Just what Iraq needs

New secret police! (or maybe just the old ones with new paymasters)

Hint to Americans: democracies don't have secret police, and Iraqis know it.

Why I will never be allowed to serve on an ethics committee

Because my first reaction on reading about this was not utter horror at Man's Interference With The Natural Order, but "cool".

Basically, scientists have taken stem cells from a mouse, differentiated them into sperm cells (a significant achievement in itself), and then fertilised an egg with the result. The implications are staggering. If perfected and applied to humans, this could

• expand the range of infertility problems currently treatable by artificial means. If there are problems with sperm or egg production, they may be able to be differentiated from stem cells.
• end the reliance on donated eggs; instead we'd be reliant on donated stem cells, but that's a lot less limiting
• allow homosexual couples of either gender to have children using only their own genetic material. Gay males would still have to find a birth mother, but that's really the only limit.

I think all of the above are good things, in that they allow the fulfilment of human desire and vastly diminish the obstacles in the path of what is for many a central goal of their life.

As for the Natural Order? Fuck it.

And another outrage

The US has been arresting Iraqi union leaders. I guess the American versions of democracy and freedom do not include the freedom to organise for better working conditions.

While Sock Thief is being so big on opinions, perhaps he'd like to consider the "Anti This War Now" position...

Can we get off the list?

Well, can we? Because it seems to be saying "please bomb me", or maybe "I'm a crawling toady to the hegemon". So can we be removed? Please?

Failing that, we'll just have to start sprouting corporate shells whose sole purpose is to front for German and French companies so they can bid for Iraq contracts. If this is anything to go by, we ought to be able to make a healthy profit while still doing things for half the cost of Haliburton...

Latest outrage from Iraq

They're no longer counting dead civillians:

Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian casualties from the war and told workers not to release figures already compiled, the head of the ministry's statistics department told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The health minister, Dr. Khodeir Abbas, denied that he or the U.S.-led occupation authority had anything to do with the order, and said he didn't even know about the survey of deaths, which number in the thousands.

Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department, said the order came from the ministry's director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, who told her it was on behalf of Abbas. She said the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, didn't like the idea of the count either.

"We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn't agree with it," she said, adding: "The CPA doesn't want this to be done."

For some reason this is reminding me of a child sticking its fingers in its ears and going "lalalalalala I can't hear you". The conquest of Iraq killed civillians. The occupation has killed more. Not counting them is not going to change that. It's not even going to hide it from the Iraqis - they know when their relatives go missing (hell, half the time they get shot right in front of them). This is primarily aimed at us, at westerners, for whom the deaths in Iraq are nothing but a statistic. By denying us that statistic, they are trying to prevent us from asking whether the war was worth it - and the fact that they're trying to prevent us from even asking suggests that they wouldn't like our conclusion...

Prosecutorial misconduct threatens terrorism convictions

The convictions of three men convicted of belonging to a terrorist cell in Detroit may be quashed after it was revealed that the prosecution withheld relevant evidence from the defence - most notably, testimony undermining the credability of a key prosecution witness.

Stupid American prosecutors - they're so intent on sticking another conviction on their scorecard that they cut corners. If these men are released, the prosecution will have only themselves to blame.

Who wants to work for the occupation?

After their initial mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army, the CPA started working on a new one. Unfortunately, things aren't going so well - out of the initial intake of 700, over a third have quit:

Touted as a key to Iraq's future, the 700-man battalion lost some 250 men over recent weeks as they were preparing to begin operations this month, Pentagon officials said.

"We are aware that a third ... has apparently resigned and we are looking into that in order to ensure that we can recruit and retain high-quality people for a new Iraqi army," said Lt. Col. James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman.

At best, these people have decided the pay sucked and that they didn't want to be collaborators and work for the occupation. And at the worst, they've taken their new expertise and knowledge of American methods, and gone straight to the resistance...

Making a difference?

In my earlier post about playing journalist, I cited Matt Robson as saying that the best way to make a difference was to target Labour MPs and convince them to take a stand. But how?

Well, the Clerk of the House has a handy list of MPs, including their contact details and email addresses. That's a good place to start. A polite email reminding them of what New Zealand and the Labour Party are supposed to stand for, and asking them to convince their cabinet colleagues that we're a better country than this would be good.

I'm not sure if this will make a difference; our MPs could all be bastards who don't listen to the public. But we have to try.

The new UN Special Envoy to Iraq is a kiwi.

Today is International Human Rights Day, the 55th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Onion is out of a job

Apparantly Bush signed some important legislation today, to the tune of Sousa's Liberty Bell March - better known to the world as the theme for Monty Python's Flying Circus...

Who will be eaten first? - for those who like John Chick and Great Cthulhu.

Pessimism about Russia

NZpundit asks about problems with the Russian elections, and whether they signify "a new Soviet block in 10 years or a strengthening democracy?"

I'm pessimistic. Putin is an authoritarian, who will gladly misuse state media or start a war to hold power; and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anyone who can standa against him. Worse, the Russian people are willing to tolerate it.

However, I think NZPundit's fantasies of "a new Soviet block" are just that - fantasies. Putin is no communist (well, not any more), and has no need of ideological props to support his rule. And the electorate aren't communists either - in fact, the communist vote has collapsed, with voters turning to "national and socialistic" parties (an unfortunate combination there...) This resurgent Russian nationalism might lead to an effort to regain past glory and empire - but the only way communism is coming back to Russia is if there's another revolution.

Meanwhile, it seems that NZPundit's commenters have gone been reading way too many Left Behind novels. Next they'll be talking about Kofi Annan in a blue turban...

More playing at journalist

I went to a public meeting in support of Ahmed Zaoui tonight, organised by Amnesty International. Two-hundred people packed into a room (coincidently the same room used by Winston Peters to demand direct democracy last time I played journalist) to hear assorted speakers. These included:

• Tom Scott (cartoonist) - whose chief theme was "we are a better country than this". Our treatment of Zaoui shames us all, and undermines our reputation as a supporter of universal human rights.
• Gregory Fortuin (ex Race Relations Conciliator) - who was reminded of his time in South Africa, twenty years ago, and felt that he had to stand up and be counted in the same way that New Zealanders had stood up for South Africans.
• John Shaw (from Amnesty International) - who laid out the reasons why our treatment of Zaoui violated both New Zealand and international law.

Matt Robson was also there, and took the opportunity to slag off his Labour colleagues for "keeping their heads down". In response to an earlier question about the most effective way to protest, he said that people should target those 52 Labour MPs and get them to place internal pressure on the government. Robson has been a sterling defender of human rights over this, and I'm becoming tempted to switch my vote to the Progressives simply in an effort to keep him in Parliament.

Finally, there was an answer to the question posed in my earlier post: "Of course [the police] had an obligation to disclose. That didn't happen". Hopefully someone will be asking the police some nasty, pointy questions about withholding relevant evidence over the next few days.

Update: Amnesty is also holding meetings in Auckland tomorrow, and Christchurch on thursday. Please go along and show your support.

They had it all along

After the weekend's kerfuffle over the SIS "losing" an hour of sound from their illegally-taped interview with Ahmed Zaoui, the police have stepped forward to say that they have a seperate audio recording.

While we can at least be thankful that the police aren't as incompotent as the SIS, it does raise the question of why they sat on the tape for so long. Shouldn't they have declared any evidence held by them to Zaoui's lawyers?

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?