Today's ruling that McLaren will lose all of their 2007 F1 World Championship points, and will be fined a large sum of money, will probably not mark the end of this long saga.
History may record that this was the least messy possible outcome to a thoroughly complex affair which has shown many of the parties in a less than flattering light.
The decision today apparently turned on the analysis of emails sent from Mike Coughlan of McLaren to the drivers Fernando Alonso and Pedro De La Rosa, concerning aspects of the set-up of the McLaren car in order to get the best use from the 2007 control Bridgestones. The WCMS took this as evidence that McLaren had benefitted from information about Ferrari's 2007 car allegedly passed to Mike Coughlan by Nigel Stepney, who was at the time employed by Ferrari.
Ferrari have declared themselves "satisfied" with the outcome of the latest hearing. However, this is nothing more than empty posturing. The decision, which hands Ferrari the 2007 Constructor's championship, is unlikely to be seen in that light by anybody else connected with motor sport. Ferrari have just been handed a championship that they were in danger of losing. That kind of ruling tends to devalue the whole championship.
There are many disturbing aspects to this affair:

1. Despite Ferrari clearly indicating all along that Stepney was responsible for the leaking of the pile of technical documentation concerning the 2007 Ferrari car, he has to date not been charged with any crime under any legal system. This should be contrasted with the events in 2003, when ex-Ferrari employees who took Ferrari data with them to Toyota were charged with the theft of intellectual property. The failure to charge Stepney with any crime makes me wonder just what sort of case Ferrari has against him.

2. When Toyota were found to be in possession of Ferrari data in 2003 (after it became visually obvious that the 2003 Toyota chassis was a very close copy of the Ferrari F2002), Toyota as a team was not charged with any violation of sporting regulations, and the team itself was not held responsible for the behaviour of it's ex-Ferrari employees. (In the case of Toyota, the ex-Ferrari engineers were dismissed and several other senior leaders in the team left shortly afterwards, in what looked like a classic "fall on your sword" Japanese exorcism of demons)

3. The alleged sabotage by Stepney of the Ferrari cars by adding a powder to the fuel system seems to be more like a scheme out of a schoolboy comic than the work of an expert F1 insider. Surely a man of Stepney's expertise would have come up with something more subtle and concealable than that?

4. The transfer of knowledge and the transfer of IP overlap to a significant degree. Let's say I work for (say) Williams, and I find an aero innovation that makes the Williams car 3/4 of a second a faster (which is a lot of time in current F1). When it becomes obvious that I am responsible for this innovation, Toyota offers me a large sum of money to move to their team. I accept and leave Williams, taking the "secret" to them. Have I taken Williams IP there? Unless I take the designs that implement the concept. no. However, as soon as I arrive at Toyota, I draw a collection of parts which are wind-tunnel tested and within weeks appear on the car, making it 3/4 of a second faster. No IP changed hands, but the innovation is now getting closer to being in the public domain.

One important factor that has been commented on by several leading designers is that obtaining proprietary data on your rival's design does not mean that you understand why and how it works, and without that understanding, making use of that proprietary data may be next to impossible. The 2003 Toyota TF103 was clearly a copy of the Ferrari F2002, but it was nowhere near as fast or effective, which shows that imitation is not the same as understanding. When Lotus invented ground effect in the late 1970's, every other team promptly copied their design as quickly as possible for the following season, but only one team (Williams) understood ground effect properly to begin with - in 1979 their car was the only Lotus copy to work properly.
The hard truth is that spying and sleuthing have always been part of F1. Teams have regularly spied on each other, either using their own employees or "cut outs" such as photographers. Teams spend a lot of time analyzing their rival's designs from photos, TV footage etc. In the current era, the spying is almost exclusively based around aero innovations, since the days of massive engine advantage have disappeared with the 19000 rpm limit and other changes in engine design regulations that have leveled that playing field. Today's F1 car is an extremely complex aero device, and the creation of a winning car requires a blend of innovation and understanding possessed by only a small number of teams and team members. The fact that Stepney and Coughlan were trying to sell themselves as the center of a design team to Honda earlier this year shows that any team that is not winning will be anxious to obtain leading-edge knowledge by any means that is not demonstrably illegal.

I am going to go out on a limb and make some predictions:

1. Nigel Stepney will not be charged with any theft of Ferrari IP. The case against him is weak, apparently turning largely on circumstantial evidence (correlation is not causation) and his inside knowledge of Ferrari operating practices over the last 5 years will result in Ferrari being unwilling to risk him spilling the beans about other Ferrari matters if he is pulled into court. My guess is that Ferrari will quietly settle his contract, and that the Italian legal system will discover that there is insufficient evidence against him. Because Stepney will not be charged with any criminal activity, Mike Coughlan cannot be charged either.

