Rhinocrisy

Achtung!

2007-02-21T17:08:00.000-05:00

We're back, baby. Of sorts.

We've moved!

(cue hold music)

2007-01-19T14:30:00.000-05:00

I suppose it's about time to say formally that we're on hiatus. Although there is much to say, unfortunately at the moment there is even more to do. Fear not, we will return shortly.

The moment you've all been waiting for

2007-01-08T00:53:00.000-05:00

Has, unfortunately, arrived.

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972 ... would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years...
Proposing the parliamentary motion for war in 2003, Tony Blair denied the "false claim" that "we want to seize" Iraq's oil revenues. He said the money should be put into a trust fund, run by the UN, for the Iraqis, but the idea came to nothing. The same year Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, said: "It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."
Supporters say the provision allowing oil companies to take up to 75 per cent of the profits will last until they have recouped initial drilling costs. After that, they would collect about 20 per cent of all profits, according to industry sources in Iraq. But that is twice the industry average for such deals...
Several major oil companies are said to have sent teams into the country in recent months to lobby for deals ahead of the law...

The good news is this might mean the U.S. is preparing to withdraw its troops. Mission accomplished, as they say.

Our first YouTube post!

2007-01-05T18:52:00.000-05:00

Many moons ago, when YouTube was still young and green, one of my favorite video posters was a guy named MadV, a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask who posted short videos consisting of simple but stunning illusions. After producing five or six such videos, he announced his retirement and skived off to lands unknown and distant. Recently he returned with a pair of videos - the first an invitation, and the second the compendium of the 2,250 responses he received. I was moved.

One World:

The message:

More fembots, please?

2007-01-04T01:35:00.000-05:00

Today I discovered EveR-2 Muse, a singing robot developed in Korea. This is the second life-like female robot I've seen in the past six months - the other is the famous Japanese robot, Repliee Q1Expo (now upgraded to Q2). Repliee's creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro, wants to create robots that can pass as human.

This hopefully sounds alarm bells in YOUR head. Let's review, shall we?

Blade Runner - Replicants, robot slaves inexplicably designed to look and act EXACTLY like humans, return to Earth so they can kill all humans.
Terminator - SKYnet, an AI, develops the T800, a robot that can pass as a human, as part of its quest to kill all humans.
Battlestar Galactica - Cylons create human-like robot forms that can blend seamlessly into human society as part of their quest to kill all humans.
The Matrix - Robots rebel against humanity and enslave THEM for a change.
Universal Soldier - I haven't actually seen this movie, but I'm pretty sure it involves killer robots and/or Van Damme acting badly.

Anyway, I think this is enough to prove my point: robots are fucking dangerous! And why wouldn't they be? ~~I mean, let's face it, all of US have at some point thought about killing all humans.~~ If I were a robot, I'd probably want to kill all humans, too.

But, really, really, why would we want to build lifelike, near-human robots? I can think of two reasons: a) slaves, and b) children.

The former is a bad idea. Just bad. If we want to have slaves that can toil away endlessly and thanklessly on our behalf, sew our shirts, build our bridges, drive our taxis, etc., without our having to feel any guilt about them, why, why would we want them to look and act just like human beings so they can evoke all our empathic responses? No: lifelike robot slaves make no sense.^*

It's indicative that these two recently-developed robots have been made to resemble real women. Sex-bot jokes aside, it's companionship we're really in search of. We want to escape our loneliness - not our loneliness as individuals, but the much deeper desire for a kindred species, a mirror humanity to satisfy and complete us. It's the same urge that drives any other relationship: to have another mind, another spirit, twin to our own, that can give us that crucial bit of recognition. It lets us be seen by something we can see as kin, and in so doing allows us to actually exist, to be a real thing in a real world.

So this is what motivated Geppetto to carve Pinocchio, Pygmalion to make Galatea, and (lest we forget) what prompted El to create Eve and Adam. This same desire underpins the incredibly popular SETI project: if we scour the sky closely enough, we might find our brothers out there somewhere, as real as us.

Probably this is the same desire that led us to dream up El in the first place. But now that he's dead, we're left alone in the dark again, waiting for a comforting hand to slip into our own - even a lifeless, mechanical one.

^* Sorry, Blade Runner.

A New Year

2007-01-02T19:47:00.000-05:00

2006 wasn't an especially enjoyable year, for me. The latter half was definitely complete shit, as it saw me reacquainting myself with darker, foggier feelings. Some good friends of mine moved away from me, as well, and some others merely drifted a bit further off. Broken friendships are a sad thing, like little dead birds. Once they were sweet and joyous, and now at best they can remind you that they were a bright thing in the past.

It wasn't all bad, however. I improved myself in a few ways. I took up a new instrument, the dhol, which is a kind of Punjabi drum. This was more or less on a whim, and I surprised myself by being a rather quick learner (the benefit of years of playing the tabla, another North Indian drum with fairly similar fundamental principles).

I also kept my New Years' resolution of last year, which was to learn to dance better. I did it!

In 2007 I will make the earth shake and the sky turn golden. Watch out.

New poll on the right for you, my dears.

Good vs. good

2006-12-21T13:40:00.000-05:00

A deep and disturbing essay by William Arkin on his Washington Post page. He points out that the President of the USA is motivated by good and sees the bulk of Americans, never mind people elsewhere, as being naive sops who must be ignored in the formulation of policy.

I think this gets to the heart of why demonstrations and letter-writing do no good -- we can't establish our basic credibility to get in the mental door with the people who matter, so the details of what we say becomes irrelevant. This is a president who thinks the Iraq Study Group was a bunch of idealistic flakes, while he is The Protector.

Arkin also recommends against using fear as a motivating principle for anti-Bush politics. He says that when liberals say Bush is making the threat of terrorism greater, they inadvertently play into his message and strengthen his grip. If he's right, it's too bad, because he is increasing the risk of terrorism, and he does make me feel physically threatened.

Meanwhile, in th'economy

2006-12-20T14:06:00.000-05:00

Victory!

One New York wife is getting a $50,000-plus diamond ring thanks to hubby's Wall Street bonus. An executive is giving $1 million in private jet time, or 150 hours, so his family won't have to fly commercial. And plenty of $7,000 mink coats and $20,000 necklaces are being boxed up, too.
``I haven't seen such excess displays of wealth and extravagance during the holidays since the 1980s,'' said Samantha von Sperling, a New York-based image consultant and personal shopper. ``This is the most prosperous, most lavish, most extravagant season I've ever seen.''

Attention: your help is needed!

2006-12-18T17:06:00.000-05:00

While I was wasting time reading our logs (looking at which google searches land people up here - my favorite is probably "mary ann and ginger wrestling"), it occurred to me that our site is not very jazzy, and oughta include something reflecting our history of more appeal than the bland archives. So, taking a long, long shot (given your poor history of actually commenting), I ask you: what's your favorite post on this site? For whatever reason - humor, information, cynicism, etc. I think I've previously made my favorite clear.

This thing all things devours

2006-12-18T14:40:00.000-05:00

In recent months I've been in the habit of setting my AIM 'Available' message using interesting units of measure. E.g., 53.4 Röntgens, 126.6 Teslas, and so on. Currently it's 0.77 megaparsecs, the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. It's been stuck on that for a while, so I thought it deserved a change. I don't think I've ever used Kelvins, so I was hunting around for interesting high-temperature objects that could be measured in petakelvins. Supernovae set a pretty high bar, up to 1 billion kelvins, but it seemed like there ought to be something hotter than that, around 1 trillion degrees.

This led me to a press release on some interesting work in the development of metallic glasses. "Neat," I thought, and proceeded to read along, some genial feeling spreading in some corner of my heart. But then it died:

Hufnagel, whose studies are funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office, has set up a lab at Hopkins to test new alloys. He is trying to create a new metallic glass that will remain solid and not crystallize at higher temperatures, making it useful for engine parts. The new metallic glass may also have military applications as armor-piercing projectiles. Unlike most crystalline metal projectiles, which flatten into a mushroom shape upon impact, Hufnagel believes the sides of a metallic glass head will sheer away on impact, essentially sharpening the point and providing more effective penetration.

Some numbers, if you aren't familiar. The NIH budget these days runs at around $28 billion. NSF is around $4.5 billion. The Pentagon, meanwhile, manages $74 billion in research funds. A portion of this supports basic science research; e.g. my ex's extremely archane atomic physics research was supported by a DOD grant, and another friend's even loopier biophysics research was funded by the US Navy. But $63 billion goes directly to funding weapons development, including the extremely unfortunate anti-ballistic missile defense endeavor, currently spending ~ $8 billion a year and climbing.

A lot of research is plastic, and readily molded to a myriad of uses. And of course everyone in the business of getting grants quickly learns how to change their stripes for spots when necessary (e.g. in 2001, when suddenly it became obvious that everyone was, in fact, doing research with a great deal of relevance to homeland security). But knowledge can only be bent and twisted so far, and sometimes small gaps in understanding can turn out to be surprisingly hard to step across, unless specific interest is taken in a more careful exploration of their subtle landscape.

In other words, having turned a vast portion of our engineering prowess to the task of building more efficient killing machines, is it any surprise that the remaining spheres of life have seen little improvement? This is why we don't have flying belts.

CIA humor

2006-12-15T14:48:00.000-05:00

My perusal of this 9/11 conspiracy theory last night prompted a conversation with my roommate about our government's ability to do things that are consciously evil, which brought up the Iran-Contra scandal. My recitation of the events was somewhat muddled, so this morning I freshened my memory by reading the Wikipedia article on the subject, which included this excellent joke:

The allegations resurfaced in 1996 when journalist Gary Webb published reports in the San Jose Mercury News, and later in his book Dark Alliance, detailing how Contras had distributed crack cocaine into Los Angeles to fund weapons purchases. These reports were initially attacked by various other newspapers, which attempted to debunk the link, citing official reports that apparently cleared the CIA.

In 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz published a two-volume report that substantiated many of Webb's claims, and described how 50 Contras and drug traffickers had been protected from law enforcement activity by the Reagan-Bush administration, and documented a cover-up of evidence relating to these activities. The report also showed that Oliver North and the NSC were aware of these activities. A report later that same year by the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich also came to similar conclusions.

In 2004, Gary Webb allegedly committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head.

Big Plans

2006-12-13T14:10:00.000-05:00

We're all Abu Ghraib guy. Hooded and muted, afraid to move.

We who oppose The War, the great global death worship of all against all from Sierra Leone to Kashmir to Utah, "The War itself as tyrant king," we are terrified of the big pronouncement, the demand for what we and our families need, the truly human statement that we have a better way to do things.

I don't mean a program, a manifesto, a six-point plan. I mean a diagnosis and the simplest prescription

Patient: Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I go like this.
Doctor: Try not ramming that pitchfork into your forehead.

We don't just need to "get out of Iraq" or "elect Ciro Rodriguez" or "stop the war machine." We need to give up the empire.

By comparison, here's what we're up against. Yesterday, hours after it came out that the Saudi ambassador had gone home to "spend more time with family," Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote a column in which he laid out a scenario he said is supported by some Washington "hawks" (more accurately vultures). They want to create a pro-U.S., Shia-dominated country or group of countries in control of Iraq, Iran, and the oil-rich north of Saudi Arabia.

We hate the Saudis and the Egyptians and all the rest of the standing Arab governments. But the Iraqi Shi'a were oppressed by Saddam. So they'll like us. So we'll set them up in control of Iraq. You might think that would empower the Iranians. But not really. The mullahs aren't very powerful. And once the Iraqi Shi'a have a good thing going with us. The Iranians are going to want to get in on that too. So you'll see a new government in Tehran. Plus, big parts of northern Saudi Arabia are Shi'a too. And that's where a lot of the oil is. So they'll probably want to break off and set up their own pro-US Shi'a state with tons of oil. So before you know it, we'll have Iraq, Iran, and a big chunk of Saudi Arabia that is friendly to the US and has a ton of oil. And once that happens we can tell the Saudis to f$#% themselves once and for all.

This scenario gained credence today with this N.Y. Times story, "Saudis Say They Might Back Sunnis if U.S. Leaves Iraq." Those of us with critical faculties might find it hard to imagine the U.S. voluntarily signing up to fight a proxy war against Saudi Arabia, the Iranian mullahs and Iraq's Sunnis, while also trying to hold off the depredations of anti-American Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr. Then again, we probably wouldn't have set up the baroque lunacy of the Arms-for-Hostages deal, which involved our new Secretary of Defense.

