Failures at Facebook

The Facebook system of reporting hate speech and such is too easily scammed and abused. See for yourself.

Reversing Climate Change — Google Fail

Can renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, replace coal and oil?

Google ran some practical experiments to see if they can run some of their data centers on renewable energy, and found it was too expensive.  Economically, coal won.

Read all about it at Spectrum, an extremely reputable source.

We're going to need something more than we've got now.  And both wind and solar are intermittent, and both require large amounts of land and equipment. Some sort of fission or fusion will have to be developed to take up the base load.

Fission has turned out to be disappointing, and fusion is taking forever to get working.  Oddly, aircraft manufacturer Lockheed is very optimistic about their Compact Fusion™ system.  My own suspicion is that they plan on announcing it a failure, because they're really working on something else, some super-secret black project for the Pentagon.  Maybe a stealth ICBM, or a supersonic tunnel boring machine to undermine our enemies.  But since they've got to be hiring fusion physicists to at least provide a cover story, it might be some new kind of thermonuclear weapon that's smaller than any H-bomb currently extant.  We don't need a bigger bomb, they're already too big for most targets.

Khair al-Din Rouf Hamdan — fauxtography?

There's an interesting video going around as the backing to several news stories.   The video shows a young man running up to a police car, hitting it several times with what looks like a knife, the cops getting out, the young man backing off, the cops shooting him and dragging him into the car. Take a look:



I've watched it quite a few times and I see a lot of things wrong with the video that our esteemed media simply did not catch.

First, here's a mediocre summary by the New York Times:

The Israeli authorities said the Arab man, Kheir al-Din Hamdan, 22, of Kafr Kanna in Galilee, was shot early Saturday after he attacked a police vehicle while wielding a knife. Grainy video footage said to be from the scene showed Mr. Hamdan banging on the closed windows of a police van with an object that looked like a knife, but it also appeared to show him retreating from the vehicle when the officers got out and shot him. The officers were then seen dragging Mr. Hamdan’s limp body toward the van.

My first impressions were that the cops did their job, but not brilliantly.  If the man was leaving, he had to be detained lest somebody else be stabbed.
My opinion has changed to puzzlement.

My problems with the video are as follows:

1. The shot man, Mr. Hamdan, was moving after he was shot and was not "limp".
2. There was no blood from his wounds.  A man shot to death will leak all sorts of disgusting body fluids including blood and feces.
3. The officers dragged his "body" to the back seat of the van, where officers had been sitting, and stuffed him in.  Presumably so he could leak fluids onto the seats and carpets.  
4. The officers were in close contact with the "bleeding" man.  Presumably getting blood all over their uniforms.
5. My resulting suspicion is that the man who was shot in the video was not hit with a fatal bullet, but possibly a stun gun or a "rubber bullet" that does not penetrate.  Otherwise, where is the blood?  And is that really how cops handle bleeders?
6. It seems really odd that the cops didn't call an ambulance first.
7. After the shooting, other officers get out of the van and point their guns out of the scene, away from Mr. Hamdan.  We cannot see what they are worried about.
8. The video appears to be in black-and-white with color imperfections.
9. At time 1:02 you can see that this is a video taken with a hand-held camera of a computer video screen.  This becomes even clearer a few seconds later, at 1:45.
10. We have no way of guessing what editing tricks were made on the computer before the release of the video-of-a-video.
11. If the guy was only hit with a rubber bullet or such like, why did he die?  Was he murdered later?
12. There isn't enough detail to verify the video is actually of the man who later died.
13. I don't understand the Arab-language background chatter of the men watching the video on the computer screen.

The Jerusalem Post has an intelligent, balanced view, worth reading.

None of the so-called "Media" companies has picked up yet on the flaws and inconsistencies clearly evident in the video.  Or should I say, the video-of-a-video.

There have been other instances in the past of Palestinian activists publicizing "raw video" that later turns out to have been heavily edited.  This includes a famous case when an Arab girl pulled a cassette out of her camera and handed it to the police, seemingly indicating a raw, unedited video, that later analysis showed to be heavily edited.  The case was thrown out of court.

The Israeli Justice Ministry is looking into the matter, though.  As the Jerusalem Post says:

The Justice Ministry confirmed that its Police Investigation Department has questioned those involved in Friday’s incident and is performing lab work and examining video footage of the shooting of Kheir a-Din Hamdan, 22.

Investigators have reviewed the scene of the shooting and have been instructed by Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to gather evidence as quickly as possible, the ministry said.

If the video is anything like reality, we must consider the possibility that the police killed Hamdan while he was in custody.  But the video is, as I've shown, very questionable.

