Jorn Berger runs one of the world’s best-known weblogs but his politics are starting to grate. He cites a piece by Arundhati Roy as being “Long, brilliant and passionate” and says she is his “new heroine”.
As you may have noticed, I am somewhat left wing and have my own fears of what America might do in an attempt to wipe out terrorism, but when I read Roy’s piece in the Guardian I was appalled.

She uses the bombing as an excuse to dump all sorts of ill-thought-out abuse on America and global capitalism. She claims that the attacks are a reaction to America’s support of “military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide.” She says that “The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry.” And in an extraordinary rhetorical flourish she says Bin Laden is:

“The American president’s dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.”

At least she has the honesty to admit, “In the absence of information, politicians, political commentators and writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations.”
There is surely no excuse for using the tragic events of 9-11 to score cheap political points and turning a mad religious zealot into some kind of crusader against American excesses…loans 100028 day loans paydaybusiness loan dollar 3 millionloan agloan a sharkloan free georgia in 1st paydayadvance wyoming cash loanloan home http advice remortgage Map

Following up on Sunday’s piece on biometrics, a report in the Register points out the weaknesses in facial recognition software. Even in controlled settings you would get a false acceptance rate (FAR) of one in 250, and in uncontrolled settings (surveillance cameras) it drops to absurdly poor levels: “With indoor light, and a prior image taken at 1.5m camera-subject separations and another taken at 2m camera-subject separations, the best false detection rate (FDR) was 33 per cent, with a false acceptance rate (FAR) of ten per cent.” This means that “to detect 90 per cent of terrorists we’d need to raise an alarm for one in every three people passing through the airport.”
Thanks to Robot Wisdom Weblog for the link.