Marine Commandant Suggests Presence Of Gays Would Endanger The Lives Of Straight Marines
Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos — who has opposed repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — suggested that if Congress lifts the ban against open service and allows gays to serve without hiding their sexual orientation, the Marines could be so distracted that they would die in the line of duty:
The chief of the US Marine Corps said Tuesday that ending a ban on openly gay troops in the military could jeopardize the lives of Marines in combat by undermining closely knit units.
General James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps and an opponent of lifting the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prohibition, cited a Pentagon study saying Marines fighting in Afghanistan were worried that permitting gays to serve openly could disrupt “unit cohesion.”
“When your life hangs on a line, on the intuitive behavior of the young man… who sits to your right and your left, you don’t want anything distracting you,” Amos told reporters at the Pentagon.
“I don’t want to lose any Marines to distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda (hospital) with no legs,” he said.
He added that “mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines’ lives. That’s the currency of this fight.”
His comments were the toughest yet on the issue, after he testified at a congressional hearing that he opposed lifting the ban at a time of war.
Amos said Marines fighting in Afghanistan sent a “very strong message” in the Pentagon’s recent study, expressing opposition to the repealing the ban in an survey.
“I have to listen to that,” he said.
The Pentagon’s survey did reveal that Marines are most opposed to repealing the measure, but nowhere did it suggest that the distraction of gay servicemembers would have the effect of killing their straight counterparts. What it found was that 47.2% of Marines said a repeal of DADT would have a negative impact and were more likely to say their morale would be negatively affected by repeal than other Service members. Ninety-two percent of servicemembers also said they were fine with working with their gay colleagues, including 84% in Marine combat arms units. The Wonk Room argues that Amos should not be worried about the “distraction” of gay servicemembers. The real distraction is a policy which denies gay Marines the right to confide in their straight comrades as they’re dealing with the difficulties of deployment.
Marine Commandant Suggests Presence Of Gays Would Endanger The Lives Of Straight Marines
Speaking to reporters this afternoon, Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos — who has opposed repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — suggested that if Congress lifts the ban against open service and allows gays to serve without hiding their sexual orientation, the Marines could be so distracted that they would die in the line of duty:
The chief of the US Marine Corps said Tuesday that ending a ban on openly gay troops in the military could jeopardize the lives of Marines in combat by undermining closely knit units.
General James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps and an opponent of lifting the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” prohibition, cited a Pentagon study saying Marines fighting in Afghanistan were worried that permitting gays to serve openly could disrupt “unit cohesion.”
“When your life hangs on a line, on the intuitive behavior of the young man… who sits to your right and your left, you don’t want anything distracting you,” Amos told reporters at the Pentagon.
“I don’t want to lose any Marines to distraction. I don’t want to have any Marines that I’m visiting at Bethesda (hospital) with no legs,” he said.
He added that “mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines’ lives. That’s the currency of this fight.”
His comments were the toughest yet on the issue, after he testified at a congressional hearing that he opposed lifting the ban at a time of war.
Amos said Marines fighting in Afghanistan sent a “very strong message” in the Pentagon’s recent study, expressing opposition to the repealing the ban in an survey.
“I have to listen to that,” he said.
The study did reveal that Marines are most opposed to repealing the measure, but nowhere did it suggest that the distraction of gay servicemembers would have the effect of killing their straight counterparts. What it found was that 47.2% of Marines said a repeal of DADT would have a negative impact and were more likely to say their morale would be negatively affected by repeal than other Service members. Ninety-two percent of servicemembers also said they were fine with working with their gay colleagues, including 84% in Marine combat arms units.
As the study’s co-chairs explained during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, the negative findings were not insurmountable, and that with the proper leadership and communication, the policy could be repealed without undermining unit cohesion. In fact, both Gates and Mullen argued that if Congress doesn’t move forward with repeal, the courts will likely rule the policy unconstitutional and force the military to end the ban without providing any time for a smooth implementation process.
The study’s co-chairs also explained that the Marines’ more negative reaction was partly the result of their relative inexperience with gay servicemembers. Here is how Army Gen. Carter F. Ham put it to me shortly after the report was released:
One of the factors that causes a difference in the Army and the Marine Corps combat arms responses when compared to the overall responses is that we find in those two communities, Army and Marine Corps combat arms, — and this is probably unsurprising — that those communities have lower rates of actual experience of having served alongside a gay or lesbian servicemember. They’re all male organizations. They are the youngest communities, if you will, within the military. So you know, it’s not really surprising that they have less actual experience serving with gay and lesbian servicemembers. We did find in the survey that there is a difference between servicemembers who have and those who have not served with gay and lesbian servicemembers. And I think this may be one of the significant contributors to the differences between combat arms responses and the force overall.
Amos should not be worried about the “distraction” of gay servicemembers. The real distraction is a policy which denies gay Marines the right to confide in their straight comrades as they’re dealing with the difficulties of deployment.
McShane–don’t come back, McShane! – The hockey stick lives! Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.
Shane (updated): A Hockey Stick is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A Hockey Stick is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.
The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more. And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century. We are punching the climate beast — and she ain’t happy about it!
Future historians — and countless long-suffering future generations — will be quite puzzled that during the same short window humanity was given to avert multiple catastrophes predicted by basic science, a vast amount of effort went into a debate over the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph developed by leading U.S. climatologists and substantiated by multiple independent analyses. As WAG notes, within a few decades, nobody is going to be talking about hockey sticks, they will be talking about right angles (or hockey skates, see figure above) — when they are done cursing our greed and myopia and gullibility in the face of polluter-funded disinformation, that is.
Here in the present, the evidence just keeps accumulating that
- Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (see “Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick” and figures below)
- Future global warming on our current emissions path risks multiple simultaneous ever-worsening disasters that individually justify strong action now but, taken together, demand it (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!“
And so into this fray walks a gunman — well, two statisticians, McShane and Wyner. Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, the real gunslingers, can take it from here (reposted from RealClimate) — while we just watch:
Shane: You were watchin’ me down it for quite a spell, weren’t you?
