Chaucery Blog

What better way to test Google's new chart API than with the exciting recent Australian election. Here are the first preferences by party, for the House of Representatives.

I have also charted the first preferences votes over the past four elections (the Liberal / National coalition were in power from 1996 until 2007).

Looking again at the chart API, if you check the properties of these charts then you can see the url parameters used to create them. This means that if you like a chart that someone else has created, you can copy and modify it at your leisure. That is, you don't just have the image of the chart to play with, but everything used to create that chart too.

As you'd expect from Google, the API documentation is complete and straightforward, and liberally sprinkled with examples. Even so, I'm sure it won't be long before some industrious developer builds a user-friendly web front-end, so that even the most timid of users could easily create a handy chart.

Posted by James at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's just over a month until the 2007 Australian federal election. This year Google is showing an interest by providing a useful election site, from which you can reach their handy election maps. These are Google maps with Australian election information overlayed. It's handy to see which electorate you reside in, and where party strongholds reside.

If you don't know who to vote for, or want to check if your views still match those of your party of choice, then try out the Oz Politics test. After answering a few multiple-choice questions it'll indicate how close a match you are to the various parties.

Whilst the test was accurate for me, its analysis page states that the party predicted by the test only matches the respondent's nominated party 5% of the time. For example, of the people who indicated they were Labor inclined, only 17% held views that most closely matched Labor party policy, whereas 38% of them were closest to the Democrats. Perhaps this is because the test is based on parties' policies, rather than what parties actually do, whereas people may base their votes more on the latter. Still, it's a fun way of prying into the minds of your friends and colleagues.

Happily we have preferential voting in Australia, so we can vote for minor party candidates without worrying that our votes will not count.

Posted by James at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UK and Australia have had strong economies for the past fifteen years, but only one has been investing in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (hint: it's not the one with one of the world's best climates for solar power generation).

Posted by James at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Australian mentioned that the United States has been criticised for not accepting more Iraqi refugees displaced by the war in Iraq:

Note, however, that these figures are pretty insignificant compared to the millions of Iraqi refugees now living in Syria, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries.

Posted by James at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a suggestion recently in The Australian that the government has been buying votes for the upcoming election by allocating road funding mainly to electorates not held by the opposition Labor party.

Of 89 road grants worth $250 million revealed in the Senate yesterday, 78 are in government or independent electorates. Only 11 are in Labor seats - most of them marginal. ... A total of 22 Liberal electorates were given $119.32 million for 44 projects, six Nationals electorates received $57.24 million for 23 projects and seven Labor seats were awarded $28 million for 11 projects.

Three independent electorates - Calare, Kennedy and New England - all keenly sought by the Government, received $16.61 million for five projects.

The article doesn't actually do the sums to see if Labor actually received less than expected funding based on the proportion of seats held by them in Parliament, so I present that here:

Yep, that looks like a pork barrel.

Posted by James at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How well has the current Australian government, in office since 1996, been managing responsible energy sourcing? They certainly made the right noises in 1997, with their Renewed Focus on Renewable Energy:

Environment Minister Robert Hill said that renewable energy is the global key to long-term greenhouse emission reductions.

"At last reckoning, energy generation accounted for over 220 million tonnes or just under half of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. For that reason the energy sector remains the major focus of our response activity.

"Today's announcement by the Prime Minister includes a target for retailers and major wholesale purchasers of electricity to source an additional 2 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010. These sources include photovoltaics, biomass, solar hot water, wind or other emerging technologies.

"On current projections, renewable energy was expected to decline as a share of Australian energy supply. This package will not just halt that slide but will lead to a growth in the share of renewables. By encouraging the growth of renewable technologies now, Australia will be in a position to progressively increase the share of renewable energy beyond 2010."

Unfortunately, the evidence points to a downward trend in renewable energy use, as a percentage of total energy generation, and in solar generation as a percentage of world production.

(Source: The Weekend Australian Magazine, March 3-4 2007)

Posted by James at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A new report from Handicap Interational shows that cluster bombs are incredibly accurate — at targeting civilians:

Countries such as Britain, the US, China and Russia oppose the banning of cluster bombs.

Posted by James at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently in Australia several major brands of yoghurt have started to use halal gelatine. This is stated explicitly in the ingredients, as shown for Yoplait Lite strawberry (pdf).

