Conundrums ...

This sentence is false.  Conundrum No. 1: aka the Liar Paradox; Conundrum No. 2: What if an AI doesn't do what is asked of it vs what if an AI does ... constitutes a conundrum of a most interesting perspective depending on how said AI responds to the question asked.

To whit ...

A now-classic thought experiment illustrating this problem was posed by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. Bostrom imagined a superintelligent robot, programmed with the seemingly innocuous goal of manufacturing paper clips. The robot eventually turns the whole world into a giant paper clip factory.

Leading one astray aka Rev 1.0 ...

The most alarming example is one that affects billions of people. YouTube, aiming to maximize viewing time, deploys AI-based content recommendation algorithms. Two years ago, computer scientists and users began noticing that YouTube’s algorithm seemed to achieve its goal by recommending increasingly extreme and conspiratorial content. One researcher reported that after she viewed footage of Donald Trump campaign rallies, YouTube next offered her videos featuring “white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.” The algorithm’s upping-the-ante approach went beyond politics, she said: “Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.” As a result, research suggests, YouTube’s algorithm has been helping to polarize and radicalize people and spread misinformation, just to keep us watching. “If I were planning things out, I probably would not have made that the first test case of how we’re going to roll out this technology at a massive scale,” said Dylan Hadfield-Menell, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

Any questions?

Bumblebees rule :)

Bumblebees rule :) Yours truly has taken many videos and pictures of these wonderful insects as they work tirelessly to visit/pollinate flowers while drinking nectar needed to keep the hive alive as said bees have to process the nectar by regurgitating their haul into wax receptacles called honey pots, so that the ones that stayed home can partake.

Read the NYTimes piece to see just how amazing these little guys are and ... thanks to a good friend for turning yours truly onto a truly terrific article. :)

Facial Recognition

Wired's fascinating and detailed history of Woody Bledsoe, the creator of facial recognition code, started 60 years ago.

Woody’s facial-recognition research in the 1960s prefigured all these technological breakthroughs and their queasy ethical implications. And yet his early, foundational work on the subject is almost entirely unknown. Much of it was never made public.

Fortunately, whatever Woody’s intentions may have been that day in 1995, the bulk of his research and correspondence appears to have survived the blaze in his garage. Thousands of pages of his papers—39 boxes’ worth—reside at the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas. Those boxes contain, among other things, dozens of photographs of people’s faces, some of them marked up with strange mathematical notations—as if their human subjects were afflicted with some kind of geometrical skin disease. In those portraits, you can discern the origin story of a technology that would only grow more fraught, more powerful, and more ubiquitous in the decades to come.

Woody Bledsoe

Origins ...

Over the following year, Woody came to believe that the most promising path to automated facial recognition was one that reduced a face to a set of relationships between its major landmarks: eyes, ears, nose, eyebrows, lips. The system that he imagined was similar to one that Alphonse Bertillon, the French criminologist who invented the modern mug shot, had pioneered in 1879. Bertillon described people on the basis of 11 physical measurements, including the length of the left foot and the length from the elbow to the end of the middle finger. The idea was that, if you took enough measurements, every person was unique. Although the system was labor-intensive, it worked: In 1897, years before fingerprinting became widespread, French gendarmes used it to identify the serial killer Joseph Vacher.

Endgame ...

Woody and Hart began with a database of around 800 images—two newsprint-quality photos each of about “400 adult male caucasians,” varying in age and head rotation. (I did not see images of women or people of color, or references to them, in any of Woody’s facial-recognition studies.) Using the RAND tablet, they recorded 46 coordinates per photo, including five on each ear, seven on the nose, and four on each eyebrow. Building on Woody’s earlier experience at normalizing variations in images, they used a mathematical equation to rotate each head into a forward-looking position. Then, to account for differences in scale, they enlarged or reduced each image to a standard size, with the distance between the pupils as their anchor metric.

