Two and two is five

Iraqi war deaths
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Over in the comments to this post, The Republic of Palau makes a point that deserves wider attention, about the critiques of that infamous Lancet study:

This whole situation has another aspect: the rubbishing of most respectable research that disproves the neocon worldview. It’s all of a piece with the faith-led agenda, when carefully researched, rigidly peer-reviewed science is rubbished on ideological grounds rather than its methodology or substance. The Lancet is a world-respected medical journal, and has no political agenda. The scientists approached the research as an epistemiological exercise i.e. ‘How can you safely estimate death rates and causualties in a war situation?’

The results were reviewed and reviewed, stringently and by some of the most eminently qualified scientists in the world, but that’s apparently irrelevant. Where the Republicans don’t like scientific results, they just rubbish and ignore them. They really are making their own reality.

These really are people who, as not even Orwell predicted, would happily argue that two plus two equals five if their masters ordered it. See also the ongoing saga of Michael Fumetti^wFumento, over at Deltoid. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Colin Powell resigns

US politics, War on Iraq
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The news did not come as a surprise and the tributes have been flowing thick and fast, even if it is doubtful Powell actually deserved them. One of the most succesful unchallenged lies promulgated by the Bush administration has to be that Powell was any kind of moderate. True, in comparision with moonbats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or general incompetents like Condi Rice Powell looks moderate, but his behaviour refutes this. He had drank of the neocon kool-aid just as much as any other Bush crony. He has always had something dodgy about him, as even a perfunctionairy look at his career shows.

After all, who was Colin Powell? A career soldier who first gained notoriety for his role in whitewashing the My Lai massacre, who was involved in the Iran Contra scandals and last but not least, who lied to the UN about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify an unnecessary war that may have cost more than 100,0000 civilian lives already. Every time it mattered, he was more than willing to help cover up US government crimes.

Therefore I don not think it matters much that Colin Powell has finally resigned; supposing he truly was a moderate influence within the Bush cabinet, he was remarkably ineffectual. Truly, nobody could do his job any worse, unless it would be Condi Rice.

Oh.

The BBC’s Space Odyssey

Auntie Beeb, sciencebollocks, Space and space exploration
Published on 1 Comment on The BBC’s Space Odyssey

Tonight the BBC finally broadcasted the first episode of a new documentary series, Space Odyssey, which had promised us a look at what a manned Grand Tour of the Solar System could be like and what wonders could be found on the way. The trailers had made it sound like the series would be equally about the technology behind the expedition and the planets the expedition would visit: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto. S— wanted to see the latter most, I was hoping the former would be dominant; unfortunately we both were disappointed.

The actual series you see, is neither fish nor fowl: it’s part astronaut drama ala Apollo 13, part reality tv about five astronauts living together for six years and only part science documentary. The information about the visited planets is shoehorned in between shots of the astronauts adjusting to their circumstances and demonstrating zero-g and Tense, Dramatic Moments, with appropriate closeups of the people in Mission Control, of the expedition in Danger. Tension while contact is lost with the Venus lander! Excitement at a dust storm on Mars! More excitement at a very close approach of a binairy asteroid! And all with the obligatory, sweeping, over-intrusive violin music. It made S—wonder whether it was a PBS co-production, while I guessed it would be Discovery Channel; rightly as it turned out.

It certainly shares the flaws of other BBC/Discovery co-productions like The Future is Wild: good central concepts but bad execution, the emphasis on special effects and pretty pictures over science and imparting knowledge, the speculation presented as fact and the fact presented without a good context to make sense of it, but as trivia. And of course, the science errors.

Radio lag? Neither seen nor mentioned until the dramatic asteroid approach when suddenly the script requires a 38 minute lag; the previous tense moments were all witnessed live by Mission Control. Then there were the Venus and Mars landers, both of which looked roughly like souped up Moon landers. But the moon has an escape velocity of only 2.38 km/s, which can be reached even by a puny lander; for Mars, (5.027 km/s) and especially Venus (10.36 km/s) with an escape velocity not that much less than Earth’s, you need something more. You need the same sort of big fuckoff rocket on Venus that it takes to put two people into orbit on Earth, basically. Another thing that bothered me about the Venus sequence: the need for a tough astronaut suit was mentioned, to withstand the sheer pressure and noxious fumes there; so why the huge clear plastic faceplate?