Joey : Yes I was.
Shane : You know, I… I like a man who watches things go on around. It means he’ll make his mark someday.
Readers may recall a flurry of excitement in the blogosphere concerning the McShane and Wyner paper in August. Well, the discussions on the McShane and Wyner paper in AOAS have now been put online. There are a stunning 13 different discussion pieces, an editorial and a rebuttal. The invited discussions and rebuttal were basically published ‘as is’, with simple editorial review, rather than proper external peer review. This is a relatively unusual way of doing things in our experience, but it does seem to have been effective at getting rapid responses with a wide variety of perspectives, though without peer review, a large number of unjustified, unsupportable and irrelevant statements have also got through.
A few of these discussions were already online, i.e. from Martin Tingley, Schmidt, Mann and Rutherford (SMR), and one from Smerdon. Others, including contributions from Nychka & Li, Wahl & Ammann, McIntyre & McKitrick, Smith, Berliner and Rougier are newly available on the AOAS site and we have not yet read these as carefully yet.
Inevitably, focus in the discussions is on problems with MW, but it is worth stating upfront here (as is also stated in a number of the papers) that MW made positive contributions to the discussion as well – they introduced a number of new methods (and provided code that allows everyone to try them out), and their use of the Monte Carlo/Markov Chain (MCMC) Bayesian approach to assess uncertainties in the reconstructions is certainly interesting. This does not excuse their rather poor framing of the issues, and the multiple errors they made in describing previous work, but it does make the discussions somewhat more interesting than a simple error correcting exercise might have been. MW are also to be commended on actually following through on publishing a reconstruction and its uncertainties, rather than simply pointing to potential issues and never working through the implications.
The discussions raise some serious general issues with MW’s work – with respect to how they use the data, the methodologies they introduce (specifically the ‘Lasso’ method), the conclusions they draw, whether there are objective methods to decide whether one method of reconstruction is better than another and whether the Bayesian approach outlined in the last part of the paper is really what it is claimed. But there are also a couple of very specific issues to the MW analysis; for instance, the claim that MW used the same data as Mann et al, 2008 (henceforth M08).
On that specific issue, presumably just an oversight, MW apparently used the “Start Year” column in the M08 spreadsheet instead of the “Start Year (for recon)” column. The difference between the two is related to the fact that many tree ring reconstructions only have a small number of trees in their earliest periods and that greatly inflates their uncertainty (and therefore reduces their utility). To reduce the impact of this problem, M08 only used tree ring records when they had at least 8 individual trees, which left 59 series in the 1000 AD frozen network. The fact that there were only 59 series in the AD 1000 network of M08 was stated clearly in the paper, and the criterion regarding the minimal number of trees (8) was described in the Supplementary Information. The difference in results between the correct M08 network and spurious 95 record network MW actually used is unfortunately quite significant. Using the correct data substantially reduces the estimates of peak medieval warmth shown by MW (as well as reducing the apparent spread among the reconstructions). This is even more true when the frequently challenged “Tiljander” series are removed, leaving a network of 55 series. In their rebuttal, MW claim that M08 quality control is simply an ‘ad hoc’ filtering and deny that they made a mistake at all. This is not really credible, and it would have done them much credit to simply accept this criticism.
With just this correction, applying MW’s own procedures yields strong conclusions regarding how anomalous recent warmth is the longer-term context. MW found recent warmth to be unusual in a long-term context: they estimated an 80% likelihood that the decade 1997-2006 was warmer than any other for at least the past 1000 years. Using the more appropriate 55-proxy dataset with the same estimation procedure (which involved retaining K=10 PCs of the proxy data), yields a higher probability of 84% that recent decadal warmth is unprecedented for the past millennium.
However K=10 principal components is almost certainly too large, and the resulting reconstruction likely suffers from statistical over-fitting. Objective selection criteria applied to the M08 AD 1000 proxy network as well as independent “pseudoproxy” analyses (discussed below) favor retaining only K=4 PCs. (Note that MW correctly point out that SMR made an error in calculating this, but correct application of the Wilks (2006) method fortunately does not change the result, 4 PCs should be retained in each case). Nonetheless, this choice yields a very close match with the relevant M08 reconstruction. It also yields considerably higher probabilities up to 99% that recent decadal warmth is unprecedented for at least the past millennium. These posterior probabilities imply substantially higher confidence than the “likely” assessment by M08 and IPCC (2007) (a 67% level of confidence). Indeed, a probability of 99% not only exceeds the IPCC “very likely” threshold (90%), but reaches the “virtually certain” (99%) threshold. In this sense, the MW analysis, using the proper proxy data and proper methodological choices, yields inferences regarding the unusual nature of recent warmth that are even more confident than expressed in past work.
An important real issue is whether proxy data provides more information than naive models (such as the mean of the calibrating data for instance) or outperform random noise of various types. This is something that has been addressed in many previous studies which have come to very different different conclusions than MW, and so the reasons why MW came to their conclusion is worth investigating. Two factors appear to be important – their use of the “Lasso” method exclusively to assess this, and the use of short holdout periods (30 years) for both extrapolated and interpolated validation periods.
So how do you assess how good a method is? This is addressed in almost half of the discussion papers – Tingley in particular gives strong evidence that Lasso is not in fact a very suitable method, and is outperformed by his Composite Regression method in test cases, Kaplan points out that using noise with significant long term trends will also perform well in interpolation. Both Smith and the paper by Craigmile and Rajaratnam also address this point.
In our submission, we tested all of the MW methods in “pseudoproxy” experiments based on long climate simulations (a standard benchmark used by practitioners in the field). Again, Lasso was outperformed by almost every other method, especially the EIV method used in M08, but even in comparison with the other methods MW introduced. The only support for ‘Lasso’ comes from McIntyre and McKitrick who curiously claim that the main criteria in choosing a method should be how long it has been used in other contexts, regardless of how poorly it performs in practice for a specific new application. A very odd criteria indeed, which if followed would lead to the complete cessation of any innovation in statistical approaches.
