The President of the United States is chosen according to how many votes each candidate receives in the electoral college. This is why it was so important to learn just who won the state of Florida back in 2000. This system gave us the Presidency of George W Bush instead of Al Gore, despite the fact that more people voted for Al Gore.

There are three systems of counting votes in a presidential election in the United States, two of which vary by state:

1. Winner take all, where the winner of the popular vote in a given state receives every electoral vote. Most states use this system today.
2. District-by-district, where the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district wins only that district’s electoral vote. Maine uses this system.
3. Straight popular vote, which is simply a count of how many people voted for each candidate. Although this number is important, it is the winner of the electoral vote that is elected president.

If you could decide which of these systems were used nation-wide, which election method would you choose to choose the President of the United States?

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Olympia Snowe is the one Republican who so far has voted in favor of any health reform bill. People are starting to wonder why we’re paying her so much attention.

There is an old (and, some say, possibly dirty) trick to getting attention in Washington. If everyone is voting for something, you can generate attention for yourself if you’re the only person to vote against it.

Everyone wants to know why you’re against it. You’re in the papers, they’re talking about you on the radio and you end up on TV to explain yourself. The media never fails to fall for this, even though they realize they’re being had.

On the other side of the coin, if everyone around you (like, say, the entire Republican Party) is voting against something, just imagine how much attention you’ll get if you vote for it.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Just google “Olympia Snowe”.

I’m not saying that this is why she voted to move the reform bill out of her committee. For all I know, she might be the one Republican who wants to serve her constituents. Surely there must be at least one of those left in D.C.

Right?

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I learned today that President Obama has flown to Copenhagen on a mission to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago.

I can’t bring myself to care about the Olympics Games anymore. It has very little to do with sports these days. The whorish catering to the corporate sponsors has grown to such an absurd level that it ruins the entire event for me.

In 2008, NBC refused to broadcast the opening ceremonies live, waiting instead to air them at primetime. NBC also refused to broadcast the most popular events live, again choosing to show them only during primetime, long after everyone already knew the outcome. They flatly refused to stream the popular events on the web, choosing instead to stream only the more obscure and less popular events.

Show up to an event carrying bottled water from Aquafina (made by Pepsi) while Coke is sponsoring the games? They’ll throw you right out of the stadium. That happened in Athens, in 2004.

The Olympic committees always vastly overestimate the legal reach of their trademark on the word “olympic.” For years, the Olympic committees have threatened to sue countless local business owners in every host country for using variations of the word “olympic.” Most of these actions are against people who are clearly trying to capitalize on the interest in the games but, without fail, they always carry it too far.

This hostile behavior is inflicted upon business owners often in cases where their businesses have used the word for several years and have nothing to do with sports. In 1996, when the games were hosted in Atlanta, the owner of a Greek restaurant, the Olympic Cafe in Savannah, Ga, lost a lawsuit with the US Olympic Committee and was forced to rename his business to Olympia Cafe.

I wish good luck to Chicago, but I don’t watch the games anymore, regardless of what city they’re in. The Olympic Games have become the Worldwide Exhibit of Corporate Sponsors and I refuse to have anything to do with that.

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An example of just how irrational Americans can be at times is the Troy Davis case. Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Ga in 1989. He was sentenced to death. Amazingly, his sentence has not yet been carried out, although it looks like it will happen next month.

There are very real reasons for believing that the wrong man has been convicted of this crime.

Davis was convicted based on the eyewitness testimony of nine people. Seven of those nine people have since recanted, saying that police pressured them into making statements that were untrue. There is also a very real possibility that one of the remaining two witnesses might be the person who actually killed Officer MacPhail.

Four of the jurors who served in the Davis trial believe now that they made the wrong decision, based on bad evidence, and they have written to the Georgia Parole board to say so.

The prosecutor in the Troy Davis case, Spencer Lawton, has been cited in the past for misconduct and for withholding evidence from defendants. A number of Lawton’s convictions have later been overturned, including death penalty cases.

