends on it.

New Fisk

First evidence of foreign fighters in Iraq.

Botched US Airstrike kills 9 Afghan children

Question to cheerleaders for the "war on terror": how many children is a single terrorist worth? How many is it permissible to kill in an effort to get one man? And does the equation change if you miss?

Giant lizards from another star

From the Independent's view from inside the "Green Zone":

As in their military bases elsewhere in Iraq, the Americans have re-created the world from which they came. Their cafeterias serve burgers with barbecue sauce, peanut butter and jelly, even lobster - all imported, not least as a precaution against poisoning. As for the banks of TV sets, if they are not tuned to American football then they will be showing the neo-conservative, war-mad Fox News. This is channel of choice for the entire US military, as it is for the CPA's Republican-appointed civilian press officers...

This is exactly what the originator of that quote was referring to when he talked about American soldiers being "maintained in self-contained biospheres, like giant lizards from another star". It's as if The Tripods have come, plonked down one of their big green domed cities in the middle of Baghdad, only instead of a methane atmosphere, the US brings Fox News... ideologically and hermetically sealed, and insulated as much as possible from the wishes of their new subjects.

Zaoui says SIS mocked him in secretly videotaped interview

No wonder they don't want anyone to see it.

A West Bank of their very own

More on the latest US tactics in Iraq:

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.

In plain English, that's collective punishment and hostage-taking, tactics used by Israel in the West Bank, and outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.

It's not just wrong, it's also stupid. Short of Viceroy Bremer going on TV to spit on the Koran and wipe his arse with the Iraqi flag, I can think of no better way to lose the battle for hearts and minds than to behave like the Israelis. Treating Iraqis like the Palestinians will simply drive more people to terrorism and fundamentalism... the exact opposite of what the US claims it is trying to achive.

The US and Kyoto

A British think-tank has figured out how to stop the US from benefiting from its abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol: tax 'em.

At the moment, countries which cut carbon emissions by e.g. imposing a carbon tax or tradable emissions regime run the risk of being at a competitive disadvantage compared to countries who externalise their costs and pollute. The solution is to impose carbon taxes on imports produced in non-Kyoto compliant regimes, thus providing both an incentive for governments to comply, and eliminating their unfair advantage if they don't.

(But the best bit of the article is the think-tank spokesman saying that "there is only a certain amount of time people can go around behaving like teenagers who don't have to care about anybody else". This is both a sadly accurate description of US foreign policy, and indeed of most of our local right-wing bloggers...)

Two-faced liars

The CPA argues that it can't possibly hold actual elections in Iraq, because they don't have time to conduct a census and prepare voter rolls - while scotching Iraqi plans to do exactly that:

Iraqi census officials devised a detailed plan to count the country's entire population next summer and prepare a voter roll that would open the way to national elections in September. But American officials say they rejected the idea, and the Iraqi Governing Council members say they never saw the plan to consider it.

The CPA are two-faced liars, afraid of democracy because they won't get to dictate the result. But worse for them, Iraqis now know it, and know that all the American talk of democracy and elections is just a mask for the installation of a puppet government. No wonder they're shooting people...

What the hell is going on here?

The SIS has lost an hour from a videotape of their interview with Ahmed Zaoui.

The whole story is outrageous. The SIS and/or the police interviewed Zaoui shortly after his arrival, taped the interview without telling him (a clear violation of police procedure), and of course failed to inform him of his rights. When queried, they point the finger at each other, and the SIS claims that the tape is classified.

But it gets worse. They deliberaely withhold information from the Inspector-General, and don't tell him that the tape exists (shows how effective that "check and balance" is). Then, when the IG is told, they claim that an hour of the tape's audio is missing, and provide him with written reports. They don't provide the original interview notes, because they've destroyed them.

What the hell is going on here? Do we have the keystone cops for an intelligence service, or is there something they don't want the Inspector-General to know?

For an intelligence service to show such disregard for the evidence they're supposed to be basing their decisions off is shocking. For them to then try and hide their laziness or incompotence from the person appointed to check their decisions is worse. It smacks of a service which believes it is unaccountable, and does not have to justify its decisions to anyone. This simply is not good enough in a democracy...

(I'll ignore their excuses about being unable to hide agent's faces if they provide the tape to Zaoui's lawyers, because that's what they are - excuses. They don't want to provide it, and so they trot out something in the hope that people will stop asking...)

This whole sorry affair has exposed both incompotence and some dangerous attitudes within the SIS. They collect "evidence" by uncritically surfing the net; they "lose" things; they think they are not accountable to anyone, and are actively hostile to any attempts to impose democratic oversight. We don't just need a review of the law - we need a full-on purge to destroy these undemocratic attitudes and bring the SIS back into line.

Interview with the resistance

Here

Yet more evidence that those who claim that the resistance are "Baathist dead-enders" or "Saddam-lovers" have their heads up their arses. These people don't love Saddam - they explicitly say they'll fight him if he returns - instead they're pissed that the Americans are running their country, and at their treatment by American soldiers:

Another incident soured Abu Mujhid on the occupation, he says. When a Humvee passed him and his friends one night while they were standing around drinking tea, the soldiers got out and accused them of having yelled obscenities at the troops.

"They cuffed our hands and one soldier kicked me," he says. "Then they released us because we had done nothing. It was that night I went and got my gun. The next night I shot the soldier that kicked me. But his (body armor) protected him. I don't think he died."

