Pictures and a poem

I got a digital camera recently, so here are my attempts at some pictures.

First, here’s the Waltham Commons as I waited for the bus:

and here are pictures of my brother’s two dogs (Athena and Casper):

and it’s Friday, so here’s a poem:

The walls were crying
As I walked below them
To find my other side
And I wish they’d fall
So I might drink dying.

Honduras resolution

It seems there is now an agreement to end the coup in Honduras. A couple places have translations for the agreement. Here’s one (for a slightly different one, go here):

The accord contains the following points:

1– The creation of a government of unity and national reconciliation

2– Rejection of amnesty for political crimes, and delay of criminal prosecutions.

3–Renouncing the convening of a National Constituent Assembly or the reform of the Constitution in its irreformable constitutional articles.

4– Recognition and support for the general elections and the succession of Government.

5– The transfer of authority over the Armed Forces to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal

6– The creation of a commission of verification to ensure compliance with the points of the accord.

7– The formation of a commission of truth to investigate the events before, during, and after the 28th of June of 2009.

8– Request of the international community the normalization of international relations with our country.

9– Support a proposal that permits a vote in the National Congress with a previous opinion by the Supreme Court of Justice to return all the Executive Power back to before the 28th of June.

I guess we’ll see if Zelaya really did something illegal since the agreement does not have immunity. The agreement isn’t immediate as it has to be voted on by the legislature, who could try delaying. I wouldn’t expect them to given the pressure on them (obviously I don’t know firsthand, so I’ll see). Boz has a reaction here and has some important results from a poll here (taken October 9-13–so before the resolution, the full poll is here):

Q. 4. Is Honduras moving in the right direction or wrong direction:
Right Direction: 15%, Wrong Direction 81%

Q.13 Do you approve or disapprove of the removal on June 28 of Mel Zelaya as president?

Total approve……………………………………………………………38

Total disapprove……………………………………………………….60

Q.15 Which would have been the best way to deal with the dispute involving President Zelaya,
the Constituent Assembly, and the firing of the chief of the armed forces — to remove Mel
Zelaya as president, as was done; or to have him legally processed in Honduras?

Remove Zelaya………………………………………………………….14

Have him processed……………………………………………………70

(Other)……………………………………………………………………….9

(Don’t know/Refused)…………………………………………………..6

Thus, most of the people did not support the coup (it’s interesting to note that Zelaya is more popular now than before the coup).

And here’s a link to show that it was an unconstitutional coup.

11/6/09 Update: The deal seems to have fallen through and part of the blame lies with the US, because:

That much was clear this week when the deal’s chief U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon, confirmed that under its terms, the U.S. would recognize the election result even if congress declines to restore Zelaya.

and here:

“We urge both sides to act in the best interests of the Honduran people and return to the table immediately to reach agreement on the formation of a unity government,” State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said.

“We’re disappointed with both sides,” Kelly told reporters.

He said “we’re disappointed that both sides are not following the very clear path laid out” in the Costa Rican accords aimed at restoring President Manuel Zelaya to power following his ouster in a June 28 coup.

Zelaya has not participated because Congress has not voted on his reinstatement and doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. It seems to me that the only way Zelaya can force them to vote is to stop the process. And the fact that Micheletti formed the ‘unity’ government by himself and will continue to lead the government seems to say that he’s at fault.

Superfreakonomics and global warming

I’m a little slow getting to this, but it seems that the new book by Levitt and Dubner has a chapter on global warming (you can see an excerpt here). As usual, I leave most of the arguments to the experts (see here, here, and here for example). Instead, I’ll look at one of the responses by Levitt to the critics:

3. Economists estimate that the costs of reducing carbon emissions are likely to be upwards of $1 trillion per year.

TRUE / FALSE

He writes that this is agreed to be true. It might even be true. There are a couple  problems with this statement.

The first is that it doesn’t look at any of the benefits: alternative energy is a growing field and the US has a lot to gain if they can get in the technological lead; one of the main ways to reduce carbon output is efficiency which may cost money to implement but in the end makes money; if we use more alternative energy then there will be less pollution–so there are non-economic benefits (although since it would reduce health problems due to pollution this also has economic benefits).

The second is that it ignores the fact that the carbon economy may be on its way out. The amount of oil and gas is finite and we may now be nearing peak oil (there seems to be enough coal to last for longer, but that would worsen pollution). This means that we will have to change over at some point: thus the conversion costs will eventually happen in any case and it would be better to start now instead of waiting for it to be forced by a crash in the economy. As one commenter notes, the same type of argument would have said the US shouldn’t try to change from horse based transportation to cars since there were a lot of costs involved.

