Hard for some people to wrap their minds around really (wait until we get to the quantum time machine simulator), but it is a fact that the Dark Side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the side facing Earth.

What prompts this musing is the new video from NASA showing the Dark Side-

Now no doubt you are familiar by this time with the ‘Big Squash’ theory of Lunar formation which contends that the Moon is the result of an oblique collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars sized planet.  Recent simulations suggest that two bodies formed out of that and their eventual consolidation is responsible for the difference in composition and appearance between the far and near side.

In other related news the next ‘Super Moon‘ (where the Moon is at its closest to Earth) will be Febuary 18th and be a ‘Black’ Moon, a New Moon (meaning all the light is hitting the far side) and the 3rd of 4 New Moons this winter.

Timey Whimey Stuff

On a quantum level there is no particular bias for time to proceed from cause to effect which makes some theoretical physicists (Stephen Hawkings) angry since it goes so much against our perceptions of reality on a macro scale and introduces paradoxes.  Scientists at the University of Queensland have recently simulated a quantum time machine and found that traveling backwards in time is indeed theoretically possible.

Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch’s model deals with the “grandfather paradox,” a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth.

…

Deutsch’s quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:

Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle-the particle-back into the CTC; if the switch isn’t flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle’s emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch’s insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands-good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch’s model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. “We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first,” Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past.

By measuring the polarization states of the second photon after its interaction with the first, across multiple trials the team successfully demonstrated Deutsch’s self-consistency in action. “The state we got at our output, the second photon at the simulated exit of the CTC, was the same as that of our input, the first encoded photon at the CTC entrance,” Ralph says. “Of course, we’re not really sending anything back in time but [the simulation] allows us to study weird evolutions normally not allowed in quantum mechanics.”

In essence the paradox is resolved by changing the future to fit the facts of the past.  Once the cat is dead (or alive) the only way forward is the probabilities based on the dead (or live) cat.  No return to a state of quantum uncertainty (in that respect) is possible so if you did indeed succeed in killing your grandfather the only future you could return to is one in which your grandfather is dead.

Nor would you disappear.  Your past self represents the resolution of quantum states that can no longer have any values other than the ones that have been measured.

Tricky eh?

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Watch physicist Brian Cox excitedly explain Higgs boson and the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of math’, by Eric W. Dolan, Raw Story
• Will Neil deGrasse Tyson’s mix of science and pop culture be enough to fill the Jon Stewart void?, Newsweek
• Google Threatens to Air Microsoft and Apple’s Dirty Code, by Chris Strohm and Jordan Robertson, Bloomberg News
• DNA Reveals How Darwin’s Finches Evolved, by Warren Cornwall, National Geographic
• Were dinosaurs tripping on the grass they ate?, by Michael Franco, CNet
• Scientists Weigh in on Plans to Hack the Weather and Cool the Earth, by Sarah Zhang, Gizmodo
• Scientists Have Figured Out a Way to Convert Solar Energy Into Liquid Fuel, by Sabrina Toppa, Time
• Comets Form Like Deep Fried Ice Cream Scoops, by Ian O’Neill, Discovery News
• Scientists now know how popcorn pops, AFP
• Sweet Science: Study Discovers How Many Licks It Takes to Reach the Center of a Tootsie Pop, By Kelli Bender, People

Three.

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

You know, in case you’ve forgotten how to sing.

Sigh.  It’s just too hard to process at the moment and as TMC says the reaction is still pouring in.  There are the tributes and arguments over what The Daily Show really means in the context of contemporary news and politics, there are the justified criticisms of Jon’s failure to really hold people to account and slipping off into the safe buffoonery of Faux Noise and penis jokes, and of course speculation about the future direction of the show and who will host it.

I’ll try to organize some of that material tomorrow or better yet Friday as a companion piece to what TMC has already written.  Tonight I’m still trying to integrate The Nightly Show into what I produce as is Larry Wilmore trying to find out what has worked and what hasn’t in his three weeks at the helm.