Gelatine is created by prolonged boiling of animal skin, connective tissue or bones. For gelatine to be denoted halal the animal must be killed in a way permitted by Islam. In practice, this means that the animal is not stunned prior to being killed, unlike the typical modern manner of slaughter. This is somewhat controversial.

Although defenders of halal slaughter claim that it is humane, I find it impossible to believe that a method that puts religion before the welfare of animals can be more humane than a method that puts the animal first.

The big question is, why is halal gelatine used for products where only a tiny minority desire it? Could they not instead substitute a vegetarian alternative, which would make everyone happy?

Posted by James at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UN voted on a number of important draft resolutions last week.

First up was a vote on "Towards an arms trade treaty: establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms". The Guardian notes that it has the support of a dozen Nobel peace prize laureates, and The Telegraph comments on the result of the vote.

Next, small arms:

A draft resolution on renewed determination towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons:

This is the US explanation:

[Christina Rocca (USA)] said that she had voted against the draft, however, because of its support for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the United States opposed. The same considerations applied to the draft on the treaty itself (L.48). She did support that draft’s operative paragraph 5, which condemned the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear test and asked it not to conduct further ones.

Now the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes:

A draft resolution on a nuclear-weapon-free southern hemisphere and adjacent areas:

Explaining his vote on the nuclear-weapon-free southern hemisphere, L.20, and speaking on behalf of France, as well as the United States, JOHN DUNCAN ( United Kingdom) said that, as in past years, his delegations had voted against the resolution. Its preamble referred to the freedom of the high seas, while including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the high seas. He believed that was contradictory, as the area would not apply to the high seas.

Posted by James at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently there are some elections coming up shortly in the United States. I wonder if voters will be influenced by the infamous bill legalising torture and indefinite detention, which shows a stark contrast between the two main parties. Here is how the members of the House voted:

Update (2-Oct-2006): The Australian government is concerned that the new US laws are too lenient on suspects. Will they follow the US lead, and push through torture laws before the federal election due before January 2008?

Posted by James at 1:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Financial Times talk about one of the reasons for the strength of the Taliban - the salary of their fighters.

"The Taliban are supported by Pakistan and they get money from the drugs trade, so they get more pay than our soldiers," said Colonel Myuddin Ghouri of the national army's 205 Corp.

Posted by James at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I liked this interesting titbit from the New Statesman's article on the US response to global warming, Can America go green?:

Posted by James at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greenpeace has compiled data on the amount of subsidies that European governments are giving to the nuclear, fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors.

They note the suggestion from the World Energy Council:

diverting just one year of Europe's fossil fuel and nuclear subsidy - around $US15 billion - could revolutionise the entire international solar renewable energy industry, making it cost-competitive with traditional sources of energy

Posted by James at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A fortnight ago the UN created an Amnesty International approved Human Rights Council.

There was quite widespread support for its creation, but also some notable objectors.

A running gag at the United Nations is that whenever the United States takes a defiant stand against an overwhelming majority of the 191 member states, there are only three countries that predictably vote with Washington most of the time -- whether it is right or dead wrong.

As expected, this incongruous voting pattern was repeated Wednesday when the three loyal U.S. allies -- Israel and the two tiny Pacific Island nations of Palau and the Marshall Islands -- were the only member states to stand in unison with the United States when it rejected a resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council.

This can be analysed in a number of ways:

The exclusive NewsMax annual feature " United Nations Report Card" reveals that when it comes to supporting the U.S. on key issues, almost every nation in the world body gets a failing grade.

NewsMax examined 12 key General Assembly votes taken on issues of critical importance to the U.S., and found that only four countries -- Israel and the Pacific Ocean nations of Palau, Micronesia and Marshall Islands sided with the U.S. on most of the issues.

The rest of the U.N. members voted against the U.S. position the vast majority of the time, and dozens of countries voted along with America ZERO PERCENT of the time.

Posted by James at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whilst PM John Howard may have problems saying sorry to the Aboriginal people for past injustices, there is no excuse for the continuing under-funding of their medical care. Though many live "inconveniently" far from cities, Australia is a very wealthy country that can and should do more to bring the standard of Aboriginal health care up to that of the general population.

Posted by James at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been over a year since an ominous report warned of "climatic tipping points'', such as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting and the Gulf Stream shutting down, if action on stopping global warming was not taken soon. Meeting the Climate Challenge called on the G-8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on green technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol.

