Stupidity In Many Forms

Conditions: Warm, Bright.


Defending The Undefendable

When Israel last invaded the Gaza strip there was an outcry that it was a disproportionate response, and that Israelis were killing too many civilians in their efforts to get the terrorists who lived among them. Recently, a series of accusations have come out in the media from Israeli soldiers telling of soldiers firing directly at civilians, with no regard for their safety. Other officers are now responding to these claims.

Officers are stepping forward, some at the urging of the top command, others on their own, offering numerous accounts of having held their fire out of concern for civilians, helping Palestinians in need and punishing improper soldier behavior.

“I’m not saying that nothing bad happened,” Bentzi Gruber, a colonel in the reserves and deputy commander of the armored division, said in an interview. “I heard about cases where people shot where they shouldn’t have shot and destroyed houses where they shouldn’t have destroyed houses. But the proportion and effort and directions we gave to our soldiers were entirely in the opposite direction.”

The accusations caused a furor here and abroad because they came on top of others that the civilian death toll was high and that soldiers took an unusually aggressive approach in Gaza.

A Colonel Herzl Halevy reported in a newspaper in January that:

“We saw a woman coming toward us,” he said then. “We shouted at her. We warned her a number of times not to get closer. We made hand motions. She did not stop. We shot her. When we examined her body we did not find a bomb belt.”

Israeli commanders defend such actions because they say they confronted armed women in Gaza as well as Hamas gunmen dressed as women and in other guises, like doctors.

“We had a woman run at us with a grenade in one hand and the Koran in the other,” Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister, head of the military’s education corps, said in an interview in which he displayed ethics kits distributed to all commanders. “What we know till now is that there was no systematic moral failure. There were not more than a few — a very few — events still being investigated.”

Col. Roi Elkabets, commander of an armored brigade told of occasions where fire was held. His troops saw “a woman, about 60 years old, walking with a white flag and six to eight children behind her and behind them was a Hamas fighter with his gun. We did not shoot him.”

- nytimes.com/

You know, it seems to me that for every story of people doing something bad there's another story of people doing something not-bad to try and back it up. Are we supposed to add them all up to get some kind of tally?

I think the overall question here is not about whether or not some soldier shot some people they should have, but rather whether an armed force was unleashed onto a population without proper justification or authority. Are we asking that question? No, instead we're quibbling over whether or not a dead person might have been smuggling a bomb under her dress. The disregard for life in general that leads to the creation of a battlefield is more important that the individual mistakes made by people on that battlefield. We end up arguing over details and we forget the more important theme.



Inevitableness

I've written about this before, but experts now believe fully-autonomous robot soldiers will be deployed onto battlefields in the next few years. These are distinguished from the current killer robots in that at the moment a killer robot requires a human to give the OK to shoot. But that delay is annoying future military planners, who want death delivered up as quick as computer processors can make it.

"The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct," Ronald Arkin , a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta , wrote in a study commissioned by the Army .

"The pressure of an increasing battlefield tempo is forcing autonomy further and further toward the point of robots making that final, lethal decision," he predicted. "The time available to make the decision to shoot or not to shoot is becoming too short for remote humans to make intelligent informed decisions."

Autonomous armed robotic systems probably will be operating by 2020, according to John Pike , an expert on defense and intelligence matters and the director of the security Web site GlobalSecurity.org in Washington .

The obvious questions crowd in to be asked

At Georgia Tech, Arkin is finishing a three-year Army contract to find ways to ensure that robots are used in appropriate ways. His idea is an "ethical governor" computer system that would require robots to obey the internationally recognized laws of war and the U.S. military's rules of engagement.

"Robots must be constrained to adhere to the same laws as humans or they should not be permitted on the battlefield," Arkin wrote.

For example, a robot's computer "brain" would block it from aiming a missile at a hospital, church, cemetery or cultural landmark, even if enemy forces were clustered nearby. The presence of women or children also would spark a robotic no-no.

