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School Portrait Pimps

What is going on here?

Your kid has to go to school. It’s required by law. It doesn’t matter whether your kid goes to a private school or public school, he or she is required by law to be there until he or she is 16.

So, while we’ve got your kid, we’re going to take an assembly-line picture and you have to buy it.

You don’t actually have to buy it. I lied. You can choose to be “different’ and disappoint your child and not buy it or you can buy it. If you’re poor, you might not buy it because it is fairly expensive, especially if you take the “package”. If you take a picture with your own camera, it might cost you fifty cents. But the school photographers charge a lot more than that for a basic print. And, of course, they always offer you packages.  You can’t just pick the one you want: you must buy the package that contains the one you want.  They offer you these little wallet-sized photos that your kids can hand out to all their friends and you can mail to your relatives. Buy it. And you can buy the deluxe glamour photo if you want. That’s really expensive.

The portrait pimps operate extremely efficiently. They are not interested in getting a personalized shot of your kid. They don’t want to waste any time at all following your kid around to see what she does, who her friends are, or which piece of playground equipment is her favorite. No, the kids are marched into a room,– assembly line style– and snapped in about 45 seconds. They are snapped in front of a cookie-cutter non-descript amorphous background. The photos are printed for everyone even if you don’t ask to see the larger prints. They are sent home– the teachers have to get the photos to the kids and force them to take them home. You have to see them. Your kids see them. Your kids friends see them. Buy.

I saw a really remarkable set of school photographs once. They were photos I would have liked to have. It was taken at Calvin Memorial Christian School in the early 1960’s. The photos were taken of each student at their desks or in their classrooms at an activity. Then they were all printed on one 5 X 7, in black and white. It was an amazing photo. You were immediately struck by the diversity of poses and expressions. It was filled with character and revelation and colour, even though it was black and white.

You can just imagine what the Portrait Studio Pimps would think of that. Lord almighty! You’d have to go into each classroom with a camera and think about each of 20 or 25 or 30 shots. You’d have to take time to do it right. You have to compose the shot, set the aperture and shutter speed, focus, aim, and shoot.  It must have also taken more time to print. And then, of course, you lose the rubber-stamp enlargements that are so lucrative to sell to the fond parents.

The company that comes in to take and sell the photos does not have any competition. I questioned the idea once when I was a teacher in Chatham I was told that it would be impractical to have numerous companies compete. The school negotiates with and chooses a vendor and they have exclusive access to the students and teachers for that year.

Does it even matter? Are you happy about the fact that your child is photographed in exactly the same style, with the same background, and the same lighting, as 40 million other children in every town, city, and hicksville on the entire continent?

Of course, it does have the unintended bizarre side effect of collectivizing public memory of school children. The image of our children at school is that frozen, bland, colourless portrait photo of an awkward nervous kid sitting in front of a strange cameraman because the teacher told him or her to. It’s almost like a tattoo or a uniform or, yes, a rubber stamp. Approved. Collectivized. A certified consumer.

Why is it impractical? Because the photo studios don’t want to ask parents first if they want to have a picture taken of their children in front of a colourless, characterless backdrop and if they would be willing to pay $50 for a “package” of prints. If they did that, some parents might reasonably say “no”. By forcing all students to have shots taken and then handing out the pictures at school and forcing the children to take them home, you have to believe, you guarantee much higher sales. Of course it’s practical. It just doesn’t guarantee enough profits to the company selling the photos.

Why do schools allow this?  The yearbook.  Yes, they get the standardized cookie-cutter roster shots of every kid in every class for the yearbook.  Indispensable.

I always feel bullied by this system. I don’t like cookie-cutter photos, and I don’t like them being shoved down my throat by people who care as much about your kid as they do about photography– nil. I think the schools should take the upper hand here and start dictating terms. Stop using the cookie-cutter approach. Get out there into the classrooms on the new “annual photography day” and start taking pictures of students doing what they do at school, studying, listening, interacting, being smart-alecks, getting stumped, whatever. Use digital cameras so film cost is not an issue, and students can pick the best shot to use for their “official” school photo.

October 13, 2002

The technical quality of school portraits is not very bad, usually. The faces are well-lit, and a large format camera is usually used, so the pictures are sharp and accurate. For many families in the 1960’s, it might well be the best technical photos they have.

But with the vastly increased popularity of 35mm cameras, however, that little niche is no longer quite so prominent, and I suspect a lot of families no longer bother with the school portraits. They take their own very good pictures.

