Eideard

Americans who prefer to fly without showing ID will be turned away by airport security beginning June 21, unless they can convince screeners that their driver’s license or passport has been lost, according to a Transportation Security Administration policy change.

The TSA describes the identification rule change as the “latest in a series designed to facilitate travel for legitimate passengers while enhancing the agency’s risk-based focus — on people, not things.”

Under the current regulations, travelers who don’t wish to show identification can opt for extra-screening instead, under secret rules made public in a case brought by civil libertarian John Gilmore. Gilmore sought to overturn the requirement on constitutional grounds, but lost when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Americans have a right to travel, just not necessarily by plane.

The new policy is about authority and beginning of the end of privacy while traveling. It has nothing to do with security.

Britain has turned over classified material to U.S. military prosecutors at Guantánamo Bay about a British prisoner’s allegations that he was interrogated and tortured in Morocco after secretly being taken there by the CIA.

The prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, was charged by U.S. military prosecutors last month with conspiracy and material support for terrorism, and the Foreign Office said in a letter to his lawyer that the evidence it gave to the Pentagon could be “exculpatory and relevant.”

In the letter, which has not been made public, the Foreign Office acknowledged that it had previously denied – to the defendant’s lawyers and to a parliamentary committee – having had any information pertaining to Mohamed.

The Foreign Office told the lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that it could not reveal the contents of the classified material, but that the U.S. prosecutors had an obligation to turn it over to the defense before any trial.

The Foreign Office wrote June 6 to Stafford Smith. “We have…written to the U.S. authorities asking them to investigate Mr. Mohamed’s allegations of mistreatment.”

The U.S. State Department informed the British Embassy in Washington this year that there would not be an investigation.

Mohamed has said that while in Morocco, the torture included being cut on his chest and genitals with a razor. Stafford Smith has said that photographs were taken of Mohamed’s injuries by U.S. military personnel.

We have one batch of sleazy, lying politicians admitting their complicity with another batch of criminals. Denying responsibility. Ignoring human rights that help define how we differ from terrorist fanatics.

How can you have anything other than contempt for either gang of self-serving bureaucrats?

In Russia, they just unveiled a bronze monument to, uh, the enema. I am not making this up. A health spa specializing in illnesses of the digestive tract commissioned a $42,000 statue of cherubs carrying an enema syringe. When balloons lifted a red drape into the sky this week, there it was…

The artist was inspired by a classic Botticelli painting, and she says she sees irony in the work. I guess maybe she should call the thing ”The Ironic Colonic.”

The monument to the medical instrument used to introduce liquids into the body via the anus is the only one of its kind in Russia, the hospital said.

Cripes! I hope it’s the only one in the world.

Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) put off a vote on the contempt resolutions while he considers his options. “I don’t think we’ve had a situation like this since Richard Nixon was president,” he said.

A consistent policy from thugs accustomed to having their own way. After all, Congress abdicated any responsibility to represent the electorate, long ago. The meager Democrat majority consistently fails to muster the backbone to challenge the White House.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani expert on the Taliban, who until 9/11 knew them better than almost any outsider, has over the decades turned out to be something of a prophet in the region, though mostly of the Cassandra type.

A longtime critic of the Taliban who raised alarms about the group back in the mid-1990s, Rashid, 59, has just come out with his fourth book: “Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”, a caustic compendium of the mistakes by the Bush administration and, by extension, its regional allies, in tackling Islamic militancy.

His central argument is not original: that the money and blood spent on Iraq should have been invested instead in Afghanistan, rebuilding the country after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 drove the Taliban from power, in order to prevent the Taliban resurgence so much in evidence now. Since that was not done, Rashid says, the options for stabilizing Afghanistan have dwindled to one: Pakistan must cut its ties to the Afghan Taliban…

“The Pakistani Army needs to make a strategic decision to dump support for the Afghan Taliban leadership in Quetta,” he said, referring to the desert city in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan where the Afghan Taliban keep a rear base. “The Afghan Taliban can be quietly arrested and put under house arrest.”

Only after that, he says, will Pakistan, and by extension, the United States, be able to reduce the threat from Al Qaeda and their brethren, the Pakistani Taliban who operate out of the tribal lands. If the Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan are not eliminated, the United States and its NATO allies will find it impossible to win what has turned out to be an unexpectedly prolonged war in Afghanistan.

Intricate, knowledgeable article. Guaranteed to be ignored by the White House, Congresscritters running for re-election, the RNC and John McCain.

Posting a vehicle’s fuel efficiency in “gallons per mile” rather than “miles per gallon” would help consumers make better decisions about car purchases and environmental impact, researchers report.

Inspired by debates they had while carpooling in a hybrid car, management professors Richard Larrick and Jack Soll ran a series of experiments showing that the current standard, miles per gallon or mpg, leads consumers to believe that fuel consumption is reduced at an even rate as efficiency improves. People presented with a series of car choices in which fuel efficiency was defined in miles per gallon were not able to easily identify the choice that would result in the greatest gains in fuel efficiency.

For example, most people ranked an improvement from 34 to 50 mpg as saving more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 18 to 28 mpg, even though the latter saves twice as much gas. (Going from 34 to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons; but from 18 to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons).

These mistaken impressions were corrected, however, when participants were presented with fuel efficiency expressed in gallons used per 100 miles rather than mpg. Viewed this way, 18 mpg becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 mpg is 3.6 gallons per 100 miles — an $8 difference today.

“The reality that few people appreciate is that improving fuel efficiency from 10 to 20 mpg is actually a more significant savings than improving from 25 to 50 mpg for the same distance of driving,” Larrick said. (See table above.)

John C. Dvorak was chuckling over this headline in his Tech5 podcast the other day. I decided to Post the article to lead folks to the details.

Essentially, Americans suck at arithmetic. This system is supposed to be easier for the math-challenged to understand. Even if you get the car builders and retailers to adopt the new system, I think the average American ain’t going to have a better understanding of comparative fuel consumption.