No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fel­low man with­out
at last find­ing the other end fas­tened about his own neck.

Fred­er­ick Douglass

Nikon D3, Full-Frame, pre­viewed. It’s here, after per­haps the longest period of spec­u­la­tion ever Nikon has today lifted the cov­ers on their first full-frame dig­i­tal SLR, the new 12.1 megapixel D3. The D3 is all about speed and sen­si­tiv­ity, twelve megapix­els on a big CMOS chip means large pho­to­sites (8.45 µm pitch to be pre­cise) and that adds up to base sen­si­tiv­ity of ISO 200 to 6400 with an addi­tional two stop boost over that (up to ISO 25600). The other side of the speed story (apart from blis­ter­ing AF and shut­ter lag) is that the D3 can shoot at nine frames per sec­ond with AF track­ing or eleven frames per sec­ond with­out. Other head­line fea­tures are a newly branded EXPEED image proces­sor, a new 51-point AF sen­sor, color AF track­ing, dual CF com­part­ments (with UDMA sup­port), an amaz­ing 3.0″ 922,000 pixel LCD mon­i­tor with Live View (includ­ing con­trast detect auto-focus), HDMI video out­put and even a vir­tual hori­zon func­tion which can tell you when you’re hold­ing the cam­era per­fectly level. There’s too much to fit here so we crammed as much as we can into a pre­view. The D3 will be avail­able in Novem­ber, at around US$5000. [Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Review]

Years ago I had intended to buy a Nikon full-frame dig­i­tal SLR when they finally came out with one. How­ever I sub­se­quently trans­ferred to a new job at Syman­tec that cen­ters on archiv­ing dig­i­tal data, and real­ized that dig­i­tal cam­eras weren’t such a good idea for any­one who wants to keep their pho­tos around indefinitely.

UnFarah Tac­tics in the War on Ter­ror. Con­gress­man Tom Tan­credo has gained at least one vote with his call to nuke Mecca: Joseph Farah’s. Mutu­ally Assured Destruc­tion may have been good enough to face down the Soviet Union, says Farah, but it won’t work with ter­ror­ists, so the only alter­na­tive is to start nuk­ing Islamic holy cities, begin­ning with Mecca, Med­ina, Tehran, Qom, Kar­bala, Kufa, Najaf, and Dam­as­cus (“Per­haps all of the above,” says the great Chris­t­ian pundit).

Lest Farah be accused of delight­ing in the deaths of mil­lions of Arabs, he writes: “I know I will be pil­lo­ried for mak­ing these sug­ges­tions today. Under­stand it is not because I want to see Islamic cities destroyed by fire and brim­stone. It is because I want to see U.S. cities spared from destruc­tion.” Oh, well, then I guess it’s okay since his inten­tions are hon­or­able. Yikes. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

Based on pop­u­la­tion num­bers gath­ered from Wikipedia, the cities that Farah wants to nuke have a com­bined pop­u­la­tion of (approx­i­mately) 25,404,377. I have pre­vi­ously pointed out that Bushe­viks often talk about Mus­lims the same way that Nazis talked about Jews in the early 1930s. Appar­ently some of them are ready to move on to advo­cat­ing another Holocaust.

We can be sure that all the Bushe­viks who attacked the Pres­i­dent of Iran for sup­pos­edly call­ing for the destruc­tion of Israel (although he really didn’t) will, at best, remain com­pletely silent about Farah–and more likely will agree with him.

The Trou­ble With the Busi­ness Press. “Fake Steve Jobs” (aka Daniel Lyons of Forbes) makes a nice jab at the busi­ness press: Most busi­ness writ­ers hate all com­pa­nies. They hate busi­ness in gen­eral. I’ve never under­stood this. It’s like hir­ing guys who hate sports to be… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

This seems easy enough to under­stand to me. It’s easy to find jour­nal­ists who love sports to be sports writ­ers, but where is the busi­ness press going to find jour­nal­ists who love busi­ness? Once all three of them have jobs, your labor pool is reduced to the over­whelm­ing major­ity of jour­nal­ists who are socialist.

Larken Rose on Immi­gra­tion.

Larken Rose has sent out four new mis­sives in his TMDS (The Most Dan­ger­ous Super­sti­tion) series:

17 Aug 2007: Under­stand­ing the Trick
18 Aug 2007: Ille­gal Peo­ple?
18 Aug 2007: Hit a Nerve
18 Aug 2007: Temp­ta­tion vs. Principle

Those of you who think the U.S. gov­ern­ment should work harder to pre­vent “ille­gal aliens” from com­ing the the United States won’t be happy. Those of us who real­ize that the gov­ern­ment has no author­ity to exist, me for exam­ple, will applaud.

