etbe - Russell Coker

Parsing Daemontools/Multilog dates in Shell Script

I run some servers that use the DJB Daemontools to manage their daemons [1]. This is something I would have changed years ago if given a chance because DJB software always seems to do things in a different way to other Unix software and causes pain. Unfortunately when you have a lot of semi-embedded systems that have intermittent net access it’s really not easy to change things, and having staff who aren’t computer experts who have been trained to use certain DJB software makes it even more difficult.

Daemontools uses multilog [2] to manage it’s logging, this gives dates of the format @400000004deedcea1e4a18d4. While DJB has written a tool to parse this it’s not always convenient, and I don’t want to install DJB software on every system that might be used for reading logs (among other things DJB software is not included in any popular distribution).

George Bernard Shaw says that “All progress depends on the unreasonable man” [3], of course he never participated in a large-scale software development project. In the modern age progress usually depends on people who can work with others, which is why DJB software doesn’t get used much – for every DJB program there is a similar program written by someone else that works about equally well on it’s own and is more than 10* more popular because of better interoperability.

So I wrote the following script to convert DJB dates to regular dates. It takes a DJB format date as the first command-line parameter as I generally just paste the relevant date into a different window. At some future time I may write a program to parse an entire log file and convert all the dates but I haven’t had a need for it yet. I think that I’ve done the hardest work involved in writing such a parser so someone else can use this as a starting point if they have such a need.

#!/bin/bash
set -e
DATE=$(echo $1|cut -c 10-17)
SECS=$(echo -e ibase=16\\n$(echo $DATE|tr "[a-z]" "[A-Z]")|bc)
exec date -d "1970-01-01 $SECS sec utc"

Evil Psychologists

Last year the Psychologist and Baptist minister George Rekers who is famous for anti-homosexuality pseudo-science was discovered to be hiring gay escorts from Rentboy.com. Lots of LULZ there.

But the story didn’t end there. It turns out that George Rekers did some research on a child who ended up committing suicide as an adult, and the circumstantial evidence suggests that George’s actions are directly related to the suicide [1]. The Rentboy.com affair doesn’t seem so funny now.

The Box Turtle Bulletin has a series of articles about Kirk Andrew Murphy’s suicide and the roles of George Rekers and Richard Green in all of this [2], the articles are well written and generally appear to be well researched – I recommend reading the articles if you can stomach them (lots of nasty stuff is described).

The section answering the question of who’s responsible for the mistreatment of Kirk Andrew Murphy [3] where they describe the use of ABA (AKA the Lovaas Technique) is interesting. Ivar Lovaas worked with George Rekers in such “research” and published a paper with him. The term ABA gets an immediate hostile reaction in the Autism community, but until now I hadn’t realised why so many people hate it so much. It seems that to some extent I made the classic mistake of misjudging the reports of Autistic people who are unable to present their case well (as opposed to the psychologists who can present any position very well even if it’s utterly insane). In the past I had the impression that ABA wasn’t inherently bad, it was just implemented in a bad way in some cases – now it seems that ABA was designed in an evil way right from the start.

There is one massive problem with the Box Turtle analysis, he says “Behavioral analysts donâ€™t dig around much into peopleâ€™s feelings, fears, dreams, family relationships or childhood memories. Indeed, in cases like autism, Lovaasâ€™s specialty, those avenues of exploration would be irrelevant“. It could be that Jim Burroway (the Box Turtle writer) is merely quoting someone else without attribution, but even so saying that the “feelings, fears, and dreams” of a group of people are “irrelevant” is just awful, a statement that denies the humanity of a group of people can’t be quoted without further explanation.

In his article about ABA Jim refers to childhood Autism as “a condition for which there is no hope for interior change” [4]. I’m not sure if he’s just saying that Autistic children are incapable of learning or whether it’s all Autistic people, in either case it’s nonsense in terms of science and nasty as well.

Generally I expect that members of various minority groups will show more sympathy to each other than they receive from the general population. Jim’s posts are a great disappointment. I understand that he would be rather stressed about the horrible things that George Rekers et al did, but even so he should be able to avoid that sort of thing. Jim is obviously a very talented writer and can do better.

