grenade launcher beside a baby’s bassinet

Kevin Sites reports from Lebanon that the Hizbullah are perhaps telling people not to leave and are stockpiling weapons in their homes:

…a Hezbollah stronghold north of the city of Tyre. Here, I am told, few families have fled. Instead, they are waiting for the call of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to come south to fight the Israelis.

[…]

Then, from the corner of the closet, next to some shirts on hangers, he pulls out an American-made M-16 assault rifle and places it on the mattress in the room next to the ammo belt. He goes back to the closet and from the same corner reaches for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and two canvas shoulder bags. He places these on the bed as well.

I ask if nearly every house in the neighborhood has a stash of small arms like this.

“Some have more,” he says, pulling an AK-47 from one of the canvas bags and locking on a 30 round banana clip, named for its banana-like curve. “But the larger weaponry is kept somewhere else.”

Not in the houses, he says later, but in secret places.

Mosques?

“Where does the M-16 come from?” I ask.

He says that Hezbollah buys all the weapons, sometimes even from the Lebanese Army.

He then pulls a grenade from the closet, screws on a cylinder of propellant behind it and then loads it into the grenade launcher. He shows me what has to be done before the trigger can be pulled to shoot it.

“Have you ever fired one of those?” I ask.

He smiles as if it were an obvious question. Yes, of course, he replies.

He then puts all the weapons back on the bed for a moment so I can photograph them. Although it’s not uncommon for households in the Middle East to have at least an AK-47 around the house, it’s incongruous to see the three rifles and grenade launcher beside a baby’s bassinet.

This basically means any opposition to the Hizbullah has either to go room-by-room through every village at great risk of life, or use superior firepower and run the risk of harming babies in the bassinets. This is a classic dilemma for military leaders. I wrote about General Sherman’s justification of his indescriminate destruction of Georgia here. The Economist does an excellent job discussing the ethics of warfare and proportionality here:

Most Western thinking about military ethics has its roots in Augustine, the sainted Christian writer from North Africa whose elaborate theory of “just warfare� has provided a framework for debate over the 16 centuries since his death. And for philosophers in the Augustinian tradition, proportionality is one of the things you should consider when contemplating war. Others are the probability of success and whether warfare is a last resort: have all the other options been tried? In this context, the proportionality question is judged by the destruction which the war will cause, weighed against the good it may do.

Put like that, proportionality is a concept that most Israelis can live with. They would argue that the good which might be achieved by smashing Hizbullah (and the threat it poses not only to Israel but also to Lebanon and other states) does outweigh the travails of Lebanon’s civilians.

It also might be important to note that in 2000 when Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon (for two reasons: to comply with a UN Security Council resolution, but also to adjust to domestic weariness with the occupation) the Hizbullah then rushed in to displace any Lebanese who opposed their rule. Christians, Druze and Shiites, especially the remaining members of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), and their families fled their homes in fear of Hezbollah retribution. Israel thus allowed persecuted Lebanese families into Israel and provided housing, residency permits that included the right to work, health insurance, schooling for their children and other social benefits (income). Given that history, do you think Kevin Sites will encounter any opposition to Hizbullah’s use of village bedrooms and bassinets to stash their weapons and stage attacks? Lebanese civilians who resisted Hizbullah may have been chased away, detained in remote prisons or killed many years ago.

In fact it seems that the remaining opposition to Hizbullah even in Beirut was in process of being declawed as part of a mission to avoid complying with UN Security Council Resolution 1559 — ensure the right for a militant fundamentalist group to maintain control over the destiny of a country trying to achieve a more egalitarian base.

Those who argued that a heavily armed Hizbullah, embedded in civilian areas, would help prevent Israeli agression should now recognize that it was in fact the very cause of the latest conflict. Perhaps they knew and secretly hoped for this outcome. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute:

Lebanese journalist Khairallah Khairallah harshly criticized Hizbullah policy, saying it was damaging to Lebanon. One cannot ignore the fact that since [southern Lebanon] was liberated [from Israel], Hizbullah has maintained a policy… aimed at perpetuating Lebanon as an arena for regional struggle. [It does this] by insisting on keeping its weapons, under the pretext of liberating the Shab’a Farms – thereby bringing Lebanon into conflict with the international community.

I actually don’t think the Shab’a Farms were sufficient war-making fodder for the Hizbullah, since the UN made several very clear and unanimous statements about International acceptance of the borders, so they just held it up as a red-herring. More significant was that Lebanese independence and detente with Israel would deflate their influence and force them to integrate into society. To avoid this they used the prisoners in Israel as a convenient pre-text for launching attacks into Israel to re-establish themselves as a prominent force in a regional conflict:

Defying growing international and domestic pressure to strip Hizbullah of its arms the militant Islamist Shia group pledged to “use all available means” to win the release of three Lebanese nationals still held by Israel.