The MW rebuttal focuses a lot on SMR and we will take the time to look into the specifics more closely, but some of their criticism is simply bogus. They claim our supplemental code was not usable, but in fact we provided a turnkey R script for every single figure in our submission – something not true of their code, so that is a little cheeky of them [as is declaring that one of us to be a mere blogger, rather than a climate scientist
]. They make a great deal of the fact that we only plotted the ~50 year smoothed data rather than the annual means. But this seems to be more a function of their misconstruing what these reconstructions are for (or are capable of) rather than a real issue. Not least of which, the smoothing allows the curves and methods to be more easily distinguished – it is not a ‘correction’ to plot noisy annual data in order to obscure the differences in results!
Additionally, MW make an egregiously wrong claim about centering in our calculations. All the PC calculations use
prcomp(proxy, center=TRUE, scale=TRUE)to specifically deal with that, while the plots use a constant baseline of 1900-1980 for consistency. They confuse plotting convention with a calculation.There is a great deal to digest in these discussions, and so we would like to open the discussion here to all of the authors to give their thoughts on how it all stacks up, what can be taken forward, and how such interactions might be better managed in future. For instance, we are somewhat hesitant to support non-peer reviewed contributions (even our own) in the literature, but perhaps others can make a case for it.
In summary, there is much sense in these contributions, and Berliner’s last paragraph sums this up nicely:
The problem of anthropogenic climate change cannot be settled by a purely statistical argument. We can have no controlled experiment with a series of exchangeable Earths randomly assigned to various forcing levels to enable traditional statistical studies of causation. (The use of large-scale climate system models can be viewed as a surrogate, though we need to better assess this.) Rather, the issue involves the combination of statistical analyses and, rather than versus, climate science.
Hear, hear.
If you want another debunking see, “I went to a statistician fight and a hockey stick broke out,” which presents Deep Climate’s evisceration, summarized as:
McShane and Wyner’s background exposition of the scientific history of the “hockey stick” relies excessively on “grey” literature and is replete with errors, some of which appear to be have been introduced through a misreading of secondary sources, without direct consultation of the cited sources. And the authors’ claims concerning the performance of “null” proxies are clearly contradicted by findings in two key studies cited at length, Mann et al 2008 and Ammann and Wahl 2007. These contradictions are not even mentioned, let alone explained, by the authors.In short, this is a deeply flawed study and if it were to be published as anything resembling the draft I have examined, that would certainly raise troubling questions about the peer review process at the Annals of Applied Statistics.
And the best scientific gunslingers always shoot with actual data, so, for completeness’ sake and new readers, let’s run through the recent literature.
There are now more studies that show recent warming is unprecedented – in magnitude and speed and cause — than you can shake a stick at!
As with a pride of lions, and a delusion of disinformers, perhaps the grouping should get its own name, like “a team of hockey sticks” (see “The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn’t Disappear“).
- GRL: “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
- JGR: “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.” [figure below]
Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961–1990AD average) for the last ∼1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39‐year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2s uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.
Yes, the 39‐year Gaussian filter appears to wipe out over half of the warming since 1950 as this NASA chart makes clear:
For the record, even a moderate MWP (even if it were global, which remains unproven) does nothing whatsoever to undermine our understanding of human-caused global warming. The temperature trend in the past millennium prior to about 1850 is well explained in the scientific literature as primarily due to changes in the solar forcing along with the effect of volcanoes, whereas the recent rise in temperature has been driven primarily — if not almost entirely — by human activity (see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Inhofe, CO2 — but not the sun — “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850 and a post to be named later).
The Geophysical Research Letters paper, “Twentieth century warming in deep waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence: A unique feature of the last millennium” concludes:
… irrespective of the precise mechanisms responsible for the temperature variations reconstructed from core MD99‐2220, it is unquestionable that the last century has been marked there by a warming trend having no equivalent over the last millennium.
For those keeping score at home, here are a few more members of the team of hockey sticks:
From Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds (2009):
From Unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika and its impact on humanity (2010):
From Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years (2008)
The Hockey Stick lives. And so we have the last Mann standing:
Joey: Was that him? Was that McShane?
Mann: That was him. That was McShane, all right, and he was fast, fast on the draw.
With serious apologies to the original writers of the classic Western:
- A.B. Guthrie Jr. (screenplay)
- Jack Sher (additional dialogue)
- Jack Schaefer (novel)
Print Lives!
Innocent Smith sees what we're trying to get at with print-on-demand projects like "The Cannabis Closet":
Personally, I don’t plan on buying the book, don’t smoke pot, and am indifferent toward marijuana legalization. What impresses me is how the book was created and is being distributed. Once again, Sullivan defies cliches, demonstrating that the internet may not be killing so much as transforming print media. Here is a book without a conventional author or publisher. What it does have is an editor (the Dish) which has compiled a popular online discussion thread (“The Cannibas Closet”) and bypassed the traditional publishing industry by printing copies through blurb.com. On top of all of this innovation, the book generates revenue for the Dish at a time when most journalists find it increasingly difficult to get paid.
You can buy the book here – for just $ 5.95 (and don't forget to use the promo-code DISH for $ 3 off shipping).
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Gone in 2010 But Not Forgotten: 100 Individuals Who Touched Our Lives
A list of people and creatures who touched our lives in large and small ways who left this mortal coil over the last 12 months .
24-26. Because Americas Royal Family Lives Here, Of Course
2010 was an annus horribilis for Barack Obama, as it was for pretty much every Democrat of genuinely national statureexcept, that is, for the blessed three whose surname happens to be Clinton.
nymag.com: Politics
Special Forces Units Ignore Bureaucrat Memo, and Save Lives
By signing a memo Oct. 29, 2007, James R. Clapper Jr. exposed U.S. military personnel to greater-than-necessary danger as they served their country in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots around the world.