LiveScience mentions:

According to the report, urgent action is needed to stop the global average temperature rising by 2 degrees Celsius above the level in 1750 -- the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution when mankind first started significantly polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

No accurate temperature readings were available for 1750, the report said, but since 1860, global average temperature had risen by 0.8 percent to 15 degrees Celsius.

The two degrees rise could be avoided by keeping the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 400 parts per million (ppm). Current concentrations of 379 ppm "are likely to rise above 400 ppm in coming decades and could rise far higher under a business-as-usual scenario,'' the report warned.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide (parts per million)

1750	275
2005	380
Tipping point	400

The tipping point value mentioned is only an guess estimate. Perhaps it'll turn out to be 381ppm, or 450ppm. Whatever it is, if we don't stop pumping out greenhouse gases at the current rate, we'll definitely reach it. It's just a matter of time.

Posted by James at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has pertinent, and frightening, information about the continued use of landmines today. Their 1999 Ottawa Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, has been signed by 154 states, though major players such as China, Cuba, Finland, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Russia, USA have not.

The following chart shows which countries are still producing landmines.

An amazing 84 countries have problems with landmines and unexploded ordnance, and about 60 countries have stockpiles, with China maintaining 110 million antipersonnel mines. I hope they don't keep them near their fireworks factories.

Will somebody think of the children, or at least the potential alien visitors?

Posted by James at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The first results from the controversial Free Trade Agreement that the Howard Government signed up to for the benefit of the Australian economy have come through, and they appear to be not too pretty for one side:

Posted by James at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every year the ABC and its supporters complain about its lack of funding, which has declined in real terms about 30% in the last 15 years. Australians can only dream of the television delights - a real Electronic Program Guide on digital tv, for example - that we would receive if the ABC was funded as well as the BBC is.

My tax money spent on the ABC is equivalent to a Big Mac every month, or one DVD each year. Considering the amount of time spent watching television, it seems amazing that the money can stretch so far.

Posted by James at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does being a superpower necessitate high-military spending? I don't have historical figures, but I suspect that past world powers were the biggest military spenders of their times, because of their large empires to protect, and the funding available to them. Below is some data for 2005 from the CIA World Fact Book on total spending on the military.

The ranking of military expenditure as a percentage of GDP paints a very different picture, with poor, war-torn countries such as Eritrea and Angola heading the list.

I must admit to being slightly surprised at Australia's relatively high spending on the military, especially as these figures were prior to the recently announced increase in spending on the military as a proportion of GDP. In absolute terms, Australia's US$16 billion already vastly overshadows its near neighbours Indonesia and New Zealand, who spend US$1 billion annually.

Finally, one can consider military spending per person, which Israel currently leads by a considerable margin, and which holds many of the rich Middle Eastern oil states and typical Western European democracies near the top.

Posted by James at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite some noisy dissenters, the Kyoto protocol has gained widespread acceptance around the world. This chart shows the number of countries who have agreed to follow the protocol, and notes some exceptions:

Posted by James at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which temperature scale does your country use? The reason for the disparity shown in the chart below is probably not accurately explained by Dr Staff.

Whilst I wouldn't normally care what scale another country uses, it does affect me because I watch films and television from the United States. For example, in Survivor Guatemala the host mentioned that it was 120 (or was it 110) Fahrenheit, so I had to get google to translate "120 f in c" as 49 degrees Celsius to realise that it really was hot. So, if only for the benefit of international relations, I believe the scale worldwide should be standardised. Although I imagine there'd be great resistance amongst the general population in the US, other countries have managed to switch seemingly without trouble.

Update (28 Jan 2006): John Quiggin has some interesting thoughts on the whole topic of why the USA has not gone metric:

the attitude underlying the adherence to traditional measures is that the US is rich enough and important enough to do what it likes, and the rest of the world can like it or lump it (an attitude not unique to this issue). There’s a lot of truth in this, and it helps to explain why the US is pretty much self-sufficient in a wide range of cultural services. On the other hand, it’s not conducive to success in export markets for goods.

Posted by James at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Has your country ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely accepted human rights treaty ever?

Posted by James at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by James at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Australia's monetary assistance offered to Indonesia in the wake of the Tsunamis certainly sounds genuine:

...Australia's generosity towards the victims themselves has been made clear as the country is the single-biggest bilateral donor to the tsunami-stricken nations by pledging $810 million. Germany stands in second with $660 million while Japan ranks in third with $500 million in amounts committed to the relief effort.