2. The Ferrari victory in the 2007 Constructor's Championship will be seen in hindsight as worthless.

3. McLaren will accept the 2007 Constructor's Championship penalty, and their 2008 design will be found to be free of the inclusion of Ferrari intellectual property

My main fear is that this affair reflects badly on the FIA, because of the massive inconsistency between their treatment of the Ferrari 2003 IP theft, and their treatment of this year's alleged IP theft. Their explanation that in 2003 Ferrari did not lodge a complaint may be true, but does not explain the inconsistency of holding the ex-Ferrari (then Toyota) employees responsible in 2003, but holding the team (McLaren) responsible in 2007, and will not sit well with the wider public if the inconsistency starts to be pointed out by commentators. Other FIA inconsistencies over the last 2-3 years (most notably the mass damper issue, where a device that had been previously ruled legal by the FIA Technical Delegate was suddenly declared to be illegal, and the Bridgestone complaint via Ferrari against Michelin's tyre contact patch), coupled with this latest issue, are undermining the credibility of the FIA as a consistent and impartial enforcer of motorsport regulations.

UPDATE
Stepney is now hinting strongly that the information exchange may not have been exclusively one-way i.e. Ferrari to McLaren (or more correctly, to Mike Coughlan). Whether there is any substance to this claim, or whether this simply represents an attempt to muddy the water, we may never know. However, Stepney intends to self-publish a "tell all" autobiography early next year, so we may find out more...or we may not. My guess is that if the book looks like opening any cupboards that contain skeletons, certain former employers of Stepney will be trying to close the cupboard doors before any nasty critters escape...
Meanwhile, Ferrari are doing their best to suggest that if McLaren win the drivers' championship, this will be tainted. I regard this as the usual self-serving BS that one hears all of the time in business by people who are merely posturing. Frankly, after the events in Austria in 2002 and at Monaco in 2006, Jean Todt has little credibility in my eyes to start pontificating about sportsmanship and championship tainting. In the case of Austria, he ordered the quicker Rubens Barrichello to make way for Michael Schumacher to win the race, and in the case of Monaco, he spent hours defending Schumacher after he had clearly deliberately stopped his car on the racing line to prevent any other driver from beating his qualifying time. Forgive me if I quietly laugh into my drink when I hear him complaining about McLaren and the 2006 drivers' championship...

Link: http://conservativesarealwayswrong.googlepages.com/

...on the tendency for conservative thinkers and leaders to consistently Get Stuff Wrong. George Lakoff would no doubt point out that this is only to be expected; when people are confronted with facts that contradict their worldview, they often react by discarding the facts.

I intend to shift the focus of this blog away from postings focussing on current events, towards longer articles about a wider range of topics. There are a number of excellent bloggers and commentators who do a great job of writing about current events, sometimes because they are doing it for a living, and they have the time to perform the essential tasks of research and evaluation, tasks that the mainstream media appears to have overlooked in many cases.
I will be posting less frequently, and exploring topics that relate more to the underlying causes of some of the malaises impacting the USA and other regions of the world.
The point was made by a friend at the weekend that I often sound harshly critical of the USA, which is my adopted country (I was born and grew up in the UK, and moved to the USA in 1998). The point that I am a "glass half empty" person is a perception that I need to be aware of. In my defense, I would note that there are currently some severe politico-economic issues in this country that. IMHO, have the capacity to undermine the USA's current world power status if the wrong solutions are adopted. Additionally, I believe it to be true that people who were born and grew up outside a country can provide a perspective that is more difficult for people who grew up in the country to acquire. One of the best books about modern America is "A Culture of Complaint", written by Robert Hughes, an Australian who moved to the USA as an adult.
I also intend to get back to more humorous writing, since I have a stock of (hopefully) funny stories to work through.

