Murder by drone

There is a new book The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the investigative team at The Intercept and it has been very favorably reviewed by Scott Shackleford who says it describes a program that is far worse than president Obama and its supporters let on because the brutal facts are strongly suppressed. In order to reduce the risk of American casualties, the risks to civilians has been increased because, of course, the lives of foreigners, especially dirt poor ones in some distant land, are worth so much less than our own precious lives.
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And yet another draw

Oliver Roeder summarizes the seventh game in the World Chess Championship being held in New York that ended in another somewhat boring draw after a little over two hours of play and just 33 moves. It looks like whoever wins a single game in the 12-gmae series will be the champion.

The eighth game starts this afternoon. But despite the series of draws, Roeder says that the tournament is drawing great interest, with people (and a lot of them young) forming long lines in the street in cold weather to get in to watch it live.

Neoconservatives jump ship again

The neoconservatives have been one of the worst influences in US foreign policy. They have advocated for the muscular use of the US military to quickly achieve both US hegemony in the world in general and Israeli dominance in the Middle East. They disdained the use of ‘soft power’ (i.e., economic and political strategies) to achieve those same ends more slowly and stealthily, which is the approach of the neoliberals.
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The effect of computers on top-level chess

The sixth game in the best-of-twelve World Chess Championship match between champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Sergey Karjakin petered out in a draw yesterday, leaving the score tied at 3-3. According to the rules, the winner of a game gets one point while a draw nets each player half a point and the first player to reach 6.5 points wins the match. During each game many observers use a computer program called Stockfish to evaluate the moves of the players, and compare them compared with that of the best move by the computer and such programs seem to have become essential training tools for top players. The program app is available for free from the iTunes store and I have downloaded it and tried it out.
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The dirty little secret of preferential treatment in US higher education

Affirmative action in public higher education in the US is a lightning rod for criticism, repeatedly targeted for legal challenges. The issue is whether colleges can consider a person’s race and ethnicity as a factor in granting admission and to what extent it can be done. In the US, of all places, this should not be such a major issue. Unlike in those countries where it is only scores on some kind of national exam that are considered (as was the case when I took my university entrance exams in Sri Lanka back in medieval times), here the goal of colleges, especially elite ones that have considerable choice over whom to admit, is to shape a student body that meets the goals of the institution and for many colleges that involves having students with diverse backgrounds. At my institution, there were many discussions about how to attract more potential arts and humanities majors, more women into engineering, and so on so as to create a more lively and varied intellectual climate.
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Francis Ford Coppola on making The Godfather

The Godfather (1972) is a film that one never forgets and spawned two sequels that, unlike in the case of so many sequels, managed to maintain the quality of the first. Director Francis Ford Coppola was only 29 when he was asked to direct the film version of Mario Puzo’s book. Coppola kept a notebook during the making of the film, with his ideas of what to do and what traps to avoid and those notes have now been published. In an interview today on Fresh Air, he talks about the making of the film and I found it fascinating. You can listen to it.
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Abusing service sector workers

I have railed in the past about the fact that some people take advantage of the fact that service workers are obliged to be nice to customers by abusing them. Via Rob Beschizza I came across this video of a woman who seems to have got offended by something one of the Subway employees said to her and started berating him using the most foul language (Be warned: it is really hateful), interspersed with calm requests for how she wanted her food prepared.
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‘Shined’ versus ‘shone’

As part of my long-running series on the quirks of the English language, I have been struck by the frequency of the use of the word ‘shined’ in the US in situations where I would have used the word ‘shone’. For example, one frequently hears the sentence “He shined a bright light on topic X” whereas I would have said “He shone a bright light on topic X”.
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