Now last night was actually pretty funny I thought-

The discussion I liked best was this one from the first episode-

The best comedy bit was from Mike Yard-

Larry sometimes seems like he’s going to go yard (hit a Home Run for you non-Baseball types) in his own ‘Keeping it 100’ but most often ends up ‘Weak Tea’ in part because of the lameness of the submissions (at least the ones the writers select).

‘Keeping it 100’ with the panel is rarely completely successful because he’s still including weasels on them, it works better with unique questions for each member than it does without because then it just seems like the writers are lazy or out of ideas.

Keeping it 100?

Umm… this is eventually going to get funnier, right?

Continuity

I can’t not play this-

Sigh.  I’m not going anywhere tomorrow.  For one thing it’s supposed to snow.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Colin Firth will be on to promote Kingsmen which looks like a rolicking good yarn if you’re not the type who snooted The Avengers remake, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or The Lone Ranger.  You know, movies don’t always have to have a message, sometimes they can be just for fun.

Fortunately David Axelrod didn’t get extended beyond his two show segments so I don’t have to pimp him again.  The real news below.

Today we get the news that Jon will be leaving The Daily Show at the end of the year.  His contract is up which is why the speculation about his taking over Meet the Press had a certain amount of reasonance.

What will he do?  It won’t be The Daily Show.

Will The Daily Show continue?  There are some indicators that it will, they’ve changed hosts before, in the beginning as often as they changed socks; but it might be replaced by something else.

What would that be?  Some people think that Larry Wilmore deserves an hour which his format probably needs though I think it’s just too soon to tell after 3 weeks.  I also hear that it strikes some people as Meet the Press with more minorities which is also true and what troubles me most.  If he’s just going to be peddling the same Beltway BS instead of Keeping it 100 (which he already shows unfortunate signs of) I might as well be watching Hayes or Maddow (which I don’t, they’re better than most but not that good in the bigger picture because they’re too tied to the Institutional Democratic Party).

What I can tell you is that it’s not funny.  So far.  Larry is way too earnest.

Now I think the topics are interesting (some people disagree) but I don’t exactly see the value of other’s opinions of them (unless of course they agree with mine) and short of throwing a brick at my TV (which is much less satisfying without that big CRT implosion) I can’t get them to shut up and listen to ME!

I won’t try to encapsulate tonight the importance of “fake” news in the current culture where everything is a blatant lie relying on you ignorance and faulty short term memory to skate by.  In this environment Jon Stewart is Walter Cronkite.

Tangentially, Brian Williams is done.  Suspended for 6 months without pay which will cost him $5 Million but don’t delude yourself, he will never anchor again.  Instead the job is Lester Holt’s to lose.

Sigh.  Culture is important.  Our perceptions of what is news and what is propaganda are important.  That’s what made The Daily Show and The Colbert Report pivotal touchstones of reality during a time when objective or even subjective truth is under constant assault.

I may be pleasantly surprised by change, but I rarely am.

You, dear readers, may rest assured that I will keep doing what I do (what is that exactly anyway?) until I can’t do it any more.  Quality is a crapshoot and a bonus when it happens, the threshold of dignity is slightly better than absolutely horrible.

The U.S. Relationship with War

Men, all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost, and will never lose a war… because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

Tonight’s topic?  You’ve got me.  The site is all focused on Wednesday’s Ask Me Anything.

Continuity

Maybe this guy is available.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Ok, everything about David Axelrod is evil.  He’s a soulless ghoul feasting on the decaying flesh of the Democratic Party.  He’s whoring his book Believer: My Forty Years in Politics.  Make no mistake, David Axelrod doesn’t believe in anything except winning (oh, and cushy jobs for David Axelrod).

We don’t want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward.

How’s that working out for you?

The real news below.

Hurray.  Well, in a meta sense, we know 3 of the 4 panel members today Michael McKean, Wes Moore, and Kimberly Dozier.  I predict that the question will not be whether the U.S. should be a global bully, but where with all of those tempting targets like Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, and Korea just waiting for a little “suck on this.”