The newer digital cameras offer excellent picture quality and would allow school photographers to take as many shots as they need to to get a good one. They can load them all onto a computer and then print out exactly as many as parents request, instead trying to shove “packages” down our throats.

 

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We Were Soldiers: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I don’t know how many ways it needs to be said, but Hollywood’s passion for fibbing while claiming to tell a “true” story is and always will be one of the most contemptible facets of modern American culture. We just can’t stand the truth.

I’m not talking about factual errors, or even the not unreasonable telescoping of events into a cinematic time-frame. I’m talking about exaggeration and distortion.

In the story told in “We Were Soldiers”, Lt. Col. Moore’s 1st Battalion/7th Cavalry command position was almost over-run when Company C failed to hold off advancing PAVN. It was an exciting battle sequence, and allowed the movie to show Moore himself in action.

In real life, Company C decimated the PAVN so badly that the attack never reached the command position.

In “We Were Soldiers”, the breakaway 29-man platoon led by Lt. Herrick chases a PAVN “scout” off onto a ridge where they are cut off from the rest of “C Company”. In real life, they were chasing nobody: they merely advanced too far. I suspect Director Randall Wallace thought it would be more exciting to show them chasing somebody.  Better yet, it would make Lt. Herrick look less stupid.

In the movie, only one man appears to be left alive of the 29 in the breakaway platoon. In reality, 20 of the men were still alive. That’s a rather big fib. Only 9 of the men were killed, though 13 were wounded, including the platoon leader.

In “We Were Soldiers”, victory is dramatized by Lt. Col. Moore leading his troops up to the PAVN command bunker area, as Lt. Col Nguyen Huu An flees his command post in the tunnels. That did not happen. Nor did the dramatic confrontation between Moore and the PAVN machine gun position (with the exciting arrival of the helicopters at just the right instant). Didn’t happen. Why is it in there? I don’t know. To show that helicopters are good?

A French Bugle was found, a few days after the events of the movie, in the same general area. I don’t care about that inaccuracy. It’s close enough, and it doesn’t materially affect your perception of the events at Ia Drang.

In 1965, the Huey “slicks” did not have machine guns mounted on their sides. An infantry man with an M16 defended each side of the chopper. Not as impressive cinematically, I guess.

A few days after Ia Drang, a far more horrendous battle took place as the relief battalion was about to be airlifted out, near a landing zone designated Albany. The 2nd Battalion/7th Calvary was spread out in a long column of 400 – 500 yards when attacked by surprise by a fresh regiment of PAVN. According to Jack Smith, most of the early casualties were due to friendly fire as panicked soldiers surrounded by PAVN snipers fired everywhere and anywhere. After a horrendous three-day battle, the survivors were air-lifted out. Casualties: 151 killed, 121 wounded.

Hal Moore, Jack Smith (son of Howard K. Smith, the ABC newsman), and other soldiers of the U.S. 7th Calvary travelled to Viet Nam in October 1993 to meet with their PAVN counterparts at the scene of the battle. There are pictures of them standing together and shaking hands.

There is something wonderful and even beautiful about such a moment. Men who once tried to kill each other in fierce battle now wisely shake hands and share memories. But there is something also deeply disturbing about it, and what is disturbing is not the shaking of hands and the smiles in the group photos. The disturbing part is that these friendly gatherings betray the utter purposelessness of Ia Drang, and every other battle of the Viet Nam War and almost every other war. In the truest sense of the word, the soldiers at Ia Drang were absurd.

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The Toilet Web

When the computer revolution started about 30 years ago, some of us wondered, conscientiously, whether there would be enough jobs for people in the future. The visionaries spoke of automated assembly lines, robotic miners, and intelligent vacuum cleaners. In this utopia of mechanical bliss, what would everybody do for a living?

The answer is here. We would invent, design, manufacture, and service talking toilets.

You may scoff. Well, maybe you won’t. Maybe you already have one of those toilets that sprays your butt with soap and warm water after you’ve relieved yourself, and plays soft music, and warms up the bathroom for you. But if you don’t, let the excitement build.

Japanese companies lead the way, as they did with transistor radios and VCRs. Toto is one the leading manufacturers in Japan (60% of the domestic market) and brags about a toilet that is responsive to voice commands. What exactly would you like to command your toilet to do? Open the lid. Spray hotter water and more soap. Massage your butt. You name it.

Oh but wait. Is that all you imagine a 21st century toilet can do? You don’t think big enough! The 21st century toilet samples your urine, your weight, and your blood pressure, and sends it’s findings off to your doctor via the Internet! Yes, we finally have the ultimate browser, and it aint Internet Explorer, and it aint the ESPN website.

