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A smattering of blurbs (and the articles which they came from) which I found interesting
First I'll start on the lighter side with some youtube clips which amused me:
Funny clip from Israel
Brains over Braun
Then to shift 180 degrees an article which seems to credibly assert the staging of "journalistic" photographs.
In the next frame, we have the same girl, this time apparently being placed in the ambulance. Also taken by AP,this time by Mohammed Zaatari the caption here reads:
A Lebanese rescuer carries the body of a young girl recovered from under the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by Israeli warplane missiles at the village of Qana, near the southern city of Tyre, Lebanon, Sunday, July 30, 2006. Dozens of civilians, including many children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that flattened houses in this southern Lebanon village - the deadliest attack in 19 days of fighting.
Intriguingly, though, the dateline given is 10.25 am, three hours after she has already been photographed in the ambulance.
This seriously disturbs me, not even for the propaganda aspects, after all propaganda in media coverage of the middle east is old news, what disturbs me is the extent and length of time. Taking the body of a child out of an ambulance and parading it around for a photoshoot which exceeded three hours in length, is beyond obscene and disgusting.
and more info on the Qana tragedy:
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Red Cross workers reported on Monday that 28 bodies, 19 of them children, were removed from the rubble. The count is lower than the some 60 bodies reported by news agencies, quoting Lebanese security officials. Survivors say 60 people were in the building at the time of the strike.
...
The IDF account and those of survivors present contradictory versions of the Qana deaths. The IDF said that there is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the IAF strike and the first report that the building had collapsed. Residents' accounts say only 10 minutes went by between the strike and the collapse. The survivors say rescue teams arrived only in the morning, as night conditions made the rescue mission difficult. The Red Cross in Tyre received a call for help only in the morning, explaining their late arrival. Sami Yazbek, chief of the Tyre department of the Red Cross, said his office received a call only at 7 A.M. The ambulances were further slowed by the bombed roads leading to Qana.
"I can't say whether the house collapsed at 12 A.M. or at 8 A.M.," said Eshel. "According to foreign press reports, and this is one of the reports we are relying on, the house collapsed at 8 A.M. We do not have testimony regarding the time of the collapse. If the house collapsed at 12 A.M., it is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it."
...
In the second IAF strike on Qana, which took place at around 2:30 A.M. Sunday, IAF planes bombed two targets located about 500 meters from the building that collapsed, and in the third strike, at around 7:30 A.M., three targets were bombed 460 meters away from the building, Eshel said. He told reporters that an analysis of photographs of the strikes, taken by cameras installed in the warplanes, showed that the four bombs dropped during the second and third strikes hit the intended targets, and that an IAF plane sent on a photo sortie in the afternoon confirmed that the intended targets had been hit.
This AFP photograph shows Beirut demonstrators with a giant poster of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that was used in a rally protesting the accidental killing of civilian human shields, along with terrorists, in Qana: What seems odd about this is that the banner was unfurled within hours after the Qana attack took place. The building where the civilians died was bombed on Sunday morning, and the demonstration took place during daylight hours, later the same day.
Obviously these prompt some peculiar questions, although I'm not sure I'm willing to go where they seem to be leading quite yet, definitely bears watching the resulting investigations closely.
and I'll end it with an interesting article by Warren Buffett:
Why I'm not buying the U.S. dollar
Funny clip from Israel
Brains over Braun
Then to shift 180 degrees an article which seems to credibly assert the staging of "journalistic" photographs.
In the next frame, we have the same girl, this time apparently being placed in the ambulance. Also taken by AP,this time by Mohammed Zaatari the caption here reads:
A Lebanese rescuer carries the body of a young girl recovered from under the rubble of a demolished building that was struck by Israeli warplane missiles at the village of Qana, near the southern city of Tyre, Lebanon, Sunday, July 30, 2006. Dozens of civilians, including many children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that flattened houses in this southern Lebanon village - the deadliest attack in 19 days of fighting.
Intriguingly, though, the dateline given is 10.25 am, three hours after she has already been photographed in the ambulance.
This seriously disturbs me, not even for the propaganda aspects, after all propaganda in media coverage of the middle east is old news, what disturbs me is the extent and length of time. Taking the body of a child out of an ambulance and parading it around for a photoshoot which exceeded three hours in length, is beyond obscene and disgusting.
and more info on the Qana tragedy:
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Red Cross workers reported on Monday that 28 bodies, 19 of them children, were removed from the rubble. The count is lower than the some 60 bodies reported by news agencies, quoting Lebanese security officials. Survivors say 60 people were in the building at the time of the strike.
...
