247.5 - Rapid-fire items

Rapid-fire items

Everything but the kitchen sink

Last for this week, something rather different. As I expect you know, over the course of each week I gather up news items which I might want to address on the show. Not everything I find makes it in; in fact most things don't. I have observed on a number of occasions that when the show is finished it bears little resemblance to what I was envisioning when I sat down to prepare it, which I do the night before taping.

I have sometimes considered the idea of sometime just making an entire show out of items that I find, with each just noted with maybe a quick comment, so that instead of devoting maybe four or five minutes to each of six or seven topics I would give a minute or two (and occasionally less) to maybe 20 or more.

So just for the heck of it, I thought I'd spend these last minutes doing just that, to give a sense of what a show such as that that might be like. Let me know what you think and here we go:

1. First, a report on charter schools in Los Angeles concludes that they are costing traditional schools in the city's Unified School District millions of dollars in tax money.

The study calculates that between services to charters that take tax money the district intended to use for traditional schools and direct education tax dollars going to the charters, the budget for traditional schools is being drained by more than $500 million a year.

Meanwhile, an advisory board in North Carolina is wrestling with who to hold accountable when a charter school closes and fails to turn over student records, pay its ex-employees, or meet its other financial obligations.

Since 2012, 10 charter schools in the state have closed, displacing 1,100 students and 150 employees through fiscal mismanagement costing the public schools millions of dollars.

None of this should come as a surprise since the whole purpose of charter schools is to undermine public schools and ultimately to privatize education, turning it into just another profit center rather than a public obligation.

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2. Next up: In 2003, Roy Moore, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was kicked off the bench after refusing a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument he had erected in the lobby of the state judicial building in Montgomery. In 2012, he was reelected to the same position.

Now he has been suspended and may be kicked off the bench again, this time for having "flagrantly disregarded and abused his authority" when he ordered state judges to ignore the Supreme Court ruling that established and recognized the right of same-sex couples to get married.

Personally, I hope they just leave him suspended and never get around to dismissing him because if they do, the mouth-breathers in Alabama will probably just vote him in again.

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3. Here's an interesting thought I came across somewhere: Hillary Clinton said she wouldn't release the text of her speeches to Wall Street firms - for which she was paid over $200,000 a pop - until every other presidential candidate, including the GOPpers, did so as well.

Well, guess what: There are three candidates standing and two of them haven't given any such speeches. So her conditions have been met. So where are the transcripts, Hillary?

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4. Meanwhile, efforts to bring attention to the issue of police brutality, especially toward minority communities, continue. In San Francisco, a group of five protesters who came to be known as the Frisco Five has just ended a 17-day hunger strike calling for the resignation of Police Chief Greg Suhr.

Although they did not succeed in that, they did draw attention both within and without the city to the issue of police violence in San Francisco and prompted the mayor to tell the PD to reform its use of force rules.

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5. Next, an official report commissioned by the government of the UK on that nation's involvement in the Iraq War, including what mistakes were made in execution or planning for the war or its aftermath, is scheduled for release on July 6: seven years after it was commissioned and five years after its last public hearing.

It's last hurdle was a security check in which, according the the BBC,

officials were reportedly looking for information that has been inadvertently included that could damage relations with the UK's allies, breach national security or violate the UK's international obligations in any way.

The fact that after that, it's claimed that nothing was taken out doesn't give me confidence that come July we're going to see a revealing, hard-hitting, or insightful document.

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6. Finally, speaking of war, an addendum to my item last week about our lovely little war in Iraq and Syria. In describing the involvement of Navy SEALS in a firefight with Daesh forces - Daesh, remember, being a sort of insulting name for ISIS, which is why I use it - military trainer Matthew VanDyke said Daesh "won't be able to sustain continued losses like those" they suffered in the battle.

The echoes of Vietnam keep ringing in my head. Now not only do we have "advisors" becoming more involved in combat, not only to we have mission creep, now it seems we're back to body counts.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/me-union-charter-study-20160509-snap-story.html
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/under-the-dome/article76747402.html
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/07/alabamas-top-judge-is-suspended-and-may-lose-job-after-blocking-gay-marriage/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/clinton-must-release-wall_b_9857934.html?m=false
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http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/san-francisco-protesters-targeting-police-brutality-end-hunger-strike-after-17-days
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/hunger-strike-san-francisco-police-shootings
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http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uks-long-delayed-iraq-war-report-published-july-38984787
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-chilcot-inquiry-timeline-of-the-events-from-911-to-the-announced-publication-date-of-chilcot-a7020936.html
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36024725
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http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/05/03/us-service-member-killed-in-northern-iraq.html

215.7 - Footnote: Nuclear weapons are not things of the past

Footnote: Nuclear weapons are not things of the past

As a footnote, this is why all that talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not just a history lesson.

