Gyroscope

A newsletter for those unmoved by spin.
No. 60, January 31, 2005

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by John Nordin
360 degrees of spin

Going to clear off the ever increasing stack of clippings this week. I'll do the Iraqi elections later - when more the nonsense has subsided and the truth is more clear. For now, however, just be careful to notice if those percentage figures are of the adult population or of the registered voters, a smaller base.

On the other hand, I just can't resist a few quotes already showing the cracks:

  Yesterday on one of the Fox financial shows, James Rogers, author of Investment Biker, commodities guru, ... was asked by host Neil Cavuto whether the elections in Iraq would be successful. Rogers said, "They'll be successful because the media will say they're successful," adding impishly, "Fox News probably already has the results." (From James Wolcott)  
  The media boys and girls will be expected to play along with this. "Transition of power," says the hourly logo on CNN's live coverage of the election, though the poll is for a parliament to write a constitution and the men who will form a majority within it will have no power.

They have no control over their oil, no authority over the streets of Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, no workable army or loyal police force. Their only power is that of the American military and its 150,000 soldiers whom we could see at the main Baghdad intersections yesterday.

The big television networks have been given a list of five polling stations where they will be "allowed" to film. Close inspection of the list shows that four of the five are in Shia Muslim areas - where the polling will probably be high - and one in an upmarket Sunni area where it will be moderate. Every working-class Sunni polling station will be out of bounds to the press. I wonder if the television lads will tell us that today when they show voters "flocking" to the polls. (Robert Fisk, Independent UK)

  

And yes, it is a testimony to the courage of Iraqi's that they voted - but they were probably voting in the partial hope that this was the fastest way to get the US out.

  "United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting." (New York Times, September 4, 1967; reported in Political Wire)  

So let's wait a bit to decide how this turns out.

Now on to other items.

  However, none of the several thousand foreign nationals rounded up since September 11th on immigration violations has been convicted of a terror crime - except for the two people in Detroit whose convictions were later voided. ... A study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering group, of all "terrorism-related" cases in the two years after September 11th found that the median sentence for conviction was 14 days - hardly what you would expect for a terror crime. The Justice Department has disputed this study, but its own caginess about its classification system has not helped its cause. (The Economist, Jan 22nd, p. 31)  

So much for victories in the war on terror. So much for the pressing need to violate civil liberties to capture the dangerous terrorists in our midst.

  In 2000, in Foreign Affairs Magazine, [Condoleezza Rice] outlined what a potential Bush administration foreign policy might look like ... At his news conference on Wednesday, the president said he had not read the piece. (New York Times, Jan. 27, p. A3)  

Putting such an article in that respected journal by a person close to the new president is an intentional signal to the foreign policy establishment. It is a common and understood event - it is intended to give a serious read on government intentions and is studied by Americans and foreign governments alike. It's understood the incoming president knows and approves what is being said. And now we learn that it was a sham - the Bush administration began misleading people even before it took office.

  Tim Kreuzfelt, the bar owner [in East Berlin] said to me: "Bush took away our America. I mean we love America. We are very sad about America. We believe in America and American values, but not in Bush." (New York Times, Thomas Friedman column, Jan. 27, p. A27)  

Beautifully said. Too bad no Democratic politician knows how to orate on this theme.

  GAVI, an alliance of official and non-governmental agencies, academics and vaccine manufactures, has funded about 50m vaccinations, preventing an estimated 670,000 premature deaths since it was founded five years ago. (Alan Beattie, Financial Times, Jan. 25, p. 7)  

The article announced the donation of the Gates foundation of $750m for more vaccinations. This is more money than the Bush Administration allocated for tsunami relief. We've spent $280 billion on the war in Iraq, but for saving lives, we have little to spend.

  Conservatives Pick Soft Target: A Cartoon Sponge Named Bob (New York Times, Jan 20, p. A12)  

The Christian fundamentalists look so much like Islamic fundamentalists. Both have no common sense.

  Ian Ayres of Yale Law School and Katharine Baker of the Chicago Kent College of Law ... have a proposal: outlawing "reckless sex." ... They define reckless sex as penetration, without a condom, in a first-time sexual encounter. (New York Times Magazine, 12/12/04 p. 62)  

And there are fundamentalists of the left as well. Can you imagine the legal intrusiveness into private life this would require? What about conspiracy to have reckless sex? Or attempted reckless sex?

  President Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom .. on Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion, L. Paul Bremer, who led the occupation and George Tenet who as intelligence director built a case for war. (New York Times, Dec. 15, 2004, A1)  

So, the guy who went to war with too few troops but didn't resign, the guy who botched the occupation and started the insurrection and the guy who couldn't tell Bush the truth. To give them the nation's highest civilian award is obscene. But not unexpected from Bush.

  The rendition of "A Holly Jolly Christmas" by Burl Ives, is the song most played on radio stations that programmed Christmas music. (New York Times, Dec. 23, 2004, B2)  

The reason we hate the Christmas season explained.

  Bernard Kerik didn't have the best resume to become secretary for homeland security. New York's former police commissioner, it turns out, abandoned a Korean daughter for most of her life, accepted unreported gifts from firms doing business with New York City, was expelled from Saudi Arabia after a physical confrontation with a local police official, was fined $2,500 for assigning detectives to help research his book and, inevitably, employed a possibly illegal nanny. (The Economist, Dec. 18, p. 40)  

A fine example of the values that voters were approving when voting for Bush.
Good news: Road signs are getting easier to read

After the usual parade of nonsense and disaster, above, an article on road signs might appear to be comic or satirical. However, I think that we ought to celebrate victories wherever we find them, and to study how they come about. Small, incremental, carefully planned improvements are not a bad thing.

Such it is with road signs on our nation's highways. An aging population of drivers increases the need for readability at a distance, especially at night. But there is seldom room to make signs physically bigger. What to do? The New York Times reported (Jan. 21, p. D8) on the work of a team lead by Donald Meekr and James Montalbano that identified that by changing the typeface used on road signs that visibility can be greatly improved with no increase in size.

It's taken years of work and testing and review before this became approved by the Federal Highway Administration. The new typeface is being field tested now.

No bluster, no spin, no one getting rich. Just ordinary Americans working in a team to make things better. I suspect these things happen all over the country -- but get no publicity and little support or acclaim.

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