'Cool' Fuel Cells Could Revolutionize Earth's Energy Resources

Originating from research at UH's Texas Center for Superconductivity and Advanced Materials (TcSAM), these SOFCs of the 'thin film' variety are both efficient and compact. With potential ranging from use in the government in matters of defense and space travel to driving forces in the consumer market that include computers and electricity, this breakthrough carries tremendous impact.

'By using materials science concepts developed in our superconductivity research and materials processing concepts in our semiconductor research, we are able to reduce operating temperatures, eliminate steps and use less expensive materials that will potentially revolutionize from where we derive electrical energy,' said Alex Ignatiev, director of TcSAM and distinguished university professor of physics, chemistry and electrical and computer engineering at UH. 'While there are a number of fuel cell research programs at the university, ours focuses on the application of thin film science and technology to gain the benefits of efficiency and low cost.'

Compared to the macroscopic size of traditional fuel cells that can take up an entire room, thin film SOFCs are one micron thick -- the equivalent of about one-hundredth of a human hair. Putting this into perspective, the size equivalent of four sugar cubes would produce 80 watts -- more than enough to operate a laptop computer, eliminating clunky batteries and giving you hours more juice in your laptop. By the same token, approximately two cans' worth of soda would produce more than five kilowatts, enough to power a typical household.

This could be really bad news for the Saudi dynasty and few others.

Channeling Flood

The Flood report is really a lot less interesting than the Butler report or the 911 report. Butler closely argues each case, sometimes going right down to discussion of particular sources in relation particular findings. Flood sweeps through with a broad brush. The famous phrase 'thin, ambiguous and incomplete' actually runs counter to the tenor of most of the report.

Flood makes some useful recommendations. He wants ONA, DIO and DIGO oversighted by the PJCAAD and by IGIS and he wants DIGO brought under the Intelligence Services Act 2001 (Recommendations 1 and 2). The rest of his report is significant for the case studies in Chapter 3 where the famous phrase occurs but he really only offers very mild criticism of ONA's performance over Iraq. He is also critical that no national assessment was ever prepared for the Iraq WMD issue.

The Man of Steel's claim that the government is exonerated by the report is just a tad weird when you consider the Flood inquiry did not have that issue within its terms of reference. It's even weirder when you consider the Jull report issued by the PJCAAD in March found:

5.20 The statements by the Prime Minister and Ministers are more strongly worded than most of the AIC judgements. This is in part because they quote directly from the findings of the British and American intelligence agencies. In particular, in the 4 February 2003 speech to the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister quoted the findings of Joint Intelligence Committee of the UK and the key judgements of the National Intelligence Estimate of the CIA. In both of these documents the uncertainties had been removed36 and they relied heavily on the surge of new and largely untested intelligence, coming, in the US at least, from Iraqi defectors.37 These dossiers comprised stronger, more emphatic statements than Australian agencies had been prepared to make. See paragraph 5.13 above for details of the statements. 38

That discrepancy was absent from Flood's terms of reference:

Without seeking to limit your examination, I ask that you provide advice on the following matters:

- the effectiveness of the intelligence community's current oversight and accountability mechanisms as they relate to such matters as the setting of priorities, the assigning to the priorities of appropriate resources, and the delivery of high quality and independent intelligence advice to the government;

- the suitability of the current division of labour among the intelligence agencies and communication between them;

- the maintenance of contestability in the provision to government of intelligence assessments; and

- the adequacy of current resourcing of intelligence agencies and in particular ONA.

Your inquiry is to focus primarily on the intelligence agencies in relation to foreign intelligence collection and assessment. As such, your deliberations should encompass the activities of ONA, DIO, ASIS, DSD and DIGO. Should you find it necessary, you should feel free also to include consideration of linkages to other agencies as appropriate, including ASIO.

Next, what the Butler saw.

George does not play dice with the universe

Mark A. R. Kleiman | Hawking's flip-flop

And instead of being properly ashamed of having been wrong, and listening respectfully to those who were right, he's bragging about having changed his mind, as if that were somehow an accomplishment or a mark of intelligence. 'I want to report that I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics.' I mean, how pompous -- how utterly French -- can you get?

Professor Hawking has a lot to learn both from George W. Bush, who can't remember ever having been wrong, and from the anti-war bloggers who keep chanting 'I told you so I told you so I told you so.' Changing your mind in the face of new facts and new analysis is a sign of weakness, and being right now is unimportant compared to having always been right.

Indeed. I always suspected quantum physics of being a leftwing plot. Any group that claim: 'God does not play dice with the universe with the universe.' have got to be treated with suspicion and preferably kept off planes.

It also worth noting that a 'quantum leap' should cover an insignificant distance:

Philip Adams: Let�s admit that the word �quantum� doesn�t make sense to most people and they get it utterly wrong. When people talk of a �quantum leap� they imagine it to be something big. But the opposite is true.

Paul Davies: The word quantum literally means �package� or �discrete packet� in Latin, and it was first coined by the German theoretical physicist Max Plank in 1900. Planck discovered that electromagnetic radiation like heat and light doesn�t come in continuous amounts of energy, but in little packets, or quanta. Those particular quanta we now call photons.

Phillip Adams: So a quantum leap is in fact what?

Paul Davies: A quantum leap in the case of heat radiation or light is a very tiny discontinuous jump in energy, for example when a photon of light is emitted or absorbed by an atom

Inquiring minds

weapons intelligence 'thin

An inquiry into Australia's spy agencies has found that intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "thin, ambiguous and incomplete".

Prime Minister John Howard says the report finds Australia's spy agencies are performing well but the Opposition says it proves the Government took Australia to war in Iraq on faulty intelligence.

Mr Howard has released the unclassified version of the report by former diplomat and intelligence chief Philip Flood.

The report raises concerns about intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war and says the agencies failed to rigorously assess them.

Mr Flood partly blames systemic weaknesses in spy agencies.

Cabinet considered the report on Monday and has agreed to all of its key recommendations.

The Government cited weapons of mass destruction as a major reason for Australia going to war in Iraq and Mr Howard says he does not regret his decision to go to war.

"The world and the Middle East and Iraq are better places because Saddam Hussein has gone," he said.

The Man of Steel is of course contradicted by his own words out of his own mouth:

Well I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that. Much in all as I despise the regime. But what I was really trying to say today and perhaps it has had some effect is that I get a bit tired of the humaritian argument all being on the one side. It's about time that the humanitarian argument was put into a better balance and people understand what a monstrous regime we are dealing with.

That one is now apparently a noncore statement of deeply held principle (something he doesn't believe anymore). The Man of Steel has finally uttered the real justification for Australia's participation in the enterprise of Iraq:

: "The decision we took was justified both on the assessments we received from our intelligence agencies and the other policy considerations including our alliance with the United States that I outlined at the time. I do not retreat in any way from the Government's decision. If I had my time again I would take the same decisions, the World, and the Middle East, and Iraq are better places because Saddam Hussein has gone.

The Flood report actually does nothing of the kind the Man of Steel proclaims. What it does say is:

There has been a failure of intelligence on Iraq WMD. Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete. Australia shared in the allied intelligence failure on the key question of WMD stockpiles, with ONA more exposed and DIO more cautious on the subject. But many of the agencies' other judgments have proved correct. Overall, assessments produced by ONA and DIO on Iraq WMD up to the commencement of combat operations reflected reasonably the limited available information and used intelligence sources with appropriate caution.

The lack of comprehensive assessment, which might have been achieved by production of a National Assessment or an Intelligence Estimate to support ADF deployment considerations, was regrettable. Such comprehensive reporting may have helped to clarify a complex and fragmented picture. The limited analysis of the significance of Iraq's WMD in terms of the threat that Iraq posed also impacted on the utility of the assessments.

The two agencies' key judgments were largely consistent until late January 2003, when ONA assessed that Iraq must have WMD, while DIO continued to assess that the intelligence on the issue was inconclusive. But differences in style, including ONA's lesser use of detail and qualification, led to an implicit difference in assessments from late December 2002. On the key points of Iraq's possession of WMD, and the significance of its concealment and deception activities, ONA judgments were expressed with fewer qualifications and greater certainty than those of DIO.

Meanwhile the Butler Report in the Uk has managed to totally exonerate everyone except for the interesting fact that Blair now claims he didn't get the memo telling him key intelligence findings had been withdrawn.

