The Western Counter-terrorist strategy is a failure
The counterforce, counterintelligence military strategy of the Western Powers in the Middle East is a complete failure.
Maybe we should stop bombing people in their own countries for no reason other than profit.
What if ISIS was dropping flying robot bombs and killing people near your home every week.
Would that make you want to surrender to them and let them install a new puppet government? That is the model the western powers are following.
It only serves the interests of the super rich industrialists who profit from eternal war, and the giant bloated militarys designed to fight the Soviet Union which had ten thousand nuclear weapons, 50 thousand tanks, and six million men under arms.
The media has managed, through selective reporting and selective outrage like that over the atrocities on Belgium this week, to get people so scared that they treat IS, which is 2-3 divisions worth of light infantry and press-ganged, barely trained conscripts, as though it is an existential threat on the scale of the old Soviet Union.
Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy
Hillary Clinton is in jeopardy of felony charges
Hillary Clinton is facing possible indictment on Federal felony charges of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material under 18 U.S. Code § 1924.
Clinton’s secret basement server’s sysadmin, Bryan Pagliano, has been granted immunity from prosecution by the Justice Department in order to testify against her. DOJ doesn’t grant immunity unless they feel certain a crime has been committed and there is a reasonably good chance of a conviction.
Pagliano is or was reportedly a GS-15 who was moonlighting for HC and did not report this engagement to his superiors nor did he report the income she paid him under the table.
Now they are both in deep, deep shit. But Brian has the get out of jail free card, but only if he brings down Hillary. She’s fucked, to put it bluntly. Whether she is charged, or convicted, or not.
The statute says nothing about whether the information was classified when it was first retained. If it was classified at any point, and it was on her server in her basement, and she was aware of this at any point, Clinton is in jeopardy of being found guilty of probably multiple felony counts.
Most likely scenario is HC pleads guilty to a single felony charge, and gets a non-custodial, or home-confinement sentence. As was done with General Petraeus and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger.
Her best outcome is to get a pardon from Obama before he leaves office, joining such notable patriots as Admiral Poindexter and John Ashcroft. That will still destroy her career and injure the Democratic Party.
If Clinton was someone lower in the bureaucracy she would be facing heavy time, like John Kiriakou, William Binney, Jeff Sterling, Chelsea Manning, Susan Lindauer, Barrett Brown, Thomas Drake, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, and Shami K. Leibowitz. And others.
Pagliano is the dude on the right.
Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy
Remembering Marvin Minsky
While I was working at One Laptop per Child, I noticed a small, birdlike man perched over my shoulder looking at my two screens. Hmmm he looks familiar from one of my books maybe, oh shit, it’s Marvin Minsky!
Henry, what are you doing?
!He knows my name!
This to me was roughly the equivalent of being a fair to middling painter tending to your business and suddenly Leonardo da Vinci shows up and is asking you what are you doing, by name.
SO I explained well I am doing this that and the other thing and then I said you know Marvin, 90% of what I am doing is repetitive in nature and goes in through standard in and out through standard out. When can I have an AI that can do this 90% of the work for me?
And without pausing he said. “Five years.”
Beat.
We both busted out laughing.
The same answer, I suppose, he had been giving since 1959, when he co-founded the predecessor of CSAIL, the year he became an MIT Professor and the year I was born.
I also had a long conversation with him in another instance about how AI needed to use the basic story structures of folklore in order to construct narratives about events that humans would remember and regard as credible and later I gave him a copy of Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale.
A great mind, an excellent listener and a lovely gentleman.
Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy
Marvin Minsky, Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88
Force Awakens is a snide parody of Star Wars
“The Force Awakens” is another snide Abrams parody and deconstruction of a beloved science fiction classic. Here’s why.
There is this terrible inversion of the moral and ethical underpinnings of Lucas’ shared universe.
Love doesn’t redeem. The force doesn’t protect the (mostly) innocent. Han doesn’t shoot first when necessary. Family ties are not stronger than the lure of power.
I think Abrams likes to destroy the tropes and ethics of the works he is mocking. Look at what happened to the dear old Enterprise in Abrams’ parody of Star Trek.
Enterprise NCC 1701 could go mano-a-mano with the world-eating doomsday machine in TOS but in Abrams it is disgracefully beat to shit by another Star Fleet vessel without even being able to fire a shot.
The most generous interpretation of this is that Abrams loves to use the cheap trope of the “Worf effect.”
“This monster/baddy is really terrible, see it beat the crap out of Worf.”
The ungenerous interpretation is that Abrams likes to make little kids and fans cry.
As the kid sitting in front of me at the Force Awakens premiere said, “I didn’t like to watch it because evil won.”
I like the idea of a storm trooper character and of course he would be conflicted and confused. But there is a right way and a wrong way to invoke this. The right way is in The Clone Wars, where the Clone Troopers (not Storm Troopers) despite being a clone army, are fully individuated and several like Rex particularly have become such fan favorites that they have been resuscitated for Rebels.
We literally got no backstory and no characterization for any of these Force Awakens characters other than stock tropes. Orphan–virgin birth–desert planet. Storm trooper–cowardly–can’t shoot straight. Supreme leader–inhuman and scary, appears in holo-images. The leader’s second — Cyborg==black armor==fallen Jedi, etc. That is so lazy.
Rey is a major Mary Sue by any definition, to a ridiculous and suspension of disbelief breaking degree. And actually, no that’s not okay. It means the script is operating at the level of the most self-servicing and badly written fan fiction.
