Et tu, Cthulhu

Mike has an illuminating account of his wife’s US visa application process over on his activity log. It’s interesting reading and contains some useful tips. Check it out.

Sometimes, following a lead to its conclusion yields very satisfying results.

I was digging around old articles today to see where the widely differing numbers on Iraq mortality rates were coming from, hoping to be able to calculate a weighted average for my own opinion’s sake (with the weights based on perceived bias of the source). An article in a Norwegian newspaper had pretty good coverage of the latest “controversial” estimate of 300k-600k additional deaths, and it included a link to a “widely respected” dissenting paper, the so-called Iraq Index, which claims the toll is in the 30k-50k range.

Now, checking the Iraq Index’s sources, I saw several referrals to an organization called IRI (the International Republican Institute). On their web site, they claim to be “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization (which) advances freedom and democracy worldwide”. So how do they do that? A little Google shake turned up this. An excerpt:

“The International Republican Institute, an arm of Bush’s party apparatus funded by the US government, admits to providing tactical training for Pan. Did Pan also make use of the purloined citizen files? (US contractor ChoicePoint, its Mexican agents facing arrest for taking the data, denied wrongdoing and vowed to destroy its copies of the lists. But what of Mr Bush’s copy?)”

I’d heard of the data theft before, but this is a new angle to me. IRI replied:

“As our web site also shows, IRI’s “tactical training” consists of helping members of the Mexican congress improve services for constituents, assisting political parties with internal party democracy, and encouraging women and young people to become involved in politics.”

Encouraging women and young people to become involved in politics? Maybe that would fly if they really were non-partisan. As their web site also shows, they clearly are not: Yuo win prize! So it’s pretty clear that they assisted the conservative PAN’s campaign; in Mexico, the preferred way to encourage people to vote is with monetary incentive and free transport to a polling station in the back of a truck. There’s a price, of course - you don’t get to cast your vote in private.

In sum, citing this Republican fake grassroots organization in a “research” paper is pretty disingenious, even if they didn’t directly provide the death toll numbers (the US government proper did that). It’s even sadder that there are a lot of these organizations, funded by the Bush administration to prop itself up.

I just imported Flow to GNOME CVS (module “flow”). It has a fairly detailed HACKING file for those interested.

The low-level I/O is done (for Unix), modulo a little polish. Mid-level stream fundamentals are mostly done, but I need to write stream elements encapsulating all the low-level features. Work on the high-level easy-to-use interfaces has not yet started.