UN Human Rights Council gives freedom of speech the finger

It’s as though the United Nations’ newest committee decided that they had too much credibility:

• U.N. Panel OKs Measure on Islam (Associated Press)

What’s all this, now?

Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion

Well, by now you folks probably know how I feel about global prohibitions of just about anything. Needless to say, I don’t like this idea.

Human Rights Watch said the resolution could endanger the basic rights of individuals.

You know, when Human Rights Watch objects to something you call a “Human Rights Council”, there’s probably something wrong.

Fortunately, there’s some good news:

The council, which last year replaced the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission, has no power beyond drawing international attention to rights issues and scrutiny of abuses in certain countries.

Now, I just love the idea of a committee without power… but if all they can do is piss off other human rights organizations — ones with credibility, even — why are they getting money?

Edit: This is, of course, the same Human Rights Council that isn’t bothered by Sudan’s behaviour in Darfur.  Go, UN, go!

To protect and serve

So, the grass-eaters keep telling me that I don’t need to worry about defending myself against personal violence, because the police will protect me and keep me safe.  I’d really like that, but, um….

•  Death Squad in Delaware: The Case of the Murdered Marine (lewrockwell.com)

So there’s this problem with unannounced “no-knock” police raids.  (I think I’ve ranted about this before.)  You might be familiar with this story (parts 2, 3, and 4 — thanks, totalrecoil!).  Perhaps we should stop and ask ourselves: who wins when this shit goes down?  Is it, in fact, Joe Sixpack the Citizen?

Okay, let’s ignore that particular uncomfortable question.  At least we know that the police will show up in time to save the day, right?

• Vancouver police probe slow response to 911 call (cbc.ca)
• Call 911 in Vancouver, and then wait (cbc.ca)
• Vancouver police accused of skewing response-time numbers (cbc.ca)

“God Dammit!“

(And that’s just my city.  Who knows what’s happening in yours?)

So, er, why ought I abrogate my responsibility for my own well-being, again?

Two hobby-horses at once

Beautiful!

• Politics and the American Language (Lew Rockwell)

Stephen Carson combines two of my favourite things about which to complain — sloppy language and government coercion — and cites William Zinsser’s excellent On Writing Well.

NYC cites “national security” to cover up domestic espionage

Big fucking surprise from the centre of grass:

•  City Asks Court Not to Unseal Police Spy Files (nytimes.com)

Here’s the basic idea:

Lawyers for the city, responding to a request to unseal records of police surveillance leading up to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, say that the documents should remain secret because the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize them,” hurting the city’s ability to defend itself in lawsuits over mass arrests.

What sorts of documents are these?

The documents show that the Police Department’s Intelligence Division sent undercover detectives around the city, the country and the world to collect information on political activists and others planning to demonstrate at the 2004 convention, according to a sampling of records reviewed by The New York Times that were the subject of an article yesterday. The records included intelligence digests and field reports from detectives, known as DD5s.

Those records showed that some of the surveillance was conducted on groups that planned to disrupt the convention, but the bulk of it was on groups and people who expressed no apparent intention to break the law. In at least some cases, the reports were shared with other law enforcement agencies.

That’s right, the NYPD — lest we forget, this is the house that Giuliani built — sent, er, “undercover operatives” around the world to suppress collect information on groups who planned to protest the 2004 Republican convention, most of which gave no indication of being inclined to cause trouble.  I’d kind of expected something like a right to free assembly, but clearly I’m misreading the Constitution.

Here’s the bit that really puts my dick in a knot:

 Because the materials have not yet been used to decide or argue any issues in the civil lawsuits, Mr. Farrell said, “there is no right of public access.”

Excuse the fuck me?  No right of public access?  Who’s paying the taxes, again — is it, perhaps, the public?

And this whole business of NYC wanting to be able to make “mass arrests” without fear of reprisal kind of rubs me the wrong way, too.  I may well be wrong about this, but I don’t believe any “mass arrests” of terror suspects have been made by, well, anyone.  This looks like NYC demanding a free hand to harrass political protestors, not maintain national security.  (Please let me know if I’m wrong.)

