October 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from Jay Currie written in the month of October 2005.
In the face of pretty overwhelming evidence that the Iraqis - Sunnis included - participated in the constititutional referendum and that it passed virtually everywhere, Juan Cole is reduced to charging vote fraud…
Al-Hayat reports that 643,000 votes were cast in Ninevah Province (capital: Mosul). At the time it filed, 419,000 had been preliminarily counted, and the vote was running 75 percent in favor. Ninevah Province was the most likely place that Sunni Arabs opposing the constitution might be able to get a 2/3s “no” vote.
Several of my knowledgeable readers are convinced that the Ninevah voting results as reported so far look like fraud. One suspected that the Iraqi government so feared a defeat there that they over-did the ballot stuffing and ended up with an implausible result.
juan cole
Of course you understand this is not Juan speaking. No, the turd tells us it is his Iraqi correspondents - unnamed - who write.
Gee, how surprising is this. Confronted with the fact that ordinary Sunnis are unconvinced that terror is the way to ensure their political future Cole plugs his ears and tunelessly sings, “La. la, la…I can’t hear you” and then, at the end of the entry, moves on to the Plame affair.
The Iraqis, meanwhile, are demonstrating that there is nothing inherent in the Arab or Muslim character which precludes democracy. Of course, that racist postion has really only ever been advocated by the soft racists on the left. The rest of us were pretty convinced that once you got rid of the Stalinesque dictator and stirred the pot a bit there was not reason why a democracy could not emerge.
Written by jay on October 18th, 2005 with no comments.
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Historically, flu pandemics have come in two or three waves, lasting a total of 13-23 months. In other words, the need to take Tamiflu — by first responders, health care workers and ordinary citizens — could go on for months and months, or even years. U.S. public health officials have said they plan to buy 20 million doses of Tamiflu, but that would be enough to treat only 200,000 people (fewer than the number who would attend a seven-game World Series) for 100 days. And the retail price per pill is around $8, so the expense to treat that small number of people for that amount of time would be $160 million.
According to various models, in the absence of sufficient amounts of an effective vaccine — which is not yet within reach — to blunt a pandemic we would need to treat perhaps a third to a half of the population with Tamiflu. Do the math: 100 million people for 100 days equals 10 billion doses, at a retail cost of $80 billion, in order to blunt the pandemic’s first wave.
Dr. Henry I. Miller, techcentralstation
In the real world there is not going to be enough Tamiflu if avian flu breaks out. Plus, there is some evidence that avian flu may be resistant to Tamiflu.
This will mean the only means of containing the flu will be quarantine. However, quarantine for a year or perhaps two is going to be tremendously difficult to sustain. While it is possible to close the schools and the theatres and the malls, there will be increasing resistance especially if the initial efforts are successful. The problem will be most acute when the first wave of the flu has been contained. At that stage people who have been stuck in their houses with no work and next to nothing to do are going to want to go out. Which may well mean the second wave will be more lethal than the first.
If H5N1 mutates and is able to easily pass between humans slamming the border shut, minimizing personal contact, getting used to gloves and masks for limited, necessary, shopping, keeping the kids inside or in the backyard are all going to be vital to shortening the epidemic and, we hope, reducing the number of dead. With the R&D Dr. Miller recomends we may be able to develope and manufacture a vaccine quickly. Which will be of little comfort if you are already dead.
The biggest difference between the potential H5N1 pandemic and the 1918 pandemic is this: in 1918 there was absolutely nothing but quarantine to protect the public and there was no prospect of any protection being developed. They had no clue what a virus was much less how to make a vaccine for a specific virus. We do. To a degree, the public health job will be to keep as much of the population alive as possible while a vaccine is developed. And to do this there is going to have to be massive co-operation from the public itself.
The more information is made available, the more planning can be done in a public manner, the more aware people are made of the potential lethality of this virus, the greater the chances are that the death count can be reduced. The clock, however, is ticking and it does not look as if Tamiflu is going to do more than protect the first responders - if it works at all.
