How to make Americans safe.

They should ban people in the USA. People are dangerous to people.

Murders in the US will stop when there is only one person left in the country. Then all we have to worry about is suicide.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

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Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.) 

Staff Sergeant Robert Bales and the price of life.

In America, money buys everything – even forgiveness, it seems. At least, that is the implicit view of the American armed forces.

Staff Sergeant Robert Bales is being charged with the murders of 17 Afghan civilians, he shot to death in their homes, at night. There were four men, four women and nine children in the tally. He also attempted to kill six others. He faces a potential death sentence and a minimum life sentence with the possibility of parole, under military law. These facts are well known. What struck me as somewhat bizarre was what America has done in response to these killings. It has attempted to bribe the affections of the deceased’s families. The US has paid 50,000 USD to the families of those killed, per victim and 11,000 USD to the families of those wounded, per victim. Think about that for a moment. America imagines that it can buy the goodwill of the families of those it has murdered. In doing so, it is implicitly stating that it believes there is some exchangeable equivalence between money and life. There is no such equivalence, in their hearts. It is certain that not a one of the survivors would rather have the money than their loved ones back, alive, with them.

Then there is another curious fact about this. The international mass media are expressing amazement at the size of the sums the Americans have offered in compensation. They seem to be saying that these are large sums of money. Now, by comparison to past payments to those killed or injured by Americans in Afghanistan, they are. Typical prior payments have been 2,000 USD for a death; 400 USD for a serious injury and 200 USD for a non-serious injury. So, by that scale these are significant payments. Yet, there is another comparison to be made. America has placed a value on human life, called the “statistical value of human life”. Different agencies place different values on life. The Environmental Protection Agency values a life at 6.9 million USD. The Food and Drug Administration values life at 7.9 million USD. This leads to a sobering conclusion: an Afghan life is worth up to 158 times less than an American life, according to the actions of the American government, in compensating the Afghan families, whose members were murdered by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

Should the Afghan people ever come to understand this discrepancy between the value of an American life and the value of Afghan life, they might be mightily insulted at the compensation offered. It should be noted that the Afghans have a blood money culture in which compensation for the loss of life is expected – yet, Afghan commentators have remarked, in tune with my words, that no compensation is enough to make amends for these crimes – for it won’t bring back their loved ones.

If America really wants to play this game, of buying off the hatred of the people who have every reason to hate them, then really they should pay the same value for an Afghan life that they notionally ascribe to an American life. Each Afghan victim should have been compensated to the tune of 7.9 million USD. This would have another effect. It might make the Americans more cautious about whom they kill in Afghanistan. It could soon become very expensive to send young, anger prone, gun happy, American soldiers into a combat environment – for reasons altogether unrelated to their pay and support. Were every civilian death to require almost 8 million USD in compensation, there would, I am sure, be suddenly a whole lot fewer of them – and this could only be described as a good thing.

I shall patiently wait for the American government to pay out the balance of the 7.9 million USD payments for each victim. Until then, the US government hasn’t shown that it values Afghan life as much as it values American life – and that is a very grave insult, to this long suffering people. A life is a life – and it should be valued as much from a distant land, as from our own. That is a lesson the Americans have yet to imbibe.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

A tale of two guns.

I read, with some recognition, of the sobering tale of David Lubin, an actor, who found himself in a perilous situation on set, recently. Mr. Lubin had been playing a masked gunman, whilst “shooting”, in Alpha Market, in the Cole Valley area of San Francisco. Unfortunately, for Mr. Lubin, a local resident was strangely observant and unobservant at the same time: they saw his gun, but didn’t see the camera crew attending to him. The local reported a crime in progress and the police responded.

Now, Mr. Lubin was not expecting real life police to turn up. When asked to drop his gun, under gunpoint, he froze and neither moved nor complied. Luckily for him, the police decided to disarm him, rather than shoot him. He was arrested – but not charged when the police found out the true situation.

I note that quite a few Internet commenters chimed in with remarks about police brutality, heavy-handedness and general stupidity. However, that is not what I saw in this situation. I see a remarkably and very fortunate restraint in the police response. Had the police been as they are so often portrayed, Mr. David Lubin would now have the credentials R.I.P after his name.

In contrast, I would like to remind you of the case of Kirk Abella, an actor in the British film “Going Somewhere” who went somewhere he didn’t expect: the afterlife. Kirk Abella was shot dead on a film set in the Philippines under almost identical circumstances. Kirk was playing a gunman on a motorbike, when a local resident reported a crime underway. A community watchman, Eddie Cuizon, gave chase and shot the actor in the back, when he saw a gun being drawn. The gun, of course, was a plastic replica. Cuizon gave himself up to the police when he finally understood what he had done. He was charged with murder.

Curiously, community watchmen in the Philippines are not even supposed to be armed. They are supposed to carry nothing more than batons. So, it seems that Eddie Cuizon took his own initiative to arm himself. No doubt that won’t look too good at sentencing.

These two tales make me reflect that David Lubin was very lucky indeed. He could so easily be a dead man, today. Worringly, the film that David Lubin had been working on, had all the right permits for shooting. Apparently, though, this information didn’t reach the policemen on the ground.