Arkin contends that a properly designed robot could behave with greater restraint than human soldiers in the heat of battle and cause fewer casualties.

"Robots can be built that do not exhibit fear, anger, frustration or revenge, and that ultimately behave in a more humane manner than even human beings in these harsh circumstances," he wrote.

- truthout.org/

And again we wonder at the spectacle of smart people being so stupid. I wonder if we can get Arkin to be the guinea pig in the first 'friend or foe' experiment. There's a scene from Robocop I've always wanted to see re-enacted.



An Hour For The Earth.

Well-intentioned idiots are gearing up their self-righteous cloaks today for the event designated as 'Earth Hour' where at 20:30 all around the world, for one hour, people turn their lights off and burn their houses down with dropped candles in an effort to save the planet. I really hate to link to FoxNews, but needs must, sometimes.

But Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and director of the Denmark-based think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre, said the event could actually increase emissions.

"When asked to extinguish electricity, people turn to candlelight," Lomborg wrote in an op-ed in The Australian. "Candles seem natural, but are almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes, and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. If you use one candle for each extinguished globe, you're essentially not cutting CO2 at all, and with two candles you'll emit more CO2. Moreover, candles produce indoor air pollution 10 to 100 times the level of pollution caused by all cars, industry and electricity production."

- foxnews.com/

Of course the hour itself isn't really important, it's the message that's being sent out to the world. And what is that message? That if we don't turn off all our entertainment in the middle of prime time and sit in the dark, risking setting fire to the couch while we pollute our own homes, then the environment is doomed. I'm sorry, but this seems like a really stupid message. In fact, it seems more like a moment of hip trendiness than the dose of hard-edged practicality we really need if we're going to clean up the environment. You can sit in the dark if you want, but personally I'm going to turn on every light I have.


- Peace out

Quivering Now, Shivering Now, Withering

Conditions: Overcast.


Weighing Shit.

See if this adds up. Bernie Madoff, asshole extrordinaire and universally-hated financial crook was sentenced this week for operating a 20-odd year Ponzi scheme.

The man responsible for what has been called the greatest con of all time, American financier Bernard Madoff, looks set to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Madoff, 70, was remanded in jail on Thursday awaiting sentencing after he plead guilty in a New York court to the 11 charges he faced over an alleged US$50 billion fraud.
[...]

Judge Chin set June 16 as the date for Madoff's sentencing. He faces a maximum penalty of 150 years in prison.

- newsroomamerica.com/

Ok, 150 years for stealing money, albeit a lot of money. Now, compare and contrast with Josef Fritzl, the beast who locked his daughter in a homemade prison for 20 years, raped her repeatedly, fathered a bunch of children, and allowed one of them to die. He was convicted this week in Austria.

Fritzl, 73, will be sent to a psychiatric institution and according to his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, had "come to terms" with the fact that he would probably die behind bars. Officials said he would be treated for a severe personality disorder. In theory he could be released after 15 years, if experts deemed he had been cured of his condition and no longer posed a threat to society.

- guardian.co.uk/

Fifteen years in a psychiatric institution? Fifteen years in what's basically an Austrian hospital? Does this add up?

It just seems odd to me that literally terrorizing and abusing someone, and causing the death of another, in the eyes of the law does not even remotely add up to stealing money from a lot of people. This seems to be our culture, where we hold money over individual life and liberty. It's as much a tragedy of our civilisation as anything else



Near Miss O' The Month.

I missed it at the time, but Earth had itself yet another celestial near miss back at the start of March. Harvard University astronomer Timothy Spahr was one of the few that was forewarned:

On Friday night, Spahr received word that an asteroid was headed our way. Though it received little publicity, the asteroid passed by Earth early Monday. At its closest, the asteroid, named 2009 DD45, came within 45,000 miles of Earth, which is around twice as high as some satellite orbits and about one-fifth of the distance between the moon and Earth.