No respite for Blair as MPs reopen intelligence inquiry

The inquiry into the flawed intelligence which led Britain to war in Iraq on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction is to be reopened by a Labour-led select committee.

The Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (FAC) agreed at a meeting behind closed doors to write to Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, with a series of questions, including whether he told the Prime Minister that the intelligence had been withdrawn in July last year, because it was no longer judged to be credible.

The Independent also learnt that the Prime Minister's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) agreed at a separate private meeting yesterday to look into the revelations in the Butler report that MI6 had withdrawn the intelligence underpinning the WMD claims.

The decision by the two committees to pursue the unravelling of the evidence surrounding the Government's Iraq dossiers was a fresh blow to Mr Blair after surviving Tuesday's Commons debate on Iraq. He was hoping to draw a line under the row for the summer, but it is now certain to continue rumbling until the party conferences in the autumn.

The Government also will be alarmed to discover that Donald Anderson, the Labour chairman of the FAC, may also have lost the Labour majority on the committee after two Labour MPs who have been highly critical of the Government - Eric Illsley and Andrew Mackinlay - refused to vote with the Labour majority.

The Labour MPs on the committee tried to stop it pursuing the inquiry beyond writing to Mr Straw. However, in a split vote, it was agreed to use an expert to investigate the disparities in the evidence to Hutton and that taken by the committee in private session from Mr Straw. Mr Illsley and Mr Mackinlay abstained in the vote, allowing the opposition MPs on the committee, including the Liberal Democrat David Chidgey, and Andrew Mackay, a former Tory whip, to inflict a four-three defeat.

The US 911 commission will report shortly. It will be interesting to see if that report proves equally thin, ambiguous and incomplete. More lots later when I've done a mountain of reading.

Troppo Armadillo | The Naive and Sentimental Politics Lover is a deal pithier than I am.

Rumoured Conjectures: Strike 2

Reuters is reporting:

Israeli estimates of when Iran will be able to build a nuclear bomb have been shifted two more years to 2007, an intelligence report said Wednesday and analysts credited the delay to international scrutiny of Tehran.

Security sources quoted the report -- delivered to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in private and leaked in part to the media -- as saying that within three years Iran would have the means to produce an atomic bomb by itself.

Iran vehemently denies pursuing nuclear weapons, arguing its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity.

Tehran officials have also accused Israel of trying to distract the international community from its own assumed nuclear arsenal and stoking world opinion against the last Middle East foe which could challenge it militarily.

In 2000, Israeli security sources told Reuters that Iran would be nuclear-capable within five years and was developing long-range missiles with which to lob warheads at Tel Aviv.

The regional picture has since changed, with a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq bringing neighboring Iran under closer watch by the West -- especially after Tehran admitted in November to buying centrifuges used to enrich uranium from a black market set up by Pakistani nuclear weapons expert Abdul Qadeer Khan.

The BOP conjectures are starting to look a tad, well, unconjectural.

Or maybe the blasphemy president

Boniface VIII | Unam Sanctam 1302

This authority, however, (though it has been given to man and is exercised by man), is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him (Peter) and his successors by the One Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, 'Whatsoever you shall bind on earth, shall be bound also in Heaven' etc., [Mt 16:19]. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2], unless he invent like Manicheus two beginnings, which is false and judged by us heretical, since according to the testimony of Moses, it is not in the beginnings but in the beginning that God created heaven and earth [Gen 1:1]. Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

George II Bush | Unam Busham 2003

At the end of the session, Bush reportedly told the group, �I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn�t do my job."

Perhaps George Bush really wants to be remembered as the sodomy president

Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:
I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

The link is at the Washington Post (pdf).

Tip via Boing Boing

Why McGauchie is a brave, brave man

Telstra has estimated the cost of connecting fibre to every home in the country at $30 billion. This is beyond the company's capital resources unless it can get a long access holiday - that is, unless it is removed from the ACCC access regime until Telstra makes a return on capital from it.

An informal conversation has already started about this, along with a couple of fibre network pilots in Queensland.

The issue collides potently with privatisation.

The most efficient builder of a $30 billion national fibre network is the Government, just as it was the most efficient builder of the copper network. It is clearly essential infrastructure, to be used by future generations and should be funded by government debt - not the far more expensive private capital that Telstra can raise.

In fact, it would be a national scandal if Telstra funded this new network using expensive capital and then received an access holiday (that is, monopoly pricing) to pay for it, when the Government could do it for half the capital cost and make it available to all-comers.

But a new government network would destroy Telstra's existing infrastructure business. The Government owns half of Telstra and is a seller, motivated to preserve its value in the face of collapsing phone call prices. It has a huge conflict of interest.

This discussion is vastly complicated and important for the nation and for Telstra, and now leading it is Donald McGauchie - farmer, Reserve Bank board member and professional director. Let's all wish him luck.

Let's not. Let's ask instead why Telstra should not be split into a public network provider and a private access retailer. Especially when it is clearly abusing it's effective monopoly in a rent-seeking binge by raising retail phone costs and wholesale network access costs.

The Blogging of the President | Rumored Conjectures

I heard a high level former general speak a week and a half ago, and here are the two interesting things he said:

1) Prior to the election, there will be a crisis with Iran. Ariel Sharon knows that neither Kerry nor Bush will contradict him before an election, so he will foment a crisis with Iran to deal with their nuclear weapons program.

2) There will be a peace deal with North Korea. The deal should have happened two years ago, but wasn't because of diplomatic blunders. A deal will now happen because it is necessary to showcase Bush as a peacemaker.

N.Korea Ready to Negotiate Nuclear Program -Official:

A senior North Korean representative said on Tuesday his government was ready to end its nuclear weapons program if the United States changes its 'hostile policy' toward Pyongyang.

Reflecting recent progress in talks with the reclusive Stalinist state, North Korea's representative to the United Nations, making his first visit to Capitol Hill, said Pyongyang would not only freeze its nuclear weapons program but also refrain from transferring or testing nuclear devices.

'The Democratic People's Republic of Korea will give up its nuclear weapons program if conditions are met to end the U.S. hostile policy,' Gil Yon Park told a forum sponsored by the Korea Society and other groups in a U.S. Senate office building.

I guess it's all part of being a peace president. Apparently that's the same as being a war president. Because after all, Peace=War and George Bush is doubleplusgood.

Not the first 'closed' case for Negroponte

Q: 'Is it enough to allow the Iraqi Minister for Human Rights to investigate [the executions of six prisoners] allegedly done by his own Prime Minister?'

Downer: 'Iraq is a sovereign country now. Who else is supposed to investigate wrongdoing in Iraq? I think Mr McGeough should present his material to the Iraqi police so they can fully investigate these matters ... I would have thought, knowing what I know about Mr Allawi - and I've met him - it would be, on the whole, rather surprising if he has done this.'

Dear me, Alexander, does your office, on the whole, still have to tell you when to come in out of the rain?

Prime Minister Allawi, formerly a Saddam Hussein associate before he fled into exile to team up with the CIA, denied, before publication, the entirety of McGeough's two witness accounts.

For the sake of his health, McGeough had by then already felt it prudent to leave Iraq. John Negroponte's office responded to him by email: 'If we attempted to refute each [rumour], we would have no time for other business. As far as this embassy's press office is concerned, the case is closed.'

Of course. One only has to consider Negroponte's record as US ambassador in Honduras to know he is a loyal servant of Republican Washington who sees and knows nothing. An estimated 10,000 Nicaraguans and Honduran political opponents died at a time when, as The New York Times reported in September 2001: 'The diplomat who presided over that embassy from 1981 to 1985 was a great fabulist.

'John Negroponte saw, or professed to see, a Honduras almost Scandinavian in its tranquillity, a place where there were no murderous generals, no death squads, no political prisoners, no clandestine jails or cemeteries. [He] exercised US power in ways that still reverberate throughout that small country. His most striking legacy, though, is the Honduras of his imagination.

'Most people who lived or worked in Honduras during the 1980s saw a nation spiralling into violence and infested by paramilitary gangs that kidnapped and killed with impugnity. Negroponte would not acknowledge this. He realised the Reagan policy in Central America would lose support if truths about Honduras were known, so he refused to accept them.'

