Să renunţăm la Insula Şerpilor

Românii au un fetiş: le place să se împuşte singuri în picior, lucru pe care cred că l-am mai menţionat.

De data asta, insistă să-i supere pe ucranieni. Ei vor Insula Şerpilor să fie declarată... ei bine, insulă, spre deosebire de Romania, care susţine că e doar o stâncă mare.

Dacă e insulă, atunci Ucraina are drept exclusiv de exploatoare a platformei continentale, pe o rază de 370 de km (12,800 km²)^[1]. Dacă e stâncă, atunci şi România are o parte din ce-i sub platformă.

Din păcate, nu-s prea multe sub platforma continentală: doar 10 000 000 de tone de petrol[2] şi un miliard de tone de gaz. Adică 1 360 000 de barili de petrol^[2.5].

România produce 119 000 barili/zi petrol^[3] şi 11,22 miliarde m3/an gaz natural^[4].

Deci România se judecă cu Ucraina la Haga pentru 10 zile de petrol şi o lună de gaz. Şi nici măcar nu sunt rezerve sigure^[5]! Ca să nu vorbim de faptul că oricum în cazul de faţă vom împărţi petrolul cu Ucraina, şi probabil nu 50-50.

Ce-i drept, exprimaţi în dolari, barilii de petrol şi metrii cubi de gaz sună impresionat: 4 miliarde de dolari. Să nu uităm însă că am avem alocaţi de la UE în jur de 20 miliarde de euro pentru următorii 5 ani (contribuţia noastră fiind de aprox. 1 miliard/an)^[6], plus 2 miliarde încă necheltuite de la vânzarea BCR.

N-ar fi mai bine pentru România să renunţe la orice pretenţie legată de Insula Şerpilor, în schimbul unor relaţii cordiale cu Ucraina? Avem alte probleme cu ei, poate mai importante: Delta Dunării şi canalul Bîstroe, situaţia minorităţii române din Ucraina, o frontieră mare de securizat. Mai mult decât atât, ucrainienii ne sunt şi ne vor fi vecini mult timp de acum înainte, şi e bine să ai o relaţie de prietenie cu vecinii, mai împrumuţi un ou, nişte zahăr.

În final, trebuie să ne întrebăm: Ce valorează mai mult: sub 2 miliarde de dolari sau o relaţie armonioasă cu un vecin? Banii vin uşor, dar prietenii se câştigă greu...

G.

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Hi5-ul va fi televizat

Give me attention.

Flash!

Give me adoration.

Flash!

Give me a break.

Flash!

Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

"I want everybody to see me because I'm hot."

...e motivaţia pentru care o tânără copilă vrea să apară în Girls Gone Wild. Articolul continuă:

"It's then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America's voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation.

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. "You want people to say, 'Hey, I saw you.' Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody's house and said, 'Give me this,' I could have it."

Rândurile de mai sus sunt o explicaţie, poate, şi pentru fenomenul autohton al hi5-ului. Toţi vrem să fim cunoscuţi, să fim faimoşi, to get noticed. Unii scriu pe blog. Alţii/altele pun poze sexy pe hi5. Acestea sunt timpurile pe care le trăim; asta e lumea pe care ne-am construit-o singuri şi e cea mai bună dintre toate lumile posibile.

În blogosfera românească e un obicei să fie înfierate public profilurile cu poze sexy. E un subiect ce practic se scrie singur şi care aduce mult trafic. Puţini însă realizează partea lor de vină în fenomenul pe care îl care condamnă şi ironic să vezi, în acelaşi blog, pe de o parte promovate centrefolds-urile şi pe de altă parte înjurat hi5-ul.

Trăim în vremuri de falsă pudoare, definite de ipocrizie. Exaltăm corpul şi îl respingem, cumpărăm FHM et co. dar blamăm adolescentele care se dezbracă pe hi5. Asta e gândirea burgheză, şi aşa va rămâne mereu, imposibil de schimbat.

Sidenote: poţi să fii incredibil de sexy şi altfel. Din păcate, e mai complicat decât cu pozele uploadate pe hi5.

G.

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Despre tortură (I)

Un american încearcă pe pielea lui waterboarding-ul. Iată experienţa sa:

So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture or not? [...]

I figure I would be a good test subject. I am incredibly fit and training for a 100 mile endurance run. The main thing about such an event is ability to tolerate pain. I am good at this. I am trained. I also have experience with free-diving from my college days. I once held my breath for 4 minutes and two seconds. Once, while training as a lifeguard I swam laps without breathing until I passed out, so that I could know my limits.

To determine whether waterboarding is an acceptable interrogation technique or torture I must research it an then undergo it myself. [...] So, here's what I would do. First I would google waterboarding to understand the basic concepts than I would try it on myself. First, self inflicted and then, if necessary, inflicted by my wife.(she has no problem torturing me. We've been married almost 15 years.)

These are the results of my research and experience:

The goal of waterboarding is to simulate drowning without the actual drowning or inhalation into the lungs. In order to accomplish this the subject is forced to lie on an inclined plane with his head lower than his lungs and then water is dumped onto his/her face (always keeping the lungs above the "Water line.") This simulates drowning and causes a panic.