The computer’s task was to memorize one version of each face and use it to identify the other. Woody and Hart offered the machine one of two shortcuts. With the first, known as group matching, the computer would divide the face into features—left eyebrow, right ear, and so on—and compare the relative distances between them. The second approach relied on Bayesian decision theory; it used 22 measurements to make an educated guess about the whole.

In the end, the two programs handled the task about equally well. More important, they blew their human competitors out of the water. When Woody and Hart asked three people to cross-match subsets of 100 faces, even the fastest one took six hours to finish. The CDC 3800 computer completed a similar task in about three minutes, reaching a hundredfold reduction in time. The humans were better at coping with head rotation and poor photographic quality, Woody and Hart acknowledged, but the computer was “vastly superior” at tolerating the differences caused by aging. Overall, they concluded, the machine “dominates” or “very nearly dominates” the humans.

Disquieting is it not? Read the piece, fascinating to a fault without question.

Ice Lines

In doing this video, yours truly kept thinking, is this the last winter to see ice at any decent level as global warming is impacting CT weather big time with intense rain, global vortexes, little snow and less ice. Think about this, I know I have. Enjoy.

The Future ... looms

An excellent  NTTimes OPEd piece talks about the future and how today's toxic political and social atmosphere, driven mostly by Agent Orange, has impacted this country in ways both astounding and disquieting at the same time. Loss of civility, lack of critical thinking and incoherent anger tops the list along with a distrust of the future where tech is not what it seems to be while the environment unravels at speeds thought impossible until now. 

William Gibson, the writer who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novel “Neuromancer” heavily influenced the film “The Matrix,” has spent a lifetime imagining surreal and noirish possibilities for human development. But Donald Trump’s victory threw him off balance. “I think it took me about three months to come out of the shock of his actually having been elected,” Gibson told me. And when he finally did come out of it, Gibson still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the manuscript he’d been working on, about a young woman in modern-day San Francisco, since the world he’d situated her in seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

“If I had somehow been able to finish it, by the time it was published, it would have just been this lost thing,” he said, “completely out of time and unconcerned with what I immediately saw as being the beginning of something extraordinary, and almost certainly something extraordinarily bad.”

Seque ...

Much of the new book, “Agency,” takes place in a stub where Hillary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened. Characters from the future — from Gibson’s extrapolated version of our own dark timeline — try to help people in the alternate past avoid a similarly cataclysmic fate. The question looming over the book is not whether the future will be horrifying but whether there’s even the possibility of a future that isn’t.

BRT has tallied about this dire situation at length as my loyal readers know. Can we survive? To yours truly, the answer is a qualified yes but it will be difficult to say the least. This is why 2020 looms as the most important election this country has ever faced without issue.

Fonts et al :)

The  NYTimes piece These People Really Care About Fonts brings back fond memories when yours truly taught computer graphics at Pratt Institute and did cooperate identity and collateral design back in the day. In doing this, one quickly finds out designing type is an exquisitely difficult process if one wants to create an art form both legible and beautiful at the same time. :)

Typefaces are everywhere. The New York City subway communicates mostly in Helvetica. The lifestyle companies advertising in its cars may use another modern sans-serif font or, increasingly, something more retro. Many large tech companies have designed or commissioned their own house styles, including Netflix Sans, Airbnb Cereal, PayPal Sans, Uber Move and Google’s Product Sans. (You are currently reading this in Imperial, by the way.)

Matthew Rechs, a business coach for type designers, whose arms are covered in ampersand tattoos, argued that a font can be a brand’s most potent signifier. For example, “if you try to imagine a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, or really any bottle, without the type on it, you’re left with very little to differentiate it,” he said.

Ed Bengutat taught an awesome course @ SVA back in the early 80's. Without question, one of the true greats in typography without question.

'Nuff said. 

Coronarovirus - A deadly entity indeed ...

The Wuhan coronavirus has sickened more than 1,100 people in Asia and at least two people in the United States, according to statements from health officials. Other cases have probably gone unreported. 

