Hypocrisy, cant and Afghanistan — contd.

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A while back I blogged about Rory Stewart’s remarkable account of his walk across Afghanistan. What his experiences suggested — to me — that the Western adventure in that pre-medieval country is, and always was, doomed to failure. What’s more, our political leaders must know that. And yet none of them ever admits to it. Instead they spout cant about bringing the West’s engagement to a planned and successful end in 2014, when they will hand over responsibility for security to the Afghans they have so diligently and expensively trained.

One significant fly in that ointment is the fact that the aforementioned trainees are heavily engaged in murdering their trainers in the so-called “green-on-blue” attacks which accounted for the deaths of 42 coalition soldiers in the last 12 months alone. Over a longer period, green-on-blue attacks have accounted for 6% of all ISAF (i.e. coalition) deaths. The significance of these attacks is, of course, continually played down — for the obvious reason that it undermines the official narrative. There is, we are told, no common thread and little evidence of infiltration by Taliban agents. The majority of these attacks are allegedly the result of personal grudges.

Unfortunately for the narrative, the US military were so troubled by the green-on-blue murder rate that they commissioned an in-depth study. Its title is “A Crisis of Trust and responsibility: a Red Team study of Mutual Perceptions of ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] Personnel and US Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide Murders”. It’s based on an extensive field study of ANSF and US soldiers to investigate their perceptions of one another.

The report runs to 70 pages. You can find the pdf here, but if you’re busy here’s the nub of the diagnosis taken from the Executive Summary.

So, remind me, why is nobody willing to admit to the obvious truth about the Afghan adventure?

This year, 9/12 will also be a date to remember

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September 12 will be an interesting day this year.

1. It’s the day that the Dutch go to the polls, and there’s some evidence that public opinion has shifted in an interesting way.

2. It’s also the day when the German constitutional court will rule on whether the European stability mechanism – the new permanent bailout fund for the eurozone – breaches the country’s constitution.

3. On the same day the European Commission’s president, José Manuel Barroso, will give details of its proposals to strengthen banking regulation as a quid pro quo for a cross-eurozone bank bailout fund.

4. Oh — and it’s also the day when the iPhone 5 comes out.

Is Facebook ‘the real presidential swing state’?

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This morning’s Observer column.

So will the 2012 election provide the tipping point, the moment when the internet plays a decisive role in influencing how people vote? Given the penetration of the network into daily life, it’s obviously implausible to maintain that it isn’t having some impact on politics. The yawning gap that existed in the 1990s between cyberspace (where people do “social networking”) and “meatspace” (where they go to polling stations and vote) has clearly shrunk. But by how much?

Judging by current online activity, if the internet decided the outcome Obama would win by a mile…

But… [read on]

The futility of fact-checking politicians

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Thoughtful post by Jack Shafer. Includes this:

You might as well fact-check a sermon as fact-check a campaign speech. Neither are exercises in finding the truth. That doesn’t mean we can excuse political lies. Please take a mallet to Romney’s fallacious assertion that Obama ended work requirements for welfare and to the Obama campaign’s ad that misstated Romney’s views on abortion. I pair these two fact checks not just to declare moral equivalence between the two parties or candidates but to demonstrate that the mutual-aggression pacts that govern politics make futile the fact-checking machinations of journalists. Give them a million billion Pinocchios and they’ll still not behave.

Sad but true. “I suppose”, concludes Shafer,

fact-checking would matter more to voters if they expected honesty from their politicians. But most don’t. Instead of vetted policy lectures, voters crave rhetoric that stirs their unfact-checked hearts. As long as the deception is honest, pointing in the direction they want to go, they’re all rght with it.

Americans (and we) get the politicians we deserve.

iPhone, uCopy, iSue

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Eminently sane Economist piece about the Apple v Samsung patent case.

It is useful to recall why patents exist. The system was established as a trade-off that provides a public benefit: the state agrees to grant a limited monopoly to an inventor in return for disclosing how the technology works. To qualify, an innovation must be novel, useful and non-obvious, which earns the inventor 20 years of exclusivity. “Design patents”, which cover appearances and are granted after a simpler review process, are valid for 14 years.

