RIFLE RANGE BOY: information

Showing posts with label information. Show all posts

Saturday, 28 September 2024

Truth is a state of mind?

Conspiracy Theory (1997)
Director: Richard Donner

In the pre-internet era, Malaysian coffee shops were fertile grounds for conspiracy theories. At a time when all news was coming out in print and the airwaves were tightly controlled, information was a priced commodity. Everyone had their version of what was going on beyond the iron curtain of bureaucracy, of what was reported and what was not.

Surprisingly, at least in Malaysia, all the coffee shop banter that would initially be denied by the powers that be will turn out to be true. Investigational journalism is better done by the single cup of coffee purchaser sitting in the shop the whole day than by people trained and paid to do the reporting job.

In the infancy age of the internet, in the early 1990s, internet buffs scrambled to be on the mailing list of MGG Pillai's discussion forum, Sang Kancil. His brand of hard-hitting fire brand exposè journalism excited young minds who were quite fed up with paternalistic information dispersal. Some of his reports were so unbelievably accurate, as if he had peeked into all governmental secret documents. A great vacuum was left after his demise in 2006. It was indeed a sad day for journalism. The hole was soon filled by Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK), who, probably with his lineage with the royalties, may be privy to much-privileged information.

RPK did such a good job that he landed on the wrong side of the law several times. Over time, he became so controversial that people wondered whose side he was on.

Sadly, with so much digital exposure these days, we are still trying to figure out what is real news and what is fake. Those who do not conform to the mainstream narrative are quickly labelled conspiracy theorists. Despite everything being at our disposal, we are still left as confused as ever. Alternative news still turns out to be accurate, as it was before. Nothing has really changed.

This 1997 obscure film tells the tale of a taxi driver who is termed a lunatic who goes on broadcasting about a grand governmental plan to kill and destroy. In between, he is also apprehended by psychologists or government agents who feed him hallucinogens and try to extract information from him. To a certain extent, we, the viewers, are also confused about what is real and what the cab driver's imagination is. In that city, he is trying to contact a lawyer with the Justice Department. Long story short, the cab driver is correct. He is part of the US mind-control team of the State, which is programmed to carry out secret missions for the government.

Truth is a state of mind?

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Wednesday, 27 December 2023

In God's hands?

Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife (2023)
Documentary

Perhaps the media is the one that needs to take the blame. It may be people's fascination with the high life and their gullibility. Or the society's rules on the confidentiality of information or the restriction. Some have perfected the art of staying in the limelight to awe others with their stories so tall that they cannot be refuted. These do not make sense, but watching Dr Paolo Macchiarini's shenanigans, they would.

Dr Macchiarini is an Italian maverick surgeon employed at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, between 2010 and 2013. With a long, impressive CV, including a stint as a visiting Professor at University College London and multiple revolutionary discoveries in regenerative medicine in Russia, he hit the headlines performing groundbreaking trachea replacement surgery using a plastic mould and stem cell technology.

At the height of his success, he meets journalist Benita Alexander. She is swept off her feet, love blossoms and wedding bells will soon be rung. Everything is going well except for his frequent absence. After all, he is a globetrotting star surgeon flying from country to country, performing avant-garde top-notch operations. On top of that, world leaders like the Clintons, Obama and the Pope have Macchiarini on their speed dial. He is their personal physician.

The wedding is planned to happen at the Vatican itself, officiated by, of all people, the Pope himself. Yes, the Pope also does weddings.

One by one, news of botched surgeries comes to the open. His credentials turned out to be fraud. His colleagues at Karolinka start an investigation. An investigative journalist is roped in. Somehow, because the World Wide Web is in its infancy, the information from one part of the world either does not reach or is falsified when it hits the outside world until ...

Benito Alexander, the journalist scheduled to marry Macchiarini, catches him having a wife and children. She exposes him in an article in Vanity Fair. Thus came the surgeon's downfall. One by one, Sweden charges him in court. He is presently serving jail in Sweden. Macchirianno used Benito's position as a journalist to springboard his own publicity.

It is funny that at the dawn of the birth of information technology, we were promised knowledge accessible to all. People would be more empowered to make informed decisions after accessing all sides of the multifaceted monster called truth. Surprise, surprise. Humans can still hoodwink the system and abuse the system to fulfil nefarious personal interests.

Information platforms further help these people to peddle fake news and whitewash things. Bragging and broadcasting tall stories have become much easier.

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Saturday, 6 March 2021

The problem of information overload!

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021)
Netflix Docu-series.

This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do.

In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she poured all her inner feeling. Her parents and sister revealed that Elisa suffered from bipolar disease.

At this stage, the police decided to release the CCTV footage to the public to obtain more about the missing person. That started an avalanche of input from internet sleuths from the world over. Many self-appointed armchair investigators and You-tubers spent many many man-hours scrutinising and dissecting the recording with a fine toothcomb coming up with many theories; some were quite outrageous. A group of them accused the hotel staff of tampering with the CCTV tape as the video flow was not smooth and the time recordings were smudged. There was the insinuation of the hotel covering up for its personnel, and police corruption was mentioned. At the time of Elisa Lam's disappearance, there was a tuberculosis outbreak among the homeless community in Skid Row in LA, where Cecil Hotel was located. Healthcare workers were doing random testing on potential victims using a kit named LAM-ELISA. This sparked a conspiracy theory that somewhat Elisa Lam was a biological weapon in a secret governmental project!