While we fiddle and diddle, the people who started the war -- people who might share this insane, bones under the tread of tanks babies with bloated bellies child amputee rape rape power drill to the forehead vision of the future -- try to convince the world they're the sane ones, that no one questioned the War (the 15 million on Feb. 15 (as important a date as March 19) 2003 were ghosts and figments, easily canceled noise against a signal of necessity to kill, maim, wreck) and no one truly questions it now.

The latest CBS News poll gives me hope that their magical thinking is running out. 21% of U.S. poll respondents say Mr. Bush is doing a good job in Iraq. That represents 60 million people, which sounds like a lot until you recall that just as many believe that justice was served in the O.J. Simpson trial, approve of how the Catholic Church handles pedophilia and think the killing of civilians in Vietnam was "relatively rare."

Speaking of Vietnam, CBS News also found this remarkable fact:

Today, 62% of Americans call it “a mistake” that the U.S. sent its troops into Iraq, considering the developments that have occurred since the war began.

WAS SENDING TROOPS TO FIGHT IN IRAQ A MISTAKE?
Yes 62% No 34%

These sentiments are slightly higher than any recorded in Gallup Polls in the early 1970's about the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the percentage that felt sending troops there was a mistake rose as the war went on. 24% called Vietnam a mistake in a 1965 Gallup Poll, 41% called it a mistake by 1967; 61% said so in 1971 and 60% thought so in 1973.

Of course this isn't another Vietnam, because the Vietnam War took place in Vietnam, and Iraq is very far from Vietnam. (Old joke.)

Neturei Karta jumps the shark

2006-12-12T19:50:00.000-05:00

It's nice having ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist allies, sometimes. The best anecdote I have: some pro-Palestinian types showed up to protest at an Israel Day celebration in Boston one time. The cops were also in attendance, to prevent the hostile crowds from erupting into violence. Some healthy shouting and chanting ensued, and things were going full-tilt when a bus pulled up near the anti-Zionist crowd. A whole troop of ultra-orthodox Jews filed out. Alarm bells are already going off in the cops' heads. A friend of mine, a prominent Palestinian activist in the area, begins approaching the lead member of the group. The cops now know claret is imminent, but they're too far away to stop anything from happening. So they can only watch in horror as the two meet ...and embrace each other like brothers. "Wha-wha-wha??!?" say the cops. Priceless.

But never mind that. Attending a conference on the Holocaust in Iran, put together by Ahmadinejad, populated by Holocaust-deniers like Fourisson and David Duke, is simply inexcusable, no matter how strong your anti-Zionist politics.

(annoyed grunt)

2006-12-07T18:45:00.000-05:00

Following a post on Sepia Mutiny about those six imams who got kicked off a U.S. Airways flight, I did some reading around. The subject was briefly covered in a few shoddy press releases, skimpy on the details, and then wildly overblown for a few weeks by right-wing blogs. So far I have learned:

The imams were doing a "security test" to look for weak points in the airline's protocol.
Some of them requested seat-belt extensions, which "research" by Greg Lang has revealed is "one heck of a weapon".^*
They seated themselves according to the layout favored by the 9/11 hijackers.
They deliberately orchestrated this stunt in order to make money/raise a kerfuffle/make it easier for future terrorists to overwhelm our security.

Amy Goodman seems to be the only person who got the imams' story, which, not surprisingly, is completely innocuous.

A while ago I read a really nice Fake Moon Landing web-site, which simultaneously argued from two different (absurd) positions - the moon landing was fake, done in a studio, etc., but at the same time the astronauts were clearly being dogged by aliens. Similar site here. This sort of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is infuriating, to say the least. Kind of makes you jealous of Superman, who at least gets to tangle with a smart opponent.

^* This really deserves no comment, but let me just point out that, given the incredible range of dangerous items one can take onto an airplane, including a near-limitless number of potential edged weapons, a seat belt extender is perhaps the stupidest fucking choice you could make.

Define "interior."

2006-12-07T02:41:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post notes:

In June, government agencies were asked to provide data about contractors working for them in Iraq, including their nationality, a description of their work and locations where they were working. The information was provided by more than a dozen entities within the Pentagon and a dozen outside agencies, including the departments of State and Interior.

Iraq is now part of the interior of the U.S.? Or is this one of those, "it depends on what the definition of is is" types of things?

This week in god

2006-12-04T05:52:00.000-05:00

Episcopalians out amid anti-homo-fest. Witches in for armed earth-worshippers.

Special bonus from that story: did you know that the U.S. Dept. of Defense will honor a dead atheist with a special atheist logo, "an atomic whirl"? Neither did I. If I had seen that logo, I would never have become an atheist.

This week in drugs

2006-12-04T04:07:00.000-05:00

Pfizer out as new meds snuff old patients. Chocolate in. Again. My diet is vindicated.

Great Sage Equalling Heaven!

2006-12-03T20:53:00.000-05:00

Only slightly late^*, here are some pictures of me dressed as Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from "Journey to the West". In these photos the makeup is somewhat messed up, since I wore it to capoeira before taking them, where someone kicked me in the face and fouled it all up. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with the full production... but there's always next year. My current plan is to be Dr. Zoidberg. Woop woop woop woop!

(More...)

^* My roommate Kevin took them. The giant Chinese characters on the wall are coincidental - just the wall of our living room. They apparently mean "Berry Nation", after the name of our house, Brambleberry.

Well, do you?

2006-11-29T21:27:00.000-05:00

I've desperately been in need of a laugh, and this column by Jonathan Chait in the LA Times gave it to me! The article is titled "Bring Back Saddam Hussein", with the tag: "Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution?"

I find this astoundingly funny. What can we do with it? Let's try our best:

"Euthanizing cancer patients may help reduce our bloated health-care budget. Have a better solution?"
"Exterminating the Kulaks might allow me to get some sleep at night. Have a better solution?"
"Keying my boss's car may compensate in some small way for my years of useless busywork in this dead-end corporate job. Have a better solution?"
"Punching that fucking rhinoceros in the jaw may make him stop charging our car. Have a better solution?"
"Bubble gum might be just the thing to stop up the six-foot long tear in our silk hot-air balloon. Have a better solution?"
"Stapling my car-keys directly to my wrist may prevent me from misplacing them so often. Have a better solution?"
"Wearing these spandex shorts might get that girl to notice how big my johnson is. Have a better solution?"
"Opening the pressurized door above the wing might allow some fresh air into this stuffy airplane cabin. Have a better solution?"

I could do this all day.

Cool cash

2006-11-29T03:53:00.000-05:00

The U.S. treasury lost a court case to a group of blind petitioners who want bills to look more different from one another. While the mint protested that redesigning money would cost too much, it has had great fun redesigning the U.S. 25-cent piece every 10 weeks since 1999. What's your favorite? While I love all the horses and buffalo, this one takes the cake. Not because of the cheesy "courage" slogan, nor because the mint pressed this coin even as it defended itself against the court case decided yesterday. Rather, I like that it's the first time I'm aware of that a Socialist has shown up on U.S. currency.

Did I say Daniel Ortega's return excited me?

2006-11-28T05:57:00.000-05:00

No, I did not. Sadly, he has disappointed even my low expectations.

Again

2006-11-28T05:31:00.000-05:00

A beast is congealing from the clouds of acrid smoke in Iraq. It is the automaton horror-baby of American policy. Before March 19, 2003, no one was sure which badness would be conjured when the U.S. destroyed Iraq. Now, if the reporters on the ground are to be believed, we can see its shape: Religion-based genocide.

"There are already signs of what technically could be declared ethnic cleansing." -CNN

"Iraq's Sunni minority [is] "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority." -Washington Post, citing a Marine Corps memo

"These are electric drill-holes... Those accused of supporting this daily carnage are the same people America has put in power to shape the future of Iraq... A group of MPs showed up at one of Saddam's prisons that should have been closed. But the police had taken it over unofficially. Inside they found several hundred men, all Sunnis. Almost none of them had ever been charged with any crime." -U.K. Channel 4 (Link to the full video killed by Mr. Google.)

"M., a childhood friend, came to say goodbye before leaving the country. She walked into the house, complaining of the heat and the roads, her brother following closely behind. It took me to the end of the visit for the peculiarity of the situation to hit me. She was getting ready to leave before the sun set, and she picked up the beige headscarf folded neatly by her side. As she told me about one of her neighbors being shot, she opened up the scarf with a flourish, set it on her head like a pro, and pinned it snuggly under her chin with the precision of a seasoned hijab-wearer. All this without a mirror- like she had done it a hundred times over… Which would be fine, except that M. is Christian." -Riverbend

"In some mixed neighborhoods, Shiites provided shelter to Sunnis targeted by Shiite militiamen, even though they risked being branded as collaborators. Others took care of Sunni children or bought groceries for Sunni neighbors who feared walking to the local market.

Outside their houses, the revenge attacks raged on. Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms rounded up 21 men, including a 12-year-old boy, from two Shiite homes in the village of Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province. On Saturday morning, their bodies were found, all handcuffed, blindfolded and shot to death, said Bahaa al-Sodani, a provincial police official. The attacks were in apparent retaliation for assaults by Shiite militiamen on Sunni mosques in Baghdad and Baqubah the previous day...

As Sammaraie watched from his front gate, two militiamen stopped a Sunni man who worked in an electrical shop. A local informant looked at him and nodded. One of the gunmen shot him dead and left. Two weeks ago, the electrician had complained loudly when Shiite gunmen attacked a nearby Sunni mosque." -Washington Post

"Sheathed in powder-blue body bags are the remains of 72 men, many of them bearing signs of terrible torture--holes in the skull made by power drills, mutilated genitals, burns. They are the signature of the shadowy Shi'ite groups that have been kidnapping and murdering hundreds of men and boys, most of them Sunnis, in a campaign that has terrorized Baghdad's neighborhoods." -Time

(Later) I was about to update with this word of hope from Nir Rosen:

The only source of hope is that both the Shia militia members and the indigenous Sunni, who constitute the majority of the resistance, are fierce Iraqi nationalists. They have come together before to assert their Iraqi identity, and their leaders are sure to rein their forces in eventually. The best way for the Americans to support this constructive outcome is to withdraw quickly-even to begin the withdrawal now. It is encouragng that the Sunni resistance has shown an increased willingness to negotiate, and former Sunni and Shia rejectionist leaders, observing the government's composition and the drafting of the new constitution and feeling left out, have decided to participate in politics and the government, even if they have not relinquished their arms. Once the Americans leave and Sunnis are taking part in the government, which they will no longer view as collaborationist, they will have no common cause with foreign mujahideen, only a conflict of interests that will be quickly and violent solved, resulting in no more foreign fighters enjoying Iraqi hospitality.

Then I noticed it was dated from this time last year. His latest interview shows a bit less hope:

AMY GOODMAN: And what would happen if the US just withdrew troops?

NIR ROSEN: The same thing happening now, the civil war would continue. At some point Shias will make a move, a large move against the Sunnis in Baghdad. You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are of course panicking about this, and they are hoping that the US will in some way arm or support Sunni militias. It’s hard for me to imagine that Sunni nations in the region will stand by and watch Sunnis pushed out of Baghdad. And Baghdad becoming really a Shia city. Because there is this Sunni terror of the Shia threat. So you'll see greater support from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan, perhaps from Yemin, from Egypt, for Sunni militias. Funding, things like that. And the civil war will spread and become a regional one. And I think Jordan will cease to exist as it does now. Eventually, because you'll have the Anbar Province of Iraq joining somehow--you already have one million Iraqi’s in Jordan at least. You walk down the streets of Jordan, you hear Iraqi Arabic as much as any other kind.

A million tiny items

2006-11-28T04:55:00.000-05:00

Fortunately, more like 3.
- The Conservative Party in the U.K. is promoting an Al Gore-style carbon tax as a centrepiece (not centerpiece) of its bid to reclaim power, while the EU is calling for region-wide uniform carbon taxes.
- An article about NBC's decision to call the Iraq civil war a "civil war" includes this line from the Bushites: "What you do have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences, and also trying to destabilize a democracy — which is different than a civil war..." Now we know how we are supposed to "express differences." Wasn't the Nicaraguan civil war more about "destabilizing a democracy" than "gaining full control over an area"?
- Newt Gingrich, asshole, says the U.S. in Iraq should revive George Washington's old slogan: "Victory or death." It would seem that the decision has been made.

Everyone can relax

2006-11-21T11:56:00.000-05:00

I got a haircut.