The cosmic object, which was estimated to be 20 yards to 30 yards across, came closest to Earth near the equator somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

It was about the same size as the one that burned up over Siberia in 1908, leveling nearly 800 square miles of forest in the infamous "Tunguska Event" event.

This asteroid wouldn't have wiped out life on the planet, but it could have taken out a city. And, we didn't see this coming?

Brian Marden, a senior astronomer at the center, said that many such objects pass this close but go unobserved.

"No one is watching the whole sky all the time," Marden said.

He said that light and celestial objects like the moon can affect astronomers' visibility. "If the moon is full, no one is watching," Marden said.

- boston.com

Oh, well I guess as long as the moon isn't full the astronomers will keep a watch out. And a partial watch for Armageddon is better than no watch at all.



Film Review: Underworld 3: Rise Of The Lycans.

It's so important for a film to end well because, obviously, the ending is the last thing the audience leaves with. Even a film with a bad opening can be saved with a good ending. And so, oddly we have Underworld 3 which is actually a prequel to the previous 2 films, which starts badly but ends quite well. Prequels are a tricky business. All these characters you already know are suddenly reanimated and set back to a previous timeframe. Of course the giant catch is that we know what happens to these guys, so obviously no one can actually die because they have to appear in the next film. And the story of Underworld 3 had already been covered in flashbacks in the first Underworld film, making this film not only predictable, but totally pointless.

Underworld was a pretty good film. It combined an interesting take on Vampires and Werewolf legends with a Romeo and Juliet love story. It was exciting, dramatic and gothic. Underworld 2 couldn't recapture the magic and kind of descended into a chaotic mess. You'd think Underworld 3 would be the proverbial lead balloon, but the filmmakers have played themselves an ace: British actors!

Specifically, Michael Sheen, who was in the first film, missed the second, and most recently was the Frost part of Frost Nixon. All that is forgotten as he again plays the rebellious Lycan leader Lucius who defies Vampire overlord Victor and pursues his daughter Sonya in another similar Romeo and Juliet format. You know, this would have all been crap if it weren't for all these characters being Brits, and bringing that heavy, Shakesperian, meaningful, 'Englishness' to their roles. There's even some primeval chemistry going on here between the leads. And while we know how it's going to end, and it is kind of dull to start with, it turns into a pretty good story about rebellion and doomed love. This is by no means a perfect film: it uses a large amount of shaky cam for most of the fight sequences, and I guess it is a little hoky. But it's a well-acted hokiness, which kinda makes the difference. Three and a Half Moons out of Five.


- Peace out.

Justice For The Shallow.

Conditions: Sunny.


Justice Served?

A few months ago Muntadher al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush during a press conference to express his anger at what Bush and his administration had done to the people of Iraq. It was a moment that perfectly summed up President Bush and the Iraqi legacy. And the result:

The man seen as a hero in some circles for throwing his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush, was sentenced to three years in prison Thursday in an Iraqi court.
[...]

Family members and journalists were cleared from the courtroom before Thursday's verdict. After news of the verdict reached family members, al-Zaidi's brother appeared close to fainting.

Other family members were seen crying and shouting curses about al-Maliki and Bush.

Al-Zaidi was a journalist who worked for the television network al-Baghdadia. The network also called for his release shortly after the incident.

Al-Zaidi explained his actions during an hourlong appearance in February in the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. Asked whether anyone pushed or motivated him, al-Zaidi said he was spurred by the "violations that are committed against the Iraqi people."
[...]

Al-Zaidi's lawyers had told CNN that he could face as many as 15 years in prison. It was unclear why he received three years.

- truthout.org/

Yes it is unclear, isn't it. Unclear why he's facing any jail time at all. Unclear as to why the fates decided to not let either shoe hit President Bush. Unclear as to why any other kind of public justice hasn't been 'aimed' at the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, in another kind of public gallery, the entrepreneur Bernard Madoff stood before a judge accused of stealing over Sixty billion dollars worth of money. The outcome:

New York - An "ashamed" Bernard L. Madoff pleaded guilty Thursday morning to bilking investors out of billions of dollars in savings in the biggest fraud in Wall Street history, and a judge ordered him jailed immediately to await a June 16 sentencing date.

