No, not by accident. Not as part of a war effort. Not as part of a biological weapons test. Rather, on purpose, as part of Prohibition enforcement efforts:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

—Deborah Blum. “The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”. Slate, 19 February 2010.

Horrific. At least, as the article points out, when they tried poisoning marijuana crops in the 1970s, there was enough outcry to stop it.
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This is probably old news to people who follow German politics closely, but I just found out about it (via MetaFilter).

Karl Heinz Kurras was the West German police officer who killed student demonstrator Benno Ohnesborg in June 1967 during a protest against the Shah of Iran’s visit to Germany. This was one of the major radicalizing events of the period for the German left, and hugely influential.
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Recently Clay Shirky wrote “A Rant About Women”, a piece essentially claiming that women needed to act more confidently, even or especially in situations where confidence would be unwarranted, in order to be more successful. There’s more to it than that, but that was what I took as the core message. I think there are some valid points in there, but I also think that Shirky radically underestimates the ways in which women are frequently punished for acting confident, and and that he appears to assume that a system which promotes self-aggrandizers is something that we all (not just women) should accept as the natural way of things.

I might write up a longer response to “A Rant About Women” at some point, but right now I want to bring some attention to a piece that’s probably more important than my response.
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I was loving this article from The Economist until the final paragraph, and specifically the final line.

The article reports on a series of psychological experiments which strongly support the idea that power corrupts. The interesting wrinkle is that some people are corrupted less—and these are apparently the people who don’t feel deserving of their powerful position.
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This post at Yes Means Yes! is an excellent overview of how the profoundly unhealthy culture of American high schools socializes boys to have negative and domineering attitudes towards women. The post is a review of Dude, You’re a Fag, an academic study of student ethnography and behavior at a Northern California high school. While the degree to which the behavior in the school is typical can be debated, it certainly seems to me that it’s certainly not a total aberration. I think a key paragraph is this one:

[Male sexual aggression in this context] has little to do with sexual orientation or desire and everything to do with a gender performance that positions the boys in relation to other boys.

—Thomas. “Compulsive Heterosexuality And Rape Culture”. Yes Means Yes!, 13 January 2010.

I don’t think this is all that controversial, but I do think it’s important.
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Her response to the recent attempted underwear bombing:

Senate Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said a "very comprehensive no-fly list" would be "the greatest protection our country has." In an interview, she said the definition of who can be included should be expanded to include anyone about whom there is "a reasonable suspicion."

—Susan Page. “National security adviser: Airline bomber report to ‘shock’”. USA Today, 07 Jan 2010.

“The greatest protection our country has” is to be able to stop people from flying arbitrarily, even though a major problem with the current system is a lack of accountability around how one gets on the list. Also, of course, Abdulmutallab was on the FBI’s “Terrorist Screening Database” and it was some kind of bureaucratic error that prevented his name being added to the no-fly list—not any legal concerns over reasonable suspicion; it is concerns of this sort that Feinstein is attempting eliminate entirely.

This isn’t surprising; Feinstein has a history of voting to increase state power. Like many others, she seeks to use more or less any circumstance to justify some expansion of state reach[*].

I’ve come across what feels like another wave of articles related to bullying recently. I previously wrote about my thoughts on institutional responses, but this time my focus is on some of the causes, as well as how technical rules are unlikely to eliminate the problem.
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A recent University of Philadelphia study apparently shows that people in possession of guns were significantly more likely (4.46 times as likely) to be shot in an assault than people without guns. I’m particularly curious about some things that the study can’t really address—namely whether it’s causation or correlation. Is it the presence of the gun that increases the danger of confrontation? Is it that the presence of the gun makes the gun possessor more belligerent? Or is it that the kinds of people more likely to be belligerent are the kinds of people more likely to be carrying guns?

Another question is one of morality—if (as is strongly suggested by the study) resisting robbery or borderline situations leads to a higher likelihood of injury or death (on either side), does this imply that offering no resistance is the more moral act?

The following is a short clip of news footage from the Pittburgh G20 protests:

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There’s a campaign at the moment, “Think B4 You Speak”, that’s attempting to get teens to not use homophobic slurs in their interactions. The aim is a good one, but I have my doubts about its efficacy—doubts that are expressed rather well by this Penny Arcade strip.
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Timothy Snyder has an interesting article on how contemporary understanding of the Holocaust is tilted towards Western victims in the New York Review of Books, which includes an overview of mass death in the period around World War II. Upsetting, as you would expect, but worth reading.

(Via Who Is IOZ?)

I occasionally read Consumerist, and a trope on that site (and perhaps in the larger culture) concerns company spokespeople stating that they take (insert some egregious abuse or screwup here) “very seriously”. This line is used so often, and is folowed by meaningful action so rarely, that it has become more or less synonymous with empty posturing. This is why the last paragraph of this article in the San Francisco Chronicle today made me laugh out loud:

CIA spokesman George Little offered a brief response to the case, saying the agency takes its obligation to the U.S. courts seriously.

