(Via BoingBoing):

The UK Border Agency has scientists “horrified” at a weird, eugenics-flavoured proposal to test asylum seekers’ DNA to determine if they are truly and purely of the “race” they claim to be from. Even the scientists who pioneered DNA fingerprinting and related techniques call the idea “horrifying,” “naive” and “flawed.”

Science has obtained Border Agency documents showing that isotope analyses of hair and nail samples will also be conducted “to help identify a person’s true country of origin.” The project “is regrettable,” says Caroline Slocock, chief executive of Refugee and Migrant Justice headquartered in London. Although asylum-seekers are asked to provide tissue samples voluntarily, turning down a government request for tissue could be misinterpreted, she says, “so we believe [the program] should not be introduced at all.”

The Border Agency’s DNA-testing plans would use mouth swabs for mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome testing, as well as analyses of subtle genetic variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). One goal of the project is to determine whether asylum-seekers claiming to be from Somalia and fleeing persecution are actually from another African country such as Kenya. If successful, the Border Agency suggests its pilot project could be extended to confirming other nationalities. Yet scientists say the Border Agency’s goals confuse ancestry or ethnicity with nationality. David Balding, a population geneticist at Imperial College London, notes that “genes don’t respect national borders, as many legitimate citizens are migrants or direct descendants of migrants, and many national borders split ethnic groups.”

Scientists Decry “Flawed” and “Horrifying” Nationality Tests

Read on… »

The Polish government has passed into law mandatory chemical castration for some pedophiles. I know many people here in Canada that would applaud this decision, and I can understand why. I however completely disagree.

I have no sympathy for the actions of pedophiles. However, they are still people, and that I think the state should be above their actions. We want to end the behaviour, not the person. I understand the wave of unquestionnable hostility to these criminals, but for the Prime Minister to say

…he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded ‘degenerates’. Tusk said he did not believe “one can use the term ‘human’ for such individuals, such creatures.”

Why stop there? Let’s just execute every priest who touches a little boy! Let’s just cut off the hands of thieves? Oh wait, we’re better than this.

I have never seen such ludicrous excuses for “debate”. There are a small portion of very stupid, racist and violent people who are so cult-like in their demeanour it almost scares me; but it doesn’t.

"If debt is the slavery of the free then you might want to start asking why your country spends more on defense than the rest of the planet put together. If debt is the slavery of the free then you might want to start asking why you owe the Chinese a trillion dollars, or what would happen if those nations that you owe money to were to come collecting. Bad news, sweetheart, your entire way of life is based on the existence of debt." - Matthew Good

Take Fox News’ boasting that it has now taken over the top spot on the airwaves. well, it is indeed true. But when was the last time you watched cable news? Have you even seen CNN lately? It’s a joke. News orgs are trying to dumb down their pieces, taslking more about Michelle Obama’s outfits than anything else. Tell me you saw the “hologram” Wolf Blitzer used on election night.

I therefore argue that now the majority of people watching cable are either tuned in to Fox, BBC, or Al-Jazeera (or comedians). I say the voices of the idiots are blown way out of proportion. I think congress (or at least the President) knows that.

I think a form of universal health care will pass. With a simple majority. However, I am weary of the senate. It wouldn’t surprise me if they killed it.

Bill O’Reilley says something sensible!

On August 29th, The Washington Post made their case in defense of torture their main story.

When Glen Greenwald of Salon.com read it, the shit hit the proverbial fan:

What makes the Post’s breathless vindication of torture all the more journalistically corrupt is that the document on which it principally bases these claims — the just-released 2004 CIA Inspector General Report — provides no support whatsoever for the view that torture produced valuable intelligence, despite the fact that it was based on the claims of CIA officials themselves. [...]

That the released documents provide no support for Cheney’s claims was so patently clear that many news articles contained unusually definitive statements reporting that to be so. The New York Times reported that the documents Cheney claimed proved his case “do not refer to any specific interrogation methods and do not assess their effectiveness.” ABC News noted that “the visible portions of the heavily redacted reports do not indicate whether such information was obtained as a result of controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.” TPM’s Zachary Roth documented that “nowhere do they suggest that that information was gleaned through torture,” while The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman detailed that, if anything, the documents prove “that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.” As Sargent reported, even Bush’s loyal Terrorism adviser, Frances Fargos Townsend, admitted that the IG Report provides no basis for what the Post today is ludicrously implying:

It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.

Yet The Post today publishes a long, breathless story that, in reality, does little more than claim that (a) Khalid Sheik Mohammed was subjected to “the CIA’s harshest interrogation methods” (not “torture,” of course) and (b) at some point after that, he provided valuable intelligence. At best, it’s nothing more than a statement of obvious chronology, not causation.

