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Satellite Images Used to Document International Atrocities
wikkedwoman wrote with a link to a Washington Post story about the use of satellite imagery to detect atrocities around the world. The story details Amnesty International's efforts to identify areas in the world that may have been subject to man-made disasters. By comparing and contrasting imagery captured over time, researchers can produce hard evidence to present to a hard-to-please international community. "Tonight, [Amnesty Researcher Jeremy] Nelson begins his work by making a copy of the [older] shot in the right-hand screen and pasting it directly over the [newer] one on the left. Then he makes the top one nearly transparent. A river that cuts through the scene becomes a marker to help him line up the two. Now he can easily flip back and forth to look for changes. Sudanese huts tend to follow a similar pattern: a solid base ring with a steep, thatched roof. In the earlier image, they show up as small circles, with a slight shading to the dome, depending on the direction of the sun. Nelson draws a small, green circle slightly larger than the area of the average hut and makes several dozen copies of it ... When he finishes, he moves the 2007 shot to the top and begins the analysis again ... parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar. If you didn't know that huts were there before, you'd have no idea they were now gone. 'Whoever did this did a good job,' he says quietly. 'Thorough, at least.'"
Can they see through the roofs at Gittmo?
from the Great fire link it appear as though we have had foreign teerrorists for longer than we thought:
The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City. Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires.
liqbase
Google Maps. Street View! Explore secret CIA prisons at the cell level, Virtually from your desktop.
I guess it would be more convincing if there is a pattern - e.g. 10 villages entirely burned in a 100 mile radius. Obviously, there were not 10 individual fires, but some underlying cause.
Also, I would guess whoever is burning down the villages is not burning down much of the surrounding trees and shrubs, which would indicate man-made causes
That's only proof if you actually know there's been a massacre there. Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire.
That's quite a gross oversimplification for any intelligent person looking at images. Sure, a village with a few burned huts is one thing. Could be a back yard fire that took hold.
But a village with every single house burned, in a desert area where there's little vegetation that hasn't already been taken up for food or housing? That's suspicious. When it's a few miles away from another village where every single house is burned, that's suspicious too - when it's surrounded by five, ten, twenty more villages where every single house is burned... it all builds up.
This isn't a case of two variables like some piece of simple code comparing the differences in two photos, some kind of "If x_then != x_now then atrocity = true", there is a phenomenal amount more information in satellite photos.
All the same, every piece of evidence helps. These things are never proven by *any* one piece of evidence. The more different types of evidence, especially from distinct sources, the better.
This will really get interesting when it becomes automated... for all sorts of purposes.
While I'll freely admit that I didn't RTFA, the summary has a quote saying "parts of this region were burned so thoroughly that there's nothing left but a large black scar". He's talking about whole parts of the region, not about only the villages being targetted. That's a freakin' huge difference.
That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your point is valid but your argumentation is flawed beyond use.
The areas they are looking into are areas with reported atrocities.
Apart from that, if you look at the summary, you'll see a description of the architecture that in no way resembles the 17th centure British capital. The reason that the fire was wide spread was the proximity of the buildings and the ineptitude of the civil servants. Apart from that, there is no documentation to support or point to a massacre (except that of the Dutch and other immigrants)
The reason for New Orleans' destruction is also heavily documented as being anything but a massacre.
The point of the technology would be to act as supporting evidence instead of conclusive. If taken alone, yeah, it could be an accident or a natural occurrence. When taken in the context of a country with millions of refugees and numerous reports of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and massacres... Well, it's less likely that the explanation is accidental/natural (but of course, not impossible)
Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire.
Did you look at the photos? Where, exactly, is the "forest"? It's the middle of the desert. You might also care to note that the area around the village is unburnt. And it's not the "only proof" it's just more proof. Never mind though, no reason you can't ignore it like all the rest.
Or you could use the same technique on New Orleans. Just show some satellite pics from before and after the flood. Lookit all that devastation. Whoever did that atrocity was very thorough.
True that. The institutional incompetence that made it a far worse disaster than it should have been was pretty thorough.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Its great to be able to see exactly whats taken place in Sudan, but it was well know that genocide was taking place. This is just more confirmation. Im not sure what value this has. What is really needed is some concrete proof to bring someone to trial for crimes against humanity. The higher up the better.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The fire pushed north on Monday into the heart of the City. Order in the streets broke down as rumours arose of suspicious foreigners setting fires. Meh. Like the rumours that Jews were spreading the plague by contaminating the water supplies.