There are ways the US can solve this. Actually delivering on the promise of democracy (first at a local level, then at a national one) without trying to stack the result is an obvious step. But the easiest way would be to moderate the behaviour of their own troops so that they don't mistreat the people they're supposed to be protecting. Preventing incidents like the above would deny the resistance their largest source of recruits, and go a long way towards "drying up the sea".

Bush drops steel tariffs

The lesson we can take from this is clear: when a dumbarse US President imposes tariffs for his own electoral advantage, the response should target him, by directly threatening his chances of reelection. "Smart sanctions" for free trade...

Smokefree Environments Amendment Act

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the local Libertarians about this. They see it purely as a matter of private property rights - but then, they see everything that way. To me, it is very much a public health and OSH issue.

Consider this: no other industry in new Zealand would be allowed to expose its workers or the public to chemicals with the carcinogenic effects of cigarette smoke. They would either be forced to provide adequete safety equipment (bartenders in gasmasks!) or to use a different process.

I don't see why offices, hospitals, bars and restaurants should be treated any differently from sawmills, factories and chemical plants in this respect. You're not allowed to expose people to toxic crap, you're not allowed to poison them. People can poison themselves as much as they want in the privacy of their own home (or out in the open air), but not where they're going to affect others. Mill's principle trumps private property rights any day of the week.

Daily Hate

Automated testing software. You know, the type used by HR agencies to screen candidates and see whether they can do complicated things like entering data in Access or creating a formula in Excel.

The problem is that any decent software interface provides multiple ways of performing common tasks, so that people can find their own way of working. There's at least three different ways of changing the number format in Excel, for example... unfortunately, the piece of software I was playing with today recognised only one of them. Mimicing the complete user interface was too much work for the programmer, it seems - so as a result, people who don't do things exactly the way some braindead HR prole does them end up swearing repeatedly at the screen.

Then there's being asked to create a macro to do X, then being told you can't use the VB editor to write it. Grrr.

The best way to test software proficiency is to give people a suitably complex task, and then examine the results. Unfortunately, this would require that the tester actually knew something - and of course, if they knew anything, they wouldn't be working in HR.

Disgusting

Garth George's reaction to Winston's pamphlet? Racism is good, innate, and patriotic...

What sewer do they get these people from?

Update: Russell Brown has a good go at George here.

"St Helena without Napoleon"

The Guardian has an amazing expose on America's gulag-in-the-sun at Gunatanamo:
part I
part II

They're right; the worst part isn't the conditions (which, while appalling and barbaric, are pretty much par for the course in the US prison system), but the way that these people have no rights, no hope, and no way out. These people are detained at the pleasure of the President, and will only be released when he says so. Now what was that revolution back in 1776 all about again...?

And yes, we should all feel threatened by this. There are already three people being held as enemy combatants within the US itself, two of them American citizens. The government has deliberately labelled people as enemy combatants, shifted them to a military jail, and denied access to lawyers when their trial in ordinary, civillian courts looked like it wasn't going the government's way. It has threatened to do such to coerce guilty pleas from suspects. This does not bode well for human rights in America - and because America was previously the beacon everyone looked to, it does not bode well for the rest of the world either.

And now, we wait

After three days of hearings, the judge in Ahmed Zaoui's judicial review has reserved his decision, saying that it may not be possible to reach a decision before christmas.

So, now we wait, and hope that the courts will stand up for human rights when the government so obviously won't

Direct Democracy III: A people's veto?

So far the discussion of binding referenda has focused on positive referenda - the electorate directing government policy or passing legislation. But there's also another form of direct democracy that hasn't received much discussion: negative or abrogative referenda, in which the electorate challenges laws that have already been passed.

Obviously a system of binding referenda can be used for this purpose (repealing laws in the same way that Parliament does), but it can also be adopted as a standalone measure, a "people's veto" on government legislation.

How does it work in practice? From the Swiss experience it seems to promote wider consultation and compromise over legislation, granting greater power to opposition parties. Any party or group who feels that they are losing out can mount a challenge, and this acts as a powerful moderating influence.

The flip-side is that it also encourages legislative conservatism. Fear of a challenge makes governments unwilling to lead public opinion or introduce potentially unpopular measures. This may be a good thing, but at the same time I can't help but be concerned about the prospects of human rights legislation under such a system; if we'd had negative referenda, homosexual law reform would have been delayed by a decade or two, not necessarily because the public was opposed, but because politicians would have been unwilling to take the risk. There's also a danger that governments will seek to enact measures by administrative decisions (which is how much of Rogernomics was passed) rather than legislation, reducing the opportunity for public input. Obviously though I'd hope that that sort of behaviour was punished at the ballot box.

To a certain extent, the above effects depend on the threshhold required to force a poll. The Swiss make it very easy (100,000 signatures in a country of 7 million, or less than 5% of the electorate), and thus have frequent referenda. Our "traditional" figure of 10% would make challenges much rarer (but at the same time more likely to succeed), and probably give governments less reason to worry about them (which may be a Bad Thing). As before, it comes down to the same question: how much direct democracy do we really want?

Good

A Rotorua judge has issued 63 arrest warrants for people who failed to show up for Jury service.

Jury service is an important and fundamental duty in our society, and it's a shame that not enough people take it seriously. Hopefully this will change the minds of at least 63 of them.

Departures

So, both Chad Taylor and Debra Daley are packing it in. But at least Circling Apollo will be sticking around...