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14. november 2005
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Christopher Hitchens asks:
Are you sure you want to keep saying we were fooled by Ahmad Chalabi and the INC?
As someone who has closely followed the Iraq war - prelude, war and the long insurgency - seeing revisionism becoming accepted wisdom is a quite bizarre spectacle.
11:56:04 PM 
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 We've had another round of extreme weather here in western Norway today, and it looks like it will continue all night. The rain has been extreme even by our standards - 143 mm (5.6 in) for a 24 hour period in Bergen, a new November record, and in Takle up north it fell 198.5 mm (7.8 in).
A house under construction in Bergen was destroyed by an avalanche, and a construction worker was killed. Tens of thousands are isolated, as avalanches and flooding has closed roads all over the region.
Luckily, I live well proteced. Unless Mt Floien falls down, I'm good.
The storm system has been named Loke (Loki), which not only demonstrates that meteorologists have a sense of drama, but they are also quite ignorant about or disrespectful of tradition. In the Norse era, no place, no person and no anything was ever named after 'Loke.' I'd suggest nobody would call a weather system 'Satan' (and, yes, I know Loke in Norse religion was not equivalent to the Devil in Abrahamic faiths, but there are enough similarities to make the comparison valid).
PS: Dagbladet has a quite nice collection of reader's dramatic pictures. No, that isn't of what is normally rivers.
11:44:41 PM
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Maybe disappointing, but not very surprising, Dilbert creator Scott Adams has written an article on his blog that is some sort of defense for Intelligent Design.
"I’ve been doing lots of reading on the subject," he begins, and then, as is typical of such articles, he proves that he hasn't read more than he'd find room for in a newspaper strip. Adams is a great cartoonist, and in between drawing and texting his cartoons, writing books and all his lecture rounds, he obviously had no time to read up on evolutionary theory. The wise course in such a case is to not pretend you know what you don't.
The reason I'm not particularly surprised is some remarkably ignorant remarks Scott Adams made about some scientific experiments he didn't understand, some superstitious crap he wrote about "assertions" as some magical trick to pass exams and get laid, and his hostility to skeptics and scientists. He has written earlier that since time doesn't exist, evolution doesn't make sense. His half-hearted apology for 'intelligent design' falls into a well-established pattern of militant ignorance.
PZ Myers give Scott Adams a thorough fisking. Myers' blog appears to be down right now. I read it on my Bloglines, and it's worth waiting for it to come online again.
PS: Jason Rosenhouse writes that - surprise, surprise - the conservative Senator Rick Santorum has backed down from his earlier support for ID.
U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Saturday that he doesn't believe that intelligent design belongs in the science classroom.
Santorum's comments to The Times are a shift from his position of several years ago, when he wrote in a Washington Times editorial that intelligent design is a "legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in the classroom."
But on Saturday, the Republican said that, "Science leads you where it leads you."
I am trying to come up with something good to write about Santorum, but I can't really put it off. I guess he deserves some credit for this turnaround, though.
Via Orac.
11:13:27 PM
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Louisette Lanteigne of Waterloo, Ontario, a stay-at-home mother of three, is being sued for C$ 2 million for her criticism of Activa Holdings Inc, a developer she criticised on her website.
She said she was constantly keeping her kids and their friends out of trouble, as they would keep running into hazards around their neighbourhood. She petitioned city council and got help but new problems would appear as quickly as the old ones got fixed, she said.
"They call me an environmental activist, but I see myself as more of a mom who's just trying to be heard," said the 36-year-old mother of three girls aged 21 months, nine and 12.
"My kids were at risk and nobody helped me, and I'm worried about other kids too, that's the bottom line," she said in a telephone interview, breaking into tears. "Nobody protected me and now I'm getting sued."
She launched her website in April to document her complaints and as a means for the province's Environment and Labour ministries to view the evidence she collected. She made about a dozen postings with photos and stories of sightings around her area.
Lanteigne received praise from environmentalists and politicians, but now she faces a large lawsuit from one of the biggest developers, Activa Holdings Inc.
The statement of claim said "the malicious, high-handed and arrogant conduct of the Defendant warrants an award of punitive or exemplary damages to ensure that the Defendant is appropriately punished for her conduct and deterred from such conduct in the future."
She is hardly in an economic position to defend herself legally, but refuses to back down.
Activa obviously believes that the bad publicity from this bully lawsuit is worth the price for silencing an annoying critic. Unless, obviously, her website has really lied (as opposed to posting her honest opinion) about the company.
This appears to be Louisette Lanteigne's website, if Google is anything to go by, but now the site has exceeded its bandwidth allowance. That may be a sign that this lawsuit is becoming more well-publicised than Activa expected. I have not been able to confirm whether it's a real blog or a conventional website, but I don't think it matters very much.
PS: Ms Lantaigne is obviously more of an activist than she lets on. That, of course, doesn't mean lawsuits to silence her public criticism is more defensible, again assuming she has not posted outright malicious distortions.
2:29:12 AM
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I have earlier noted that Norwegians glorify the United Nations to quite parodic levels. Hardly anything negative about the UN ever penetrates our media. The oil-for-food scandal was, to put it mildly, under-reported. Now results from the European Social Survey (ESS) confirms this: No other European country has a similar level of trust in the UN; 78.2 % of Norwegians say they trust the UN, according to a Norwegian article in Aftenposten. The other Nordic countries filled the next three slots. The average in Europe is 44.4%.
Researcher Lars H. Gulbrandsen at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, which must be described as pro-UN even by Norwegian standards, has some explanations to Aftenposten.
- Most people realise that a small country like Norway depends on strong multilateral institutions to solve collective problems. In addition we have a genuine wish to contribute towards a better world, we like the role as the 'good Samaritan' whether it is about development, conflict resulution or environmental problems, claim researcher Lars H. Gulbrandsen at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute.
- Are we naive in all our trust?
- We may have a somewhat exaggerated faith in what the UN can do. The debate in Norway easily becomes black and white, the UN is always the good and the US is always the bad.
Former state secretary for development aid (ie assistant minister) Leiv Lunde says that among scholars, the foreign department and politicians, there is actually some debate about the merits of the UN. This never makes it to the public sphere, however, where all politicians are unanimous in praising the organisation. Lunde explains why:
- When the support in the people is so large, a Norwegian politician criticising the UN risks 'shooting himself in the foot.' Thus we don't get a public debate about the failings of the UN.
In other words, our politicians are followers, not leaders.
In the rest of Europe, distrust of the UN is much more widespread. In the UK, 46.5 % trust the UN, in Germany 41.4, and in Poland only 38.8. Greece ranks rock bottom at 26.4%, perhaps related to the UN's initiatives on Cyprus.
1:54:38 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.12.2005; 01:34:22.
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