I don't think there is really much debate that there are massacres taking place in Sudan at the moment. However is it very easy for the Government to control the flow of information out of the country. Doctors without Borders, who are often the organization on the front line of these crisis, who are willing to speak up about atrocities, got kicked out in 2005. A UN diplomat (http://www.janpronk.nl/index288.html#290) was also expelled for blogging about the Sudanese government.
NGOs have a hard time bringing in any sort of communication equipment (satellites for internet etc etc) and I'm pretty sure that you need to have a permit to take photos in Sudan, and the government controls where people can go. This is the same for many conflict zones, especially those with dubious treatment of human rights.
What this article shows is that there are now ways of documenting what is going on in Sudan, which is beyond the direct control of the Sudanese government. However it is very expensive (the images are costing about $1600 each) and there was an issue, when they couldn't book satellite time over Sudan. Whether this was because the government booked it out to prevent them from taking photos is unsure - but it does show the limitation.
Part of the reason that the international community is dragging their feet (or can drag their feet) is probably the lack of reliable concrete information - and this is what this project provides.
That and the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
...there are all kinds of atrocities going on internationally and domestically (for you /.'ers here in the US) that you don't need more than a pair of eyes to see. How many times a day do people just blow off the homeless and starving people of their own country.
Yes there are problems like Gitmo, Darfar and Sudan. Hell there is most of a continent that is what I consider an international atrocity because of starvation, disease, and corruption.
What about all the homeless people here in the US, the overrun VA hospitals with deplorable conditions and the Katrina victims still waiting for FEMA--things we can see without Satellite Imagery?
Maybe we should handle those problems first before we spend the big bucks on the technology to look for more problems we can't afford? And for fscks sake, no, I'm not saying that any atrocities found with this tech are of any less importance than the ones found without it. Human suffering is human suffering--it all sucks. But that money AI used for the satellite images could have been feeding people in Africa and the US and elsewhere... ~sigh~
I guess I'm just not as excited about technology as I am about humanitarianism. I feel like this is getting ahead of ourselves.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
Don't ya wanna know how we keep starting fires ?
It's my desire ! It's My Desire !
That said, the same could be said about New Orleans. Suspiciously the devastation doesn't expand that much further than the city, so it must have been man-made, eh?
No, 'cos a person with a brain in their head would go "shit, it's right near the ocean, and there's what looks like sediment covering stuff, and one kind of damage follows land contours, and the satellite pic was taken right after this other satellite pic of a fuckass huge hurricane"
And the smart person would figure it's probably flood & storm damage.
Bingo. You just gave the best example of one of the biggest manipulations in European history.
Thing is, you could use the same media manipulation techniques to that one too. (If they had photography back then, which they didn't.) Get a few refugees to testify with tears in their eyes about how the Jews are ethnically cleansing them by poisoning their water supplies, show some photographs of piled bodies, show some satellite images of whole areas which turned from fertile farmland back to woods because the peasants there kinda went extinct. Voila, now you have your "proof" of the atrocities Jews commited against the poor Christians of that region.
Before anyone accuses me of anti-semitism, I _know_ it wasn't the Jews to blame there. It's just an example of the kind of absurdity one can support with careful picking of whose testimonies they listen, and some emotional images.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"That's only proof if you actually know there's been a massacre there. Otherwise it can mean anything, including a forest fire."
Why a troll such as you got modded "interesting" befuddles me, but I'll bite.
No, it couldn't have been "anything." "Anything" includes meteorite strikes, Acts of Gawd, and other such unlikelihoods.
Systematic burning of _disconnected_ villages over hundreds of miles over long stretches of time is not a "forest fire" especially when there is no forest.
"E.g., take the Great Fire Of London"
No, you take it. Part of the reason that the Great Fire spread so quickly was the density of flammable wooden structures. What we actually see in the satellite photographs is not dense urban construction.
I don't know what you're trying to prove in your message, but being so disconnected from reality is never a good thing. Maybe you can't wrap your brain around the fact that the long tradition of killing your fellow man has gone on for millennia and isn't all that uncommon. I don't know. I do find your twisted logic, if you can call it that, disturbing.
--
BMO
These before-and-after satellite images aren't being used as ironclad proof, in isolation; they're being used as supporting evidence. RTFA—but really now, shouldn't this have been obvious?
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
Actually, thanks for bringing that up. 'Cause, see, that's the whole flippin' point I was trying to make.
No, I don't know enough about that conflict to have an informed opinion. And I'm not going to suddenly jump to a spoon-fed conclusion based on some emotional images and wording. When I have enough other data there, I might make a judgment. But I refuse to jump to one of the sides and wave a banner, just because the media spoon fed me some images.
That's all I'm preaching: exercise some healthy skepticism, get your information from more than one source. That's all.