But when you have a look at the details of what is actually being given, it doesn't sound so good:

The Australian Government will contribute $1 billion over five years to this new partnership. The package will consist of $500 million in grants and $500 million in concessional loans over 40 years with no interest and no repayments of principal over the first 10 years.

So while some countries were talking about freezing, or even cancelling some of Indonesia's foreign debt, Australia will actually be increasing it by half a billion dollars. Maybe they should use the $500 million grant to pay off the $500 million loan.

Posted by James at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Which formerly great power used a recent national tragedy to put more power in the hands of the president? Yes, it's Russia, a country with many pressing issues: .

Long life is one of the central characteristics of an advanced society; in Russia, men often die too young to collect a pension. In the United States, even during the Great Depression mortality rates continued to drop, and the same has been true for all other developed countries. Except Russia. In the past decade, life expectancy has fallen so drastically that a boy born in Russia today can expect to live just to the age of fifty-eight, younger than if he were born in Bangladesh. No other educated, industrialized nation ever has suffered such a prolonged, catastrophic growth in death rates.

Posted by James at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seeing the number of countries that still execute people dwindling gives a glimmer of hope that in my lifetime this practice will have ceased worldwide. In addition to the humanist arguments, CSICOP has the statistical reasons.

There are some questions that social scientists should be able to answer. Either executing people cuts the homicide rate or it does not. Or perhaps it does under certain conditions and not others. In any case, the data are readily available and researchers should be able to answer the question. Of course, this would not resolve the ethical issues surrounding the question, but that is another matter.
...
Models that find deterrence effects of capital punishment often rely on rather bizarre specifications. In a rigorous and comprehensive review Cameron (1994, 214) observed that, “What emerges most strongly from this review is that obtaining a significant deterrent effect of executions seems to depend on adding a set of data with no executions to the time series and including an executing/non-executing dummy in the cross-section analysis . . . there is no clear justification for the latter practice.”

In less technical language, the researchers included a set of years when there were no executions, then introduced a control variable to eliminate the nonexistent variance. The other day upon the stair, they saw some variance that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there again today, thank goodness their model scared it away. Not all the studies rely on this particular maneuver, but they all depend on techniques that demand too much from the available data.

Posted by James at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An aside to a flu vaccine story in the Washington Post says:

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, released an ad Friday calling Kerry "the most liberal man in the Senate" and "the most liberal person ever to run for president."

• Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
• Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

(Obsolete) Morally unrestrained; licentious.

In this country, liberal is such a positive term that parties from both sides of politics are associated with it. The conservative party was founded on the bold idea of naming itself the Liberal Party. At no time were their policies liberal, so it seems to be a sly way of forcing people to think liberal when talking of that party. More straightforwardly, the parties to the left, Labor and the Greens are both seen as being liberal in policy.

Posted by James at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're not satisfied with the return of the Howard government, or you've ever been unhappy with results in the past, then you might be interested in a fairer method of calculating the winner. Named after its French creator, the Marquis de Condorcet, the Condorcet method is described (and evangelised) at ElectionMethods.org, and you can even try out some examples of its implementation regarding the 2000 and 2004 US Presidential elections.

It is more complicated than current systems, but some might consider that fairness is more important than understandability.

Posted by James at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was Crikey the only major news organisation in Australia to voice the opinion that Labor should win?

The booming economy is a false dawn with a policy-induced housing bubble and a debt-funded consumer binge leaving no great legacy for future generations.

The Howard years have coincided with the age of the Internet, yet we have not produced an IT company of any note or taken advantage of new technology to create greater diversity of ownership and choice in media. Our business sector has become an amalgam of gouging cartels, a service sector oligopoly which has delivered for shareholders but not for the nation. Look no further than the way bank profits have more than doubled since 1996.

For the first time in history, we have fallen below one per cent of world exports and those exports remain dominated by primary products and minerals.

Just as Bob Hawke benefited from the drought breaking in 1983, the Howard Government has taken credit for things over which it has no control, primarily low global interest rates and the our best terms of trades in many years thanks to the boom in China.

Posted by James at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow's the day when your television viewing will be rudely interrupted by a bunch of politicians talking about themselves. I hope that there's some input from The Chaser Decides to liven things up. If you have digital tv and you live in Sydney then the live ABC election results service on channel 41 might be of interest.

If you were just planning at lobbing up at the polling booth and letting your party of choice choose your preferences too, then you might want to read The grubbiest preference deals at Crikey.com.au to get some background information. You can find out who your candidates are at the Australian Electoral Commission candidates pages.