One might think that Jim’s posts use the word “Autism” to refer only to the people who are non-verbal (or in other ways less capable than the huge number of Autistic people who work for companies like Google and IBM). But that’s no excuse either. You can find blogs and essays written by non-verbal Autistic people that describe their experiences if you care to search for them. It’s obvious that they are people too and deserve to be treated as people not objects. Abusing Autistic children to try and make them impersonate NT children is no less evil than abusing children who don’t fit gender norms.

Rallying for a Carbon Tax 5th June

It’s not that common to have a rally in favor of creating a new tax, but today I attended the Melbourne rally in favor of a “carbon tax” [1], it was the second such event this year. The rally was held in front of the state library, there is a reasonable size park there and it’s a great place for a few hundred people, and a few thousand can squeeze in there without any problem. But according to the best estimates 10,000 people attended and the venue was obviously a bad choice as all available space was used and the crowd was so great that it wasn’t much fun to be there. This was a great contrast to the previous rally in favor of a carbon tax which had maybe about 8,000 people attend and a much larger area [2]. The state library is a great place to hold a small or medium size rally where people can see it, but if you are going to get 10,000 people you need a bigger venue – as the exits were partially blocked by road work I’m sure that the local government wouldn’t have given a permit if so many people were expected.

Usually the city center is very quiet on a Sunday afternoon, but this afternoon everything was packed. An extra 10,000 people really makes a difference – although admittedly sunny weather would have helped. Australia wide there were apparently about 100,000 people attending similar rallies, that’s 0.5% of the population of the country!

The aim of the rally was to advocate a large enough tax on coal, oil, and other energy sources that emit CO2 to provide an economic incentive to minimise use and use alternate energy sources where possible. Currently billions of dollars are being given to polluting industries, instead those industries should be taxed and the money raised given to compensate needy people.

Looking North towards where I entered.

Two pictures from slightly different angles that are roughly East from where I was standing in the center of the crowd.

Pictures looking east through the band when people were starting to leave and looking south towards the exit I chose while on the way out.

Leaving Three

In February I started the process of moving my phone and my wife’s phone to Virgin from Three [1]. The reason is that Three didn’t offer any good phones on affordable contracts, the cheapest that was suitable was a HTC Desire HD which would have cost me $55 per month, while I could justify spending that for my own phone (which is used for responding to SMS from Nagios to fix client servers) I didn’t have the budget to spend that much on my wife’s phone too – and I really want us to have the same type of phone for ease of support. So I chose Virgin who offers the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for as little as $29 per month – I chose a $39 per month deal that included 1500MB of data transfer and also had three months free which makes it effectively $34.12 per month.

When using previous phones that weren’t particularly smart I had also carried a Netbook and a 3G modem with me most of the time. Now that I have a phone that is a ssh client I don’t need that so I tried to cancel the contract today.

Three allows you to do almost everything over the Internet except cancel a contract – their web site doesn’t even give a phone number to call for that purpose. This must keep their support people busy, Vodaphone (which has just merged with Three) has recently had a horrible security breach because their sales booths used public Internet access for all customer data [2]. Also there is currently a law suit against Vodafone for poor network performance and misleading claims about service areas [3]. My experience with Three performance has been reasonably good apart from the fact that they advertised 3G service in Bendigo and provided none.

As Three are apparently desperate to retain customers they offered me free service for 6 months if I don’t close the account now. So I have a SIM that supports 1G of 3G data transfer per month for no charge until December (worth $90). What can I do with it? I don’t own a 3G modem as I gave that to my parents (who are quite happy with pre-paid 3G net access via Three) and the phones that I have which can be used for tethering are a little slow (usable for ssh and basic web access but not for Youtube etc).

Is there a way of selling such a SIM? Note that my name is still on the contract and any excess data or roaming fees will be billed to me so I can’t just put it on ebay.

I guess that one thing I can do is to use the SIM for receiving phone calls. For example if a friend was visiting from another country and wanted to receive calls without paying roaming fees I could lend them a phone.

Any ideas?

Ziggy’s Lecture about Nuclear Power

The Event

I just attended a lecture by Dr Ziggy Switkowski (see the above picture) on the topic of nuclear power, for a long time Ziggy has been the most prominent advocate of nuclear power in Australia, so naturally the talk was pro-nuclear. The lecture was free for alumni of Swinburne University and introduced by Swinburne’s Chancellor who described Ziggy as a friend.

