I read an article in today’s BBC news about a magazine by and for slum dwellers in India. It’s different from the Street Spirit/Spare Change/other publications by the homeless that you see in the states, because the target audience is not the guilt-ridden middle class. It reminds me of a paper I read about “Serving The World’s Poor, Profitably, which made the claim that slums have functional economies on their own and that companies, rather than treating slums as a problem to be solved by the goverment, can instead provide services and goods to slum dwellers, improving their standard of living, while at the same time making (some) profit. When I first read it, it seemed exploitative, but now I’m wondering if market forces really can make substantial differences in the quality of life for the urban poor.

Part of what helped change my mind was hearing a talk about Project Impact, which tries to develop cheaper manufacturing methods for medical technologies and spin those off to companies in India. These things make me wish I did more socially redeeming engineering work.

Go read Susan Sontag’s essay in the NY Times Magazine. Well worth the read, and points out things that I didn’t even realize about the Abu Ghraib photos. For example, the photos we saw in the papers were significantly cropped. Sontag also makes explicit the connection between pornography and these photos, which is something I had been mulling over for a while. The real kicker is her comparison to other visual recordings of torture. These photos are not like those of the Nazis, who did not place themselves in their photographs of atrocities. They bear a much closer resemblance to photographs of lynchings, “which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.” Indeed, as Sontag says, those soldiers are us.

To quote the Shins, “we are a brutal kind.”

The US is pressing criminal charges against Greenpeace for “sailor mongering.”

Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. The idea was to get the sailors so drunk they could be whisked to shore and held in bondage, and a law was passed against it in 1872. It has only been used in a court of law twice, the last time in 1890.

They are being tried for stopping ships bringing in illegally harvested Amazonian mahogany from Brazil. This brings up two questions: is this like charging the Mafia on tax evasion, and how many more ridiculous naval laws are there from the 19th century?

From the Financial Times, via Crooked Timber:

The chilling photographs show US soldiers forcing prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison to simulate sex with each other and to pose naked with US men and women in military uniforms. Others show a detainee with wires attached to his body in an attempt to convince him he might be electrocuted, and naked prisoners stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written in English on his skin.

I looked at the photos (warning: pretty graphic) this morning and it put me off my lunch. At the risk of conflating unrelated issues, the president seems to think that the US is a country for white people:

There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.

I can’t tell if Bush is using the “royal we” or if he’s promoting the “democracy: it’s not just for white people” line. In any event, it’s always good policy to call your critics racists when you don’t want to admit you made a mistake. Given those photos, it seems that some of those people whose beliefs he rejects are the ones on the ground bringing democracy to Iraq.

I would love to believe that those photos are not representative of systematic problems, but Amnesty International disagrees. Who is providing training to these interrogators? Who should be held accountable for these abuses?

One of the soldiers facing court martial, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, reported that “We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things…like rules and regulations, and it just wasn’t happening.”

Apparently he’s a reservist who works as a corrections officer. I suppose that the procedure for military prisoners is different, but is that an excuse for these abuses? Here’s Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Perhaps some more training is in order. Or we can just turn the whole mess over in June and make it someone else’s problem.

Images having ALT tags is a good thing — this allows those dinosaurs who still use lynx to get a description of an image, assuming the content provider has decided to provide an accurate description of the image’s contents. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and ALT tag contents are often woefully inadequate and suffer from the oft-humorous ambiguity of our human languages. Consider this picture from the front page of the BBC site, pointing to their story Bush accused of anti-gay Stance. When it was loading in Firefox, I got to see the ALT tag briefly. The full tag reads: “Gay couple smell flowers prior to their planned wedding in San Francisco.” The only thing that displayed in the small space taken up by the image was “Gay couple smell.”

My distinguished governor has decreed that the gay marriage licenses in San Francisco represent “an imminent risk to civil order.” He’s right on the money. Once those gay people get married, they’re going to start rioting, smashing windows of shops, looting, burning cars. They’ll be worse than Patriots fans in Kenmore Square after the Superbowl. Unless we stop them right now, San Francisco might have to get put under martial law. I’m just waiting for him to say he wants to “terminate” the licenses.