So the next time you get depressed thinking about the limitations of human endeavor, and the failure of our culture to reach greater heights of enlightened reflection, consider the toilet browser and rejoice in the infinite potential of human aspirations.

And don’t forget to wipe.

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Billy Graham’s Recovered Memory

The Rev. Billy Graham apologized Friday for a 1972
conversation with former President Nixon in which he
said the Jewish “stranglehold” of the media was ruining
the country and must be broken.

Billy Graham, who must occasionally take a little pride in the fact that while Swaggert and Baker and others have fallen, he remains pure and unsullied by scandal, says:

Although I have no memory of the occasion, I deeply regret comments I apparently made in an Oval Office
conversation with President Nixon … some 30 years ago.

This statement was released by Mr. Graham’s Texas public relations firm.

It’s disgraceful. He has no memory? He has no memory of a conversation he had with President Nixon, in the Oval Office? He has no memory of the fact that he was an anti-Semite?

The thing is, the comments didn’t materialize out of thin air. They don’t sound like a man making conversation while waiting for a bus. They sound like a man deep in serious discussion with another powerful man for whom the issues being discussed are not academic or abstract. Mr. Graham, presumably, said what he believed. Why would it be something he didn’t believe? It’s not enough for him to say now that he doesn’t remember saying it, and doesn’t believe what he said. It is not enough.

You have to think of other things. You have to think about the civil rights movements and the antiwar movements and the media reporting on it all and the perception widely held among redneck Americans at the time of some kind of global Jewish conspiracy to undermine core American values. Mr. Graham was condemning the media for holding liberal values which he thought were alien to Mr. Nixon’s constituency, the so-called silent majority.

“This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s
going down the drain,” Graham said.

“You believe that?” Nixon says in response.

“Yes, sir,” says Graham.

“Oh boy. So do I,” Nixon agrees, then says: “I can’t ever
say that but I believe it.”

“No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might
be able to do something,”

Now, what I am disturbed about is this: Billy Graham has a public relations firm?

Added March 2007:

President Nixon wasn’t able to break the “stranglehold” of the liberal, Jewish Media. So was God’s man in America, Billy Graham, being prophetic when he said America would go “down the drain”.

Are we down the drain yet?

I know some people think we are They think the pervasiveness of sex, sexual references, sexual topics, sexy bodies, sexy jokes, and sexy clothes are proof of that. The sex itself is not what leads us down the drain: it is the drain. We are here.

But by any objective standard, we actually live in a kind of neo-Victorianism where in Stewy’s little animated butt on “Family Guy” is now censored. I am not making this up.

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“Recovered” Memories

Feldman-Summers, S., & Pope, K. S. (1994). The experience of “forgetting” childhood abuse: A national survey of psychologists. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 636-639.

Abstract: “A national sample of psychologists were asked whether they had been abused as children and, if so, whether they had ever forgotten some or all of the abuse. Almost a quarter of the sample (23.9%) reported childhood abuse, and of those, approximately 40% reported a period of forgetting some or all of the abuse. The major findings were that (a) both sexual and nonsexual abuse were subject to periods of forgetting; (b) the most frequently reported factor related to recall was being in therapy; (c) approximately one half of those who reported forgetting also reported corroboration of the abuse; and (d) reported forgetting was not related to gender or age of the respondent but was related to severity of the abuse.”

This passes for scientific research? It is taken from http://www.jimhopper.com/memory/#bc, a website dedicated to “proving” that memories of traumatic childhood experiences can be recovered.

If you believe that there is scientific evidence in support of “recovered” memories, you ought to read this paragraph very carefully. This is what is passed off as “scientific” proof. A poll of psychologists asking them if they had been abused as children and then if they had repressed the memories of it and then if they felt it was corroborated.

In other words, can you “remember” being abused as a child, and did you lose the memory of it. In other words:

Do you have faith in God above?
If the bible tells you so.

Now, the writers of this hoax are dimly aware of the issue here, so they ask how many of these psychologists who remember that they didn’t remember they were sexually abused “recovered” their memories in therapy? And how many now claim that they can corroborate the abuse? This article doesn’t detail the nature of “corroboration”, but we can imagine. Well, we can, but we shouldn’t, I suppose. By “corroboration”, they could mean… well, what could they mean? Other than some kind of confirmation from a non-witness– since the abuse is almost never witnessed– or by someone else who was also abused by the same person, which is not corroboration by any definition of the word. (In fact, in how many cases did they hear the alleged corroboration first, and perhaps were moved to “remember” that they too were victims?)

