Levi on the OOO phenomenon

HERE.

from the We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page

7 years seems too little for these thugs, but that’s apparently the maximum allowed for this charge.

We are all Khaled Said

The two police officers responsible for Khaled Said’s murder have been sent today to 7 years in jail which is the maximum penalty for the “attack that led to death” accusation. The court found the officers were responsible directly for the murder based on a medical report ordered by the court and produced by 3 medical Professors at 3 Egyptian Universities.

The report also found that Khaled did not die because he himself tried to swallow a 7cm long pack of Marijuana as claimed by Police officers, State media and Mubarak regime. The report found that the pack was forced into his throat to fix the crime as “died from suffocation” and to prove their accusation that he tried to swallow them when he saw the police officers rather than the reality which is that they hit and kicked him to death and then forced the pack to his throat.

Doctors who produced the fake original report to align with the Mubarak regime accusation and to protect the officers should be put to trial. Those responsible for defaming Khaled Said, his family and anyone who dared to support them should be named, shamed and removed from their posts in the state media paid for by the taxpayers. They are not paid to support regimes, they are paid to say the truth in their reporting.

Until this happens, Justice has NOT been delivered. Khaled will not smile in his grave until the truth prevails and those responsible for his and his family suffering during and after his death are put to trial.

I’m an evil omen

Just realized that the Euro-debt talks are going on in Brussels right now.

That does not bode well for the talks. The last time I was in the same place as such a key international gathering was in Prague in August 2006, when the astronomers voted to expel Pluto from the solar system.

[ADDENDUM: Yeah yeah yeah, I know Pluto is still technically in the solar system, but now with a “dwarf planet” tag. You all knew what I meant. But some people just never saw a niggling little point that wasn’t worth scoring.]

honorarium-in-kind

Derrick de Kerckhove received a big box of chocolate with ribbons on it after his keynote talk. The moderator said that in Belgium they do this for all keynote speakers. I can hardly wait to get mine on Friday.

McLuhan conference almost underway

I’m sitting in the Albert II Auditorium in the Royal Academy in Brussels. This morning’s keynote speaker is DERRICK DE KERCKHOVE.

Probably a late start on this one. It’s a miserable, drippy, dark morning in Brussels, and this isn’t the easiest conference venue to find, so they may start late for the sake of stragglers.

After the keynote, it splits into parallel sessions, and as luck would have it, there’s a “McLuhan’s metaphysics” panel among the first three offerings, so my choice is automatic.

Latour in London on November 21

ANTHEM has the details, HERE.

Brussels

Rainy, but happy to be here. The three-day McLuhan Fest starts early tomorrow.

this makes no sense to me

“Death of a dictator: Questions remain

As Moammar Gadhafi is buried, there is still a huge amount of uncertainty about how the longtime Libyan leader met his death, what happened during the last battle in Sirte — and what it all means for the future of Libya.”

Both major aspects of this ongoing story make no sense to me– both the supposed “mystery” of how Qaddafi died, and the veneer of deep soul-searching going on about it. I think the situation is really quite simple.

1. Obviously, Qaddafi was executed. Watch any of that video, and it will become very clear what his last minutes were like. He was captured by the rebels and paraded through Sirte for a little while, abused and threatened and finally shot in the head. I don’t doubt that the rebel leadership might really have preferred a trial. But Qaddafi was captured after a fierce battle of some weeks. He was captured most likely by a group of violent hotheads with automatic weapons, and many had lost family members in Misrata or elsewhere, and some of them may even have been personally tortured by Qaddafi’s regime at some point. These same people were probably also worried about Qaddafi’s vampire-like survival ability over the decades, and at some point they simply decided to take the law into their own hands. I’m not sure where the big mystery is here. A big secret conspiracy behind it all? I don’t think such a theory is necessary to explain the likely events.

2. As for the supposed moral dilemma– well, yes, the way Qaddafi was treated at the end looked pretty deplorable to me. The way Mussolini was treated at the end was also inhumane, but I doubt we would have tracked down and charged the responsible partizani with crimes either. And here too, there’s just no way Libya is going to arrest and charge whoever shot Qaddafi, their national monster. Not everyone in the country, but enough people in the country, will be quite happy that he was summarily shot.

And furthermore, NATO would have been perfectly happy to have killed Qaddafi with an airstrike at any time in the past 7 months. I’m not saying that combat fatalities are the same thing as the deliberate killing of a prisoner-of-war (the former is war, the latter is a war crime), but let’s not get too sanctimonious about the out-of-control and angry Libyan rebels who almost surely did this, based on what we see the available video.

Summary executions are definitely a terrible idea, I’m just not sure what people expect the end result of this inquiry to be. If we arm a bunch of rebels to take out a supposed monster on our behalf, and then they take the assignment seriously and actually kill the supposed monster… we can say they should have given him up for trial, but why pretend to be surprised that things went as far as they did? This wasn’t exactly an organized army attack on Sirte with responsible officers and so forth, at least not as far as I can see from the video.

Nonetheless, this was no way to treat anyone, and I’m sorry I ever saw the video. Demanding the arrest of these guys would be analogous to demanding the arrest of the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden. Is a trial the right thing in principle? Yes. But…

[ADDENDUM: Later headline: “Was Gadhafi’s killing a war crime?” Well, yes. You can’t just shoot a surrendered prisoner in the head, and everyone knows that. The question as I see it is– what next? Give a group of Libyan rebels a long prison sentence for this? I just don’t see it, wrong though it was, what they did.]

“explosion in downtown Nairobi”

I would guess this is some sort of retaliation from the group in Somalia.

$2,000 not enough for student athletes

“NCAA pushes $2K increase for athletes”

HERE.

It’s a start, but $2,000 is simply not that much money anymore, and while it may allow track & field and volleyball players to be happy with buying themselves a nice new laptop, it will do nothing to stem the tide of corruption in the big money sports. $2,000 just isn’t enough to prevent a basketball star from a poor family from accepting cars, jewelry, and so forth.

What would a fair amount be that might take a little bit of the temptation out. How about paying college athletes the same amount they pay their graduate students in teaching assistantship stipends? Then you might be looking at $15,000-$20,000 in some cases, and while it obviously wouldn’t stop corruption, it might make some of the players less desperate.

I’m a huge college sports fan, but I’m afraid I’ve come around to the view that big-money sports simply brings too much corruption to the table at universities. I’d rather have the European-style system of clubs and junior teams for our professional sports franchises.

However, that won’t happen. Universities are too dependent on the money, both directly and also from the role of sports programs in stirring up alumni enthusiasm. And too many fans like it this way. So, we will continue onward with the current comical system in which, if you live in a place like a Big Ten university town, you’re going to see football and basketball players (many of them from deeply impoverished backgrounds) riding nice motorcycles around town all the time. We all know it happens, but we all sort of pretend it doesn’t count.