If you already know enough about that conflict, by all means, go ahead and have an opinion about it. But so far I only have someone's word that some pictures mean what he says they mean. And that's just not enough data to base an opinion on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Money for nothing, pix for free
perhaps I may suggest you get some more info before you open your trap? You got a point that unless you are heavily invested with all the info about a conflict, you cannot make a good judgment on it. But nobody was asking for your judgment, and you still spouted your 'that can mean anything' judgments.
You may also tell me what party AI or other human rights watch organizations are in these conflicts? Maybe you can at least expect some form of objectivity from them?
All in all these photos are not conclusive proof that these atrocities were committed by one particular party. But they will serve as very good supportive evidence when (if ever) these cases are brought before a real judge.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
E.g., do you even know which side was inhabiting that area, if not for being spoon fed that it's an atrocity against the Sudanese? While you do have a point it is still quite possible to use satellite photography quite effectively to document atrocities and prosecute the guilty. US and Nato footage from UAVs, satellites and recon aircraft has proven instrumental in locating mass graves of civilians murdered in ethnic cleansing operations by Bosnian Serb and Croat militias and that would otherwise probably never have been found. In some cases the perpetrators of the atrocities in question were even caught on film while doing the deed. Satellite footage can also serve to confirm the reports of refugees as to when a settlement was razed and if the footage is good enough the type of vehicles involved and any registration marks they carried can identify the party guilty of the atrocity and even individual military units involved. The Serbs for one got such a shock when they found out how these graves were being located by UN investigators that they started digging up the corpses of the people they had ethnically cleansed and tried to dispose of them by burning them. In at least one instance they tried to dispose of them by processing the decaying human remains in a plant intended to produce cattle fodder. From the UN investigators and SFOR/IFOR/EUFOR point of view this both mixed blessing since, while it resulted in some destroyed evidence, it also led to the discovery quite a few mass-graves the recon assets hadn't caught but that were located when the people responsible panicked and started to dig them up again in an attempt to dispose of evidence.
It's not a massacre. It's muslims murdering blacks and enslaving children, imitating their prophet. It's not a massacre for the same reason muslims aren't genocidal maniacs. It's "just" "religious observance" :
n nah/bukhari/084.sbt.html#009.084.057 (slaughtering of atheists because they're, well, atheists)
r fur-jihad-on-horseback.html
(just one example, straight from the muslim "holy text")
http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/fundamentals/hadithsu
http://coalitionfordarfur.blogspot.com/2007/05/da
This darfur, and kashmir, is what people call "moderate" islam. Care to see extremism ?
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
You don't think the international community knows about Dafur - or knew about Rawanda? They don't care. This may strip plausible deniabilty (eg "we had no idea that was happening"), but it won't mean there will be action taken.
I'm surprised TFA does not mention the newly announced by Amnesty International "Eyes on Darfur" website. Oh, Beirut imagery has been updated to reflect the situation after the 2006 Lebanon War.
Here's a few stories in the same vein:
Documenting Humanitarian Crisis with Google Earth
New Google Earth Layers: Darfur and more
The Israel-Lebanon Conflict in Google Earth
Beirut Destruction Through Remote Sensing
Israel - Lebanon Conflict and Geospatial Data Access
Animoog.org
I understand your upset or annoyance at someone suggesting that this is reactionary inference, but Slashdot comments are supposed to be debate about the issues surrounding a story. Inform and educate, rebuff and argue, but please don't be abusive. There's a world of difference between impassioned and aggressive, and leaning towards the latter actually damages your argument more than strengthens it.
Meta will eat itself
It doesn't take a satellite picture to see that the parent poster is a moron, troll, or both. Manipulation at its finest, indeed.
Evidence is evidence; no one bases anything on a single piece of information. Our military has the most sophisticated satellite imagery in the world, do you think they plan entire missions over a single photo?
You know the image in that article more likely than not is a village murdered. It's more than enough evidence to go look for the bodies.
Why do I suspect the parent poster supported the Iraq war based on its "evidence"?
Using satellites to track what is going on with Darfur is interesting for two important reasons. First, based on what reports have been confirmed, the number of people being killed in the conflict in Darfur appears to be larger than any other conflict on the globe at this time. Although the moral issues have some relation to each other, there is some difference between the genocidal murder of millions and the torture of a few hundred or so at Guantanamo. Second, information flow out of Darfur has successfully been restricted. This means that alternative information sources should be considered.
