James R. Rummel

We’ve got an election in full swing down here in the US. Lots of noise and fury, plenty of sound bites and photo ops. It’s quit the show.

But other countries have elections. They’re going to have one in Canada pretty soon.

So Collin May over at Innocents Abroad is covering the Canadian election. He’s already put up three posts about it, and they really summarize the issues pretty well. Worth a read if you want to know what’s going on without much effort.

In this post, Collin defines the campaign strategy of the Liberal Party, which is currently the ruling party up in the frozen North.

“The Liberal tactics, at least as far as the Conservatives are concerned, is to paint the party and especially the leader as a redneck right-winger who will push Canada toward a more American style of government.”

What exactly do they mean by that, “…a more American style of government”?

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Mike at The Feces Flinging Monkey notes that an American lawyer was imprisoned for 2 weeks because his fingerprints were mistakenly matched to a latent print found on an item used by terrorists.

That’s what I used to do when I worked for the police. Fingerprints, ID, stuff like that. I figure you guys would like to hear an opinion from someone with some practical experience.

So far as prints are concerned, they are 100% reliable when it comes to an ID. There are some people who have a problem with this, but that’s the way it is.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not false matches, though. The problem lies in the quality of the prints themselves, either the ones taken from the person you want to ID or from items and surfaces found at a crime scene.

One of the biggest problems I had was with crack addicts. They’d use glass pipes to smoke the drug, the smaller the better so the pipe would be missed in a search. They’d heat up to some really impressive temperatures, and the addict would be so high after the first puff that they wouldn’t be able to feel their fingers cooking.

This meant that most of the print would be burned off by the time I got them. Even so, there would almost always be enough detail to make a positive match. If there wasn’t we would just wait, since fingerprints grow back unless the skin is very horribly scarred. And if it was too scarred to read the print, well, even scars on fingertips have enough fine detail to make a positive match.

The other problem lies with latent prints. These are prints found out in the wild, so to speak. There’s no telling who left the prints, or usually when they were left, so the fingerprint examiner focuses on objects that had to be used to facilitate a crime. Find a print on a weapon or object used in a crime and that would go a long way to proving guilt.

But the world is imperfect, and most people are in a hurry when they’re committing a crime. So the vast majority of latent prints are smeared or obscured in some way. This can also be due to a bit of fumbling while lifting the print from the surface where it’s found as well as environmental factors.

But there’s standards to make sure that this doesn’t happen. The print has to have a certain amount of detail, a finite number of distinct features visible, before it can be used as evidence.

It looks to me like the latent print itself didn’t have this level of detail. So the latent print examiner at the FBI put it through their AFIS computer to see what the machine could do with it. When it came up with a match they picked the one that looked most promising and sent the data along.

This might not be as sinister as it seems. I don’t have access to the evidence files, so it could very well be that they simply told the Spanish intel guys that it looked like this lawyer was involved, and someone should explore that avenue of investigation. Then it would be over zealous Spanish cops who decided to pull the suspect in.

But this doesn’t excuse the FBI in any way. Like I said, there’s standards that they’re supposed to follow, and it’s obvious that they dropped the ball. If they didn’t have enough detail to make a positive match they should have simply said that they couldn’t do anything with the evidence and let it go at that.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not the system of using fingerprints as an ID tool that’s faulty here. Instead it’s human error that screwed everything up. Cops are people too, they make mistakes, and they really want to catch the bad guys. The problem is when they don’t follow the rules and try to make shortcuts.

So Michael Moore’s latest “documentary” won the big prize at Cannes.

Not too surprising, considering that Cannes is in France.

Maybe I should make a muck-raking fantasy full of lies and half-truths. As long as I bash the current administration it’s sure to be a hit.

Back in the late 1970’s I started to hear about some amazing research that was being done with primates. Researchers were teaching them to talk using American Sign Language.

This was particularly interesting to me because I was very interested in the outdoors. The 1970’s was the Time of the Great Extinction, or so it seemed. There were all of these doom and gloom stories in the press about acid rain, the reduction of biodiversity and looming ecological calamity that was just around the corner. If it could be proven that some primates could communicate, that they actually had an intellect that was similar to a human’s in some respects, then the arguement to protect primate species would be strengthened.

But nothing happened. A chimp never got up to address Congress or testify in front of the Supreme Court. In fact, there was a rather thunderous lack of content from the researchers that were tasked with teaching the apes ASL. So I started to pay attention to what they were doing.

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For decades, spies from North Korea would secretly travel by boat to Japan. Once there they would roam the beaches, looking for isolated couples or individuals they could grab and take back to N. Korea.

After they arrived the kidnap victims would be forced to work in spy training camps, teaching Communist commandos and spies how best to pass unnoticed in Japanese society. Every so often they’d be joined by the odd duck who had actually defected to N. Korea.

Sounds like something out of a bad spy novel, doesn’t it? But it really happened. N. Korea’s been doing it for decades. Rumors and defectors have confirmed the practice, and N. Korea finally admitted to the practice a few years ago. They would even allow a few select victims, people who had children and loved ones that could be held hostage back in N. Korea, visit Japan for a short period of time.

Now it would appear that they’re going to allow the kidnap victims to finally come home. Japan brokered a deal where they’d pass on food and oil to Korea in exchange.

This is probably a mistake even though I don’t blame Japan for making the deal.

North Korea is in dire straights, with a famine that’s reached catastrophic proportions by most accounts, and the only way they’ve been able to keep going as long as they have is by threatening the free world with nuclear bombs unless they received the food and energy needed to keep the Communists in power.

The problem is that the Communists are an enormous threat. They’ve been threatening the countries around them, particularly South Korea, for over 50 years. Any direct confrontation would result in inevitable defeat for the North but would also mean huge civilian and military casualties in S. Korea.

So the hope has been that there would be some sort of collapse in North Korea. Too many starving people, too little oil and energy, and the entire house of cards should come crashing down sooner or later.

This deal the Japanese made might just prolong that, or even mean that the Communists will be able to keep going long enough for the famine to end. But, on the other hand, it will also mean that the Japanese will be able to get their people out of harm’s way before the collapse.