The dispute between Apple and Samsung is less over how the devices work and more over their look and feel. At issue are features like the ability to zoom into an image with a double finger tap, pinching gestures, and the visual “rubber band” effect when you scroll to the end of a page. The case even extends to whether the device and its on-screen icons are allowed to have rounded corners. To be sure, some of these things were terrific improvements over what existed before the iPhone’s arrival, but to award a monopoly right to finger gestures and rounded rectangles is to stretch the definition of “novel” and “non-obvious” to breaking-point.

A proliferation of patents harms the public in three ways. First, it means that technology companies will compete more at the courtroom than in the marketplace—precisely what seems to be happening. Second, it hampers follow-on improvements by firms that implement an existing technology but build upon it as well. Third, it fuels many of the American patent system’s broader problems, such as patent trolls (speculative lawsuits by patent-holders who have no intention of actually making anything); defensive patenting (acquiring patents mainly to pre-empt the risk of litigation, which raises business costs); and “innovation gridlock” (the difficulty of combining multiple technologies to create a single new product because too many small patents are spread among too many players).

Some basic reforms would alleviate many of the problems exemplified by the iPhone lawsuit. The existing criteria for a patent should be applied with greater vigour. Specialised courts for patent disputes should be established, with technically minded judges in charge: the inflated patent-damage awards of recent years are largely the result of jury trials. And if patents are infringed, judges should favour monetary penalties over injunctions that ban the sale of offending products and thereby reduce consumer choice.

And it’s nuts letting this stuff go to jury trial.

After cameraphones…

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… this. According to PetaPixel the spec is: it runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a 16 megapixel 1/2.3″ BSI CMOS sensor, a 21x f/2.8-5.9 23-480mm (35mm equiv.) lens, a 4.8-inch HD LCD screen, a minimal smartphone-esque design, a 1.4Ghz quad core processor, 8GB of internet storage, ISO of up to 3200, and 3G/Wi-Fi or 4G/Wi-Fi.

Doesn’t make calls but, hey, who uses a smartphone for voice anyway?

That Republican convention

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Paul Krugman’s summary.

The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.

Negative:

The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they didn’t build their own firms — which isn’t true.

The claim that Obama has gutted Medicare to pay for the expansion of health insurance — which isn’t true.

The claim that Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare — which isn’t true.

Positive:

The claim that Ryan has a plan to balance the budget — which isn’t true.

The claim that Romney has a plan for economic recovery — which isn’t true. (The Economist: “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex).

It seems to me that there’s a pattern here, but I can’t quit figure it out.

Ignorance is the only real option

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Splendid meditation by Mark Anderson on the meaning of the Mars mission.

As you are no doubt aware, at 1:38 a.m. this morning, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech succeeded in landing a one-ton rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars.  This effort required years of scientific, technical and engineering preparation, resulting in a novel multi-stage process for getting heavy equipment onto the red planet, rife with steps which, if any failed, would likely cause mission failure.

The landing occurred without a single problem, including minutes during the critical last phases of the flight when the spacecraft was out of communications with Earth and ran autonomously.

While this effort will no doubt have a great impact in improving our knowledge of the Mars geology and surface, including habitability for future human missions, and perhaps information on past life in the targeted crater, there is a deeper meaning to this effort:

Science is reality.

At a time when a large and increasing fraction of the U.S. population does not “believe in” science (i.e., objectively provable reality) – or, worse, has bought into the idea that science is just one choice on the reality menu – NASA has again given concrete reason to understand that science works, and that science is not an option, not a theory, not a menu item, but instead represents the finest efforts of human minds in understanding, and addressing, objective reality.

Those on Earth who currently think that science is a political football should take note: not only are you endangering your own reputation, you are endangering the welfare of your constituents, and today, of the planet itself.

Any person or party which mocks science should be considered for what he or it is: a threat to the welfare and future of us all.  Under the influence of political propagandists, misled religious zealots, and truly dangerous television and radio empires (such as Fox (Not) News and Rush Limbaugh), too many people today have been led to believe that science is in some way an option to opinion.

Science is as optional as gravity.  Ignorance is the only real option.

Worth reading in full.