Written by jay on October 17th, 2005 with no comments.
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Andrew Sullivan writes vis a vis the possibility that OBL and his ilk may be looking at biologicals,
I fear we are close to the moment when our intellectual capabilities as human beings overtake our moral capacity for self-restraint. We are becoming too smart for our own good. We know too much, and have too much potential for massive destruction for major shit not to hit the fan relatively soon. I’m not even talking about unintended consequences of intellectual or scientific advances. I’m talking about deliberate use of destructive technologies to end our civilization as we have known it. Have we advanced morally as a species at the same pace that we have advanced technologically?
andrew sullivan
It is pretty easy to imagine scenarios in which the sheer fanatical nastieness of al-Qaeda or the perversity of nature let lose the plague. (I am always struck by the fact Canada’s own Timothy Finlay had his bizarre dystopian novel Headhunter set against a backround of dying birds…What did he know??)
At the same time, we are on the brink of scientific revolutions - from nano technology to solar power to space elevators to cancer vaccines - which will push back the limits of our Earth’s resources and our own mortality. My bet is that Sullivan read rather less science fiction than Glenn Reynolds when he was a kid. The sheer awfulness of the deliberate use of biologicals is not a foreign country to people who read Heinlein or Herbert; but the ability of humans to adapt and thrive drives the classic science fiction.
No doubt OBL and his fellow cave men would be delighted to let loose a plague. I doubt they have the ability at the moment; but the desire is there. Which, of course, makes them vermin in the same sense that the rats which carried the bubonic plague are vermin. Time to go and finish the job. Extermination is never particularily attractive; but the alternative is worse.
Written by jay on October 15th, 2005 with 8 comments.
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My gut tells me that the letter is a forgery. Most likely it is a black psy-ops operation of the US. But it could also come from Iran, since the mistakes are those a Shiite might make when pretending to be a Sunni. Or it could come from an Iraqi Shiite group attempting to manipulate the United States. Hmmm.
The authenticity of the letter has also been questioned by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
juan cole
Cole goes through a delicious song and dance about various idiomatic issues with the Zawahiri letter which, given that he barely speaks Arabic, is marvelous fatuous. But, for Juan, if al-Qaeda questions a document that’s really all he needs.
What a turd.
UpDate: Actually the turd may be engaged in even more wishful thinking than I thought…this just in from a Powerline reader:
The actual Al Jazeera seems rather skeptical of the denial (see this story): “A purported al-Qaida web posting”…”who claims to be spokesman for al-Qaida in Iraq. It could not be authenticated.”
via memeorandum
Written by jay on October 15th, 2005 with 4 comments.
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I am trying out ads from Chitika. While I have no problem with Google Adsense the truth is that people are pretty used to seeing the Google ads which means their eyes slide right by them. There are a couple of cool things about Chitika. First, the little images of the products for sale. Second, the pulisher has control of which keywords to use. (This is actually mandatory if you run Adsense anywhere on the page.)
There are some real advantages to Chitika. You control the ads which arrive so you don’t get endless ads for blogs. You can target services and products which you think will appeal to your audience. The per click payout is at least the same as Google and, in some cases, two or three times as good. I can’t say much about the click through rate but, as there are practically no clicks on my existing ads it would not take much to create a XXX% increase.
If you want to give Chitika a try on your blog you can find out more by clicking here.
Written by jay on October 15th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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Blog readers reported higher incomes than bloggers did. This supports the theory that blogging entails an opportunity cost of time – the higher the income, the less likely one is to blog.
http://www.canadianeconomist.com/2005/10/14/the-great-canadian-blog-survey/
The head is the way MSM would like the blogging world to fall out…it has nothing to do with causality. Aaron Braaten got 1146 responses to his blog survey in Canada. Using a little ex-magazine publisher statistical lore and the back of a Revenue Canada envelope that suggests that there are at least a couple of hundred thousand Canadians who read blogs. Apparently not this one; but Kate, at Small Dead Animals is a must read….Now, when I was a boy and statistics were just being invented there was some talk about how best to measure the independance of a variable. Not to be picky but if Kate is one of the most widely read bloggers in Canada and she promotes the survey…oh, never mind. It’s a great report and I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing.
