Day: August 9, 2003

Pentagon Caught in Stupid Lie

The Independent reports that the U.S. dropped napalm on some Iraqi positions even though back in March it claimed it had destroyed all napalm stocks back in 2001. According to the Independent,

“We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches,” said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. “Unfortunately there were people there … you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.”

A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who witnessed another napalm attack on 21 March on an Iraqi observation post at Safwan Hill, close to the Kuwaiti border, wrote the following day: “Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the observation post was obliterated. ‘I pity anyone who is in there,’ a Marine sergeant said. ‘We told them to surrender.'”

At the time, the Pentagon insisted the report was untrue. “We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April, 2001,” it said.

The revelation that napalm was used in the war against Iraq, while the Pentagon denied it, has outraged opponents of the war.

“Most of the world understands that napalm and incendiaries are a horrible, horrible weapon,” said Robert Musil, director of the organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility. “It takes up an awful lot of medical resources. It creates horrible wounds.” Mr Musil said denial of its use “fits a pattern of deception [by the US administration]”.

The Pentagon said it had not tried to deceive. It drew a distinction between traditional napalm, first invented in 1942, and the weapons dropped in Iraq, which it calls Mark 77 firebombs. They weigh 510lbs, and consist of 44lbs of polystyrene-like gel and 63 gallons of jet fuel.

Officials said that if journalists had asked about the firebombs their use would have been confirmed. A spokesman admitted they were “remarkably similar” to napalm but said they caused less environmental damage.

I don’t think anybody’s going to buy that sort of hair-splitting nonsense. Even the Marine colonel here has no illusions that this was anything but napalm.

And why lie about it? What sort of advantage is there to not just saying, “Yes, we used napalm”? Why lie about such a stupid thing that nobody but groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility are going to care about anyway?

Idiots.

Source:

US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq The Independent, Andrew Buncombe in Washington, August 10, 2003.

Good Example of How Dave Winer Edits and Reputation

Back when Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watch was up and running, Dave Winer posted in several places that most of the edits he makes are relatively minor. That may be true, but Pilgrim provides a good example of how drastically things can change at Winer’s sites in the course of just a few hours.

Here’s what Winer’s site says at the moment about Pilgrim complaining about a bug in Radio Userland’s implementation of Trackback,

Mark Pilgrim’s bug report. Just a bug, not a conspiracy.

Here’s what it apparently said earlier today (emphasis added),

Mark Pilgrim’s bug report has all the grace of a Rush Limbaugh rant. Shoot first and ask questions later. Someone should kick his ass, hard.

One of the things that Dave is really setting himself up for is for someone to simply making something up and start claiming that Winer actually said it but then deleted it.

Suppose, for example, I decided to make up a particuarly over-the-top statement and falsely attribute it to Winer. So I post it to my weblog and say that Winer posted this earlier and then almost a quickly deleted it.

How’s Dave going to convince people that he didn’t? He’s not going to be able to say he wouldn’t make that kind of inflammatory statement, because we have plenty of evidence that he does. He also can’t credibly claim that he wouldn’t post and then delete an inflammatory statement because there’s plenty of evidence he does it regularly.

Dave himself pointed out the problems attendant with having a reputation for that sort of thing when he linked to an Andrew Orloski story but noted that given Orloski’s track record the story only had about a 10 percent chance of being true. But Winer himself has a long-standing reputation, and his habit of constantly modifying what he writes is really setting himself up for the above scenario.

Which is a very good reason not to make the sort of wholesale changes Winer makes to his weblog posts. If you make a mistake or post something extremely inflammatory, it’s much better to simply leave it there and append it somehow (possibly with strikethrough text) rather than completely erase it. At least that way, visitors know they can rely on you standing by the things you write. Once you start editing to the point that you are regularly changing the entire context of weblog entries you open up a whole can of worms that gradually degrades the trust readers have in your weblog.

More Stating the Obvious about Africa

Again this summer, African nations held a summit where they give nice speeches about what’s wrong with the continent, but nothing will actually change.

This year, Ghanian Private Sector Development Minister Kwamena Bartels shocked the World Economic Forum’s Africa Economic Summitt by fingering a previously unknown contributor to Africa’s woes. It turns out that corruption is actually a major problem on the continent.

In other news, African states fund rebel movements that destabilize the continent while denying they do so,

This is an area where Africa fails itself. We can’t look our fellow Africans in the face and say what is wrong. We can’t all people to order publicly and tell them what needs to be done.

To be fair to Bartels, being a government minister in Africa must be like watching a slow motion train wreck. The problems that Africa faces and their solutions are not brain surgery. All they require is the political will to actually give African nation’s rhetoric about promoting democracy and ending corruption teeth.