[End the War on Free­dom]

Con­spir­acy The­o­ries.

Fas­ci­nat­ing New Sci­en­tist arti­cle (for sub­scribers only, but there’s a copy here) on con­spir­acy the­o­ries, and why we believe them:

So what kind of thought processes con­tribute to belief in con­spir­acy the­o­ries? A study I car­ried out in 2002 explored a way of think­ing some­times called “major event — major cause” rea­son­ing. Essen­tially, peo­ple often assume that an event with sub­stan­tial, sig­nif­i­cant or wide-ranging con­se­quences is likely to have been caused by some­thing sub­stan­tial, sig­nif­i­cant or wide-ranging.

I gave vol­un­teers vari­a­tions of a news­pa­per story describ­ing an assas­si­na­tion attempt on a fic­ti­tious pres­i­dent. Those who were given the ver­sion where the pres­i­dent died were sig­nif­i­cantly more likely to attribute the event to a con­spir­acy than those who read the one where the pres­i­dent sur­vived, even though all other aspects of the story were equivalent.

To appre­ci­ate why this form of rea­son­ing is seduc­tive, con­sider the alter­na­tive: major events hav­ing minor or mun­dane causes — for exam­ple, the assas­si­na­tion of a pres­i­dent by a sin­gle, pos­si­bly men­tally unsta­ble, gun­man, or the death of a princess because of a drunk dri­ver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpre­dictable rela­tion­ship between cause and effect. Insta­bil­ity makes most of us uncom­fort­able; we pre­fer to imag­ine we live in a pre­dictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some con­spir­acy the­o­ries offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability.

Other research has exam­ined how the way we search for and eval­u­ate evi­dence affects our belief sys­tems. Numer­ous stud­ies have shown that in gen­eral, peo­ple give greater atten­tion to infor­ma­tion that fits with their exist­ing beliefs, a ten­dency called “con­fir­ma­tion bias”. Rea­son­ing about con­spir­acy the­o­ries fol­lows this pat­tern, as shown by research I car­ried out with Marco Cin­nirella at the Royal Hol­loway Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don, which we pre­sented at the British Psy­cho­log­i­cal Soci­ety con­fer­ence in 2005.

The study, which again involved giv­ing vol­un­teers fic­tional accounts of an assas­si­na­tion attempt, showed that con­spir­acy believ­ers found new infor­ma­tion to be more plau­si­ble if it was con­sis­tent with their beliefs. More­over, believ­ers con­sid­ered that ambigu­ous or neu­tral infor­ma­tion fit­ted bet­ter with the con­spir­acy expla­na­tion, while non-believers felt it fit­ted bet­ter with the non-conspiracy account. The same piece of evi­dence can be used by dif­fer­ent peo­ple to sup­port very dif­fer­ent accounts of events.

This fits with the obser­va­tion that con­spir­acy the­o­ries often mutate over time in light of new or con­tra­dict­ing evi­dence. So, for instance, if some new infor­ma­tion appears to under­mine a con­spir­acy the­ory, either the plot is changed to make it con­sis­tent with the new infor­ma­tion, or the the­o­rists ques­tion the legit­i­macy of the new infor­ma­tion. The­o­rists often argue that those who present such infor­ma­tion are them­selves embroiled in the con­spir­acy. In fact, because of my research, I have been accused of being secretly in the pay of var­i­ous west­ern intel­li­gence ser­vices (I promise, I haven’t seen a penny).

Lots of good stuff in the arti­cle, includ­ing instruc­tions on how to cre­ate your own con­spir­acy theory.

[Schneier on Secu­rity]

Absurd con­spir­acy the­o­ries have been pop­u­lar with a cer­tain seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion for as long as I can remember.

Whom Do You Sup­port?. A neat inter­net ques­tion­naire. (Thanks to Dale Fitz)… [LewRockwell.com Blog]

The ques­tion­naire cov­ers all the Demo­c­rat and Repuli­can can­di­dates and (cor­rectly) con­cluded that I strongly sup­port Ron Paul (fol­lowed dis­tantly but still with a fairly high score by Mike Gravel). My scores for Giul­liani and Rom­ney were large neg­a­tive num­bers, appro­pri­ately enough.

Do blog­gers need a union of their own?.

A group of blog­gers and labor activists today con­sid­ered whether blog­gers might need their own union, and if so, what form it would take. Also, whether Repub­li­cans would be admitted.

Read More…

[Ars Tech­nica]

At first I thought this was a joke, but after read­ing the arti­cle it appears that the morons are really seri­ous. Just who exactly do they think their pro­posed union would extort?

