Eideard

Sarah Palin believed that the Queen rather than the prime minister was responsible for the decision to keep British forces in Iraq, according to research done for a new film chronicling her brief political rise.

The former Alaska governor reportedly made the comment during the 2008 presidential campaign as aides to John McCain, the Republican candidate, scrambled to bring his surprise-pick running mate up to speed on foreign affairs.

Her confusion emerged during a coaching session with Steve Schmidt, a top McCain adviser, who asked Mrs Palin what she would do if Britain began to waver in its commitment to the Iraq war.

In one of the many rambling responses that steadily eroded her credibility during the campaign, Mrs Palin reportedly replied that she would “continue to have an open dialogue” with the Queen…

The incident was revealed during research for Game Change, an HBO ‘docu-drama’ based on a book about the 2008 campaign by two leading American journalists.

While the film is a dramatisation – with the Oscar-nominated actress Julianne Moore playing Mrs Palin – its producers conducted dozens of research interviews and Mr Schmidt confirmed its accuracy in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

The incident can be added to a long list of policy gaffes made by Mrs Palin during her three months as the Republican vice-presidential candidate…

Game Change describes panicked cramming sessions during the campaign, with aides beginning their history tutorial with the Spanish Civil War and carrying through to post-9/11 era.

Mrs Palin was initially enthusiastic, making notes on hundreds of coloured flash cards, but became increasingly sullen and was described by tutors as going into a “catatonic stupor“.

Perhaps a catatonic stupor might be less embarrassing to the Republican Party than the confidently 19th Century noises brayed by the current herd of presidential candidates?

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square, the crucible of their revolution, on Wednesday in a mixture of celebration and agitation to mark the first anniversary of the protests that forced out Hosni Mubarak, the former president.

By midmorning, tens of thousands of people had packed the square here, smiling, cheering and waving Egyptian flags, but it was already evident that the spirit that unified last year’s uprising had been replaced by new tensions between Egyptian political factions over their view of the military rulers who took power when Mr. Mubarak was ousted.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that won nearly half the seats in the newly elected Parliament, sent many of its followers to the square. The Brotherhood’s leaders have endorsed the military’s timetable for a handover to an elected president by the end of June, and they sent thousands of their members out to ensure that a spirit of celebration prevailed, erecting soundstages and setting up security checks at each entrance to the square. An abundance of Brotherhood flags, buttons and disposable plastic hats filled the crowd…

Groups of ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis, political rivals to the Brotherhood who won about a quarter of the seats in the new Parliament, said they would also turn out to help secure the square and keep the day peaceful, and there were plenty of men with the Salafis’ trademark long beards mingling in the crowd.

The crowd in the square on Wednesday morning was overwhelmingly male, with very few women in sight.

Youth groups and other activists — including many of the leaders of the original uprising — were determined to make the day a huge demonstration calling for an immediate end to military rule, urging Egyptians to gather at mosques, churches and other strategic locations around the city for marches to the square that would arrive by midafternoon…

Superficial decisions continue to be a mistake. They provide, at best, fodder for the news-as-entertainment drones.

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A group of Black soldiers who rescued a drowning marine at Iwo Jima

Director George Lucas says it took 20 years to get his latest film made, “because it’s an all-black movie”.

Speaking on The Daily Show, Lucas said he had to self-fund Red Tails, the true story of a group of African-American pilots who fought in World War II. He claimed major film studios would not back the movie because “there’s no major white roles in it at all”.

“I showed it to all of them and they said, ‘No. We don’t know how to market a movie like this,’” he said…

It features several well-known names – including Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding Jr, Terence Howard and R&B star Ne-Yo – and shows how the pilots were segregated and kept on the ground for most of the war, until they were called up to fight for their country.

The real-life airmen featured in the drama were given a Congressional Gold Medal by then-President George Bush in 2007.
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Lucas’s comments echo those of Spike Lee, who criticised the lack of black faces in Hollywood war movies in 2008.

Speaking about Clint Eastwood’s movies Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Lee said: “He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films”.

“I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know…”

Lucas insisted that Red Tails was nothing like preceding war films, including 1989′s Glory which, although it starred Denzel Washington, featured “a lot of white officers running these guys into cannon fire”.

The more things change – the more they stay the same.

Movie moguls are like Congress-critters. If we’re lucky they’re only a generation or two behind the public.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta cautioned global rivals on Sunday not to misjudge U.S. plans to slash military spending over the next decade, saying America would still field the world’s strongest military and nobody should “mess with that…”

Pressed on whether the United States could take out Iran’s nuclear sites without using nuclear weapons, Dempsey would only say: “I absolutely want them to believe that that’s the case…”

The tough talk comes days after President Barack Obama unveiled a new military strategy that calls for a smaller force as the United States cuts $487 billion in projected defense spending over the next decade in an effort to deal with the nation’s $14 trillion debt…

Dempsey said he worried that some countries might misunderstand the debate Americans are having over changing strategy and the need to cut defense spending…”There may be some around the world who see us as a nation in decline, and worse, as a military in decline. And nothing could be further from the truth,” Dempsey said…

Panetta said U.S. rivals should not misunderstand the situation…”I think the message that the world needs to understand is: America is the strongest military power and we intend to remain the strongest military power and nobody ought to mess with that,” he said…

Congress missed a deadline for reaching a compromise that could have stopped the new defense cuts, but it could still take action to override the spending reductions before they are due to go into force next year.