Then an Under Secretary of Defense and now our nation’s Director of National Intelligence, Clapper designated the polygraph and its hand-held cousin, the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System, as the “only approved credibility assessment technologies” in DoD. At the same time, he sent a dangerous message to U.S. troops: “Stop using the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer.”
Fortunately, some of our nation’s bravest warriors sided with common sense and opted to ignore The Clapper Memo. One of those who did was, until recently, a member of the Army Special Forces whom I will call “Joe” (not his real name).
Trained in counterintelligence and as an interrogator, this former SF operator used CVSA to conduct nearly 500 interrogations of enemy combatants and third-country nationals — more than anyone in the U.S. military — while serving in Qatar, Kuwait and Iraq and regularly working 18-hour days from 2004 to 2009.
Joe agreed to speak with me on condition of anonymity about his firsthand experience with CVSA and why Department of Defense leaders are wrong to keep the technology now used by more than 1,800 U.S. law enforcement agencies out of the hands of people in uniform.
“I was still downrange when that memo came out,” said Joe, who spoke with me on condition of anonymity.
After learning of the memo, Joe said he went to his commander and asked one question: “You want me to stop?”
His commander replied, “Hell no, don’t stop! You’re just not using it anymore, right?”
Despite Pentagon orders to the contrary, Joe’s SF commanders wanted him to continue using CVSA for one primary reason: They knew it was far superior to PCASS when it came to dealing with various types of detainees, captured enemy combatants, third-country nationals and others who could pose threats to U.S. and allied troops in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and Qatar.
“The craziest thing about this whole deal was that it became such a controversy that, for us to continue to go up there and continue to fight — to say, ‘Hey, we need to use this,’” — “we were ordered to stand down and not even mention the words anymore,” Joe said.
Why the stand-down order? Because, according to Joe, someone in Army leadership was more willing to rely upon laboratory studies commissioned by officials and agencies with vested interests in the continued use of the polygraph instead of trusting operational research like that Joe conducted almost daily.
One of the often-cited studies that proves his point, “Assessing the Validity of Voice Stress Analysis Tools in a Jail Setting,” was conducted by University of Oklahoma Professor Kelly R. Damphousse using funds from a noncompetitive $ 232,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice, the research, development and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For their participation in the 2007 study, inmates at the Oklahoma County Jail received candy bars as rewards but faced no real jeopardy, a factor that makes or breaks the validity of the test.
In places like Iraq, where CVSA worked so effectively for SF operators, Joe said, he could tell an interview subject, “Hey, you’re gonna be here for a really long time and convicted as a terrorist if I find out you’re lying to me.” Conversely, he could say, “You’re gonna go home tomorrow if you clear this chart.” In other words, jeopardy was clearly present. Not candy bars.
Not surprisingly, Joe isn’t the only soldier who shares Joe’s opinions about the polygraph and CVSA.
One “Anonymous Fort Bragg CVSA Examiner” sent me the message below soon after I published my first serious piece about the polygraph-CVSA controversy April 9, 2009. It appears unedited below:
“I was one of the first US Army soldiers trained on the CVSA system back in 2005. I have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and have used the CVSA in both theaters. Despite the unofficial “ban” on the system by the Army polygraph examiners, my commander and chain of command have supported and continue to support the CVSA.
“Over the past 4 years I have conducted over 200 CVSA exams, and kept records and logs of each exam as required by SOP. My CVSA exams have been accurate at least 94% of the time, because the information I developed from the CVSA was independently confirmed by other evidence we developed during our operations. And that is either Deceptive or Not Deceptive.
“Unlike the PCASS, there are no flashing lights, and no inconclusive results when you use a CVSA. The CVSA always lets you know whether a subject is Deceptive or Not Deceptive. Oh, did I mention some buddies from Fort Campbell who are also CVSA examiners went through PCASS training and they refuse to use it because it simply does not work. The whole PCASS concept is a joke, and when they went to PCASS training the instructors got pissed when they asked informed questions about the CVSA and polygraph.
“We will not risk our lives on a piece of junk that was put together by eggheads who don’t have a clue about the real world, and have probably never been to a combat zone. The CVSA is accurate, and has been instrumental in obtaining legal (by the book) confessions from the tests I have conducted. I have used it to get confessions from bombers , spies, infiltrators, killers, and other low life’s. They break down quickly once they know that you know the truth, and they confess.
“The CVSA has helped us round up more bad guys than I care to count. It is well regarded by Army SF and NSW, because it works. It has saved the lives of US personnel, ask any of the guys who have conducted the hundreds of CVSA exams in Iraq.
“I forgot to mention that the polygraph examiners go crazy when they find out we are using it. They will fly into our AO waving their regulations, and our chain of command boots them in the ass, and they leave with their tails between their legs. It is funny these clowns are more concerned about protecting their turf than they are about us and our mission. I am surprised the Army leadership puts up with the bullshit. They have ZERO successes to point to, only failures.”
Days later, another confidential source provided me a copy of an After Action Report written by an “insider” at Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility following a 30-day test of the technology in 2003. It’s summary included the praise below:
“During the test period, it was obvious that CVSA would become an invaluable tool for focusing the efforts of intelligence collection. By virtue of utilizing the CVSA equipment and training, interrogations could be focused on areas where deception if indicated, versus wasting time and energy on avenues of exploitation that would have little to no value. The outcomes of the 30 day test period has shown outstanding results, and has generated a high degree of interest and satisfaction among the intelligence community.”
I also received a copy of a letter written by a high-ranking interrogation official (name withheld) who served at GITMO while CVSA was tested there. He listed seven distinct advantages of CVSA (shown unedited below) over the traditional polygraph system:
1. It is more portable.
2. It is less intrusive (microphone as opposed to galvanic, heart, blood pressure, and breathing monitors).
3. Less training required for the examiner.
4. The test is easier to explain to the subject before the test is administered.
5. The test results are easier to explain to the subject. (The charts for both control questions and relevant questions can be shown and explained. This makes post test questioning much easier.)