The 70-year-old disgraced financier, who had been confined to his Upper East Side penthouse under a $10 million bail agreement since his Dec. 11 arrest, admitted running an extensive Ponzi scheme that wiped out charitable endowments and cost thousands of people their life savings.

The 11 felony charges carry a maximum sentence of 150 years in prison. The actual sentence is likely to be much shorter, but given Madoff's age would likely still amount to a life sentence.

Madoff pleaded guilty to securities fraud, investment advisory fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements, perjury, false filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission and theft from an employee benefit plan.

- truthout.org/

Sending one man to jail in response to a roughly 20-year long giant pyramid scheme that's ripped off god knows how many people of about 60 billion dollars kinda seems like finger-in-the-dike sort of stuff. That's it? One guy sent to jail? That's all there is to it? One would hope this is more the opening act in investigations into this scheme and the people behind it, but the 150 years thing looks quite impressive on paper.

So then we come to another dark scheme that was carried out by ruthless men over a long period of time. What justice in the cold light of dawn awaits them?

At a "Great Conversations" event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an "executive assassination ring."
[...]

"After 9/11, I haven't written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It's complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It's a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you've heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I've had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: 'What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don't get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?'

"But they're not gonna get before a committee."

...Whuh?

"Under the Bush Administration's interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference."

- truthout.org/

Well, seems to me the cold light of dawn looks a lot like the half-dark of evening.

So let this be a lesson: Justice only applies to the small fish, close enough to the surface to get caught to the indifferent fishermen, but every now and then we get a glimpse of huge, shadowy things, far beneath us, contemptuous of the puny fishing poles we hold.




Film Review: Watchmen.

Watchmen is a very ambitious project. A comic book written back in the eighties, it's set in a world in which things are somewhat the same, and yet slightly not. America won the Vietnam war through the use of a nuclear "weapon". Nixon avoided Watergate and was reelected multiple times. But oddest of all is that superheros exist in the world, but are basically just costumed vigilantes and daredevils rather than the moral do-gooders we're used to. Some are inherently good, most are a little nuts, and a few are legitimately bad. They have been forced to retire, and a few have gone public with their real identities, and a few still work on a mysterious government project. By far the oddest of these characters is Dr Manhattan, a nuclear scientist who was caught up in a terrible accident and developed the power of basically a god. Obviously this has made him a little 'distanced' in the dealings of the human race, the Americans, and things in general, which I guess is yet another side effect of being a god, especially one who can teleport himself to any point he wants, to take things apart with his mind, to grow in size, to be completely impervious to anything, and to not wear any clothes at all.

Believe it or not, but this last point brings the whole enterprise down. Watchmen seems like a very serious film. America and Russia are poised on the brink of Nuclear Armageddon. Someone is killing off old costumed superheros. There's a whole gritty detective whodunit story that's ticking away here in order to link everything together, but the simple fact is that every time Dr Manhattan is on screen, one cannot but notice his lack of clothing. Despite the drama of what's going on, the audience laughs and fidgets, and it's not hard to see why. This film, for all it's attempts at earnestness and seriousness, is stupid. And it's moments where Dr Manhattan is swinging across the screen that that stupidness is most apparent.

There's just something about the film that undermines itself, almost as if no one in it can quite take it seriously enough. Setting it in the eighties when the comic was written is another odd choice, the world is a much different place now. Nuclear brinkmanship with Russia dates this film quite badly. And it also pales in the face of the more gritty comic book films we have today, and it particularly pales in the wake of the likes of V For Vendetta, or The Dark Knight. Hell, I think the Incredibles did basically the same thing but with more character. It's not that Watchmen is bad, parts of it are quite entertaining, director Zack Snyder's made good use of his actors and settings, The stuff with Rorschach was actually pretty good. But ultimately the lesson is that we can only get along if we're all threatened by something. I don't think that lesson makes sense anymore. We seem willing to fight each other regardless whether we're all threatened or not. Perhaps Watchmen simply missed it's timeframe of relevance. Three Ooofs out of Five.