Before the lecture started I handed out flyers for Beyond Zero Emissions [1] with a plan for zero carbon use in Australia by 2020. That was more difficult than handing out Greens polling cards on election day. The people who attended were there for a purpose and they could see the free food and wine on offer inside the building so getting them to stop and take a brochure wasn’t easy. There were also people from Friends of the Earth [2] and some other anti-nuclear organisations giving out brochures.

There were also some anti-nuclear protesters dressed as Uranium miners and the specter of nuclear contamination, they made for an interesting picture (which is amazingly good for a phone camera 20 minutes after sunset), but got in the way when I was handing out brochures. There were a few university security people at the door trying to keep the opposition away who were a bit annoying. There was also one policeman in attendance who was quite friendly, he asked whether there was a competition between the different groups as there is when handing out how-to-vote cards on election day.

15 minutes before the lecture was due to start I quit handing out the brochures and went inside for free food and drink (food always tastes better when the other team pays the bill).

The Lecture

I felt that Ziggy did a poor job of advocating nuclear power. There were a number of gaping flaws in his argument, but I have to commend him for his honesty in his appraisal of how hard it would be to develop a nuclear industry in Australia. Most nuclear advocates are a lot more optimistic about the process of building nuclear power plants and training all the people to run them.

I will write a post tomorrow rebutting some of Ziggy’s arguments.

After the Lecture

Immediately after the lecture the vice-chancellor stated that 500 people registered which made it the best attended such lecture that they have held. I don’t know how many of the 500 attended, but I did notice that about 1/4 of the seats in the lecture hall were empty. It’s rather sad that they can’t get more people to such lectures, is TED.com stealing the audience?

When I got out of the building I started handing out brochures to people as they left. I noticed that they were a lot friendlier than they were on the way in. I believe that people who left the lecture had greater interest in renewable energy because Ziggy just failed to make a good case for nuclear power. I expect that anyone who hadn’t already made up their mind would immediately want to research the alternatives after watching Ziggy’s lecture.

[1] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/
[2] http://www.foe.org.au/

Links May 2011

John W. Dean wrote in insightful series of three articles for Findlaw about Authoritarian Conservatives [1]. In summary there are Authoritarian Followers who follow their leader blindly and Authoritarian Leaders who do whatever it takes to gain and maintain power. The Authoritarian mindset lends itself towards right-wing politics.

Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring TED talk about his work developing a system to produce art that is controlled by eye movements [2]. The development work was started to support the quadriplegic graffiti artist TEMPT1. Mick’s most noteworthy point is that all the hardware design and software are free so anyone can implement it without asking an insurance company or hospital (this is one of the few occasions when a TED speaker has received a standing ovation during a talk). The Eyewriter.org site has the designs and source which is licensed under the GPL [3].

Morgan Spurlock (who is famous for “Supersize Me”) gave an amusing TED talk titled “The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold” [4]. He provides some interesting information about the brand sponsorship process and his new movie “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold”.

Ralph Langner gave an interesting TED talk about reverse-engineering the Stuxnet worm and discovering that it was targetted at the Iranian nuclear program [5]. The fact that the Stuxnet environment could be turned to other uses such as disrupting power plants is a great concern, particularly as it has special code to prevent automatic safety systems from activating.

Angela Belcher gave an interesting TED talk about using nature to grow batteries [6]. She is evolving and engineering viruses to manufacture parts of batteries and assemble them, the aim is to scale up the process to manufacture batteries for the Prius and other large devices at room temperature with no toxic materials. She is also working on biological methods of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen which has the obvious potential for fuel-cell power and also solar PV cells. As an aside she mentions giving a copy of the Periodic Table to Barack Obama and he told her that he will “look at it periodically”.

Bruce Schnier gave a good overview of the issues related to human perceptions of security in his TED talk about The Security Mirage [7]. There isn’t much new in that for people who have been doing computer work but it’s good to have an overview of lots of issues.

TED has an interesting interview with Gerry Douglas about his work developing touch-screen computer systems for processing medical data in Malawi [8]. This is worth reading by everyone who is involved in software design, many of the things that he has done go against traditional design methods.