As of Saturday morning, at least 41 people have died.

A deadly entity indeed. 

Fifteen more people have died in the city of Wuhan, the Hubei provincial capital and epicenter of the outbreak, the health authorities in Hubei said.

The new figures, announced early Saturday, represented a nearly 60 percent jump from the previous death toll of 26.

Just three of the 41 deaths reported over all have taken place outside of Wuhan: one in another city in Hubei Province, one in Hebei Province, and one in Heilongjiang, near the Russian border.

The new victims ranged from 55 to 87 years old. Eleven were male, and four female.

Nationwide, more than 400 new cases of the virus were diagnosed, officials said early Saturday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in China to nearly 1,300.

A deadly outbreak is growing. 

• Fifteen new deaths were reported in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
• China restricts travel for 35 million people as the death toll rises, including a 36-year-old man.
• New cases are confirmed in the United States and France.
• Anger and mistrust spill over online
• Anxiety hangs over residents on Lunar New Year’s Eve.
• China reports two deaths outside the center of the outbreak.
• Experts are preparing for an outbreak that could last months.

Thus far, 2020 is starting off far worse than 2019 ...

Definition ...

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause infections in the respiratory system. There are seven known coronaviruses, including the newly identified  2019-nCoV. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was the coronavirus behind a deadly outbreak from 2002 to 2003, which infected  8,098 people and killed 774. MERS (also called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), first identified in 2012, is another recent and ongoing coronavirus outbreak, with cases reported as recently as this week. Of the 2,494 cases and 858 deaths associated with MERS, most occurred  in the Arabian Peninsula. The Wuhan coronavirus is different from these diseases, however, and it has never been seen in people before. 

Addendum ... Scientists Predict Wuhan's Outbreak Will Get Much Worse

Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

As more data on the new coronavirus circulating in China emerges, it’s becoming clear that whatever the country is experiencing now—dozens of deaths, hundreds of people hospitalized, cities of millions quarantined—is just the tip of the outbreak.

On Friday, a team of researchers based in the UK and US reported in a preliminary paper that the number of confirmed cases at the outbreak’s epicenter in Wuhan reflects only 5 percent of people who are actually infected. That would mean that for Tuesday, the last day they included in their analysis, the real number of cases is not 440, as has been reported, but is more like 12,000. The paper, which has not yet undergone peer review, appeared on the Medrxiv preprint server. Already, since Tuesday, the number of diagnosed coronavirus patients in Wuhan has shot up to 729.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

A Design fail ...

Yours truly has a Galaxy 8, a great phone that has worked for two years without issue. The 20 looks really good and may be the one this rube chooses when doing the inevitable upgrade but when it comes to the Galaxy Fold, not a chance ...

The Galaxy Fold was supposed to be The Future™. Samsung, the world's leading display manufacturer, invested six years and $130 million to birth its ultimate creation: the flexible OLED display. And with the holy grail of display technology under its belt, Samsung would revolutionize the smartphone industry by introducing the "foldable" smartphone—a device that would be a portable, pocketable smartphone when closed and a multi-pane, multi-tasking, big-screen tablet when open. Samsung might have started the modern smartphone era as "that company that just copies Apple," but after surviving a thousand lawsuits, ushering in the big-screen smartphone, and eventually surpassing Apple in sales, Samsung would finally, indisputably plant its flag atop the smartphone market with the Galaxy Fold, a device that would redefine the modern smartphone.

At least, that was the plan. Things have not gone to plan.

Read the detailed Ars piece to see why the moniker A Design Fail applies to a company that should know better when it comes to tech like this. A folding phone's a really cool concept but not this one IMHO.

Betting pool ... Samsung will get it right as their tech, in the smart phone arena, is really outstanding.

Gotta get this book ...

Animal House comes to mind here with Agent Orange as stand in for John "Bluto" Blutarsky.