Based on your response you have little interest in either technology or humanitarian activities. In attempting to put Bosnia back together at some level satellite images have been critical in documenting what happened and assisting with recovery of bodies from mass graves. This means that this technological approach which you deride has already been shown to be extremely useful in helping people recover from all too common instances of genocide. Yet even with this proven record you would dare to suggest this is just some technological gimmick that somehow interferes with humanitarian goals.
Is one of the main reasons. Nothing can be done through the UN because of the Chinese veto, and we all know that action taken without UN sanction is illegal, and possibly a war crime.
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Let's hope the rest of the world will finally do something - we've seen Khartoum and Omar al-Bashir flaunt sanctions and other restrictions. I think dealing with the Sudanese government will involve a lot of "hard evidence" (sadly, eyewitness accounts are still being questioned by Sudan). Plus a stronger standing army not fighting other battles would be helpful too.
OK, so I'm pretty sure that this is flamebait, but you did it on my comment, so I took it...
Sudan is already in the top 30 oil exporters in the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chart_of_exports_and _production_of_oil_by_nation), so rubbish about what you're saying about it taking decades to get the oil out of there. Admitted I don't think that it's coming out of Darfur, but it's still the same government.
I actually believe that the biggest problem comes as much from people with close minded views such as your. When people think like that it becomes a "war of civilizations", instead of just an peacekeeping-operation to end genocide, of course the Sudanese government is going to object. Your views of Islam and Muslims are incredibly narrow-minded, and I can only guess, very uneducated. By thinking like that you prevent peaceful dialog from happening.
I have personally spent the last 18 months living mostly in Pakistan and Indonesia - the worlds two largest Muslim countries. Despite standing out as a tall westerner, I didn't have any trouble at all, no terrorists, no jihads. Actually I found most of the people much friendlier than the people back home.
So please take some time to think about the situation, and what will make it better, before spreading such narrow minded rubbish.
The UN basically won't send any stabilizing force into Sudan without approval from Darfur - the very leaders who are responsible for the massacre in the first place. They were formed so that these kinds of horrors would never happen again, but the fact is that they keep happening again and again and all the UN is capable of doing these days is wagging their finger like a disapproving parent. The US would have had to intervene unilaterally in Sudan, and the rest of the world would sit on the sidelines and wag their collective fingers at us for trying to be the world's police. So fuck you and your either/or scenario you ignorant asshat. By the way, it's spelled "Iraq", not "Irak."
How many people out here just troll google maps for fun sometimes? I know I know, only when a new version is released. But you know what would really be a good tool? If a dual screen or dual map version of a program like google maps was made. One w/ pics that were released on a yearly schedule. With this a community of people could be developed in tracking more then one kind of atrocity. The evidence of any kind ofglobal change could be seen and reported by any one. This would be a great tool for bloggers, reporters, and really any one who want to help gather evidence for a cause of global effect. Wow before and after pics, never looked so relevant to me.
So amnesty international takes one more step toward becoming big brother. But you slashdot whiney leftards will keep blaming Bush and RIAA for everything instead of seeing whats really happening.
Oh and they'll turn a blind eye to muslim genocide because the religion of peace is amnesty's ally.
but it's a safe bet that Google Earth can see you flogging the meat in your mom's basement.
England was a pretty advanced country at that time
Advanced in stupidity?
Why, yes! I AM new here.
Right. Because after all, everyone knows that the cause of one fire can't also cause another fire. For instance, when Oklahoma and Texas had all those summer grass fires a couple years ago, since there were actually multiple fires, they were definitely caused by somebody setting them deliberately.
Fact is, if conditions are right for a forest or grass fire to start spontaneously, they are typically so over a fairly large area, and typically a whole lot of fires will start by the time the conditions go back to normal again.
Even if villages were the only thing burned, that wouldn't be sufficient evidence for anyone who really thinks about it. Villages tend to change the landscape of their immediate vicinity some. If nothing else, people walking around compresses the ground, making it more difficult for most plants to grow. The botanic makeup of the area immediately around a village is usually slightly different than in unpopulated areas. Perhaps it is different in such a way that fires are more likely to start in the village area.
For instance, fewer plants means fewer roots in the soil, which usually means poorer quality soil, which usually means drier land. It is not at all inconceivable that drier land would lead to more fires, many of which might not spread to areas further from the village which have more plants, better soil, and therefore more water.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I wonder if we can get satallite photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well?
A post is not insightful because it agrees with your political belief. Neither oil, nor bush is responsible for all evil in the world. Neither of these 2 have ever touched Sudan more than a tiny bit, so I won't go as far as to say that the exact opposite is the case, but clearly there's at least more than one factor involved here.
... I don't really think so actually. It's just too little oil to realistically matter.
Maybe oil is involved, maybe
Of course, realism is something you're not worried about, right ?