The IDF account and those of survivors present contradictory versions of the Qana deaths. The IDF said that there is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the IAF strike and the first report that the building had collapsed. Residents' accounts say only 10 minutes went by between the strike and the collapse. The survivors say rescue teams arrived only in the morning, as night conditions made the rescue mission difficult. The Red Cross in Tyre received a call for help only in the morning, explaining their late arrival. Sami Yazbek, chief of the Tyre department of the Red Cross, said his office received a call only at 7 A.M. The ambulances were further slowed by the bombed roads leading to Qana.
"I can't say whether the house collapsed at 12 A.M. or at 8 A.M.," said Eshel. "According to foreign press reports, and this is one of the reports we are relying on, the house collapsed at 8 A.M. We do not have testimony regarding the time of the collapse. If the house collapsed at 12 A.M., it is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it."
...
In the second IAF strike on Qana, which took place at around 2:30 A.M. Sunday, IAF planes bombed two targets located about 500 meters from the building that collapsed, and in the third strike, at around 7:30 A.M., three targets were bombed 460 meters away from the building, Eshel said. He told reporters that an analysis of photographs of the strikes, taken by cameras installed in the warplanes, showed that the four bombs dropped during the second and third strikes hit the intended targets, and that an IAF plane sent on a photo sortie in the afternoon confirmed that the intended targets had been hit.
This AFP photograph shows Beirut demonstrators with a giant poster of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that was used in a rally protesting the accidental killing of civilian human shields, along with terrorists, in Qana: What seems odd about this is that the banner was unfurled within hours after the Qana attack took place. The building where the civilians died was bombed on Sunday morning, and the demonstration took place during daylight hours, later the same day.
Obviously these prompt some peculiar questions, although I'm not sure I'm willing to go where they seem to be leading quite yet, definitely bears watching the resulting investigations closely.
and I'll end it with an interesting article by Warren Buffett:
Why I'm not buying the U.S. dollar
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What the Hell is he talking about with the date stamps on photos? Is he talking about time stamps on the feed? I don't get it. H's camera was pumping out dates stamps from 1999 last week... Pick up any newspaper, you'll find a minimum of a dozen typos. Shit is complicated... and people make mistakes... lots of them. It seemed like this guy was really searching for something to take the edge off of a bunch of dead kids. The people who killed these kids aren't monsters... it's the people who let them rot for cause of propaganda... THEY are the real monsters.
I lost the link to that cool site that gave really great definitions for rhetoric. What's this one called again?
You've said this (or something quite similar) yourself in the beginning of the Iraq war: War is nasty. War is ugly. People die in wars. Why deny it? If you start (or even if you engage in) a war you've got to be prepared for collateral damage. Why in God's name even try to spin it... or spin the spin? You want Isreal to stop Hezbola? You know what needs to be done (you've said somethign similar with reguard to Iraq as well): Kill every male in every town. Slaughter the lot and let the blood flow down the streets like a river... Get ROMAN on their asses... That'll be the only thing that settles their hash...
You can't put lipstick on a pig, bubba. War is bad shit, even if it's for the right reasons.
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it calls to mind an incident several years ago. there was a targeted killing, i forget who it was that got hit. Palestinian authorities said "17 people were killed, 10 of them children" (the latter thrown in for good measure maybe?). This number was put out on the AP newswires. About an hour later the IDF public affairs division in one of the more intelligent moves Ive seen from them in the last 6 years released the UAV footage of the incident in IR-thermal and regular view, showing conclusively there were absolutely no other warm bodies in the area when the bomb was hit, and indeed none showed up until five minutes later when a police car arrived and a crowd of spectators began to gather. I can't remember whether AP issued a retraction or not. I think they did.
You also saw in Jenin palestinians were loudly shouting of a massacre in "operation defensive shield" there. A UN investigation subsequently ruled that there was no such massacre, and that the palestinian numbers of casualties were completely fabricated. Such rumors of course did indeed persist, and a documentary called "jenin jenin" was covertly financed by PA public affairs people to continue (rather unsuccessfully) to propagate massacre rumors. that "documentary" remains rather popular among anti israel campus groups even today.
As far as the timestamps go you're correct that's not reliable evidence of much of anything. In APs response to the allegations they pointed out that they have 3 different sorts of timestamps that are used for internal purposes, and for those released on the photos it is not specified after release which it is. I have a friend who is an AP photographer in Port Au Prince who mentioned that all AP photographs are taken with digital cameras and have a time stamp when they are taken, when they are received by AP, and when they are distributed by AP. however the blog linked to does provide quite a bit of other evidence of stage managing and makes a very convincing case even without the timestamps.
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Some time ago I posted to my journal a video that CLEARLY showed US forces smoking a farmer and two dudes with a single gun with a 50 Cal from an apache. Shit happens, war sucks I feel bad for the farmer but...
