A sober British judge opines on Gunatanamo Bay:
As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials. The answer can be given quite shortly: It is a resounding No.
The term kangaroo court springs to mind. It conveys the idea of a preordained, arbitrary rush to judgment by an irregular tribunal which makes a mockery of justice. Trials of the type contemplated by the United States government would be a stain on United States justice. The only thing that could be worse is simply to leave the prisoners in their black hole indefinitely.
Looking at the hard realities of the situation, one wonders what effect it may have on the treatment of United States soldiers captured in future armed conflicts. It would have been prudent, for the sake of American soldiers, to respect humanitarian law.
Second, what must authoritarian regimes, or countries with dubious human rights records, make of the example set by the most powerful of all democracies?
Third, the type of justice meted out at Guantanamo Bay is likely to make martyrs of the prisoners in the moderate Muslim world with whom the West must work to ensure world peace and stability.
See also this BBC report.
(Via Dan Gillmor)
Here's a nice piece by Declan McCullagh (via O'Reilly News) describing the crass protectionism to which the American administration is willing to descend in exchange for small amounts of cash, even when such policies clearly run against the interests of US consumers. After all the recent offshoring hysteria coming out of the US, it's nice to see at least some people in the tech world defend the principles of free trade. As if this weren't enough, no less a source of wrongheaded offshoring angst than the Interesting People mailing list has just published a link to this very fine article on why protectionism makes losers of us all.
Then, just when you think the battle might be turning in your favour, word arrives (to subscribers of The Economist only) that Dell — one company that you think really ought to get this stuff — is considering shifting call centre jobs from India to the US, and for no better reason than political pressure. A sad day indeed if it's true.
Another drop of good sense in the ocean of ignorance and hype that is the GM debate in Britain:
To generalize and declare 'all GM is bad' or 'all GM is good' for the environment as a result of these [UK farm scale evaluation] experiments is a gross oversimplification, but statements from both sides in the GM propaganda war have claimed 'victory' based on these findings.
So says Robert May, president of the Royal Society. Someone should give him a newspaper column and a TV show.
Conrad Lichtenstein (who, as it happens, used to lecture me when I was a biochemistry undergraduate) has provided a welcome dose of sense and wisdom in the otherwise hysterical and ignorant world that is GM in the UK today.
Writing about the farm-scale evaluation (FSE) results that were widely (mis)reported in the British press a month ago, he says:
That the evaluation involved GM crops is not relevant: herbicide-tolerant crops can also be, and indeed have been, developed by conventional methods. GM is a process not a product - and, as demonstrated by this study, each new product (whether it is GM, conventional or organic) needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis using rational evidence-based science.
Thank you — at last someone's talking sense. Contrary to press reports, which led people to believe that these experiments cast further doubt on the safety of GM technology, they were really investigations into different herbicide treatment regimes and only indirectly relevant to the GM debate.
This confusion arises from a profound misunderstading that has infected the debate in Britain: GM technology is just a tool and, as such, is intrinsically neither good nor bad. It can be put to both kinds of use and it's our job to pick the good ones in as rigourous and dispassionate a way as we can. Instead the British media (backed up, it must be said, by most of the country's population) chooses to misrepresent and denouce GM technology through deep prejudice and ignorance. If we'd done the same to mechanical and electronic engineering as we're now doing to genetic engineering we'd have no cars and no computers, among many other good things.
Lichtenstein also goes on to point out that GM is a truly organic technology, and that it can provide us with plants that are less damaging to the environment than the chemical-laced "organic" stuff that we're forced to put up with today. For example, did you know that, to protect them from late blight, "organic" potatos come laced with copper sulphate-based chemicals? No, thought not — the organic lobby don't tend to dwell on facts like that. GM is currently the only realistic hope of creating disease- and copper sulphate-free potatoes. Do we really want to stop our kids from enjoying them for dinner one day?
I've just finished reading Why Innovation Fails by Carl Franklin. Top-line summary: A bit of a waste of time and money. You're much better off reading Clay Christensen.
The good: It deals with an important, and perhaps unrepresented, subject. It also debunks the most ridiculous forms of futurology reasonably effectively.
The bad: The case studies and insights are veneer-deep. It feels like it was written in a hurry and there's very little that's noteworthy or original in the 200-plus pages.
The ugly: For a journalist, Franklin's writing is very poor. The text is full of cliches and throwaway phrases. It's also got far, far too many exclamation marks! What was Franklin's editor doing through all this, sleeping?!
There are a few useful checklists to help you assess your own innovations and their chances of success, but they're pretty obvious. You could probably come up with lists of your own that are equally good in less time that it takes you to get through this book.