This is the context in which Troy Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Davis has requested a new trial. Supporters of his request include former Governor of Georgia and former President of the United States Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict, former Georgia congressman Bob Barr and former Director of the FBI William Sessions. Both Congressman Barr and Director Sessions are supporters of the death penalty.

In most nations, a person accused of a crime is assumed to be guilty, unless they can prove their innocence. To most Americans, that sounds barbaric. In the United States, our system of justice holds that a person is innocent of any crime, until the government proves otherwise. Our system is designed to protect the innocent, even if it means that a few truly guilty people may escape punishment.

Strangely, most Americans have an irrational response to the Troy Davis case. Ask the prosecutor, the family of Officer Mark MacPhail, the Savannah Metro Police Department or the general public what they think of the case and you’ll hear something along the lines of “Why hasn’t he been executed yet? Hasn’t the MacPhail family suffered enough?”

This reaction is a perfect example of how irrational Americans can be in many situations. They are not seeking justice for the victim; they want vengeance. They want someone to be punished and, amazingly, they really don’t care that it might be the wrong person. They just want to clench their jaw, nod their head and say “serves him right; bastard got just what he deserved.”

This response makes very little sense.

First, these people don’t seem to care that the wrong man might be punished. Few of them argue that they believe the evidence supporting Davis’ conviction. Their main argument is that someone needs to be put to death, because the MacPhail family is suffering.

The fact that the family is overwhelmed with grief is not an excuse to kill people. That is not a valid argument. Nor will it assuage their grief in any way if the wrong person is executed. Anyone with any sense of morality would be horrified at the thought of an innocent person being put to death on their behalf.

Second, these people don’t seem to care that the real killer might get away with committing murder. The evidence for convicting Troy Davis – the eyewitness testimony – has vanished. There is a very serious possibility that one of those witnesses actually committed the crime.

Despite their demands for justice, most of these people seem to have no problem with the possibility that the person who actually killed Mark MacPhail might escape justice completely.

For my part, as a dispassionate, uninvolved observer of this train wreck, this is what I think.

There are very real and very strong reasons for thinking Troy Davis is innocent. This is not just some guy in prison swearing that he was framed. A president, a congressman, a director of the FBI and the Pope also think he might be innocent.

The evidence for convicting Troy Davis turned out to be bogus. If that trial were held again today, a jury would surely have reasonable doubt about the evidence and would cut him loose. It would be immoral and unjust to execute this man when there is considerable doubt about his guilt.

There is reason to believe that a different man actually killed Officer MacPhail. It would be irresponsible not to investigate the possibility. If this man is a murderer, the government has an obligation to remove him from society and to punish him for what he did.

A murderer should not be given a “Get out jail free” card, just because the police don’t want to admit to the possibility that they may have screwed up the original investigation and accused the wrong person.

Troy Davis might be innocent. There is more than enough reason to grant him a new trial. The people who support this argument have far more knowledge and experience with these matters than anyone who is likely to read these words.

If Troy Davis is put to death without a new trial, it will not be justice, it will be vengeance. It will not be an execution, it will be a lynching.

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I don’t know who coined the phrase “question everything” but that is how I approach life. That is my motto.

If someone is claiming to have new information about something, I don’t just accept their claim at face value. I want to know where they got their information and why they think it means what they are claiming. I ask myself if it makes any sense, if the source of the information is credible and if there are other sources of information to back it up.

Example:

Saturday night, an adviser to President Obama resigned from his job, due in large part to a smear campaign by Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck. Progressives were very angry about the situation.

Almost immediately, I began to see a rumor about Glenn Beck making the rounds on Twitter. According to the rumor, Glenn Beck raped and murdered a woman back in 1990. It was tweeted by someone with a large following and it provoked a retweet chain reaction. Glenn Beck soon became a trending topic on twitter; the rumor had gone viral.

The rumor is not true – Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a woman in 1990. The site that is the main culprit in spreading the accusation says (all the way at the bottom of the page): “This site is parody/satire.“

I am disappointed in the progressives, the atheists and, most especially, the skeptics who believed that rumor. Not only was the rumor complete bullshit, it was obviously bullshit. It took me less than five minutes to debunk it.

