3 Soldiers

This story of a female soldier driven to cold-blooded murder by blind jealousy has recently caught my attention. Homicide in the Pacific Northwest is rare, but when it does happen, it usually takes on a markedly macabre aesthetic, and this case is no exception. According to her testimony, Ivette Davila shot fellow soldiers Randi and Timothy Miller when Davila suspected Randi Miller of stealing her boyfriend. Davila loaded up her Glock, took a cab to the Millers' home, and then it gets weird:

When the couple didn't show up, she took the cab to a nightclub where she thought she would find them.
She had a couple of drinks, but was not intoxicated, she told the court. The couple wasn't there, however, so she called them for a ride.
Randi Miller, according to Davila, picked her up and took her to the couple's house, where Davila said she played video games with Timothy Miller and lay with the couple in their bed.
Around 5 a.m., Davila said, she retrieved her handgun, went into the bedroom and shot Randi Miller in the head.
She said she then went to the bathroom and shot Timothy Miller several times while he was in the shower.

 What gets me is the way Davila does not immediately murder her victims; she hangs out with them for hours before pulling the trigger, with the Millers unaware of their impending fate until they are suddenly shot to death at dawn. She plays with her prey, the same way a cat will bat around a mouse before finally killing it. Things get weirder still:

After the slayings, Davila cleaned the crime scene and took the [Millers'] baby to Home Depot, where she purchased muriatic acid, according to court papers. Davila then returned to the home and poured the acid on both bodies "to get rid of them," court documents say.

 What was she planning to do with the baby? Perhaps we'll never know, as she turned herself in soon thereafter, before needing to make such a decision about the infant.

Maybe the eeriest part of this whole ordeal is the way it has scarred members of the Miller family:

Timothy Miller’s younger brother Daniel Gray said he looked up to Timothy as a hero and now is haunted by violent, unwanted images.
“A lot of times when I picture him now, I picture him with holes in his face,” he said.
Greg Taflinger, Timothy Miller’s half-brother, said, “Tim was the man. He was always there for all of us.”
Images of the murders have made it difficult for him to take showers, Taflinger said, and to be in rooms with closed doors.
“Now I carry a gun with me everywhere I go,” he said.

 (Randi and Timothy Miller with their daughter, Kassidy. Above: Ivette Davila in court.)

She's no Lynndie England

People in Israel/Palestine are making a big fuss about this and another such photo that were posted on Facebook by the female Israeli soldier pictured. NYT reports on the comments they generated.

A few friends on her page praised the pictures, including one who wrote, “You look so sexy like that.” Ms. Abergil’s reply, using the shorthand of the medium, was, “Yeah I know lol honey. What a day it was. Look how he completes my picture. I wonder if he’s got Facebook! I have to tag him in the picture!”

 Officials in that corner of the Middle East are not LOLing, however.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib condemned the photos and said they pointed to a deeper malaise - how Israel's 43-year-old occupation of Palestinians has affected the Israelis who enforce it.
"This shows the mentality of the occupier," Khatib said, "to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. The occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting."

"These are disgraceful photos," said Capt. Barak Raz, an Israeli military spokesman. "Aside from matters of information security, we are talking about a serious violation of our morals and our ethical code and should this soldier be serving in active duty today, I would imagine that no doubt she would be court-martialed immediately,"

 Look, I appreciate how horribly the Palestinians are treated, I really do, but, being from the country that brought the world Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, I fail to be shocked or dismayed at the above photo. And to address Mr. Khatib's comment about the mentality of the occupier; it took American troops and their superiors no time at all become corrupted and filled with malaise after invading Iraq, and our transgressions towards our captors far exceed the trifle at the top of this post. Does this mean that Israelis inherently have higher moral fortitude that us? If this is the case, is it at an individual or systematic level? The infamous events at Abu Ghraib point to a problem in the system, but of course it, like every system, is run by and made up of individuals.

The Internet Bleeds onto Old Media

(click to enlarge)

This is America

In the above speech, President Obama not only fully endorses and defends the controversial and so-called "Ground Zero Mosque", but also successfully weaves Muslim-Americans into the historical tapestry of our country.