This same man, with an embassy regime of more than 1000 American 'foreign service officers', plus American advisers 'salted throughout Iraqi ministries' as well as 140,000 US military personnel, now has absolute covert power in Iraq.

Of course 'the case is closed'.

Perhaps we should be grateful the Foreign Minister of Kleenex did not see into Allawi's soul. This business of replacing investigations with soul-searching is dangerous.

How to catch the tube

Neville de Mestre was eight years old when he started bodysurfing. That was in 1946, 10 years before surfboards started to make a splash in Australia. Today, he is the world Iron Man champion in the 60-64 age group as well as professor of mathematics at Bond University in Queensland.

This month, de Mestre published the world's first scientific paper on the sport he loves. 'It got to a stage where I thought it was about time that someone who's a fluid dynamicist actually tried to put together the mathematics and physics of bodysurfing,' he says.

This is a profound evil. It is against all the laws of nature to reduce catching a wave to a matter of metrics and equations.

Clinton minds the Gap

What was Bill Clinton saying about the US Administration not getting involved in Australian politics?

Following Denton's interview with Clinton, to be screened on the ABC tonight, the pair chatted about East Timor's Foreign Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, and his appearance on Enough Rope . Despite the cameras still rolling, the intriguing portion of the interview can't be shown because the pair were standing out of frame. However, Spike has a transcript, which certainly makes for interesting reading:

Clinton: "I'm glad you liked Horta. I liked him, too."

Denton : "Oh, he was very, very impressive."

Clinton: "Yeah, he's good. Very supportive. That whole crowd, all those guys are, you know, the top two or three guys are interested people."

Denton: "They are and ... you know they're such a fragile nation."

Clinton: "Um, if they resolve that [Timor Gap oil and gas] dispute."

Denton: "It certainly would. I'm not sure if this administration."

Clinton: "Yeah. You guys can cut them a little slack and, you know, a little bit of money will go a long way there and if we could get enough money through that to give them some infrastructure, I have talked to hotels over the world I think you could make it sort of, like, the middle-class vacation destination for a lot of South-East Asia because you could keep the costs down so low."

The whole interview is online now. Cutting them a little slack is precisely what the Australian government refuses to do. In the short term this means East Timor continues as the largest aid donor to Australia. In the long term, it means the Timorese are condemned to be a client state just like the others we're developing in the South Pacific.

Iraqi PM executed six insurgents: witnesses

MAXINE McKEW: Paul McGeough, thanks for joining us.

Paul, as you've also made clear in your article, Prime Minister Allawi has flatly denied this story.

Why then is the Herald so confident about publishing it?

PAUL McGEOUGH, 'SYDNEY MORNING HERALD' AND 'AGE' FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: Well it's a very contentious issue.

What you have is two very solid eyewitness accounts of what happened at a police security complex in a south-west Baghdad suburb.

They are very detailed.

They were done separately.

Each witness is not aware that the other spoke.

They were contacted through personal channels rather than through the many political, religious or military organisations working in Baghdad that might be trying to spin a tale.

And they've laid it out very carefully and very clearly as to what they saw.

MAXINE McKEW: You haven't identified these witnesses but why have they felt free to talk about such an extraordinary story?

PAUL McGEOUGH: Well, they were approached through personal connections and as a result of that, they accepted assurances.

They were guaranteed anonymity, they were told that no identifying material would be published on them and they told what they saw.

Both the Herald and McGeough are sticking to their guns, if you'll forgive the expression.

Hawking cracks black hole paradox

After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong. It seems that black holes may after all allow information within them to escape. Hawking will present his latest finding at a conference in Ireland next week.

The about-turn might cost Hawking, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, an encyclopaedia because of a bet he made in 1997. More importantly, it might solve one of the long-standing puzzles in modern physics, known as the black hole information paradox.

It was Hawking's own work that created the paradox. In 1976, he calculated that once a black hole forms, it starts losing mass by radiating energy. This 'Hawking radiation' contains no information about the matter inside the black hole and once the black hole evaporates, all information is lost.

But this conflicts with the laws of quantum physics, which say that such information can never be completely wiped out. Hawking's argument was that the intense gravitational fields of black holes somehow unravel the laws of quantum physics.

Other physicists have tried to chip away at this paradox. Earlier in 2004, Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in Columbus and his colleagues showed that if a black hole is modelled according to string theory - in which the universe is made of tiny, vibrating strings rather than point-like particles - then the black hole becomes a giant tangle of strings. And the Hawking radiation emitted by this 'fuzzball' does contain information about the insides of a black hole.

The Man of Steel may have to abandon the black hole in his private office and go back to using plain old shredders to deal with children overboard, SIEX-X, the dangerous Tampa refugees he's admitted to Australia, the Manildra meeting he as sure his advisers had told him he did not attend, the qualifications to prewar Iraqi intelligence and a number of quantum politics anomalies.

Allawi shot inmates in cold blood, say witnesses

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they 'deserved worse than death'.

The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

This bears watching. The journo, Paul McGeough, has always been reiable.

The crane is still my neighbour

On the off-chance you have a passion for slightly obscure Australian poets, you can get the complete works of John Shaw Neilson in a variorum edition here. I still think ripples are thoughts that go out to the edge of a dream.

Lord Butler delivers Iraq verdict

The quality of the intelligence used to make the case for Britain going to war with Iraq has now been thrown into doubt, the Butler inquiry has said.

The 196 page report says MI6 did not check its sources well enough, and sometimes relied on third hand reports.

Lord Butler was asked by No 10 to look at the accuracy of Britain's pre-war intelligence after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He is now outlining his report, before Tony Blair faces MPs at 1330 BST.

The whole report is now available for download.

U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib

Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldnt make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.

"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.

Interesting that the upper reaches of the US military command were just not interested in anything more than making a problem go away by ignoring it. It's also interesting that, for all the scare stories about the need for intelligence justifying anything and everything, Taguba found so many prisoners were simply never interrogated and political pressure from Washington for actionable intelligence was driving the chaos and violence at Abu Ghraib.

It's almost as though this one prison served as a metaphor for the whole of Iraq.

agressively not apologising

British PM Blair 'Considered Resigning

Blair, who has seen his ratings tumble in opinion polls since last year's war in Iraq, had been 'seriously considering his position' following a series of attacks on his leadership, the broadcaster said in an unsourced report.

Three cabinet colleagues, Health Secretary John Reid, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Education Secretary Charles Clarke met Blair, urged him not to quit and sought to assure him he had wide government support, it said.

'I'm not going to speculate on what I see as Westminster gossip,' Jowell told BBC radio Saturday. 'Tony Blair is our prime minister -- the most successful prime minister of modern times. He will continue to lead our government.'

US findings turn up heat on Blair as he awaits the Butler report

The United States Senate committee�s damning findings last night piled more pressure on Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, as he and his ministers braced themselves for criticism from Lord Butler�s inquiry into intelligence on Iraq next week.

Lord Butler, a former Cabinet secretary, will report on Wednesday and will cast serious doubt on the quality of British intelligence reports that the Prime Minister said made military action in Iraq a matter of urgent national interest.

While Mr Blair is likely to avoid a direct rebuke, his September 2002 dossier on Iraq may be targeted by Lord Butler, as may Sir Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, the current and future heads of MI6.

In the face of controversy over the MI6 role, Mr Blair decided earlier this year to promote Mr Scarlett to replace Sir Richard at the end of this month. Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former head of the joint intelligence committee, last night told the BBC that the Butler report could make it impossible for Mr Scarlett to take over as head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

"You do have to ask the question whether somebody who�s been deeply involved and possibly criticised in the findings of the Butler report is regarded as a suitable person to head [MI6]," Dame Pauline said.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, yesterday emerged as another possible target for Lord Butler, who is expected to reveal that he over-ruled Foreign Office lawyers who said military action could not be justified in international law.

Meanwhile, back at the fort:
Now say sorry for war, PM told

The Labor Party yesterday called on the Prime Minister to apologise for taking Australians to war under false pretences, after an American inquiry's damning findings about US intelligence failures over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said John Howard talked a lot about character these days.

But, he said: "A core part of character is telling the truth. It's time John Howard at last told the Australian people the truth - that the reasons he gave them for going to war were wrong."