6. There are no inconclusive test results.
7. The examiner can identify the questions to which the subject’s answers appeared to show deception. This helps to focus additional questions and subsequent interrogations. (The polygraphers would not identify the questions to which the subject appeared to be deceptive when answering. They would only say the test showed “No deception indicated, deception indicated or inconclusive.”
That same GITMO interrogator included the paragraph below as his closing statement:
“My opinion based upon my observation is that CVSA is superior to the polygraph when used as a tool in the interrogation process. Consequently, I conclude that those who wish to remove CVSA from the “interrogator’s tool box” are more interested in protecting their turf than they are in gathering intelligence that protects the American people.”
The pro-CVSA opinions above stand in stark contrast to official answers I received in response to questions asked about the Army’s use of the portable lie detectors.
Appearing carefully-constructed and thoroughly-coordinated, they arrived in my inbox in early May 2009 — after 27 days and the exchange of dozens of e-mails — from U.S. Central Command. The person delivering the answers was Maj. John Redfield, an Air Force PAO assigned to CENTCOM.
Asked whether officials at the joint command considered PCASS effective after one year of use, CENTCOM responded as follows:
“The comments from forward commanders and their principal intelligence advisors regarding the value of PCASS have been very favorable. In Iraq and Afghanistan, PCASS has proven its value; aiding in the identification of individuals with inimical interests to the U.S. government and our allies has allowed commanders to take actions to reduce the risks these individuals posed.”
Asked if CENTCOM had plans to continue, expand or otherwise modify the use of PCASS devices in the field, they wrote:
“CENTCOM published guidance which authorizes the use of PCASS in our area of responsibility. The continued use and any expansion of use will be decided by commanders on the ground and those ready to deploy after consultation with their military service leadership. CENTCOM does not envision modifying the use of PCASS, as our current policy permits the use of the device as a screening tool in some very specific situations on specific individuals and under specific conditions. To expose those specifics would endanger the lives of American military personnel.”
Asked if PCASS has been credited with directly saving any American lives or thwarting any enemy operations, CENTCOM replied as follows:
“Unlike a bulletproof vest, PCASS is not a stand-alone tool which one can point to and give credit for saving lives. PCASS is an aid which complements other techniques and is a device which is complemented by other procedures. Together these tools have aided intelligence personnel in the identification of locally employed persons who were corresponding with violent extremist organizations, foreign intelligence and security services, and criminal elements. There is no way to measure how many lives were saved by taking positive action against individuals who would pass friendly information to persons who would then use that information to attack or attempt to disrupt U.S. and coalition military operations.”
In stark contrast to the official message coming from headquarters, Joe told me SF operators would “rather go back to the stubby pencil and taking an educated guess” than use PCASS.
One of the major flaws in the technology that cause Joe and others to discount PCASS can be found in polygraph training, Joe said.
“If you can trick yourself into thinking you’re a bomber,” Joe said, “then why can’t you trick yourself into thinking you’re not and trick that machine?”[Note: To see the training scenario Joe cited from the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (formerly the DoD Polygraph Institute) at Fort Jackson, S.C., click here.]
Joe added that he thinks rank-and-file polygraphers would embrace CVSA if given the opportunity.
“If you take PCASS operators and CVSA operators, cross-train ‘em and, at the end of that, give ‘em some time to work with the equipment in the field, I would say 95 to 96 percent of them guys — because, you know, some people just don’t like change if they were PCASS guys first — will tell you that the CVSA is a much better piece of equipment.
As for those who remain opposed to CVSA, Joe had this message: “Anybody looking out for the welfare of the soldier and really looking at this open-minded (would) see that the CVSA is the best tool for the job,” he said.
I asked Joe what he would say, if given the chance, to our nation’s leaders in Washington about the prohibition on the CVSA use by U.S. troops.
“I would testify in front of Congress that this piece of equipment is essential for HUMINT personnel on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “If they want to save lives, they’ve got to put this piece of equipment back into that theater. Every unit should have this equipment.”
Fortunately, Joe told me that SF operators are skilled in knowing how to keep equipment “off the books.” One can only hope that some of the CVSA computers remain in use.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Stay tuned! The information in this and previous articles I’ve written and published about the polygraph-CVSA controversy represents only the “tip of the iceberg.” More will appear in my upcoming book about this controversy, “Turf War: Detecting Lies and Deception.”
SEE ALSO:
- To read true stories about the use of CVSA technology on the Arabian Peninsula during the past decade, click here.
- To read this author’s previous posts about the polygraph-CVSA controversy, click here.