We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble…. What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!” That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Who says our elite media is full of genocidal maniacs?

Keeping it 100 Larry?  Suck on this-

Continuity

HIHOL

What?  Hebrew International House Of Latkas.  This is a Billion dollar franchise opportunity I’m telling you.

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 2/9: Patricia Arquette
• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

I dunno.  Is Thursday something besides Abraham Lincoln’s birthday?  Still no guest.

Patricia Arquette will be on promoting… Boyhood?  That’s getting a little old though Oscar season is right around the corner.  CSI: Cyber is slated to debut March 4th so there is that I suppose (oh, and if you want a hack toolkit let me recommend DEFT, Digital Evidence & Forensics Toolkit, currently in version 8.2.  Your target computer will have to support a DVD though).

Other than that the question is how will Jon handle the Brian Williams scandal.

Jon Stewart’s Brian Williams dilemma: How will “Daily Show” handle a friend becoming a punchline?

by Sophia A. McClennen, Salon

Monday, Feb 9, 2015 08:30 AM EST

Of all TV news icons to fall, though, Williams is in a unique spot. Williams, perhaps more than any other TV news anchor working today, has been particularly visible in popular culture. Williams has consistently attempted to court a younger audience and cultivate a “hip” vibe by making regular appearances on late night comedy. He has been on David Letterman’s show numerous times, he appeared on “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” and he has made appearances on Conan O’Brien’s show as well as on “30 Rock.” In each of these cases he has traded his gravitas as a news anchor for laughs and for a chance to reach a wider audience.

But now as we reflect on what the revelations of his exaggerated experiences in Iraq (and possibly elsewhere) mean for his career, it is worth wondering what we can learn about Williams’s special connection to comedy. Certainly in hindsight these stunts reveal a degree of parody and performance that are much less funny in light of his diminished integrity.

One of the best examples of this heightened parody is his repeated appearances on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” A few months after Fallon stepped in as host in 2014, his staff created a mash-up of Williams where he appeared to rap to hip-hop. The show made a few of these mash up videos and they repeatedly went viral. But even funnier- and even weirder in light of recent events – are the “slow jams” Williams did with Fallon, where he read news to music and Fallon sang and made puns. The slow jam with Fallon was funny because it was a parody of Williams as a serious reporter. Now that we know the truth – that Williams was less serious and more egotistical – the slow jams seem more like examples of shameless self-promotion.

It is important to point out, though, that this story is about more than the inflated ego of one nightly news anchor. Instead, the decline of Williams needs to be read as part of the ongoing blurring of entertainment and news. TV news has long been in decline as a trusted source of information to the public. Numerous studies show that network news is decreasing as a source of information for the U.S. public, especially among younger viewers. Williams, who won a Peabody for his reporting on Katrina (reporting that is now also being called into question) may have been one of the most visible TV news journalists, but his presence as a public figure was nothing in comparison to TV anchor predecessors like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

The real news below.

To begin with, programming wonks know that ‘=’, which is rendered in English simply as ‘equals’, in computer languages can refer to two distinct acts.  The first is that it can assign a value to a variable as in this snippet of C–

#include <stdio.h>

main()

  {

  int a;

  for(a=100, a>=0, -7)

     {

     printf(%i", ", a);

     }

  printf(/n);

  }

Which provides the output-

100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 65, 58, 51, 44, 37, 30, 23, 16, 9, 2

The second is as a test.  Does one thing equate to another?  The answer is either yes or no.  In ‘C’ the way to express this meaning is ‘==’.  Some more code-

#include <stdio.h>

main()

  {

  int a;

  for(a=100, a==0, -7)

     {

     printf(%i", ", a);

     }

  printf(/n);

  }

Looks mostly the same doesn’t it?  Only changed the one symbol, but because ‘a’ will never have the exact value of 0 the loop will never end until you overflow the limit of your negative integer values (which varies and is not specifically relevant) at which time you will have “unpredictable” results (unpredictable in this case meaning not only probably wrong, but bad in ways that are likely to cause your computer to stop working.