That apparently means using civilians as camouflage and declaring all Israelis as targets. Not to excuse the Israeli strikes on civilian centers, or tragic loss of lives, but Kevin Sites shows that Lebanon is dangerously infiltrated by Iranian/Syrian-backed militants who intend to manipulate the country into a staging-point for their objective — to attack Israel and continue to destabilize the region. This reminds me of how South Africa used to destabilize its neighbors with war in order to prevent them from forming any sort of alliance against Apartheid. Iran and Syria fear a Lebanon that could make peace with itself, let alone Israel.

Face recognition

Will it ring a bell? Speaking of photos of people, MyHeritage.com claims that if you upload your mug it can be matched with a celebrity’s. Sounds like fun, right? After I was forced to register on their site (*ugh*) I started out by trying a half-dozen photos. None produced any accurate matches. I thought the pictures I uploaded were well-known celebrities, which means I’m either very unhip (they claim 3,200 celebrities in their database) or their Cognitec system is absolute proof of how unreliable this form of biometric identification is today (or both). Try it for yourself. Grab a photo of your favorite celebrity, upload it to the system and see if it can recognize them. If that doesn’t work, do you really trust this interface to manage your identity information?

Brad Pitt in disguise

Separated at birth?

Jeremy Piven was matched to Sugar Ray Leonard and Walt Disney. Who would have thought? And if you search their database, you find names like “Agam Rudberg“. Um, who? Is she the same person as Agam Rodberg? More data integrity worries from a system meant to make it less of a concern. I can only hope they do a good job with confidentiality.

The Oxford Project

I used to work for Peter Feldstein in the mid 1990s to help him manage a computer lab for the arts. His work is top-notch and he’s the nicest guy you could ever work for, so it’s great to see him get some well-deserved media attention [1]. His Oxford Project, listed in the Yahoo! most popular news stories today [2], humanizes a part of the world that some people will never be exposed to; it is a brilliant ethnographic tool.

In the current phase of his project, Feldstein has added a new twist, thanks to the help of friend Stephen Bloom, an author and journalism professor at the University of Iowa. Based on interviews, Bloom has crafted short narratives that lend a confessional, poetic and unvarnished dimension to the lives in Feldstein’s then-and-now portraits.

Way to go Peter! I really like reviewing the photos and I wonder if facial recognition technology would accurately predict the changes.

[1] Examples of recent stories:

I expect to see it on the Colbert Report or Daily Show soon.

[2] The BBC has “related” links and other helpful segues on their news pages, but for some reason Yahoo! does not even suggest than there might be an official project website. BoingBoing had to be told by a reader that they should link to the project site, but at least they did so. All very strange, considering the basic concept of hyperlinking versus traditional text…

The Poetry of Programming

While working on some Solaris 10 security recently I ran into an interesting article on the Sun site called The Poetry of Programming, which is an interview with Richard Gabriel, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems:

Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it — the software that’s interesting to make is software that hasn’t been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, “Well, how come we can’t build software the way we build bridges?” The answer is that we’ve been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that’s been built. Someone says, “Oh, let’s build a bridge across this river. The river is this wide, it’s this deep, it’s got to carry this load. It’s for cars, pedestrians, or trains, so it will be kind of like this one or that one.” They can know the category of bridge they’re building, so they can zero in on the design pretty quickly. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

But in software, even with something such as Java 2, Enterprise Edition or the Java implementation (or almost any of the APIs we define), we’re rolling out — if not the first — at most the seventh or eighth version. We’ve only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we’re creating something new. If you look at software developers and what they produce, if you look at their source code, the programs they make, and the designs that they end up creating, there is real variability. And some people are really good and others are not so good.

True, but that is also because software is not heavily regulated or disciplined. Not just anyone can be hired to build a bridge that millions of people will cross in the material world, but on the Internet people who are idealists and hacks can throw anything up and people will use it. I am not being critical of the latter situation, just pointing out that there is a much lower hurdle and so nothing to require the study of prior bridges (and their failures) before building another one. This is further compounded by the intellectual property movement that restricts source from view, whereas every inch of a bridge can be studied in detail.

Writing code certainly feels very similar to writing poetry. When I’m writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I’m writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place. It’s the same kind of concentration.

Ah yes, the same for all aspects of information technology. Poetry is mastery of a discipline. You might say Microsoft software, thus, is like supermarket checkout tabloids — all glam and glitz and very little to hang your hat on. We already look back at Windows 9x and agree, even Microsoft, that it was a train-wreck of an operating system. And for what it’s worth I met with Microsoft the other day for another review of Vista and a new browser that I’m not even allowed to give details on…let’s just say that some of their developers clearly don’t practice the poetry of programming.