After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.

This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).

Cory Doctorow, “Entertainment industry sours on term ‘pirate’ — too sexy”, BoingBoing, 2010-03-18

Top Ten Things That Sound Dirty In Winespeak, But Aren’t
Courtesy of fellow wine writer Dean Tudor (www.deantudor.com):
1. “Spit or swallow?”
2. “Stick your nose all the way in”
3. “She’s needs to open up a bit”
4. “I’ve had a ‘69 with my sister”
5. “My God! Check out the legs on that Blue Nun!”
6. “I keep Sherry on the rack in my cellar”
7. “I find the Italians flacid and the French hard”
8. “There are too many whites in this room”
9. “You have to pull it out slowly, otherwise it’ll shoot all over the place!”
10. “Wow that really swelled up, can you stick it back in?”

Here are two more, just to make it an even dozen:
11. “Me and the guys did a 10 year old Tawny, it was sweet”
12. “I’m sorry Madame but your Pouilly-Fuisse is awfully dry”

As the Watergate scandal deepened, the U.S. Senate struck a committee to investigate. Headed by Sen. Sam Ervin, it had broad powers to subpoena documents and compel evidence, together with a staff of investigators and legal counsel.

On July 13, 1973, Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon’s deputy assistant, told committee staff that discussions in the Oval Office were routinely tape-recorded. Before long, judge John J. Sirica had launched proceedings to force the president to hand over the tapes. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege, but in the end complied with a Supreme Court ruling ordering their release, with consequences that are well known.

But suppose the U.S. Congress functioned like Canada’s Parliament, and Nixon had the powers, not of a president, but of a prime minister of Canada. The committee, uncertain of its jurisdiction and with little in the way of staff or resources, would very likely never have learned of the tapes’ existence. Had it persisted with its inquiries, Nixon could have shut down the committee, and the Congress with it. And, rather than defend his case in court, Nixon could have hired a former Supreme Court judge to “advise” him on whether to release the tapes. And that would more or less be that.

He does say that he’s not trying to draw a direct comparison between the two situations (Watergate versus the Afghan detainee issue), but to highlight the relative amount of power a “mere” prime minister wields.

H/T to Lewis Page, who writes:

Though the F-35 had been planned to be bought in thousands by the US forces alone, suggesting good economies of scale and affordable prices for export customers down the road, critics of the programme are now alleging that costs are so far out of control that the well-known military procurement “death spiral” process has set in: higher price, less planes bought, unit cost driven up even higher, even less planes bought and so on.

However it’s important to note that if the F-35 is successful it has the potential to destroy large amounts of the present global military aerospace industry. If it does get made in large enough numbers to be offered cheaply in time, it will be more sophisticated and yet cheaper than any other combat jet on the market, in all likelihood putting several of its competitors out of business in decades to come. This is probably a major reason why so many aerospace people are desperate for it to fail.

But there are others who feel that the Western fighter jet industry is overlarge, bloated, has no real threat to confront any more and is consuming funds which might be better spent on simpler things such as infantrymen or helicopters. They might be hoping that the F-35 can resolve its problems.

Earlier posts on the F-35, particularly from the Royal Navy’s viewpoint here.

Australian boffins have developed a treatment which allows mice to smoke cigarettes without the usual negative health consequences. The method could potentially allow gasper-loving humans to sidestep some of the self-destructive results of their habit.

The key to the business, according to lead cig-boffin Ross Vlahos, is Granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF), an agent released by the lungs when they are exposed to cigarette smoke. GM-CSF causes inflammatory leukocytes to activate in the lungs, which then leads to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and other complaints such as “oxidative stress, emphysema, small airway fibrosis, mucus hypersecretion and progressive airflow limitation”.

Vlahos and his team at Melbourne uni decided to tackle this by the use of a blocking agent known as “anti GM-CSF”. As called for by tradition, they got hold of a group of mice and dosed half of them with the miracle smoko-proofing drug, and left the others alone. Then all the mice were given “the equivalent of nine cigarettes of smoke each day for four days”.

At the end of the test every single mouse was dead. However, this was simply because the boffins had killed them in order to examine their lungs. According to the mouse autopsies, the ones treated with “anti GM-CSF” were in much better nick than the others.

Of course, “safer” is not “safe”. This research implies that human smokers could benefit from use of this drug or similar formulations, but it doesn’t address all the health risks of smoking (chances of developing cancer appear to be the same, for example).

A rational reader would assume that this new research would be welcomed, but my belief is that anti-smoking groups will condemn it for “encouraging smokers” and call for the research to be discontinued. After all, this is a moral rather than a scientific campaign for many activists.

Full disclosure: I’m not a smoker, and never have been. I’m not particularly fond of being in smoke-filled rooms, but I do think the crusade against smoking long ago passed the health advocacy point and became mostly moralizing (see this for example).

People who appear in these registries have a long list of prohibited activities, most frequently requiring them to stay a certain distance from schools (which often means there is little or no choice for where they can live, work, or travel, as the legallly mandated distance exceeds the average distance between schools). Ordinary ex-cons have great difficulty getting employment even in a growing economy, and the situation for identified “sex offenders” is close to impossible.