Unfortunately, the technical realities behind the expedition, what it would take to actually do it in real life got even less mention than the planetary exploration. What I would’ve liked to see was an approach similar to that of The Blue Planet, where each program had two parts. With Blue Planet, you would first get the wonders and miracles of whatever part of the oceans it was this time, followed by an explenation of how these wonders and miracles were filmed and the technology and science behind it. That would’ve been much more interesting here too, especially if the programme’s makers hadn’t tried to cram everything into two episodes.

A failure then, but an interesting failure.

Letter to the Observer

Iraqi war deaths, Manufacturing Consent, War Lies
Published on 1 Comment on Letter to the Observer

Sir,

it takes particular cheek to cite the partisan TCS website refering to the Lancet as “Al-Jazeera on the Thames” when the website in question is well known for its activism on behalf of corporate intrerests and the “journalist” who provided you with this quote has managed to both misread and misrepresent the Lancet report [1] in his own writings on the subject.

He made exactly the same mistake as your article did when it stated that:

The report’s authors admit it drew heavily on the rebel stronghold of Falluja, which has been plagued by fierce fighting. Strip out Falluja, as the study itself acknowledged, and the mortality rate is reduced dramatically.

When in fact the excess mortality figure the report arrived at, of 98,000, was reached with the Falluja figures left out of the calculations. If these had been included, the figure would have been even higher.

All of which leads me to conclude that the writer of your article, rather than reading the report itself and drawing his own conclusions, has instead relied on the accusations of those for whom this report is embarassing and who have an ulterior motive in bringing it into doubt.

Yours sincerily,

Martin Wisse

[1]: PDF file

The killing of Theo van Gogh

Dutch politics, Islamophobia
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It may just be for the best that Dutch filmaker and writer Theo van Gogh was killed on the day of the US elections, as that way we may possibly be spared the mock outrage and parading of hobby horses by rightwing know-nothings we got when Pim Fortuyn was murdered. Certainly the media here in the Netherlands were filled to the brim with the sort of comments we saw two years ago, full of jeremiahads and dire warnings about the state of free speech and democracy in the Netherlands.

All bullshit.

Theo van Gogh was a provocateur, a shock jock, somebody who sought controverse as much because he relished it as out of genuine conviction. He was an arrogant crude bastard, one of those people, of whom we have had far too many these last two years, who thought freedom of speech meant being able to say anything he wanted, any way he wanted, without regard to the consequences. If you call an entire religion backward, call its adherents goatfuckers and make a movie about domestic violence in Islamic families which is deliberately provocking, by putting half nude women in see through burkas, their bodies painted with verses from the Koran, should you be surprised that somebody wants to kill you for this?

And of course what he wrote, said and filmed does not excuse his murder, no matter how provoking or insulting. However, his murder is not an attack on democracy or freedom of speech; it was far more personal than that. It looks more like a revenge killing, a honour killing.

Let’s not forget the context in which his murder took place. In the last three years or so years, especially after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the political and cultural climate in the Netherlands has been one in which the right had appropriate to itself the right to talk as loudly and freely as it wanted to, without regards to consequences. Van Gogh was not hounded for his opinions; he was lauded for it. And his grandstanding did not do the cuase he was allegedly championing, domestic violence against Muslim women any good, when you realise his movie, if it had been made about domestic violence amongst Hassidic Jews, would’ve branded him an anti-semite. But because it is anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, it is all right.

If a genuine criticism could be made that until recently, too many existing problems had been taboos, could not be discussed, that there was too much tolerance in the Netherlands for things that should not be tolerated: crime, antisocial behaviour and the like, the last two years the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. We have become too tolerant in the other direction when we have people saying things that are borderline or wholly racist and getting awy with it, with whole population groups –Muslims, immigrants, Moroccans– being demonised, blamed for the failure of the Dutch society to adjust them to it and it to them.

It is therefore not surprising that someone who by all accounts was already radicalised, somewhat of a nutter and who took his religion very serious, would be so insulted by van Gogh’s movie that he was wanted to kill van Gogh for this insult.

Condemn his murder, but do not make Theo van Gogh into a martyr of free speech. He wasn’t. He was killed because he insulted people, not because he told them the truth.