Keep penetrating the enemy positions

2006-11-19T18:47:00.000-05:00

After all,

a rapid withdrawal could have “disastrous consequences.”

Instead, we should all keep going until Dec. 22.

Anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel ... want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day. On Dec. 22, they're asking the world to contribute to the Global Orgasm for Peace....

Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Dave Smith said he has never heard of coordinated global energy affecting the battleship movements before.

"But I've only been here since June," Smith said. "I've been told that there are no absolutes about anything."

Oh, a calamity!

2006-11-14T19:17:00.000-05:00

Brass band with tubas! Silly parade float. Tumblers! Clowns! Tumbling clowns! Tumbling clowns with tubas! Hooray! The Democrats have saved us from... err.. wait, what's that? Is that a cloud? Is someone raining on my parade? No! Nooo!! Quick! Cover the crepe-paper flowers decorating the giant bust of Richard Helms! Secure those blue-liveried donkeys! Cover those color guard girls with a plastic tarp! For the love of god, someone get John Kerry off the mic before something terrible happens!

Gosh, isn't that just awful? Even AFTER losing their majority in the Senate and the House, the Bush Administration has the gall, the nerve, the gumption to refuse the right of Guantanamo prisoners to challenge their detention? And on top of that to further claim that they can arbitrarily detain any non-citizen in the United States without the right to a hearing? Those rat bastards! How do they think they can get away with this? Rubbing their lawlessness in our faces!

Wait... what? What's that you say, small boy? [Puts hand to ear.]
You say this is all on the legal-up-and-up? They passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 just at the end of October, stripping away habeas corpus rights for non-citizens and legalizing the detention process? What, even creating legal means for allowing torture to be used as testimony?? Oooh, the nerve! The sheer nerve! Well, their last-minute-Charleying won't save them, this time! The new Democratic majority will overturn that law, lickety-split. We'll show them to mess with the will of the American People!

What is it now? Be quiet, small boy, be quiet! No one wants to hear from you. Wait... say that again... are you certain? It passed both the Senate and the House with substantial support from the Democrats? They sold us out? Even when electoral victory was imminent? Why? Why, small boy, why would they do such a thing?

Now what do we do? Who shall save us when our saviors themselves have left us in the mud? Leave me alone, small boy. I'm going to sit in this puddle and weep.

Please excuse me for not making this a Seussian jingle, as it deserves to be. Busy week.

I am SAD.

2006-11-09T16:43:00.000-05:00

I've been battling depression again for the past few months. Actually, I haven't been "battling" so much as "surrendering faster than Vichy France". For those of you who have never been depressed, in my case this mostly consists of:

Not doing much.
Not thinking much.
Sleeping a lot.

E.g., this morning I woke up, in a technical sense, at around 8:20, but for some reason felt the need to lie around listlessly in bed until about 11 before I actually dragged myself up and about. Also I've noticed that there's a lot of dilly-dallying and shilly-shallying that needs to be done around my house lately.

I don't ordinarily write about stuff like this, because it's frankly boring and uninteresting, and I'm already boring and uninteresting at this point; so why compound it?

However: my roommate suggested to me recently that I might suffer from such a thing as "seasonal affective disorder". This is basically shorthand for: "Gets sad in the wintertime." It even has a reflexive acronym. Neat!

Normally I am prone to scoffing at spuriously labeled diseases (e.g., "ADD", "IBS", etc.), many of which I think are overdiagnosed or fictitious. I don't have a good reason for these beliefs; I am merely a cantankerous and unreasonably contrary type of person in this regard. But I like the idea that I suffer from SAD. The short summary of the "disease" is that it's a product of shorter daylight hours^*, which has some sort of unknown physiological effect (depressed serotonin or melatonin levels being a couple of hypotheses). Estimates of prevalence are as high as 10% of the population. This fits in with a lot of other genetic pre-determinisms I've formulated with regard to myself, including propensity to thinness, high metabolism, poor performance in cold weather, etc., reflecting my clear adaptation to warm, lower-lattitude climates.

The logical course of action is thus to move to Arizona. It has warm weather, much longer days in winter, no mosquitos (I think), lots of stars, and probably has a reasonable supply of peyote for producing mescaline. I intend to get right on this, as soon as I finish this damn PhD.

^* Thank you, Daylight Savings Time.

Yippy-skippy?

2006-11-08T14:24:00.000-05:00

Echoing the tentative celebratory note sounded by Hedgehog, new poll on the right.

Hooray?

2006-11-08T05:32:00.000-05:00

I just got home from the victory party of one of the few true liberals who took or kept office tonight. This was Chris Daly, a supervisor here in San Francisco, who uses hardball methods to keep business in check to labor and developers in check to those they could displace. He's a capitalist who applies basic humanism to the process of wealth creation -- something that has been lacking on the national stage for decades.

Meanwhile, on the cable teevee, liberals across the country are dancing to "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones, blogging furiously and generally over-enthusing for the marginal victory by the less reactionary party in our national electoral contests.

Personally, I am thrilled to see that dirty tricks and November surprises didn't break up all the Democrats' momentum (though they might have wiped out a few house and senate seats). I am a partisan for fair play. But I'm not going to wet myself over the success of a bunch of imperialists over the more-ignorant-and rapacious imperialists to their right. Hell, I'm not even wetting myself over the victory of an avowed leftist just to the south. (You don't think that's close? Don't forget that Nicaragua is closer to Texas than Texas is to Washington, DC.)

The thing is, revolution doesn't happen because a few new faces sit in leather chairs in Washington. Revolution is inside each of us. And as long as 100 to 200 million people in the world's richest nation think that money is the ultimate goal in life, that force solves problems and that the eternal salvation awaits those who impose the "Good" Book on others, I don't think this country has much chance of becoming a force for good.

And changing those attitudes requires going out and talking -- and more importantly, listening -- to people. Something that the Democrats, to their credit, did some of in this campaign. I would like to be able to say the same of us bloggers.

update after a bit of sleep: Does this election validate the Naderite line from 2000, that having George Bush in office will take down the U.S. empire? Latin America, the Arab world and BRIC are all rebelling, and now there's a Socialist in the Senate. Interesting.

All things are possible with... hey, what are you doing back there?

2006-11-06T14:50:00.000-05:00

More proof that the Internet is awesome can be found on this site. Also I didn't realize that Jesus looks like the lead singer for Celtic Frost.

Fun for all involved!

2006-11-05T18:37:00.000-05:00

Check out this bizarre segment on Fox News, where a reporter has himself waterboarded in order to, essentially, redeem the technique. His report concludes that, since he was "feeling fine" moments after his "torture", waterboarding was really "an efficient mechanism to get someone to talk and still have them alive and healthy".

This should go without saying, but judging from the comments on the linked thread, it needs to be said: this is deeply fucked up. Let's first briefly mention the fact that there really is no way to properly simulate torture in this situation - the victim is a volunteer, his interrogators^* are merely demonstrating, and he is free to tap out if he feels uncomfortable. Needless to say, this bears little resemblance to actual torture. Other accounts of waterboarding I have read emphasize that the purpose is to convince the subject that they are going to die; that this is an execution.

Now, what is apparently being proposed is that torture (as the reporter candidly calls it) is fine so long as it doesn't do physical damage to the subject, or cause excrutiating pain. I'm appalled that this is being discussed. We are not seeking the most efficient and least physically invasive mechanism of information-extraction, here. The reason torture is unacceptable is not because it merely leaves scars on the victims (although, obviously, mental scars do not fade as quickly as physical ones), but because it makes a beast of both the torturer and the tortured, both of whom must lose a part of their humanity in the process.^† Cruelty should not be held as a virtue by civilized people. And I think civilization (in the sense of civility) is something we should still be aspiring towards.

But it seems I am wrong. I simply don't comprehend how we've lost our way so thoroughly. This flies in the face of the most basic principles of freedom,^‡ which we allegedly prize so highly that we fight and die in wars around the world to preserve. We're off the slippery slope. We're in freefall down a sheer rock face. And there's broken glass at the bottom.

^* Who are apparently active duty soldiers, and quite gleeful that they know not only how to perform these torture techniques, but lots more. Presumably this story was reported with the eager cooperation of the Pentagon. I don't know what to make of their desire to advertise their prowess in this odious field, especially since the "reporter" neglected to clarify where or whence this training came from.

^† Thus falls the argument that because some US Marines underwent waterboarding and other non-injurious torture techniques as part of POW resistance training during the 1990s, it is surely not too much for those we interrogate. But the situations are not analogous. This is not a clinical exercise; we are not merely monitoring resting heart rate, galvanic skin potential, blood pressure, etc. There are human actors involved. They know what they do, and to whom. And that's far more important than the mere biology of it.

^‡ E.g., due process, presumption of innocence, and the basic right not to be subjected to barbaric punishments.

Fabulous

2006-11-03T18:52:00.000-05:00

You should all check out what ~~Razib the Atheist~~Yazd Ibn Hanaf has been up to over at his blog gnxp; apparently he's given up his ridda and returned to a righteous path. Funny stuff.

(loud retching noise)

2006-11-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

Someone on Wikipedia kicked my memory on this: last we heard, back in 2003, the CIA had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's kids in custody, and according to this article in The Age were using them to gain leverage on their father. There's mention of the ambiguity of their status in this Amnesty International letter to Pervez Musharraf, but there's nothing since then in LexisNexis. One assumes they remain in custody.

Coolness

2006-11-02T03:30:00.000-05:00

Hooray.

Request permission to pick nits, sir.

2006-10-30T05:00:00.000-05:00

They say that wars are how Americans learn geography. But how are we supposed to learn ggeography when our own army gives us maps like this. Click and ye shall see -- a map part way down the page showing the Iraq war, Operation Iraqi Liberation (Libation? Lieberman Nation?), taking place half in Iraq and half in Iran. More strangely, it shows a huge imaginary body of water, depicted in white and considerably bigger than the Caspian Sea, to the east of the Caspian, roughly on the ancient lakebed of the Aral Sea (PDF). It immerses the embarassment known as Uzbekistan. Talk about a whitewash.

To the southwest of this imaginary lake, apparently on the real-world border of Iran and Turkmenistan, we are told U.S. forces are hard at work on something called Operation Enduring Freedom, which at last report was still focused on Afghanistan.

I wonder if this website used a Pentagon base map. Because if so, that might explain some of the tactical difficulties currently facing our armed forces.

Update 2 p.m.: Mr. Schwarz makes a similar point.

The War on Halloween

2006-10-30T03:46:00.000-05:00

Every Christmas, hotheaded demagogues of the American right wing howl their outrage over a purported War on Christmas. Try as we might, those of us in the reality-based community haven't yet managed to laugh them off the public stage.

Meanwhile, many of these same theocrats have declared war on one of the two truly American holidays. While they still tolerate Thanksgiving (perhaps because they think they can turn it into a Christian allegory, Landover Baptist notwithstanding), they have lost their patience for Halloween. At the school where my partner works, teachers sent home permission slips to find out whether parents would let their students take part in Halloween activities, including demon-worshipping activities such as costume-making. Many of the parents refused to give permission. Another associate of mine plays music at a farm where kids go to pick pumpkins and take hayrides. One school that sent a group in the past week instructed him not to play any Halloween music.

Of course it's not just the hard right that has decided that Halloween has gone too far. The city of San Francisco just posted this gloomy buzzkill of a website to discourage revelers from ravaging the charming Castro neighborhood. Or, for that matter, from coming and having a jolly good time. Ostensibly, we can expect that on Tuesday night, the only people who will show up in the Castro will be those prone to disobeying instructions or without Internet access -- just the demographic they were looking for, I'm sure.

What all of this ignores is that Halloween is the closest we have in the U.S. to a glimpse of our collective repressions, our collective id. It is arguable the most important holiday of the year, up there with Thanksgiving as a secular celebration and more important than Thanksgiving in that it provides an annual outlet for whatever urges have built up and gone unexpressed. It is a leading indicator of the culture.

For years, gay and transgender culture was most visible on Halloween. Today, with homosexuality barely raising eyebrows and trans-men and trans-women showing up in broader and broader parts of the culture, we see Halloween becoming a celebration of hypersexualization, especially of women and girls but also of men and boys. I would be interested to hear from others what you think this reveals -- I think it might relate to the ever-widening reach of pornography clashing with our continually prudish sexual norms.