The US Senate committee has said most key judgements in the intelligence community's major October 2002 report on Iraq's WMD programs were overstated or not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting. The intelligence community suffered from a "collective presumption" that Iraq had an active and growing WMD program. "Group think" led to ambiguities being put aside or ignored, and usual mechanisms for challenging assumptions not being used.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat member of the committee, said the lapses "rank among the most devastating... intelligence failures" in American history. "We in Congress would not have authorised that war... if we knew what we know now," he said.

Really, it's weird how the party of personal responsibility seems to think a war for WMD's that don't exist is not even a case for an apology.

The crane is my neighbour

The bird is my neighbour, a whimsical fellow and dim:
There is in the lake a nobility falling on him.

The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme,
And ripples are thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream.

He bleats no instruction, he is not an arrogant drummer:
His gown is simplicity � blue as the smoke of the Summer.

The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise,
But he never could spend all the love that is sent for his eyes.

How patient he is as he puts out his wings for the blue:
He is an old guest of the sunlight � a child of the dew.

I always liked John Shaw Neilson. There's a furious textual argument over whther Line 3 reads this way or:

And waves are as thoughts coming out to the edge of a dream

Old People May Hold Key to Human Success

'What we looked at is differences in the proportion of people who were living to be older,' Caspari said. Some individuals may have lived to great age, but at some point humans as a species began living longer on average than other primates and Caspari and Lee wanted to find out when and why.

They divided the fossils into two groups -- adults of reproductive age, which they settled on as 15 years, and adults that lived to be twice as old, 30, based on tooth wear.

In primitive societies, people are often grandparents at 30, Caspari pointed out.

'We found this proportion of older to young adults in the fossil record increased over time,' Caspari said.
'In the Upper Paleolithic that proportion just skyrocketed. It was just unbelievable. It increased five-fold. We didn't expect that.'

Caspari and Lee rechecked their numbers and analysis.

'But then we started to think about it and thought we really shouldn't be surprised, because there is a behavioral change that took place over time at the same time,' Caspari said.

'You start to see a change in symbolic behavior. You see art. You see a large number of people being buried with jewelry, with body ornaments.'

Perhaps around this time people started to value and take care of the weak and the old, and in turn benefited from their help and experience, Caspari sad.

This could be when the uniquely human condition of menopause evolved and started to have an effect, Caspari said. Women not burdened by childbearing could focus on their grandchildren and other kin.

'We live in a society that is so geared toward younger people. It is nice to realize that it might be older people that make us human after all,' Caspari said.

Now if only the economic rationalists had a decent grip on politics in the Upper Paleocene we could have avoided centuires of economic inefficiency in caring about the weak and the old. Damn!

Speed of light may have changed recently

The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.

The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants.

A varying speed of light contradicts Einstein's theory of relativity, and would undermine much of traditional physics. But some physicists believe it would elegantly explain puzzling cosmological phenomena such as the nearly uniform temperature of the universe. It might also support string theories that predict extra spatial dimensions.

The threat to the idea of an invariable speed of light comes from measurements of another parameter called the fine structure constant, or alpha, which dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. The speed of light is inversely proportional to alpha, and though alpha also depends on two other constants (see graphic), many physicists tend to interpret a change in alpha as a change in the speed of light. It is a valid simplification, says Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

It was Flambaum, along with John Webb and colleagues, who first seriously challenged alpha's status as a constant in 1998. Then, after exhaustively analysing how the light from distant quasars was absorbed by intervening gas clouds, they claimed in 2001 that alpha had increased by a few parts in 105 in the past 12 billion years.

Yikes (if you're a traditional physicist) or wow (if you're anyone else or a traditional physicist with lots of imagination).

Big spender: Howard's $29m ad bill

With the Prime Minister, John Howard, still playing bluff on calling an election as early as tomorrow, new figures reveal the Federal Government is accelerating bumper taxpayer-financed advertising of its policies.

Latest industry figures show the Government spent $29 million in the past six months, up nearly 60 per cent on the same period last year.

More than $4 million was spent in just one week last month on promoting measures including the Medicare changes and the $600 child payment.

Spending by the Department of Health, largely on the Strengthening Medicare campaign, topped $10.5 million in the six months, according to Nielsen Media Research AdEx.

The Department of Family and Community Services spent $1.1 million and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet $3.2 million.

There is much more to come according to information released to the Opposition, which has estimated the advertising bills will total $122 million this year. The Government says the figure is about $90 million.

Mr Howard, who insisted yesterday he would rely on 'gut instinct' on when to go to the country, would not rule out calling the contest tomorrow, for an August 7 poll.

While most insiders say a move tomorrow is unlikely, government departments in recent weeks have rushed to clear any policy initiatives before the election campaign puts the Government into caretaker mode.

We really need better rules on government advertising and we need a fixed date for federal elections.

The constitution says:

Duration of House of Representatives.
28. Every House of Representatives shall continue for three years from the first meeting of the House, and no longer, but may be sooner dissolved by the Governor-General.

That's just not good enough. Note that the term is not 3 years and there's no provision for when a new House must meet after the election. The last federal election was 10 November 2001. The last day for the next federal election, because of the gap between election day and the first meeting of the House, is 16 April 2005. That is too long and too flaky.

The government does not go into caretaker mode until the House is actually dissolved by the governor-general on the prime minister's advice. Politicised ads, paid for by public funds, are entirely legal until the dissolution. The government not only determines the date but is in a position to run a massive advertising campaign immediately before announcing the date. The Herald report merely confirms what we already guessed.

Harradine set to quit after 29 years

A Catholic conservative and former right-wing member of the Labor Party, he was first elected as a senator for Tasmania in 1975. He has been a key player in the Senate's balance of power, particularly during the Howard Government's first term, when he often found himself with the deciding vote.

Told of Senator Harradine's retirement plans by a reporter while campaigning in the Tasmanian electorate of Bass yesterday, Prime Minister John Howard said he had great admiration and respect for the senator.

'I have found him to be an immensely decent, committed person, a very fine Australian and someone who's worked very hard for the people of Tasmania,' Mr Howard said.

Senator Harradine was widely recognised for winning $150 million of concessions for Tasmania when he cast the deciding vote for a 30 per cent sale of Telstra in July 1998.

But he nearly sank the GST in 1999 when he voted against it, forcing the Government to make a deal with the Democrats. Other important votes on the Wik Native Title legislation, the private health insurance rebate and the second part sale of Telstra went the Government's way.

Election analyst Antony Green said a decision by Senator Harradine not to contest the election would open the way for the Greens and Labor to benefit in Tasmania. 'It will probably make the Senate contest easier to pick: three Labor, two Liberals and a Green,' he said.

This should drive the last nail into the Magic 38 thesis.

2002-03 Redistribution of Commonwealth Electoral Boundaries

The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 provides three triggers for a redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries. Under section 59 of the Act a redistribution shall occur:

• when there is a change in the representational entitlements of a state or territory
  
• when more than one third of the divisions in a state or territory vary from the average divisional enrolment for the state or territory by more than ten per cent for three consecutive months, or
  
• if seven years ('seven year rule') have elapsed since the last redistribution in the state or territory.
  

A redistribution of Commonwealth electoral boundaries occurred during 2002 and 2003 in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. The redistribution in Victoria was occasioned by the 'seven year rule', while the redistributions in Queensland and South Australia were triggered by a change in the representational entitlements of the two jurisdictions.

The second trigger, malapportionment of electoral divisions, has not occasioned a redistribution since the three triggers were incorporated in the Act in 1984.

Worth reading for the impact of boundary changes, especially in Queensland and South Australia.

The Northern Territory missed a second seat by 295 voters. This was fixed by the House of Representatives (Northern Territory Representation) Act 2004 which restores the territory's second seat.

Into the Abyss

Around Iraq, the States that have most to fear from an American collapse are Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Each in its own way, all three depend on American support. All suffer under severe social strain, whether against an ethnic background%u2014as in Jordan where Bedouin and Palestinians clash%u2014or a religious one as is mainly the case in the other two. As unrest spreads from Iraq probably not all three will see their regimes overthrown, but one or two might well undergo this fate. Jordan being a small and weak country, its fate will be of concern mainly to its immediate neighbors such as Syria%u2014which, if it tries to intervene, will have Israel to reckon with%u2014Israel, and Saudi Arabia. By contrast, the collapse of Saudi Arabia, or a situation whereby Egypt turns into an Islamic republic and abrogates its peace treaty with Israel, would have world-wide economic and strategic implications that are hard to foresee.

