Thursday, July 5, 2018

Catching Up

My last post was September of last year. I’m obviously not keeping up. Here are updates to posts from last year I'm publishing so I can move on to other things.


Syria June-July 2018

In early 2017 I watched a graphic documentary, “Cries of Syria.” I learned how the rebellion started in 2011 with the arrest and torture of 15 boys in the city of Daraa because they wrote graffiti on a school wall. The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt inspired them to write, “Doctor, you’re next,” referring to President al-Assad’s medical degree. One of the boys, 13 years old, died. His parents were told after their child’s mutilated body was returned to them, “you can always make more.”

Nonviolent protests spread primarily in the cities. Men and women marched in the streets; they carried roses and shouted for al-Assad’s ouster. Assad was conciliatory at first but soon replied with arrests, and soldiers and tanks began firing into the crowds. I wrote about the roots of the protests in civil disobedience and the disappearance of the leaders of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement. Civil disobedience died opposing a government willing to torture and kill thousands of unarmed citizens to stay in power.

After that came the civil war, bringing more torture and death, abductions, chemical gas attacks, rubble, over 12 million refugees, ISIL (ISIS), starvation, barrel bombs, and more rubble. The Syrian government was close to losing to the rebels in 2015 when al-Assad asked for Russia, Iran, and Lebanese Hezbollah militia to intervene. Beginning in October 2015 Hezbollah and Iranian Shiite militia engaged in ground offensives that were coordinated with Russian airstrikes.

More countries became involved either directly (as de facto invaders) or by backing rebel groups. France and the US went into Syria to fight ISIS (as of July 2018 they are still there) while Turkey went in to fight the Kurds. Recently Russia promised all these groups would soon leave but who knows when everyone will actually leave. The US may leave soon but I doubt Iran will.

The Syrian civil war is a holocaust both statistically (over 460,000 dead) and in terms of human cruelty. Amnesty International in 2017 reported that in Saydnaya Prison up to 50 prisoners were taken out of their cells once or twice a week in the middle of the night, beaten, pronounced guilty in a quick trial, and hanged. A crematorium was built to incinerate the bodies and hide the mass murder.

Besides hanging as many as 13,000 civilians in secret, the Syrian government systematically beat, tortured, and starved prisoners to death. Most of the murdered prisoners were civilians arrested for peacefully protesting against the government.

When the ware is finally over, all that will be left is rubble. President Trump made more rubble when, in coordination with allies, he ordered a missile attack in response to the killing of women and children in a rebel-held area with chemical gas in April. This strike and the one last year that pockmarked an airstrip probably did little to change al-Assad’s behavior. But it may have been better than nothing. The strikes let al-Assad know that the world saw the crime, even if little could be done about it. It wasn’t an act of war; the act of war was earlier when the US went into Syria uninvited to fight ISIS.


The end may be near for the rebels. The al-Assad government with Russian air support began an offensive against the last rebel stronghold in the southern province of Daraa on June 18. The offensive has since forced 271,800 civilians to flee into the desert. “Local activist Islam al Balki said on Tuesday (June 26), ‘People have left with the clothes on their backs, risking the airstrikes, time to bury the dead. Nowhere is safe.’” “Huge numbers of people are sleeping under trees and in cars in fields and wasteland”[1] near the Jordan and Israel borders. Both countries closed their borders to refugees.

I've glossed over the last seven-plus years of Syrian history because my focus has been the failure of civil disobedience. So far I haven't found answers to my original questions: How could civil disobedience have possibly succeeded with the array of internal and external forces that arose to oppose it? What would the leaders of the Nonviolence movement back in 2011 have done differently if they knew what they would be up against? Could they have done anything differently? I can only hope the Syrian people will rebuild and someday be free, without al-Assad, Russia, and Iran in control of their country.


AI and the 2016 US Election

Shortly after the 2016 presidential election I reported that an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system called MogAI predicted that Trump would win. This is ironic not because it was an AI system that made the correct prediction while telephone polls were wrong. Other AI systems attempted to predict the election results and were also wrong. MogAI was different because it analyzed real-time data provided by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google. It had the right data to work with.