Part of the rumor involved what was supposed to be a police incident report. Take a look at this picture of a piece of paper and ask yourself if that looks real. [Update: It turns out that does look real] The faked President Obama Kenyan birth certificate looked more realistic than that.

While looking for an example of an actual Durham police report from 1990 to compare with the fake, I found a rightwing blog which debunks the rumor. That blog points out a problem with the address listed in the report. The address is that of a house involved in another false accusation of rape from three years ago: the 2006 Duke University lacrosse scandal.

The Glenn Beck rape rumor is false, so drop it. Glenn Beck does a fine job of making himself look like an idiot; he doesn’t need our help.

To my fellow progressives out there, don’t become a left-wing version of the birther. The birther phenomenon is one of the best things to happen to us in years. The right-wingers are making such fools of themselves that we hardly have to say anything. That foolish behavior is going to make it harder for them to recruit young people in the future.

As for my fellow atheists and skeptics who believed the rumor, I am really disappointed with you. We are supposed to look at things with our bullshit-o-meters running at full throttle. We don’t take things on faith; we look for proof. We are supposed to accept a claim when it is backed up by credible evidence. We are supposed to reject a claim when it lacks credible evidence or when the evidence refutes it.

Believing in that Glenn Beck rape rumor is no different than believing President Obama was born in Kenya. Spreading the rumor is little different than showing up to a town hall meeting waving tea bags and screaming that you want your country back.

As I said on Twitter, those of us on the left are the ones who argue things based on facts and on reality; it’s the right-wingers who have to make shit up. So stop acting like the right-wing.

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***
I want to start this with a disclaimer. I am not writing this to scold anyone that I follow or to ask them to change how they use Twitter. This rant is aimed squarely and solely at the people at Twitter Inc.
***

I have reached a roadblock in my use of Twitter. I cannot follow any more people who interest me. In fact, the more interesting a person is, the less useful Twitter becomes if I follow that person. This strange and seemingly contradictory situation is entirely Twitter’s fault.

Twitter treats messages that begin with @username as being addressed to that user and so most other followers won’t see them. Up until May, you had three options in how to deal with those messages from the people you follow. You could choose to see all of them, only the ones addressed to other people you follow or only the ones addressed directly to you.

If you were using Twitter in May of this year, you probably remember the controversial @reply change. Twitter Inc. found it necessary to change Twitter.com so as to remove the ability of people to see @replies from people they followed that were addressed to people they did not follow. It was causing a large strain on their network and the option simply had to go. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Unfortunately, Twitter also removed the option to not see the @replies addressed to other people you do follow. When one person I follow says something to another person I follow, I see that conversation in my own stream, even though the message wasn’t addressed to me.

I don’t want to see those conversations. They do not involve me and they do not interest me. On rare occasions, I will see something interesting but, 99% of the time, I do not want to see these conversations. It is unwanted clutter in my time line and Twitter has taken out the setting that used to remove it.

I am now in a situation where I simply cannot follow any more people who share my interests. The very fact that we share interests means that we probably both follow a lot of the same people. These people talk to each other because of their shared interests and I would see both sides of the conversation. I’ve already had to unfollow a few people because they were constantly talking to other people I follow and it became just too much. These few people were completely overwhelming my time line.

You see the problem here? This arrangement discourages me from following people who interest me. Every time I do so, Twitter becomes less useful. That is exactly the opposite of how a social network should work and it is frustrating as hell.

I don’t want to unfollow people on Twitter. Some of the people I follow have become friends and I do want to see what they are saying. I just don’t want to eavesdrop on a conversation where I am not involved.

The people at Twitter Inc. need to bring back the option to filter out these @replies. That setting has to come back. This problem has grown to the point where I simply cannot continue to use the service the way it should be used. Twitter, please fix this.

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The answer is no.

Since he asked for it right at the bottom of this article (read it because I’m not summarizing it here), this is an email I just sent to Robert Cringely.

What’s more important: privacy & anonymity or identity & responsibility?

Why don’t we compare the pros and cons?

