The Choices Unseen

Conditions: Rainy.


Wakka Wakka

A couple of years ago there was a lot of concern over voting machines in America being vulnerable to attack and therefore democracy itself being in danger of total irrelevance. Then Obama was elected and so everyone stopped caring. But they shouldn't, thanks to a recent experiment carried out by a bunch of hackers. What did they do? They managed to put the game Pac-man onto one of these voting machines without breaking any of the tamper-proof seals.

"We received the machine with the original tamper-evident seals intact," the hackers from Princeton and University of Michigan report. "The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case."

This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as "tamperproof". It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use them.

I really don't understand two things about this whole thing. The first is that the Government decided that the only way for electronic voting to work was by people pressing buttons and having the votes go into a database that is then transmitted to the central computer. This is just flat out stupid - having the results get transmitted electronically to any location is creating a huge vulnerability. What makes so much more sense is to have the machine spit out a paper ballot, then have the ballot be counted/collated as per normal.

The other thing I don't understand is how, despite these things clearly having been shown to be not only vulnerable, but downright open to abuse, the American public hasn't risen up and set the damn things on fire. Isn't it written down somewhere that if the government isn't doing things right then the people are supposed to take back control?

Short of adding "tamper-evident" seals to these machines --- the same seals that went undisturbed when Pac-Man was hacked onto the Sequoia AVC Edge machine --- very little has changed since 2006, and most of the same hackable (and often 100% unverifiable) electronic voting systems are still in use today, in both primary elections this year (such as the one where the unknown, unemployed campaign-less Alvin Greene was said to have defeated the four-term state legislator and circuit court Judge Vic Rawl for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination), as well as in the general elections this November.

- truth-out.org/

So sadly we have to conclude that not only is the physical infrastructure of Democracy in America under threat, but it's throbbing heart seems to be in great stress as well.




Film Review: Salt

You know, Paul Greengrass has a lot to answer for, I think, when it comes to the Spy Thriller genre. Bringing his shaky-camera tricks to the second and third Bourne movies (and having them inexplicably so well received by the public) really established this benchmark that every Spy thriller had to be furiously-paced, and bordering on the incoherent. Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA operative who's accused of being a Russian spy, and embarks on a crazy escapade that concerns the presidents of Russia and America, and the brink of World War three.

The classic cold-war ideas of sleeper agents and nuclear brinkmanship are wheeled out again for a fresh airing, but the real star of the show is Angelina Jolie, who simply overrides shoddiness in plot logic or direction with sheer aggression and determination. Salt is as much about what an actor can bring to a role as it is about crazy stunts and shocking twists. It's great to see female actors cutting loose in what would be a traditional male role (apparently written for Tom Cruise) and being totally believable in it.

You have to go a long way in today's spy thriller movie genre to be really impressive, and while this film isn't hugely impressive, it is at least entertaining thanks to Ms Jolie. Sure, there's a complex plot and a couple of daring twists, but it's characters that drive a film, any film, and Salt unfortunately remains a very closed-off character lost in a plot that frankly makes no sense whatsoever. We know why she ends up doing what she does, but it's not easy, or perhaps not allowed, to know how she's feeling about it. And so it goes. Three Sleepers out of Five.


- Peace Out

Whimper

Conditions: Cold, still

The End

After all these years, the end has apparently finally come. The Iraq war, the war that will define for our generation as the moment that we threw off the mistakes of our fathers and chose to make our own mistakes, all over again, is finally coming to an end. Or at least, coming to the part where the troops start pulling out.

BAGHDAD: Iraqis danced in the streets when US troops withdrew from their cities a little more than a year ago. After the last American combat brigade trundled across the border into Kuwait on Thursday, reversing a journey that began more than seven years ago, there was no rejoicing.

Instead, a mood of deep apprehension tinged with bitterness is taking hold as Iraqis digest the reality that the American invaders who they once feared would stay forever are in fact going home - at a time when their country is in the throes of a political crisis that many think could become more violent.
[...]

US combat operations in Iraq will not officially end until August 31, the deadline set by Barack Obama for the reduction of the force to 50,000 people involved in ''stability operations''.

But with the departure to Kuwait of the last combat brigade, the formal battle mission is essentially over. In the coming days, 2000 more personnel from units scattered around the country will leave, bringing the number remaining down to the 50,000 promised by the President.
[...]

But many Iraqis worry that the time is wrong for a drawdown whose date was a result of Mr Obama's campaign promise to bring troops home. Parliamentary elections in March that were supposed to cement Iraq's fledgling democracy have instead triggered a destabilising political stand-off between ethnic-tinged factions that received roughly similar numbers of votes and cannot agree on who should be in charge.