I hope that lessons are learnt from these two cases. Policemen should always try to make an arrest, of a living suspect, if at all possible and should not do as Eddie Cuizon – shoot first, and find out later what it was all about.

I am led to wonder how many actors, on film sets, have been harmed by the police, the world over. After all, most contemporary films seem to involve guns. So, out of the hundreds of thousands of fake gun crimes, on film sets around the world each year – how many of them lead to police intervention? It is a worrying thought. If anyone has the answer, please respond below.

Posted by Valentine Cawley

(If you would like to support my continued writing of this blog and my ongoing campaign to raise awareness about giftedness and all issues pertaining to it, please donate, by clicking on the gold button to the left of the page.

To read about my fundraising campaign, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-in-support-of-my.html and here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/01/fundraising-drive-first-donation.html

If you would like to read any of our scientific research papers, there are links to some of them, here: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2011/02/research-papers-by-valentine-cawley-and.html

If you would like to see an online summary of my academic achievements to date, please go here: http://www.getcited.org/mbrz/11136175

To learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, 10, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, 7 and Tiarnan, 5, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html

I also write of gifted education, child prodigy, child genius, adult genius, savant, megasavant, HELP University College, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, Malaysia, IQ, intelligence and creativity.

There is a review of my blog, on the respected The Kindle Report here:http://thekindlereport.blogspot.com/2010/09/boy-who-knew-too-much-child-prodigy.html

Please have a read, if you would like a critic's view of this blog. Thanks.

You can get my blog on your Kindle, for easy reading, wherever you are, by going to: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much/dp/B0042P5LEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1284603792&sr=8-1

Please let all your fellow Kindlers know about my blog availability - and if you know my blog well enough, please be so kind as to write a thoughtful review of what you like about it. Thanks.

My Internet Movie Database listing is at:http://imdb.com/name/nm3438598/

Ainan's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3305973/

Syahidah's IMDB listing is at http://imdb.com/name/nm3463926/

Our editing, proofreading and copywriting company, Genghis Can, is athttp://www.genghiscan.com/

This blog is copyright Valentine Cawley. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. Use only with permission. Thank you.)

The miraculous power of selective memory.

Memory often has a miraculous power: that of being selective. Sometimes it reveals things to us, sometimes it hides them from us.

A few months ago, I was speaking to an American man of similar age to myself. He had journeyed across the world to Singapore from Chicago, for the love of a woman and was now father to her child. His son was the same age as my eldest, so, in a way, I felt an echo of my own tale, in his.

"Will you ever return to the US?" I asked him, one day.

"Oh yes. Sure!", his lips everted strongly and there was a certain determination in his features.

"In fact, I think I made a mistake in staying here.", he went on, his lips pursing as his tongue fell silent, his brow furrowing.

"What about the gun problem, though? You don't have that here.", I said, my eyes sweeping the room to indicate Singapore as a whole.

"Guns?", he snorted, "Oh I have never had any trouble with guns, in the US." He seemed defensive, a certain pride in America rushed to fill his gestures and puff out his frame. I had clearly said something a little unacceptable. He turned to speak to another, present in the room and didn't look back at me, as he did so.

I watched and listened, quietly, not satisfied with his answer, for I had read the statistics on gun violence in the US and wasn't convinced that someone could reach middle age, in Chicago and not encounter a problem or two with guns.

The other guy present was also an American. For reasons known only to himself, but perhaps because he, too, was dissatisfied with his friend's answer, he swung the conversation back to violence in America.

The Chicago resident's answer was most revealing. "I have had guns pulled on me, twice.", he revealed to his fellow American.

I said nothing. I didn't point out the inconsistency between his defensive denial to me, that he had ever had any gun problems in America - and his admission to his fellow American that he had twice had guns pointed at him. Apparently, they had pointed them at his head. But, heh, this qualifies, when speaking to me, as "Never had any trouble with guns".

I marvelled at his essential inconsistency. He had contradicted himself within the space of ten minutes on an issue on which no-one could ever forget: that of being held up at gunpoint. To the non-American, he had never had any trouble, to the American, he had been held up twice, at gunpoint. I noted that, to me, he had defended his nation - but to his fellow American he had, perhaps, told the truth - or remembered the truth. I wonder, now, which it was: was his memory being selective, to me, when he defended his country - did he genuinely not remember the hold ups? Or was he lying to me, to defend his country? Did he suddenly remember the incidents when talking to his fellow American, perhaps because he had no need to defend the reputation of his country against a fellow citizen, for both would know the true deal?

I shall never know. However, I shall also not forget the lesson of apparently selective memory he taught me. His life was one thing to one person, one thing to another. His nation was one thing to one person, one thing to another. With such a one, I think one would have to observe him in many different situations to have a chance in getting at the truth of things. Then again, which tale would be the truth? He would be selective to each listener, depending on whom that listener was.

I am glad I said nothing, for that allowed me to continue to observe him, whenever I encountered him. Had I pointed out the contradiction, no doubt he would have altered his manner in front of me. Perhaps, in fact, he would have become actively hostile had I pointed out his own self-contradiction. Often, it is better just to listen, and not to speak one's mind: more is learnt that way and fewer friends are lost. Nevertheless it is funny what might be observed if you simply allow people to be themselves in company for a while. Sometimes, you even learn the truth.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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