An example of large news: They report that in the spring of 2017, Trump implored Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, to help him jettison the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump whines to a group of aides. Nearly every line from Trump, in “A Very Stable Genius,” is this venal.

Another example: While visiting Pearl Harbor, according to John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump seemed to have no idea what had actually happened there. Throughout he is misinformed and confused while at the same time utterly certain of himself.

John "Bluto" Blutarsky

Up close & personal

We're all under surveillance, but now ... we will also be tracked in real time.

His tiny company, Clear View AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Up close and personal indeed.

RR 2019/Amber Anchor

A blues tune most evocative and powerful in conjunction with a high-speed bluegrass jam delivered with wit and humor defines what Amber Anchor does with consummate style. Check this out as it's the right thing to do. :)

RR 2019/Bone Dry

Think Summer and Redding Rock'n Roots Revival 2019 with a touch of reggae and jam as Bone Dry delivers both with humor and style. Enjoy.

8:15 AM ...

At 8:15AM, August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was vaporized by Little Boy, the first of two atom bombs used against Japan in order to end the war. When reading  John Hershey's extraordinary account of this event from the personal perspectives of people who survived the bombing, one comes away forever shocked and dismayed as to just how quick and devastating this kind of warfare truly is.

Little Boy

I—A Noiseless Flash

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

John Hersey, 1958,

photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Read Hiroshima in its entirety, it's the right thing to do.

The future of imaging ...

The future of imaging lies in light field tech and liquid lens as the former enables variable depth of field, in real-time, the later, an infinitely variable zoom lens without the weight and complexity of glass.

To whit.

The coming revolution in holographic video technology has been given a boost with the unique approach of Spanish start-up Wooptix. It has presented the first single lens light field camera capable of capturing light field video in real time and it does so using a liquid lens.

The camera is called SEBI and incorporates a hardware controlled liquid lens capable of capturing the same image at multiple depth-of-field settings. SEBI is also able to generate a depth map in real-time whilst recording. By using the depth map users can refocus at will within the scene. Blur and focus areas can be modified by controlling the depth of field. Alternatively, an ‘all in focus’ image can be displayed.

The company says its tech could have multiple applications including in film and TV.

Effect of re-focusing and depth of field adjustment using the Lytro software.
Top (near), Middle (far), Bottom (full depth).

Wooptix is the company developing the hardware while Google, having bought Lytro, is developing light field tech for smartphones.

And so it begins ... K. Vonnegut

Gravitas ...

Gravitas comes to mind when thinking about Bloomberg as the self-made billionaire is tough, relentless and one who engenders loyalty, running a company that virtually has little or no-churn due to how he treats his employees. With that being said, it matters not who gets the nomination because he's going to help fund said candidate in order to defeat Agent Orange in November.

SAN MARCOS, Texas — Michael R. Bloomberg on Saturday did not rule out spending a billion dollars of his own money on the 2020 presidential race, even if he does not win the Democratic nomination, and said he would mobilize his well-financed political operation to help Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren win in November if either is the party nominee, despite their sharp policy differences.

Mr. Bloomberg’s plans would effectively create a shadow campaign operation for the general election, complete with hundreds of organizers in key battleground states and a robust digital operation, ready to be inherited by the party nominee — regardless of who that nominee may be.

Gravitas indeed as he's the only candidate Trump is afraid to face IMHO.

Of Winters Past

Family

Huntington Snow Field

Winter 1999

Thin Ice

Channeling DC & Trump ...

This sentence is false. :)

Pedal Steel ...

The video could be better but the music, well, that's something else altogether.

Pedal Steel Guitars live. :)

Also, it is one of the most difficult-to-learn instruments in the world. Just setting up the pedals and levers requires an intense amount of foreknowledge. There are multiple standard tunings. Its strings usually run in a non-intuitive order. Playing it requires both hands, both feet and, occasionally, both knees. Sometimes there is one guitar neck full of strings, sometimes there are a few — each in its own tuning. Its mechanics have very little to do with guitar as most recognize the instrument, or even the open-tuned Hawaiian lap steel, from which the pedal steel evolved.