There is no record of anyone producing any kind of physical evidence in support of the recovered memories. There is a lot of evidence of “recovered” memories that were demonstrably false. There is a lot of evidence that the human mind is exceptionally creative when it comes to memory, combining them or altering them in amazing ways.  There is lots of evidence that human memory is subject to suggestion and manipulation.

Partisans would argue that it’s because of the nature of the crime– there never is physical evidence. There are just these long-suppressed memories.

The fact that 56% of these people “recovered” their memories in therapy, of course, is highly suspect. First of all, we’re dealing with psychologists here. These are people who already have faith, presumably, in psychology, and the various beliefs, structures, and assumptions common to the practice of psychology. A keystone of Freud’s theories is “repression”: memories of traumatic events are buried somewhere in our psyche but can be “recovered” through psychoanalysis.  Memories are like a tape recording: once found, they are an accurate record of what happened.  More recent research shows that this is patently false.

In other words, that there is such a thing as an unconscious, and a location for things that are repressed, and such a thing as repression. Maybe they all read “Sybil”, which, for a time, was the bible of hack psychology.

It’s like asking people if they believe in angels. You have to choose only people who also believe in the bible. If they say yes, you proceed to ask them if they have ever met one. I’ll bet 25% of that group have, in one form or another. An angel, for example, saved me from a serious car accident by waking me up when I was falling asleep on the freeway. That may sound strange to you, but a lot of people out there believe that such things really happen.

So a lot of psychologists, in therapy– with a psychologist, presumably– are led to “recover” memories of abuse which, apparently, they had repressed. So how do they know these memories are valid?

The study looks at corroboration, which consists of:

  • people who knew about the abuse confirmed it
  • someone else reported abuse by the same perpetrator (if you know someone who was robbed, does that mean that the robber probably robbed you as well?)
  • The abusers acknowledged some or all of the abuse. (I’d like to hear that conversation.)

None of this is really scientific by any stretch of the imagination. You just have to have a lot of questions about a person who “knew” about the abuse confirming it. How did they know? What did they really know? What kind of conversation led to this disclosure?

On to another facet:

Just as technology evolves, social consciousness and hence the definition of academic freedom is evolving. And this is coming about as people, particularly members of less powerful groups, speak. Dr. Jill Vickers, a Professor at Carlton, for example, recently “urged CAUT to come to grips with and to understand how the principles of academic freedom and institutional authority, ideas that legitimize the university, can also be used to perpetuate the status quo and sustain those who are more powerful and privileged – in most cases white males” (Riseborough, 1993). Along similar lines, UNESCO is currently reviewing an international proposal regarding academic freedom (International Conference of University Teachers’ Organizations, 1993). The text of this proposal makes it clear that there can be no academic freedom without social responsibility.

by Connie M. Kristiansen, Carleton University, Newsletter of the Section on Women and Psychology, Vol 20, No 2, page 7-16.

Read that chilling line again: “There can be no academic freedom without social responsibility”. Sound like an old communist plot? It’s a feminist plot, however, aimed at those would deny that memories can be repressed and then “recovered”.  Who believe that there is such a thing as a false allegation.

It’s idiotic, to be blunt. Free inquiry should be suppressed in the name of a greater social good, which is, to be able to expose the institutionalized oppression of women that is so pervasive and encompassing that women are justified in suppressing freedom of speech in order to fight it.

If I have to explain why that’s a bad idea, I’d have to admit that our society is hopelessly ignorant about the fundamental basis of freedom, democracy, and human rights. It probably is.

And if radical feminists are so stupid as to believe that this very weapon, the suppression of free and open discussion and deliberation, is not sure to be turned and used against them in the future, as it has been in the past, then they are greater fools than even I imagined.

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The Mission Statement

“The Company’s core purpose is to enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”

As you may or may not already know, I regard mission statements as the quintessential example of middle manager masturbation. A group of executives or managers or board members or whathaveyou meets with an expensive consultant who could not perform a single really useful task if his life depended on it and, with solemnity and reverence, gather around a table to ask themselves the question: what is it we do?

Remember– there are useful things that people do. Install an Oracle Server. Repair a defective furnace. Replace the battery in a car. And then there are consultants.

Now, if a company like McDonald’s came out with a mission statement like “we provide crappy, cheap, non-nutritious food to vulnerable and foolish customers to maximize return on shareholder’s investment in our company, regardless of the social, medical, or cultural cost”, I would be all in favor of mission statements. A mission statement like that could be regarded as a useful piece of information about a company.