According to the Arms Control Association, as of July 2015:

- The United States has 1,597 strategic nuclear warheads deployed plus another 2,800 in reserve along with a tactical (short-range) nuclear arsenal of about 500 warheads.

- Russia has 1,582 strategic warheads deployed and several thousand non-deployed strategic warheads. It also has approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads.

- France has 290 deployed warheads.

- China has about 250 total warheads.

- United Kingdom has about 120 strategic warheads, of which 40 are deployed at sea at any given time. The total stockpile is up to 225 weapons.

- India has 90-110 nuclear warheads.

- Israel has somewhere between 80 and 100 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200.

- Pakistan holds between 100 and 120 nuclear warheads.

- North Korea is estimated to have 6-8 plutonium-based warheads.

Nuclear weapons are very real, continue to be very real, and the threat continues to be very real. We have been comforted some over the past years by the fact that the arsenals of the two biggest nuclear powers - the US and Russia - have been significantly reduced as the result of negotiations. But what we don't hear is how the present-day weapons are more efficient, more accurate, in every way "better" than those in those old massive arsenals of a few decades ago, how today's weapons, those designed and built since the 1980s, are, as one person put it, "more for use than deterrence."

What's more, the threat is not only that of a deliberate attack. A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists from April reports that "Erroneous or ambiguous warnings from U.S. or Russian early warning sensors of an incoming nuclear attack are relatively common" and there have been literally dozens of what the group calls "near misses" over the years.

Despite that, about half of US nuclear forces remain always on hair-trigger alert, capable of being launched within minutes of the decision to do so, the same high alert status they have been on since the height of the cold war.

And with the US having just sabotaged a conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to shield Israel from a call for a nuclear-weapons free zone in the Middle East, I will say that no, the issue of nuclear weapons is not passe, not something in the past, not something we can ignore, not something we can pretend is limited to our fantasies and paranoia about "the Iranian bomb."

Nuclear weapons are very real, continue to be very real, and the threat they present continues to be very real. And the anniversaries of the only times they have been used in warfare is a good time to be reminded of that.

Sources cited in links:
http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/04/Close%20Calls%20with%20Nuclear%20Weapons.pdf
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/hair-trigger-alert/close-calls#.VcGUjPmRaVE
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/01/Hair-Trigger%20FAQ.pdf
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2015/06/2089-outrage-of-week-us-sabotages.html

#IAmSpartacus

If I was on Twitter, I might have heard about this sooner. But I'm not, so I just came across it now.

Last January 6, a young man named Paul Chambers was irritated when Robin Hood airport outside Doncaster, England, was closed by a winter storm. He had plans to fly out of that airport to see a woman he had gotten to know online. Frustrated at the potential cancellation of his plans, he tweeted this to his followers:

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!

The message was discovered five days later by an airport duty manager who was browsing the Web.

The manager forwarded the offending tweet on to his station manager, and - even though the threat was deemed "non-credible" - it was passed on to police.

On January 13, Chambers was arrested. Even though police determined that the comment was a joke "for only his close friends to see" according to his police case file, he was charged with "sending a menacing electronic communication" - that is, of making a threat. In May, he was convicted. This, again, despite the undisputed facts that it was deemed a "joke" and "non-credible" as a "threat" and the supposed "threat" was never sent to the supposed target, which would not have even known about it but for pure chance.

This past Thursday, his appeal was rejected. Not only rejected, his punishment was increased: He'd originally been fined a total of £1000; on Thursday the appeals judge added an additional £2600 for "prosecution costs."

The danger such a decision presents to freedom of speech online needs or at least should need no explanation, not when you can be arrested, convicted, and punished for what everyone involved agrees was a joke.