He then asks this question:

If we need to cool the Earth in a hurry, what is the best way to do it?

But there isn’t a hurry to cool the Earth–our practices are changing the conditions so that in the future there will be problems. We want to act now because excess CO2 will cause problems in the future even if we could stop emitting CO2 now.

In his answer you can see his bias:

Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth. Like every question we tackle in Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics, we approach the question like economists, using data and logic to conclude that the answer to that question is geo-engineering. Not coincidentally, almost every economist who has asked the same question has come to the same conclusion, including Martin Weitzman and the economists at the Copenhagen Consensus.

But that is not the question that Al Gore and the climate scientists are trying to answer. The sorts of questions they tend to ask are “What is the ‘right’ amount of carbon to emit?” or “Is it moral for this generation to put carbon into the air when future generations will pay the price?” or “What are the responsibilities of humankind to the planet?”

Notice the bolded Al Gore. That’s because he knows he better not try to argue with the real scientists who are trying to answer “What’s the best way to deal with this problem?”. They do talk about geo-engineering, but conclude that the science isn’t conclusive yet and there appear to be lots of possible problems with it (see here, for example–notice that this refers to the Copenhagen Consensus). Again, I’ll leave that to the experts. Just think about this: there is a global warming problem and Levitt says that the best way to attack it is to attack the symptoms. This means that his solution is forever: we will have to continue these geo-engineering projects until the underlying problems are solved.

As an aside (via Kevin Drum), Levitt claims that he is not a denialist and doesn’t think this is the full solution, but go look at this column by Jonah Goldberg:

If you cannot afford — politically, morally or economically — the solution to a perceived problem, then it’s not a solution. We cannot afford to end the use of carbon-based energy, so a better strategy is to develop remedies for the bad side effects of carbon use.

That’s the case Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner make in their book, “SuperFreakonomics,” which is already being torn apart by environmentalists horrified at the notion they might lose their license to Get Things Done as they see fit.

Is the atmosphere getting too hot? Cool it down by reflecting away more sunlight. The ocean’s getting too acidic? Give it some antacid.

The technology’s not ready. But pursuing it for a couple of decades will cost pennies compared with carbon rationing. Moreover, you just might get to keep your dog.

Levitt is saying this is not what he means and yet, despite several posts about environmental critics, he has no posts complaining about this or similar articles. I wonder why?

Global Warming

Hmm, it seems there is more out about global warming and the data still says the Earth is getting warmer. First, via here, a study finds the same basic ‘hockey stick’ graph using different methods. Being a math guy, I love this:

The sheer amount of computation, however, is daunting, involving heavy matrix algebra. Initial values for proxies and temperatures (where they have a known overlap) are input, and the methodology works backward to refine the relations at other times. To determine past temperatures, Tingley typically had to manipulate about one million matrices, each consisting of 1,296 columns and 1,296 rows.

Yay, matrices.

In another report:

The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA’s year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

and as a check:

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

At this point I should put this graph in again:

I really don’t see that cooling trend, but maybe if I bang my head against some walls I will.

You can see the stupidity:

It’s what happens within the past 10 years or so, not the overall average, that counts, contends Don Easterbrook, a Western Washington University geology professor and global warming skeptic.

“I don’t argue with you that the 10-year average for the past 10 years is higher than the previous 10 years,” said Easterbrook, who has self-published some of his research. “We started the cooling trend after 1998. You’re going to get a different line depending on which year you choose.

“Should not the actual temperature be higher now than it was in 1998?” Easterbrook asked. “We can play the numbers games.”

This comment should, by itself, should eliminate Easterbrook in any respectable argument: he either has just shown he does not understand the concept of statistics or is not an honest debater.

Here’s a nice typical scatterplot (it looks at numbers gathered for counties used in the 2004 American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau):

It has an upward linear trend with the usual amount of spread for a correlation of .67. There are lots of questions to be asked about the data to decide if this shows some real relation, but saying there’s no relation because of the point (77678, 32.8) which lies quite a bit below the line is stupid. And it’s always the averages that matter in statistics (well, or median or …the point is it’s never a few points that matter).