Mike Matas gave an interesting demo at TED of the first proper digital book [9]. The book is by Al Gore and is run on the iPad/iPhone platform (hopefully they will have an Android version soon). His company is in the business of licensing software for creating digital books. The demonstration featured a mixture of pictures, video, audio, and maps with the pinch interface to move them around.

Dr Sommers of Tufts University wrote an interesting post for Psychology Today titled “Why it’s Never About Race [10]. It seems that there are lots of patterns of people being treated differently on the basis of race but for every specific case no-one wants to believe that racial bias was involved.

The Register has an amusing article about what might have happened if Kate had left Prince William at the altar [11].

Fiorenzo Omenetto gave an interesting TED talk about synthetic silk [12]. He is working on developing artificial fibers and solids based on the same proteins as silk which can be used for storing information (DVDs and holograms), medical implants (which can be re-absorbed into the body and which don’t trigger an immune response), and cups among other things. Maybe my next tie will have a “no pupae were harmed in the production” notice. ;)

The CDC has released a guide to preparing for a Zombie apocalypse [13], while it’s unlikely that Zombies will attack, the same suggestions will help people prepare for the other medical emergencies that involve the CDC.

Salon has an interesting article by Glenn Greenwald who interviewed Benjamin Ferencz about aggressive warfare [14]. Benjamin was a prosecutor for war crimes at Nuremberg after WW2 and compares the US actions since 9-11 with what was deemed to be illegal by the standards of WW2.

Eli Pariser gave an interesting TED talk about Online Filter Bubbles [15]. He claims that services such as Facebook and Google should give more of a mixture of results rather than targetting for what people want. The problem with this idea is that presenting links that someone doesn’t want to click doesn’t do any good. It’s not as if the filter bubble effect relies on modern media or can be easily solved.

Terry Moore gave a TED talk about how to tie shoelaces [16]. Basically he advocates using a doubly-slipped Reef Knot instead of a doubly-slipped Granny Knot. Now I just need to figure out how to tie a doubly-slipped Reef Knot quickly and reliably. Terry uses this as a mathaphor for other ways in which one might habitually do something in a non-optimal way.

Are Assholes Essential to a Free Software Project?

What do Assholes do?

Rusty just wrote a post titled “If you didnâ€™t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldnâ€™t boot” [1] about some of the anti-social tendencies demonstrated by programmers, including some that are implied to be fairly important. His post seems to imply that there are really great programmers who are anti-social and that we should just put up with it because of their great code.

One of the problems with his post is that he doesn’t define “asshole”. Holocaust deniers and all other Nazi supporters seem to clearly by assholes by any definition. People who have silly ideas about medicine and tell others seem to be merely misguided (although my dictionary gives “stupid or irritating or ridiculous” in the definition of “asshole” so technically they can meet the criteria).

In the comments Rusty states that “nuttiness is relative”. While that is correct it doesn’t seem to have much bearing on whether someone is an asshole. For example I know some very nice people who are utterly convinced by creationism.

Is Anyone Essential to Free Software?

Most projects have one person or several people in leadership positions, usually there seems to be a combination of project management and lead-programmer positions. Such people are obviously quite important to a project. But we have seen examples of people dying, being employed by Microsoft, retiring, relicensing the source in a bad way, and just losing interest without the project ceasing.

It seems clear that in most cases when a project which has a significant amount of use has significant bugs and no maintainer then someone will step in. The cases where no-one takes over the project are often resolved by someone creating a competing project. If no-one takes over an abandoned Free Software project then it’s a strong indication that the project wasn’t particularly important anyway.

I have no doubt that if any bug or missing feature made Linux systems stop booting then someone would fix it quite quickly.

In a more general sense it seems that every time someone takes a position in a project that is of wide interest they are displacing someone else who might have done the job. When you volunteer to do significant work for a project you may be displacing someone who is more skillful than you – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as there are plenty of other projects to work on, some of which require more skill.