Here's a double-neck version.

Awesome to a fault.

The Midnight Hour

The Midnight Hour has come. Trump did the strategically brilliant move of killing the number two man of Iran, thus creating the wonderful possibility of WW III in order to avoid impeachment by pandering to the forever war crowd in the senate to show how tough he truly is regarding Iran. Said move is needed as the Court of Southern NY waits in the wings to talk to The Donald about all things related to money laundering if said POTUS becomes a private citizen.

There are no more adults in the room.

After three harrowing years, we’ve reached the point many of us feared from the moment Donald Trump was elected. His decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most important official, made at Mar-a-Lago with little discernible deliberation, has brought the United States to the brink of a devastating new conflict in the Middle East.

It gets better ...

The administration has said that the killing of Suleimani was justified by an imminent threat to American lives, but there is no reason to believe this. One skeptical American official told The New York Times that the new intelligence indicated nothing but “a normal Monday in the Middle East,” and Democrats briefed on it were unconvinced by the administration’s case. The Washington Post reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who last year agreed with a Christian Broadcasting Network interviewer that God might have sent Trump to save Israel from the “Iranian menace” — has been pushing for a hit on Suleimani for months.

If only this issue was as funny as the original Midnight Hour flick.

Asleep @ the Switch ...

3 gems from Steve Cutts.

Had to add one more. LOL applies here. :)

Asleep @ the Switch  ... without a doubt.

The hole card

Factoid:

Chris Hedges, an Arabic speaker, is a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He spent seven years covering the region, including Iran.

So he knows a little bit.

His piece, War with Iran details the eminent blowback coming to the US, thanks to this incredibly stupid act of killing Qassem Suleimani, thus continuing a bankrupt foreign policy iniative started in 1953 with the assassination of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mosedagh by the CIA in order to ...

1. Give access to BP to Iran's oil and ...
2. Install the Shah to ensure cooperation with the US. 

The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang. 

The hole card indeed.

Of Light & Water

The Cape is world-famous for its light and water as artists like Robert Motherwell and Edwin Hopper used to go to Provincetown to work due to the amazing qualities of late summer illumination of a most extraordinary kind. Enjoy.

Stupidity personified ...

BRT has written copiously about Iran and the ramifications of what it means if the US is stupid enough to start a war with this country. Well, it seems Agent Orange, under the control of the deep state, Israel and Saudi Arabia, along with the complicit press, is just that stupid, not understanding that a possible WW III looms, something akin to WW I whereby a totally avoidable catastrophe turned into a monstrous atrocity due to the same kind of stupidity we are witnessing today.

US attempts to portray Soleimani as a master terrorist leader, like say, ISIL's (ISIS's) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is wrong and misses the big picture. Soleimani may have been controversial, even a bloody "shadow commander", but he served at the pleasure of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, to protect and expand the regime's interests in the Middle East. The killing of Soleimani is an attack on the Iranian state.

From one liar to another.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, under indictment for criminal charges, was the first and only national leader to support Trump’s action, while claiming that that Trump acted entirely on his own.

“Just as Israel has the right to self-defense, the United States has exactly the same right,” Netanyahu told reporters in Greece. “Qassem Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of American citizens and other innocents, and he was planning more attacks.”

The question to ask here is ... who wins and who loses?

WHILE THE MEDIA focus for three years of the Trump presidency has centered around “Russia collusion” and impeachment, the most dangerous collusion of all was happening right out in the open — the Trump/Saudi/Israel/UAE drive to war with Iran.

On August 3, 2016 — just three months before Donald Trump would win the Electoral College vote and ascend to power — Blackwater founder Erik Prince arranged a meeting at Trump Tower. For decades, Prince had been agitating for a war with Iran and, as early as 2010, had developed a fantastical proposal for using mercenaries to wage it.