"I don't know what you're trying to prove in your message, but being so disconnected from reality is never a good thing. Maybe you can't wrap your brain around the fact that the long tradition of killing your fellow man has gone on for millennia and isn't all that uncommon. I don't know. I do find your twisted logic, if you can call it that, disturbing."
I'll bite.
Perhaps you can set down the Red Bull for a second and read the OP again.
His point was (clearly enough to me anyway) NOT that massacres didn't happen in Sudan. His point was that the original article's analysis (you did RTA, yes?) was that this was some sort of panacea, proving genocidal massacres etc BY ITSELF. That's *patently* untrue, and I thought his point was a bit obvious, really.
Apparently not.
There is no question that there is genocide going on in Sudan. But simply overlaying pictures of areas from year to year, and even the subsequent recognition that a village that WAS there has been entirely eradicated, is not ipso facto proof that the village was "massacred". In fact (his point continues) there are SO many possible explanations that the utility of the photos without contextual ground investigation is essentially nil.
I don't think his point is that complicated, nor does it deny the horrific realities of this specific case in any way.
-Styopa
I've read the article, but I saw no mention of what software they used to manipulate the images. Does anyone know?
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Since the flood was caused by man-made levees bursting, the notion that the disaster wasn't at least in part 'man-made' seems flawed.
Let me just point out a few instances when oil may have played a part in recent history.
- Saddam's campaign against the Kurds - why was he allowed to get away with this for so long?
- Why were the French and Russians so opposed to sanctions against Saddam?
- Sudan is already listed here
- Venezuela seems to be losing its democracy right in front of our eyes, and nobody seems to want to do anything.
- Why are the middle-eastern countries allowed to get away with the kind of autocratic behavior that we would not tolerate in our own countries
There are probably others where oil has played a part, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
It's true. The millenium dome is clearly visible.
God Be Gone
They need FLASH to show a jpg picture?! How lame is that.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
2- Natural disasters are atrocious, but not atrocities.
3- Those levees should have been cat4 resistent, they weren't. All levels of governments over the last 20 or 30 years are responsible for that disaster. Primarily the officials who say things like "no one could have known" and who botch the response. This was their responsibility, and they were asleep at the wheel.
You can't take the sky from me...
Massacres are an emotional issue, and so are easy for us to latch on to as a means of overlooking our problems at home. And in the USA at least, the mess is huge. Most people hate their jobs. We spend half our lives commuting. The cities are disgusting, dirty and ugly thanks to commercialization. Corporations (insert MS|Apple|Google if you like) rule our world. Violence is increasing, so is desperation. Why don't we fix our own house before we try to tell others how to live?
technical writing / development
The only advanced things in London are the drugs, house music and the aging problem.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Looks like someone set Darfur up the bomb. All their base are belong to Sudan.
Actually, that's sorta the whole point: context is _everything_. And the context you're given can be misleading (deliberately let you connect the dots in the wrong direction), or outright a lie.
Yes, if you also have the right context, you can make an informed judgment. But do you? That's the question I'm asking.
Since you mention Nazis and mass graves, there is already at least one case where that was a lie. There are mass graves in Poland which the Soviets blamed the Nazis for. Turns out that it was the _Soviets_ themselves who were responsible for that. Stalin's NKVD had rounded up what they thought would be potential problem elements there, such as the Polish army officers, and summarily executed them.
Atrocity? Yes. But the context was an outright lie. Now I'm not saying the Nazis were nice guys, far from it, but in this case they had just provided a convenient scapegoat for NKVD's own atrocities.
And before someone says that's revisionism: no, it's not. The USSR finally owned up in the end. It's as official a confession as it gets.
Also, since you mention Nazis, those guys pioneered another thing: whole "war documentaries" that were entirely produced in a movie studio. Yay for first-hand front-line footage. You can believe that, can't you? I mean, the images surely speak for themselves, right? Well, too bad it came from a studio in Berlin instead of from France.
That's the whole point: if I show you a small pile of corpses in a mass grave, it's emotional and all, but you're entirely dependent on the context provided. How do you just know from that image alone whether that's Jews massacred by the Nazis, or "kulaks" (rich peasants, i.e., any peasant who wasn't starving) massacred by Stalin's NKVD, or maybe some the victims of the post-WWI flu epidemic (think like the bird flu, but it could be transmitted from human to human), or whatever else? The context is _everything_. And by just giving you the proper lie as a context, that image can be made to mean almost anything.
The point isn't to grow complacent or "post-modernist" but to start realizing when you don't have enough reliable context to make an informed judgment.