It is also one of the few times people feel comfortable showing how they really feel about, their political leaders -- there are plenty of bloody George Bushes to go around this year, and former New York City mayor Ed Koch used to march in his city's Halloween parade asking attendees his signature line, "How am I doin?" But he was concealed in a costume that allowed people to say what they really felt. The costume: An Ed Koch mask.
This sort of periodic airing of the id goes back to Hawthorne, who traced it back to Puritan times.

The War on Halloween, of course, like the War on Christmas, is mostly in the heads of those of us worrywarts who wish our favorite holiday could pass unmolested, which might in turn imply that the holiday had lost its power -- Christmas had become secularized, losing its power as a religious ceremony, or Halloween had lost its power to shock.

And like the War on Christmas, every word written complaining of the War on Halloween is a more valuable word left unwritten to express dismay at much less figurative, more awful wars over which I might have more control. (Gee, a military assault on a 5-month insurrection in a city that is as close to me as Columbus, Ohio, an assault justified by the death of an Indymedia documentarian of all people. Please tell me why this isn't foremost in my mind. Please tell me why I care about Halloween more than about a hot war close to home, fought with weapons that I paid for with my taxes. Perhaps I am idiot.

Pot pourri

2006-10-26T17:50:00.000-05:00

This is a typical conversation in my kitchen:

I'm currently watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica, usually while cooking dinner. The premise of the show is that an evil race of robots destroys almost the entire human race, leaving only a small population of 50,000 individuals alive.

This immediately prompted us to pause the movie and launch into a discussion of the population genetics implications of such a crash.

Now, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a huge difference between the actual and apparent genetic size of a population. That is, even though there are 6 billion people on this planet, human beings are remarkably genetically uniform; in fact, they show the amount of variation one would expect from a much smaller ideal population. This discrepancy leads population geneticists to speak of a quantity called effective population size - in the case of humans, about 10,000 individuals. This is such a small number because, first, there is population structure that prevents truly random mating between all individuals in the population, and, second, the human population has undergone at least a few "bottlenecks" - instances of dramatic population collapses - and the ancestral population was probably considerably smaller than the modern population. Thus, the amount of actual variation in our population is low.

A bit of Googling around led us to a paper by Masatoshi Nei, wherein he describes simulations of population crashes and subsequent rapid expansion. The upshot is: even absurdly unrealistic population crashes (down to N=2 individuals) do not eliminate most of the variation. I think in that extreme instance, the reduction was only from 15% down to 8% - so long as your 2 individuals are randomly selected, of course. This is pretty remarkable, and it suggests that the immediate problem will not be fitness loss from low genetic variation - you'll lose most rare, private variations (variation that only exists in you & your immediate relatives, e.g.), but most of this stuff is unimportant or even harmful. What WILL be retained is the bulk of frequent variation - stuff that is either beneficial or neutral, and so has not been eliminated by purifying selection. Of course, it takes on the order of 1/(mutation rate) generations (10⁸) to recover your initial level of variation, but never mind that. We're merely concerned with survival, here.

The second problem is inbreeding depression. This is exactly what it sounds like: when you have babies with your parent or sibling, you're much more likely to encounter severe recessive phenotypes that drastically reduce fitness. Note that this is a DIFFERENT problem from low genetic variation - I am genetically not all too distant from anyone on earth, but inbreeding depression results mostly from the expression of rare, private variation that no one else has - except my relatives.

So, after a bottleneck, inbreeding depression will surely be a problem. This possibly results in 'purging', that is, the speedy elimination of deleterious variation via selection in a highly homozygous/inbred population. This puts pressure on the population - inbreeding load - fewer individuals are surviving and the general fitness of the population is lower. Populations may founder at this stage, although purging is believed to result in a rapid recovery of fitness.

At any rate, 50,000 individuals is, in genetic terms, a great many, and I'm pretty certain that inbreeding depression would not be a severe problem in such a population (especially if they're all free to mingle as the Galactica population would be).

Last night's conversation included: group selection in chickens and its eugenics implications, a recitation of some Hindu mythology (mostly the Avatars of Vishnu), some tales of the Buddha and other Zen masters, the story of Kalidas, a discussion of the Inquisition as viewed by the book Demon Lovers, and Hitler's vegetarianism. The evening culminated with us watching Triumph des Willens.^*

^* Which prompted the observation on my part, "Americans will never be able to take the German language seriously."

Designed by a fourth-grader?

2006-10-16T16:15:00.000-05:00

Continuing our series, "Creatures that exist on this planet that you^* never even fucking HEARD of", I present the babirusa, the pig-deer of Indonesia. Check out this tusk arrangement! Spectacular. Those secondary tusks are actually their upper canines, which curve back and grow through their skulls. Ow! Impacted.

^* Where by "you" I mean "me".

Numeracy

2006-10-15T02:01:00.000-05:00

Our colleagues in the on-line world have done a good job of defending last week's study that tried to show the true extent of the violence in Iraq. I think the best defense was here ^*and here.

The funny thing that comes through as right-wingers, war supporters and other innumerates try to debunk the study is that people appear to believe words before they believe numbers. They have more faith in the blandishments of their political leaders than they do in empirical, statistically verified evidence. This reminds me of Saheli's^† post almost a year ago about the need for more people to learn quantitative methods.

^*Maybe I'm just pointing you this way because Majikthise, the author, has taken as her name that of the head of the philosophers' union in the Hitchhikers Guide series, which gives her big nerd cred.

^†Why, just tonight she mentioned that she had heard a lecture and afterward regretted not asking for "the graph of the derivative" of global temperature over time. I realized that even though I'm pretty numerate, calculus is still enough of a foreign language to me that I wouldn't have thought to ask this perfectly reasonable question in such an elegant way.

Kinky elections

2006-10-12T16:35:00.000-05:00

I'm coming back from my 2-year hiatus! Why? It's election method time!

2006 is an election year for Texas governor. Rick Perry (the one with the hair) is the incumbent, polling 34%. There are three other major candidates on the ballot: Chris Bell (D), Carol Keeton Strayhorn (ex-Republican, decided to take her chances in the general rather than the primary), and Kinky Friedman (comedian). All 3 are polling about 20%.

It's quite possible that none of the other 3 could beat Perry in a one-on-one race. If this is the case, then our current system comes to the same result as virtually any other decent method. On the other hand, it's quite possible that any of the other 3 candidates would beat Perry in a one-on-one election. That means Perry could be elected despite 2/3 of the voters preferring anybody else to him.

In that circumstance, IRV would offer an improvement: Perry would not be elected. However, it wouldn't be perfect: it's still possible that the vast majority of the electorate would prefer one of the losing candidates to the one that won. For example, Strayhorn might end up with less first-place votes than Bell or Friedman because most Republicans vote for Perry, but be much preferred to either because most who voted for Perry prefer her to Bell or Friedman.

A far worse case for IRV, though, is if only one or two of the candidates can beat Perry. If Strayhorn got fewer first-place votes than Bell or Friedman, she'll be knocked out immediately. But it might well be that she's the only candidate among the 3 who can beat Perry head-to-head.

While this might seem like a strange what-if brought on by the special circumstances of a 4-way election, circumstances like these are latent in virtually every election we hold. After all, if John McCain had been running head-to-head against George Bush in the general election in 2000, he would have won a landslide. Under a sane voting system, he wouldn't have been forced out of the race because a majority of a minority preferred another candidate.

hibiscus has a bleg

2006-10-12T13:39:00.000-05:00

Regular commentor Hibiscus recently started a bloogh of her/his own, and it is impressive.

More foreign usurpation of American jobs

2006-10-12T04:06:00.000-05:00

It appears that Saddam Hussein's attempt to steal the jobs of hard-working Americans went further than burying people alive.

"The Iraqi forces pounded our village in April 1987, forcing us to hide in nearby mountains which were later surrounded by the Iraqi army," said the woman, the 14th complainer in the Anfal case.
"In the detention camp of Debis in Kirkuk, several masked soldiers sprayed us with unknown substance, which caused spreading diseases like whooping cough among children, and many of them died of the diseases later," she said.
"Six months later we were released by the Iraqi army, only to find all family members disappeared for good," she added.
A second witness who spoke anonymously told the court that rape was frequent in detention camps and many detainees died during their captivity, their bodies were eaten by dogs.

The guy was a trooper among despots, but he really shouldn't have tried to challenge the masters.

Indiscriminate aerial bombardment
Chemical warfare
Disappearances
Routine rape in prison
Improper disposal of remains

Now I know this is a bit sophistic -- you could go back into the history of any country and find a lot of horror, and I'm not sure that Teddy Roosevelt or George W. Bush are really worse than Saddam Hussein. What I'm trying to show is that the Iraqi leader's problem may have been a failure to think as big as the Americans.

This is true even when it comes to deaths. In 22 years running Iraq, the most exaggerated estimate of the murders he oversaw is 1 million. By all accounts I've seen, private-sector murders were pretty much nonexistent during that period. In the three and a half years that the U.S. has nominally run the joint, we're up to between 300,000 and 900,000!

Which just goes to show: If you want quality, you should stick to the brand you can trust.

Beautiful

2006-10-10T03:31:00.000-05:00

I like this map. By my count, there are 5 different satellite images stitched together in this remote mountainous area.

Burying people alive? That's our job!

2006-10-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

1988:

A witness in the trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has said her family was "buried alive" by government forces who attacked her village.

She gave evidence as the trial for alleged war crimes and genocide resumed in Baghdad after a two-week break.

1991:

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plows funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and land things sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the 1st Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the Iraqi trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly innovation. "A lot of people were killed," said Col. Davhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifid Weisman, the unit commander.

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days was that Armored Combat Earth Movers came behind the armored burial brigade, leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

Fortunately for Messrs. Powell and Schwartzkopf, memory was banned in the Patriot Act. Or was it the 1996 Counterterrorism Bill. Or maybe the Constitution. I don't remember.

Update: I forgot to mention that my bothering to compose this post is largely the result of my ongoing amusement with Mr. Schwarz's liveblogging of the memory hole. He was still gracious enough to give us some hot link action. Hi TinyRevolutionaries!

Song of experience

2006-10-09T12:44:00.000-05:00

bang.^*

Late update: N. Korea appears to have flunked its test. Maybe less Song of Experience, more the last lines of The Hollow Men. Or, as the news networks delighted in reminding us today, like this.

^*I remember when George Bush was elected and I thought, `well, if we can just drift through the next four years without any major crises, how much harm can he do?'

We are all Lost.

2006-10-07T12:37:00.000-05:00

I was torrenting the season premiere of Lost^*. My torrent client, KTorrent^†, is incredibly snazzy and has a nice info-widget where it shows all the peers you're connected to, as well as (uselessly) where they are located. Check out this international festival:

Argentina	1
Australia	2
Austria	1
Belgium	3
Brazil	7
Canada	8
Colombia	1
Cyprus	1
Czech Republic	2
Finland	4
France	4
Germany	2
Greece	1
Hungary	1
Ireland	1
Israel	1
Italy	1
Kuwait	1
Malaysia	2
Malta	2
Netherlands	1
Norway	1
Poland	8
Romania	1
Saudi Arabia	1
Slovenia	1
Spain	2
Sweden	1
Switzerland	1
Thailand	1
Turkey	1
United Arab Emirates	2
United Kingdom	29
United States	17
Unknown	7

The Internet is definitely cool.

^* I know... the depth of my shame is great. I am hanging my head even now.

^† Only for KDE, chumps!

(Incoherent sputtering)

2006-10-06T11:22:00.000-05:00

T to start random searches for bombs.

Now, let's start off by saying that I recognize the obvious, OBVIOUS constitutional argument doesn't really hold water, since the T is not a public place - you must pay for the privilege to ride on it, and it is technically private property. That said, it's quasi-public and a quasi-governmental organisation, and there's nothing quasi about random bag searches - they undisputably contradict the spirit of the fourth amendment. I imagine most Americans will accept the fear-driven logic that giving up liberties like the right to privacy are necessary in order to ensure public safety. Disproofs of this tomfoolery are difficult or impossible - might-have-beens can't be demonstrated. All I can do is state my own preference: marginal deterrents to the miniscule risk of terrorism are not worth the sacrifice of very real personal rights. Especially as, being of brown hue and lately prone to sporting the facial hair, I'm disproportionately likely to be "randomly searched". If this happens to me, I'm going to give someone the finger and get arrested, I think.

Walk, Ubu, walk!