Skip to main content CNN CNN US * EDITION: U.S. * INTERNATIONAL * MÉXICO Set edition preference * Sign up * Log in * Home * Video * NewsPulse * U.S. * World * Politics * Justice * Entertainment * Tech * Health * Living * Travel * Opinion * iReport * Money * Sports [Feedback] Feedback Share this on: Mixx Facebook Twitter Digg delicious reddit MySpace StumbleUpon LinkedIn Holder: ‘Significant’ actions taken in WikiLeaks investigation By the CNN Wire Staff December 6, 2010 11:40 a.m. EST STORY HIGHLIGHTS * U.S. attorney general calls posts of diplomatic cables “arrogant” and misguided” * Swiss bank ends business relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Washington (CNN) – Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized “significant” actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. “National security of the United States has been put at risk,” Holder said. “The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can.” Holder, speaking at a news conference on financial fraud, declined to answer questions about the possibility of the U.S. government shutting WikiLeaks down, saying he does not want to talk about capabilities and techniques at the government’s disposal. His comments came as a Swiss bank announced that it had closed the account of Julian Assange, the website’s founder. “The decision comes after it was revealed that Assange provided false information regarding his place of residence when opening the account,” Swiss PostFinance said in a news release. (MORE) Share this on: Mixx Facebook Twitter Digg delicious reddit MySpace StumbleUpon LinkedIn We recommend You might like: * And the winner of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ is… The Marquee Blog * Obama in Afghanistan Afghanistan Crossroads * House, Senate Democrats: no tax cut extension over $250,000 CNN Politics * Clinton condemns leak as ‘attack on international community’ CNN US * Fighters scrambled as DC airspace rules violated CNN US From around the web Selected for you by our sponsor: * California man goes to court for modifying Xbox 360 Digital Trends * WikiLeaks: Vladimir Putin, He’s Just Like Us New York Magazine * WikiLeaks Worse for SEC Than Bank of America TheStreet * WikiLeaks’ Next Target Could Be U.S. Bank TheStreet * Citizen Journalists Offer Disturbing Video From Inside North Korea New York Magazine [what’s this] Loading comments… Problems loading Disqus? Log in or sign up to comment soundoff (0 Comments) Show: Newest | Oldest | Most liked Post a comment Log in or sign up to comment There are no comments on this story. Be the first! Thanks for posting. Would you like to edit your profile? NewsPulse Most popular stories right now WikiLeaks lists sites key to U.S. security Frum: Why obesity harms national security Officials: Bodies of U.S. balloonists found Mechanic convicted in deadly Concorde crash Australia: Assange allowed to return home Explore the news with NewsPulse » * Healthcare Jobs * Sales and Marketing Jobs * Finance Jobs Quick Job Search more options » 30° HI 38°LO 20° Welcome, NCWeather forecast Home | Video | NewsPulse | U.S. | World | Politics | Justice | Entertainment | Tech | Health | Living | Travel | Opinion | iReport | Money | Sports Tools & widgets | RSS | Podcasts | Blogs | CNN mobile | My profile | E-mail alerts | CNN shop | Site map CNN en ESPAÑOL | CNN Chile | CNN Expansion | | | | CNN TV | HLN | Transcripts © 2010 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of service | Privacy guidelines | Advertising practices | Advertise with us | About us | Contact us | Work for us | Help
Washington (CNN) – Attorney General Eric Holder said Monday that he has authorized “significant” actions related to the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks as the website faces increasing pressure worldwide for publishing sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables.
“National security of the United States has been put at risk,” Holder said. “The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way. We are doing everything that we can.”
FULL STORY
What the pro-pollution, anti-science crowd won’t tell you about the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments – Benefits exceeded costs by 30-to-1, with 160,000 lives saved
This repost from EDF’s Steve Cochran is part of CP’s series on EPA’s highly cost-effective, science-based efforts to preserve clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for our kids.
There they go again. Economic meltdown. Higher consumer costs. Massive job losses. These are among the predictions of doom surrounding EPA’s current and forthcoming round of clean air protections. If they sound familiar, they should. Time and again, from the enactment of the Clean Air Act in 1970 to today, prophets of doom have predicted that disastrous consequences would flow from cleaning the air we all breathe. And time and again, those dire predictions have been wrong. The Clean Air Act has protected American health and our environment for decades while our economy has grown. It is a legislative success story that continues today.
This series will examine what the naysayers have said about Clean Air Act protections and how those wild predictions compare to the statute’s actual record of protecting Americans from toxic air pollution and its devastating effects on human health and the environment. We start with the acid rain program in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.
Predictions of Doom
Twenty years ago, and twenty years after enacting the modern Clean Air Act, Congress took up the matter of acid rain, which was devastating ecosystems across the East and Northeast. Acid rain is caused by air pollution including sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. For the first time ever, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 used the groundbreaking tool of a market-based cap and trade system to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions.
Industry fought the acid rain program with scare tactics throughout the legislative debate, warning that it would wreak havoc on the economy:
The Edison Electric Institute predicted the Clean Air Act Amendments would cost the electric utility industry up to $ 4.5 billion a year. The Business Roundtable projected the total economic cost would be $ 104 billion a year. American Electric Power Company warned of “the potential destruction of the Midwest economy.” In an editorial that dismissed the scientific case for reducing acid rain, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution warned that “Americans can expect their power bills to skyrocket for nothing.”
Protecting our Health and Environment
Twenty years later, peer-reviewed EPA studies required by the Clean Air Act show that sweeping public health benefits have resulted from the reductions in air pollution achieved under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. While the legislative debate about acid rain focused on environmental harm, public health reaped great benefits because sulfur dioxide pollution from power plants forms not only acid rain, but also particulate pollution that is particularly dangerous to breathe.
EPA estimates that the pollution reductions achieved under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments will in this year alone:
Save 160,000 lives Avoid 130,000 cases of acute bronchitis and 130,000 heart attacks Prevent 86,000 emergency room visits Keep children in school and prevent 3,200,000 lost school days Keep workers on the job and prevent 13,000,000 lost work days.
These profound public health benefits are paired with dramatic reductions in sulfate deposition, and damaged environments have begun to recover from the ill effects of decades of acid rain.
Costs and Benefits
Not surprisingly, the cost of achieving the tremendous public health and environmental benefits of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 were a fraction of industry forecasts, and significantly below EPA’s own projections. In 1990, power companies predicted that reducing sulfur dioxide pollution would cost $ 1000-$ 1500 per ton and electricity prices would increase up to 10% in many states (Factsheet, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Industry Claims About the Costs of the Clean Air Act [PDF], June 16, 2009). In fact, the actual pollution reduction cost has been between $ 100 and $ 200 per ton for most of the program, and electricity prices fell in most states. Acid rain has been dramatically reduced and the limits on sulfur dioxide pollution were met faster and at a strikingly lower price than anyone expected in 1990.
The benefits to public health and the environment outweigh these costs many times over. EPA’s analysis of the costs and benefits of the Clean Air Act projects that in 2020 the benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments will exceed the costs of compliance by a factor of 30 to 1. Studies by the Office of Management and Budget and private researchers support these conclusions as well.
The predictions of doom in 1990 overlooked the power of American innovation unleashed by the goals of the Clean Air Act Amendments and the market-based system Congress established to achieve them. Unlike previous programs that specified what pollution controls must be used, the acid rain program set enforceable and descending limits on total pollution, but let industry experiment, innovate and find the most cost-effective means to lower pollution. These results are a striking rebuke to the critics who said it could not be done.