“The questions posed by these cases have great public significance,” the judge, James C. Francis IV of Federal District Court in Manhattan, wrote on March 12. “At issue is the proper relationship between the free speech rights of protesters and the means used by law enforcement officials to maintain public order.”

I thought the Constitution was pretty clear on this whole “free speech” thing, but I’ve been wrong before.

One little sign change…

This is terrifying:

• A sign, a flipped structure, and a scientific flameout of epic proportions

I’ve had a few moments of sheer panic when I discovered bugs in my research code, but — partly by good fortune, partly by good planning and a great deal of testing — my results have never been affected.  (Yet….)

Québec elects minority government

…and there was much rejoicing:

• Liberals win minority in Quebec (cbc.ca)

Why can’t we elect one of these out West?

Don’t feel too safe at airports these days

My, my. Look at this:

• Canadians not getting air security they deserve: Senate (cbc.ca)

Before I get started on the article, I have to ask: just what kind of air security do Canadians “deserve”? How can you tell who deserves security, and how much, and what kind? Do some people deserve better security than others? Do Canadians, for instance, deserve better security than Israelis, or Brazilians, or Indonesians? Do some Canadians deserve less security than others?

The only guideline that comes to mind is, of course:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. (Benjamin Franklin)

by which measure it seems that Canadians are getting exactly the air security we deserve — fuck you very much, voters — but that’s probably not the answer we all want to hear. Let’s move on.

The first problem here is that, while passengers get ever more intrusively searched as they enter “security”… well, staff don’t. And as you might expect, some of those staff members work for unpleasant people:

[Liberal Senator Colin Kenney] said the RCMP had told Senators that organized crime was present at all major airports in the country, and criminals had access “airside” — a reference to the secure zone at airports where employees can board aircraft or handle baggage and cargo before it’s loaded.

Yet the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority performed only random security checks on airport employees, searching about two per cent of staff every day.

The latest Senate report says Ottawa hasn’t acted quickly enough to fight organized crime at airports or to tighten other lax measures identified in an earlier report on airport security released in 2003.

According to that earlier report — The Myth of Security at Canadian Airports — these security gaps include inadequate background checks for people with access to aircraft on the ground, lack of screening of mail and other cargo carried on passenger jets and reduced levels of policing at many airports since the privatization of local airport authorities.

Your Tax Dollars At Work.

Smile, it gets worse.

“The committee would like to assure the public that the numerous gaps that remain are being treated with some degree of urgency by government,” the 2007 report says. “But we cannot.”

Conclusion:

1. Airport security sucks.
2. The relevant authorities know that it sucks.
3. They don’t care.

Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

Edit: Hat tip to totalrecoil for reminding me of this news story:

• Orlando Airport Boosts Security After Gun-Smuggling Arrests (news4jax.com)

Short version: baggage handlers sneak a duffel-bag full of firearms onto a flight from Orlando to San Juan.  It’s not as though there’s no threat here.

Linguistic Irritants

Some things that bother me:

Pluralizing with apostrophes.  This is wrong.  Don’t do it!

The singular “they”.  Oh, I know where this comes from: cowardice.  You don’t want to come across as sexist, so you pick a “gender-neutral” pronoun and hope for the best.  Look, if you’re going to pull this dodge, at least do your readers the courtesy of reworking your sentence into a plural form.  Subject/verb disagreement grates on the mind.

Singular “they” is particularly amusing when you do it to hide information, then lapse halfway through your story.  For example:

A student came to my office hours with a simple algebra question: they couldn’t figure out how to apply trig identities to one of the geometry problems in the homework.  As I worked through the problem with them, he got increasingly frustrated, and eventually I realized that he had no intuitive grasp of what the cosine function meant.

Whoops.

“None” as a plural.  No, “none” is a contraction of “not one”, and is therefore singular.  Everybody does this, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

“Hopefully”.  It’s an adverb meaning “full of hope”.  It does not mean “I hope that…”.

Excessive obscenity.  Heh, just kidding.  Foul language doesn’t bother me at all.