State ideology and a poem

Via Kevin Drum, Boris Shor has put up a graph that:

has performed some analysis (jointly with Nolan McCarty) on the ideological positions of state legislators. The estimates are based on state legislative voting, which might make you wonder how you could possibly compare legislators in one state with those in another. The trick is that some state representatives (for example, Barack Obama) also end up in Congress. There are enough of these overlap cases that you can put legislators from all 50 states on a common scale.

Here it is:

It’s not obvious, but the states are ordered from most conservative to most liberal over all (the two lines are the US averages for Democrats and Republicans). Massachusetts is the second most liberal (California is, on average, more liberal but its Republicans are much more conservative). There are 12 states more liberal than the US as a whole and 7 of them are from the northeast (8 if you include Maryland–the others are: HI, CA, NM, and OR). Only NH is more conservative and, since the data only goes through 2003, I wouldn’t be surprised if NH hasn’t become much more liberal in the ratings.

And it’s Friday, so here’s a poem:

Air sweeping beneath the tides
Follow my dreams
The immortality of death
Intrudes upon the illusion.

The NRA and arms treaties

So, the UN is trying to write a law to help prevent illegal arms transfers. The main purpose is to try to stop the flow of arms to private armies in mostly lawless countries like Somalia and the DR Congo and to stop arms from getting to regimes like Zimbabwe that use them against their citizens.

Sounds nice. Let’s see what the NRA makes of this:

The National Rifle Association is in the field with a call campaign asking recipients a rather leading question — “Should third-world dictators and Hillary Clinton dictate our gun policy?” — according to several TPM readers who have reported receiving the call.

…

The call starts with a pre-recorded message from Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s CEO, warning that Clinton is meeting with the United Nations “right now” to take away guns from Americans. Then, a live person comes on and asks the question.

Well, of course, how silly of me. It seems like this is a treaty to try to stop violence in third world countries, but that’s just a trick. Of course it’s about trying to get rid of the US constitution–everything, everywhere is about the US. And all those thousands of people killed each year in places like Somalia and the DR Congo by illegal weapons aren’t real–it’s all propaganda so people like Clinton can get rid of the 2nd amendment. I’m glad we have the NRA to figure these things out.

Sri Lanka

I haven’t talked about Sri Lanka for a while, mainly because there has been almost nothing in the news here. Looking around at the news by other countries, I catch glimpses that show the government is still not acting well. From a British newspaper, I see that Sri Lanka may be about to lose a subsidy:

The EU grants the Generalised System of Preferences Plus (GSP+), to help developing countries to boost their economies while improving human rights and labour standards. Sri Lanka is the only country in Asia to benefit from GSP+, which obliges beneficiaries to adhere to 27 international rights agreements.

The EU has investigated whether Sri Lanka violated the UN Convention against Torture, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In August it completed a report, which described a culture of “complete or virtually complete impunity in Sri Lanka”, citing police torture, abductions of journalists and uninvestigated disappearances.

The final report is due out next Monday and both this article and one at Foreign Policy in Focus seem to be saying that it looks like they might not get an extension and that there also might be problems with an IMF loan.

From Australia, I see that there is a hunger strike by asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and:

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor has agreed to send Australian police to Sri Lanka to help the government there clamp down on the exodus of asylum seekers.

But there has been hardly a peep out of Rudd or any of his ministers about the appalling camps in which an estimated 300,000 Tamils are being held following the end of the Sri Lankan civil war.

“I understand something of the plight of people around the world,” Rudd said yesterday. Of course he does.

He knows exactly what is happening in Sri Lanka. He knows how the displaced Tamils are treated by the Sri Lankan Army. He knows the Sri Lankan Government denies international aid organisations access to the camps and shuts out the international media so conditions cannot be reported.

Now I don’t really know much about these news outlets, so I don’t completely trust them, but what I see from all sources is that hundreds of thousands of Tamils are still be held in camps five months after the end of the war and Sri Lanka doesn’t allow any independent observers in (EU, UN, reporters) even with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. That speaks very loudly to me.

Saturn, nuclear war, and a poem

To try to keep things calm, let’s start with a very nice image of Saturn (taken by Cassini–it’s a mosaic of many pictures taken over 8 hours; Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute):

Ok, now that you’re calm, here’s John Bolton intimating that Israel should attack Iran with nuclear bombs:

“Negotiations have failed, and so too have sanctions,” Bolton said, echoing his previously-stated belief that sanctions will prove ineffectual in changing Tehran’s behavior. “So we’re at a very unhappy point — a very unhappy point — where unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran’s program, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the very near future.”