It turns out that MogAI’s accurate prediction was actually an indicator of the effectiveness of the social media campaigns employed by Russia, Cambridge Analytica, and other groups to influence US voters. Based on MobAI’s success, It’s not hard to imagine other AI systems ramping up, either somewhere in Russia or in a deep-state laboratory, if you believe Trump supporters. These AI systems could refine the content of the ads, tweets, headlines, and comments that worked so well in 2016. Meanwhile hackers are undoubtedly devising new and better techniques to hide where malicious content is actually coming from.[2]


The US President and the Environment

We Americans have always been obsessed with our President but today’s non-stop commentary by media pundits, Radio and TV talking heads, and comedians is excessive. Much of it must be intended to be purely entertainment. I'm including Trump's daily tweet rants and routine administration turn-overs. I'm struggling to ignore all of it except for a few articles per week about the issues and the election debates. This is difficult but I have a prescription, re-purposing Timothy Leary's hippie phrase, to “turn off, tune out, and drop in.” That is, turn off: all devices, TV, smart phone, Xbox, et al., tune out: the media circuses, and drop in: meet with people and talk face to face.[3]

I’d think better of Trump if he didn’t hate the environment so much. It’s now okay to shoot bears while they are hibernating in their dens, shoot birds with lead bullets, and let eagles die from lead poisoning after eating the shot birds, block puppy mill inspections, use a pesticide known to cause brain damage in children, and so on.

The liberal Democrat party, the party of environmentalists, wants government to oversee our use of the environment. The right wing party calls this oversight, with the regulations that come with it, a war on jobs and small businesses. Consequently the environment is in the middle of a fight between ideologies. I wonder, why is there a choice between a healthy environment and a healthy economy? If the land is there to be used, shouldn’t the land be maintained to remain healthy enough to be used? Will the economy always grow while the environment dies?

Or is it possible that taking care of the environment has become too expensive because extracting and distributing natural resources has become too expensive? This last question deserves a thorough investigation and it’s on my list of things to look into.

As technology advances here and there industrial production has dependencies to resolve on the natural world as it falls apart. One of the most well known dependencies is the pollinating bee. Bumblebees, honeybees, solitary bees, and other insects pollinate many of the fruits (apple, mango, kiwi, peach), berries, nuts (almond, Brazil nut), and squash tended by farmers and shipped to grocery stores around the country.

As important as bees and other pollinating insects are to farming, they’ve been dying off in recent years. While exactly how bad the situation for bees is today isn’t clear, an article about beekeeper Bret Adee published in February 2017 stated, “in the year that ended in April 2016, 44 percent of the overall commercial bee population died.”[4] More recently the bee population may be improving.

Bee population deaths could be due to pesticides and herbicides, parasitic mites, bad weather, starvation, or Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). CCD itself may be the result of any or some combination of the other causes I listed. If pesticides in particular are one of the reasons for the demise of bees, then the decision to stop regulating pesticides and herbicides could devastate the production of much of the food Americans eat.

Some people accuse love of the environment of being a religion. If love of something above God is a religion, surely money and technology are also religions. Many people seem to believe that money and technology solve all problems. Trans-humanists and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity prediction come to mind as two examples. Here are three possible solutions to the loss of pollinating bees and insects. They are technology applications from three science and engineering areas: robotics, biology and genetics engineering, and botany.

The robotics idea is an air force of pollinating drones. I think this idea has a few technical problems. First, a single drone bee must be small and light to pollinate a flower and not harm it. Ideally it should also recognize and pollinste only flowers that haven't been pollinated so that every flower in a grove is visited only one time. Then there is their efficiency. That is, can drones be as efficient pollinating as real bees? Based on work on a Computer Science computability problem known as the Traveling Salesman, finding an efficient algorithm, even after making simplifying assumptions, is really hard. Drones can probably be trained though to increase their pollinating efficiency over time.[5]


So far I haven’t found an article about genetically modifying bees to be resistant to pesticides and mites. I imagine in a laboratory somewhere there are researchers trying to isolate the genes that promote resistance (after all there is research on genetically modifying bees to make concrete instead of honey). The problem may again be a problem with the number of factors researchers have to consider. Bee strains resistant to both pesticides and mites (and by extension to CCD) should have been found by now but maybe none exist.

The two ideas above likely moot if either new varieties are found, or new hybrid varieties are created, of the trees and plants grown by farmers and pollinated by insects. For example, corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and sorghum either self-pollinate or are pollinated by the wind. And humans pollinate hybrid trees and plants. In March 2016 NPR published an article about a variety of Almond tree, called Independence, which is self-pollinating. Its almonds taste as good as the traditionally pollinated variety. Almond farmers also saved money not having to rent as many bees.

Does our industrial food supply, and by extension our modern civilization, need a healthy ecology of plants and animals to survive? The answer may turn out to be no, but someday I suspect we’ll miss it. My own research on this question isn’t finished.