In the short run, the greatest beneficiary of the war is Israel. The destruction of Iraq has created a situation where, for the first time since the State was founded in 1948, it has no real conventional enemy left within about 600 miles of its borders. If Sharon had any sense he would use this window of opportunity to come to some kind of arrangement with the Palestinians. Whether he will do so, though, remains to be seen.

In the longer run, the greatest beneficiary is likely to be Iran which, without having to lift a finger, has seen its most dangerous enemy ground into the dust. Even before President Bush launched his war against Iraq, the Iranians, feeling surrounded by nuclear-capable American forces on three sides (Afghanistan, the Central Asian Republics, the Persian Gulf), were working as hard as they could to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to match. Now that the U.S. has proved it is prepared to fight anybody for no reason at all, they should be forgiven if they redouble their efforts.

Even if the Islamic Republic is overthrown, as some hope, the new government in Tehran will surely follow the same nationalist line as its predecessor did. A nuclear Iran is likely to be followed by a nuclear Turkey. Next will come a nuclear Greece, a nuclear Saudi Arabia (assuming the country can survive as a single political unit), and a nuclear Egypt. Welcome to the Brave New World, Mr. Bush.

This is the sort of thing that happens when you confuse a throwaway line in a speech to Congress with the grounds for making war and peace.

Inquiry into the Marriage Legislation Amendment Bill 2004

On 23 June 2004, the Senate referred the above Bill to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee for inquiry and report by 7 October 2004.

The Bill seeks to:

• amend the Marriage Act 1961 to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life; and to confirm that unions solemnised overseas between same sex couples will not be recognised as marriages in Australia; and
  
  
• amend the Family Law Act 1975 to prevent intercountry adoptions by same sex couples under multilateral or bilateral agreements or arrangements.

Latham has mucked this issue up completely. Labor voted in favour of the bill in the House. They did not need to. A Senate inquiry was always the best way to deal with this issue. Dorothy Mcrae-McMahon asked legitimate questions today, of Latham as well as Howard:

"Why on earth would heterosexual people be so nervous about us threatening their relationships?" she said.

"If families are in trouble at the moment, it's none of our doing.

"It's related to all sorts of complex situations and issues which lie with heterosexual relationships today and, to some extent, with ours as well."

Bush's Mistaken View of US Democracy

If, in the president's view, the goodness of Americans and the nobility of our mission are self-evident, then the failure of peoples around the world to see the struggle in Iraq the same way we do means that they are 'enemies of freedom.' Fighters opposing American power, even if they are residents of occupied countries, do not merit the protections of international law. Institutional restraints on the exercise of power by Americans in detention centers and prisons can, in this view, safely be relaxed. Moreover, constitutional protections can be denied even to American citizens, arrested in the United States, when they are suspected of being 'enemy combatants.'

From James Madison's point of view, on the other hand, the abuses of Abu Ghraib would have been entirely explicable. The founding fathers, and great American leaders ever since, understood that without institutional restraints, voluntarily followed and supported by the top leadership, such abuses are virtually inevitable. This doesn't mean that Americans are 'bad' people, just that they are human - like Iraqis, Afghans, Germans, Japanese, and every other nationality and race.

If the struggle against terrorism were to be carried out consistently with the institutional theory embedded in the U.S. Constitution, America's leaders would be well aware of the potential for abuse - even by decent patriots. They would have ensured not only that the Constitution was upheld at home, but that the more limited protections embodied in international law would have been conscientiously applied to people living under American occupation, or otherwise within U.S. control.

Behind the debate about the conduct of the war in Iraq, and the occupation, is a larger divide - between those Americans who believe that their unique virtues should permit them to act above the law, and those who believe that people in authority, necessarily imperfect, must be constrained by institutions and by law. Those who understand and believe in the theory of the American Constitution should reject the Bush administration's political theory of personal good and evil. We must continue to insist that the United States is a 'government of laws and not of men.'

Australia does not have the same tradition of checks and balances, even through our constitution is an adaptation of the US constitution. Some of us do have the Manichaean view of the world.

As Howard told parliament on 23 October 2003:

The President of the United States and I first met face-to-face on 10 September 2001. As we celebrated at the naval dockyard in Washington the shared partnership of the ANZUS alliance neither of us knew what lay ahead. The next day the world did change, and we saw arising out of those events the character and the strength and the leadership of the man we welcome today. George Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, rallied his own people and the people of the world in the fight against terrorism. He reminded us then, as we should be reminded today, that terrorists oppose nations such as the United States and Australia not because of what we have done but because of who we are and because of the values that we hold in common, and that terrorism-and we should remind ourselves of this again and again-is as much the enemy of Islam as it is the enemy of Judaism or Christianity.

If you substituted 'the West' or 'the coalition' for 'United States' you would describe exactly the way the Man of Steel views the world. I think it is a deeply flawed view. It is as though we took the form, without the content, of the Madisonian tradition and shaped it into something much less impressive. Just as Bush does.

Parliament passes changes to voting laws

Australians enrolling to vote will need to produce identification under changes to electoral laws which passed Parliament today.

Members of the House of Representatives today took part in a rare Saturday morning sitting. The Senate sat until 2am.

The Parliament dealt with a backlog of business ahead of its winter recess and a possible early election.

The changes to electoral laws passed today will require people enrolling to vote to produce a driver's licence or two witnesses to serve as enrolment identification.

The Senate knocked back a Government proposal which would have given Australians who were not enrolled to vote only until 6pm on the day writs were issued for an election to get their name on the electoral roll.

Currently, Australians have seven days in which to enrol from the time writs are issued.

The Senate also rejected a proposal to reduce to three working days after election writs were issued the time allowed to change address details with the electoral commission.

The Senate knocked back a Government amendment to ban all full-time prisoners from voting.

I am very glad the prisoner disfranchisement and the close of enrolment were rejected.

Internationally, the trend is to recognise that voting is a human right and that prisoners are human beings. The Prisoner vote is also some slight guarantee against the kind of incarceration society the US has grown where they have 6.19 per 1000 people. Australia has 1.1 prisoners per 1000. Disfranchising all prisoners would also fall heaviest on indigenous Australians, a group that does not have a strong record of electoral support for the present government.

Equally there is nothing sacred about the day the writs are issued. In fact it would be better to allow people to enrol at any time, including election day itself. With new technology and the new checks on identity that should not be a problem.

The joint committee on electoral matters had unanimously rejected both ideas. The electoral act should not be about keeping the government of the day in power.

Federal government advertising

Sally Young, a Melbourne political scientist, has argued that these arrangements have placed incumbents at a �massive advantage� and challengers at a �massive disadvantage�.(21) She argues that governments have the capacity to run a �permanent campaign� using the highly effective electoral tool of direct mail-outs. In the absence of restrictions on the format of these advertisements, Young sees modern government advertising as blatantly self-promoting.

and:

Tables 1 and 2 support this claim of pre-election spikes in expenditure on government advertising. The 1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001 federal elections were preceded by sharp increases in government advertising outlays:

• the bulk of the Keating Government's $3 million advertising campaign on Medicare Hospital Entitlements was spent the month before the 1993 poll(14)
  
• the Keating Government spent $9 million in the three months prior to the 1996 Federal election campaign(15)
  
• the Howard Government spent $29.5 million in the three months before the 1998 election campaign.(16) Half this expenditure ($14.9 million) was on the GST campaign. Still, pre-election spending on GST advertising accounted for only 13 per cent of total expenditure on the GST campaign, and
  
• in the four months before the 2001 election, the government spent roughly $78 million.(17)
  

This trend of pre-election spikes in government advertising seems likely to continue. A May 2004 Senate Estimates Committee heard evidence of various plans for commencing new and continuing existing government advertising campaigns (see Table 2, shaded).

Both sides abuse government advertising. Neither side follows principles advocated by the auditor-general in Victoria. The obvious reform is either bipartisan membership of the Ministerial Committee on Government Communications or requiring opposition approval for advertising more than 30 months into the parliamentary term.

Antony Green Election Guide

In 2004, the fate of the Howard government will largely be determined by two states, New South Wales and Queensland.