Which seems to be saying that Israel should use nuclear weapons against Iran, because Iran can’t be trusted not to use nuclear weapons if they get them. Or something. And this was once our UN ambassador. He continues:

“There are some people in the administration who think that it’s not really a problem, we can contain and deter Iran, as we did the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I think this is a great, great mistake and a dangerously weak approach…Whatever else you want to say about them, at least the Soviets believed that they only went around once in this world, and they weren’t real eager to give that up — as compared to a theological regime in Tehran which yearns for life in the hereafter more than life on earth…I don’t think [deterrence] works that way with a country like Iran.”

This is typical warmongering. The first step is to demonstrate that your enemy is different–they don’t respect human life, they aren’t logical, … When the US was in the cold war with the USSR, the Soviets didn’t respect life, were lazy, ugly, and whatever else the person could think sounded bad. Of course, now that there’s a new enemy, the same people have to try to show that this new group is worse (because after the cold war ended, we found that Soviets were very much like us; after WW II it was shown that the Soviets were worse than the Japanese and Germans). Bolton dutifully does that here. You’d think they’d at least be inventive (Iran uses kitties as target practice).

Anyway, since it’s Friday, a poem:

I have no bombast
For your ears
I can’t find sparkle
On your skin
So I close my mind
Mouth closed
Reach out with fingers to
Find the sky
But reach only the base
Of my eyes.

Protest in Puerto Rico

I heard via TPM that there’s a large strike going on in Puerto Rico: there are estimates of 100,000 or more people demonstrating against large job cuts by the government. There are a few things interesting about this.

The scale is comparatively quite large (more than 100,000 go to the demonstration and 200-300,000 are estimated to stay home from work in a population of about 4 million) and yet there isn’t much coverage. This really isn’t surprising to me, since Puerto Rico is relatively poor and doesn’t have voting members in Congress.

The couple places I see coverage are calling it international news. Umm, Puerto Rico is part of the US–if you go to the Census page it’s listed under the states. So why does the NY Times put it in their ‘world’ section? And CNN puts in their ‘international’ section? Very weird.

As an aside, you can see coverage here and here. At these places you can learn that the governor threatened to charge protestors with terrorism. I see this at none of the mainstream sites. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow if he actually followed through.

Lead, abortion, and murder

I have seen the Freakonomics idea that legalizing abortion caused a decrease in violence and I have been wary about it. They say that they control for lots of variables, but it still amounted to an observational study with their inherent problems. In particular confounding factors–just because you think you have thought of all the other variables, doesn’t mean you have. It now seems that exposure to lead (via here) is one such factor. I also have doubts about this study, but it seems stronger to me:

The centerpiece of Nevin’s research is an analysis of crime rates and lead poisoning levels across a century. The United States has had two spikes of lead poisoning: one at the turn of the 20th century, linked to lead in household paint, and one after World War II, when the use of leaded gasoline increased sharply. Both times, the violent crime rate went up and down in concert, with the violent crime peaks coming two decades after the lead poisoning peaks.

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher

This means that there is statistical evidence and medical evidence. If it’s thought that exposure to lead changes parts of the brain that make violence more likely, then that can be tested (they imply this has been done, but don’t really state that it has–they only point to more observational studies). If a medical theory predicts something and data shows that it happens that makes the conclusion stronger even if the data does come from an observational study. Still, I think this is stating things much too strongly:

Most of the theories have been long on intuition and short on evidence. Nevin says his data not only explain the decline in crime in the 1990s, but the rise in crime in the 1980s and other fluctuations going back a century. His data from multiple countries, which have different abortion rates, police strategies, demographics and economic conditions, indicate that lead is the only explanation that can account for international trends.

It’s only saying that of the variables they look at, lead is the only one that accounts for the trends. There could be other variables they haven’t looked at that explain things better.

More DR Congo

The DR Congo is back in the news, put there by a joint report by 84 humanitarian and human rights groups. It’s not pretty:

“The human rights and humanitarian consequences of the current military operation are simply disastrous,” said Marcel Stoessel of Oxfam. “UN peacekeepers, who have a mandate to protect civilians, urgently need to work with government forces to make sure civilians get the protection they need, or discontinue their support.”

…

Since the start of military operations against the FDLR militia in January 2009, more than 1,000 civilians have been killed, 7,000 women and girls have been raped, and more than 6,000 homes have been burned down in the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. Nearly 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and live in desperate conditions with host families, in forest areas, or in squalid displacement camps with limited access to food and medicine.