Growing More Programmers

It seems to me that a large part of becoming a great programmer is facing great challenges. People who could be described as “optimistic” or “arrogant” will tend to take on more challenging tasks and therefore learn more. I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who have the potential to be great programmers apart from not taking on the challenging work, this seems to be an unfortunate waste of talent. Given a large enough population if someone leaves a senior position there should be someone else who can obtain the skills needed to take over. One advantage of this for Free Software development is that even if the best person to take on the challenge isn’t living in the most convenient continent that won’t be an obstacle, while with proprietary software development projects the teams are small and it’s common that no-one else is capable of stepping up to a lead position. Another advantage is that when the lead developer leaves there are generally many candidates to replace them, all of whom can start work and be judged on the work that they do.

I think that the best claims that can be made regarding essential people are not in regard to technical skill alone but to a combination of technical and people skills. Getting a group of programmers to work together is really hard but it’s something that needs to be done for any significant project. Also the larger projects tend not to stand alone, being able to get changes included in other projects requires some skill.

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick gave an insightful talk at Google IO 2008 titled “How to Protect Your Open Source Project From Poisonous People” [2]. The first half of their talk is mostly about people who are misguided or difficult rather than what most people would consider “poisonous” and the second half is more about people who are actively poisonous and need to be removed. They advocate a community based on Politeness, Respect, Trust, and Humility. They describe in detail how the methods they advocate result in the members of their community being more productive, it seems obvious that those principles will lead to better career growth for people within the community and more friendly people wanting to join.

When is being an Asshole OK?

I once worked for a company that apparently had a team consisting solely of assholes. Apparently one asshole got promoted to management and after some internal transfers they ended up with all the assholes in the company on one team. I guess that when someone has negative interactions with everyone they won’t notice the difference if they are put in a team where everyone is difficult. For a corporate environment that lacks a “no jerks” hiring policy this is probably a good way of improving productivity overall. I am not aware of any significant Free Software project that was comprised of mostly jerks – although I have seen a few with dysfunctional environments that encourage the worst behavior from their members.

The smaller Free Software projects have less need for people who can relate to other people. There are many useful Free Software projects which have only one developer, in most cases anyone can take the source code and use it without dealing with the author. But even for a single-developer project an asshole can cause some serious problems. One example I know of concerns a developer who had unclear licenses and started making legal threats in response to a request for a clear license. Another example is of a developer who released code that was designed to not work when one particular user compiled it and redistributed the binaries. Both of them caused some significant amounts of time to be wasted by people who were unfortunate enough to develop systems that interacted with the code in question, and even more time was wasted when some misguided people defended them in the inevitable flame-wars.

Even for a project with only one developer it’s still better for everyone if that developer isn’t an asshole.

One comment I’ve seen related to this issue suggesting that some types of asshole behavior shouldn’t be a problem – an example that was cited is a colleague who cheats on a romantic partner. Jeremy Clyman (who is currently doing a Ph.D in Psychology) has written an interesting article about this for Psychology Today [3]. He reviews the movie “The Dilemma” which deals with someone catching their colleague’s wife cheating. Jeremy analyses the psychological issues involved and how they can (among other things) impact the ability for such people to work. I once worked in an office where two married employees were very open about having an affair and we were all apparently expected to lie on their behalf if necessary, it really affected the quality of the working environment.

Extreme Assholes

There are lots of people involved in Free Software development who are difficult and many who are to some extent assholes. But some of them take being an asshole to the extreme, such as Holocaust deniers (an example which Rusty used). In the comments on his post the Westboro Baptist Church is also mentioned.

It is possible to entirely disagree with someone on a contentious issue such as abortion but still be able to get along with them. But when someone supports a hate-based organisation such as the WBC or supports Nazis in any way then there will be many people who just can’t tolerate them – and no-one should be expected to tolerate such people.

I have seen two instances where Free Software developers advocated pro-Nazi positions (one had an archive of neo-Nazi propaganda and the other claimed that Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust). Neither of the pro-Nazi programmers was evicted for defending Nazis, but both of them ended up leaving the community in adverse ways – after causing other damage in the mean time.

I don’t think it takes any great ability to predict the future to determine that someone who defends Nazis will eventually end up doing something that requires expulsion and drive away users and developers in the mean-time. There is no possibility that someone can support the Nazi or WBC ideology only when not associated with your project, it will affect all aspects of their life.