Some other possible examples:

“We provide the public with sexually attractive women and men to read ridiculously facile and trivial accounts of news events while maximizing the public tolerance for incessant commercial interruption” (CNN)

“We do extensive research and promotion to find out exactly how to market expensive but dangerous mind-altering drugs to a credulous public that actually believes their problems can be cured with a little pill. If absolutely necessary, we will actually pay for research to develop drugs of dubious efficacy. It is imperative to foster the conviction that if one drug “fails” the solution is always another drug.” (Pharmaceutical Company).

“We sell the public glamourized images of unimportant people who are well-known for being well-known and whom the public aspire to emulate precisely because they can’t be them because they aren’t in the magazine.” (People Magazine)

“We will cheat and lie and defraud people in order to obtain the maximum amount of personal material benefit for our top executives” (Enron Corporation).

“We will attack and invade Iraq so that a plentiful supply of oil will be available for our future needs especially if those bozos in Saudi Arabia fail to keep the fanatic Moslem hoards in check”. (U.S. government).

But look at the New York Times mission statement. Can you believe they used the word “enhance” in their mission statement? That they said “enhance society”? What kind of vacuous tripe is this? Enhance Society? It sounds like something a Grade 10 student could improve upon. “Schools enhance society by providing something for young people to do when they are not on drugs or vandalizing schools.”

Then they use the phrase “high-quality”. “High-quality news, information, and entertainment”. At least someone realized that “quality news” is grammatically incorrect, even if almost everybody, including the Minister of Education in Ontario (“we wish to provide the children of Ontario with a quality education”).. Instead, they fell back upon the merely incomprehensible. What is “high-quality”? The mission statement doesn’t say. If it did say, then it would actually be specific. It would have content and meaning. But the goal of devising a mission statement is to emasculate language of all content and meaning so that everyone can sign on to it.

Whenever someone at one of these meetings actually proposes a specific statement against which any particular activities or achievements can be measured, the consultant, and other participants, are sure to have a panic attack. The danger of specific statements of quantifiable details, of course, is that it be revealed to people that either you haven’t fulfilled your mission, or that you have fulfilled your mission but your mission sucks, or is unimportant, or isn’t something remarkably useful in any case.

I’ll bet that none of the reporters at the New York Times had any hand in this mission statement. It’s too incomprehensibly dumb to believe that someone like Seymour Hersh could have signed on to it.

Your mission statement is usually created with the assistance of an outside consultant. The assumption is that nobody on your staff knows what the hell you do, so you better bring in someone who is unfamiliar with the organization to lead the effort.

Is that what the mighty New York Times did? I hope not. It’s something CNN or United States and World Report would do.

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Jesus is Back

Suppose that Jesus returned tomorrow. He appeared somewhere and announced the end of time, judgment day, the rapture, whatever.

Where would he appear? If he appeared at Bob Jones University, a lot of us would have to rethink some of our value judgments. Maybe that’s where he would appear. He would arrive in a limo surrounded by Secret Service agents, wearing a nice suit, with a cell phone. He would shake hands with Pat Robertson and say, “blessed is he who preserves traditional family values, promotes deregulation, and cuts taxes for the rich.” Then he’d go golfing with Pat and Jerry at Augusta.

But what if he had a kind of funky sense of occasion and appeared in New York? He might drive his own Volvo, or a Prius. He might be dressed in black t-shirt and jeans, and preach in Central Park. He might hang out with beggars, welfare mothers, drug addicts and prostitutes. Mayor Bloomberg might elbow his way into one of these gatherings and try to give him the key to the city. He might say, “there is more love and beauty and truth among these panhandlers and homosexuals and prostitutes, than among your councils and your senators and your police.”

Some people would suggest Jerusalem. I have a hard time believing that Jerusalem has any special claim, especially lately. Does Jesus share our fuzzy conceptions about spiritual significance? I doubt it. Jerry Falwell thinks the anti-Christ is already in Israel. But that’s Jerry Falwell. Maybe Jerry Falwell is the antichrist. So what if Christ appeared in Jerusalem and stood in front of an Israeli tank, like that heroic student in Tiananmen Square, and said, “the endless cycle of violence and retribution can only be broken with an act of grace and love”. Do you think the tank would stop?

Our best guide to where Jesus will reappear is the bible, of course. In the bible, Jesus was born in a very small, insignificant little town. He carried on a lively ministry in several small towns in various areas of Palestine, and even ventured into Samaria. Then he went to Jerusalem where, of course, he was finally arrested and sentenced to death by the civil authorities, after a trial held by the Jewish authorities, the Sanhedrin.

Do I have this all right? I’ll check later. I’m going from memory.