Many commentators have already commented on the unfolding story about Sen. Larry Craig (R. ID, for those people who watched Fox News and saw him captioned without his party affiliation...).
I am not going to labour all of the obvious points about hypocrisy. I will simply note that Craig is a dead man walking. He is finished as a Senator, because he failed to note the Richard M. Nixon framing lesson.
Nixon, on November 17th 1973, uttered the phrase "I am not a crook" during a TV broadcast. The remark, intended as an aggressive statement of innocence, helped to sink his presidency. It allowed the public to think "crook" whenever they saw a picture of Nixon or talked about Nixon. He inadvertently framed himself for the public and his opponents.
Craig, after his press conference yesterday, which he began by uttering the unfortunate sentence "thank you all for coming out today", declared "I am not gay" in the same manner as Nixon declared "I am not a crook". It is my prediction that this will forever frame Larry Craig as "I am not gay" whenever the public think of him or see him.
Never mind the fact that he may actually be bi-sexual; facts never tend to bother people when there is a witch-hunt in progress, and the current witch-hunt to force Craig out of office is a double-posse witch-hunt, comprised of conservatives and authoritarians who hate gayness and all that it supposedly stands for, and progressives who see Craig as yet another wonderful example of Republican party hypocrisy.
However, the witch-hunt is being fuelled by the rather curious and defective decision of Craig to plead guilty to a criminal charge, and then attempt to deny guilt. If nothing else, he is guilty of stupidity. As this poster remarks, being gay is not a crime, and I could not care less about whether Larry Craig is heterosexual, bi-sexual, gay or even tri-sexual...what matters more is that his voting record shows a readiness to discriminate against people based on sexual orientation, and his public pronouncements exhibit the usual GOP obsession with "family values", which IMHO, in many contexts, is nothing more than a code-word for "we hate anybody who is not heterosexual", in the same way that "States rights" became a code-word for the continuation of racism by other means following the passing of the Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's.
I would say the odds are currently stacked against Larry Craig surviving in electoral politics.

Link: http://www.sltrib.com/ci_6589559

Although the media (as one might expect) is still focussed on the human interest side of the recent mining collapse which has trapped a number of workers, as investigative journalists and bloggers get to work, the seedy underbelly of mining regulation in the USA is starting to be revealed. As this article in the Salt Lake Tribune makes clear, mine owner Bob Murray, far from being the concerned employer that he publicly professes to be, has been working behind the scenes to ensure that his mining operations are all but exempt from the normal regulations and rules.
I wish I could say I was surprised about this, but I am not. One thing that many of my fellow Americans still fail to appreciate is that there are many processes in the governance of this country that do not rise much above Third World standards, with corruption and other forms of malfeasance dominating the process. I think we can add another process to that lengthening list.

...to the demands of The Great Decider that the checks and balances in the Constitution should be partially dismantled to allow for the retrospective legalization of warrantless wiretapping (what part of the conflatable phrases "Eastern Europe" and "police state" do these people not understand?), the best comment I found on the practical impact came from a commenter at democrats.org:

Is there an 800 number I can call to just report each day what I'm up to. I'd like to get it out of the way.
When they listen in, somebody keeps breathing heavily in the background, and it is very distracting.
I think it's Cheney, But I'm not sure

.

Link: http://rg.bravenewfilms.org/blog/7848-bill-o-reilly-is-projecting

I wrote this posting over at Robert Greenwald's blog as a response to a commenter who (in typical Fox News debating fashion) seized upon a statement in the original posting as an excuse to dismiss the underlying argument (the equivalent of the old "look up there!" playground distraction trick).

With increasing agitation from hard-core Christian conservatives for the display of the Ten Commandments in public places (witness Judge Roy Moore's Don Quixote-like campaign to display them in his courtroom building), it is time to note that what people today refer to as "the Ten Commandments" are in reality some way removed from the original commandments communicated to the Israelites by God via his representatives, as documented in the Old Testament. This article on BeliefNet explains some of the complexities that usually get completely ignored in the debate.
Mush of the debate here in the USA currently centers on whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed in public places (as per Judge Roy Moor's failed campaign). However, there have been suggestions and attempts to have the Ten Commandments also included in US law. This article in FindLaw from 2003 explains rather cogently why the attempts to enshrine the Ten Commandments into US law are misguided and not rooted in any historical reality.

Link: http://www.whenprophecyfails.org

One of the questions that I always used to ask myself is why, when the policies, strategies, tactics and beliefs of a group are shown to be wrong, there is no much resistance to changing those policies, strategies, tactics and beliefs. I have personally seen this happening up close in business, and in politics. Groups of individuals seem to be capable of quite extraordinary levels of denial; when confronted with evidence of failure, they instead "circle the wagons" and become shrill and insistent that They Are Right. Disagreement is met with hostility, usually followed by the ritual expulsion of "doubters" and "non-believers".
Underlying clues and insights as to the origins of this pathology are contained in an academic research paper called "When Prophecy Fails" written in the 1950's. This looked at the behaviour of a religious sect whose members came to believe that they would be abducted by aliens. The leader of the sect solemnly pronounced the date and time of the abduction, and the cult members duly organized their earthly lives on the basis that they would end. When the predicted events did not come to pass, instead of the belief system of the cult collapsing (as might be logically expected), the cult instead closed ranks and increased its efforts to convince others of the validity of its belief system (which is the opposite of what one would logically expect). It appears that the human cognitive processes operate to prevent sober, objective reflection, and instead tend to re-inforce denial and group cohesion. Maybe this is a relic of what is often referred to as "old brain"...

Link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070622-000002.xml

Of course, how true these might be is always open to doubt...but I found them thought-provoking...