Is any of this relevant?  We shall see.

As I mentioned last week in my discussion of Rimsky-Korsakoff it was a popular theory among many Romantic composers that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri because Salieri, a merely ‘good’ composer, was jealous of Mozart’s ‘Musical Genius’ and offended by his crass personal behavior (a modern re-telling of this can be found in the musical and movie Amadeus).

Oh, those Compton boys.  And now the Barzinis P. Diddy stands and the Teflon Don Gambinos Suge Knight looks destined to spend a long time in stir (told you they were rock stars).

Well, how true is this story?  The modern historical consensus is- not at all.

In the 1780s while Mozart lived and worked in Vienna, he and his father Leopold wrote in their letters that several “cabals” of Italians led by Salieri were actively putting obstacles in the way of Mozart’s obtaining certain posts or staging his operas. For example, Mozart wrote in December 1781 to his father that “the only one who counts in [the Emperor’s] eyes is Salieri”. Their letters suggest that both Mozart and his father, being Germans who resented the special place that Italian composers had in the courts of the Austrian princes, blamed the Italians in general and Salieri in particular for all of Mozart’s difficulties in establishing himself in Vienna. Mozart wrote to his father in May 1783 about Salieri and Lorenzo Da Ponte, the court poet: “You know those Italian gentlemen; they are very nice to your face! Enough, we all know about them. And if [Da Ponte] is in league with Salieri, I’ll never get a text from him, and I would love to show here what I can really do with an Italian opera.” In July 1783 Mozart wrote to his father of “a trick of Salieri’s”, one of several letters in which he accused Salieri of trickery. Decades after Mozart’s death, a rumour began to circulate that Mozart had been poisoned by Salieri. This rumour has been attributed by some to a rivalry between the German and the Italian schools of music.

…

However, even with Mozart and Salieri being rivals for certain jobs, there is very little evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after 1785 or so when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues and supported each other’s work. For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own; and when he went to the coronation festivities for Leopold II in 1790 he had no fewer than three Mozart masses in his luggage. Salieri and Mozart even composed a cantata for voice and piano together, called Per la ricuperata salute di Ophelia… Mozart’s Davide penitente (1785), his Piano Concerto KV 482 (1785), the Clarinet Quintet (1789) and the 40th Symphony (1788) had been premiered on the suggestion of Salieri, who supposedly conducted a performance of it in 1791. In his last surviving letter from 14 October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he collected Salieri and Caterina Cavalieri in his carriage and drove them both to the opera; about Salieri’s attendance at his opera The Magic Flute, speaking enthusiastically: “He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not a piece that didn’t elicit a ‘Bravo!’ or ‘Bello!’ out of him.

Salieri, along with Mozart’s protégé J. N. Hummel, educated Mozart’s younger son Franz Xaver Mozart, who was born in the year his father died.

Now you can see why this was an attractive myth to Romantics who were rebelling against what they saw as the strict formalism of Classical Music in favor of a more emotive and evocative expression which was presaged by the music of Mozart.  They saw in him a champion, despised and thwarted by ‘the establishment’ and ultimately martyred to the cause at the hands of its representative.

So what of the ‘evil’ Salieri?

Reasonably popular and relatively wealthy and respected during his lifetime, after the Romantics turned against him his music languished in obscurity, rarely performed until Amadeus revived the long forgotten 19th century canard.  Today it has a certain cachet among Art Music hipsters (and believe me it’s an incredibly Nerdy and Geeky subculture).

Wait- what about the Genius thing?

As Perrine and Arp (.pdf) put it in Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry–

The attempt to evaluate a poem should never be made before it is understood; and, unless you have developed the capacity to feel some poetry deeply, any judgments you make will be worthless. A person who likes no wines can hardly be a judge of them. The ability to make judgments, to discriminate between good and bad, great and good, good and half-good, is surely a primary object of all liberal education, and one’s appreciation of poetry is incomplete unless it includes discrimination. Of the mass of verse that appears each year in print, as of all literature, most is “flat, stale, and unprofitable”; a very, very little is of any enduring value.

