Month: October 2006

I tried to write a post on the high politics of the Russia-Georgia dispute, but I got sidetracked into the stuff that actually matters: the social impact of it all. There will be another post on Putin and Saakashvili throwing their toys at each other, but first, have something about the real people:

The politicians and pundits are talking up how bad things are. Saakashvili (Georgian president) calls it “

a form of ethnic targeting not seen in Europe since the Balkans in the 1990s

“, and to Bezuashvili (Georgian foreign minister) it is ‘_a mild form of ethnic cleansing_’. At Georgia Online, a columnist collects a list of recent anti-Georgian Russian headlines and comments “

Replace ‘Georgian’ with ‘Jew’, change the date 2006 to 1933, and we fall back to Nazi Germany.

”

Certainly, things are bad. Newspaper Novaya Gazeta (employer of Anna Politkovskaya) has printed copies of letters Moscow police sent to local schools, demanding lists of Georgian students. The information required includes:

Relations of children of Georgian nationality with other pupils, cases of hostile relations between children, and such [hostile] relations toward them [i. e. Georgian children], facts about disobedience of Georgian children to teachers, facts of antisocial activities, and unlawful acts.

All this is “

For the purpose of securing law and order and abidance of the law, the prevention of terrorist acts and aggressive feelings between children

“. [Sean](http://seansrusskiiblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/moscow-police-documents-show-attempted.html) has full translations and commentary.

But, there is some good news. Many Russian bloggers are still trying to counter the anti-Georgian prejudice – the “[I am Georgian](http://ya-gruzin.ru/)” site is one of many examples. And it is striking that the anti-Georgian events in Russia haven’t been mirrored by anti-Russian events in Georgia. At Radio Free Europe, Jimsher Rekhviashvili [interviews](http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/2168b35e-cec0-4e67-9766-82089160b5a4.html) ethnic Russians living in Georgia. And finds…nothing. No mirror of the anti-Georgian sentiment in Russia. One says “

I continue to receive warmth and love, the lack of which I have never experienced from the Georgian people.

“. Another says her friends in Russia “

call and ask us not to believe what we’re hearing. We are by your side, they say. We love Georgia and Georgians.

”

Russia has made some apparently conciliatory moves towards Georgia this week – notably a [promise](http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/21d0a8f7-6bd1-47dc-bc8c-db532164fad4.html) of early withdrawal of the Russian troops based in Tbilisi.

Is this an olive branch to Georgia? No – it’s shrewd international politics. The UN has just passed a [resolution renewing the mandate of the UN observer mission in Georgia](http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/13/news/UN_GEN_UN_Georgia.php). Had Security Council members agreed with the EU’s (obviously correct, but politically awkward) [assessment](http://mosnews.com/news/2006/10/12/russiageorgia.shtml) that “

Russia is not a neutral participant in the peacekeeping arrangements

“, they could have produced a resolution limiting Russia’s role in Georgia. So, Russia keeps them sweet by making a concession – but notice that it is a concession that doesn’t require any immediate action. By the time it comes to remove the troops from Tbilisi, everybody except the Georgians will have forgotten what Russia promised.


Update

: According to [Saakashvili](http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=13869),Russia was aiming for – and failed to get – two items included in the [resolution](http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sc8851.doc.htm):

The first is unconditional denunciation of the Georgian police operation in the upper Kodori gorge that would have a serious legal force, and the second, restoration of the status quo, which existed in the gorge prior to this operation. It would have meant the withdrawal of the legitimate Abkhaz authorities from the Kodori gorge and renaming of the Kodori gorge,

Also….

I do not own a camera. There are lots of fascinating things around me that I would love to be taking photos of. Like all those protests outside parliament, for example. And perhaps a couple of buildings too.

Anybody want to recommend a cheap digital camera? I don’t know what the going price for these things is, but I’m after the ‘usable (just), turns out recognisable photos, but you wouldn’t be heartbroken if it got stolen’. Also, I’ll need to either find somewhere in Hungary to buy it, or somebody who will ship it here.

Hmmm…I imagine the problem here is that people like karohemd and who know about cameras, also have much higher standards than I do for photography. Guys, the standard here is that if you’d consider using it, it’s almost certainly better than I need.

This is a picture predicting how long it would take nature to take over again after the freak destruction of humanity (originally from the Times, but via boingboing).

The graphic isn’t actually all that astounding, but the idea is fascinating. If I had even the least amount of graphic-design mojo I’d love to make a poster on the same topic.

In other news, it’s very bad how much easier it is to go through your emails after a bottle of wine. Unanswered emails really shouldn’t be that frightening. Bills, I can accept – the not-quite-monthly ‘get drunk and write cheques’ is as close to a financial routine as I have – but emails going over to the dark side of things I hide from is bad news.