Written by jay on October 14th, 2005 with 1 comment.
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But apparently, the Dean of IIPM wrote him a mail saying that the IIPM Students Union had decided that if my blog posts were not deleted, then they would gather all the Thinkpads they had been given by the institute, and burn them in front of the IBM office in Delhi. Yes, that’s right. Burn laptops!
vantage point
Rather than delete his post - not that IBM wanted to - Gaurav Sabnis quit his job with IBM.
There is a quick summary of the issues involved here - basically Gaurav linked to a story which pointed out that IIPM (a private Indian university) was not telling the truth in its advertising. Legal letters were sent. Rather than expose IBM to the silliness of having laptops burned in front of its office, Gaurav quit.
There are moments in a national blogosphere which create a sense of community. I suspect this may be one of those for India. Pop over to Gaurav’s blog, vantage point, and lend support. The world’s watching and all that.
Written by jay on October 12th, 2005 with no comments.
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Doing a bit of research today I came across Memeorandum. brilliant and right onto the Firefox bookmark bar. It combines blogs and news for US politics and tech in a way which, if I had the computer skill I would love to do at the Canadian Bullet for Canadian news and blogs.
Written by jay on October 12th, 2005 with no comments.
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Canada is working with governments, international relief agencies and other organizations in the region to determine the need for financial and other assistance. Canada has already offered $100,000 to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for early needs assessment. An additional $200,000 is being provided to our High Commission in Pakistan to respond to urgent requirements. Canada stands ready to provide further assistance depending on the needs identified.
pmo
It’s Thanksgiving otherwise a cynic might suggest that Dithers might use some of the money allocated for but, apparently, as yet unspent on tsunami relief…
Written by jay on October 11th, 2005 with no comments.
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Having not nearly enough to do the UN and the EU have decided that it is time for the internet to move from American to international control. Declan McCullagh has been covering this issue at C-Net for some time.
The Americans are, quite rightly, having none of it. There is a fair bit of commentary rejecting the very idea that the “Oil for Food” tainted UN with its censor loving ways and its motely collection of expression denying states should have anything at all to do with the ‘net. The UN types and the Eurocrats are trying to run the argument that the internet is a “world resource” and therefore should be subject to world control.
Politically this strikes me as an enormously bad idea simply because no nation on earth has a record of commitment to free speech to match the United States. And the net, whatever else it may be, is all about free speech.
However, there is also a real question as to the technical feasibility of the UN/Euro threat to split the net if they don’t get their own way. This is the so-called “nuclear option”.
Beyond the usual levers of diplomatic pressure and public kvetching, Brazil and China could choose what amounts to the nuclear option: a fragmented root. That means a new top-level domain would not be approved by ICANN–but would be recognized and used by large portions of the rest of the world. The downside, of course, is that the nuclear option could create a Balkanized Internet where two computers find different Web sites at the same address.
cnet
at a purely technical level, propose that the UN were to set up its own top level domain. What would prevent ICANN from recognizing that domain. It may not reciprocate but all that would mean is that almost everyone would stick with WWW knowing that because ICANN recognizes the UN domain they would not be missing anything.
I may have this wrong at a tech level but my sense is that unless particular nations were willing to actually filter their citizens net use - which many are already doing - to allow access to only the UN domain, the two systems could co-exist. Of course, virtually no one except the EU and the Chinese government would bother actually using the UN system because, er, there would be nothing on it.
This is one of those dilemmas where the technology is going to determine the political outcome rather than vice versa. And, no matter what is done by the officials, there will be some kid in a basement building a script which will give access to both nets.
Time for the weenies at the UN and the EU to buy a clue and, perhaps, look at ways that they can actually use the net rather than trying to control it.
(Any bets which way Canada will go on the question….)
Written by jay on October 10th, 2005 with 2 comments.
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