Father of dead Jehovah’s Witness girl can sue church: court

“’It is not at all clear to what extent a religious adherent can convince another person to take actions for religious reasons that will cause him or her bodily harm or even death, even if the religious belief is sincerely held,’ the justices wrote.

The appeal judges said those issues could only be resolved in a full trial.

Mr. Hughes was shunned from the church after he rejected its teachings about blood transfusions and agreed to allow Bethany to undergo transfusions during her chemotherapy treatments.

Her illness and death tore the family apart and renewed public debate over how to determine when a child should be able to choose medical care.”

Recently my extended family was chatting about “nasty corporate entities you have worked for”. I have quite a list. Logging companies, oil companies, militaries. It ain’t pretty. My mom pitched out NASA as one of mine.

Now I don’t quite agree with that. It’s far too true that the vast majority of NASA’s resources are committed to cube-esque self-perpetuating boondoggles on the one hand, and boyish triumphalist pre-obselete politicized megafollies on the other. And that’s bad. Some people are advocating a new apollo program to save our planet from epic climatic perturbation, and instead what we have is a more literal apollo program to stand around on Mars a bit. Kind of a waste of our treasure, and a bit off the point as a new spiritual uniter of our civilization. Yes, OK. But.

NASA also does some of the best work on the planet on gathering data about the planet. Planetary and regional and landscape-scale data that is sine quo non for understanding and responding to planetary and regional and landscape-scale problems, which increasingly exist. The fact that we can think globally and quantitatively at the same time, at all, is largely thanks to the boffins and administrators at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and their fancy ballcaps.

The biggest and best and most mature of NASA’s earth-observing programs is the Landsat series of satellites and their accompanying infrastructure and data processing and distribution programs. Anybody who works in satellite monitoring of the earth’s functions has used Landsat data, and probably mostly Landsat data. Around the time that NASA announced it’s Bush-mandated refocus on putting people on Mars, they also quietly announced that the ailing Landsat program was going to be left to die in space, dieing as the satellites died one by one.

Well, as of this month, they’ve backed off that position. They are once again going to allocate some small fraction of their budget into useful programs. According to this report, a resolve exists to make the “moderate-resolution imaging” program a permanent and stable thing. This is good news. So yay NASA! And yay me for taking their money (sort of, occasionally)! And yay Landsat! May you ride the horizon a few decades longer.

Some economist blogger called Dani Rodrick neatly translates my suspicions about economics and economists into economist-talk. He also manages to explain why some economic theory seems reasonable and forthright while other of it seems impossibly ridiculous, or at least plausible and internally coherent to some alternate universe into which graduate students of schools of economics are whisked during their orientation weeks, and where they continue to live their intellectual lives while their physical shades wander still in our world, saying these things which consequently seem so strange to us.

“The gut instinct of the members of the first group is to apply a simple supply-demand framework to the question at hand. In this world, every tax has an economic deadweight loss, every restriction on individual behavior reduces the size of the economic pie, distribution and efficiency can be neatly separated, market failures are presumed non-existent unless proved otherwise (and to be addressed only by the appropriate Pigovian tax or subsidy), people are rational and forward-looking to the first order of approximation, demand curves always slope down (and supply curves up), and general-equilibrium interactions do not overturn partial-equilibrium logic….Those in the second group are inclined to see all kinds of complications, which make the textbook answers inappropriate. In their world, the economy is full of market imperfections (going well beyond environmental spillovers), distribution and efficiency cannot be neatly separated, people do not always behave rationally and they over-discount the future, some otherwise undesirable policy interventions can generate positive outcomes, and general-equilibrium complications render partial-equilibrium reasoning suspect.”

There’s a problem here, for me. The buddhists council against believing something just because it fits with your existing points of view (or pretty much any other reason actually), and so I’d better watch it with this stuff. The internet will always supply somebody who’s got your back on what you already believe.That experience of having your ‘common sense’ suspicions elegantly reified is a guaranteed zinger, and I think it’s where long-lasting ideologies are born. I don’t need any more ideologies. I’m finding the ones I already carry heavy enough, thank you.

So I’ll thank this Rodrick for being less convincing in future, and keep my eye open for some Uncle Milty apologists who can blithely rebut him, preferably quickly, as I am busy.