The FBI’s Twisted Pri­or­i­ties: Mur­der, Wrong­ful Impris­on­ment Some­times Nec­es­sary to Pre­serve Drug Inves­ti­ga­tions.

Last week, a fed­eral judge exco­ri­ated the FBI for not only hid­ing excul­pa­tory evi­dence that would have exon­er­ated four inno­cent men who served more than thirty years in prison, but for reward­ing those who did the hid­ing and cov­er­ing up with bonuses and pro­mo­tions. For this crime against Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, Amer­i­can tax­pay­ers will now shell out more than $100 mil­lion. Thus far, none of the gov­ern­ment agents actu­ally respon­si­ble for this crime have been held account­able. Only rewarded.

Well, we’re just get­ting started. On July 19^th, the House Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee held hear­ings on the use and abuse of con­fi­den­tial drug infor­mants. The tes­ti­mony Assis­tant Direc­tor of the FBI Direc­torate of Intel­li­gence Wayne M. Mur­phy gave at that hear­ing is truly astonishing.

The tran­script below was pro­vided by the ACLU. It comes from the Q &A ses­sion after the wit­nesses pro­vided their ini­tial tes­ti­mony. Murphy’s being ques­tioned by Rep. Dan Lund­gren (R-Calif.) and Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.). The con­text: Lund­gren and Delahunt have cited inci­dents in the past in which the FBI has cov­ered up evi­dence that its con­fi­den­tial drug infor­mants have com­mit­ted vio­lent crimes (includ­ing mur­der) in order to pro­tect their iden­ti­ties, so that they could con­tinue pro­vid­ing the bureau with infor­ma­tion. They’ve cited other inci­dents, includ­ing the case above, in which the FBI has hid­den excul­pa­tory evi­dence, and allowed inno­cent peo­ple to go to prison. Lund­gren and Delahunt want Mur­phy to assure them that the FBI has insti­tuted poli­cies to ensure that these sorts of inci­dents won’t hap­pen again–that mur­der­ers won’t be pro­tected and inno­cent peo­ple sent to prison in order to pre­serve drug investigations.

Remark­ably, Mur­phy refuses to make such assur­ances. We pick up the tran­script just after Lund­gren has asked his ini­tial ques­tion, and Mur­phy has obfus­cated. Lund­gren fol­lows up:

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lun­gren: If I could just ask my ques­tion once again very sim­ply. That is: Is there a pol­icy in the FBI to share infor­ma­tion with local and state law enforce­ment offi­cials when you, the FBI, have become aware that your con­fi­den­tial infor­mants have engaged in seri­ous vio­lent felony activ­ity, not all crim­i­nal activ­ity, seri­ous vio­lent felony activ­ity, in the juris­dic­tion of the local or the state authorities?â€

Mur­phy: It is my under­stand­ing Con­gress­man that there is not a spe­cific doc­u­mented pol­icy, directly to answer your ques­tion sir.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lun­gren: Well I thank you for that because you may have given me the basis for enact­ing our leg­is­la­tion to require that. Do you think it should be?

Mur­phy: I think it’s dif­fi­cult to make a gen­er­al­iza­tion that will fly in every cir­cum­stance. And in fact in some cases there are activ­i­ties which are closely coör­di­nated with a local law enforce­ment activ­ity but have equi­ties that affect other local law enforce­ment activ­i­ties. We’re being asked to respect and sup­port the acts of one local law enforce­ment agency against another. And I want to say again, I don’t mean in terms of con­fronta­tional but in terms of bal­anc­ing the equi­ties and the inter­ests of a long term inves­ti­ga­tion. So I don’t think it would be fair or accu­rate for me to try and char­ac­ter­ize a gen­eral solution .…

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lun­gren: All I can say is that if I were still a law enforce­ment offi­cer in the state of Cal­i­for­nia and you were to tell me that the FBI was reserv­ing judg­ment about whether to tell me that you have CIs in my juris­dic­tion that are com­mit­ting seri­ous vio­lent felonies, I would be more than offended.

I’ll say. And let’s keep some­thing in mind, here. This would be a morally dubi­ous pol­icy even if were were talk­ing about mat­ters of, say, national secu­rity. But we aren’t. We’re talk­ing about the FBI con­ceal­ing evi­dence of mur­der and other vio­lent crimes, and of know­ingly allow­ing inno­cent peo­ple to go to prison in order to not dis­rupt drug inves­ti­ga­tions. In other words, all of this is nec­es­sary, the FBI is say­ing, to keep peo­ple from get­ting high. And when con­fronted by the United States Con­gress, the FBI can’t even say out­right that this is cat­e­gor­i­cally a bad idea, nor can it promise that it will insti­tute a pol­icy pre­vent­ing these things from hap­pen­ing in the future.