There are some advanced techniques that make this more extreme, but that's the basic concept.

Easy enough to duplicate. I have an inclined weight bench and a watering can. No problem. I lie on this and tilt the watercan to pour water on my mouth and nose. Water goes up my nose causing me to gag and choke and splutter, but after a try or two I'm able to suppress my reflex, relax breathe in shallowly and then expel rapidly (shooting out the water) and maintain my composure. This is not too bad. with my diving experience, you would never break me this way. I can't believe those Al-Zarqawi guys were such pussies.

Back to researching the advanced techniques:

The first of these is wet rag in mouth. I try it. Ok, I can handle this too. It makes it a little bit more difficult to maintain control. I didn't realize it, but the first time around I was selectively breathing through either mouth or nose, to help maintain control. The wet rag eliminates the mouth as an option. You have to really concentrate to maintain control, breathing very shallowly on the inhale and not allowing yourself to exhale until you have a good lungfull with which to expel the water in you nose throat and sinuses. Then, you have to inhale slowly but fast enough to pull in a lungful of air before your nose throat and sinuses fill up. Difficult, but doable with some self-control. I can see where this would get very unpleasant if you lost control, but still, not terrible, not torture, per se in my book. It wasn't as bad as my vasectomy or last root canal.

Next up is saran wrap. The idea is that you wrap saran wrap around the mouth in several layers, and poke a hole in the mouth area, and then waterboard away. I didn't reall see how this was an improvement on the rag technique, and so far I would categorize waterboarding as simply unpleasant rather than torture, but I've come this far so I might as well go on.

Now, those of you who know me will know that I am both enamored of my own toughness and prone to hyperbole. The former, I feel that I am justifiably proud of. The latter may be a truth in many cases, but this is the simple fact:
It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.

And I understood.

Posted by ParentalAdvisory: "Now see, you were in a controlled enviroment and found it to be torture. Now imagine you have some scumbag CIA or military officer doing this to you not knowing what else they're capable of. That's like 20x the fear, IMO, of what you went through!"

I don't think it would really matter whether the scumbag in question was CIA, Al Quaeda, my wife or you. After experiencing it, I'm not sure it would necessarily be worse if somebody else was doing it, it would just be more protracted.

Frankly, it felt infinitely terrible. The reaction was totally involuntary and totally automatic even though it was self- inflicted. It would be worse if somebody else was doing it because they might not realize when you reach that magic point and keep doing it, but really I found that magic point to be as bad as it can possibly get whether I did it or somebody else.

Originally Posted by gonzomax: "There have been cases of soldiers going through waterboarding in training and having psychological damage from it. Both you and the soldiers had an advantage. You did not have it done by an enemy that hates you and may screw up and kill you."

You say that, and it may be true. I'm trying to be honest about this, and I think you're wrong.

In most normal situations where pain is involved, it feels to me like control is important. Things that would otherwise be horrifying and intolerable were livable when I felt like I was in control. For three examples, I had third degrees burns on my hands when I was a kid, bad ones. Once the damage was done it, hurt terribly. It was horrifyingly bad, the worst physical pain I ever felt, and it went on and on.

But I was still me. I could feel myself through the pain. I knew that the doctors who were washing or scraping my hands to eliminate infection or scarring were trying to help me not hurt me, and I could keep myself still and I was in control.
Similarly, I was in control during my vasectomy which was pretty damn painful and uncomfortable. I was in control during a root control.

With the waterboarding, at the moment I hit the magic spot where I was drawing water in, I was no longer me, I was no longer in control. It felt out of control and dying.

I honestly feel that it doesn't matter who's doing it, that the matter of control was inconsequential, totally involuntary and besides the point.

In short, this was on a totally different level than anything I had ever felt before. It felt like an automatic hardwired panic.

The loss of control may prime you beforehand. The fear may get to you, and it may last longer if somebody else is doing it to you. In the lasting longer, it may be worse in quantity, but you really can't get worse than infinite and total surrender and panic, and that's what it felt like.

Does that make sense?

It's not so much the pain. The pain itself is simply discomfort. There is a total instinctual panic that I felt that was not only uncontrollable, but seemed to me that the very idea of seeking to control it is itself inconceivable.

Pure hardwired instinct.

Originally Posted by ParentalAdvisory: "I get it, dying is dying is dying. But you weren't in any kind of confinement with people who could care less about you. IMO, you would have a different experience with having terrorists do it to you, and another with your wife doing it to you. No doubt however, you've had some extreme feelings after having done it yourself now giving you a new perspective, but I still feel it would be a heck of a lot worse if you were detained and it performed by nut jobs."

Ok. You're allowed. It seems logical. I would normally agree with you. For example, I voluntarily got vasectomized. It hurt. It was bad and scary. It would have been horribly worse if it was involuntary and in a torture situation.

This was different though.