Now, off out to “50% depeche mode, 50% kraftwerk”, which is a fantastic goth(ish) club night.

Edit

: link should work now!

Tagged


budapest

,

green

,

paranoia

Wow. Drop what you’re doing, and go read this article:

The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America – aside from their special-ed designation – is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student’s wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student’s backpack is a battery and a generator, both about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled with the student’s name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes trained on the students’ behavior. They stand ready, if they witness a behavior they’ve been told to target, to flip open the box, press the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into the student at the end of the wire.

Now, this is already astoundingly nasty stuff. The justification is that these are severely disabled children who would otherwise be locked up, drugged to the eyeballs, or killing themselves. I can’t accept it – because I wouldn’t want anybody to have that power over anyone, certainly not in such a regimented system – but at least I can see the defence. Only, read on and it gets far worse:

Sometimes, the student gets shocked for doing precisely what he’s told. In a few cases where a student is suspected of being capable of an extremely dangerous but infrequent behavior, the staff at Rotenberg won’t wait for him to try it. They will exhort him to do it, and then punish him. In these behavior rehearsal lessons, staff members will force a student to start a dangerous activity – for a person who likes to cut himself, they might get him to pick up a plastic knife on the table – and then shock him when he does.

And worse:

New York state inspectors concluded that “the background and preparation of staff is not sufficient,” that JRC shocks students “without a clear history of self-injurious behavior,” and that it uses the GED “for behaviors that are not aggressive, health dangerous, or destructive, such as nagging, swearing, and failing to keep a neat appearance.”

[crossposted from [my livejournal](http://oedipamaas49.livejournal.com)]

Isn’t In our time the bestest thing evvar?

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Wow. Drop what you’re doing, and go read this article:

The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America – aside from their special-ed designation – is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student’s wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student’s backpack is a battery and a generator, both about the size of a VHS cassette. Each generator is uniquely coded to a single keychain transmitter kept in a clear plastic box labeled with the student’s name. Staff members dressed neatly in ties and green aprons keep the boxes hooked to their belts, and their eyes trained on the students’ behavior. They stand ready, if they witness a behavior they’ve been told to target, to flip open the box, press the button, and deliver a painful two-second electrical shock into the student at the end of the wire.

Now, this is already astoundingly nasty stuff. The justification is that these are severely disabled children who would otherwise be locked up, drugged to the eyeballs, or killing themselves. I can’t accept it – because I wouldn’t want anybody to have that power over anyone, certainly not in such a regimented system – but at least I can see the defence. Only, read on and it gets far worse:

Sometimes, the student gets shocked for doing precisely what he’s told. In a few cases where a student is suspected of being capable of an extremely dangerous but infrequent behavior, the staff at Rotenberg won’t wait for him to try it. They will exhort him to do it, and then punish him. In these behavior rehearsal lessons, staff members will force a student to start a dangerous activity – for a person who likes to cut himself, they might get him to pick up a plastic knife on the table – and then shock him when he does.

And worse:

New York state inspectors concluded that “the background and preparation of staff is not sufficient,” that JRC shocks students “without a clear history of self-injurious behavior,” and that it uses the GED “for behaviors that are not aggressive, health dangerous, or destructive, such as nagging, swearing, and failing to keep a neat appearance.”

Edit

: wow, there have been some totally fascinating comments on this. Thanks, everybody

I’m not sure how much [this](http://kbke.livejournal.com/3726214.html?style=mine)(RUS) is tongue in cheek, but it made me laugh:

Livejournal is spying on you!


American spies have developed a special search engine. It rummages through all livejournal posts, including locked ones, and adds politically dissident authors to a special list.

All personal information which you entrust to livejournal can be subjected to a political search.

Do you oppose interference of the secret services in personal life?

Do you oppose the illegal opening of internet postings?


Be sensible…don’t use Livejournal!

Seems the CIA aren’t content with [running Facebook](http://www.infowars.com/articles/bb/facebook_bb_with_a_smile.htm),and having the [NSA](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19025556.200) fund research into scraping social software sites


Oh, and before anybody says it: yes, I’m sure the CIA do search through anything you put on LJ or anywhere else on the web. That is their job, isn’t it?

Update

: The report is now available online

How credible is the study about to appear in the Lancet, estimating 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq as a result of the war?

All this is based on the media coverage I’ve seen ([Wall Street Journal](http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116052896787288831-zIkhR7ZgGRS2_Bz9LXSKJsg43vQ_20071010.html?mod=rss_free), WaPo, NYT). I haven’t seen the report, so I can’t say it is trustworthy. All we can say for now is that it is consistent with other figures, and using an appropriate methodology.