E.g., in this case, sure, burned villages is an emotional thought and all, but who burned whose houses?
One context particularly used as a battle-banner by a lot is that the Darfur conflict is some muslims-massacring-christians case. That's actually false, as both sides involved are muslims. It's an ethnic/racial war, not a religious war. There you go, an outright false context that's been used a lot lately.
Or how do you know which of the two sides burned the villages down? There are at least two sides in any conflict. And even the arab militias were funded in response to the insurgent forces of the other side. Are all the burned houses on the rebels side, or did the rebels do some burning of their own? In the absence of some first-hand information from down there, how _do_ you draw the right conclusions from just a satellite photo?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
unless it's in Europe.
Germany? Genocide.
Serbia? Genocide.
Some village full of uncivilized savages? Nah, that's just them being normal.
It's lack of options. What can the US do about Darfur? Stop trading with Sudan? What trade do we have? So do we stop trading with Sudan's trading partners? That would be China. Not a good plan.
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Most of the mess that is currently in the Middle East now is due to promises made to both sides (Israel and the Arabic countries) to keep them from allying with the Axis in WWII. Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor was the result of our blockade on Indonesia (which was Japan's source of oil). Pretty much since the development of the internal combustion engine/tank/airplane every facet of geopolitics has been primarily about oil. Before that it was about coal (for steam ships).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
"I have personally spent the last 18 months living mostly in Pakistan and Indonesia - the worlds two largest Muslim countries. Despite standing out as a tall westerner, I didn't have any trouble at all, no terrorists, no jihads. Actually I found most of the people much friendlier than the people back home."
Well maybe you just expected less from them and where pleasantly surprised.
Actually I learned on of the big truths that most people never seem to get. I spent a summer with some relatives in Belfast when things where really bad. It looked like a war zone because it was.
The big truth that people seem to miss is this. I don't what messy place you are in 99% of the people in that place just want to provide a good life for their family. It is that 1% that are heavily armed and would rather kill and die than forgive that cause all the grief.
So you got to see the 99 during your visit. BTW I am on your side. I have meet some very nice people that follow Islam. When you judge an individual because of what group they belong too that is the definition of prejudice. Of course when it comes to members of certain groups that prejudice is ofter correct. I have to admit that I can not say that I know any good members of the Klan or the Neo-Nazis.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is a Slovenian humanitarian worker's page in which he describes his stay and views of Darfur. He was imprisoned for "espionage" and sentenced to two years' imprisonment but was released after an effort from Slovenian president.
http://www.tomokriznar.com/ang/index.html
...Not harder! Are these guys seriously messing around with transparency layers and hand-drawing circles? Just subtract one image from the other. Their way is a waste of time, and time is money; money that could be used to help fight these problems instead of inefficiently-identifying them. (No, I didn't RTFA.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Maybe because some people aren't as interested in groupthink games as you seem to be. Sometimes reality isn't as convenient as "someone quick hide any inconvenient questions." Mind you, the question _can_ be stupid, but "someone quick mod it down" isn't a panacea either.
Which is just bogus even as debating semantincs goes. If your point is that it's only "a large number of different things" instead of literally "anything", then that's not really useful. My point still stands even then. "It can mean more than one thing" is plenty enough.
Fires happened all over the place, not only in London. It may not be immediately obvious to someone from the age of flame retardants everywhere. But before those, fire running amok was one of the constants of human history. Wood burns surprisingly well when untreated, and straws (as in, thatched roof) even more so. In a dry sub-desert environment, doubly so, since it's dry wood and dry straws.
And maybe you can't wrap yours that we have an equally long history of propaganda to support that killing.
The fact is that the average peasant would rather stay on his farm, than take part in a war where the best he can "win" is remaining alive to return to the farm. That's a very loose quote from memory from Goering, btw. I don't like the fellow on the whole, but he was right in _that_ aspect. You need to lie a bit to that peasant to get him chest-thumping patriotically, or marching in a neat line to the front.
And it's not something that started and ended in the 30's and 40's, either. The same applied when the Greeks went to fight the Persians in the 2'nd millenium BC, or when the USA went to fight Iraq recently.
Invariably you have to first motivate the people a bit as to why it should be their problem that you want to go fight some war where they have nothing to win. So you'd start by presenting the enemy as (A) doing some unspeakable atrocities, or (B) quite often that they're not even humans at all. They're a bunch of vampires or ghouls eating corpses, really.
E.g., when the Romans went to war against Carthage, the "they're doing atrocities!" smear campaign went into full speed too. The Carthaginians were presented as burning infants alive to appease their dark gods. Surely it's your duty as a Roman citizen to go stop that atrocity, right? (The only funny thing is that each account gives a different version as to _how_ did they sacrifice those children. Did anyone actually see one of those sacrifices, or is it just propaganda run amok? I guess we'll never really know.)