…

Great poetry engages the whole man in his response- senses, imagination, emotion, intellect; it does not touch him on just one or two sides of his nature. Great poetry seeks not merely to entertain the reader but to bring him, along with pure pleasure, fresh insights, or renewed insights, and important insights, into the nature of human experience. Great poetry, we might say, gives its reader a broader and deeper understanding of life, of his fellow men and of himself, always with the qualification, of course, that the kind of insight which literature gives is not necessarily the kind that can be summed up in a simple “lesson” or “moral.” It is knowledge–felt knowledge, new knowledge–of the complexities of human nature and of the tragedies and sufferings, the excitements and joys, that characterize human experience.

You tell me, which is better-

Or-

Or this-

As I mentioned, performances of Salieri’s work are hard to find, but to give him the best possible chance and most direct comparison I found a performance of his 2nd Symphony (he didn’t do that many and was more a sacred, choral, opera composer) that is not too bad.  He composed it in his mid to late 20s.

Mozart’s numbers are all screwed up with many Symphonies attributed to him actually pieces of his father’s or mere musical sketches with fragmentary orchestration composed while he was but a boy (though child prodigy was his stock in trade).  This is Symphony No. 29 composed solely by him when he was 18 years old in 1774.

So, relevant or not?  What is truth?  Beauty?  Or just a changing law?  Must we have truths?  Are mine the same as yours?

I wash my hands (unlike Thom Tillis).

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Europe and austerity failed Greece

by Joseph Stiglitz, AlterNet

Friday, Feb 6, 2015 04:30 AM EST

Every (advanced) country has realized that making capitalism work requires giving individuals a fresh start. The debtors’ prisons of the nineteenth century were a failure – inhumane and not exactly helping to ensure repayment. What did help was to provide better incentives for good lending, by making creditors more responsible for the consequences of their decisions.

…

The idea of bringing back debtors’ prisons may seem far-fetched, but it resonates with current talk of moral hazard and accountability. There is a fear that if Greece is allowed to restructure its debt, it will simply get itself into trouble again, as will others.

This is sheer nonsense. Does anyone in their right mind think that any country would willingly put itself through what Greece has gone through, just to get a free ride from its creditors? If there is a moral hazard, it is on the part of the lenders – especially in the private sector – who have been bailed out repeatedly. If Europe has allowed these debts to move from the private sector to the public sector – a well-established pattern over the past half-century – it is Europe, not Greece, that should bear the consequences. Indeed, Greece’s current plight, including the massive run-up in the debt ratio, is largely the fault of the misguided troika programs foisted on it.

So it is not debt restructuring, but its absence, that is “immoral.” There is nothing particularly special about the dilemmas that Greece faces today; many countries have been in the same position. What makes Greece’s problems more difficult to address is the structure of the eurozone: monetary union implies that member states cannot devalue their way out of trouble, yet the modicum of European solidarity that must accompany this loss of policy flexibility simply is not there.

Seventy years ago, at the end of World II, the Allies recognized that Germany must be given a fresh start. They understood that Hitler’s rise had much to do with the unemployment (not the inflation) that resulted from imposing more debt on Germany at the end of World War I. The Allies did not take into account the foolishness with which the debts had been accumulated or talk about the costs that Germany had imposed on others. Instead, they not only forgave the debts; they actually provided aid, and the Allied troops stationed in Germany provided a further fiscal stimulus.

…

Seldom do democratic elections give as clear a message as that in Greece. If Europe says no to Greek voters’ demand for a change of course, it is saying that democracy is of no importance, at least when it comes to economics. Why not just shut down democracy, as Newfoundland effectively did when it entered into receivership before World War II?

One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail.