Cosma Shalizi, as quoted at Crooked Timber, is clearly not the man for that job:

“Now, I am the last person to deny that the invisible hand is a very powerful and valuable concept, and I’m certainly not going to deny the fundamental theorems of welfare economics; Debreu’s Theory of Value is one of my favorite books. Under certain precisely specified mathematical conditions, perfectly competitive markets inhabited by perfectly rational agents will allocate scarce resources in ways which cannot be altered without making some people worse off. Whether those conditions are satisfied by any economic system in the real world is an empirical question, and the answer is of course No. Given that those theorems do not apply, the efficiency of markets is another empirical question, or rather a whole series of questions, with answers depending on the market and the tasks they are being asked to perform. There are many situations where markets are a very valuable and powerful social technology, a useful way of coordinating actions, allocating resources, and eliciting valuable efforts. … There are other situations where they produce awful, even perverse results, and still others where they’d never begin to get off the ground, like funding basic research or national defense. … “

Reason magazine, which I’ve finally realized is about libertarianism, has a great article up about the introduction of an alternative-energy corporate pavilion to Burning Man. The author of the article clearly isn’t a drive-by commentator on the Burning Man thing (he’s previously written a book about the event), and has an interesting perspective and reasonable things to say. Which is nice. I like Reason magazine because it confirms my suspicion that not all self-identifying capitalists are shrill 2-dimensional blowhards. Which is a nice. There’s an awful lot of capitalists out there, and it’s nice to like people.

Generation Dobler

In the end I don’t think I’m quite aligned with the author’s perspective. He finishes off with this:

“I doubt I’ll be spending much time in their pavilion of green technologies this year, but an important message can be found in what they are doing: that the free play of creative action, even in a corporate market context, can be interesting and important, create win-win situations, and be engines of innovative and exciting new ways to act, to accomplish, and to live. Anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21st century knows this in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud.”

I made this comment:

There’s a couple of ways to read that closing paragraph.

either 1) that a corporate market context creates exciting new ways to act and accomplish, or

2) that “the free play of creative action” (including but not limited to corporate markets) *can* (but not necessarily has or will) create exciting new ways to act.

The first one I absolutely don’t feel in my bones. Not even a little bit. Actually, I feel kind of the opposite down there.

The second is obviously true, but kind of trivial for bone-feelings. Yes, of course the free play of creative action has the capacity to create exciting new ways to act. It’s just that corporate markets consistently manage to bollocks that potential up and make something unpleasant and even somehow dehumanizing out of it.

And I would have assumed that anyone lucky enough to live in America in the 21st century knows that in their bones, even if they are loathe to admit it out loud. But maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe I am.

China is the 800 pound gorilla in every room in the house, but damned if you can see that gorilla clearly for looking at it. So it’s good there’s a trend towards China-centric media coverage in the west. Here’s some of my recent favourites:

1. Seed’s Mara Hvistendahl reports on the enormous environmental crises and solutions China is cooking up inThe China Experiment
   

   ‘”The Chinese advantage is that when they decide something, they can do very dramatic things,” says energy analyst Jim Brock. “In 2000, they took 26,000 heavily polluting minibuses off the road in a week [in Beijing]. They cut the pollution by 6 percent just by saying we don’t want these cars on the road. Try that in the United States—it wouldn’t work.”

   But the story here in Inner Mongolia is how the speed with which China implements projects can become a liability. In places like this, China in fact runs the risk of moving too quickly on the environment, with too little attention to the alliance-building and cooperation that are necessary to address an issue as gargantuan as climate change.

   Entire wind farms have been built so quickly that the infrastructure to connect them to the grid wasn’t integrated into the plan, and so they sit, huge aeolian props thumping into the constant breeze, powering nothing. In July 2005, turbines from an Inner Mongolian wind farm collapsed, killing six workers. A subsequent investigation revealed that the accident was caused by hasty deadlines and failure to observe construction standards.’

   In a world where degree is all nobody does bigandfast like China. I’m reminded (as usual) of William Gibson’s immortal novel opener:

   “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”

2. Getting your head around matters of extreme degree often requires visual aids. Edward Burtynsky’s photos of industrial China do that for you. There’s a bunch of places to see Burtynsky’s photos on the interwebs (thankfully! lots of ‘serious’ photographers seem hell bent on consigning their efforts to arty obscurity by keeping their precious images off the tasteless plebian tubes), here’s a good one at Wired: Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias; Inside China’s Vast Factories

   

   You bet I’m gonna see the accompanying documentary movie as soon as I can, and in the astronomically unlikely change I’ll actually be in the same vicinity as one of his gallery shows I’ll even go see it, because I saw the micro version on the internet.