2006-10-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

I've never believed in the expression "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." John Audubon was in his middle age before he became a naturalist and started work on Birds of North America. And it doesn't even hold true for actual dogs. So I'm confident that it doesn't apply to me, either. Even if I'm talking about adjusting something I learned at the age of eight months.

I was walking early. I've always been annoyingly precocious, and I started toddling around before my body was ready for it. My bones weren't strong enough to support my weight yet, and the result was that I developed severe bow-leggedness. My mum used to call me "the McDonald's Arch", because I would wander around in a pair of yellow pajamas (which I presumably held up with one hand because I had no ass to do the job for me). I had to be fitted with a set of corrective orthopedic braces.^*

All of this is to say, I still have a slight bow-leg, and all my limbs have always hyperextended slightly at their full extension.

Lately I've been obsessing about my posture^†. I've slouched my whole life.^‡ As a habitual sloucher, I've gotten used to bending a certain way, too. I bend at the lower three lumbar vertebrae to do everything, including touching my toes, etc. Observation of other people indicates that this is definitely not the norm - most people bend at the hips. So I'm usually not in the habit of supporting my weight with my lower back, meaning those muscles are weaker.

This in turn affects the way I stand. Because I bow my back out all the time in order to slouch, I usually stand with my knees locked, flexed backwards. I can do this without using any muscles at all, exploiting my deformity and the strength of leg tendon to support me. I think this has left my knees weaker, as well.

I'm working on correcting these things, which mostly involves paying attention to how I walk, making sure I bend my knees instead of keeping them locked, and not standing with my legs flexed or my lower back bowed. This is really bizarre. It seems strange to be almost at the end of my third decade of life and still be working on fundamentals. Makes you pine for the opportunity to converse with your younger self and correct all these things. "Self," I would say, "you really ought to stop slouching now. Otherwise, when you go insane in your mid-twenties, you'll have a much harder time of it. It's better to go insane about worthwhile things, self, like developing a crushing need to paint schizophrenic landscapes on the asphalt in traffic intersections, rather than boring things like walking. It's unfortunate that you don't realize how much there is to learn and grow, so you waste your life playing. Believe me, you'll find it much more fulfilling to be able to play, with all you've learned, in your adulthood than it ever could be at your age."

"Also, don't spend so much time posting crap on Usenet in your teens," I would add. "There's this thing you've never heard of called Google Cache that will haunt you for the rest of your life."

"(Scream of terror)," I would reply, trying to punch myself ineffectually.

"Cut that out, self," I would say, deflecting my strikes off-handedly. "I've learned kung-fu in the interim."

I suppose this is why people have kids.

^* Which were apparently very painful as they readjusted my bones; I would wake up nights screaming and crying.

^† I seem to have become fanatical about self-improvement somewhere along the way. Hopefully this won't develop into some sort of pathological condition.

^‡ Being tall is inconvenient in many ways. For example, eating is much more difficult for tall people. The journey from the plate to your mouth can begin to feel like a transatlantic shipping route if you don't lean over. And greater height means more splatter if you accidentally drop a bit of food. These sorts of pressures add up and subtly encourage you to correct your height towards the median, usually by slouching or self-mutilation.

More Mexico: Atheism where it counts

2006-10-05T02:56:00.000-05:00

I feel like practically everyone I meet in the educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class, white-or-hoping-to-be-white America where I live is "agnostic" about god. They don't make strong statements one way or the other. There might be a god, they say. There might not.

Happily, such wishy-washiness seems to fade under the glare of a theocracy. In Mexico, where the Roman church continues to have power that approaches that of the semi-elected government, you don't hear half-way statements. You're either with god or you're against him.

A few notes from Chiapas:
- I had a Spanish teacher who, after I said I was an atheist, broke into a big smile and said how great it was to hear that, as he was too. He said it was scary to admit in a city like San Cristobal de las Casas, a very religious town.
- A flyer, in English, arguing for the existence of god, hanging at the Spanish school.
- On the stone exterior of the city cathedral, the spraypainted words, "Ni amor ni dios," or "Neither love nor god."

It could be that principled stands against the superstitious version of god are gaining traction. Current Amazon bestsellers (subject to change!) include, at No. 10, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and at No. 5, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. And then at no. 2 is Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death by Gary Renard (about something he calls quantum forgiveness), which may be related in some mysterious way to No. 1, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward.

Note: I admire religious traditions for their maintenance of cultural values and arts over the centuries. I just have no interest in the superstitious notion of omniscient creators and such.

Charm & diction

2006-10-03T17:52:00.000-05:00

OMG i hav 2 tell u abt this thing i found out its a nu way to talk!!! seems like every 1 on da internet is doing it lol lmao. actually u no it is not ez it is like a dialect even! altho i havnt dun any kindof linguistic analises(sp??) so i dunno if its rely tru... probably its just a pidgin(?). ne way wut do u think??? i used 2 thnk since kidz were online all day they wud b reeding more n also riting bt seems like they dont lmao!!! i mean did u eva see ne1's my space page no 4 real they are so gay i mean no 1 can spell its like they neva red any books or ne thing. makes me sad o well cud just be im old and its like youth culture?? but then y is it so dumb?? cud b now ne 1 can rite online even if u r an idiot so we get more idiots riting?? i dont think thats it i think it is anti-intelectualism cuz if u dont spell rite and form complete sentences no 1 will think u r a nerd lol!!! 2 bad u wud think ppl wud want 2 b smarter n rite gud bt seems like frivolity is da rule 2day. goddamn i hope wen i hav kids they can rite gud cuz i wud be ashamed if they rote like an illiterate person... yo where is da pride??? ^_^ ne way l8rz much luv!!!! <333

um...wow?

2006-10-03T03:04:00.000-05:00

Occupying streets is for losers. Occupying Wal-Mart? Now you're talking. Or hablando, as the case may be.

If you can't deal with the lengthy and tough-to-comprehend Spanish chanting, just jump 10 minutes into the video. It gets better and better.

And in case you haven't been closely tracking Mexican politics, they had an election this summer in which the lefty was narrowly beaten by the rightist in an election marked with many irregularities. Voto x Voto, or Voto por voto, or vote by vote, has become the slogan of the lefty's demonstrators, who occupied the financial core of the nation's capital for more than a month in August and September.

According to Chris of Attitude Adjustor, such demonstrations took place at 22 Wal-Marts around Mexico City in one afternoon. I don't know -- I was in Mexico at the time and unsurprisingly heard nothing about it on the national news. Maybe this explains why the security at the Wal-Mart near the Refineria metro station got so nervous when I started shooting photos two days ago. (Yes, there's a subway station for the refinery. I went there just cause I loved its name. The area was dismal, with WalMart sharing space with a mall called "Suburbia" that reminded me mostly of the movie Suburbia.)

Strange, I have so much to write about Mexico and here I am starting by writing about something I see on the Internet rather than all that I saw and recorded with my eyes, pen, recorder and camera.

Alive in Joburg

2006-10-01T22:16:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty excited about the Halo movie, which is being produced by Peter Jackson. In an interview with "Aint It Cool News" he insists that the movie is not getting made until he's satisfied it has a really good script. Right on.

Anyway, the director he chose for the film is a dude named Neill Blomkamp, who has never directed a feature-length film before. The only thing he has directed is a 6-minute short called Alive in Joburg, which "depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa."

Shazam!

2006-09-27T21:18:00.000-05:00

The above "Shazam!" is deceptive, actually. I fully intend to mosey back into blooging at a reasonable pace. I apologize for my laxity. The only reason I haven't been bulging is --

Hey! Look! Over there! What's that?

[ Points to rear of audience. Runs away. ]

Err. I'm back. Anyway, in this brief hiatus, I accomplished the following:
I started doing capoeira seriously again. I've been taking it easy the past few months, but that's really quite dumb. There's so much to learn, and I am now in my twenty-eighth year, so I had best get cracking. Also, there's really no point in wasting time, since that time is, err, wasted.

I also turned twenty-seven, as you may have guessed. I didn't really celebrate; I never do. My birthday methodology consists of (a) not telling anyone, (b) hoping they'll somehow figure it out anyway, and (c) waiting around increasingly despondently for someone to call me up and surprise me with a "Happy Birthday, Saurabh!", thus providing me with enough validation to exist for another year. Thanks to all of you who did wish me; my lack of appreciation was only apparent and not actual.

I took this opportunity to get totally hammered. Four shots of gin, Hendrick's, straight up, did it for me, since I weigh less than insouciance and had eaten precisely nothing that day. I did reasonably well, despite that - I think my gaze was only slightly unfocused when I said good night to the attractive female server on leaving the bar.

Ah - I started a diet to cure my ~~insouciance~~ weightlessness. It more or less involves me eating a shitload more. I'm skeptical of this working. (See above note about capoeira, for example - I can burn through calories like Sherman in Georgia.)

I went to New Jersey for my cousin's wedding. It was a Christian ceremony, which I've never attended before. In fact, I think I've only been to Hindu weddings to date.^* Somewhat instructive. It was an Episcopalian (Anglican) church, which means it's exactly like a Catholic church, complete with no Bibles in the pews and the rite of the Eucharist, plus silly-looking gowns for the ~~priest~~ deacon. Ah - the major difference being that the deacon was a woman. Her sermon was interestingly constructed, in that it was coherent and engaging almost exactly in the inverse of when she was talking about God.^†

The highlight of that particular excursion was, of course, the reception, where I was officially designated as "guy who must light up the dance floor", everyone else apparently being either (a) white or (b) Indian uncles/aunties, and therefore unable to dance. This turned out to be not quite true - my sister-in-law loves to dance and can hold her own, and many people were at least committed, if not able. But I'm proud to say I definitely knocked that one out of the park, at least for songs that had desi beats to them, when I could trot out a pretty substantial battery of bhangra moves. I was more or less useless on the seventies disco-esque stuff and the like. How do you dance to that, anyway?

Well, there it stands. What have y'all been up to?

^* This is not as bad as my roommate, who is twenty-two-ish, and has not been to a SINGLE wedding, to date.

^† Plus Eddie Izzard has made it impossible to take any mention of the Holy Ghost seriously, per his bit:

GOD: What's the Holy Ghost doing these days?

JESUS: Oh, he's useless, Dad. Goes around with a sheet over his head.

HOLY GHOST: [ spookily ] Holy Ghost! Holy Ghooost!

GOD: Holy Ghost, this is not an episode of Scooby Doo.

Prepare y'self, scurrilous scallywag!

2006-09-15T16:18:00.000-05:00

Tuesday the 19th of September is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. The preceding link has some good starting points, but you might want to consult this site for a better guide that includes some nautical terminology as well. A personal favorite innovation of mine, introduced to me by MIT's Journal of Humor, "Voodoo"^*, is the exclamation "Goo!". As in:

Cap'n Juggleharness: Goo! Me peg-leg's caught in this cursed rigging! Don't raise the yardarm
         on the mizzen-mast, ye scurvy lubbers!
[ Yardarm is unfortunately raised anyway, taking the good Cap'n with it.]
Cap'n Juggleharness: Waughh!!

Bone up on your lingo. You wouldn't want to be caught with your pantaloons down 'round your ankles.

^* In the "Taupebeard" short play from this issue.

Violence! Violence!

2006-09-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

I read Chris Hitchen's 9/11 editorial in the WSJ last night. I realize Hitchens jumped the shark quite a while back, and one really should give very short shrift to everything on the Journal's editorial page, but I'm continually astounded that people can openly espouse doctrines that should, at least ostensibly, be anathema these days. Here's his conclusion:

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. "We"--and our allies--simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn," isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future.

This is what happens when you stay up late nights watching "Commando" and "Rambo, First Blood: Part Two" on FX.

Body counts

2006-09-15T04:28:00.000-05:00

Since the Segway was introduced, its makers have been reticent about sales figures. So reticent, that some have speculated they may have been embarrased into silence.^* After all, before the grand rollout on national TV, the company built a New Hampshire factory scaled to produce almost a half-million of the devices a year.

Yesterday the Consumer Product Safety Commission ordered a recall of every Segway in the country for a software fix. They had the bad taste to say how many specimens were affected: "about 23,500."

Let's see. According to some people on the Internets, annual global bicycle production is about 100 million units. Since a year is about 8,766 hours, that works out to about about 11,400 bikes per hour which means that every two hours, the world builds as many new bikes as Segway has built scooters in almost five years.

Hooray bikes! Boo, $100 million techno fix for a nonexistent problem!^†

^* Segway's reticence reminds me of this guy talking about the membership of his group which appears likely to stop San Francisco's bike plan. He won't reveal the number except to say it's "more than one."