Heiner Flassbeck

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Not from here of course, all we ask is that people get preapproved if they want to write about I/P and that you refrain from stalking, harrassment (bullying), hate speech, and outing, otherwise you can insult my intelligence and your fellow readers to your heart’s content because blogging is not crochet and best bring your sharpest needles and thickest skin if you want to play.

I recall a different time (2009) and a different place that is now a shadow of what it once was.  Barack Obama and his Administration had just decided to withold thousands of photographs of prisoner abuse and torture from Abu Ghraib and other sites under U.S. control.

That was then.  This is now.

Judge Gives US Government a Week to Appeal or Comply With Order Involving Thousands of Prisoner Abuse Photos

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Friday February 6, 2015 11:54 am

The United States government has been given a week to appeal or comply with a federal judge’s order to provide a justification for why approximately 2,100 photographs of torture and abuse of prisoners must remain secret.

The American Civil Liberties Union has pursued the release of records related to detainee treatment and “the death of prisoners in United States custody and abroad after September 11, 2001, since October 2003.

In October 2009, the Protected National Security Documents Act (PNSDA) amended the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to “provide that photographs could be made exempt from disclosure for a three-year certification by the Secretary of Defense to the effect that publication would endanger American lives.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki asked President Barack Obama not to release photographs of detainees abuse, for “fear of the consequences.” Secretary of Defense Robert Gates filed a certification to prevent the release of photographs and the court upheld that certification.

Three years later, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta renewed the certification, even though US troops had withdrawn and the war in Iraq had been declared over.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein found that Panetta’s certification failed to show why the release of the photos would continue to “endanger the citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.” He ordered the government in August 2014 to go through each of the photos and explain why they should not be released.

On February 4, Hellerstein informed the government he was skeptical of Panetta’s reclassification. He had already seen a small sample of the photos and did not think a national security exemption covered many of the photos he reviewed, according to The Guardian. He requested the government put forward a plan for assessing each individual photo to justify withholding them from the public.

…

According to The Intercept, government lawyers invoked the Islamic State’s use of past abuses to justify executions of hostages. A government lawyer stood in court and argued the government had already fulfilled its obligation to “review” the photos when associate deputy general counsel in the Department of the Army, Megan Weis, was designated in 2012 to look at the photos on Panetta’s behalf.

…

Hellerstein was not satisfied with this process.

The judge said he would be willing to go through the photos one by one in a closed session with the government. The government could explain why each one had to remain secret. But, at one point, Hellerstein added, “I did not enjoy seeing the pictures the first time. I would not want to see them again.”

He did not believe any threat posed by the Islamic State was justification for secrecy. Newsweek reported Hellerstein contended soldiers and citizens were as “exposed” as they were when the court favored release in 2005.

…

When Obama refused to release the photos in 2009 and responded to criticism, one of his remarks in defense of the decision was that they were not “particularly sensational.”

Journalist Jason Leopold reported last year that documents from the Defense Department show the photos come from “203 closed criminal investigations into detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The Defense Department had actually planned to “mitigate the threat to security and political stability” by offering apologies to “regional partners” and “audiences who find [the] images humiliating.”

The photos the government are afraid of releasing depict scenes such as soldiers zip-tying Iraqi detainees to bars in stress positions, a soldier pointing a pistol at a prisoner tied up with his head covered while lying on the ground, a dead Afghan national shot and killed and a female soldier holding a broom near a detainee as if she was going to stick it into his rectum.

Leopold’s report suggested the soldiers had wanted to hold on to these photos as “mementos.”

Like all court orders where judges refuse to show the utmost deference to the government’s secrecy arguments, the government does not think the court is correctly interpreting the law passed to effectively help the Pentagon conceal embarrassing photos. However, PNSDA clearly says the Secretary of Defense must issue a certification for a photograph. It does not refer to photographs collectively. So, a process that attempts to justify blanket certification for secrecy is not in line with the law.

The judge may decide that all or most of the photos should remain secret, but the judge has decided he will not defer to the government when it is not doing what the law says the Defense Department is supposed to do.