As a general rule, having your name added to the sex offender registry is as close to a life sentence as possible, but with no hope of parole and no hope of even a semblance of living a normal life.

Georgia apparently thinks this situation is not only fine, but they’d like to add non-sexual offenders to the registry too:

Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice.

Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal. He unsuccessfully challenged his mandatory, lifelong sex-offender listing to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled against him Monday.

Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2007, the states are required to have statutes demanding sex-offender registration for those convicted of kidnapping or falsely imprisoning minors. The Georgia court ruled that the plain meaning of “sex offender” was overridden by the state’s law.

If it’s your world view that criminals should never be forgiven for their transgressions, then this sort of deliberate act is understandable. It’s morally indefensible, but it’s understandable.

Up to 25,000 people died in the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II – fewer than often estimated, an official German report has concluded.

The Dresden Historians’ Commission published its report after five years of research into the 13-15 February 1945 air raid by Britain and the US.

The study was aimed at ending an ongoing debate on the number of casualties in the German city.

Germany’s far-right groups claim that up to 500,000 people died.

They say the bombing – which unleashed a firestorm in the historic city when the Nazi Germany was already close to defeat – constituted a war crime.

Note that the “they” in that final paragraph refers to the “far-right groups” and not to the Dresden Historians’ Commission. It’s not the judgement of the commission that the bombing was a war crime.

The world looks at China with envy. China’s economy grew 8.7 percent last year, while the world economy contracted by 2.2 percent. It seems that Chinese “Confucian capitalism” — a market economy powered by 1.3 billion people and guided by an authoritarian regime that can pull levers at will — is superior to our touchy-feely democracy and capitalism. But the grass on China’s side of the fence is not as green as it appears.

In fact, China’s defiance of the global recession is not a miracle — it’s a superbubble. When it deflates, it will spell big trouble for all of us.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m anti-Chinese, because that isn’t why I post this sort of material. I think the Chinese miracle has been to raise literally hundreds of millions out of poverty, but it hasn’t been a purely positive thing: hundreds of millions of others are supporting the uplift but being deprived of similar opportunities. It’s a fantastic achievement, but it has involved — and continues to involve — injustice and repression.

It also requires continued state control over media, and not just BBC/CBC/PBS type state funding, but actual state censorship and worse:

During the crisis, Chinese exports were down more than 25 percent, tonnage of goods shipped through railroads was down by double digits, and electricity use plummeted.

Yet Beijing insisted that China had magically sustained 6 to 8 percent growth.

China lies. It goes to great lengths to maintain appearances, including censoring media and jailing those who write antigovernment articles. That’s why we have to rely on hard data instead.

Those lies will compound the impact when the lies can’t be maintained any more:

What happens in China doesn’t stay in China. A meltdown there — or even a slowdown — would have severe consequences for the rest of the world.

It will tank the commodity markets. Demand for industrial goods will fall off the cliff. Finally, Chinese appetite for our fine currency will diminish, driving the dollar lower against the renminbi and boosting our interest rates higher. No more 5 percent mortgages and 6 percent car loans.

It will be bad for the US and the rest of the world’s economies, but it could well be catastrophic (in the full meaning of that word) for China. As the US economy contracted over the last couple of years, it revealed lots of malinvestments . . . and the companies which were most exposed to the risks took huge hits to their balance sheets and their business models. A similar shock to the Chinese economy could topple the government or raise the already-high chances of massive unrest and corresponding increased repression.

Interesting times, indeed.

As Jon suggested, you can see my previous concerns about the Chinese economy here.

Idea number two: I’ve been interested in alternate history as a sub-field of SF for a while. There are a couple of ways of writing alternate history; you can do it straight (as an historical novel set in a history that never happened) or if you bend the rules enough to allow for a visitor from our own world to get a tourist visa to the universe next door, you can use it as a tool to poke at our conceptions of how our own world operates.

First I took a stab at designing a straight alt-hist novel. (Elevator pitch: “I’m going to cross the streams of The IPCRESS File and Heart of Darkness in a universe where the first world war ended in 1919 with allied tanks sitting in the wreckage of Berlin, and the decaying British empire went on to invent fascism in the 1940s. It’s 1962, and two OSS agents are injected into British-dominated Europe to trace the underground railroad that is funneling abducted/brainwashed American scientists east. Our two spooks, “Wild” Bill Burroughs and his swivel-eyed Californian sidekick Philip K., follow the trail — by way of a sleazy S&M nightclub in Hamburg presided over by ageing queen Adolf and his boyfriend Rudi Hess — to Ceylon, where in the guts of a hollowed-out mountain they confront the jackbooted, monocle-wearing Air Commodore Arthur Clarke and his program to build an atom-bomb powered space dreadnought.) My agent shot it down as “too weird”. With 20/20 hindsight, I think she may have had a point.

Actually, the fact that I think it’d be a fascinating read probably proves that his agent was quite correct.

Update: Well, to be pedantic, the latest book isn’t the final book, although it concludes the second (of four) story arc. Charles doesn’t intend to write the other two arcs for a few years yet.