Why would he reappear in Jerusalem? A lot of people believe that there is still a special tie between Jesus and the Jews. The Jews don’t believe that– a lot of born-again Christians do, especially those who buy into a lot of the silly “end-times” tripe being trotted out by guys like Tim Le Haye lately.

The biggest problem here is that some evangelical Christians think that they will do a lot better than the Jews in 0 A.D. They think they will know who Jesus is. They won’t call him a blasphemer and send him to the Romans to be executed. They will see this person who looks like any other man. They will hear him speak like any other man speaks, except for the content of his speech.

They think they will take one look and say, “it’s the Messiah! He has returned!”

Think about that. How will they know it’s really the Messiah? How do they know what Jesus will look like, or what he will say? Do they honestly think he will say “God bless America”? Will he carry a little American flag? Will he say, “you people in your suburban churches with the rock bands and the lighting effects, and the annual trip to Vegas, and the hummer, and clever tax dodges– yes, that is exactly what I meant.”

Or might he say something like, “Cursed be those who make weapons of death and destruction and sell them to tyrants and dictators. And cursed be those who pollute the earth, and rape her forests, and destroy all that lives beneath the sea. And cursed be those who cry ‘war, war’, while the hungry lament in silence. And cursed be those who seek status and wealth; and cursed be those who elect politicians and judges who allow the execution of people whose minds are so shattered they have no concept of right and wrong…”

And cursed be the tobacco companies, Enron, and the companies that make little plastic land mines.

Maybe he’ll tell a parable like the one Nathan told David about the rich man who stole the sheep from the poor shepherd, even though he had thousands of sheep of his own, and maybe he’ll mention the words “Citibank” and “Third World Debt”.

What if he said, “this nuclear bomb is a great evil. Men will make war, and men will die, and evil will be heaped upon evil, but let no man be received among you who has deliberately targeted civilians.”

And what if he said, “my father gave you a beautiful planet that lavishly provided everything you needed to prosper– how well have you taken care of it?” He might take one look at our abandoned open-pit mines, and our slums, and polluted rivers, and plastic islands, and say, “oh my God!”

We wouldn’t like that message. You know what we would do? We would say, “you’re not the real messiah. ”

The real messiah will look more like a gay Caucasian shepherd with a bunch of tiny lambs at his feet, carrying a spool of cotton candy. “That’s more like it, we’d say. Will there be ice cream in heaven?” Of course there will be. It’s melting right now.

And because you people all went to church almost every week and Christmas and Easter and because you gave money that one time to pay for Amy’s surgery after her gymnastics injury because it wasn’t covered by her parents’ health insurance, and because you once almost joined a protest march against abortion, and because you didn’t see any actual nudity in that stripper movie you went to see last year, and because you got married just as soon as you found out you were pregnant, you get to have some.

 

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War With Iraq: Quagmire Awaits

Do you think George Bush is smart? No, you don’t. Even his conservative, Republican, oil executive supporters don’t think he is smart. But that’s okay. He is surrounded by smart people and he relies on their judgment.

That is logically ridiculous of course. Americans are suspicious of intellect– we know. They somehow think that a down-home country guy with a little cunning surrounded by competent managers is the ideal leader. He won’t get confused by details or messed up by the subtleties or ambiguities of complex realities. He’ll just go with his instincts. Instincts are always better than closely reasoned judgments. Aren’t they? They are in the movies.

Well, actually, less than 50% of the voters seemed to think that Bush was smart enough to be President. And, of course, a decisive majority of all the conservative Republicans on the Supreme Court, including the acute Clarence Thomas.

The trouble is, if you aren’t very smart yourself, how do you know your managers and advisors are smart? And when they give you conflicting advice, as surely Colin Powell and Donald Rumsveld and John Ashcroft have been doing, how do you sort out who is right? You kind of feel for it, right?

Is that good enough in 2002? Is that good enough for the world’s only remaining superpower, other than Europe, China, or India?

So you have this fixation on Iraq. Iraq is a crisis point for America right now because, well, George Bush Jr. decided Iraq is a dangerous threat. He seems to have made up his mind that he must invade Iraq and kill Saddam Hussein and set up a new government, so that oil can be extracted and sold by large American corporations, or democracy can be restored, or Americans can feel safe once again from all those Iraqi Scud missile attacks we’ve been experiencing lately.

Dick Cheney was so prescient about Iraq that while he was in charge of Halliburton, as recently as 1998-99, he did more than $23 million of business with Iraq. Didn’t he know that Saddam was a monster? Not until George Bush Jr. announced the “axis of evil”, apparently.