Like so many other immigrants, generations of Muslims came to forge their future here.  They became farmers and merchants, worked in mills and factories.  They helped lay the railroads.  They helped to build America.  They founded the first Islamic center in New York City in the 1890s.  They built America’s first mosque on the prairie of North Dakota.  And perhaps the oldest surviving mosque in America —- still in use today —- is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

He also makes it clear that our struggle is not against Islam, but against extremists and mass murderers, with Islamic leaders standing fast beside us against the evil of terrorism.

Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam -– it’s a gross distortion of Islam.  These are not religious leaders -– they’re terrorists who murder innocent men and women and children.  In fact, al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion -– and that list of victims includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.

Pehaps I Should Brush Up on My German

While most of the industrialized world still struggles to keep from teetering off the recession cliff into depression gulch, Germany is actually seeing economic growth. Believe it or not, the German unemployment rate has actually gone down in the last five years, a trend that they maintain now, even after spiking up slighting at the beginning of this year. 

As this graph attests to, in spite of US and European Union trends, Germany has managed to slash unemployment while their allies have seen their own rates explode. Clearly the Germans are doing something right. Hopefully they can drag the rest of us out of the hole with them, or at least the EU; as the NYT notes, higher employment in Deutschland means more German tourists vacationing and spending euros in places like Spain and Greece, the later of which saw their economy shrink by 1.5% this year, as compared to Germany's growth by 2.2%.
Being an unemployed American, and looking at the gulf between US and German unemployment rates in the above graph, I have a strong urge to dust off my German dictionary from high school and become fluent enough to work in a land that has more promising job opportunities than here.

Apple Falls into the Uncanny Valley

You may have seen ads in Apple's latest iPhone campaign like this one:

Clearly, the intent here is to advertise the device's video chat feature that will allow the user to have touching, memorable moments with his or her loved ones even when they are thousands of miles apart. I have no problem with this. Sometimes a traditional phone conversation or email exchange just won't do. What I do have a problem with are the ads themselves. They show these touching moments, but each one is obviously scripted by cynical advertisers and performed by actors; they fall into what robotic scientists call the uncanny valley.

Wikipedia explains:

The [uncanny valley] theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.

 This theory can and has been applied to various forms of media, most notably the not-quite-human CGI characters in films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Polar Express. And now I'm applying it to these iPhone ads. If these commercials featured actual footage of regular people having real, spontaneous conversations, then I would not find them disturbing. Similarly, if they swung in the other direction, and were perhaps animated, they'd be just as acceptable. But as they are, I cannot help but be repulsed; they're are like the TV equivalent of one of these creepy Japanese robot girls:

(shudder)

Iran the Nation vs. Iran the Idea

In America, we talk about Afghanistan and Iran separately, as if they are worlds apart, when in reality they share a border.

The way we separate these two countries in our political discourse is completely dissonant. It would be like discussing New Jersey without ever mentioning New York, or visa versa. It's just absurd. Tehran Bureau has a great piece on this very subject: the Iranian-Afghan connection.

After spending several weeks in Kabul, one can hardly deny the extent of Iranian influence in Afghanistan. As a major player in the region, Iran has a vital stake in how its Afghan neighbors are governed. I paid closer attention to this after spending several days with an elite Afghan commando unit tasked with guarding a key site for high-level meetings. These commandos had been trained not only by U.S. Special Forces, but also by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the highly skilled paramilitary group accused of arming and training the Shia insurgents in Iraq.

 Should it really be a surprise that Iran has such a cultural, political, and military influence on its neighbors? We talk about Iran as if it is some esoteric concept, when really it is sitting right between the United States' two biggest current military commitments, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a living, breathing country.
I'm reminded of a film by Iranian auteur Majid Majidi called Baran, which explores the relationship between these two countries. It's a really charming, gorgeous, and Chaplin-esque fable about a young Tehrani man who falls for an Afghan girl who works illegally in Iran disguised as a boy.

Wild Fires in the Nuclear Age

The Russian wild fires have apparently spread to areas contaminated by the Chernobyl disaster.

The Emergency Situations Ministry also said that at least six wildfires were spotted and extinguished this week in the Bryansk region - the part of Russia that suffered the most when a reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded during a test in 1986, spewing radioactive clouds over much of the former western Soviet Union and northern Europe.

More from Al Jazeera.

Disaster Round Up

Deadly floods in Pakistan, deadly wild fires leading to deadly smog in Russia, and now a deadly mudslide in northwest China.