Of the 78 seats north of the Murray, the Coalition holds 48, the Labor Party's 26, with 3 Independents and a Green. Of the 72 seats in the rest of the country, Labor already holds a majority of 37 seats to the Coalition's 35. In effect, the Howard government's majority is built in New South Wales and Queensland.

On current polling it looks likely the election will be decided in the Coalition's marginal seats. Apart some Marginal Labor seats in Perth, it is hard to see a Labor seat at risk of being lost to the Coalition.

The ABC has it's election guide up. I think Anthony Green is an analyst worth following, because I happen to agree with most of his conclusions. I'd point to the Northern Territory and Queensland as the place where Labor is likely to find most of the 11 seats. I doubt they are places where the free trade agreement with the US will prove all that popular.

U.S. Immunity In Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30

In Iraq, Washington had originally hoped to achieve a formal Status of Forces Agreement to grant immunity, but that was effectively vetoed when Sistani and other Iraqi politicians said no unelected Iraqi government could enter into a treaty with other countries. The United States now hopes to negotiate a status agreement next year, after a government is elected.

In the current negotiations over Order 17, a senior Iraqi official said, the basic concept is to cover 'soldiers and foreign nationals working in operations conducted by mutual consent or understanding with the Iraqi interim government and the command of the multinational force. But what that means remains to be seen.'

The United States hopes to include some foreign contractors, many of whom are engaged in security operations, the Iraqi official added, while Iraq is pressing to retain sovereignty.

'It's going to be a political hot potato, and we're worried it'll be used as a hot potato in a way that is not good for either the interim government or the multinational force,' the official said.

As a legal basis, Iraq's transitional law, which was worked out between Bremer and the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, may be considered too weak a foundation for granting immunity. Sistani argued against it because it was not the work of elected officials.

The U.N. resolution also has no direct reference to immunity for foreign troops. The only reference is in a letter from Powell to the Security Council attached to the resolution, which says contributing states in the multinational force must 'have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel' but does not mention prosecution or other specific activity.

The Transitional Administrative Law continues all CPA orders and regulations until such time as the elected Transitional National Assembly can amend or revoke them. Between 30 June and the election the Iraqi Transitional Government has no legislative power at all.

Sovereignty, apparently, does not extend to the dangerous idea of an Iraqi judge issue a writ of habeas corpus to the prison at Abu Ghraib.

US war crimes immunity bid fails

The US has given up trying to win its soldiers immunity from prosecution at the new International Criminal Court.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan had warned the Security Council not to renew the measure, partly because of the prisoner abuse scandal.

Washington withdrew its resolution after it became clear it would not get the required support.

For the last two years it had secured special status for US troops, arguing they could face malicious prosecutions.

The BBC's Susannah Price at the United Nations says the latest move is a major climb-down for the Americans, who rarely face such united opposition on the Council.

Good news for the rule of law and good news for cutting back impunity. Impunity is central to the practice of torture, whether it's an outgoing dictatorship 'decreeing itself amnesty, the White House decreeing itself above the law, or any government decreeing that despite the Torture Convention's ban on exceptional circumstances there are exceptional circumstances.

Australia has signed an Article 98 impunity accord which exempts US forces from the ICC's jurisdiction. We should abrogate that accord, especially as it grants legal protections to US troops which are not available to ADF troops.

Druid demands return of Stonehenge

The Archdruid of Wales is calling for Stonehenge to be pulled down and carted back to the principality where it belongs.

Dr Robyn Lewis wants the stones at the centre of the world heritage site returned after 4,300 years.

Experts have long known that the ancient bluestones used to form the site came from Pembrokeshire, in west Wales. But the discovery this week that remains found near the site appeared to be those of prehistoric workmen, almost certainly from Wales, has prompted his call.

But how does he fell about Elgin marbles?

What causes some people to be left-handed, and why are fewer people left-handed than right-handed?

These theories of hand preference causation are intriguing because they can account for the fact that the side of hand preference of individuals with the C gene (most left-handers and some right-handers) can be influenced by external cultural and societal pressures, a phenomenon that researchers have documented. These theories can also explain the presence of right-handed children in families with left-handed parents and the presence of left-handed children in families with right-handed parents. If the familial genetic pool contains C genes, then hand preference becomes amenable to chance influences, including the pressures of familial training and other environmental interventions that favor the use of one hand over the other. The proposed genetic locus that determines hand preference contains an allele from each parent, and the various possible genetic combinations are DD individuals who are strongly right-handed, DC individuals who are also mostly right-handed, and CC individuals who are either right-handed or left-handed. These genetic combinations leave us with an overwhelming majority of human right-handers and a small, but persistently occurring, minority of left-handers.

Schools once went through a phase of forcing lefthanded kids to write with the wrong (right) hand. The history is ancient:

Most animals are fifty/fifty right handers/left handers. Two million years ago all humans became right handed - that's one hundred percent of them and that had its advantages. And then about a hundred thousand years or so ago another mutation occurred which meant that left handedness could come into being and it must have had some advantage to it and left handers have stayed around since then. So they�re there not because they're an evolutionary throw back to a primitive state, but because they're a recent mutation with additional advantages. Now what they are is anybody guess.

I don't remember anything at school, but family pressure can work just as well. there is also a considerable religious pressure:

Moreover, the Scriptures themselves amply attest to the preeminence of the right hand and the depravity of the left. Thus the right hand confers blessing and signifies strength, while the left hand is treacherous and deadly (Gen. 48:13-20; Exod. 15:6; Eze. 21:22; Rev. 1:16-17; Judg. 3:15, 20:16; 2 Sam. 20:9-10). A place at one's right hand is the seat of honor and dignity (1 Kings 2:19; Ps. 45:9, 110:1). Sagely does Qoheleth teach that "a wise man's heart inclines him toward the right, but a fool's heart toward the left" (Eccles. 10:2). In like manner, both the passivity and the inferiority of the left hand are apparent in the solemn injunction forbidding us to let our left hands know what our right hands are doing (Luke 22:50). And it is by no accident that the elect are to stand like innocent sheep at the right hand of the Eternal Judge, while the reprobates cower and whimper like noisome and tick-infested goats on His left, awaiting their dizzying descent into sulfurous fumes and unfathomable miseries in the mind-bending agonies of eternal damnation (Matt�25:31-46).

I think I'll stick to the recent mutation with evolutionary advantages. It sounds about right left to me.

It's neck and neck, but on paper they're still polls apart

Thirteen million Australians are eligible to vote. Therefore, any opinion poll that claims, in a period of just two weeks, the Government went from 390,000 votes behind Labor in primary votes (ALP 44 per cent, Coalition 41 per cent) to 1.3 million votes ahead (Coalition 47, ALP 37), and then, a further three weeks later, to lose 520,000 votes while Labor magically regains 780,000 votes (Coalition 43, ALP 43), is massively kidding.

In other words, the Newspoll of three weeks ago couldn't possibly have been anything but a cock-up somewhere. You don't get huge voting shifts like that, back and forth, in just a matter of a few weeks. Newspapers, though, aren't going to admit it. Thus we get silly stories that get overexcited in the first place and then, when the next poll comes along and voting trends regain credibility, we get equally silly stories that pretend there has suddenly been a huge turnaround in public sentiment.

It is just the most grievous twaddle.

Far more reliable is the long-term trend. And this shows that in each of the past four elections (1993, 1996, 1998 and 2001), newspaper polls invariably, in their research in the months before election day, underestimated the Labor vote and overestimated the Coalition vote, sometimes quite markedly. The political parties know this and so do those analysts who know what they're talking about.

And if you take a line from the last election, then understand Labor's primary vote, say both public polls, has gained between four and five percentage points (between 520,000 and 650,000 votes) since the last election, while the Government has gained nothing.

Think hard about that. You can bet the Prime Minister does.

Ramsey says the election must be between 31 July 2004 and 16 April 2005. That is what the constitution says. I doubt the Man of Steel will want to face waking up one morning and discovering that George Bush is a lame duck. I'd place the chances of the election being held after the first Tuesday in November at zero.

There are a number of election furphies we can expect in the next few weeks:

1. The Senate does not have the most complex system of election in the world

2. The Man of Steel is not putting off the election. Howard is doing what every other prime minister of Australia does and trying to set the election date to his own advantage.