Do you think these men in charge of the White House have given thoughtful, intelligent consideration to these issues:

  • what if the Kurds, who are already itching to join the attack, decide, as they are likely to, to set up their own little country in Northern Iraq, right on the Turkish border? How would Turkey like that? Or Iran, which also has a substantial Kurd population that it is struggling to keep in check. Neither Turkey nor Iran would tolerate a breakaway Kurd republic on their borders.

Bush has extracted promises from the Kurds not to seek an independent state. And these guys are smart enough to believe them….

  • what if the hardline Moslems react to the war by tossing President Pervez Musharraf and setting up a hardline Islamic republic? With a bomb. And with an incendiary situation in Kashmir?
  • what if the same thing happens in Saudi Arabia or Yemen? What if hard-liners in Iran come to believe that the U.S. won’t be satisfied with deposing just one pole of the “axis of evil”?
  • what if the Shiite Moslems in the South of Iraq decide they would be happier united with their brethren in Iran than with Baghdad’s Sunni minority, whatever form that leadership might take in a post-Saddam Iraq?
  • what if the overthrow of Saddam doesn’t stop terrorism? (It won’t– it will probably increase it.) Who’s next?
  • can the officials of this administration name a single instance in which concerted military action (as opposed to negotiation and compromise) put an end to terrorist activities, anywhere in the world?

After Iraq, terrorists hiding out in Yemen, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere will continue to target U.S. military installations, diplomatic buildings, and the U.S. itself.

Since the U.S. seems incapable of actually tracking down and capturing real terrorists, it will have to find someone else readily available for a good bashing. Iran? North Korea? Somalia?

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Your Fingerprints: Junk Science

When we were little children watching police shows like “The FBI” and “Adam-12” on TV, we became convinced, along with everyone else, that if a criminal’s fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, it was case closed, proof-positive, open and shut.

Why? Because no two fingerprints, in the entire world, could be alike. How did we know that? How did we know that that was true? Because everyone acted as it it was true. Everyone acted as if no two fingers in the entire world could have matching patterns on them. Everyone acted as if this was the product of years of sound, thorough research conducted by revered scientists.

It is very odd, then, to discover, that there might never have been a good reason for believing that the evidentiary value of fingerprints has ever been established with any kind of scientific rigor. There really is no body of systematic research or scientific proof that fingerprints really are unique to each individual, at least, not in the way the movies and television would have you believe. In other words, nobody has ever systematically compared fingerprints to each other to establish just what the odds are that any two, from perfect strangers, might match.

In 1995, a proficiency test was administered to 156 law enforcement examiners. These are the guys called in to court to testify that the suspect’s prints — don’t forget, we could be talking about Lee Harvey Oswald here, among others– were found on the murder weapon, or a door knob, or a table surface, or something. Only 44% of these “experts” could correctly identify all five of a set of test prints. Read that again: less than half of the “experts” were proficient. And again: half of these guys got at least one of the prints wrong, out of five. Twenty percent. One in five.

I don’t know the details of the test, but I do know that the people who administered it considered the performance of half the experts to be inadequate and unreliable.

What has happened is that the Supreme Court of the United States has recently made some rulings that require courts to establish that “scientific evidence” really is scientific before it is allowed in the courtroom. What you have to imagine is some “expert” talking in obscure, difficult language about some scientific information which the jury doesn’t understand. The jury takes the guy’s word for it. The jury figures that the “expert” knows. The jury figures that he wouldn’t be testifying this way if he didn’t have a solid body of research and knowledge behind him. Think about fiber and hair analysis. Think about fingerprints. Think about those difficult cases where the prosecution actually has very little evidence so they scrounge around for “matching” fibers and hairs and semen and spots of blood. We have been trained by television and the movies to regard such evidence as definitive and decisive. Now we are beginning to know that such evidence can be constructed around a suspicion.

In France, 16 points of similarity, between fingerprints, are required before a “match” can be asserted. In Sweden, the number is 7. The FBI, in the U.S., won’t tell us how many it considers decisive. The FBI says it decides on a case by case basis. I thought that justice is exactly the opposite of that. Blind and impartial. Consistent. The FBI says, “trust me”. I wish I could.  Science does not provide standards that apply on a “case by case” basis.

Our system of justice– adversarial– encourages both sides to become advocates for their clients’ interests, rather than the truth. The police don’t just present facts– they invest in the suspect’s guilt, and advocate for it, and do whatever they feel needs to be done to “win” their case. It is apparent that often they feel that they know who did it– they just need to muster the facts necessary for a conviction. They sometimes regard the law as an impediment to justice.

