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No plans for repeat final between world’s worst
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On the day the World Cup final was played in 2002, the Caribbean island of Montserrat played the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in a specially arranged match between the two lowest ranked teams in the world.
Bhutan, ranked 202nd, beat Montserrat, then ranked 203rd and last in FIFA’s rankings 4-0 in front of 15,000 people at home high in the Himalayas. After the match the players got together and watched Brazil beat Germany 2-0 in the real World Cup final on TV.
FIFA’s membership has now grown to 205 countries but last-placed American Samoa — unenviably on the wrong end of a 31-0 world record defeat to Australia five years ago, will not play 204th-ranked Turks & Caicos Islands on the day of the World Cup final this year.
“It’s a shame,” FIFA spokesman Markus Siegler said at FIFA’s daily briefing, “because it was a great occasion and there was a great documentary made about it, but there are no plans to repeat the idea.”
Sony BMG DRM Rootkit Spyware Album Settlement Still Unsettled
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Remember in late 2005 when Sony put out CDs that contained malicious rootkit spyware that infiltrated their “paying” customers’ computers and left huge gaping holes for hackers?
Remember how the patch they issued actually opened up larger holes? And then remember that the final patch actually used stolen copyrighted code, no less?
Well, we’re sorry to say, we fell victim to the Sony scam. And over the past 230 days (as of today, 6/20/06), we’ve had more than 20 back and forth e-mails with Sony Customer Service, more than 4 hours logged on the phone and still have not had our case settled.
Executive branch to EFF: We’re above the law
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed suit against AT&T over the company’s possible complicity with NSA spy programs, suffered a setback last month when the government invoked the “state secrets privilege” in an attempt to have the entire case quashed. The hearing over “state secrets” will take place on Friday morning, and the government has recently filed its final documents in the case. The claims made there are quite extraordinary; the executive branch basically claims that it is above judicial scrutiny.
“The court-even if it were to find unlawfulness upon in camera, ex parte review-could not then proceed to adjudicate the very question of awarding damages because to do so would confirm Plaintiffs’ allegations.”
The EFF interprets the government statement this way:
Essentially the Government is saying that, even if the Judiciary found the wholesale surveillance program was illegal after reviewing secret evidence in chambers, the Court nevertheless would be powerless to proceed, because the Executive has asserted that the Program, which has been widely reported in every major news outlet, is nevertheless still such a secret that the Judiciary (a co-equal branch under the Constitution) cannot acknowledge its existence by ruling against it. In short, the Government asserts that AT&T and the Executive can break the laws crafted by Congress, and there is nothing the Judiciary can do about it.
U.S. May Have Been Abused During Formative Years
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A team of leading historians and psychiatrists issued a report Wednesday claiming that the United States was likely the victim of abuse by its founding fathers and motherland when it was a young colony.
“In its adulthood, the U.S. displays all the classic tendencies of a nation that was repeatedly mistreated in its infancy—difficulty forming lasting foreign relationships, viewing everyone as a potential enemy, and employing a pattern of assault and intimidation to assert its power,” said Dr. Howard Drexel, the report’s lead author. “Because of trust issues stemming from the abuse, America has become withdrawn, has not made an ally in years, and often resents the few nations that are willing to lend support—most countries outgrow this kind of behavior after 230 years.”
According to Drexel, nations that act out in selfish, self-destructive ways in statehood were usually granted too much independence at an early age, especially if the motherland had other newly annexed lands to care for.
(the Onion does it again….)
The Gay Animal Kingdom
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Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.
As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there’s a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.
Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution’s Rainbow—and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgendered—Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn’t only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden’s theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.
Battle of the Bulge
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It’s a minor point, all things considered. But like a number of readers I can’t help but flag White House spokesman Tony Snow’s witless comparison of ’staying the course’ in Iraq to WWII’s Battle of the Bulge.
The president understands people’s impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the reference, the Battle of the Bulge took place as the Allies were moving across France and Belgium several months after D-Day. The Germans launched a counter-offensive the strategic objective of which was to force the allies to give up their goal of unconditional German surrender and force them to come to some sort of negotiated peace. The German effort was initially successful, opening up a large salient or ‘bulge’ within the allied lines. But the allies eventually recovered the lost ground. And I believe the general consensus is that the whole battle greatly accelerated the Nazis’ eventual collapse because they lost a lot of armor and other resources in the effort.
In any case, you don’t need to know those details to understand one key fact. The Battle of the Bulge began in the middle of December 1944. And it was over by the end of January 1945. So the whole thing lasted less than six weeks. It must have been an eternity for the American and British soldiers in this incredibly hard-fought battle in sub-zero temperatures. But in terms of time, or what Snow terms ‘impatience’, it’s simply not comparable to the last three years in Iraq.
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In any case, Snow clearly believes he can get away with this malarkey because he thinks polls weren’t taken at the time.
But he’s wrong. They were taking them. And they pretty clearly belie Snow’s whole point.
My great friend and former graduate student colleague James Sparrow dropped me a line last night to tell me that “Hadley Cantril, at Princeton, did secret polling for FDR throughout the war on public support for the war, and specifically focused on trendlines, noting shifts from event to event.”
This morning we managed to dig up a helpful chart that shows the polling Cantril did (click the image below for a full sized picture).
As you can see, there was no downtick in public support for the war around the time of the Battle of the Bulge. Approval for President Roosevelt’s conduct of the war continued at around 70% where it had been for years. The number of people who said they had a clear idea of what the war was about was at about the same level and appears to have been rising. Support for a negotiated peace with Hitler remained around the anemic levels it had been for years — at around 15%.
But the basic picture is clear: the American people then, as they will now, will stick through a lot of adversity if they think the war they’re fighting matters and that their president knows what he’s doing.
Then they did. Now they don’t.
Also, this isn’t just a gotcha on Tony Snow, showing the existence of polls he wasn’t aware of, and so forth. There’s a serious underlying point here about the administration’s basic frivolousness in its conduct of the war.
No one thinks you can fight a war or conduct any project of great consequence by following minor oscillations in polls. But long term and imbedded trends in public opinion mean something. In this case, the public can see President Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Having his flacks go out and compare him to great wartime leaders of the past and insult the American people in the process doesn’t change that.
‘The One Percent Doctrine,’ by Ron Suskind
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The title of Ron Suskind’s riveting new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind’s words, “if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it’s not about “our analysis,” it’s about “our response,” and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.
I wonder - how about a 1 percent chance of a hurricane hitting the Louisiana coast?
Bush the Diplomat
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“For Europe, September 11th was a moment. For us, it was a change of thinking.?
– George W. Bush, at a press conference in Vienna, Austria as part of a diplomatic visit to Europe.
Yeah, a change from “thinking” to “not-thinking”.
85 Europeans died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
What a real great way to try to get us to support you, georgie.
Voetbal
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“We hebben op deze manier de rust in het koningshuis bewaard.”
– Marco van Basten, na de 0-0 tegen Argentinië, met kroonprins Willem-Alexander naast zich.
Penis Fencing as a social bonding activity ? How about as a new Olympic sport ? Of course, if it were to end with the same, er, gooey ending as with the bonobos, the competitors would need to wear aprons instead of (or in addition to) the usual fencing armor…
Hmm. Interesting article. I feel compelled, however, to point out that there are many activities in which those of the animal kingdom engage which I would not recommend to humans. Not to be taken as a comparison to homosexual activity, but for some reason this example springs to mind :
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/monkeypee.html
Interesting example, Jericho - do you want me to flood you (yeah, bad pun, I know) with examples of humans doing the same?
Smile. Not really a bad pun at that. And thanks for the offer, but no need to shower me with examples …