At this meeting was George Nader, an American citizen who had a long history of being a quiet emissary for the United States in the Middle East. Nader, who had also worked for Blackwater and Prince, was a convicted pedophile in the Czech Republic and is facing similar allegations in the United States. Nader worked as an adviser for the Emirati royals and has close ties to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince.

Conjecture. What is the possibility of Iran signing a defense deal with Russia and China as China depends on Iranian oil for energy while Russia needs Iran to keep peace with Muslims in Russia?

Washington’s murder of Soleimani is a criminal act that could start World War 3 just as the Serbian murder of the Austrian Archduke set World War 1 in motion.  Only Putin and Russia with China’s help can stop this war that Washington has set in motion.

... The destabilization of Iran serves both Washington and Israel.  For Israel Iran’s demise stops support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has twice defeated Israel’s army and prevented Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon.  For Washington Iran’s demise allows CIA-supported jihadists to bring instability into the Russian Federation.

Unless Putin submits to American and Israeli will, he has no choice but to block any Washington/Israeli attack on Iran.  

The easiest and cleanest way for Putin to do this is to announce that Iran is under Russia’s protection.  This protection should be formalized in a mutual defense treaty between Russia, China, and Iran, with perhaps India and Turkey as members. This is hard for Putin to do, because incompetent historians have convinced Putin that alliances are the cause of war.  But an alliance such as this would prevent war.  Not even the insane criminal Netanyahu and the crazed American neoconservatives would, even when completely drunk or deluded, declare war on Iran, Russia,  China, and if included in the alliance India and Turkey.  It would mean the death of America, Israel and any European country sufficiently stupid to participate.

End game

The assassination is not going to change any of these policies; in fact, it will merely accelerate them.

If history is any guide, Iran will absorb the attack at first and avoid an all-out war with far superior US military forces. Trump may have challenged Khamenei for a duel, but the supreme leader prefers fighting in the shadows.

So, respond, he will. His options are plentiful and his timetable is open-ended. This includes assassinations, covert operations, low-intensity warfare and oil and maritime disruptions in the Gulf region.

Addendum

WASHINGTON — In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him — which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq — on the menu they presented to President Trump.

They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.

By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.

A contrary opinion: let's hope it's the right one ...

Finally, there is the possibility that this is tied into the impeachment process that will get going again this month. Senate Republicans like Mitt Romney and Ben Sassy are wholly owned by Jerusalem. In order to get their vote in the impeachment fight, Trump may be forced to give into the forever war crowd. If anyone thinks this is too conspiratorial, just look at the  anti-BDS campaign.

The likelihood of this scenario leading to war, however, is low as the impeachment lever has a clear expiry date on it. There is an election brewing and Washington needs to dispense with the impeachment issue by February at the latest. That’s enough time to do some drone strikes and saber rattling, but not enough time to gin up support for a war with Iran. Instead it will just make negotiating with Iran impossible for the remainder of Trump’s tenure, which may be the real point.

Last but not least, here's a quick bio on Qassem Suleimani.

Suleimani’s biography as a pivotal figure in Iran and the region is well known. Since the late nineteen-nineties, he was engaged in trying to remake the Middle East to Iran’s advantage, directing his proxies to kill or dispatch anyone who impeded his vision of an Iranian-dominated sphere of influence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean Sea. He was remarkably successful, legendary even—certainly the most influential operative in the region in modern times. He was involved in sponsoring terrorist attacks, propping up despots like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, helping to assassinate at least one foreign leader—the Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri—and killing hundreds of American soldiers along the way. In the latter years of the American war in Iraq, Suleimani’s militias deployed a particularly bloody weapon against U.S. soldiers—the “explosively formed penetrator,” or E.F.P.—which tore through the armor of U.S. military vehicles and wreaked havoc on soldiers and marines. It was no small irony that he died on the road to the Baghdad International Airport, where so many Americans soldiers and Iraqis died by ambush.

A dangerous and competent man without a doubt.