Rulings

Coincidences are funny. Surprising. Just two days ago Pi asked me to write about the most recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then she apologized for potentially ruining my weekend. I told her that the thought of that war doesn't depress me anymore, and that I'll try to write some over the weekend. Obviously, I did not get around to it. Then I listened to the BBC World Service this morning. And I cried. The UN court has cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide in BIH. You can read a story over at BBC . Or, you can read what Washington Post has to say.
I like this quote:

But the 15-judge panel rejected Bosnia's claim that the Serbian state was responsible for the killing, saying it did not have effective control over the Bosnian Serb forces it had helped arm and finance.

Hmm. Not responsible. Sure. Gave a helping hand, and arm and more. Why not. We don't hold anybody responsible for that. They then continue on:

Instead, the judges ruled that Serbia stood by and allowed the massacre to happen.

Pardon my bosnian, but no shit.

The fact that the country is not responsible is not what bothers me. That the government is not responsible is what is not acceptable. And the worst part is that people who have committed the crimes will now think that they have been exonerated. They will say "See, we didn't do anything wrong. The court said so."

And, if that were not enough, let's hear more from the "Honorable" Judge Higgins:

They "were fully aware of the climate of deep-seated hatred which reigned between the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslims in the Srebrenica region."

I think few of us remember this in a slightly different light.

Update The Economist has put in its two cents.

Precision and war

Mark is on the documentaries binge. The latest one is Why we fight. My favorite snippet is the United States of Amnesia. An interesting statistic is: In the Gulf war about 7% of the bombs were precision guided. That number rose to 63% in the latest Iraq war. The estimated number of civilians killed during the Gulf war is 3 500, while the estimated number of civilians dead in the FIRST MONTH of the Iraq war is 6 000. How's that for precision?

On an unrelated note: is one's subscription to a membership of an organized religion connected to their altruistic motives? You may read a BBC's blurb or if you prefer check out Nature Neuroscience's article.

Wisdom of history

It is amazing how little we learn from events of the past. I highly recommend watching Sir! No Sir!, and listening what people had to say during and after Vietnam war. It probably should not have come as a surprise that lot of what was said sounded rather familiar and current.

On an unrelated note, during dinner hosted by a friend of mine not too long ago, his colleague, whom I hadn't met before, argued that global warming did not exist. His argument was that he had read all the scientific papers written on the subject and found their statistical analysis to be crap, which led him to the conclusion that the global warming did not exist (now that I think about this I am hoping I do not remember this event properly, because, as a mathematician, he should know better than to claim that the existence of global warming was disproved in this way). Anyhow, since I had not read scientific papers in question, I could really not argue with him. Anyway, it is middle of January in Michigan and I picked up huge clumps of hair off my



dog (the white one) last night. Global warming or not, she is not supposed to start sheding in mid January!