Cecil Hotel had indeed seen better times. Built during the heady times of the swinging 20s, it fell into hard times after the Great Depression and never really recovered. It drew in seedy characters and was the venue for murders, drugs, prostitution and many more. It housed vagabonds and serial killers. Against this background, that part of LA, known as Skid Row, became the USA's poorest part, probably the world. Because of its location and local housing rules, Cecil Hotel developed part of the building to house in the society's disadvantaged segment. It was the same building but with clear demarcations except for the elevators. Hence, there is a certain level of interaction of the hotel guests with the hapless long-staying renters.

Another idea floated around was that Elisa was on recreational drugs, hence, the abnormal gestures seen in the lift footage.

About 19 days after her disappearance, hotel guests complained of plumbing issues. The janitor who inspected the water tanks found Elisa's body in one of four water tanks, naked and decomposed. The police, in their press statement, in narrating the find, described how the janitor had to open the hatch to discover Elisa. (It was later corrected).

The coroners' report classified the cause of death as indeterminate awaiting toxicological findings. As the authorities dragged on with the final report, the internet sleuths became more restless. There was a lot of yoyoing between suicide and homicide. It was Youtubers from the four corners of the world who wanted to have their say. The whole scenario mirrored that of the Korean paranormal blockbuster 'Dark Water'.

Around that time, a Death Punk artiste named Morbid (aka Pablo Vergara) stayed at the hotel. As his song describes death and murders, some eerily similar to Lam's death, the social media vilified him as the possible murderer. He took it so badly that he developed suicidal thoughts and had to be institutionalised.

Elisa Lam

The coroner's office finally issued the cause of death as accidental drowning with bipolar disorder as a precipitating factor. Her psychiatric drugs levels were almost non-existent, indicating that she had not been compliant with her treatment. Elisa had had another similar a couple of years previously.

This unfortunate case shows how a simple, straight-forward tragedy with a simple explanation ends up with various other equally compelling arguments. There is no such thing as beyond reasonable doubt. The element of suspicion can be conjectured by creative minds to escape conviction. There must have been so many wrongful convictions based on compelling circumstantial evidence aided by our tunnel visions and laissez-faire attitude of people commissioned to perform specific tasks. It must be the cruel twist of fate that made the innocent pay time for crimes they did not commit. Some call it the misalignment of his stars; others call it paying dues of past karma.

Sometimes unrelated events change the course of the trial and subsequent fate of the accused. I think the shut hatch of the water tank can be explained like this. I guess the opened hatch must have been noticed by the hotel workers who frequently hung out at the roof. They must have inspected the tank and did not find anything as Elisa could have had submerged. He must have shut it thinking that it was an oversight by the plumber. How one action can change the narrative?

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Saturday, 13 April 2019

Damn statistics

Freakonomics (2005) Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner
A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything

The conventional thinking is that economists are nerds who fancy numbers, statistics and balancing GDPs and expenditures. Now, we have come to realise that economics is more than statistics. Statistics are the greatest lies invented by mankind. It can be made to work for either side of the fence if you know how. The same numbers can be used to assert both sides of the argument if you know how. That is the reason for the frenzy of data in the 21st century. Information is knowledge.

The authors try to freak us out with numbers that baffle us with information that actually questions whether our supposedly scientific approach to solving our day to day problem is indeed appropriate. For a starter, they suggest that the reason for the reduction in crime in the 1990s is not because of great policing, increasing prisons or use of resources to curb crime but instead due to the legislation of allowing termination of pregnancy.

Morality represents the way we want the world to work, to create a utopia but economics is how it actually works. Business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics. People have always been assumed to have goodness in them. Even without expecting anything in return, they would do what is best for a fellow human being. But then, could anyone resist the temptation of evil if his acts would not be undetected. The numbers do not.

Capitalism thrives on the disparity of information. Information is a double-edged sword. It gives empowerment, but at the same time, it creates fear for uncertainty. We say one thing and do another. We associate truth with convenience, self-interest and personal wellbeing. We make promises best to avoid awkward situations or unwelcome dislocation of life.

How does the termination of pregnancy reduce crime? People who are least capable of being good or exemplary parents are the ones who have the most number of children. These children do not complete school, get into gangs and get in crimes. The world would be a better place without their existence.

Is it not interesting that parenting rules always change with time? Anyway, parenting has nothing to do with the outcome of the future of the child. The book also brings up many salient interesting points about naming children and that swimming pools kill more children than guns in the US. Are we going to ban swimming pools or increase security there?

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

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Tuesday, 3 March 2015

Running commentary of life?

Looks like a new form of parenting has crept into our society. The little one, usually a toddler would be given sort of of a running commentary of all the things that go around him.

Bring him to a checkout counter, while the mother is busy unloading the trolley of food stuff, the father would be busy narrating what is being done and how the transaction is recorded, calculated and so forth.

At the obstetrician's office, whilst having the good doctor examine the yet-to-be-born addition to family, father does his duty again. He explains to the confused toddler of the various anatomical parts of his offspring as seen on the ultrasound screen much to the annoyance of the attending obstetrician. The doctor who is still living suspended in the good old time where children were seen and not heard, seriously wonders whether the child really understands what in heaven's name is going on, but the father's duty has to go on! He is waiting for the son to ask the father, "Who put little Tommy in?" just like he heard his mother read to him the nursery rhymes "Ding Dong Bell".
In his own mind, the obstetrician shudders what the father would say to son when he is literally caught with his pants down during his nocturnal orchestrated manoeuvres in the dark?
I thought children were to explore things themselves, learn the hard knocks lessons of life through self discovery and research rather than being spoon fed information that they sponge up as they pompously slide through life mollycoddled and sugarcoated....