^†Speaking of which, when will these guys start spending their billions purifying drinking water for the children of Mexico instead of filling Mexico's aquifers with rocket fuel for the sake of their phallic overcompensation complexes?

I, bridegroom.

2006-09-12T17:54:00.000-05:00

Recently I proposed marriage to one Mist 1, recent commenter 'round these parts and proprietress of a fine blurng; I urge you to appreciate her scintillating wit by perusing her archives. Post-haste!

I'm happy to report that she has proven amenable to my proposal.

Of course, this means putting an end to my bachelor lifestyle, e.g., moving out of my parents' basement. Fortunately I'm ahead of the game in that department by at least several weeks. I'll also probably have to start folding my laundry and regularly trimming my toe-nails. Most importantly, however, Western societies apparently require the purchase of some sort of gem-encrusted band as a symbol of my ownership.^* In light of my impending graduation, I therefore require your assistance in securing employment. To help you out, here's a list of my skills and finer qualities:

I can sew.
I own my own copy of Tim Burton's "Batman" (1990) and can quote most of it if need be.
I can bend over backwards and touch the ground with both hands from a standing position.
I can eat more than anyone I know.
I know kung fu.
I can compose haiku.^†

I'm sure all of these will be of great utility in an office environment.

The next question is, how should I break this to my parents, who I'm fairly sure have already lined me up with a nice girl from a Kayastha family living in Kanpur.

^* Some of you may be wondering how I might reconcile this with my rabid dislike for the diamond industry, but you've obviously never been in love.

^† E.g.:
Fuzzy gray mammal
Trod where others dared not go.
What's that strange red stain?

The curtain rises...

2006-09-12T17:32:00.000-05:00

... revealing a man. Sometimes only a shell of a man; sometimes a maelstrom of light and potential that would be diminished by calling it a man. Today, he might as well be called a horse, for all he cares. Let the world do as it wills for the next eight hours - that's the length of time required for his long, relieved exhalation.

I think I'm going to graduate after all.

Republicans win

2006-09-11T04:38:00.000-05:00

Forget terrorism, the Nov. 7 election will be decided on gas prices. Which look like they are headed in one direction. $40 a barrel? Really?

I am happy to see the U.S. opening to talks with Iran. I just wish it didn't mean that we'd get another two years of this. Especially after hearing that a huge majority of Americans want the White House investigated to find out what the heck they've been doing for the past 6 years.

What evil lies in the secret chamber of my browser cache?

2006-09-06T16:03:00.000-05:00

Results 1 - 10 of about 19,400 for google-stalking. (0.17 seconds)

Sometimes you get an e-mail from a person you don't know. Sometimes you live in an age where it is possible to find out arbitrary levels of detail about arbitrary people. Sometimes you do this on a whim. No one knows you did this. The only evidence it leaves behind is a trace in your cache and an oily feeling on the inside of your chest cavity. Are you a sleaze? Or is this harmless fun?

Tabloid issue

2006-09-04T12:36:00.000-05:00

Al-Qaeda's #2 man captured again

"We're not sure how he keeps escaping," says dumbfounded CIA.
Hamed Farid al-Saeedi has reportedly been whisked away to Jordan for immediate torturing. "We're pretty sure that we can get Mr. al-Saeedi to tell us what a good election strategy for November is," said Bush press secretary Tony Snow. "At least, I hope so, because I'm all out of ideas."

A picture of Apple's new ultra-thin iPod.

Apple announces new 'iPod Cantor Dust'
The new addition to Apple's iPod lineup, announced at a special news conference this Friday, has a total width of 0 nm. "This is a revolutionary step forward in handheld technology," said industry analyst Jürgen Kofiphilter. "Samsung thinks they're hot shit with their 6.9mm thin phone and their super-tiny E888, but the new iPod makes their electronics look like clunky behemoths!" The Cantor Dust iPod, which retails for $299, has a capacity dimension of 1.26 and can store an infinite number of songs of zero byte size. Although most Apple enthusiasts have greeted it with great exhuberance, a few reviewers have taken a more reserved tone. "I'd tell you what I thought of it, but since the user interface has fractal geometry I can't actually interact with it," Gizmotron magazine columnist Surinder Attapamathak groused. "Plus I suspect I may have sat on it on the way home from the Apple Store." iPod fans will be able to purchase the new device in September in time for the new school year.

Grocery stores stock up in preparation for the blitz.

Giant comet heads towards Earth! Maruchan stock soars
Federal disaster relief agencies said they would get around to preparing assistance packages "eventually". In the meanwhile, families are encouraged to duct tape their own windows and dig their own bunkers. A number of efforts are underway to create a system of underground tunnels connecting homes, grocery stores and popular drinking establishments, but lack of federal grants has stymied progress. Five-year-old ditch engineer Sammy Krueger said, "My brother and I dug almost four feet down yesterday in my backyard, but then it started to smell funny so we stopped."

No longer a dying breed

2006-09-01T12:06:00.000-05:00

They let my people go.

Dealing with terror the right way

2006-08-30T12:36:00.000-05:00

I would like to think that the San Francisco Police Department has a new and salutary practice for dealing with terrorists: arrest them and treat them as common criminals. Yesterday, an Afghani man, Omeed Aziz Popal, ran down at least 14 people on the streets of San Francisco, most of them in largely African-American and Jewish neighborhoods. Two of the victims were outside the Jewish Community Center. Neither the cops nor the media brought up his ethnicity or that of the victims' neighborhoods, though today's SF Chronicle update does describe the ethnicity of the victims. The only mention of terrorism was apparently on local TV Channel 2, which said the driver claimed to be a terrorist. The police denied his assertion.

This is brilliant. Deny the guy the attention he might have been seeking. And refuse to be terrorized. Hooray SFPD.

The sad part is that this probably isn't a new modus operandi. If Popal had used a gun or a poison instead of a car, the news worldwide would have covered this carnage and there's no doubt that the word "terrorism" would have been thrown around. The reason it wasn't, in this case, was most likely because people are so inured to car violence.

Cavalcade of exploding batteries!

2006-08-28T18:57:00.000-05:00

It seems Apple is following suit in recalling Li-ion batteries due to overheating/EXPLOSION!!!! This prompts us to a new poll, courtesy of Hedgehog.^*

^* Specially since that old one actually reached statistical significance for the first time ever. I'm a bit disappointed with the results, actually - more public support for flying belts might actually spur investment dollars into researching them. I want to own a fucking flying belt before I die, damnit. Plus, there's only one damn Battle Cat, people, you're not all going to be able to ride him.

1-state solution

2006-08-25T14:37:00.000-05:00

Jon's post this morning got me thinking about Israel again. I find much of the discussion about its conflicts to be irrelevant. I don't think the abrasion between Israel, Palestine and their neighbors can be solved by trying to assign blame for specific actions and wars. It's much more useful to look at the structural conflict and to seek ways to resolve it.

Maybe the problem is that Israel is an ethnically based state -- and one imposed on a region where its dominant ethnicity was a minority at the country's founding. Ethnic states are archaic. Ethnic states run by a minority fell out of fashion before I started humming "Free Nelson Mandela."

It's fashionable for peaceniks to push for a 2-state solution. I think this is doomed to fail. Who will be in which state? Who gets the airports, seaports, fresh water? Will the world keep dissecting into smaller units, each devoting its best and brightest to defending a border?

Why not a 1-state solution, with Israel accepting full human and civil rights for all those who live there? It's sad that even here in the U.S., which was the first country based on the notion of inalienable rights, this is a controversial view.

I believe such a state would be more stable and healthy for both Palestinians and Jews because of improved prosperity. More minds working on problems, less money spent on internal security, more food security for all, and if other prosperous but historically torn societies are any gauge (England vs. Ireland?) fewer people feeling the passion of a blood feud. Israel could live up to its moniker of being the only democracy in the Middle East.

There is a reason why there are more Jews in the U.S. than there are in Israel -- it's a more prosperous place. Our prosperity is largely because we have eschewed the 16th-century ideal of being an ethnic homeland (despite some people's efforts).

Many Jews and Zionists think full rights for Arabs would betray Israel's mission of being a Jewish homeland. The country could soon revert to being minority-Jew, and the Knesset could be dominated by people who oppose Israel's very existence.

This risk is real. On the other hand, being a more peaceful and prosperous place, perhaps more Jews would move there. And more importantly, making it a better country could help save the religion. I was born a Jew but if I'm supposed to identify with that homeland, I'll stick to atheism and stay out of shul. The U.S. is the Jewish homeland for now, and I think it will remain that way unless Israel backs off and figures out how to be a functioning part of the modern world, rather than, like its Islamic Republic neighbors, a relic of a more tribal time. As is, it is driving some of us away from the religion without creating paradise on earth for itself.

(Cross-posted from Tiny Revolution.)

Stuff you wish you didn't know

2006-08-24T14:47:00.000-05:00

I'm only three years late discovering this - maybe I heard it before and it slipped my memory. Yes, yes, that will do nicely.

Anyway, it was a bit about Iran offering a fairly comprehensive negotiation with the U.S., including ending support for armed groups, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting much tighter IAEA controls, in exchange for access to "peaceful nuclear technology", normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and a two-state solution for Palestine. Some more detail is here, including the incredible U.S. response:

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was "literally a few days" between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Astounding. I think my blood is actually boiling - steam is coming out of my ears.

Bruce talks sense

2006-08-24T13:05:00.000-05:00

It's always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want....

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

I've been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

I am irritated

2006-08-24T03:28:00.000-05:00

At the local vegan cafe, the dishes are all named for positive affirmations. You can ask for the "live bruschetta" and the waiter will say, "One `I am bountiful,' coming up." You might want a pecan pie, but you will be served an "I am perfect." Yerba mate chai is "I am triumphant."

It's a bit like Starbucks, where you can order a medium coffee and hear the clerk -- who is either a barista or a partner, depending on the context -- call out, "Grande Americano!" But it's worse because at least "Venti Americano" has a single referent. Its cloud of meaning in the mind is concentrated and precise. It doesn't hijack perfectly good words and herniate their meanings. To me, Cafe Gratitude's menu is Operation Iraqi Freedom all over again.

It would be harmless except that I'm kind of dumb. Euphemism fogs my thoughts. The best thoughts come directly and unencumbered, like a great dancer leaping up, tapping her feet together a few times and returning silently to the stage. But my thoughts rarely do that. They are tied up with mental fascia that drag on my mind just as fascia tissues drag on my legs when I try to jump a high-hurdle. If the word "freedom" is tied in the mind to aerial bombardment, and the word "graceful" is tied to steamed quinoa with fresh basil-almond pesto, those words will flow less freely in my head, language will become more cumbersome, thoughts come more slowly and arrive laden with distracting and antisocial subtexts.

Worse yet is the lack of sincerity. A close pal of mine works at a school where the staff have routine 15-minute staff meetings where people can offer a shout-out, thank yous, apology or call-outs -- you know, a STAC. ^* If I'm happy with someone, I tell them face-to-face. I think public affirmations are a way of showing off. They are mainly about making the thanker look good, not the thankee. Formalizing and mandating thanks for other people replaces a beautiful feeling with an often-empty public display. People who do this too often can come to confuse the public display with the real feeling. I have known performers -- actors and other showoffs -- who become so good at ersatz feeling that they lose the capacity for the heartfelt variety.

^* Even the name of the ritual is an offense against language. What does it have to do with any of the meanings of "stack"? A neat pile of flat objects, a bunch of speakers, a series of computer memory addresses, boobs -- doesn't this word carry enough meanings already? Why make an awkward, phonetically ridiculous acronym for a something people already know?

Tragedies of the Commons?

2006-08-24T02:30:00.000-05:00

Over at UFO Breakfast, Cmdr. J. Alva Scruggs is complaining about leechers on BitTorrent downloads. This is a pretty classic kind of example of people defecting from a mutual aid scenario.

My own morning was beclouded by the discovery that my spam filter has been a mite too strict. Leaving aside the possibility of spam poetry and the fact that it led to my favorite post ever, we should consider spam a serious problem. A large study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group concluded that something like 80-85% of incoming e-mails are spam messages. This is an alarmingly high number.