But for the most part, organizations like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development are simply dog and pony shows designed to generate the right headlines domestically and internationally while allowing business-as-usual to proceed in African countries.

Source:

‘Africa fails by not exposing corruption’. The Natal Witness (South Africa), June 12, 2003.

European Farmers Want More Aid?

European farmers who have been hit by drought accompany this summer’s heat wave are asking the European Union for more aid.

That’s right, the most excessively subsidized farmers in the world want even more financial help from the state. Copa-Cogeca, which represents European farmers, wrote a letter to the European Commission and the Council of Ministers asking for aid to relieve this “natural disaster.”

What, as opposed to the man-made disaster that Europe’s excessive subsidies and entry barriers for agricultural programs have created in its former colonies in Africa?

Talk about throwing good money after bad.

Source:

Drought-hit farmers plead for aid. The BBC, July 21, 2003.

Number of Scientific Procedures on Animals in the UK Increased Slightly in 2002

The UK Home Office recently released its annual Statistics on Animals in Scientific Procedures 2002 which showed a slight increase in the number of scientific procedures performed in 2002 as compared to 2001.

According to the report, there were a total of 2.73 million such scientific procedures performed on animals in the UK, representing a 4.2 percent increase over the 2.62 million procedures performed in 2001.

The slight increase brought attacks from animal rights groups. Dr. Penny Hawkins, who heads up the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ efforts related to research animals told the Press Association,

We hear an awful lot from scientists and the Government about everything they are doing to replace animals with alternatives. These figures reveal that they are failing.

Similarly, Wendy Higgins of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection told the Press Association,

This shocking rise, and the alarming increase in the use of genetically modified animals, is a shameful reflection of this Government’s utter failure to tackle the controversial issue of animal experiments. Nearly three million animals still suffer painful and lethal experiments in UK labs and the UK public are legally denied access to detailed information about what goes on. The Government is stuck in a policy vacuum on vivisection, meanwhile the lab animal death toll continues to go up and up.

Higgins and Hawkins are both lying about the alternatives and the trends in the UK regarding animals procedures.

First, this was hardly a shocking rise. In fact, the total number of animal procedures performed in 2002 was barely above the 2000 level. The total number of procedures declined by 3.5 percent from 2000 to 2001, so the increase of 4.1 percent from 2001 to 2002 simply returned the number of procedures back to the 2000 level (full statistics on all species for 2000-2003 are available here.)

Moreover, this represents a dramatic decline in the total number of scientific procedures on animals over the last 5 years. In 1998, there were a total of 3.4 million such procedures conducted on animals. So researchers in the UK have reduced the total number of procedures by more than 20 percent in just 5 years.

It’s simply absurd that Higgins and Hawkins would turn around and accuse research of not being serious about using alternatives.

Second, Higgins is simply lying when she says that all 2.73 million procedures performed in 2002 involved “painful and lethal” research. Consider the 710,000 procedures on genetically modified animals that Higgins is so horrified about. What she conveniently leaves out is that more than 550,000 of those procedures involved breeding. Now maybe things are different from Higgins perspective, but breeding animals typically is neither painful nor lethal.

In fact, almost 30 percent of the 2.73 million “painful and lethal” procedures preformed in 2002 involved breeding.

Sources:

Scientific tests on animals increase. Western Mail and Echo Ltd., July 19, 2003.

Number of animal experiments rises. Sam Sheringham, Press Association, July 18, 2003.

Study of High Dose Oral Contraceptives Finds Low Death Rates

When the first oral contraceptives were introduced in the 1970s, they used relatively high doses of estrogen. Acting on the widely held view that lower doses of estrogen were safer, pharmaceutical companies gradually replaced the high dose pills with low dose versions. A new study of women who took high dose oral contraceptives, however, suggest that the concern over the high dose pills was misplaced.

Researchers at the Oxford Family Planning Association studied 17,032 women who visited family planning clinics in England and Scotland from 1968 to 1974.

Of the women how used high dose oral contraceptive, the death rate was actually 11 percent lower than for women who did not use high dose oral contraceptives. Due to the uncertainties in epidemic studies, that should not be read as implying that high dose contraceptives had a protective effect, but rather that their effect on the total death rate is not significant.

Which is not to say that high dose oral contraceptives might not contribute to some diseases. The study found that users of high dose oral contraceptives had much higher death rates from cervical cancer than non-users. But this was more than offset by a far lower risk of ovarian and other uterine cancers among users of high dose oral contraceptives.

The study confirmed that the major risk factor among the women in the study, both users and non-users of high dose oral contraceptives. Heavy smokers in the study had a death rate 100 percent higher than that of non-smokers.

Source:

Death rate low in former oral contraceptive users. Karla Gale, Reuters Health, July 18, 2003.