Climate Change Narratives

Back in December 2016 I wrote about a discussion on Fox News hosted by Sean Hannity about what he described as global warming propaganda. Here are a few events, which I think are relevant, that occurred since then.

Monica Crowley, a Fox news contributor at the time, was charged with plagiarizing parts of both her 2012 book, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened,” and PhD dissertation. Whether the charges were true or a “hit job” as she claimed, her credibility has been undermined. It’s hard to write a book, I know this from first-hand experience. I also know there’s no excuse for not using quotation marks and properly referencing sources.

The other expert on the show back in 2016 was talk-show host Bill Cunningham. He presented the argument known as “natural variability,” that there have always been, and always will be, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves. “Global warming and cooling has been going on for eons without human involvement. Earthquakes, sun spots, avalanches, tsunamis all affect weather. It’s not man-made global warming.”

Last summer there were extreme heat waves around the world. In early August countries around the Mediterranean experienced a three-day wave called “Lucifer” that broke many records (e.g., 106.3 ℉ in Florence, Italy, August 2). The people living there didn’t think it was common. Meanwhile, in North America a heat wave even reached Alaska with the temperature as high as 88 ℉. July was the hottest month ever recorded in Florida and in the southwest it was so hot airplanes were grounded because they couldn’t take off.

This year is no different with another round of record temperatures around the world: Montreal (98.6 ℉ July 2), Denver (104 ℉ June 28), Motherwell, Scotland (91.8 ℉ June 28), and Rostov-On-Don, Russia (98.6 ℉ June 29), and Yerevan, Armenia (107.6 ℉ July 2). June was the warmest on record in Northern Ireland and Wales. In the Middle East, Quriyat, Oman remained at 108.7 ℉ for 51 hours. This was the highest nighttime low temperature ever recorded on the Earth’s surface.

According to data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the number of record-breaking high temperatures exceeds record lows by an average ratio calculated over this decade of two to one. Looking at monthly weather records for the US this past June, for example, 19 high temperature records were tied and 16 were broken. Over the same period, 5 low temperatures were tied and 9 were broken, a ratio of 7 to 2. Earlier in January 30 high temperature records were tied and 29 were broken while 6 low temperature records were tied and 17 were broken, a ratio of 59 to 23.

Heat wave temperatures indicate a trend going in only one direction. But I doubt Hannity, Crowley and Cunningham will ever abandon their global warming conspiracy theory. Their politics won’t allow it. Winter won’t disappear anytime soon, global warming is slow, and for years to come they’ll tell everyone they're right every cold day in April.

Notes

  1. Syrian civil war: Unprecedented 270,000 people face desperate desert conditions after fleeing regime offensive
    Bethan McKernan July 3, 2018
  2. In my estimation there is an ineluctable expansion of technology that observes, influences, and predicts our behavior. One possible outcome is a cyber war run by AI systems. The war may already have started. But I can only guess what US, Russia, and other countries have done or are working on.
  3. The answers to the questions, what happened to Hillary Clinton's e-mails and why did they disappear, and did Russia help Trump win the 2016 election, are politically intertwined yet they are in fact separate. The truth may be that neither candidate was worthy to be President. This is as likely as one or both being innocent.
  4. A Bee Mogul Confronts the Crisis in His Field
    Stephanie Strom February 16, 2017
  5. The best way to figure out how to train drones to efficiently pollinate thousands of flowers would be to study the bees. Drone research must include recording bee flight patterns, and how a bee lands on a flower, pollinates it, and moves on. After enough data has been recorded, accurate flower recognition and optimum flight path can be solved by machine learning.

References


Syria June-July 2018


AI and the 2016 US Election

  • Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News
    David Z. Hambrick, Madeline Marquardt February 6, 2018
  • Social Media is Giving Us Trypophobia
    Natasha Lomas January 27, 2018

    "In truth, social media is not a telescopic lens — as the telephone actually was — but an opinion-fracturing prism that shatters social cohesion by replacing a shared public sphere and its dynamically overlapping discourse with a wall of increasingly concentrated filter bubbles. [...]

    Little wonder lies spread and inflate so quickly via products that are not only hyper-accelerating the rate at which information can travel but deliberately pickling people inside a stew of their own prejudices."

  • Resource for Understanding Political Bots
    Public Scholarship November 18th, 2016
  • Bots Without Borders: How Anonymous Accounts Hijack Political Debate
    Katina Michael January 23, 2017

    "Bots have not just been used in the US, but also in Australia, the UK, Germany, Syria and China. To what extent – and how – are they affecting political discourse?"


The US President and the Environment


Climate Change Narratives

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