No Consequences

Conditions: Windy

Just Business.

Timing is everything in business, which is why that right now, in the middle of an enormous recession, and in the heart of an apparent ongoing environmental crisis, Richard Branson has announced a new venture aimed at taking people into orbit and back.

LOS ANGELES (Agence France-Presse) — Richard Branson, the British billionaire, will unveil a craft on Monday that could soon carry tourists on a trip into space for $200,000 each.

The craft, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, will make its debut on the moonlike landscape of the Mojave desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

SpaceShipTwo, which can carry six passengers and two pilots, is scheduled to begin test flights next year and start commercial flights in 2011 or 2012.

Virgin Galactic, owned by Mr. Branson’s Virgin Group and Aabar Investments of Abu Dhabi, says about 300 people from around the world have paid a total of $40 million in deposits to guarantee spots on the carbon composite aircraft.

Seriously? In this day and age, people are willing and happy to pay a fortune to be ferried into orbit for a few hours. I really can't help but feel this world has it's priorities seriously screwed up. I mean, kudos to Brandon for identifying a market and selling to it, but what is up with wanting to spend 200 large for a ride up and back?

“First a few will go to space, but ultimately, over the next hundred years or so, spaceflight will become commonplace,” said Charles Chafer, chief executive of Space Services, a Houston company that specializes in space funerals.

In 2007, the company released into space the ashes of the actor James Doohan of “Star Trek.”

A Space Services spokeswoman, Susan Schonfeld, said the company now takes the ashes of hundreds of people at a time into space, compared with 27 people in 2007.

“Through the years, I have had the opportunity to speak to hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world,” she said, “but 99 percent of the people are everyday people like myself that have a very deep sense of exploration I do believe is in all of us.”

- www.nytimes.com/

Exploration? Where is there any sense of exploration in the concept of being cargoed up to orbit and back? There's nothing exploratory about it. It's mundane and commonplace, and about to become even more mundane and commonplace. Suck on that, mother nature.



The Magic Number

In the war on terror, perception is everything. Which is why such importance is on casualty counts of any action against "the enemy". And so, inevitably, the count itself becomes the battle.

On Monday, the anonymous blogger Security Crank noticed something interesting: all the U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan seemingly kill exactly 30 people every time. How can that be?

Security Crank documented no less than 12 occasions in which news reports, relying on field commanders' estimates, noted that exactly 30 suspected Taliban were killed in airstrikes and, occasionally, artillery attacks.

The point Security Crank is making is that how can we really have any freaking idea of how the war is going if we can no longer trust the amount of casualties being produced by it?

So, why is it always 30? Do thirty casualties seem like enough to justify a military attack, or few enough to not attract too much attention to an incident?

Another blogger, Joshua Foust of the Central Asia blog Registan, seemingly stumbled upon the answer.

- alternet.org/world/144509/

He found an article in the LA Times from last July by Nicholas Goldberg, that noted:

In a grisly calculus known as the "collateral damage estimate," U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost.

We don't know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon's former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, "the magic number was 30." That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OKd by the legal and military commanders on the ground.

- latimes.com/2009/

So, there we go. The pentagon has determined that if less than 30 people die in a military attack, even if they're civilians, then the public won't care. And so this has inevitably trickled up to the military commanders on the ground, who unsurprisingly then tailor their tallies in order to to not stand out in the river of statistics that is modern warfare.



Quick Release

With little fanfare, one of the true victims of Bush's war on terror was release and sent home last week.

The long ordeal of Fouad al-Rabiah, an innocent man and a 50-year-old father of four, who had been in US custody for almost exactly eight years, finally came to an end today, when he was flown back to his homeland of Kuwait from Guantánamo, where he had spent the majority of those lost years, after several brutal months in US custody in Afghanistan.

Until the moment of his release, everything about his treatment at the hands of the US government was shameful.Twelve weeks ago, when District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted his habeas corpus petition, and ordered his release, she revealed the most extraordinary - and extraordinarily depressing - story. This shone the most unflinching light on Guantánamo as a place where men, who were rounded up for bounty payments by the US military's allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and were never adequately screened on capture, were then sent to Guantánamo. Once there, in the absence of any information to back up the administration's claims that they were "the worst of the worst," they became the victims of false allegations made by other prisoners (who were either coerced to do so, or were bribed with the promise of improved living conditions), and were then tortured and abused to make false confessions.

- truthout.org/1210093

Film Review: Zombieland

It's not every day you can combine a Zombie film with a Road Trip movie. Actually, scrap that. Virtually every Zombie movie is a road movie, it's part of the charm. But not every Zombie movie is a slightly sweet coming-of-age comedy, a feat pulled of here with Zombieland. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Columbus, a nerdy shut-in who ironically is released by the end of the world as we know it. Being obsessive, he mocks up a series of rules to live by in the Zombie world, in order to stay alive. Things like staying fit and smart. To that end he meets up with Woody Harrelson, in full cartoon mode as a Zombie killing cowboy-type, and they head off roughly south west, looking for any other survivors.

They quickly run into a pair of sisters who don't trust anyone and are heading for an amusement park in California. So eventually they all go there, and end up having a massive shoot out with Zombies. Apart from a pretty good cameo, that's basically it. So the plot is kinda weak, and it's really up to these characters and their dynamic to engage us. And to a certain extent they do, all coming out of their protective shells to a certain extent and growing into a family type unit.

Of course this would all be terribly boring if not for the whole Zombie angle, and a fair dosage of quips, one liners and Woody Harrelson offing zombies with various gardening implements. So it really is fun for the whole family, with an overriding message of learning to come out of our caves and interact with each other, before it's all too late. How sweet. Three Braaaiiins out of Five.


- Peace out