Call me old fashioned, but I do believe in the principle that if you break it, you buy it. This was one of the principles held over the long-departed Bush regime at the dawn of the Iraq war, and here we are seven years later. Lets not forget the simple point that Iraq hadn't actually done anything to justify the invasion and subsequent slaughter. So is Iraq still broken? Or has it gotten to the point where we don't really remember the difference?

A rash of attacks on judges, traffic police, senior civil servants and members of the Iraqi security forces has stirred fears that insurgents are more ubiquitous than had been thought. A suicide bombing in Baghdad against army recruits on Tuesday, in which 63 people died, called into question the Iraqi security forces' ability to take care of its own, let alone the safety of ordinary citizens.

- smh.com.au/

Maybe the key is to trash the entire store, that way you can break whatever you want and no one can tell the difference.

Sadly, I don't believe anything will really come of all this mass stupidity and carnage. The architects have already long ago received their rewards and scuttled away out of the limelight. All that's left is the wreckage, which inevitably over time (approximately seven years of time) molds itself into the background clutter and becomes scenery.

So all that's left is the tradiional declaration of victory, the speeches about hope, and the distribution of medals. I guess it's now mostly in the hands of the historians. God help us all.


More:
Five Myths about Iraq troop withdrawal


- Peace out

Got Hypocrisy?

Conditions: Wet

Standing (Hopefully) Awkwardly

It seems every week there's a commemoration of something horrible, and this week it's the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, the event that most history books seem to think ended the second world war. This year there's a subtle difference in the normal proceedings

The US ambassador to Japan, John Roos, today became the first US representative to attend an annual ceremony to honour the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Roos's presence at an event to mark 65 years since a US bomb left Hiroshima in ruins has raised hopes that president Barack Obama will visit the city when he attends a meeting of Apec leaders in Japan in November.

It seems there's very little in the world that the Americans can be shut out of for very long, and I for one get a weird drunk-driver-attending-victims-funeral kind of vibe when I read about this.

The mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, welcomed Washington's decision to send Roos, after it had previously turned down invitations to mark the moment a B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the city on the morning of 6 August 1945.

"We need to communicate to every corner of the globe the intense yearning of the survivors for the abolition of nuclear weapons," Akiba said. "I offer my prayers to those who died. We will not make you wait for much longer [for nuclear disarmament]."

And that's a good point, but in pursuit of a fruitless goal. In reality, no obe is ever going to completely disarm their nuclear arsenals. Not the U.S, not Russia, not Israel, not India or Pakistan, not even the secret Atlantean deep sea research facility. It's not going to happen. So if that was what the invite was for, then I think all that uncomfortableness you and Roos must have had to endure during the event was all for nothing.

Conservatives in the US have criticised the decision to send Roos, saying it would be misinterpreted as an act of contrition. The son of a member of the Enola Gay crew said the ambassador's visit to Hiroshima amounted to an "unspoken apology".

Gene Tibbets, whose deceased father, Brig Gen Paul Tibbets, piloted the bomber, told Fox News: "It's making the Japanese look like they're the poor people, like they didn't do anything. They hit Pearl Harbor, they struck us. We didn't slaughter the Japanese. We stopped the war."

- guardian.co.uk/

And then of course there's the peanut gallery, where anything that is not full and total America The Beautiful is seen as traitorous and evil.




So Much For Tolerance

Another big story this week is the horror being expressed in America over the news that a Mosque is going to be built on Ground Zero, home of the 9/11 attack. Well, not on Ground Zero, more like a few blocks away from it. But still. The horror.

To critics, the centre's proximity to the site of the atrocity would be an affront to the dead and to the feelings of families and firefighting colleagues who have survived them.

Some relatives have said that a building representative of the religion in whose name their loved ones were killed is too painful to countenance.

The Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish civil rights group, came out against, arguing that "this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right".

In a Quinnipiac University poll, a narrow majority of New Yorkers disapproved of the plan, though a majority of Manhattans approved.

- telegraph.co.uk/

I'm pretty sure Americans understand Irony, but maybe the stakes here are too high for that kind of subtlety to penetrate. That it's ok for America, which really did unnecessarily drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, to officially attend ceremonies for the victims while it's totally wrong for a Mosque to be built in a city for a religion that was not responsible for an attack in that same city, is something that I'm sure passes completely over the heads of most of these angry protesters. How fun it is to be the crusader.

- More: Zakaria returns ADL award



- Peace out