Not long after, Ray McGovern of Anti-War.com was even more to the point:

But the story contained some weird contradictions that might have given pause to a less credulous – or less biased – newspaper. For example, the Post’s two unnamed sources who told the tale of Mohammed’s transformation depicted him as anything but a broken man suffering from “learned helplessness,” terrified of more torture. Instead, Mohammed, known as KSM, is described as holding forth like a professor in a lecture hall, pontificating about Greek philosophy and criticizing his American students for their shortcomings. “In one instance, he scolded a listener for poor note-taking and his inability to recall details of an earlier lecture,” the Post wrote.

So, instead of a cowering figure induced to talk out of fear that he might be subjected to a 184th session of waterboarding, Mohammed appears to be a boastful narcissist who views himself as a historic figure – exactly the sort of interrogation subject who would be susceptible to flattery and other successful, nonviolent strategies favored by experienced FBI interrogators.

If the “learned helplessness” had worked – and was the reason Mohammed was talking – would he really have risked scolding an American interrogator, like an angry teacher chastising an inattentive schoolboy?

However, that is not a question the Post asks or its editors apparently want the readers to think much about. The story is written as if the Post writers Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate are seeking expiation for their sins of writing fact-and-document-based stories in recent days.

Back to the Steno Pool

The Post management, it seems, is determined to return to its past practice of acting as stenographers for the CIA’s PR machine. On Sunday, the Post had its steno pad out again, taking dictation about how torture investigations were harming CIA morale. The story, titled “Ex-Intelligence Officials Cite Low Spirits at CIA: IG Report’s Release, Looming Investigation Into Detainee Interrogations Blamed” by Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick, filled nearly half of page two.

The CIA is the only agency of the U.S. government that elicits the Post’s hand-wringing concern about its morale and “spirits.” It’s as if CIA officers were fragile Southern belles at risk of being overcome by “the vapors” if a harsh word is uttered in the parlor.

I’ve been reading tons, and now I’m off to P.E.I. for a night.

Oh, and if you wish to have an opinion on torture or the war in Afghanistan, read Matthew Good’s blog.

Have you or has anyone you know made an insurance claim following an injury? My father was in a vehicle that was rear-ended by a van, suffered a severe back injury, and to be honest has actually ruined his own life psychologically and now physically (and it has affected the lives of others, which I’ll describe some day). It took him four years to settle with insurance, receiving only a fraction of what his plan was supposed to offer.

In the Unites States, health care is pretty much the same. If you don’t have insurance, you’re fucked if you contract a long-term illness. If you do have insurance, they’ll blame some fabricated “pre-existing condition” that usually does not apply, in order to make it so that the sick don’t get their coverage. In all honesty, even Canadian insurance companies are disgusting.

The worst part? That New Brunswick lost out on the chance to have a government-run insurance option in 2004.


Fear Mongering in America

Not to mention how scary it is for people to bring an AR-15 to an Obama town hall meeting:

I would dare think that if people would be generally more informed and cared a little more about how their country was run, life would be much better.

For those who do not know, almost every square inch of every English city is covered by the lens of one of it’s 4 million CCTV (Closed circuit television) cameras. If you’re in London, you are most certainly covered by some CCTV. This Orwellian measure is supposed to prevent crime, even though it has been found that the whole program has not been effective at stopping crime.

With the progress of technology, comes that of England’s CCTV. Now there are talking cameras that will scold you for littering. Now, taking photos of police in England is illegal as of February 2009, and punishable by up to ten years in prison and a fine. All in the name of counter terrorism. Also noteworthy is the recent announcement that CCTV will be placed inside the homes of the 20,000 worst families in England. To make it worse, this is the leftist government’s idea, the conservatives wanted to take things much further.

Next thing you know, they’ll be putting cameras in bathroom stalls of 11 year old schoolchildren. Oh wait, they have.

If this mess of a government policy were ever to make its way to Canadian shores, I would hope that people would cause as much of a shitstorm about it as is deserved, so that the people we elect will not let it happen. To quote Benjamin Franklin:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

Tip of the hat to this man for conducting an awesome interview with Bill Kristol. You can’t miss it.

I was at a family gathering in Québec this weekend, so I was too busy having a conversation with my 94 year old great-grandmother to post something about current affairs, or updating the poll on my website.

In the meantime, check out how “hope and change” has not yet come to America, as a critic’s metaphorical mic is cut.

“AREA NEWSPAPER HATES WORLD, LIFE, YOU” – If you don’t know where this is probably from, you might need to read this.