This report from Israel National News says the first time the van door opened, the cops performed their required warning shot.  And it says that the cops later transferred the guy to an ambulance that carried him to a hospital, where he died.   I agree that could make more sense.

Still, the investigators need to get their hands on the original, unedited, video.

Sweet Bacteria

Recent scientific news out of the Weizmann Institute once again shows the power that intestinal bacteria have over our lives.  There's evidence that using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar alters the populations of bacterial species in our gut. The result is a greater tendency toward diabetes and weight gain.

Artificial sweeteners raise the blood sugar level and can make us fatter.

But they're careful with their advice:

"...the last thing we want is to drive people away from sweeteners back to sugar without testing this. Don't draw premature conclusions from the study." 

Next they'll be telling us to eat more butter. It just goes on and on.

Very Bad Behavior — Hysterical

This Russian dash cam footage will make you laugh.  Afterwards, you can criticize...

Optimistic Atomic America

Back when the US was an optimistic country, we were working on Atomic Rockets.  Really.  Nuclear powered rocket ships.  Check it out.

Obama's War — US vs IS

Barack Hussein Obama (BO) has declared war, more or less, on the Islamic State (IS).

Obama's war is bit confusing.  He's getting the US into Iraq when his whole Presidential purpose was to get the US out of Iraq?
Does he want to be as popular as Tony Blair?
Or is he just jealous of all the attention that Bibi Netanyahu has been getting ?

Anyway, when the bombing gets going everybody will forget about Israel and the bombing of Gaza.  And Israel will have a better set of political arguments.

After all, ISIS has not sworn to destroy the US, the way Hamas did to Israel.  Another benefit for Israel, is that those who have been claiming, that peace in the middle east hinges primarily on settling the Arab-Israeli dispute, will now have to shut up.

Also,  a  new topic for the headlines:  US vs IS.
It kinda scans.

I think the US will defend Jordan, Kurdistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.  It will also do something regarding Syria, but I don't think the US will be a reliable ally for the Assad family, who are buddies with Iran.  Iran benefits from the US intervention, and gives nothing in return, so I think a good US war leader would manage to screw Iran, even though it is an ally, because it is also an enemy.

But Obama has not been working on making himself a good war leader, and it's not the sort of thing that happens by accident.  As a result, Iran may manage to outsmart the US and the western non-proliferation movement.  This is not good for anybody.  For these reasons, and to oppose  the Finlandization of Iraq by Iran, I think the Iranian regime must be knocked down, and maybe knocked out completely.  This makes it all a multi-way war.  And if the US is getting involved in a multi-way war, a land war in Asia, then a Machiavelli is required, not the ghost of Woodrow Wilson.  Although I might settle for a Bismark.

Like Golda Meir said: "The Muslims are trying to destroy each other — I wish them both the greatest success".  So this is Obama's opportunity to get in there and start up an even bigger inter-Muslim civil war.   By the time they're all done with each other, there won't be a man standing.  Or so we hope.

The war in Syria has claimed the lives of 100 times as many as died in the recent war in Gaza; But apparently that's not enough to do the job.

Prediction:  Somebody will say this is the Biblical "War between Gog and Magog".  Somebody always does.

My own suspicion is that it was really Saudi Arabia that pushed the panic button.  The US and SA seem to have a secret mutual defense pact.  The US leap to stop Saddam Hussein and, later, to depose him, makes more sense if the Saudis had the right to call on US help for defense.

Of course, it could simply be corruption.  All the recent US Presidents have warm, cordial, friendly, cooperative, genial, benign, chummy, and supportive relationships with the Saudi Royal family.   BFFs, really.  No money changes hands, of course.  That would be unethical.

Presidents are sometimes known by the promises they break.  Here's a promise from Obama: "It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil".

Bread, Wheat and History

1800: God makes wheat; Mama makes bread
1900: God makes wheat; Bakeries make bread
2000: Agronomists breed wheat; Factories make bread
soon: Genetic engineers make wheat; Robots make bread

Fat, Carbs and Mental Illness

This whole flip-flop on the fat-carbs thing has driven me nuts.

Everything is backwards now.  For healthy living, eat a high-fat diet with few carbs.  So sayeth the Worlds Foremost Authority, the New York Times.

Truth be told, psycho-historian Woody Allen predicted this very result, 41 years ago (!), in one of his documentaries.
Watch the excerpt:



The Times supplements the original article with a Q&A.

And as a result of all the hoopla, I'm eating more nuts.   I told you it was driving me nuts…