Navel intelligence

The latest attempted plane bombing caught my interest because of the way perception seems to trump reality in our media-saturated age.

It wouldn't be surprising if holiday travel to the CNMI takes a hit. One incident on one of the thousands of daily flights can do that. Airline travel is ridiculously safe, particularly immediately after an incident like this, but who cares about statistics?

The system worked, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano reportedly said. With all due respect... no. (UPDATE: she agrees) Her unspoken assumption is that the system can work all of the time, every where. That's a very American assumption: if we throw billions of dollars at a problem it will go away.

It won't. We can, and have, added multiple layers of security. They work very well and they can undoubtedly work better. Not perfectly, though. Sorry.

Realistically, it's been eight years since Richard Reid the shoe bomber. Both men used very small amounts of a high explosive-- and failed. We've been very lucky. There are thousands of fanatics out there and they are going to keep trying.

Let the hand-wringing begin

'What went wrong?' the politicians are howling as they put on television make-up and schedule hearings, meaning 'who can we blame?'

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on the lowest-level database, evidently because there was 'insufficient derogatory information' to classify him higher. Supposedly his father told the American Embassy his son had extremist views. That's it-- though maybe he followed up with emails that ended up in the spam folder with other Nigerian bankers.

Seriously, Abdulmutallab probably would have earned more suspicion if there had been other factoids about him. We simply don't have the resources to investigate more than 500,000 'suspicious' people. The reports I've read say that even now, authorities are still checking out his claim of a Yemeni connection, possibly to Al Qaeda.

Degrees of separation

That Yemeni link intrigues me: evidently the poor little rich kid's mother is from Yemen and he says he studied with a radical internet cleric there. The Detroit area is home to a large number of Yemenis (and Moslems) and there have just been two air strikes against radicals in that country.

One of the targets in the second strike was a former Guantanamo detainee who went through the highly-touted Saudi Arabian 're-education' program for radicals-- he is one of the few recidivists to-date. Since almost half of the remaining prisoners are from Yemen, that's a monkey wrench in plans to close Gitmo.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading the Washington Post and New York Times articles on the second bombing if their lead sentences hadn't pissed me off by referring to the "suspect in the Fort Hood shootings". Innocent until proven guilty, sure, but what a namby-pamby politically correct way of putting it.

Mostly, I'm concerned that we're drawing closer to a semi-free failing state that tortures its opposition, locks up its journalists and appears to survive because the majority of the population is in a self-medicated khat-chewing stupor.

Do I hear a Yemen?

If, like me, you are a little frustrated with the dribs and drabs of information about the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane, Politico has a pretty good story. They have also posted a copy of the criminal complaint against Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Oh, yeah. Politico linked to an ABC News report that the bomber came by way of Yemen.

Here we go again; yet another failing state with Al Qaeda moving in. I was going to make the inevitable reference to Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, but Politico posted this while I was thinking about it.

Tuning out the medicine show

Quick, name five differences between the House and Senate versions of 'Health Care Reform'.

I couldn't, and I thought I was following along. Partly, it's because of distractions like this photo from TPM Muckraker. Mostly, the subject is just too complicated. Who has the time to pore over different versions of 1,000-plus page bills in a half-dozen committees?

My brother mentioned yesterday that he'd stopped paying attention to polls on the issue. Wisely, I agreed. What do the polls ask, and how? How many people think they know what's in the House and Senate bills, but are just miming talking points from one side or the other? Do they oppose it because it's another brick in the socialist wall, or because it doesn't include the public option?

How many people, like me, just don't want to hear the day-to-day bickering over arcana and see the latest politician or pundit to mount the soapbox. (I'll admit there are a lot of people with personal interests and political junkies out there, but they've got to be a minority.)


Not me, I'm like the guy in this cartoon by Ann Telnaes.

At this time of year I can't even get excited by this silly priest pushing shoplifting or the Pope trying to 'copyright' his name, image and symbols. Don't expect me to slog through the swamps of Washington.

Have another cookie. Maybe I'll tune in next year.

(Yes, folks, that's Agana's famous Roto-Pope.)

Will Your CUC cost you $320,000,000?

I really hope I got this wrong.

The Environmental Protection Agency just linked me to a new toy based on Google Earth. It shows most EPA enforcement actions in the United States for 2009.

I dutifully went to the Mariana Islands-- the easiest way is to put New Guinea on the bottom of the map and the Philippines on the left side and slowly center us as you zoom in.

Once you find the islands, just click the type of enforcement action in the box on the left and little flags will pop up showing locations. Click the flag and you get a link to EPA's ECHO (Enforcement & Compliance History Online-- another toy I've been meaning to play with).

Saipan and Rota showed nothing I hadn't heard of, all of the violations except one were for the settlement (Stipulations one and two) CUC and EPA entered into March 11, 2009.

Nothing new at all, until I got to the "Enforcement Conclusion Dollar Amounts" in the ECHO search (Since it's a search, you may have to repeat the process; I can't guarantee the link will still work for very long), which lists the "Compliance Action Cost" at $320,000,000. I'm sure that doesn't include penalties for not meeting the deadlines in the stipulations.

Woa. That's the first estimate I've seen. Am I missing something? Someone please tell me I am.

Putting detainees on ICE

It can't happen here, probably, but next month's The Nation has a disturbing story about detainees 'disappearing' into Immigration and Customs Enforcement subfield offices.

Author Jacqueline Stevens opens with this jaw-dropping quote from former ICE Office of State and Local Coordination executive director James Pendergraph: "If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear."