Hmm…

When Obama refused to release the photos in 2009 and responded to criticism, one of his remarks in defense of the decision was that they were not “particularly sensational.”

The photos the government are afraid of releasing depict scenes such as soldiers zip-tying Iraqi detainees to bars in stress positions, a soldier pointing a pistol at a prisoner tied up with his head covered while lying on the ground, a dead Afghan national shot and killed and a female soldier holding a broom near a detainee as if she was going to stick it into his rectum.

The proximate cause of my banishment was that I said that people who wanted to suppress these images were no better than the “Good Germans” who ignored the evidence of the Nazi Death Camps and when a particular member objected to that characterization I said that he too was behaving like a “Good German”.

I put it to you, gentle reader, how much acumen is required to ignore the trains arriving full of humans every day and leaving empty?  How insensate do you have to be to consume your dinner downwind of the stench of decay and the stink of burning flesh that you can claim not to know what crimes your leaders are committing in your name?

Or are you also worried that the irrefutable evidence of this will inflame the victims’ sentiments?

Why should they not be inflamed at this injustice?  What kind of excuse is that?

After slightly less than 2 years I was reinstated.  I never apologized, I have nothing to apologize for.  I was later banished again for defending a rape survivor against a drunken bully, but that’s another story.

So this was the gloomy news yesterday-

The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies On One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

by Julia Angwin, ProPublica

Thu, Feb 5th 2015 12:34pm

The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.

Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.

…

Koch’s code powers most of the popular email encryption programs GPGTools, Enigmail, and GPG4Win. “If there is one nightmare that we fear, then it’s the fact that Werner Koch is no longer available,” said Enigmail developer Nicolai Josuttis. “It’s a shame that he is alone and that he has such a bad financial situation.”

The programs are also underfunded. Enigmail is maintained by two developers in their spare time. Both have other full-time jobs. Enigmail’s lead developer, Patrick Brunschwig, told me that Enigmail receives about $1,000 a year in donations – just enough to keep the website online.

GPGTools, which allows users to encrypt email from Apple Mail, announced in October that it would start charging users a small fee. The other popular program, GPG4Win, is run by Koch himself.

…

For almost two years, Koch continued to pay his programmer in the hope that he could find more funding. “But nothing came,” Koch recalled. So, in August 2012, he had to let the programmer go. By summer 2013, Koch was himself ready to quit.

But after the Snowden news broke, Koch decided to launch a fundraising campaign. He set up an appeal at a crowdsourcing website, made t-shirts and stickers to give to donors, and advertised it on his website. In the end, he earned just $21,000.

The campaign gave Koch, who has an 8-year-old daughter and a wife who isn’t working, some breathing room. But when I asked him what he will do when the current batch of money runs out, he shrugged and said he prefers not to think about it. “I’m very glad that there is money for the next three months,” Koch said. “Really I am better at programming than this business stuff.”

And here is the good news today!

Internet Comes Through For Developer Of Key Email Encryption Tool

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Fri, Feb 6th 2015 6:13am

Yesterday, we reposted Julia Angwin’s article from ProPublica about how the guy behind GPG, a key tool for email encryption, Werner Koch, was basically broke, and that attempts to crowdfund money to keep going hadn’t been all that successful. The story seemed to resonate with lots of people, and the donations started flowing. After getting a grand total of just about €34,000 in 2014, he’s already well over €100,000 this year, with most of that coming yesterday after Angwin’s story went up. On top of that, Stripe and Facebook each agreed to fund him to the tune of $50,000 per year (from each of them, so $100k total), and the Linux Foundation had agreed to give him $60k (though, Koch admits that the deal there was actually signed last week).

Either way, this is great to see, though it’s unfortunate that it had to wait until an article detailing his plight came out.

…

It really is quite incredible when you realize how much of the internet that you rely on is built by people out of a true labor of love. Often, people have no idea that there even is an opportunity to support those projects, and it’s great that Angwin was able to highlight this one and get it the necessary funding to keep moving forward.