First, the plausibility. Yes, 600,000 is a very big number. It is about 2.5% of the population of Iraq. But remember that this isn’t anywhere close to saying that 600,000 people were directly killed by American soldiers. It is just that the overall death rate has increased massively – that might include inadequate healthcare or nutrition, more traffic accidents, whatever. It certainly includes the violent crime, which we know there is a huge amount of. Granted, it is at the high end of the scale, and I’ll want to look at the methodology in detail before I say that I believe it.


This is not inconsistent with other accounts

. In particular, it isn’t disproved by the fact that [Iraq Body Count](http://www.iraqbodycount.org/), give a much lower death toll, between 43,850 and 48,693 deaths.

It’s because they are

counting different things

. Iraq Body Count simply totals up the civilians reported in the media as having been killed. [By their own admission](http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/) this is will always be an undercount:

We have always recognised and made explicit that our media-derived database cannot be a complete record of civilians killed in violence, and have called forproperly supported counts since the beginning of our own project. What IBC continues to provide is an irrefutable baseline of certain and undeniable

deaths based on the solidity of our sources and the conservativeness of our methodology.

The figures

are

higher than the death counts based on bodies in morgues. These generally relate only to violent deaths (narrower than this study), and count about 100 a day. [Juan Cole](http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/655000-dead-in-iraq-since-bush.html) doesn’t find this discrepancy too large to deal with:

First of all, Iraqi Muslims don’t believe in embalming or open casket funerals days later. They believe that the body should be buried by sunset the day of death, in a plain wooden box. So there is no reason to expect them to take the body to the morgue. Although there are benefits to registering with the government for a death certificate, there are also disadvantages. Many families who have had someone killed believe that the government or the Americans were involved, and will have wanted to avoid drawing further attention to themselves by filling out state forms and giving their address.

Personally, I believe very large numbers of Iraqi families quietly bury their dead without telling the government of all people anything about it. Another large number of those killed is dumped in the Tigris river by their killers. A fisherman on the Tigris looking for lunch recently caught the corpse of a woman. The only remarkable thing about it is that he let it be known to the newspapers. I’m sure the Tigris fishermen throw back unwanted corpses every day.

I’m not entirely convinced by Juan Cole’s line of argument here, simply because people generally

were

able to produce death certificates:

When people reported deaths, researchers asked them about the cause and obtained death certificates in 92 percent of cases


(Baltimore Sun)

And at the Washington Monthly blog, [Kevin Drum](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_10/009727.php) adds:

This time around, the figures from their new study buttress the previous one, and also match up with other data, which suggests their methodology is on target.

How reliable is their methodology?

Not perfect, but better than anything else available. As far as I can see, the methodology is the same as what they used back in 2004 – see a collection of defences of it [here](http://www.iraqanalysis.org/info/128). Probably the biggest criticism of the 2004 report was the small sample size. But now, as [Rubicon](http://www.robertsilvey.com/notes/2006/10/death_in_iraq_d.html) says:

For statistical purposes, the sample size is very large, much larger (for example) than typical national voter polls in the US, which sample about 1,000 to 1,200 individual respondents. If we presume 4 persons per Iraqi household, the sample size is over 7,000 persons—in a country one-twelfth the population of the US. The data-gathering and estimation techniques are quite reliable; according to one of the lead researchers, Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins, “This is a standard methodology that the U.S. government and others have encouraged groups to use in developing countries.”

One likely methodological problem is ‘recall bias’ – that is, the possibility people will have forgotten deaths that happened in the past. This would decrease the figures for pre-war mortality compared to post-war mortality, and so give an inflated count of excess deaths. The issue was raised with the 2004 study, and the longer timescale of the latest report makes it an even bigger issue.


Note

: I am updating and amending this entry as I find out more about the study. I haven’t yet made up my mind on how much I believe it – and in any case, I still haven’t seen the report.

Blogs defending the study: [Amptoons](http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2006/10/11/ny-times-coverage-biased-against-lancet-study/), [mahablog](http://www.mahablog.com/2006/10/11/adding-up-the-commas/), [Barista](http://barista.media2.org/?p=2764), [Deltoid](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/600000_violent_deaths_in_iraq.php#commentsArea) (not much yet, but likely will have more in time)

Blogs arguing against it (only the ones I think have halfway-decent arguments): [Jay Reding](http://www.jayreding.com/archives/2006/10/11/lies-damned-lies-and-casualty-figures/). No doubt there are more decent arguments against this, but I’ve not been bumping into them much.