—Nedra Pickler, Associated Press. “CIA committed fraud in court, judge rules”. SFGate.com, 21 Jul 2009.

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I know this has been on BoingBoing already, but it seems so ridiculous that I can’t resist posting it here too:

[The City of Bozeman]’s background check policy … states that to be considered for a job applicants must provide log-in information and passwords for social network sites in which they participate
(emphasis mine)
—“Bozeman City job requirement raises privacy concerns”, Dan Boyce, montanasnewsstation.com, 18 Jun 2009

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In a recent MetaFilter thread about some more expanded Taser us after a judge ruled it was okay to Taser an uncooperative suspect in order to get a DNA sample from them (with passing mention of some grandmother tasering thrown in), I came across a comment that I thought was fantastic:

Remember when you could tell that Spock’s political system was eeeevil because of his willingness to use the agonizer?
—mwhybark, comment on ‘Niagara County Judge: tasing a suspect into compliance with DNA test = okay’, metafilter.com, 05 Jun 2009

Via Bruce Schneier comes news that four American states have banned smiling while having your driver’s license photograph taken. Yes, really. Because facial recognition software that they’re apparently using to try to cut down on fraud doesn’t like it:

Dull expressions “make the comparison process more accurate,” says Karen Chappell, deputy commissioner of the Virginia DMV, whose no-smile policy took effect in March.
—“Four states adopt ‘no-smiles’ policy for driver’s licenses”, Thomas Frank, USA Today, 25 May 2009

Sure, the explanation that they need to do this to prevent fraud sounds rational, but really, preventing people from smiling? I think it’s hard to find a better metaphor for “soulless bureaucracy”.

It irritates me, every year, that May Day isn’t an official holiday here. It irritates me further that US Labor day is tucked far away at the other end of the year. It just seems petty. And today I discovered that, indeed, the US Labor Day was a deliberate attempt to gain distance from the “radical left”.
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Pensecola Christian College, an unaccredited (except for nursing) university, has about 4500 undergrads, and they apparently have to abide by rather stringent regulations. Some excerpts:

Married personnel should refrain from physical display of affection realizing that our college students are not allowed to have physical contact.
—Bruce Gerencser, “Pensacola Christian College Rules and Regulations”, Bruce Droppings, 17 April 2009

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Over the last month or so I’ve come across a bunch of articles on school bullying, mostly in the United States. A common thread among them seemed to be the lack of interest of the school authorities in effectively dealing with the bullies. This is always a little surprising (and disheartening) on the individual level, but makes perfect sense to me on the institutional level.
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I caught some of the inauguration this morning, missing the swearing-in itself and whatever came after Obama’s speech.

Unlike most people I know, I don’t expect much from an Obama presidency—except, perhaps paradoxically, to be disappointed. But I’ll try not to rain on everyone’s parade today with my reasons for that. Instead, I’ll focus on some good things.
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That’s how much the “fingerprint all foreigners at the border” program costs. Not only is it completely wrong-headed, it’s amazingly wasteful an expensive! Bruce Schneier and Jim Harper weigh in.

A judge today dismissed indictments against (among others) Gonzales and Cheney, brought by a Texas grand jury last month. That’s not too surprising, sadly. The Associated Press article paints the prosecutor, Juan Angel Guerra, in a rather poor light.
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In Britain, a Member of Parliament was recently detained for nine hours by “counter-terrorist” police forces, and had his phone and computer seized.
His heinous alleged crime?

The MP was arrested under common law “on suspicion of conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office”.
—“Damian Green arrest: PM accused of contempt for parliament”, Andrew Sparrow, Nicholas Watt and agencies, guardian.co.uk, 28 Nov 2008

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Maroni should do what I did when I was secretary of the interior. He should withdraw the police from the streets and the universities, infiltrate the movement with secret (provocateurs) agents, ready to do anything, and, for about 10 days, let the demonstrators devastate shops, set fire to cars and lay waste the cities.
—Francesco Cossiga (former President of Italy), Retribution and revenge, Roberto Mancini, guardian.co.uk 24 Nov 2008

Assuming some degree of “democracy” in a state, it should be rather obvious that those in power will do anything that they can get away with in order to sway public opinion in their favor. This clearly implies that they will do what they can to discredit any popular movement they don’t control, and this in turn explains quite a lot of the “extremism” on display at large rallies/marches/demonstrations, where there are suddenly lots of ‘protesters’ doing more or less exactly what would be guaranteed to stoke mass desire for crackdown/repression in the name of security. This also explains why those particular protesters don’t tend to get arrested: many of them are agents provocateurs.
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