Obama, in unveiling the new defense strategy at a Pentagon news conference on Thursday, noted that even with the $487 trillion in cuts to projected spending, the defense budget would continue to grow in nominal terms.

He also said the U.S. defense budget would still be by far the world’s largest – roughly the size of the 10 next-biggest defense budgets combined.

Phew. I was worried the retired generals and admirals infesting the infrastructure of the military-industrial complex might be forced to make do on their pensions.

BTW – don’t you love it when the “peacemakers” we elected can’t help but brag to the rest of the world how easily we can kill and destroy everyone?

Dan Jurafsky of Stanford teaching computers to spot deception, anger, friendliness, flirtation

She looks as innocuous as Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous detective. But also like Miss Marple, Julia Hirschberg, a professor of computer science at Columbia University, may spell trouble for a lot of liars. That’s because Dr. Hirschberg is teaching computers how to spot deception — programming them to parse people’s speech for patterns that gauge whether they are being honest.

For this sort of lie detection, there’s no need to strap anyone into a machine. The person’s speech provides all the cues — loudness, changes in pitch, pauses between words, ums and ahs, nervous laughs and dozens of other tiny signs that can suggest a lie…

Programs that succeed at spotting these submerged emotions may someday have many practical uses: software that suggests when chief executives at public conferences may be straying from the truth; programs at call centers that alert operators to irate customers on the line; or software at computerized matchmaking services that adds descriptives like “friendly” to usual ones like “single” and “female.”

The technology is becoming more accurate as labs share new building blocks, said Dan Jurafsky, a professor at Stanford whose research focuses on the understanding of language by both machines and humans. Recently, Dr. Jurafsky has been studying the language that people use in four-minute speed-dating sessions, analyzing it for qualities like friendliness and flirtatiousness. He is a winner of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship commonly called a “genius” award, and a co-author of the textbook “Speech and Language Processing.”

“The scientific goal is to understand how our emotions are reflected in our speech,” Dr. Jurafsky said. “The engineering goal is to build better systems that understand these emotions…”

The practical political goal – from those most likely to fund this research – is to better spy on citizens of any nation.

For her continuing research, Dr. Hirschberg and two colleagues recently received a grant from the Air Force for nearly $1.5 million to develop algorithms to analyze English speakers and those who speak Arabic and Mandarin Chinese…

David F. Larcker, an accounting professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, audited a course in computer linguistics taught by Dr. Jurafsky and then applied its methods to analyze the words of financial executives who made statements that were later disproved.

These executives were, it turned out, big users of “clearly,” “very clearly” and other terms that Joseph Williams, the late University of Chicago professor who wrote the textbook “Style,” branded as “trust me, stupid” words.

No mention of political campaigns, budgets developed by Congressional hearings.

Ten days after the military dumped its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays and lesbians in the military, the Pentagon has issued new rules allowing military chaplains to perform same-sex marriages, but only if allowed by law and the chaplain’s beliefs.

“A military chaplain may participate in or officiate any private ceremony, whether on or off a military installation, provided that the ceremony is not prohibited by applicable state and local law,” a memo released Friday says. “Further a chaplain is not required to participate in or officiate a private ceremony if doing so would be in variance with the tenets of his or her religion…”

The new military rules on marriages must be in line with the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and local laws.

The latest two-paragraph memo, from Under Secretary of Defense Clifford Stanley, carefully stops short of fully embracing the idea of same-sex marriage…

Don’t wish to get too far ahead of the President and Congress. Even if the Pentagon is still leading the race to catch up to the rest of the American people.

Graves marked by numbers in Kupwara district

More than 2,000 corpses, believed to be victims of Kashmir’s long-running insurgency, have been found buried in dozens of unmarked graves in the divided region, an Indian government human rights commission report has said.

The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the line of control, the de facto border that has split the former kingdom between India and Pakistan for nearly 40 years. “At 38 places visited in north Kashmir, there were 2,156 unidentified dead bodies buried in unmarked graves,” the inquiry found.

Though campaigners and community leaders in Kashmir have long said such graves exist – and often provided extensive documentary evidence to back up their claims – the report is the first official statement confirming their existence…

Up to 70,000 people died in the 22-year insurgency in Kashmir, which pitted armed separatist groups, many backed by Pakistan, against New Delhi’s rule.

The worst of the violence occurred during the mid-1990s when a vicious struggle pitted thousands of militants against Indian security forces supplemented by locally-hired irregulars. Human rights abuses were routine with militants intimidating local communities and killing so-called spies while Indian authorities resorted to abductions, torture and extra-judicial executions on a wide scale. The graves appear to date from this period.

Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state and the struggle rapidly took on a religious dimension. The victims in the mass graves had been buried by local communities.

Police originally described the bodies to villagers as “unidentified militants”. This claim is disputed by the report, local media said , which also calls for a forensic investigation involving DNA identification of remains…

A US diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian last December revealed a briefing to the US embassy in Delhi by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross which described continuing torture and arbitrary detention by security forces.

Sigh. No government can mask anti-human practices for long. Time either proves accusations right or wrong – and governments which intend democratic practices, past, present or future had better learn to open the door to investigation.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

There was likely some semblance of good sense in homogenizing the Canadian army, navy and air force 43 years ago, creating a single home team — with its relatively new national flag — to represent our nation in hot spots around the world…

The change made it clear Canada was not a colony of Britain. We were a grown-up country with our own armed forces, no longer beholden to the Queen…

Stephen Harper’s government made everything old new again with its announcement that the old names of the air and maritime divisions of the Canadian Forces will be restored, with the “royal” intact. Welcome back Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Canadian Air Force and Canadian Army. Never mind that the changes will not affect the military’s command structures.

The name changes come after five years of intense lobbying by veterans groups and military personnel, as well as recommendations of the Senate Committee on National Defence. In announcing the changes, federal Defence Minister Peter MacKay said it was important to correct a historic mistake made during unification. Restoring the historic identities, he said, is a way to reconnect today’s military men and women with the history and traditions of our armed forces…

But does the “royal” moniker make much difference to the young men and women starting their military careers? They are, after all, the future of our armed forces.

It seems a retrograde move to hearken back to colonial times, despite the fact that royal themes are ingrained elements in the fabric of our parliamentary democracy. It would be more appropriate for our military to look forward, not back, to define itself based on the present and the future, rather than the past.

Not that Harper and his Tory fan club are especially strong at forward-looking. I don’t know what my Progressive Conservative kinfolk on PEI think of the change – but, cyberfriends I know through one or another part of the blogosphere are embarrassed as all get-out. It should only cost about $25 million to get Harper a few new votes!

Yes – they must be teased. That rather advanced social and political structure up there in the GWN has proven capable of marching to the rear of backwards as easily as any Kool Aid Party birther.

 
On Tuesday, 24 February 2009, two days before Obama presented a proposed budget to Congress, Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and other House Democrats called on the Obama administration to reduce military spending, setting up a potential clash between House liberals and the White House. At a White House summit on fiscal responsibility the day before, Obama had cast doubt on the future of an $11.2 billion project to upgrade the fleet of presidential helicopters. But Obama has shown no indication that he plans to reduce, or even freeze, overall defense spending, which will be around $650 billion this fiscal year.

Frank says that’s a mistake. “To accomplish his goals of expanding health care and other important quality of life services without ballooning the deficit,” Frank noted, Obama has no choice but to decrease military spending. He said that spending excessive amounts of money on the defense budget “precludes” the Obama administration from addressing other priorities: “If we do not get military spending under control, we will not be able to respond to important domestic needs.”

Acknowledging that Obama does plan to save hundreds of billions of dollars by withdrawing from Iraq, Frank said the President must go further and take big whacks at big-ticket military projects. He pointed to programs like the Air Force’s F-22 fighter, the Osprey troop transport, and missile defense as expensive, unnecessary Cold War-era boondoggles. He singled out missile defense in Eastern Europe as a particularly wasteful use of American taxpayers’ money. “I will confess that I am not a regular reader of Iranian-issued fatwahs,” Frank quipped. “And probably one of the ones I missed was the one where they threatened devastation against Prague. We plan to spend several billion dollars to protect the Czech Republic against Iran. That’s either a great waste of money or a very belated way to make up for Munich…”

But don’t look to Congress to reduce military spending on its own, Frank said: “Left entirely on our own, the Congress will not do the cuts in the military budget that ought to be there.” Military spending cuts will only come, he said, if there’s grassroots pressure for them…

Overdue. We can cut over 20% of the military budget just by bringing our troops home from the 175 countries where they are stationed. At a minimum, the cost of maintaining someone in the military is doubled when they are stationed outside the continental US.

Go to www.congress.org and email your Congress-critter and President Obama. Tell ‘em to Bring the Troops Home Now!

A Mexican military helicopter landed Saturday afternoon at Laredo International Airport by mistake, said a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Mucia Dovalina, the uniform public affairs officer for the Laredo Port of Entry, said the helicopter landed about 3 p.m., but she couldn’t share details such as the number of occupants or whether they were armed.

Dovalina said that, following protocol, CBP officers checked out the helicopter’s occupants, then allowed them to return to Mexico in the aircraft.

“The only thing that I can tell you is that they did land here,” she said. “It was by mistake. They were processed and they were returned to Mexico…”

In July, a convoy of soldiers rolled across the international bridge at Donna and were processed by customs and sent back across.

Just in case you wondered about some of the factors affecting the success rate of Mexico’s military operations against drug gangs.