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Daily Blog
Interesting article about the rabidly-pro war Republicans who all conveniently managed to dodge serving themselves.

Having been in combat isn't necessarily a pre-requisite to making intelligent policy decisions, but when you have no first-hand knowledge of what it's like to actually be a soldier, to be shot at, your judgment about aggressive military actions has to be questioned. And it's the fact that so many of the draft dodgers cover it up, or deny it, or issue absurd excuses, like the ones mentioned in that article by Bush and Quayle and other prominent Republicans.

The startling idiocy of zero tolerance laws is amply demonstrated here. Kid has a bread knife in the back of his pick up from moving boxes over the weekend, and get expelled for a year.  Reminds you of the other stories about girls being expelled for taking a Midol.  Meanwhile underlying issues that lead to kids shooting a dozen students are ignored, and gun control laws in society are weakened.  Ahh, priorities in America!

Fake!, by Clifford Irving.  Interesting book on Elmyr de Hory, the greatest art forger of modern times.  As far as we know.  You can do a Google search on Elmyr and find plenty of articles and features about him.

A quote from this article, which is easier than me actually, you know, typing my own:

According to Fake!, the deliberately outrageous biography concocted together by Cliff and Elmyr, this man of variable names, wobbly gender and multiple styles had committed many more masterpieces than those for which he had gotten jailed. In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly like, you should stop and ask, "Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did Elmyr do it?'' Sort of changes your whole view of what critics call "the canon,'' doesn't it?

Another interesting page of forgery info can be seen here.  Especially interesting is the tidbit that various semi-famous artists have at times claimed that some of their authentic work, their less-great stuff, was fake.

This was notably the case with the Italian master Giorgio de Chirico who was charged in 1969 for having seized some of his sculptures as forgeries whereas he had signed a legal contract for their production. Another master, Maurice de Vlaminck refused to authenticate some of his own works simply because he did not like them anymore. He also was charged and received a fine for having rejected a painting which was in fact genuine.

Why?  So it would be discredited and perhaps even destroyed, and thus tighten the market for their other work, or future work.  Free publicity too.

I can't really recommend the book, Fake!.  I read it and tolerated it, but it sort of goes on and on with the same stuff.  Elmyr paints forgeries and passes them off to greedy clueless art dealers, Elmyr squanders his money, Elmyr says he'll stop and live off of his own work, etc.  Then he starts working these two nuts who are selling his fakes, making 10x what they share with him, traveling wildly around Europe and the US, etc.  It sounds better in theory than it is in actuality, since it just gets tedious.  The last 1/3 of the book is better, once it starts to unravel on them, and there is a bit more analysis and character description, rather than just events.

Get it from the library if you can find a copy.  Clifford Irving is the author.

Show on Discovery Science channel tonight, about training US soldiers to be better killers. Really.  But it was interesting when they discussed psychological issues with actually shooting another person.  They dropped in a bunch of psycho-babble about how every species has a strong prohibition against killing its own kind.  Their example was that rams and deers when they battle for fucking-rights they hit antlers to antlers, where they won't kill each other, which they would if they gored to the sides or whatever.  Which is I'm sure very easily disproven by any biologist with a few examples. Not to mention a socialogist.

Anyway, I was thinking the show would suck, if they were throwing out bullshit right from the start.  However they got into better info shortly after that, when they started speaking about things historically.  Historical studies had examined captured weapons, or abandoned ones on battle fields, and always, the majority of weapons weren't fired.

They had some wars from the 1800's, when you had to load your weapon with actual gunpowder, wadding, etc.  So you'd stuff in some gunpowder, some packing, and then the actual lead ball, with a bit more packing on top.  After some big battles the weapons were often 80% unfired, and lots of them had double or triple packing.  Which indicated the soldier would load it, go to fire, lose his nerve, and load it again, lose his nerve, etc.  They said one had 23 loadings, and wouldn't have worked if fired anyway.

I doubt their methodology and the logic as well.  Why would you keep loading it if you didn't have the nerve to shoot?  Maybe everyone fired at once and then loaded at once, so you had to appear to be doing something when everyone else was loading, (or pretending to load).  But it seems a bit suspect on the reasoning.  I'd think load once, lose nerve, run or hide in the trench.

Also, being able or unable to kill another person isn't at all the same thing as being too scared to stick your head out of a fox hole and start shooting when there are bullets whistling overhead, bombs going off, etc.  Anyone would be scared there, and your fear is of death if you move, not that you might kill someone.

Anyway, they had another discussion of this with US soldiers in WW2, and their official findings were that infantry soldiers were able to fire at a good target 15-20% of the time.  As the modern day sergeant said, "That's like having 15% of your librarians who aren't illiterate."  Not the best example but hey, he's just a grunt.  They cited extensive post-battle interviews from Iwo Jima and many other US troop battles in WW2, and typical example was of 7 guys in a trench, 2 or 3 would be firing.  One guy they interviewed said of his 9 man group, there were 2 guys who were good shots and killed anything, and he wasn't one of them.

The show went on to detail US training methods since ww2, how they desensitize soldiers to fire at any target, and they said that in Vietnam, US forces averaged 50,000 bullets fired per kill.  Which seems just impossible to me, but anyway, that was their official figure. 

Interesting component of warfare if that's true. Certainly would show how small motivated forces can win over larger conscript armies. If only 15% of the big army is actually firing, and 95% of the smaller group is. and they're more likely to hit, as they have more targets.  I'd say the actual figure varies tremendously, depending on morale, defensive positioning, etc.

So it wasn't a very good program, but it was worth a quick mention, anyway.

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