You can see that all through the middle ages and even renaissance too. Accusations of cooking and eating babies, and or drinking their blood, can be found all over the place, whether it was in a "why we should go to war against X" context, or confession extracted by torture in witchcraft trials. If you listen to those confessions, half the witches or even christian sects all over europe had human babies as their primary food source. Too bad that the same confessions also admit stuff like flying on broomsticks or fucking with the devil (quite literally), which kinda ruins the credibility of the whole. Again, the attrocity accusation was really just the boilerplate template for any "why should we exterminate X with extreme prejudice" campaign.
Anti-semitism too s
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Did they use the Super Sheep? :-)
Well, its not quite a mop, and its not quite a puppet, but man.. So to answer your question I don't know.
OBVIOUSLY this isn't the only source of information being used by the intended audience. You might as well point out that "golly, how do *I* know that's really Chad? I mean, it's brown, the buildings are made of sticks, it could be, you know, like Ouagoudougou...but I don't know where that is either, so it might as well be London." These images are part of the analysis kit for those who already have half a clue what is going on and where, not for the sub-average moron who couldn't find Chad on a map if it was already labeled in flashing 150pt Helvetica bold.
You're making a garrulous argument that could be made for every piece of historical evidence in existence if taken individually, which is to say: no shit, Sherlock.
Because you're a cretin? Because your smooth neanderthal brains can't deal with other stances than "us-vs-them"? Just a thought.
Point in case: here noone was arguing whether the Darfur massacre exists or not, but that a satellite image by itself doesn't prove much. Yes, if there's more information to confirm it, that's good, but that kinda was the whole point: you need a ton of context information before you even know what that picture even means.
Let me spare you the effort to figure that out: it's _not_ taking either a pro- or contra- "save Darfur" stance, it's just debating a tangential detail. No more, no less. It's really just a marginally off-topic tangent. But I guess that just doesn't compute in your retarded "us-vs-them" world, does it? Someone _has_ to take sides in your view of the world, don't they?
Is there some connection between that and Iraq? Not really, and I'm pretty sure I've been against war in Iraq for years. But it seems that in your tiny little brains there's no room for such complexities. People have to be neatly divided into two camps. If someone doesn't support this, they surely pro-war in Iraq too. That someone can actually have different positions, on two unrelated issues, and use their own brains instead of following party lines, doesn't even compute in your deffective little mind, does it?
You amuse me, little cretin.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nice. Now the agents of those governments know the names of those who need to be eliminated.
Ok now take the other side of the coin... you could just as easily replace Islam with Christianity say that all the Christianophobia on Slashdot is incredibly narrow-minded. Yet the FUD seems like it's a persistent Slashdot meme. Double standard?
FTA: "But today, anyone with a big enough checkbook can order spy-quality images. (With some exceptions; a 1997 U.S. law prohibits the collection and release of satellite imagery of Israel with a resolution better than two meters, for example.)"
We wouldn't want see satellite details of Israeli war crimes now, would we?
Oh yeah the world would have been *so* much better if USA did not block indonesia. *cough*
You ARE a white german speaking aryan or a japanese heterosexual non-cripple, right ? Just to check your sanity, and to remind you that it was *not* about oil.
Yes at one point in the war the supply routes of the armies were an issue. This does *not* mean the war was about oil.
The issue in the war was the same issue we have with muslims today : ideology. We don't like the death penalty, and we're having freedom as our main ideology.
They wish to stone people to death - slowly - so they suffer more, and they wish to rape them first (if they're women), and wish to lash people publicly with a whip for wiping their ass with their right hand (seriously, you have to do it with your left hand according to the paedophile prophet), that's 20 lashes of the whip !
Needless to say, their society is not exactly a prime example of prosperity.
Ok, so Hezbollah is a charity and aid organization. So are lots of Middle Eastern countries. Right?...Right?
So where are they on Darfur? What are they doing to help?
The war was most definitely about oil, Germany and Japan needed it, and the Allies sold their souls to the then leaders of the Middle East to keep them from supplying the Axis with oil. I'm very happy that the Allies won, but most of the war was entirely about who would control access to cheap oil in the Middle East and South Asia. A decent amount of the indirect blame why Germany lost was because they were cracking oil (in limited supply) from coal rather than getting it from Saudi Arabia.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
the government controls where people can go.