3. Maybe the best of the three,China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?

   (scroll down, it’s in there)

   is Orville Schell giving a longnow seminar on the current social and political state of the Big One. Someone’s going to complain that I’m being colonial by pushing a white foreigner’s view of China as important, but hey I’m a white foreigner and when it comes to something as foreign (to me) as China, I need the on-ramp of a sympathetically contextualized point of view. Schell, a longtime resident and observer of the country, suggests that China is aggressively in-between revolutions, extremely neither this nor that, in an entirely liminal and furthermore practical state of national mind. From the “blog summary” of the talk:

   “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army.

   No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.

   So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term.

   These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.”

Here we go.

It can be hard to discuss ubiquitous phenomenon like the professionalization of politics precisely because they are ubiquitous: pointing to any one example trivializes the argument by reducing the scope to a single incident, and it’s hard/boring to list enough examples to broaden the scope sufficiently to do the topic justice.

Here’s an article-ish thing from the Chicago Tribune which hits a nice balance of detail and comprehensiveness: a laundry list of the lobbyists on the US presidential candidates’ campaign teams:

McCain, the maverick, and all McCain’s lobbyists

Frightening that, assuming it’s accurate. And it has that “too strange to not be true feel”. And the last paragraph foreshadows new horrors to come. How is lil ol democracy suppose to survive this stuff? I guess nobody is suggesting it is.

The media is bit by bit beginning to accept that the scientific consensus really is that serious human-induced global warming is a go. It has taken years for us to get to this point, and we’re not fully here yet anyway. One of my most grumpy moments this summer was on a day off in town, standing in a line up in a king sized grocery store, staring at a 3″ National Post headline claiming that global warming skeptics have been unfairly ignored.

Strangely enough, it hasn’t been very difficult to figure out what the scientific community has actually been thinking on this issue. Not for years. There is a single credible and comprehensive international body which coordinates global warming research and goes to great lengths to assemble and summarize findings on the topic. I can’t offhand think of any other major science-related issue that has been made as transparently easy to research.

But I guess that wasn’t enough for the press. They could hardly be expected to, you know, read the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. They had stories to write and deadlines to meet. Poor buggers. It must be a real existential challenge, keeping a sense of reality when you are charged to make it up without reference to it on a daily basis.

I’m not complaining here about the editorial position of journalists or journalism outfits. People are free to dismiss the findings of the scientific enterprise if they have doubts about its integrity or value. The thing is, the media haven’t been casting doubt on the value of the science, they’ve just been routinely misstating that science, for years. For the most part it’s been to play up the uncertainty angle. Maybe it made for more exciting reading. You would think certain impending social and environmental disaster would be more interesting than uncertain impending social and environmental disaster. Guess not.

So the poor folks at the IPCC who have been writing these reports every few years have, I imagine, been getting more and more desperate each year at the lack of impact of their crucially important publications. The last one came out in 2001. The next one is due out in 2007.

Looks like the scientificos are trying some tactics this time round. In particular, individual scientists are giving interviews talking up the report as being wildly important and containing amazing information. Which it is and does, no doubt, it’s just not like an esteemed international scientific body to pimp it’s pubs with teasers and interviews.

There are, for example, some great lines in this newspaper article from CanWest:

”I can tell you for sure that the statements in that report will be far stronger than what existed in 2001. It will be flabbergastingly stronger.”

Holy crap, that’s a lot stronger. Let’s hope the brave new edition of the report will be enough to do it. And let’s hope that if it is action-jam-packed with unequivocal statements of flabbergasting strength, that they will be interpreted for what they are: the highly unusual result of the highly unusual situation in which the level of doubt around a scientific question has drained almost completely away; and not for what they aren’t: evidence that the scientists have lost objectivity and are making personally motivated overclaims.

I guess we’ll see. If anybody pays attention.

Google google google. I would estimate that someone somewhere points out that Google is now analagous to a natural resource about once a second. I suppose the ideas surrounding the search-engine debates aren’t new, in fact I bet if I could be bothered to read Marchall McLuhan, he was probably making some pertinent points was back there in the 60s or 70s or whatever. Probably he pointed out that with the emergence of more channels of information flow, the main problem of information access is no longer finding but filtering: how best to drink from the firehouse. There are too many answers out there for your question, so how do you find the ones that are most useful?

Of course, search engines have become our main firehose mouthpiece. And google has, through good hard work and smartness, become our main search engine. And so it has become one of our main filters on the world, arguably as important as the news media for those of us who use the internet a lot.

And of course, controversy has ensued.