I'll try to explain it. Even though the situation I described of the vasectomy would be horribly worse if it were involuntary, without anesthesia, and done malevolently, all the things that would make it worse would be things that would prey upon a lucid mind. It is conceivably possible that if you are tough enough, you could tough it out.

Waterboarding feels like it completely bypasses lucidity, or anything that's in your control. The psychological aspects would be terrifying going into it, no doubt. I just feel that the actual sensation is on a whole different order.

Originally Posted by ParentalAdvisory: "I see where you're coming from. I guess our disconnect is the AFTER feelings. You likely aren't going to be PTSD on us. Where as someone in Gitmo having the same thing done to them will carry that weight on with them for the rest of their lives, assuming they survive it."

Well, then we have no disconnect. Ten minutes after, I was fine. There was just no chance I was gonna let it happen again. If somebody was doing it over and over again, one might go permanently mad. No question in my mind.

All I was trying to say is that once you have totally and complete panic and surrender, you can't surrender or panic to any greater degree.

I sure hope it's true, and objectively I beleive it's true. But, I don't think the sensation could be worse, it could just damage you more by lasting. I found it true in my ultramarathoning that when things hurt as bad as they possibly can, they just don't get worse.

To quantify it, look at it this way. Let's say the maximum human distress a person can voluntarily withstand is 10.

Waterboarding was a 1,000.

It's not pain. It's in a totally different league. It's something different. It's like somebody pulling your plug.

I did read up quite a bit before I tried it. The main danger is cardiac arrest. It will take you three to four minutes to asphyxiate. Waterboarding will take you about ten seconds before total surrender. Just long enough for your lungs empty, and begin to draw water.

From my understanding, you are in no physiological danger (besides the cardiac arrest thing) as long as you keep your lungs above the water line. You won't actually drown. The problem is that your body doesn't know this and your reaction is completely involuntary.

So, I have no doubt that it can be done safely. Which has nothing to do with the fact that as far as I'm concerned it is the worst torture imaginable.

I understand the CIAs point, or anybody who might defend it. "Hey, it's easy. It's safe. They give up instantly. There's no physiological damage. It gets total capitulation."

I believe those points are true and valid.

My merest taste simply suggests that by any definition of torture this is as bad as it gets. While on the surface, it doesn't seem that bad, it is worse than you can imagine.

You can't do this to another human being and stay human and remain moral.

Thread-ul original se găseşte aici.

G.

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Din nou despre marele R

Se dă un filmuleţ relativ amuzant, cu un comentariu relativ neutru, postat de Zoso, relativ aici. Fiindcă filmuleţul conţine un rrom, rasismul congenital românesc îşi scoate căpşorul, tunând şi fulgerând împotriva naţiei brune cotropitoare.

Astăzi, cel cotropit îi eCostin.

În postul său, eCostin face câteva afirmaţii care ar trebuit să poarte vestitul tag al Wikipediei, [citation needed]: că poliţia dă ture prin cartierul lui rar, de frică, că (mai) toţi infractorii erau ţigani. De fapt (dacă tot e să facem afirmaţii fără fundament), ştim cu toţii că cei mai mulţi infractori sunt români, iar poliţia nu patrulează fiindcă sunt de fapt zombi în solda hoţilor români.

În general, eCostin tratează filmul ca ilustrând problema rromilor, ce stau toată ziua şi o freacă aiurea şi/sau intimidează delicatul popor român. Bineînţeles, lucrurile sunt mult mai prozaice: nu e vorba decât de nişte high-school bullying. În cazul de faţă, chiar justificat, având în vedere că "inculpatul" l-a lovit pe "ne ve" pe "reclamant". Mai mult, e parfum faţă de ce bullying am avut parte/am văzut când eram la liceu, la Doamna Stanca/Marin Preda, undeva prin Giuleşti. Iar the bullies nu erau ţigani, ci români sadea, de familie bună (cum se zice).

Închei cu un citat din Adrian Stanciu, editorialist la Wall Street:

"Nu etnia e problema, ci excluderea ei brutală din societate. Când ai crescut dispreţuit, batjocorit şi umilit, într-o familie săracă cu părinţi infractori, e greu să ai sentimente pozitive şi obligaţii morale faţă de cei care te umilesc. E un război surd: noi contra ei."

G.

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Hero of the day: Chris Dodd

Chris Dodd e un senator american. A iniţiat un filibuster împotriva unui proiect de lege ce ar fi acordat imunitate retroactivă firmelor de comunicaţii care au spionat cetăţenii americani la cererea Washingtonului. Actuala lege expiră în februarie 2008.

Astăzi Harry Reid a anunţat amânarea dezbaterii până după anul nou.

Pentru că a luptat aproape singur¹ împotriva avansului statului poliţienesc, Chris Dodd, senator democrat, este azi Hero of the day.

G.

¹A fost susţinut doar de senatorii Brown, Boxer, Kennedy, Feingold, Wyden.

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Happy Bday!

Hey Jim, wherever you are, (a little delayed) Happy Birthday!

G.

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De ce iubesc România

Nu am nici un motiv să iubesc această ţară.

G.

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