3. Polls are a wholly owned- and -operated device for increasing newspaper sales. Sometimes they're outright wrong. The trend line and the pattern are all that really tell us anything.

4. No matter who wins here and in Washington the US alliance will continue after the election.

Rain tanks, recycling in water pipeline

The report, by the House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, precedes a meeting on Friday to decide on a national approach to water-rights reform.

Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson was reluctant to say yesterday whether he would commit to a plan where farmers, the states and the Commonwealth would each pay one-third of any water-rights buyback dictated by future scientific discoveries.

His spokesman later welcomed the report calling for mandatory rainwater tanks and said the Government was still considering the idea of water bonds. Controversially, the report renews the committee's call to hold back a plan to put another 500 gigalitres into the ailing Murray River until more research on the environmental impacts of extra flows is complete.

'The committee is not swayed by commentators who portray the river as dead or dying,' wrote chairwoman Kay Elson. But South Australian Liberal MP Patrick Secker, representing the Goolwa electorate, said: 'I believe the science in many areas of the Murray-Darling basin is adequate.'

Wow, a newspaper that actually identifies what a parliamentary committee is doing. Water reform is not a sexy issue ad does not often make the floor of the House but a mountain of work is done in the back rooms. I've read the committee's chapter on the Murray-Darling. It's not quite a snow job, but it comes very close. The precautionary principle alone suggests the 500 megalitres cannot harm the river.

Hill won't release abuse dossier for risk of offending US

The Federal Government has refused to make public a detailed 61-page dossier outlining what Australians knew about prisoner abuse in Iraq, with the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, claiming some details would offend the US.

Senator Hill was yesterday censured in the Senate for his role in misleading Parliament and his failure to take responsibility for the false statements made by him, the Prime Minister and senior Defence officials.

Senator Hill had been asked why he chose to make a 5 page correcting statement when Defence had given him the comprehensive report plus nine large folders of supporting documents.

'The so-called [61-page] report ... was a brief to me,' he said. 'It is not the practice of this Government or previous governments to table its briefs,' he said, adding that Parliament had been 'fully informed'.

Among the material was a scathing assessment of US detention practices, in the form of a situation report, written by Australian military lawyer Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Muggleton, who was stationed with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Senator Hill said Colonel Muggleton's situation report was not released 'because I did not think it was in the best interests of our relationship with the US'.

A government that is basing its claim for re-election (among other things) on White House support is declining to embarrass its political ally. Diplomatic manoeuvres are not n exception to Australia's obligations under international humanitarian law. The depth of Hill's ingenuousness emerged last week in the Senate estimates hearings.

Moreover no-one in government will say why the Australian government did not make any representaitons to Washington to end the abuses the government knew about. More later.

Torture Didn't Work for the French in Algeria Either:

France won key battles by torturing suspects for intelligence. But the bigger lesson is that it lost the war. The fact that French military leaders resorted to the extensive use of torture shows that they had lost the support of the populace at large. It is a lesson that seems to have been ignored by American leaders as they prosecute a war in Iraq.

The French use of torture in Algeria didn't happen overnight. It was a reaction to a deepening crisis in which the French military, originally looking for suspect Algerians, came to see all Algerians as suspects. A signatory to the Geneva Conventions on war, the French government nonetheless insisted that these conventions weren't applicable to the Algerian situation. Its rejection of Geneva protections, and the consequent acceptance of harsher methods of interrogation of prisoners, proved to be fertile breeding ground for torturers.

Since late 2001, because the attacks against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. government has, like the French in Algeria, displayed a clear ambivalence toward the Geneva Conventions. At times it has professed adherence; at others, it has scoffed. Even the reasoning for rejecting these conventions is identical to earlier French arguments: like the United States today, the French military argued that countering terror required harsh methods.

In Algeria, concerned about countering a 'revolutionary war,' French generals increasingly seized authority from civilian leaders. They ran roughshod over legal protections for the population. The main opposition to French rule, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), seized the initiative. But the FLN was not simply the virtuous revolutionary force beloved of the left; like many weak revolutionary forces (for example, the Vietnamese Viet Minh at the beginning of its war against the French), it too resorted to terror to achieve its aims.

It's probably trite to say also that the French in Algeria insited that their interrogation methods did not amount to torture because of fine distinctions advanced by the French military. The difference in the US case is that it is the civilian leaders in the White House and the Pentagon who are advocating fine distinctions to exclude themselves from the Geneva Convention and the Torture Convention.

Fighting a War in Name Only

With the third anniversary of the war on terror fast approaching, the administration has not expanded the armed forces and apparently has no plans to do so. It categorically rejects proposals to revive the draft. It has left untouched the rituals of consumption deemed essential to the American economy. It has studiously refrained from curtailing corporate profits or prerogatives. Old-timers will recall when big wars meant rationing and higher taxes. Not this time. Through deficit spending, we will slough off the cost of war onto future generations.

Thus, for most Americans, the global war on terror has become a little like global warming: We sense dimly that we ought to take it seriously, but in practice we go about our daily routine as if it didn't exist.

Pass through a major airport, visit a mall, shop for a new car and look for signs that this nation is engaged in anything approximating a great struggle. There are none.

Which suits Bush just fine. Real wars -- those that engage the passions of the American people -- energize politics and subvert the established order. Change is the last thing this administration wants. For despite the high-sounding talk, the overriding aim of this war is not to march toward freedom but to dissuade Americans from peering too deeply at the events of 9/11. Were they to do so, they just might pose discomfiting questions about the competence of our leaders, the organization and purposes of government and the rationale of U.S. foreign policy.

The contrast with World War II is instructive. To fight that war Franklin D. Roosevelt mobilized the nation. The result was decisive victory. But with victory came other, largely unanticipated consequences. Roosevelt's crusade to liberate enslaved nations raised questions about the meaning of freedom at home. As such, it gave impetus to the embryonic civil rights movement. It undermined old notions of a woman's 'place.' It affirmed workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. It extinguished old forms of religious bigotry. It created a new class of politically aware and upwardly mobile citizens -- 16 million returning veterans.

Australia is in the same boat. In fact, the Man of Steel announced we had withdrawn from Iraq and were not an occupying power, until Labor said it would withdraw the remaining troops. The Australian presence then suddenly became the central pillar in the occupation of Iraq.

The truth is that Australia never withdrew. We reduced the ADF Iraq commitment from (roughly) 1800 to 850. Essentially we pulled out the SAS. Labor will not withdraw the troops in any real sense and very little apart from symbolism separates the major parties. In Australia, as in the US, the War on Terror and the War in Iraq are being fought with press releases aimed at domestic opinion.

The 'debate; about the US alliance grossly exaggerates the positions of Australia's major parties and also grossly exaggerates the threat to the alliance. Neither party opposes the alliance. Neither party is going to threaten the US bases -- Pine Gap and North West Cape -- we already host. Pine Gap will have crucial role in missile defence. It's unlikely a Labor Government would even refuse the US plans for bases in northern Australia. Equally the US is unlikely to strain the alliance to a point where the existing bases come under question.

Alliances are always a two-way street, under Labor governments as much as Coalition governments.

Australians tell Bush: stay out of it

A majority of Australians say President George Bush was wrong to criticise Labor's pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq by Christmas and the nation is evenly split on whether the relationship with the US is too close, a Herald Poll has found.

In the poll taken last weekend, after Mr Bush and other senior figures in his Administration publicly savaged the stance by the Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, on Iraq as 'disastrous', 56 per cent of those surveyed, and more than one-third of Coalition voters, said the President was wrong to comment on Australia's domestic politics.

The Herald-ACNielsen poll found that only 29 per cent agreed that, as leader of the coalition in Iraq, Mr Bush had the right to comment on policies affecting the coalition. But 41 per cent of voters said the Australian-American alliance would be weakened if Labor won the election, and only one-third believed that it would be unaffected.

This suggests that the public disagreement between the White House and Mr Latham created disquiet in the electorate about the implications for the relationship of a Labor victory.