Posted by James at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unlike the vibrant, competitive newspaper industry in England, there is a decided lack of journalistic material available daily in Australia. In Western Australia there is the choice of the nominally neutral The West Australian, or the obligatory Murdoch rag, the national The Australian.

Whilst there is an extreme lack of investigative, in-depth reporting in The West, I did find it easier to read without grinding my teeth because they didn't have an overt right-wing slant. However, in recent months, they have been shuffling to the right, such that it is not unusual to find them making rather outlandish attacks on the lefty political parties. A pertinent recent example was the leaking of a budget report announcing that the state had achieved a larger surplus than expected. Instead of lauding this achievement as sound financial management, such as the federal liberal party does regularly about its surpluses, the paper attacked it as an embarrassing blunder.

Now, I'm not arguing that the paper should not be attacking the government. However, in a situation where there are no alternatives, a more disinterested perspective would be more palatable. An ideal solution would be for more daily newspapers to be available, but I don't see that happening.

As an aside, The West has recently introduced electronic subscriptions, sllowing readers to read the paper over the internet. For this priviledge of not receiving a physical paper, you get to pay quadruple the normal $1 daily price. I always thought that electronic subscriptions, utilising savings in not having to manufacture anything, would be cheaper. It'll be interesting to watch for price alterations over time.

Update As noted by a correspondent, the right-wing influence of the only two daily newspapers in Western Australia (and The West Australian now being more right-wing than The Australian) may be the cause of the low polling of the national Labor party, rating perhaps the worst in the country in WA. When the public only sees news favourable to the Liberals, and has to deliberately seek out the whole picture from interstate news sources such as those in the Fairfax stable, the end result is all too predictable.

Posted by James at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For me, the only time I think about politics and politicians is when I don't like what is happening. If there's not anything I disapprove of, then I don't even contemplate the topic. However, a politician doing things against my wishes, but in my name, really irks me. And that is the nub of the negative feeling about politics in general. The only people who care are those who feel badly about it. And that's not a bad thing at all.

Posted by James at 1:39 PM | Permalink

While you can get a personal view of living in occupied Iraq by reading the various blogs by Iraqi bloggers, such as Baghdad Burning, you can get a better idea of what issues concern the majority by reading a variety of Iraq's newspapers. If you don't have the time or language skills to do this, then you will welcome the Iraqi Press Monitor, from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

Every day they select and produce one paragraph summaries of the major stories being reported in the Iraqi press. As well as putting a local slant on stories reported in the international media, there are interesting articles that would not otherwise make it out of Iraq.

Posted by James at 8:43 PM | Permalink

Here's a nice thorough analysis of what we now know about the whole Iraq war business, in Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong.

Some defenders of the Administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defense attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client (even if the client is guilty). That is a false analogy. A defense attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The President is responsible for serving the entire nation. Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S. government—and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.

...

Finally, the U.S. government must admit to the world that it was wrong about Iraq's WMD and show that it is taking far-reaching action to correct the problems that led to this error. Iraq is not going to be the last foreign-policy challenge in which we must make choices based on ambiguous evidence. When the United States confronts future challenges, the exaggerated estimates of Iraq's WMD will loom like an ugly shadow over the diplomatic discussions. Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth. The only way that we can regain the world's trust is to demonstrate that we understand our mistakes and have changed our ways.

Posted by James at 9:28 PM | Permalink

With the Australian Labor Party moving further to the right with each policy annoucement, traditional labels of political Left and Right are becoming more outdated. In Australia, the UK and the US, the traditionally leftist major parties (Labor, Labour and the Democrats respectively) have all shifted to the authoritarian right, close to their right-wing opponents. This leaves centre-left parties looking more like extreme lefties.

The latest in Labor's policy changes, one that was a surprise to many, was the Labor leader Mark Latham's support for the death penalty for Saddam Hussein.

Latham’s decision to support the death penalty was taken unilaterally and in direct contravention of official party policy. As Barry Jones, one of Labor’s rotating presidents, was quick to point out: “The policy of the Labor Party for over a century has been to oppose capital punishment. This is a moral position and it’s unequivocal. It does not apply just to Australian nationals or to offences committed in the southern hemisphere. It is a universal principle.”

A positive aspect to the Australian electoral system is proportional voting, which gives minor parties a fighting chance of getting a voice in Parliament. Voters know that a vote for the Greens, for example, will not be a vote wasted.