For anonymity:
In some places, speaking your mind might lead to:

A) You begging the men with clubs to stop beating you into a bloody mass of tissue on the living room floor in front of your family, being thrown in prison without being charged with anything, being tortured every day for months on end and being raped by the prison guards and the other prisoners.

B) Offending a boss who happens to be a bigot and who will fire you for speaking out against bigotry.

C) Harassment and/or danger from the powerful corporation / organization / person / government / mobster / drug dealer you just slagged off on your blog.

D) I could go on until I run out of letters at “Z”, because there are infinite possible ways that being identified with your speech can go badly.

Against anonymity
In some places, speaking your mind might lead to:

A) Someone having their feelings hurt.

B) Well, that’s really the only one, isn’t it?

The rest of us have long since learned how to ignore annoying people without wanting the government to make them stop being mean to us. The option they should look for in the blogging software is called “Comment Moderation.” They should learn to use it if they’re too thin-skinned to deal with trolls.

Update:
8/23/09
Added link to CNN article: The coming-out stories of anonymous bloggers

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I hate it when someone uses the phrase “I have nothing to hide.”

That is a fantastically stupid thing to say. It is one of those seemingly clever, snarky little quips that sounds like it almost means something. It is what someone says when they have lost the argument but are not honest enough to admit it.

The statement is a strawman. It is only vaguely related to the debate at hand and is used in order to change the subject. Rather than an honest debate over privacy, now there is a veiled accusation that perhaps you have done something embarrassing and don’t want anyone to know about it.

It is similar to a violation of Godwin’s law – it derails the debate and everyone involved forgets the fact that no real argument has been made against privacy.

The next time you run into this strawman, there is a very simple way to respond to it and turn it around:

Person A: I have nothing to hide.

Person B: Then print out your home address and a daily schedule showing at which times of day the building will be empty. Copy that information onto 100 fliers and then staple them to utility poles all over town.

Do not accept any of their excuses or their attempts to weasel out of it. Whatever it was you were debating no longer matters – the conversation now is about why this person does not want to post that information in public. They and their growing discomfort are now the subject of the debate, which serves them right for attempting to derail the conversation with nonsense in the first place.

Either they admit they are wrong and acknowledge that some things are simply none of anyone’s business and that it is up to each person to decide where that line is for their own information or they reveal themselves to be a hypocrite and discredit everything they were trying to say.

The most likely outcome will be that they simply vanish from the conversation altogether, which only demonstrates to everyone that they have lost the argument and are too embarrassed to continue.

In the unlikely event the person goes out and actually posts the fliers, it doesn’t matter. It simply means that this is a person who will not change their mind without first learning a painful lesson and that you were never going to convince them with logic anyway. Simply wish them luck and suggest that they may want to double-check that their homeowner’s insurance is up-to-date.

To everyone else who may have been following the discussion without becoming involved, that person will appear to be a fool. Those are the people you can convince and the other person’s stubbornness only makes that easier.

If you are one of the people who feel that privacy doesn’t matter and feels the need to say so in a comment, that is fine. Before you make that comment, you will first need to post a few fliers around town.

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The following is an altered version a column written last year by Simon Singh for The Guardian. In his column, Singh called out many practitioners of Chiropractic therapy for making claims that he says are unsupported by medical science. In response, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) filed a libel lawsuit against Singh.

In most civilized nations, anyone suing for libel must prove that they were, in fact, libeled. Unfortunately, UK law is hopelessly backwards in this area. In an ignorant reversal of common sense, you are required in the UK to prove that you have not libeled the plaintiff.

That has proven to be an excellent method of silencing legitimate criticism in the UK. Singh’s fight against this baseless lawsuit has become a cause celebre for skeptic and science bloggers around the world.

It seems that bloggers are republishing this column everywhere today. Since Singh’s cause is one in which I believe, I will republish it too. This site has free hosting and I have no idea how WordPress.com would react to a complaint, so I’m sticking to a slightly-modified version which omits the specific wording to which the BCA objects.

The original, unedited version of this column can be found at Respectful Insolence.

You also should read this great article by Ben Goldacre: An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers.