This is part of back and forth actions in the country going back years: there’s a movement that looks like it might help, but it doesn’t. All the articles play up the Hutu/Tutsi problems that helped start the war, but it still all comes down to money.

It’s easy to see how these things snowball:

• the war in the DR Congo and Angola has led to tense relations between the two countries as they have tit for tat expulsions of refugees. There now seems to be an agreement, but, like all deals involving the DR Congo, I’ll wait and see.
• there is a fresh border dispute with Uganda. When a country can’t control its citizens, this becomes common (especially with all the wealth in the DR Congo).
• there are problems with refugees in Burundi. Because of the renewed fighting in the Congo, more refugees are expected and so they’re planning on building a bigger camp further to the east. The refugees don’t want to be moved further from their homeland, but the Congo is seen as too unsafe (not that being in Burundi is safe).

Thus problems in the DR Congo cause problems in the entire region.

Now that’s a ring

Well now:

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn — by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.

The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers (3.7 million miles) away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers (7.4 million miles). One of Saturn’s farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.

Saturn’s newest halo is thick, too — its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring.

They think the ring might explain the shape of the moon Iapetus (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute):

Here’s an artist’s rendering of the ring (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Keck):

War against the moon commences and a poem

It’s begun:

NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, created twin impacts on the moon’s surface early Friday in a search for water ice. Scientists will analyze data from the spacecraft’s instruments to assess whether water ice is present.

The satellite traveled 5.6 million miles during an historic 113-day mission that ended in the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the moon’s south pole. The spacecraft was launched June 18 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It doesn’t look like it was a knockout blow:

That means the moon probably still has retaliatory capabilities and given their tendencies (I think they’re socialists and even supporters of Obama), expect them to retaliate (you heard it here first). I’ll be under my desk.

Oh, it’s Friday, so here’s a poem;

If you hit me in the head
I may fall out of my bed
And break my leg instead
Of burying the past.

Rape, arbitration, and Republicans

An amendment by Senator Franken to stop funding for defense contractors who mandate arbitration for certain things (like sexual assault) passed the Senate 68-30. Democrats have started to use the fact that 30 Republicans voted against a proposal to rectify a situation where a woman gang raped and then imprisoned in a metal container was unable to bring charges to court (I’ve talked about it here, here, and here; you can also go here). It’s easy to see why, this is a stupid vote by Republicans.

I don’t really think that Republicans are pro-rape, but I don’t think this helps their cause:

Republicans point out that the amendment was opposed by a host of business interests, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and applies to a wide range of companies, including IBM and Boeing.

“This misleading, partisan attack makes clear yet again just how out of touch Democrats in Washington are with the serious issues facing average Americans,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh.

So, the gang rape of an employee of a US defense contractor isn’t a serious issue? And people like Vitter, who was implicated in a prostitution scandal, really should know that voting this way will look bad.

The real issue that Republicans have with this is that it’s bad for business:

Sessions pointed to the fact that an appeals court recently ruled that Jones’ lawsuit could go to court, in part because it is beyond the bounds of the contract agreement. (On Tuesday, however, Halliburton filed a petition for re-hearing to try to return the case to arbitration.)

“For overall justice in the American system, I think arbitration employment contracts is legitimate and we ought not to constrict it too much,” said Sessions.

Those in favor of the arbitration process argue that it is faster, more private, and usually less expensive than going to court.

“The Congress should not be involved in writing or rewriting private contracts,” Sessions said. “That’s just not how we should handle matters in the United States Senate, certainly not without a lot of thought and care and the support of, at least the opinion of, the Department of Defense.”

Businesses like arbitration because it keeps their costs down. Of course, that could be because the arbitrators are paid by the company (I looked at that here). There’s a more topical look at it here:

Her legal saga started after Halliburton failed to take any action against her alleged attackers, and the Justice Department and military also failed to prosecute. Jones then tried to sue the company for failing to protect her. But thanks to an employment contract created during the tenure of former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, Jones was forced into mandatory binding arbitration, a private forum where Halliburton would hire the arbitrator, all the proceedings would be secret, and she’d have no right to appeal if she lost.

Data from the American Arbitration Association showed that Halliburton won more than 80 percent of its cases in arbitration, and when I looked at the data two years ago, it showed that out of 119 cases Halliburton arbitrated over a four-year period, only three resulted in the employee actually winning any money. The deck was clearly stacked against Jones from day one.