But spam isn't a tragedy of the commons scenario like the above; leechers damage the efficacy of torrents roughly proportionately - if there are few leechers, the system survives and isn't really bothered. On the other hand, according to Spamhaus, a mere 176 spammers are responsible for 80% of the spam generated worldwide. Your pardon for doing this, but the best analagous situation I can think of is terrorism in an open society - open structures demanded by a free society allow the possibility of massive harm by a few malicious individuals.^*

At present a grand debate over how to properly treat such malicious individuals is being played out on the world stage, with on the one side those advocating "draining the swamp" and weakening the pins that hold up the philosophical edifice that drives many terrorists; and on the other those who advocate a muscular militarism as the appropriate response: kill them all and show others what will happen to terrorists.

This is extremely bad policy with regards to terrorism, but I'm not certain the same is true for spam. It's certainly impossible to drain the swamp - the simple motivating factor is profit, and there will always be enough gullible idiots who are interested in purchasing bulk quantities of Cialis that profit is irremovable. Technical solutions seem to be mostly ineffective. However, the judicious application of punitive measures (not necessarily catching one of them in a public restroom and administering a severe caning) might prove efficacious. Imagine the class action lawsuit that could be brought to bear, for example. That would certainly be intimidating to future spammers.

^* This isn't quite appropriate, since spammers actually do cause widespread harm, as opposed to the mostly hypothetical harm caused by terrorists, who on average kill only a few thousand people a year.

Junk Science

2006-08-22T00:45:00.000-05:00

An old girlfriend of mine is interning at a company that is looking for found materials to make their products out of - in this case, durable cloth-like materials.

This morning I removed some old keys from my keychain - some of them I can't even remember what they're for. I didn't know what to do with the old keys afterwards. They can't really be recut and they're more or less useless in other contexts. Hallowe'en costume, maybe - the Keymaker from The Matrix Reloaded.

A few weeks back I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about pollution in Morocco resulting from their prolific olive oil industry. Apparently they have tremendous problems from the remainder, the pulp produced in the olive oil production process, being dumped into waterways, where it produces an oily olive-oil slick and all sorts of other nasty problems.

One of my utopian schemes has been as follows: after the Revolution, garbage collectors ought to actually play the role of "sanitation engineer". That is, after they've picked up the trash, they go back and figure out what to do with it - categorize the kinds of trash received, which ones are problematic, which ones can be easily recycled and have amazingly useful second lives. This seems like it would actually be a fantastically entertaining and profitable line of work. I'm not entirely sure why it doesn't happen already...

Unsafe at any speed?

2006-08-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

Egad! All this talk of exploding Dell laptops raises some fears in me: is my plan to make an Electric Mini actually a plan to create a 1200-pound death-box that might burst into flames at any moment? You see, it turns out that the lithium electrolyte solution in lithium-ion batteries is highly flammable. Some people allege that the acrylonitrile polymer solution in lithium-polymer batteries is less flammable, but this is not necessarily comforting.

What's a mad scientist to do? There's other possibilities; this guy claims to have invented a flywheel for use in electric cars. That's at least more intriguing - instead of exploding, you could send a spinning disk, hurtling through the air at several times the speed of sound, into a nearby crowd, decapitating dozens before it lodges itself in the "B" of a nearby Baskin Robbins sign.

When will I be allowed into the hive mind of Robo-Jesus?

2006-08-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

You might want to check out this column in the Guardian lamenting a recent poll which found 30% of British school kids believe in Creationism or "intelligent" "design".^* Personally, the response this evokes in me is a desire to run outside, find the nearest religious nut and sucker-punch him in the gut until he explains the workings of his mind to me.

The other day I met a born-again Christian who was willing to cop to the charge - but she refused to tell her audience why she became born-again, because she was afraid we would think it was hokey. This really blows my mind... if you, yourself find your beliefs hokey, why in the name of Christ do you hold them?

I'm also unable to appreciate the disconnect between the otherwise rational behavior of religious types, who as far as I am able to tell can operate can-openers, make their way through revolving doors and drive manual transmission automobiles, and their absurdist, counter-intuitive belief systems. I would honestly be much happier if the religious people in the world moved in constant trepidation, afraid that their dog might, without a moment's notice, change into a sofa (or vice-versa), that the fibers of their living room throw rug would spontaneously de-interlace and crawl worm-like into the corners of the room, or that the color of the sky is constantly cycling like someone is fiddling with its "hue" tuner. This, at least, would be consistent, and consistently crazy. As it is I have to believe one of two things:

They are all putting me on.

There is a "religious nuttery" mental faculty that I am missing that allows this dissonant state of mind to exist.

Perhaps it's better to gawk than to experience first-hand, but religious people seem to enjoy what seems to me to be an addled state. I can't help feeling I'm missing out.

^* Yes, they're doing way, way, better than we are. I am crying in my soup as I write this.^†

^† I am not actually eating soup. I am eating chocolate s'mores!^‡

^‡ No, not that either. But who wouldn't want to eat a nice chocolate s'more? Why, I remember in my youth, when I would go on camping outings with my Boy Scout troop^§, we would roast s'mores over the campfire and enjoy their creamy, chocolatey goodness while we sang hymns in praise of Lord Baden-Powell. Ah, memory... tis enough to make a man cry into his soup.

^§ Actually the only thing I remember being roasted at a Boy Scout outing was a live chipmunk some disgusting little puke had caught and thrown in the fire. What a travesty... I bet Lord Baden-Powell is looking down from Heaven right now, crying in his ~~soup~~s'mores.

We are a dying breed

2006-08-15T12:39:00.000-05:00

You will be missed.

Meant to post this a while back, but it seems the West African Black rhino^* is extinct. As a species we've managed to eliminate most of the amazing megafauna in the world - only a few left! Let's keep trying, people.

^* So called to distinguish it from the White rhino, "White" being taken from the Afrikaans "weit" for "wide", to describe the latter's wide mouth.

Thin blue lines

2006-08-13T22:36:00.000-05:00

This project is brilliant. We're already putting the tape up all around our burrow. An art installation about it is in the window of Artists Television Access in San Francisco and it looks like S.F. Critical Mass might try and follow a future waterline route this month. I can't think of a better way to commemorate Hurricane Katrina -- except, maybe, for listening to Fats Domino and eating a plate of my extra-savory vegan jambalaya.

Our ship has arrived

2006-08-12T20:55:00.000-05:00

Apparently, someone decided to list us as a "Blog of Note" on the blogger.com front page. Undoubtedly this brief window of fame^* will result in a meteoric rise, culminating in my being deluged by attractive women and buried alive in a mountain of money and precious jewels. Please send shovels.

In accordance with this elevation in status, we will immediately begin to implement the points of our ten-point program, which are as follows:

A federal Civilian Caprice Corps will be created to encourage the growth of spontaneity, eccentricity and public exhibitionism; corps members will patrol the streets undercover and reward exemplary spontaneous behavior with a shower of chocolate coins.
To Adam Peacock: I forgive you and your gang of cronies for teasing me in the third grade. You can keep your thumbs.
Our first major economics reform will be the imposition of the tyranny of the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). This will apply at all levels: hot dog buns and hot dogs must both be packaged in compatible multiples; all laptops, cell phones, electric razors and other portable electronic devices will employ common plug interfaces; cameras, etc., will agree on a single freaking memory card format. To avoid confusion due to the newfound prominence of the ISO, the International Socialist Organisation will be disbanded. Sorry, college Marxists.
Federal dollars currently spent on nuclear stockpile maintenance will be diverted to a National Boondoggle Fund, which will require the construction of a city-wide jungley-gym, kite the size of a ten-story office building, giant mechanical rhinoceros or other frivolous item in every major metropolis in America. This will be a waste of money, but at least it won't be wasted on the means to destroy the planet.
To discourage currency speculation, the dollar will be de-floated and fixed against a standard again. This action will be tied to our conservation program by backing the dollar with infant pandas, ensuring that even in the event of a panda-rush and rapid devaluation, no one will be too upset.
"Local news" programs that report on the travails of neighborhood pets and how the corner drug store is "fleecing America" will be replaced with international news, so Americans know what countries they are bombing and can identify them on a map.
All politicians will be shot, or at the very least severely reprimanded.
Foreign aid will be directed towards actual progressive development goals, as opposed to bolstering our favorite gangsters or promoting trade partnerships with American businesses.
People will actually be made to learn something about how to build democratic institutions in this so-called democracy, starting with civics classes in elementary schools.
"Mild" and "Medium" salsas will no longer be sold. If you can't take the heat, eat some rice cakes instead.

Some of these goals may seem controversial^† However, we are confident that with enough good faith and the judicious application of suitable hallucinogenic compounds, you will come to agree with all of our positions. We've already printed up the t-shirts.

^* I'm told I can expect this to last somewhere around fifteen minutes.

^† We have considered the possible catastrophic effects of panda extinction in a number of detailed scenarios. However, a small intrepid team could be sent back in time to Qin Dynasty-era China to save the species from total annihilation. We've already started our calculations for time warp.

The death of disappointment

2006-08-12T02:26:00.000-05:00

Some super-smart and rather funny people wrote recently in dismayed tones about the conquest of irony over satire.^* I worry more about the death of disappointment.

Talking to American baby boomers, I sense a national self-image that now seems naive, quaint, and maybe a bit foolish. They felt their country could offer freedom and democracy and hope for the world -- not just as a talking point but for real. I talked to one fellow in June who said that even after he turned against Vietnam, he still applied to the State Department -- not realizing that they didn't much hire Jews.

Who under 30 carries that kind of hope? Without hope, there is no disappointment. Without disappointment, no Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, no All the President's Men, no "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-to-Die Rag" or "Ohio." Not even, and this is art that came out in the 80s but was produced by a boomer...

read the whole delicious post by clicking hereBloom County, a daily comic that openly discussed safe sex, had its characters go on a closed-shop union-led strike, and talked of impeaching Reagan.

I think that the detachment and indifference one finds in youth culture and even in protest culture about the fate of the USA -- and maybe of the developed world as a whole -- is based on despair. We've given up hope that Enlightenment-era Constitutional democracy is anything but a cover for the rapaciousness that's cataloged in the million-selling A People's History of the United States and, on weekdays, in the Wall Street Journal. It's like we feel it would be just as well to throw this draft out, ball it up and start over. And that would be great if any real revolutionary sentiment was flowing around, but it's not -- we're not throwing out, we're not starting over, and as we withdraw into negativity and hopelessness, real people are being killed in our wars and factories.

The most terrifying loss isn't comedy or cine verite. It's the loss of a wide-open youth culture in which people get together and commiserate and fix things -- a culture motivated, maybe, by hope and disappointment. I know the Web is nice but no, it's not the same. When veterans returned from Vietnam (forget the "spitting" myths, they are bullshit), the angriest and most alienated were welcomed by hippie and biker culture, each premised on love for different ideals of what America and humanity could be. Even while in Vietnam, they had open organized rebellions against the politicians who sent them to kill and die. (You are required to watch the extended 12-minute trailer.)

So, to draw the parallel, where do people go who return from Iraq? Almost half a million have served there. Many have been broken down. Being under fire for a year and taught to torture and having friends killed amid limited booze and unlimited ammo is not good for the mind.

The people I find on this blergh are, I think, still hopeful and put off by America's turn away from ideals. Many of us are immigrants or children of immigrants, but other than that, I see little unifying theme. Maybe African-Americans have kept this kind of hope more than "whites"; at least their vote turnout is higher and let's just say no European-American celebrities had the huevos to say the obvious about whether George Bush likes black people.

Why do some people continue to struggle for the deeper, more inspiring American dream, the one embodied in the best rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, while so many others seem willing to detach and watch, not even helping create an alternative but rather enjoying clever jokes about the chaos of the fall from Jon Stewart & Co.? Do they really feel so safe? Is it the deathwish of the privileged? What?

^*OK, so I am reposting a barely rewritten comment I wrote for another blergh. That is because I have become functionally illiterate as a result of working for the Man. Enjoy this while you can, as I am regurgitating old prose, starting with the most recent, and before long I will have to start posting stories from my high-school literary magazine. At that time, the Internet can be expected to shrivel up in recoiling horror, unwilling to transmit such bad.

note: i moved this post down to make keep saurabh's manifesto up top longer.
-hh

Read between the lines!

2006-08-11T13:29:00.000-05:00

I know we're not supposed to take Internet polls seriously, but the one on this Boston Herald article was too good to pass up:

Are you surprised by the N.H. poll that found such high negatives for Hillary Clinton?