(h/t Skepchicks)

Simon Singh
The Guardian, Saturday April 19 2008

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.”

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher.

If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

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The Internet Is Serious Business

Customers of AT&T DSL and U-Verse internet services throughout the United States began to notice Sunday evening that they were cut off from parts of the popular website 4chan.org. In particular, the /r9k/ and the infamous /b/ image boards could not be accessed.

The regions affected were largely in the West, Midwest, parts of Connecticut and Texas. No reports of blockage were reported in other parts of the United States.

AT&T later confirmed to CentralGadget.com that they were blocking portions of the site but did not disclose why they were doing it. Full access to the site was restored at around 1:50AM Eastern Monday morning.

As the news of this event bounced back and forth across the unblocked parts of 4chan, Twitter, IRC chat channels, message boards, blogs and at least three different wiki sites, a clear consensus emerged regarding what AT&T’s reasons might have been for blocking 4chan: censorship.

Several different image boards are hosted at the 4chan.org domain, each with its own theme. Due to their popularity and very heavy usage, the /r9k/ (Robot9000) and /b/ (Random) boards are hosted on their own separate web server.

/b/ is easily one of the most infamous destinations on the world wide web. Graphic, pornographic and highly offensive images are posted to the board on a regular basis. Comments from regular /b/ users – who refer to themselves proudly as /b/tards – are nearly always just as offensive as the images. It is not the sort of site you would want to be caught browsing while at work.

In other words, it is exactly the sort of thing that a censor would want to block.

AT&T’s blockage of 4chan on Sunday was targeted specifically at the web server which hosts /b/ and /r9k/. The rest of the domain was entirely unaffected. This seemed to many to be proof that AT&T was censoring customers’ internet access.

It is not the first time that AT&T has been accused of censorship. In 2007, AT&T tampered with the audio stream of a Pearl Jam concert, which was webcast over AT&T’s network. During the performance and without the permission of the band, AT&T edited from the stream lyrics which were critical of then President George Bush.

There is another possibility however. For the last several weeks, that same web server has been the target of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). One member of an email mailing list suggested that spoofed network packets might be bouncing from 4chan onto AT&T’s network.

It might not have been censorship after all. AT&T might simply have been trying to stop the bounced packets from disrupting their own network.

Since AT&T has failed to disclose exactly what it was they were doing, there is no way to know at this point what their motive may have been. AT&T may release some sort of press announcement later today, as this story already is all over the blogosphere and likely will be picked up by the mainstream press.

Whatever it was they were doing, AT&T seems to have stopped blocking the site. Users who had been blocked earlier began to report at around 1:50AM Eastern time that they could reach the site again.

Of course the entire 4chan site still is under assault from an ongoing denial of service attack. While the site is available, it is loading very slowly.

Update:
As predicted, AT&T has released a statement:

Dallas, Texas, July 27, 2009

Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers. This action was in no way related to the content at img.4chan.org; our focus was on protecting our customers from malicious traffic.

Overnight Sunday, after we determined the denial-of-service threat no longer existed, AT&T removed the block on the IP addresses in question. We will continue to monitor for denial-of-service activity and any malicious traffic to protect our customers.

4chan has released a statement:

For the past three weeks, 4chan has been under a constant DDoS attack. We were able to filter this specific type of attack in a fashion that was more or less transparent to the end user.

Unfortunately, as an unintended consequence of the method used, some Internet users received errant traffic from one of our network switches. A handful happened to be AT&T customers.

In response, AT&T filtered all traffic to and from our img.4chan.org IPs (which serve /b/ & /r9k/) for their entire network, instead of only the affected customers. AT&T did not contact us prior to implementing the block. Here is their statement regarding the matter.

In the end, this wasn’t a sinister act of censorship, but rather a bit of a mistake and a poorly executed, disproportionate response on AT&T’s part. Whoever pulled the trigger on blackholing the site probably didn’t anticipate [nor intend] the consequences of doing so.

We’re glad to see this short-lived debacle has prompted renewed interest and debate over net neutrality and internet censorship—two very important issues that don’t get nearly enough attention—so perhaps this was all just a blessing in disguise.

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