When a Holocaust denier is allowed to be a member of a community it also sends out a message that members of the groups which were persecuted by Nazis aren’t particularly welcome in the community.

Helping Minor Assholes

There are a lot of people who don’t have malevolent aims but who unintentionally cause some difficulty (it seems that the truly malicious are a tiny minority). I don’t think that excusing the bad things that they do on the basis of writing good code helps them in the long term. Many of the suggestions that Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick make seem likely to help people who don’t want to be assholes and direct them towards positive involvement in the community.

One trend that seems apparent is the non-linear response to certain types of bad behavior. There is often little difference in severity between something that gets almost no attention and something that results in a large and extremely hostile reaction. If someone persists in acting like an asshole for long enough it seems to be inevitable that they will eventually exceed some threshold for what is tolerated and get a very significant negative response. It would be good if things didn’t need to get to that stage.

I think that the most unfortunate aspect of Rusty’s blog post is that most people will probably interpret it as encouragement to write better code as a way of getting a free pass for being an asshole. I know that this isn’t what Rusty intended, but most people on the Internet don’t know Rusty as well as I do.

Conclusion

Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick seem to have some of the best ideas for how to deal with these issues when you control a project, but most of us aren’t in that position.

Everyone can advocate better behavior.

Extreme assholes need to be removed quickly and without a great debate about their contributions, freedom of speech, or other issues.

Since considering this issue I’ve been wondering about when one should avoid the lesser assholes and asshole-positive environments. People tend to adapt to their environment, so if you associate with assholes a lot then there’s a good chance you will start to become like them.

Book Company Bankruptcy

In February Borders went bankrupt [1], since then they have been in the slow process of closing down. Now Borders is trying to clear the last of their stock and offering 80% discounts off the marked price.

I bought a book by Stephen Baxter and one by Peter F. Hamilton and those appeared to be the last two books worth buying (IMHO) on the almost empty sci-fi shelves, the books were a little tattered but at 80% discount I’m not complaining.

It’s been almost four years since I last bought books, and I still haven’t read all the free sci-fi stories and watched all the free sci-fi movies from the net which interest me [2]. So I’m not planning to buy many more books unless I see something better than a 50% discount.

Paul Wayper writes about the difficulty of buying ebooks [3]. It’s ironic that some people have claimed that ebooks were part of the cause of Borders financial troubles given that they really aren’t working well, not even for the most dedicated buyers. In related news Kobo (the company that runs the Borders ebook store) has assured customers that they won’t lose the books that they own [4]. There are very few situations in which a company needs to assure customers that they won’t lose property that they have paid for and received due to a corporate bankruptcy.

As further evidence that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is a bad thing, Apple have shut down the iFlow Reader [5] so that they can monopolise ebook sales on the iPhone and iPad. This is a good reason to avoid restricted platforms (such as anything from Apple) and encrypted content.

It seems to me that Cory Doctorow’s scheme for giving copies of his books to libraries is a more effective way of donating in return for a free ebook [6] (which is rather similar to the “buy one get one” scheme that they used to run for OLPC). Hopefully Charles Stross will end up doing something similar to make Paul Wayper happy.

Preventing the End of the World

Some crazy people led by Harold Camping who call themselves Christian claimed that the world was going to end yesterday [1]. Harold had previously done this in 1994 so he’s got form for predictions that don’t come true.

The bible says that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” [2], so obviously Jesus can’t return on a day when billboards all around the world are predicting him! Maybe rather than being wrong, Harold has in fact prevented the end of the world by predicting it correctly!

Now if a church like Harold’s can make predictions separated by slightly less than 17 years (let’s round it off to 6000 days) then we only need 6000 such churches scheduled to predict different days to cause the rapture to be indefinitely deferred. If the churches were to predict which week the world would end then we would only need something less than 900 such churches – or maybe 1800 so we have redundancy.

It seems that Harold Camping makes his money by scaring gullible people into selling everything they own and giving the money to him [3]. If we are to achieve the goal of having someone forecast the end of the world every day then it would be good if such people were forced to raise money more often than every 17 years. A good solution to this might be a tax on “end of days” religious investments, money that was given to a religious corporation or sole trader following a scare about the end of the world could be subject to a 100% tax rate if not spent within 1 year. Then Harold would be forced to make a prediction for every year and thus give us greater protection from the end of the world.