A couple of things make the alliance issue dangerous for the coalition. The most obvious is that if the alliance between nations becomes a party issue then the alliance is in danger every time a Labor Government is elected. The Bush endorsement did not help the pro-war government in Spain and it looks like it is not going to help the pro-war government in Australia. It's worth recalling the massive swing against the Spanish right was not predicted by any poll taken before the election. Later research has showed the electoral impact of the Madrid bombing was to outrage swinging voters at the manipulation of the issue by the Aznar government. Aznar himself has since admitted this error.

Howard would do well not try and manipulate the issue here. Bush could not be elected to a shire council in Australia and I just cannot see why his endorsement is seen as a good thing by the Man of Steel.

Torture | Because I could...

Torture's dark allure

In fact, as George Browder explains in his powerful book 'Hitler's Enforcers,' 'the Gestapo, like police anywhere, could not do its work without public support.' The Gestapo's enormous success against the resistance, first in Germany and then elsewhere, depended heavily on bureaucratic files, police informants (G-men or V-men) and collaborators in foreign countries. 'Increased reliance on interrogation through torture during the war years reflects the declining professionalism of an overextended staff much watered down with neophytes,' Browder writes.

The priority in America's war on terror should be on developing human intelligence. Working one's way into a terror cell is not unlike working one's way into organized crime in the United States. One has to turn potential terrorists into double agents and to win the confidence and cooperation of the communities that shelter them. Technology is no substitute for this. Nor is torture.

Abu Ghraib should teach us what America's founders would have told us: that we are our own worst enemy. Leaders of dictatorships sign on to the Geneva Conventions only out of prudential fear of what other states might do to their POWs. Leaders of democracies sign on to them because they understand the evil that lurks in the heart of all human beings. Those who choose to abide by the rules do so not simply to restrain others but to restrain themselves.

Unrestrained power leaves behind a legacy of destruction that takes generations to undo. Torture, like incest, is the gift that keeps on giving. Democratic societies that legalized torture or tried to constrain its use have come to two ends. Some, like the Greeks and Romans, created tiered societies where authorities could torture whole classes of people (slaves or lesser citizens) and those who were beyond torture. Others, like the Italian city-states, were unable to prevent the executive branch from torturing more and more citizens and in the end fell to its dictatorial power.

The first result is hardly a model for modern democracies, and the second serves as a warning. In modern times, France routinized torture in Algeria, producing a racist, tiered society and an aggressive military government that almost overthrew French democracy. Proponents of torture would argue that destroying democratic institutions -- and the individuals involved -- is worth it if torture, as for the French in Algeria, succeeds in defeating terrorism.

Bill Clinton was interviewed by CBS on 17 June about his affair with Monica Lewinski.

RATHER The central question, if I may, and I know this is difficult, the central question is why?"

CLINTON I think I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could. I think that's the most , just about the most morally indefensible reason that anybody could have for doing anything. When you do something just because you could ... I've thought about it a lot. And there are lots of more sophisticated explanations, more complicated psychological explanations. But none of them are an excuse ... Only a fool does not look to explain his mistakes.

It would be laughable to compare Clinton's affair with Bush's launching an unjust war on untrue premises and with inadequate resources, and then trying to substitute torture for policy failure, but then it's laughable that Clinton faced impeachment and Bush has not. Bush also has a record of projecting himself (somewhat inaccurately) as a strong man in politics.

I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

911 did not change everything. The law is still the law. The Bush administration may think that everything changed.

There was a before-9/11 and an after-9/11," as Cofer Black, the onetime director of the CIA's counterterrorist unit, put it in testimony to Congress in early 2002. "After 9/11 the gloves came off." Many Americans thrilled to the martial rhetoric at the time, and agreed that Al Qaeda could not be fought according to traditional rules. But it is only now that we are learning what, precisely, it meant to take the gloves off.

As the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment provides:

Article 2
Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

No exceptional circumstances whatever... And if, as Darius Rejali argues, torture is ineffective as well as unlawful, then the real question is why the Bush administration not only thinks it's above the law, but that what failed for the Gestapo and the KGB will work for them.

Railways and the roots of relativity

The young Einstein was not, of course, employed in the academic world but in the Swiss Patent Office. And Switzerland, as we know, was a centre of invention and innovation in clock technologies. The patent office at Bern was a clearing-house for new timing technologies, and Einstein's job afforded him a veritable grandstand seat from which to become acquainted with new electro-technological advances.

Moreover, every day Einstein saw an abundance of public clocks on his way to and from work - on storefronts, on baroque towers, at the train station. How to synchronize such clocks was a widespread concern all over Europe and America. Engineers, scientists and businessmen needed to synchronize clocks effectively in order to solve important problems, ranging from determining longitude at sea to preventing train crashes.

Galison's book is thus about the history of the problem of co-ordinating clocks, from the 1800s to the early 1900s. As he points out, this period was characterized by many efforts to unify, by convention, a plethora of standards of lengths and time. Geographical regions - even within a single country such as Germany - were distinguished by their own 'local times'. Railway lines defined and distributed time, bringing distant times into conflict with local times. Engineers struggled to pinpoint and unite locations and times. Chronometers transported aboard ships failed to keep the time of stationary clocks. Underwater telegraphic cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean to transmit not only messages, but also time, from observatories in Europe to Africa, Newfoundland, Brazil and beyond. Poincar�? was even a member and sometime president of the French Bureau of Longitude, where he laboured to revise time-keeping conventions.

Local times, synchrony conventions, moving clocks that do not keep proper time, the diversity and unification of lengths and time. Were these remarkable coincidences? Or were there causal connections between breakthroughs in theoretical physics and prior techno-cultural developments? Galison's narrative implies a resounding 'yes', but he cautiously avoids any outright claims of historical causation. His aim is not to reduce the emergence of relativity to such developments, but to place it in a context where the interests of engineers, physicists, philosophers, entrepreneurs and even politicians converged.

Despite Galison's good intentions, his middle-of-the-road outlook does not counterbalance the direction of his research and the drift of his book. While claiming that special relativity emerged from physics, philosophy and technology, his book highlights the technological dimension, seemingly at the expense of the others. Readers who are not well acquainted with the roots of special relativity in optics and electrodynamics might therefore get the exaggerated impression that its crucial origins lay in the techno-culture of clock synchrony.

Be warned, moreover, that the patent offices were not the only possible source of technological imagery. Even before 1900, discussions of kinematics included references to clocks, observers, the measurement of length and time, and even trains. For example, in the 17th century, imagery of ships cruising rectilinearly served to illustrate the equivalence of physical processes on board to those on land, while by the late 19th century imagery of trains had become widespread. Such factors have to be subtracted before injecting Galison's circumstantial findings into a general history of physics. How much weight to give to the techno-cultural aspects will now challenge historians of special relativity.

Fortunately the young Einstein did not have to deal with the complex temporal leakages in the blogosphere where 'I'll just check my newsfeeds for a minute' can turn into several hours of densely (or loosely) argued post. Britain was the first government to make the time run on trains.

Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, and they forced a uniform time on the country. The original idea was credited to Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903). The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840; other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most (though not all) railways used London time. On September 22, 1847 the Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it. The transition occurred on 12-01 for the L&NW, the Caledonian, and presumably other railways; the January 1848 Bradshaw's lists many railways as using GMT. By 1855 the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13. The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect; it received the Royal Assent on August, 2, 1880.

At least that was easier than reforming the European calendar, where the retrograde Catholic south went Gregorian 170 years before the scientifically advanced Protestant north.

In an age of intense religious passion, the simple fact that the Pope instituted the reform was enough to make Protestant countries reject the change. The greater part of Protestant Germany did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1700, the Protestant Cantons of Switzerland and Protestant Netherlands until 1701. The Swedish dithered. In 1700 they began what was intended to be a gradual switch to the Gregorian calendar. They planned to stop observing leap years until their calendar was in line with the Gregorian one. They did omit the leap year in 1700, but observed the leap year in 1704 and 1708 (apparently they forgot the plan). Thus they were 10 days out of step with the Gregorian calendar and 1 day out from the Julian. Then, in 1712, they changed their minds, and went back to the Julian system by adding two leap days to February. Somewhere in Sweden, there are probably some unique baptismal records of people whose birthday was on a date never to be seen again: February 30. Lithuania and Latvia, which were under Polish rule at the time of the reform (and hence changed in 1582), actually reverted to the Julian calendar, so strong were the feelings. They did not change back again until the 20th century.

Now about that blogospheric temporal leakage...