– Steve Cochran is the Vice President of the Climate and Air program at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Related Posts:
- For EPA regulations, benefits consistently exceed costs
- The EPA and Lisa Jackson versus the polluters who want dirtier air and water for your family
Duke freshman Kyrie Irving lives up to hype against Michigan State – MLive.com
 Washington Post |
Duke freshman Kyrie Irving lives up to hype against Michigan State
MLive.com AP PhotoDuke's Kyrie Irving scrambles for a loose ball in the second half near Michigan State's Korie Lucious. DURHAM, NC — Kyrie Irving came just as advertised. The Duke freshman point guard dropped 31 points on Michigan State in the biggest game of … No. 6 Michigan State Duke super-frosh Irving already worthy of superstar status Michigan State's list of visitors grows by two |
Partisanship Lives On
Walter Shapiro notes the bipartisan “smile-button summit” at the White House yesterday “was all for show in a political pantomime that fooled only those already credulous enough to believe in Taliban imposters. By Thursday, at the latest, Washington will be back to its old ways by treating the lame-duck session of Congress as a blood sport. Republicans will snarl about the Democrats’ support for job-killing tax increases while Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will fulminate about the GOP’s preference for millionaires over hard-working American families. Congressional leaders in both parties will dispense with Standard English and lapse back into a language of epithets known as Partisan Speak.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
Farmer in the Times: “Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life.” – “The country must get serious about climate-change legislation and making real changes in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions. The future of our nation’s food supply hangs in the balance. “
THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless.
So begins a poignant, must-read NY Times op-ed, “An Almanac of Extreme Weather,” by Jack Hedin a Minnesota farmer. The NYT actually has three op-eds to usher in international climate talks in Cancún, which start Monday.
ClimateProgress will cover Cancún over the next two weeks, including onsite blogging in the final week from CAP attendees, even though little actual climate progress is expected.
One of the NYT op-eds is so misleading I’ll have to set the record straight later, but for now let me excerpt the Hedin piece, in which a farmer out-reports most of the U.S. media, with a seldom-told story that will ultimately be the much-retold story of the century, but needs to be heard now while there is still time to act:
My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. While our farm is not large by modern standards, its roots are deep in this region; my great-grandfather homesteaded about 80 miles from here in the late 1800s.
He passed on a keen sensitivity to climate. His memoirs, self-published in the wake of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, describe tornadoes, droughts and other extreme weather. But even he would be surprised by the erratic weather we have experienced in the last decade.
In August 2007, a series of storms produced a breathtaking 23 inches of rain in 36 hours. The flooding that followed essentially erased our farm from the map. Fields were swamped under churning waters, which in places left a foot or more of debris and silt in their wake. Cornstalks were wrapped around bridge railings 10 feet above normal stream levels. We found butternut squashes from our farm two miles downstream, stranded in sapling branches five feet above the ground. A hillside of mature trees collapsed and slid hundreds of feet into a field below.
The machine shop on our farm was inundated with two feet of filthy runoff. When the water was finally gone, every tool, machine and surface was bathed in a toxic mix of used motor oil and rancid mud.
Our farm was able to stay in business only after receiving grants and low-interest private and government loans. Having experienced lesser floods in 2004 and 2005, my family and I decided the only prudent action would be to use the money to move over the winter to better, drier ground eight miles away.
This move proved prescient: in June 2008 torrential rains and flash flooding returned. The federal government declared the second natural disaster in less than a year for the region. Hundreds of acres of our neighbors’ cornfields were again underwater and had to be replanted. Earthmovers spent days regrading a 280-acre field just across the road from our new home. Had we remained at the old place, we would have lost a season’s worth of crops before they were a quarter grown.
The 2010 growing season has again been extraordinarily wet. The more than 20 inches of rain that I measured in my rain gauge in June and July disrupted nearly every operation on our farm. We managed to do a bare minimum of field preparation, planting and cultivating through midsummer, thanks only to the well-drained soils beneath our new home.
But in two weeks in July, moisture-fueled disease swept through a three-acre onion field, reducing tens of thousands of pounds of healthy onions to mush. With rain falling several times a week and our tractors sitting idle, weeds took over a seven-acre field of carrots, requiring many times the normal amount of hand labor to control. Crop losses topped $ 100,000 by mid-August.
The most recent onslaught was a pair of heavy storms in late September that dropped 8.2 inches of rain. Representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency again toured the area, and another federal disaster declaration was narrowly averted. But evidence of the loss was everywhere: debris piled up in unharvested cornfields, large washouts in fields recently stripped of pumpkins or soybeans, harvesting equipment again sitting idle.
My great-grandfather recognized that weather is never perfect for agriculture for an entire season; a full chapter of his memoir is dedicated to this observation. In his 60 years of farming he wrote that only one season, his final crop of 1937, had close to ideal weather. Like all other farmers of his time and ours, he learned to cope with significant, ill-timed fluctuations in temperature and precipitation.
But at least here in the Midwest, weather fluctuations have been more significant during my time than in his, the Dust Bowl notwithstanding. The weather in our area has become demonstrably more hostile to agriculture, and all signs are that this trend will continue. Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.
I can’t find the Zandlo or Seeley statements online, so if anyone can direct me to them, please post links in the comments.
No two farms have the same experience with the weather, and some people will contend that ours is an anomaly, that many corn and bean farms in our area have done well over the same period. But heavy summer weather causes harm to farm fields that is not easily seen or quantified, like nutrient leaching, organic-matter depletion and erosion. As climate change accelerates these trends, losses will likely mount proportionately, and across the board. How long can we continue to borrow from the “topsoil bank,” as torrential rains force us to make ever more frequent “withdrawals”?
Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life. A family farm like ours may simply not be able to adjust quickly enough to such unendingly volatile weather. We can’t charge enough for our crops in good years to cover losses in the ever-more-frequent bad ones. We can’t continue to move to better, drier ground. No new field drainage scheme will help us as atmospheric carbon concentrations edge up to 400 parts per million; hardware and technology alone can’t solve problems of this magnitude.
To make things worse, I see fewer acres in our area now planted with erosion-preventing techniques, like perennial contour strips, than there were a decade ago. I believe that federal agriculture policy is largely responsible, because it rewards the quantity of acres planted rather than the quality of practices employed.
But blaming the government isn’t sufficient. All farmers have an interest in adopting better farming techniques. I believe that we also have an obligation to do so, for the sake of future generations. If global climate change is a product of human use of fossil fuels — and I believe it is — then our farm is a big part of the problem. We burn thousands of gallons of diesel fuel a year in our 10 tractors, undermining the very foundation of our subsistence every time we cultivate a field or put up a bale of hay.
I accept responsibility for my complicity in this, but I also stand ready to accept the challenge of the future, to make serious changes in how I conduct business to produce less carbon. I don’t see that I have a choice, if I am to hope that the farm will be around for my own great-grandchildren.
But my farm, and my neighbors’ farms, can contribute only so much. Americans need to see our experience as a call for national action. The country must get serious about climate-change legislation and making real changes in our daily lives to reduce carbon emissions. The future of our nation’s food supply hangs in the balance.
Hear! Hear!
Here are two posts on the connection between human-caused global warming and superstorms that have been devastating the nation and the world during what is likely to be the hottest year on record:
“Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts. The greater water vapor content of a warmer atmosphere allows larger rainfall anomalies and provides the fuel for stronger storms driven by latent heat.”
“I find it systematically tends to get underplayed and it often gets underplayed by my fellow scientists. Because one of the opening statements, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard is “Well you can’t attribute a single event to climate change.” But there is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago. It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change. And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
The past 12 months have been the hottest on record, according to NASA. So perhaps it isn’t completely surprising that we are seeing these record-smashing deluges. But the number of these beyond-extreme events just in the United States alone ought to make people take notice:
- Coastal North Carolina’s suffered its second 500-year rainfall in 11 years
- We had Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’.
- Capital Climate wrote about Oklahoma City Paralyzed By Flash Floods.
- The Northeast was hit by record global-warming-type deluge (a piece which has links to the scientific literature).
- Weather Channel expert Stu Ostro discussed Georgia’s record-smashing global-warming-type deluge: “Nevertheless, there’s a straightforward connection in the way the changing climate “set the table” for what happened this September in Atlanta and elsewhere. It behooves us to understand not only theoretical expected increases in heavy precipitation (via relatively slow/linear changes in temperatures, evaporation, and atmospheric moisture) but also how changing circulation patterns are already squeezing out that moisture in extreme doses and affecting weather in other ways.”
And, of course, another part of the world has been even more devastated by deluges and flooding, albeit while receiving only moderate attention in this country (see Juan Cole: The media’s failure to cover “the great Pakistani deluge” is “itself a security threat” to America).
And then there was the devastation to Russia, a country that always thought it was going to benefit from climate change:
- Russian President Medvedev: “What is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.” NYT: “Russia Bans Grain Exports After Drought Shrivels Crop”
- Russian Meteorological Center: “There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.”
This is all one big coincidence for the anti-science disinformers. But for the rest of us, the really scary part is that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half-century. We are on track to warm nearly 10 times that this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F ).
In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet!
Related Post:
How Texting Could Save Lives
Ryan Singel investigates how the ability to text 9-1-1 could increase efficiency for emergency responders:
The last real overhaul of 911 by the FCC came in 2001, when mobile carriers were required to allow 911 to identify the location of callers either through GPS or cell-tower data. … But the 911 system still can’t handle text messages, multimedia messages or streaming video, all of which could be very helpful to first responders. A system that could handle those messages would also allow people to report crimes without being overheard, which could be useful in situations ranging from kidnapping to seeing someone being robbed on the street.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
On The Bookshelf: Nothing To Envy, Ordinary Lives In North Korea
I’ve been catching up on my reading and one of the books was so compelling I felt the need to commend it to the TMV crowd. The book is called Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea by Barbara Demick. We’ve all heard the stories out of North Korea about the famines or how the average North Korean is shorter than his South Korea brother, but this book takes a new tack that gives you a real insight into the nation.
The author chose to focus on one city in North Korea and tried to speak to as many people as possible from that city. She then chose several of them and relates their stories in the book, giving us a really personal kind of feeling for what they have gone through.
The subjects range from top elite members of the country to the bottom of the pile, they have true believers and silent rebels, adults and children. You find yourself wrapped up in the stories and rooting for them to succeed. Often you also find yourself saddened by the pain they have suffered and the losses the have endured.
The story is not entirely one sided either. It points out that during the 1960’s North Korea was far more economically stable than South Korea and that it was this that compelled many to move to that nation. It also points out that not everyone who has come to South Korea has found success or joy.
Perhaps one of the most moving stories though involves a doctor who escapes North Korea for China. She is just over the border and is looking for shelter. She opens a gate and notices a bowl on the ground with white rice and some meat in it. The bowl catches her attention because it has been so long since she had seen white rice, something of a luxury back home.
But she is confused as to why the bowl is on the ground until she hears a dog bark.
As she put it, this was when she realized that dogs in China eat better than doctors in North Korea.
The book is full of stories like this and is an amazing insight into a mysterious nation.
You can find it at B&N and other bookstores.
WaPo Gets One Right: Sharing Data Saves Lives
The Washington Post is right. In an
The U.S. uses data like this to track and capture terrorists like Faisal Shazad, the Times Square bomber. It is too early to tell whether it had a similar role in thwarting the Yemeni printer bomb plot last week, but whether it did or not is not relevant to the overall utility of the air travel data-sharing program.
And now the Parliament wants to rescind an earlier agreement with Europe and deny the U.S. access to the data it needs. We face this potential confrontation because