Well, okay, no, not everyone: The appeals judge - who "icily lectured the courtroom about the impropriety of sending Twitter updates during the case," claimed that "any ordinary person would have been menaced by the tweet." Well, if that's true then "any ordinary person" is a goddam flaming idiot. I mean, come on: threatening to blow up an airport if it is not open? Saying in essence that "I want that airport open and if it's not open in a week I'll keep it closed?" That's like making a "threat" along the lines of "You'd better feed me, or else I'll go on a diet" or "If you don't stop laughing, I'm going to tickle you." Who in their right mind could take that seriously as a threat? In point of fact, no one and yes I am fully aware of what I am suggesting about the appeals judge.

Chambers has suffered more than a fine as a result of this:

He was fired from his job as an administrative and financial supervisor at a car-parts company. He moved to Northern Ireland ... and was fired from a subsequent job after his employers discovered his criminal record. He is now unemployed.

So he is out of a job as well as some £3600 (about $5800) for failing to have sufficiently absorbed the "watch what you say lest you irritate some official or another" mantra, the "don't make waves or even ripples" meme. Star Simpson could tell him something about that.

On the upside, almost immediately upon the loss of the appeal thousands of tweets started appearing under the tag #IAmSpartacus either re-tweeting Chambers' original post or making their own comic "threats" against a variety of targets. AP said it counted 5000 in just two hours.

As I noted at the top, I'm not on Twitter, so I can't participate directly in the campaign of solidarity, but I'll say here that unless within a week and a bit Robin Hood airport adopts a policy of free beer and pretzels, I'll send a team of overweight middle-aged guys to do the full monty on the main concourse after which they will pee on the benches.

A spokeswoman for South Yorkshire Police, which originally arrested Chambers, scoffed and said "no" when asked if police planned on arresting any of Chambers' online fans.

But she refused to answer when asked why the thousands of jokey threats to blow Robin Hood Airport "sky high" would be treated any differently than Chambers' original tweet, which resulted in his arrest.

Of course she couldn't answer because there is no coherent response available. Right now, count on officialdom to hunker down and try to wait it out. Because even if the furor disappears, this case as a precedent, as a source of support for future, harsher limitations, will not. It will still be there, waiting to be whipped out.

Police and prosecutors "seem to have completely ignored the notion of context, which is a very dangerous thing," said Padraig Reidy of the London-based Index on Censorship. "If he genuinely intended to blow up the airport, he wouldn't have tweeted it. It's obviously a joke."

Reidy also said that

"The verdict demonstrates that the UK's legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century."

I suspect it's more likely true that they do understand - and the prospect of being unable to control such technology-driven intellectual anarchy, the prospect of not being able to confine communication within "acceptable limits," with appropriate "respect for authority," scares the living hell out of them. And that's why cases like this happen: to remind people who's boss.

As a footnote, after the hearing, British actor Stephen Fry renewed his promise to pay Chambers' fine. Good on him.

The Crawling Geek

Adding a bit to the overall mystery of Stonehenge comes the fact that in ancient times it may have been a tourist destination - at least it was a place people from quite some distance came to see.

Studies of the skeleton of an adolescent boy from some 3,500 years ago found near the site suggest that he traveled all the way from the Mediterranean - potentially Italy, Spain or southern France - to the southwest of England. ...

Another body found near the famous stone complex has been identified as coming from the German Alpine foothills some 800 years earlier.

So over 4,000 years ago, not only was Stonehenge being put to some actual use but knowedge of it was spread wide enough that people traveled halfway across Europe to be there.

Knowledge of the skeletons themselves was not new - the boy was found five years ago and the German before that - but determining where they came from, is.

Tooth enamel forms in a child's first few years, so it stores a chemical record of the environment in which the individual grew up. ...

Most oxygen in teeth and bone comes from drinking water - which is itself derived from rain or snow.

In warm climates, drinking water contains a higher ratio of heavy oxygen (O-18) to light oxygen (O-16) than in cold climates. So comparing the oxygen isotope ratio in teeth with that of drinking water from different regions can provide information about the climate in which a person was raised.

Most rocks carry a small amount of the element strontium (Sr), and the ratio of strontium 87 and strontium 86 isotopes varies according to local geology.

The isotope ratio of strontium in a person's teeth can provide information on the geological setting where that individual lived in childhood.

By combining the techniques, archaeologists can gather data pointing to regions where a person may have been raised.

One interesting thing is that both skeletons seem to indicate the presence of some sort of illness or injury. The boy died at 14 or 15 and since the article makes no mention of the skeleton bearing marks of violence, he apparently died young of some sickness.