The only reason why I'm bringing it up, is thid dude I was working with at the time was in the military, and when I told him about the video, he laughed, called me hippie, and said I was being maniupalted... That 'farmer' was actually an anti-aircraft gunner. It was OBVIOUS because the video was shot in IR, and the heat signiture on this thing sticking up in the air was OBVIOUSLY the barrel. They showed reference photos... He showed me the video, it was very convincing. So much so, I was almost convinced and had to go back and look at the video I'd downloaded to see if it was the same incident.
It was. Mine showed scene from a plethora of angles, and over a much longer time-frame. It was obvious that the AA Battery was a tractor in working in a field, and the 'barrel' was an exhaust pipe.
I sent the video to my coworker who ultimately conceeded that the act was as I described... He was stunned his beloved army could possibly manipulate the killing of an innocent.
My point is this: Until you actually KNOW... I mean KNOW not based on sketch evidence like time stamps, quick two second bursts of IR video that could be anything, and told what it means, you really don't know anything.
The Arabs clearly use propaganda for their advantage. This is true. So do the Israelis though... Do you remember the pictures of the kids screaming during the pullout from Gaza? It's human nature to jockey for advantage... And according to the times, it's also human nature to deny evidence that is contrary to your position.
The only thing you KNOW from that picture is that a little girl is dead most likely from an Israeli missle. You can PRESUME that they did it for a good reason... but you can't PRESUME they didn't make a mistake. People are after all prone to errors, even IDF.
Does it suck if the IDF made a mistake? Yup. Is it possible the Hezbola is lying and covering up the truth of who/what is there? Sure is... but all you KNOW is that a girl was killed in a war zone by an Israeli bomb/missle. Own it brother, war is Hell.
A couple of years ago, the lovely and talented Plural once described to me why it was insane that Israel pull out from gaza (I think) his argument was that if they did, they'd use missles within months to start randomly shelling Israel. I thought he was nuts, but whatever, he's a decent enough guy... And what happens. They pullout, and the shelling starts... Just as he said.
Hezbolla absolutely deserves a response, but it isn't so clear to me anyway if this is the way for any kind of lasting peace. Only because lasting peace simply may not be possible.
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What did you think of it?
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while I'm very pro-capitalist, I've been saying for a long time that the US has lost its way and can no longer be considered a capitalist country.
Capitalism has a rational, that is ratios and balances between debt and income among other things, we've moved far beyond that into what I would consider a consumerist economy rather than a capitalist one.
That is that our economy is fueled by reckless consumption and requires the propigation of that recklessness to keep moving.
This among other things is why I've chosen to live (and continue to live) outside the US for the past few years (and the determinable future).
I posted the article because I believe he is spot on, or very close to it.
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i know thats what im saying. people like jeremy always seem to want to argue that this is somehow a good thing
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All things change and come around again, brother. The only thing that can kill this country IMHO is to cut off the ability to be creative in solutions. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me in no uncertain terms that inovation was dead. There was NO WAY it was possible for I as member of an economy that had hit its zenith could possibly hope to see real gains in my station... This was the same man who thought I was wasting time learning to use computers by programming toys... the same man, in fact who disuaded me from invesitn $80K in MSFT back in '84... When I see the comercialization of things like 'make' magazine, and an underground movement of the promotion of tinkerers... I can't help but believe that while things look grim now, they will get better. When I was in graduate school the SINGLE thing I saw in myself and other Americans that was utterly lacking in students from every other country was a deisre to dream... to try new shit and be good with utterly humilating yourself with some whacked-out idea that more often than not turned out to be bullshit. But the point was that every once and again, it wasn't and it would have NEVER been found by not taking the risks and applying the creativity to make it happen.
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And another thing...
1) it was written 3 years ago.
2) In my experience with economists (which you know is rather considerable), they tend to get bogged down with estimates of expectations, and forget about individual variablity... They see linearity, where they may not actually be any. The insanity of the trade debt may actually not be insane at all... It's been rising at a ferocious pace for years to be sure, but 'insane' is always relative, and must be measured against something that isn't insane. In this case, it's past experience. One could argue that the current generation (the boomers) are living on 'squander island', and the previous generation were from 'thrifty island', suppose instead that we look at it this way:
Maybe the current generation is consuming more because thier children aren't yet working... It may just be that the squander generation is merely consuming at a higher rate than previous generations because their children aren't working as hard to produce as they were forced to with respect to their consumption. What happens when the echo-boomers hit their peak producing years, and as the demographics seem to be playing out, they don't have all that many kids on which to help them consume from a single stream of production? I'm guessing they will become 'thrifty island' members without even trying.