Stevens lists 186 unlisted and unmarked field offices where detainees are held, with anecdotal tales of family and attorneys trying to find people who were detained.

I could quote huge swaths of the article, but I really, strongly suggest you read the original. I think you'll be as appalled as I was. One more excerpt:

ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for its lack of a real-time locator database.

I'm making the assumption that it probably can't happen in the CNMI because we're so small. I wonder.

Take two steaks and call it morning

The Anti-Jet-Lag Diet was only a few links (degrees of separation) away from my morning emails. Since the places I'm likely to visit are many, many timezones away from Saipan, that's of more than passing interest.

There's some interesting information at the site, though I'm not yet ready to plunk down $10.95 ($16.95 round-trip) for a personal A-J-L plan. Then again, it's probably a good deal because you only have to ask once for each destination.

Evidently, the plan is a spinoff from studies of circadian rhythms by biologist Charles Ehret at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

In a nutshell, you eat high-protein breakfasts and lunches and high carbohydrate dinners to match your current time zone. Supposedly, this resets your body's internal clock. There's some feasting and fasting involved, too, but what have you got to lose?

No alcohol, but I knew that already and for other reasons. There are some interesting claims about caffeine tucked away in the page I linked. According to the site, the "methylated xanthines" found in coffee, tea and cocoa make it harder for most people to get to sleep at night if they are taken in the morning. Conversely, it is claimed, taking them at night tends to make most people get up earlier. I'd never read that before.

This may be just the ticket for you if you're traveling over the holidays (Around Christmas, for the people out there who enjoy raining on other people's parades).

Something completely different

Thinking like a Senator (not recommended) made me do it: some clever scientists found a way to make bacteria turn little tiny gears. Neat, I thought, but some curmudgeonly suit with seniority is probably going to mock this research. Why not browse through the Argonne Newsroom and find a practical application near and dear to their heart. Travel, for instance.

Not that the exercise was necessary. Somebody, sometime, somewhere is likely to remember this research and combine it with another idea or two to give us a new gadget. That's how technology lurches forward. It makes good video anyway:



Luckily, Scientific American has a better, albeit less popularized, version of the story. (I say luckily because I usually follow links to Scientific American articles and find they are charging for a sip from their font of wisdom, which then sadly remains a staid secret.)

As it turns out, I'd stumbled onto the interesting scientific problem of getting work out of random (Brownian) motion in a fluid. Or, as the magazine cleverly puts it, the research "presents a new spin on the concept of the so-called Brownian ratchet, in which arbitrary fluctuations generate directed motion to power tiny mechanical systems."

Fascinating possibilities, but as one scientist points out, it hasn't been tested against a load. Another mentions the lack of hamster-driven appliances.

So, no NASCAR In a Bottle yet, but I still think it's neat.

The worldwide Jack Webb

There are so many mistakes, misunderstandings and outright lies on the internet that fact-checking has become a growth industry. It always makes me think of Joe Friday's phrase 'Just the facts ma'am' from television's Dragnet.

I love this development, even though it often spirals wildly out of control: Media Matters loves to hammer Fox News, for instance, leading to a website critical of them from the opposite end of the political spectrum, and so on. The back-and-forth buzzing wears thin quickly unless you're committed to the subject.

Most of the attention focuses, rightly, on the major media, but no one is safe. If you write it on the internet, even one little twitty tweet, don't be surprised if it comes back to bite you. The term 'crowdsourcing' was coined to describe the sharks that will school if there is a little blood in the webby waters.

I got hooked on The St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact during the last presidential election, but I don't go there much any more. Like FactCheck.org and, to a lesser extent, the rumor debunkers at Snopes.com, they miss the lowlights that satisfy my perverse sense of humor.

Nah, give me the kind of errors Craig Silverman collects in his Regret the Error Columbia Journalism Review blog and like-named website: (Warning, close your eyes when you go over the next sentences if you are easily offended -- they're from Gawker -- 'nuff said.) "Earlier this week, we called congressman Jason Chaffetz a self-hating weirdo, an asshole, a probable closet case, and the son of Kitty Dukakis. He is not the son of Kitty Dukakis. We regret the error."

An extreme example, but I liked it. More representative is the Washington Post's Correction (Crunk) of the Year after they mistakenly claimed Public Enemy's song was saying 9/11 was a joke instead of the 911 emergency system. Here's the Post ombudsman writing about the fiasco, just because I like the headline: A spotty record on counter-errorism.

The local media's errors are usually so prosaic by comparison: the Saipan Tribune dropping $10 million in its headline and story Senate supports $6M ship disposal program or a couple of stories in the Marianas Variety where charges were stated as facts instead of alleged. A problem there: I could cite them, but even a lowly blogger has to be careful about what he 'publishes', particularly if he has cause to think it's untrue.

I was happy to see Gov. Benigno R. Fitial's transparency in saying Jenner & Block still on NMI payroll for $50,000 a month. (In an interesting contrast of editorial emphasis, the Tribune headlined that Fitial won't block 'green card').

At this late date, particularly since it was one of the issues in the election, I'm not interested in arguing the merits of the contract. I would, however be interested in a little fact-checking on the total cost to-date. I really don't have a clue with all of the figures that have been tossed around, and some of them are so outrageous they should be debunked.

Not real fact-checking, but I've been bemused by some of the articles about the ongoing employment controversy at Northern Marianas College. President Carmen Fernandez seems to be staying in the background as much as possible: "Fernandez’s office stated"... and "The office added,".