</Satire>

But seriously we need to tax religious organisations in the same way as other companies. A religious organisation that gives money to help the needy can use that as a tax deduction, and operating expenses such as paying salaries of staff are also tax deductable. So the serious religious groups would have a tax rate that is fairly close to zero anyway. When a religious leader wants to have 27 Rolls Royces they should be forced to pay tax on all that money, and additionally they should be compelled to publish a statement of company accounts for everyone who gave money – just as corporations are compelled to provide information to stock-holders.

Currently various religious organisations are denouncing Harold and his followers to try and save Christianity from ridicule (here’s one example [4]). It seems to me that if they want to avoid ridicule they should advocate that religious organisations be forced to open their books and pay tax on their profits so that people like Harold can’t use religion as a money-making scam.

Osama bin Laden

After almost 10 years the Americans finally found Osama bin Laden, unfortunately they were unable to take him alive. The Reid Report has a good summary of what happened [1].

Sam Varghese wrote an interesting analysis of the political aspects of this event in Pakistan [2], and he’s a lot less positive about it than most people. Later he wrote about the inconsistencies in the reports, it seems that bin Laden was executed while unarmed [3]. When dealing with someone who is no stranger to suicide attacks and who has stated an intention to never be taken alive it’s not unreasonable to shoot quickly, it’s just a pity that they couldn’t have been honest from the start.

Dr. Pamela Gerloff wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today titled “Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Ladenâ€™s Death” [4]. She asks the rhetorical questions “What kind of nation and what kind of species do we want to be? Do we want to become a species that honors life? Do we want to become a species that embodies peace?” and suggests that we should mourn the series of tragedies that led up to this situation and to “feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play any role in killing another”.

Daniel R. Hawes wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today that’s quite different from Dr. Gerloff’s article [5]. He is quite glad that bin Laden is dead. But he considers how the people who have lost friends and relatives on 9-11 might feel about this and says that “the shouts and celebratory chants that rang around America today seemed to me to carry a certain element of irreverence for those affected most deeply by the September 11 attacks and the entire military operations that followed”.

To represent the people who are partying now there is a post by Jenny Lind Schmitt that is totally unworthy of a site such as Psychology Today [6]. Jenny told her small children about al Quaeda: “They hate you because you are American. Their god is destruction, and they would kill you, a little child, if they had the chance, just because you are American.” She also describes al Quaeda as “lunatics”. Describing all your enemies as “lunatics” is quite common in general conversation, but it’s not suitable for a web site that discusses psychology (where some respect for people with mental health issues is expected). Teaching children to be bigoted against Islam is a bad thing too. It seems to me that a factor in the violence that comes from the middle-east is a result of women just like her telling their children similar things but with country names and religions switched. Finally some capacity for empathy is required for someone to have any insight into psychology, someone who can’t understand such things can’t be competent to discuss psychology.

In stark contrast to Jenny (who bears an irrational hatred in spite of apparently not having any close connection to the events in question) there is a TED talk by Phyllis Rodriguez (who’s son was killed in the 9-11 attacks) and Aicha el-Wafi (who’s son is in jail for being a member of al Quaeda and was accused of being part of the 9-11 plot) [7]. The two women became friends after 9-11 and work together in the cause of peace. From reading some interviews that Google turned up Aicha seems like a very intelligent woman, I think that the TED talk with her section translated from French to English didn’t seem to show this. Perhaps people who speak French and English would get more from the TED talk than I did. Also perhaps if she gave a talk to a French audience and it was subtitled then the result would be better.

Now of course the less intelligent people on the right-wing are trying to spin this to say that Bush deserves credit for getting bin Laden. The Reid Report has a good analysis of the history of the hunt for bin Laden and it doesn’t make Bush look good [8]. Also the Reid Report has an interesting analysis of the operation to get bin Laden and the possibility for peace now that he’s gone [9].

LA Times has an article about the use of the name Geronimo as a code-word for bin Laden [10]. But compared to the use of words such as “crusade” and “paladin” by the US armed forces this hardly rates a mention.

etbe – Russell Coker

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