They almost never willingly admit a mistake, even when DNA analysis proves they were wrong.

Occasionally, it is clear, they manufacture the “facts”. An expert, for example, will testify that a fiber found in the suspect’s car exactly matches a fiber taken from the victim’s sweater. So how do you assess the real degree of similarity, and the real likelihood that these fibers could have matched fibers from almost anyone else’s sweater? The lab is not presented with five samples and five potential matching fragments of evidence, and then asked to identify which ones match. They are presented with a set of fibres from the suspects home or clothing, and a set of fibres found at the crime scene. Do they match, yes or no? If no matches are found, we’ll find more fibres, and then more. The lab technician knows that the police will be happier if a match is found.

A suspect’s car– or any car– is loaded with smells, particles, dust, fragments of things, scraps of paper, coffee stains, oil and grease, residues, maybe even bodily fluids. If you took thousands of samples of every substance in a any car, how hard would it be to find something– anything– that matches something that can be linked to a victim– any victim? I’ll bet it wouldn’t be that hard at all.  Look at the Azaria Chamberlain case.

The Supreme Court is right. We should demand very high standards of “expert” testimony, before allowing smooth-talking partisan professionals to try to bowl over a jury with analysis that might well be nothing more than “junk science”.

Random Notes:

Until the 1880’s, the commonly accepted “age of consent” in America was 11.

2011-06: in the case of Casey Anthony, the prosecution is actually presenting “evidence” that traces of the smell of a decomposing body can be detected and analyzed from the trunk of Ms. Anthony’s car. This has all the hallmarks of the good old fibre analysis presented at so many cases by discredited forensic “scientists” in the past.

I hope her defense attorney has the intelligence to ask the prosecution to produce evidence of the smells of hundreds of cars compared to the smell captured from Ms. Anthony’s car and then have the “expert” blindly identify which one had the body in it.

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You are Insane

According to two studies, the National Institute of Mental Health Epidemiologic Catchment Area Program (1980-85), and the National Co-morbidity Survey (1990-92), about 30% of all Americans will experience mental or addictive disorders in a given year and 50% will need mental health services in their lifetimes.

According to the February issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, those numbers are too high. What a relief to find that out! The “correct” number of people who experience mental or addictive disorders in a given year should be about 18.5%. I didn’t see a corrected number for the second piece of data.

So if you ever thought that most people are nuts, you’re not too far off. The professionals agree with you.

Makes me wonder what would happen if the plumbers did a study showing that 50% of all homes need some plumbing. Would you rush out and hire a plumber to come in to check your house to see if it was one of the 50%? How likely do you think it would be that your house, indeed, was one of the needy homes, if you asked a plumber to check it?

Some car repair shops urge you to come in for free brake inspections. You bite. You bring your car in and wait twenty minutes while a repairman inspects your car. The repairman should probably be working on someone else’s vehicle up there on another lift, but he stops his work to look at your car. The impatient owner of the other car is reading three-month-old newsmagazines and drinking stale coffee in the waiting room. But they already have his car on the lift, so you get priority. Now imagine, if you can, that the mechanic comes back into the office and walks up to you and says, “everything looks hunky-dory down there.” Right.

Now you may believe that unlike car repair shops, psychologists and social workers aren’t after your money. They work in those professions because they want to help people. Right. And pop stars are in it for the love of music. And politicians because people begged them to lead. And lawyers because they love justice. I’m not saying they’re not. Necessarily. Just that their perspectives on the necessity of their professions might be influenced every so slightly by their pecuniary interests.

But psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers are not plumbers. They do not work with fixed physical properties of objects. They work with your mind. They would like to believe that theirs is a “science”, beyond argument, and demonstrable with evidence and proofs. The assumption is that personal spiritual or philosophical values are secondary to the eternal and scientifically grounded principles of psychology and sociology. You can be manipulated. Fixed.

If about 20% of the population really does have a disorder, you would think that someone would realize that there is a serious problem in our society that needs to be fixed. There are too many casualties. If 20% of all airplane trips crashed or 20% of all ships sank, you can bet that all travel would be suspended until the problem was found out and solved.

The other possibility, of course, is that 80% of our society is nuts and 20% fully comprehend our predicament. Our predicament is that we have built a society that, in order to gratify the voracious appetites of the rich and powerful, has driven itself into a pathological system of destructive obsessive behaviors. The 20% understand that and have opted out and carry their belongings in shopping bags and fervently wish for a happy meal tomorrow. Beyond that, who knows?

The rest of us can just keep taking our medications.