- Peace out

Don't Look Back In Anger?

Conditions: Blustery


Who Will Save Us? The Socialists?

One of the bigger themes of the great depression of 2010 is that capitalism, as a way of life, is dead. Finally proven as a giant shell-game of worthlessness. And (still) standing in the wings, waiting for the moment to shine, is capitalism's eternal enemy: socialism. So, is it time for the collective to raise up as a new way of life? Are the commies ready to roll? Well, no, not really. Because the crash of capitalism seems to have damaged the runway that socialism would use to take off from.

There was supposed to be a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up in some fashion--preferably inclusively, democratically and nonviolently--and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed, in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of organizing required for revolutionary change would create an infrastructure for governance, built out of--among other puzzle pieces--unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism--the "means of production"--and start putting it to work for the common good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas--to China, for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories, studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos, would require major retooling to make something we could use--not more cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

- alternet.org/

Unsurprisingly, they don't. I mean, no one else has a plan, why should the socialists differ. Socialism, like most other ways of life, assumed there would be things worth distributing and managing. But what we're faced with here is apparently the need to entirely remake how we as a civilisation lead our lives. And while we can look to the revolutionary campaign of President Obama, sung to the tune of "Yes we can", it's a long-ass way from principles to fusion to action. There is one seed of hope there though, in that the more people become unemployed, the more people there are to cluster together in groups and "discuss" how things should be. I wouldn't want to be a fat cat in those days to come.



Dropping The Hammer.

After eight years of Bush rule, most thought the series of abuses of the law by him and his administration were unlikely to be addressed. But this week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing to explore the possibility of investigating what actually happened. Great Scott!

"We must not be afraid to look at what we have done, to hold ourselves accountable as we do other nations who make mistakes. We must understand that national security means protecting our country by advancing our laws and values, not discarding them," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said, later adding, "in order to restore our moral leadership, we must acknowledge what was done in our name. We cannot turn the page until we have read the page."

Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) the highest-ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called the actions of the Bush administration "the greatest expansion of executive power in United States History." Spector went on to say that the actions of Bush administration lawyers who provided legal justifications for potentially unlawful Bush administration policies may amount to "criminal conduct."

Spector stopped short of endorsing the idea of a commission, instead arguing that the Department of Justice (DOJ) should be tasked with prosecuting officials who may have committed crimes.
[...]

An issue central to the formation of a commission to examine possible criminal wrongdoing is whether individuals who testify will be granted immunity. Previous examples of so-called "Truth and Reconciliation" commissions have come under criticism for allowing those who violated the law to avoid prison. Historically, these commissions have been used to document atrocities in lieu of formal prosecutions where official court cases could have been too destabilizing to a weak central government or too divisive to a society recovering from conflict.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley argued against using such a commission to avoid dealing directly with crimes committed by Bush administration officials on his blog.

"We are not some new nation emerging from civil war or dictatorship. We are a nation of laws. Bush officials have already confirmed the acts of torture and we are obligated by treaty to prosecute such war crimes ... Otherwise, President Obama's repeated statements of 'no one being above the law' will appear a pretty cynical spin designed to give the appearance of actions while evading our collective international obligations."

During Wednesday's hearing, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, argued in favor of a fact-finding commission, which would leave the door open to prosecution.

- truthout.org/

In my opinion, a special investigation into criminal wrongdoing by an administration that grants immunities and does not prosecute offenders is worth less than a chocolate firefighter. Hopefully they'll keep their heads and work towards perhaps repairing some of the damage that man and his lackeys did in their eight years of power.



Laugh O' The Week.

- Danziger

- Peace Out