Actually the government in Sudan doesn't have that much control. As long as a person is willing to risk their life they could enter the Darfur area via Chad or the Central African Republic or southern Sudan via Ethiopia or other nations. And these borders aren't strung with barbed wire fences or have many guards if any. Once inside travel to the center or north of Sudan is where there will be trouble with the government.
...the fact that Sudan has oil, which the Chinese are heavily invested in.
Which is why the UN will do nothing until after a massive atrocity, China won't allow the UN do do something. The thing is is this could byte China in the ass. The Sudan government is made up of Arab Muslims, and they may support Muslim separatists in western China. Though it's not in the news much, there are Muslims in the western part of present day China the Chinese under Mao invaded the lands of and subjegated such as the Uighur.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Venezuela seems to be losing its democracy right in front of our eyes, and nobody seems to want to do anything.
No, Venezuyela isn't loosing it's democracy, what it's loosing is what small amount of capitalism it has as well as freedom of the press. I used to support Chavez especially after the coup but he's going too far now in closing down the opposition press or radio and tv. Then again the US under Bush is supporting those outlets which is no different than the if the Chinese were to support the US opposition press.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This would be a very interesting community approach for other matters that are less subject to caution such as rain forest destruction rate...
This is happening now in Brazil. There was an article earlier this year on /. about how Indians and others were using Google Maps to look for places of illegal mining and such in Brazil. Although good use of Google Maps was being had, the problem was that the maps weren't being updated enough. By the tyme an illegal mine was identified and could be checked out the miners could of already left.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Finally: how would you justify invading Sudan vs e.g. Tibet? Tibet doesn't even exist anymore as the sovereign state it was. Yet I don't hear any whining from the usual suspects in our gov'ts.
Of course you don't hear anything about China's invasion of Tibet, trade is more important. You won't hear about the Chinese, Nationalists, invasion of Formosa, Tiawan, for the same reason. Fact is is until now, there has been no united China, like pre-Colombian America or pre-Czar Russia, there were many difference ethnic/religious groups occupying the landmass of China.
Falcon
Ni howNi how ma?
Should there be a Law?
Doesn't it bother you to be a revisionist ? I mean you cannot seriously think that you're right ... I've yet to see oil mentioned anywhere in the reasons for Germany's attacks. The reason for their attacks was their supremacist and totalitarian ideology.
I suppose you're going to say that the cold war was also about oil.
As you said, they could, if necessary do without oil. And yet you keep saying this.
Same with Japan. They did not join the war to get access to oil. That's bullshit.
Why do you think that we have a strategic petroleum reserve? That oil isn't for regulating the price, it allows a war to take place without imports. Since WWI militaries have depended on oil to operate. Oil was one of the key strategic resources and it was most certaily the reason for the direct engagement of the US/Japan portion of the war.
a ureview/1981/jul-aug/becker.htm
Paragraph 8:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2129.html
In 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the French Vichy government, and joined the Axis powers Germany and Italy. These actions intensified Japan's conflict with the United States and Great Britain which reacted with an oil boycott. The resulting oil shortage and failures to solve the conflict diplomatically made Japan decide to capture the oil rich Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and to start a war with the US and Great Britain.
Paragraph 6:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/
At the outbreak of the war, Germany's stockpiles of fuel consisted of a total of 15 million barrels. The campaigns in Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France added another 5 million barrels in booty, and imports from the Soviet Union accounted for 4 million barrels in 1940 and 1.6 million barrels in the first half of 1941. Yet a High Command study in May of 1941 noted that with monthly military requirements for 7.25 million barrels and imports and home production of only 5.35 million barrels, German stocks would be exhausted by August 1941. The 26 percent shortfall could only be made up with petroleum from Russia. The need to provide the lacking 1.9 million barrels per month and the urgency to gain possession of the Russian oil fields in the Caucasus mountains, together with Ukrainian grain and Donets coal, were thus prime elements in the German decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.3
Did you think that the war was just about some land in Poland?
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Can we look at Iraq?8 7288831-8l5AMVpCdg07M3w6XdmTXoPuzno_20061109.html? mod=tff_main_tff_topwsjt /11casualties.html?ex=1318219200&en=516b1d070ff83c 15&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rssNY Times
There have been estimated 600,000 civillian deaths to the war on terror.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1160528967
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeas
I think, and I feel just about the entirety of history agrees with me on this, that the invasion of poland was about the conflicting ideologies of nazism and communism.
And you know as well as I do that that is true.
Sure, it's fun to play philosopher and ask what the meaning of one photo is in the absence of all other evidence. We could also spend some time discussing whether or not Sudan actually exists. The bottom line is that the "context" you're talking about is quite well known and the fact that you're not familiar with it doesn't make it any less there.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"