Republicans have decided that helping out businesses is a more important issue than the right to bring rape to trial. It doesn’t mean they’re pro-rape, but it does make it easy to say they are (to be exact, we should say that Republicans believe that a corporation’s profit is more important than the right to a trial for a rape victim).

Priests and Polanski

The Catholic Church still doesn’t get things. Sunday’s Boston Globe had this bit:

David Gibson, writing for Politics Daily, also asks, “Comparisons are by their nature invidious. But what if Roman Polanksi were wearing a Roman collar? Would ‘Monsignor Polanski’ receive the same considerations?’’ Peter Smith, a religion writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal, wonders, “Let’s say Roman Polanski was a priest who, say, fled the country and for decades avoided serving a sentence for statutory rape. Well, the question is a bit obvious. Would anyone sympathize with the end of his longtime fugitive status for his statutory rape conviction?’’ And Rod Dreher, blogging as BeliefNet’s Crunchy Con, takes the argument even further, writing, “In our culture, when it comes to sex, celebrities are beyond good and evil. At least Polanski isn’t an orthodox Catholic or committed Evangelical of any sort. In his cultural milieu, that would be the unforgivable sin.’’

Wow, go read about the Catholic Church scandal. Here’s what would have happened if Polanski had been a priest at the time:

if the allegation had been made to the Church, he would have been sent to a center for rehabilitation then sent to another Church. He would have not been reported to the police even if he continued to rape or abuse children, the Church would have worked to keep it silent.

if the allegation had been sent to police, the Church would have talked to the police or a judge and the charges might have been dropped. If not, they would have worked to keep the records sealed.

The Catholic Church can also say things like (via here):

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was “busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

You would think by now that the Church would know that these type of statements makes them look bad and extends the controversy. I guess not.

LCROSS and a poem

This seems interesting:

LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18, 2009 at 2:32 p.m. PDT. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009  and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Projected impact at the lunar South Pole is currently: Oct 9, 2009 at 4:30 a.m. PDT. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.

The debris plumes are expected to be visible from Earth- and space-based telescopes 10-to-12 inches and larger.

The LCROSS science payload consists of two near-infrared spectrometers, a visible light spectrometer, two mid-infrared cameras, two near-infrared cameras, a visible camera and a visible radiometer. The LCROSS instruments were selected to provide mission scientists with multiple complimentary views of the debris plume created by the Centaur impact.

As the ejecta rises above the target crater’s rim and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. The spacecraft’s visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact.

There is a viewing party of this at the Boston Museum of Science (there’s a list of events here) and here’s what the things look like (Credit: NASA/Dan Andrews–the LRO is on the top, the LCROSS on the bottom):

And since seems destined to end any eon, here’s a poem:

I dread it coming
I lie awake at night
Pushing it away
What I lose
The minutes of the day.

Not a good week

The natural disasters in Asia are sobering:

• a typhoon killed hundreds in the Philippines (at least 240) before moving into southeast Asia and killing tens in Vietnam (at least 41 and at least 10 in Cambodia) before the weakened storm headed into Laos.
• scores were killed in Samoa and American Samoa (at least 154) when a 8.0 level earthquake triggered tsunamis up to 33 feet tall that drove up to a mile ashore only minutes after the earthquake struck.
• a 7.6 level earthquake hit Indonesia yesterday and killed several hundred (at least 529). There was a 6.6 level aftershock today.

Of course, humans don’t want to be outdone by nature so we also get hundreds killed by the army in Guinea. What makes this even worse is the dictators spin:

Camara appeared on state television late Tuesday, blaming the opposition for acting irresponsibly in the demonstration and calling for an inquiry.

…

“It was the opposition politicians who led other people’s sons and daughters to their deaths while their own sons and daughters are comfortably living elsewhere,’’ Camara said, referring to wealthy Guineans who send their children abroad to study.

This is an escalation from his initial comments where he said it wasn’t his fault:

“I wasn’t myself in the stadium,” he said in an interview with Radio France Internationale. “They told me there was stampeding, and they told me also there were gunshots, and that some people stole weapons from a police station. So, in this human flood, there were gunshots.

“We’re talking here about an uncontrolled movement. Even the chief of state can’t control this movement.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if his next step is to jail and/or kill people in the oppostion, because it was their fault.