Posted by James at 1:04 PM | Permalink

The New York Review of Books is a magazine that I've always wanted to have a squiz at, but I was never motivated enough to look for their web site. Well, it turns out that they have a spiffing content-filled extravaganza. This fornight's edition includes such essays as The Vanishing Case for War:

The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained.

Posted by James at 9:48 PM | Permalink

So this is why so many Americans supported the invasion of Iraq.

A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war.

The three common mistaken impressions are that:

• U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
• There's clear evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein worked closely with the Sept. 11 terrorists.
• People in foreign countries generally either backed the U.S.-led war or were evenly split between supporting and opposing it.

....
The analysis released Thursday also correlated the misperceptions with the primary news source of the mistaken respondents. For example, 80 percent of those who said they relied on Fox News and 71 percent of those who said they relied on CBS believed at least one of the three misperceptions.

The comparable figures were 47 percent for those who said they relied most on newspapers and magazines and 23 percent for those who said they relied on PBS or National Public Radio.
....
The study found that belief in inaccurate information often persisted, and that misconceptions were much more likely among backers of the war.

Posted by James at 10:59 AM | Permalink

Are you thinking of moving to a new country? One aspect you might like to check up on is press freedom. Reporters Without Borders has released their first worldwide press freedom index. Australia, the US and the UK are suprisingly far down the list given their recent utterances about freedom.

Rank	Country	Note
1	Finland	0,50
-	Iceland	0,50
-	Norway	0,50
-	Netherlands	0,50
12	Australia	3,50
17	United States	4,75
21	United Kingdom	6,00
121	Russia	48,00
138	China	97,00
139	North Korea	97,50

Posted by James at 1:03 PM | Permalink

A well-written, interesting blog about daily life in Iraq has commenced, Baghad Burning.

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!

Posted by James at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It seems that the US army is not such as safe place to be. Judging from Gulf War 1, it could be years before the real toll is known.

Even more alarmingly, the Veterans Administration revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Schwarzkopf's entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and pension benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as "disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities, the casualty rate for the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3%.

Posted by James at 12:07 PM | Permalink

Contradicting the utterances recently coming from Bush, Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq.

The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants....

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun.

Posted by James at 12:35 PM | Permalink

Contradictions and motives in the war on Iraq:

After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an invading army!

Posted by James at 2:45 PM | Permalink

Even Slate is doing interesting anti-war articles, such as Unauthorized Entry - The Bush Doctrine: War without anyone's permission.

But George W. Bush defied embarrassment and slew it with a series of Orwellian flourishes. If the United Nations wants to be "relevant," he said, it must do exactly as I say. In other words, in order to be relevant, it must become irrelevant. When that didn't work, he said: I am ignoring the wishes of the Security Council and violating the U.N. Charter in order to enforce a U.N. Security Council resolution. No, no, don't thank me! My pleasure!!

Posted by James at 9:59 AM | Permalink

For those late to the party, here is a summary of why the war on Iraq is happening.

They've won. They got their war against Afghanistan (planned before September 11). They're getting their war against Iraq (planned slightly after September 11). After Iraq, they plan to get their wars against Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Last Sunday, one of them, Vice President Dick Cheney, said that President George W Bush would have to make "a very difficult decision" on Iraq. Not really. The decision had already been taken for him in the autumn of 2001.

Posted by James at 2:49 PM | Permalink

Lots of good examples about how vehemently the US media and politicians feel about France's reluctance to toe the Bush line on Iraq - US right-wing media, politicians spit out anti-French venom.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post has been one of the leaders of the anti-French pack. The front page of the Post’s February 10 issue carried a photograph of the graves of US soldiers who died in the Normandy invasion in 1944 with a headline, “They died for France but France has forgotten.”

Posted by James at 4:09 PM | Permalink

The 50 Most Ridiculous Things About the Upcoming War in Iraq! should have stopped at about 15, but it's fun nonetheless.

A large part of the brouhaha over Saddam Hussein's "defiance" is based on the popular belief that he expelled U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998. In fact, U.N. weapons inspectors were never kicked out of Iraq in 1998. What actually happened was that lead inspector Richard Butler evacuated his crew in order to avoid an imminent U.S. bombing run.

Posted by James at 4:14 PM | Permalink

Does US Secretary of State "Colon" Powell call his large intestine "Colin"?

Posted by James at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)