The German seems to have suffered from a painful leg condition.

It may be that Stonehenge was a center of healing, drawing people from across Europe in search of cures....

Nobody is quite sure what the site was used for. It could have been a religious site built by sun worshipers, since the axis that runs through the center of the stone circle aligns with the midsummer sunrise.

Actually, it doesn't anymore due to Earth's precession of the equinoxes, but it did a few thousand years ago. Personally and in what is hardly an unshared opinion, I think part of the problem of "what was Stonehenge used for" is that is was used for different things by different people over the 1500 or so years in which the site was in use.

Whatever drew these ancient travelers to the location, they certainly weren't budget travelers. The boy was found with a 90-piece amber necklace, while the German had copper daggers and gold hair clasps.

"People who can get these rare and exotic materials are people of some importance," Andrew Fitzpatrick of Wessex Archeology told BBC News.

So were they seeking some sort of medical miracle? Was this a Bronze Age Lourdes? Or were they each on some (very) early version of The Grand Tour who just happened to die while they were there?

Questions are cool.

Footnote: Major props to the first one who can identify the source, the theme if you will, that provides the titles of a number of the science posts, marked by use of the word "geek" somewhere in the title.

Makes it whiter than white

This, too, is an old bit - two weeks, in fact - but because it's about something I addressed at the time, I wanted to mention it.

I expect you heard some news about how

[v]ital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of Government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly will be kept under wraps for up to 70 years.

In a draconian – and highly unusual – order, Lord Hutton, the peer who chaired the controversial inquiry into the Dr Kelly scandal, has secretly barred the release of all medical records, including the results of the post mortem, and unpublished evidence.

What you might not recall is what this was about, so I thought I'd refresh folks' memories.

In September 2002, as part of its efforts to bang the drums of war against Iraq, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair issued what was claimed to be a sober, solidly-founded indictment of Saddam Hussein as possessing massive stocks of banned weapons.

Prominently played in this report was the dramatic statement that Saddam's chemical weapons were so advanced and so well-distributed to front-line units that they could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order to do so.

Later, two BBC reporters, citing a senior official, reported that the 45-minute claim was poorly sourced and was inserted at the insistence of Blair's director of communications, Alistair Campbell, to "sex up" the document to make Saddam seem more threatening.

Blair's team stomped about Whitehall, looking for the leaker - and Dr. David Kelly, Britain's top weapons inspector, admitted to being the source, while denying he said anything about "sexing up" the dossier. The Blair government then proceeded to try to discredit the BBC report by outing its own intelligence operative, dropping hints as to his identity until some reporter guessed it - and then "confirming" his name.

Dr. Kelly was publicly assailed, his sanity was questioned (the usual tactic against a whistleblower), and he was raked over the coals by a Parliamentary committee. Unable to deal with the publicity, the pressure, the destruction of his career, and the humiliation, David Kelly committed suicide.

That caused a huge row, which the Blair government tried to quiet by having a special inquiry overseen by Lord Hutton. It's conclusion? Dr. Kelly did commit suicide, and the whole imbroglio, the whole mess, the whole deal, was all the fault of (wait for it) the BBC. No, I'm not joking.

That was in 2004. Last year, a group of doctors opened a legal challenge to the verdict.

They argue that Hutton’s conclusion that Dr Kelly killed himself by severing the ulnar artery in his left wrist after taking an overdose of prescription painkillers is untenable because the artery is small and difficult to access, and severing it could not have caused death.

It was as a result of that proceeding that it has emerged that all the evidence in the case is to be sealed - even from the family - for between 30 and 70 years.

Last night, the Ministry of Justice was unable to explain the legal basis for Lord Hutton’s order.

Oh, we know the basis, and it's not a legal one. The Hutton inquiry was, I said at the time, "a shameful, disgraceful, disgusting, and transparently false whitewash," a sentiment in which I was hardly alone, intended to maintain the fiction of a justified war on Iraq,

And that, friends, is why this recent news is so infuriating: It is a whitewash of a whitewash.

Footnote: On a tangentially-related note, I just came across an item from last October, where it seems that Tony Blair labeled atheists a danger to society and the equivalent of terrorists, decrying "an aggressive secular attack from without" and "the threat of extremism from within" from those who would "scorn God."