We get more of the same when Rep. Delahunt ques­tions Murphy:

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Delahunt: The scan­dal occurred in the Boston office in the late ‘90s, about a decade ago. These issues have existed for decades now.… Is there a legal respon­si­bil­ity on the part of the FBI, in the case of mur­der, to report infor­ma­tion to local or state law enforce­ment agencies?

Mur­phy: Con­gress­man the Attor­ney Gen­eral guide­lines in their infinite…

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Delahunt: I’m not talk­ing about the Attor­ney Gen­eral guide­lines. Do they have a legal respon­si­bil­ity, cur­rently, to report evi­dence, both excul­pa­tory, or evi­dence of a crime, when a homi­cide is being investigated?”

Mur­phy: If you will indulge me Con­gress­man, I’d like the oppor­tu­nity to answer that ques­tion offline because there are var­i­ous cir­cum­stances under which that ques­tion might be answered dif­fer­ently that would include some of the aspects about how we man­age sources, how we make deci­sions about the man­age­ment of sources. And I would appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­nity to answer that ques­tion for the record offline.

The hell with that. If the FBI is “man­ag­ing its sources” in a way that allows for inno­cent peo­ple to be mur­dered by its infor­mants, or sent to prison for crimes they didn’t com­mit, we damned well need to know about it.

To his credit, Rep. Delahunt doesn’t back down.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Delahunt:I’m not ask­ing about qual­i­ties or guide­lines or con­sid­er­a­tions. Does there exist today, in your opin­ion, a legal respon­si­bil­ity for the FBI to com­mu­ni­cate, in a homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tion, either excul­pa­tory infor­ma­tion to the state and local author­i­ties, or evi­dence that would indi­cate that an indi­vid­ual is respon­si­ble for mur­der? That’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question.

Mur­phy:I would pre­fer to answer that ques­tion offline if you wouldn’t mind, thank you Congressman.

Delahunt: Well I do mind. And I don’t see the rea­son why that answer has to be pro­vided offline. That’s a legal question.

Now, go back and read about the “House of Death” case.

Delahunt and Lund­gren say they plan to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion that will force the FBI to both divulge excul­pa­tory evi­dence and divulge evi­dence that its infor­mants have com­mit­ted vio­lent crimes. Good for them.

Rather hor­ri­fy­ing, though, that we’d need a law like that in the first place.

Track­Back (0) | [The Agi­ta­tor]

Even more hor­ri­fy­ing is the cer­tainty that even if such a law should some­how make it into the books, the FBI would just ignore it and keep right on with what they’re doing.

The Decep­ti­cons are Here. One good thing to come out of the YKos FCC ses­sion: I was tipped off to this story, which I hadn’t heard of even though it hap­pened in a movie the­ater I occa­sion­ally patron­ize.

Jhan­net Sejas and her boyfriend were cel­e­brat­ing her 19^th birth­day by tak­ing in a mat­inée show­ing of the hit movie “Trans­form­ers” at the the­ater at Ball­ston Com­mon mall.

Sejas was enjoy­ing the movie so much that she decided to film a short clip of the sci-fi adventure’s cli­max to get her lit­tle brother hyped to go see it.

Min­utes later, two Arling­ton County police offi­cers were point­ing their flash­lights at the young cou­ple in the dark­ened the­ater and order­ing them out. They con­fis­cated the dig­i­tal cam­era as evi­dence and charged Sejas, a Mary­mount Uni­ver­sity sopho­more and Annan­dale res­i­dent, with a crime: ille­gally record­ing a motion pic­ture.
…
Sejas faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident.

But Sejas was try­ing to con­vince her brother to spend money on a movie.

Kendrick Mac­dow­ell, gen­eral coun­sel for the Washington-based National Asso­ci­a­tion of The­atre Own­ers, said that ille­gal pirat­ing of films costs the indus­try bil­lions of dol­lars and that the indus­try was step­ping up efforts to stamp it out.

Because of that, he said, there has to be a “zero-tolerance pol­icy at the the­ater level.”

A “zero-tolerance pol­icy?” Come on, that’s cant. Grab­bing 20 sec­onds of a movie isn’t like giv­ing some­one a tiny sam­ple of cocaine. What Sejas was doing wasn’t much dif­fer­ent than what iTunes does, whet­ting your appetite with a 30-second clip of a movie or song.

[Hit and Run]

So from this we learn that, if you want to inter­est your lit­tle brother in a movie, it’s really much bet­ter to down­load the entire thing off the Inter­net and avoid deal­ing with the­aters at all.