Luke didn’t just magically learn to be an ace pilot without ever having flown before. Luke trained with two old Masters, Obi-Wan and Yoda. And it was a major plot point when he went tearing off before his training was complete and promptly got his ass handed to him and his hand chopped off.
Contrast Ahsoka Tano, who made major mistakes and lost the better part of two squadrons of fighters and almost lost an entire battalion of soldiers in her first commands before she gained more experience and learned to bridle her aggressive tendencies. In The Clone Wars Season I.
Star Wars The Clone War – Storm over Ryloth (The first attack)
I’m sorry but the the action scenes in Force Awakens are horrible, only better than a mediocre fan film or kids playing Star Wars in the back yard due to better production values. Truly embarrassing. Okay Rey has probably never used a light saber so that’s excusable. But Kylo Ren is supposed to be the head of the Evil neo-Sith/Dark Jedi Knights, who trained with Luke Skywalker and Supreme Leader Snoke? What an emo shlub!
The following a good light saber battle. Imagine if this was the trailer for the new Star Wars movie how much cooler it would be than the Abrams parody:
There’s more character development, drama, suspense, action, plot advancement and general badassery there in six minutes than in any 3 hour Abrams sludgefest.
Or a more recent example from Rebels a few weeks ago:
Inquisitors vs. Ahsoka & Kanan ᴴᴰ
Ahsoka Tano is Anakin’s former apprentice in both old and new continuity. This is her Big Damn Heroes/The Cavalry moment as we haven’t seen her in action since she left Anakin and the Jedi Order at the end of season 5 of The Clone Wars. 16 years ago in-universe time.
I’m not trope averse, I just don’t like to see them mishandled or misused.
Another negative regarding Force Awakens is the presence of the Jar-Jar expy, Finn. The prequel movies are rather derivative of the original trilogy, and Force Awakens is completely unapologetic in strip mining the tropes from the real Star Wars films.
Although the character elements have been tossed a bit we can still clearly see trope-wise, or structural analysis-wise:
FA/Original trilogy/Prequels
Rey = Luke (ground) = Anakin
Finn = C3PO = Jar-Jar
BB8 = R2D2 = R2D2
Poe Dameron = Luke (air) = Anakin
Luke = Yoda = Yoda
Mas kanata = Obi-Wan = Qui Gon Jinn
Kylo Ren = Darth Vader = General Grievous
Snoke = The Emperor = Count Dooku
I’ve read a number of articles praising the new Star Wars parody by JJ Abrams as, “inclusive” or words to that effect. Really? There is one count ’em one, black or brown face among the characters.
My issue is not with John Boyega’s portrayal of the character. He has done a good enough job with the material he was given.
However, Boyega’s character, “Finn”, shares a number of tropes and characteristics with Jar-Jar Binks, the much-derided alien from the prequel movies.
Here are some specific points of similarity between Finn and the dark-skinned alien with big lips and a faux-Carribean patois:
Cowardly? Check.
Clumsy? Check.
Fails at everything he attempts? Check.
Treated as comic relief? Check.
Lies to the other characters? Check.
Abrams has even added an old trope new to Star Wars. What’s Finn do when he finds the protagonist, Rey? As soon as the Empire arrives and they flee, he grabs Rey’s hand, twice. She even explicitly tells him not to do that, which puts this into the squicky realm of harassment.
Your Star Wars dollar is far better spent watching the old movies, even the prequels, or the excellent “The Clone Wars” or the almost-excellent “Star Wars Rebels” than this dreck.
Copyright © 2015 Henry Edward Hardy
The United States fetishizes gun Violence
The United States fetishizes gun Violence
I think it is very facile to attack guns for gun violence. That model fails to account for societies like Switzerland or Finland with high gun ownership but little gun violence.
What separates the United States is the degree to which it fetishizes gun violence. The stock character of the Western hero has morphed into the hard nosed cop and now into the faceless futuristic enforcer but the plot is the same: a lone man, using violence to right wrongs in society, then conveniently riding off into the sunset. “Hiyo, Silver, away!”
American Exceptionalism is the modern version of Manifest Destiny and White Man’s Burden. All are pinioned on the Idea that American Ideas are the Best, so much Better, in fact, that extreme violence and skullduggery are justified in their lofty pursuit of a greater good only America the Beautiful can provide.
Well, where’s the beef? Where are the benefits this benevolent violence are supposed to provide? Stable governments, democracy, prosperity, pluralism, tolerance, human rights, rule of law, all that?
Shall we ask Afghanistan? Or Libya? Or Yemen? Or Somalia? Or Iraq?
How’s that workin’ for ya USA? Is that the right model for Syria? Really?
I think it is very facile to attack guns for gun violence. That model fails to account for societies like Switzerland or Finland with high gun ownership but little gun violence.
What separates the United States is the degree to which it fetishizes gun violence. The stock character of the Western hero has morphed into the hard nosed cop and now into the faceless futuristic enforcer but the plot is the same: a lone man, using violence to right wrongs in society, then conveniently riding off into the sunset. “Hiyo, Silver, away!”
American Exceptionalism is the modern version of Manifest Destiny and White Man’s Burden. All are pinioned on the Idea that American Ideas are the Best, so much Better, in fact, that extreme violence and skullduggery are justified in their lofty pursuit of a greater good only America the Beautiful can provide.
Well, where’s the beef? Where are the benefits this benevolent violence are supposed to provide? Stable governments, democracy, prosperity, pluralism, tolerance, human rights, rule of law, all that?
Shall we ask Afghanistan? Or Libya? Or Yemen? Or Somalia? Or Iraq?
How’s that workin’ for ya USA? Is that the right model for Syria? Really?
Copyright © 2015 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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