I’ve just sort of woken up to this debate and I find it mucho interesting. I’d always seen google as a nuetral thing, doggedly returning what really was the best and most relevant answer to my question. I shouldn’t really be suprised that it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Back in March or April (when are we going to standardize numerical date formats?), The Register printed off a great story on the use of googlewashing to, in a sense, change the meaning of the term “the second superpower”. It hits on and illustrates many of the themes in the search engine controversy. If you are interested, here it is. Be breifly warned: the writing is about on level with my own. But the topic is sticky and the insight is deep, something you get from people writing about their own field (as opposed to news journalists, who do a great job of making their quickly researched shallow insight accessible). It’s sort of a like a conspiracy-theory story, but one you can verify yourself by playing around with Google. And they never point out that Google is like a natural resource, which is refreshing.

I haven’t been trying very hard to find out what’s going on in Iraq. I don’t have TV and wouldn’t have the time to watch it anyway, the newspapers are heavy on unhelpful analysis and light on reliable facts, and unfortunateley Enemy Combatant Radio hasn’t set up a Basra satellite van.

(note to self: is ECR still casting these days?)

It’s also a questionable undertaking. Do I really want to try and find out the details of the war? What would it benefit me? Is half truth or even 3/4 truth better than no truth at all? Do any of the details have any particular bearing on my life?

If an average person did want to find out what was happening on the ground in Iraq, could it be done? This is, after all, the information age. The internet and an associated suite of communication technologies indisputably changed the process and quality of the antiwar movement in a way that has been alledged/predicted since the anti-globalization “battle of Seattle”. If you stay very quiet and listen to the academics muttering to themselves in their closets, you will learn that information distribution is now really, really pending a revolution courtesy of audio blogging, photo blogging, plain ‘old’ blogging, text messaging, wikis and CMSs (gracias Chiron), bluePods and their inevitable ilk, news.google.com-esque information filtering algorithms and other things I’m not quiet enough to be aware of.

But can it be done now? Can you or I, given a PC and an internet account, get a genuine sense of what’s happening? I certainly don’t know, mostly because I haven’t tried. A few possible resources for someone who was trying:

globalsecurity.org offers a truck stop breakfast sized serving of operational details. Or it did, I don’t know if they’ve been able to keep up with troop movements and whatnot since the combat proper began. Interestingly, they also offer a serious point-counterpoint on the strategical benefits of the invasion, and a decent library of anti-war graphics. If you’re really bored, you could just play “guess their personal opinion”.

Iraqwar.Ru offers daily executive summaries of the battles. I am told third-hand that the “This center was created recently by a group of journalists and military experts from Russia to provide accurate and up-to-date news and analysis of the war against Iraq. Daily english-language translations are being offered by Venik’s Aviation. A brief scan of the reports suggest that they are either markedly unfriendly to the US/British forces, or the battles are going much more poorly than we are being led to believe be CNN.

Several intercepted reports by the US field commanders stated that their troops are unable to advance due to their soldiers being demoralized by the enemy’s fierce resistance and high losses.

Kevin Site’s war blog used to provide a dramatic example of the power of direct publishing. As a CNN war correspondant on the ground in the middle east, Kevin was well set up to provide very interesting coverage. His own remarks that “This experience has really made me rethink my rather orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media…. Blogging is an incredible tool, with amazing potential. “ are indicative of at least the potential for real information flow from places from which information is a hotly contested material. Unfortunatley, CNN requested that he stop blogging. Much has been said of this, in chat-room discussion and publications.

Iraq Body Count goes the other way, offering contextless aggregate statistics filtered from the ceasless torrent of mass media, rather than independanly verified on-site details. The methodology is based on past work to document the citizen death toll in Afghanistan. It doesn’t count actual death tolls, only reported citizen fatalities. But it is information that otherwise isn’t being compiled. This is the site that powers the banner-counter on this blog.

news.google.com is a way to dip a net of one’s own into the river of mass-media reporting. Google uses a purely-automated algorithm, presumably related to their famous page-ranking system, to monitor many news sources in realtime and summarize the most “significant” stories in frequenly updated lists.

Then of course, there’s this.

Of these links, only the second two seem to be using technological changes to make more directly-sourced information available. There may well be other methods. There certainly will be in the future. The possible implications of these maybe-existing sources of fact-distribution would seem to include the ability for citizens to stay better informed of the distant actions of their governments, as well as providing a much larger heap of data for analysts and historians to process in after-the-fact attempts to dissect what really happened.