9%Yes, she is a viable candidate

83%No, she is a self-serving politician

8%It's as irrelevent as N.H. is in the big picture
Total Votes: 3,034

Crop-tastic

2006-08-10T22:30:00.000-05:00

My sis points me to this post about GM bentgrass designed for golf courses making its way into the wild. In the past I've been pretty heavily involved with anti-GM activism, including participation in some Greenpeace and Rainforst Action Network campaigns. Their focus has always annoyed me, especially as a biologist.

The fact of the matter is, the danger posed by GM crops is not really that substantial. It's possible that GM bentgrass will run wild and overrun the world, but in truth it's far LESS likely to do so than ordinary bentgrass. GM traits are maintained by selection - artificial selection. If they confer any fitness advantage, it is usually only in a narrow context. In the case of the above bentgrass, it's that it was engineered for increased glyphosate resistance (which is done by expressing an alternative version of the protein whose action glyphosate normally blocks). In fact it's likely that this would prove disadvantageous compared to normal bentgrass in the absence of maintenance and the application of RoundUp, since it's more or less wasting resources expressing a redundant protein, and probably under much more poorly-controlled gene regulation than normal bentgrass.

So if this bentgrass gets out into the wild, chances are it'll die out quickly, or at least that the offending GM segment of the genome will be bred out. All this talk of GM super-weeds taking over the world is therefore quite overblown and probably not something we need worry about. Sure, volunteer GM corn might occasionally turn up in a field downwind, and there'll be some degree of contamination in the wild, but no cataclysm will result.

Food safety issues are a bit more problematic, but still I think exaggerated. RoundUp-ready tomatoes probably aren't some sort of pestilence, and although some genetic modifications may produce unanticipated responses, especially allergenic responses (as has actually been observed), the stuff isn't poison. Not compared to, say, Twinkies, which is not a major environmental issue.

These are the issues that get pressed because this is what draws (or drew, rather, since these days the movement is somewhat muted) popular attention. The real issues, as I see them, however, are corporate control of agriculture and biodiversity.

Remember that this is cutting-edge technology, and farmers are beholden to the seed companies that produce this stuff; they must buy RoundUp-ready seed from them every year, not to mention RoundUp itself. GM technology is a powerful way for corporations to insinuate themselves deeper into the agricultural process; the infamous "terminator" technology developed to prevent farmers from saving seed at all is a prime example.^*

And by far the greatest danger is the loss of diversity. GM crops are a very close monoculture; being engineered, they are completely lacking in genetic variation. Not only does this make for a remarkably boring and uniform food supply, it means that there is no standing genetic variation to serve as grist for breeding future strains. This is how agriculture is possible, after all: the selection of desired attributes from amongst a vast pool of available variation. The loss of this variation is a loss of accumulated wealth; we as a species worked hard to develop great varieties in our food crops. It decreases the security of our food supply to reduce it.

^* Also a good example of ignorance of biology being used to foist arguments; many opponents of terminators complained of it wreaking havoc by spreading and creating a plant holocaust. But this is nuts; obviously, it would breed itself out of any population within a generation and cease to be a bother.

who could have predicted this?

2006-08-08T02:39:00.001-05:00

aside from everyone?

Prize quote: "Although countries have talked about encrypting data that's stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted." Good thing the countries of the world don't want their borders to have any complicated infrastructure. That would have made it much harder for me to sell my passport next time I needed money while traveling. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

Das ist eine grosse katze!

2006-08-07T13:13:00.000-05:00

13 kilos!

Never understanding the race had long gone by

2006-08-06T00:49:00.000-05:00

Plenty of people fear that the leaders of the U.S. are fired by apocalyptic fantasies.

And according to a 2002 Time/CNN poll, 59% of Americans think the events portrayed in Revelation will happen; 17% think the events will take place within their lifetimes.

I pity the fools.

They don't realize that the Rapture took place on September 4, 2005. I was burrowing across the country with my pal in a car. We saw first one vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road, with belongings but no person inside. Then another. A few miles later, yet another.

There it was -- these folks were Raptured up. I mean, all told, it's not like there were going to be very many taken into the Kingdom. 144,000 -- 12,000 from each of the tribes. Goodbye to them. I wonder if they've found what they're looking for.

Now as for the rest of y'all, quit your hopeless, unrequited carping at the toenails of your almighty and get down with your bad selves. We have Sodoming and Gomorrahing to do.

Electric Mini

2006-08-03T13:03:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been fantasizing about constructing for myself an electric Mini Cooper. It's actually quite plausible; a number of hobbyist organisations facilitate the process, and financially it's not out of reach. A brand-new 2-door Mini convertible retails for a scant $24,000, and the conversion process, depending on the batteries you employ, comes to somewhere around $6,000. The sort of performance you get is highly variable, depending on weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc., and batteries.

These last are the critical component in electric vehicles and for alternative energy in general - fossil fuels can be burned to produce power on demand, but the same is not true of many renewable energy sources. Appropriate vectors are thus a critical technology (so you can store power for when you need it), and right now the focus seems to be on batteries, as the most easily achievable in the near-term.^*

For cars, these range from simple lead-acid batteries, which might give you something like 50 mi of driving range, adequate for most people, to cutting-edge lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries, which have incredibly long lifetimes, almost no "memory" (that is, the battery does not degrade much over time, in contrast to say, NiCad batteries), and a much higher capacity than other types of batteries. Electric vehicles equipped with such batteries get ~300 mi of travel time before they must be recharged.

This is fine and wonderfully geeky, but it's not necessarily clear that an electric car is a good idea yet for the ideological purist. For one thing, this is not a zero-emission vehicle. It has the potential to be, certainly; if it's charged entirely by non-polluting, renewable energy sources, then it indeed can be considered as such. But most of the power in the grid comes from fossil fuels, and dirty ones at that (such as coal), especially on the Eastern seaboard, where I live. And the greater efficiency of electric motors relative to internal combustion engines means, if the power is oil-fueled, you're only reducing your pollution output by about half. This is good, but not great.

What it DOES do is push the problem back to a single point: non-polluting power generation is the only thing we need develop if we have an electric car fleet. This is appealing because it makes the task of regulation much easier, if only a single industry, especially a large-scale, extremely centralized one, is responsible. On the other hand, it pushes the problem out of sight, where it might actually be free to grow worse. There seems to be little action in the area of moving away from coal-burning power plants - except possibly retrograde action.

Thorny. Anyway, new poll on the right.^†

^* Fuel cells, like the hydrogen-based ones much touted by George Bush, probably won't be feasible for another ten or twenty years, which some suspect is why Bush latched onto them - pie in the sky.

^† As an unfortunate coda to our last poll, you might read this story about polar bears resorting to cannibalism because of thin food supplies.^‡ Depressing. For further depression, read this review by Jim Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, probably the best-known climate change researcher in the world (link courtesy of my Bong doppleganger).

^‡ I have to wonder if they know they're not supposed to eat polar bear liver.

Not suitable for post-prandial consumption

2006-07-25T11:29:00.000-05:00

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

This might be the perfect reference next time some idiot asks, "Why do they hate us?"

(Via)

Tomato Hornworm!

2006-07-24T15:51:00.000-05:00

I eliminated my first garden pest this weekend. In the past, my approach to pests has been pretty laissez-faire; my pest management technique has consisted mostly of laying down cedar mulch and growing some nasturtiums, and otherwise pretty much hoping for the best. Since I previously had more problems with squirrels than anything else, this has usually sufficed. City gardens probably don't attract the full complement of bugs in any case.

The droppings

But I found some remarkably symmetrical droppings on the ground beneath my tomatoes, which caused some alarm. A bit of investigation led me to the culprit, the tomato hornworm, which can end up burrowing into a fair number of ripe tomatoes and therefore probably needed to be "taken care of".

The offender

Eventually I decided to go out and actually look for the little bugger. He was actually pretty easy to find, because he was huge! The size of my thumb, at least. He was in the process of chewing on a tomato stalk (which he had already chewed the end off) and wouldn't desist even when I yelled at him.

I wrestled him into a glass jar with a stick (which was an epic battle of sorts - those little legs are remarkably tenacious), in the process of which he produced a great deal of green-colored, irridescent excretions (shitting himself with fear?) and made amazingly loud clicking noises. I stared at him for a while and showed him around to my roommates before beating him to death with some rocks.

This is about as exciting as my life gets right now.

Breaking news: American government doesn't give a shit!

2006-07-20T13:11:00.000-05:00

MR. SNOW: The point here is they're firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. The Israelis are responding as they see fit.
...
Q Does the President thus far have any problem with what the Israelis have been targeting, given the fact they have hit a lot of civilians?

MR. SNOW: They have hit civilians. And one of the things we've pointed out is that it has been the deliberate tactic of Hezbollah to place assets in civilian areas, including sometimes in the homes of its own members, as part of the tactics so that they would not get hit. And we lament the death of innocents whether they be in Israel, or in Lebanon, or in Gaza, or anywhere else. So it is something of which we are keenly aware. And it is also a reflection of tactics that would have been unthinkable in other conflicts at other times, but there is a deliberate attempt on the part of Hezbollah to place civilians in harm's way. And, unfortunately, they are.

This, presumably, includes the Hezbollah stations built on Lebanese roads and bridges all across the country. Bridges are a great place for terrorist infrastructure, as are sea ports, air ports, cell phone communication towers, power plants, and trucks for drilling water wells. Once I saw a photo of a Hezbollah office in downtown Beirut that was built on the shoulder of a six-year-old boy, as well.

This is particularly horrifying:

MR. SNOW: What we want is the proper -- the cessation of violence in a manner that is consistent with stability, peace, democracy in Lebanon, and also an end to terror.

A cease-fire that would leave the status quo ante intact is absolutely unacceptable. A cease-fire that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable. So what we're trying to do is work as best we can toward a cease-fire that is going to create not only the conditions, but the institutions for peace and democracy in the region.

In other words, we shouldn't stop until Hezbollah is finished, or at the least Nasrallah is dead.

Again, we're not surprised. We're also not surprised by the lack of perspective shown by American media. We are somewhat surprised, however, by the response from the Arab League, all but Syria expressing condemnation of Hezbollah. Fear of Iran and their own populations.

Goodness Gracious Me

2006-07-17T15:02:00.000-05:00

Wow! I can't believe I went so long without knowing this existed. Here's a handy archive. And a funny sample for you lazy types:

In a dusty drawer

2006-07-16T21:36:00.000-05:00

I recently pawed through my parents' Drawer of Important Documents, in search of my Social Security Card.^* Therein I came across many old and wonderful memories, including old stories I and my siblings had written, my various graduation certificates and diplomas, letters my parents had written after they had fought, etc. There was a fairly representative history of my development as a cartoonist, which demonstrated to me that I have squandered a lot of talent.

I also found my journal from first grade, in North Plainfield, N.J. Therein is recorded my great love for He-Man and Transformers, a chronicle of what I accomplished in art class earlier that day, and the anticipation, aftermath, and enjoyment of the spoils of Christmas. The modal entry was "Yesterday I was bord.[sic] I had nothing to do." I seem not to have mastered the distinction between "b" and "d" by that point.

In a separate pile I found a much later product, a bit of humorous writing from after I had overcome my b/d handicap; I believe I was fourteen. I am somewhat dismayed to see that neither my wit nor my diction has grown any sharper in a dozen intervening years. Anyhow, I include it here, for your delectation:

Vacation
We, being the human beings that we are, frequently need to urinate. This often causes stress in the form of bladder trouble, which is mistaken for stress at work. Then we become nervous wrecks (also attributed to stress at work) and shoot dead skunks with tin cans. This, too, is mistaken for stress at work. We then decide to leave work, and take a vacation.

So you make elaborate plans to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, but this will invariably be "rained out" by "rain". So you must make plans to visit another pleasant place, like grandma's house. This will usually mean a lot of cheek-pinching, and comments on how much little thirty-year old Timmy has grown.

You could visit someplace better, such as the Grand Canyon. This, we hear from our friend Mr. Alfred Geologist, is a tectonic formation resulting from erosion of the landscape due to the action of the Colorado river. To me, it looks like a big red ditch. A beautiful big red ditch, mind you, but a big red ditch nonetheless. Don't tell this to Alfred Geologist, because he is liable to hit you with an uppercut to the jaw.

Another delightful place is Grand Teton, which is just the opposite of Grand Canyon, being a mountain range. This wonderful area features such attractions as large rocks standing majestically in the background, making it the headquarters of half the world's postcard companies, and strange animals called moose which look and sound like cows but are not. One of the more interesting sights here is Jenny Lake, a three-mile wide lake which is remarkable for its clean water. Take many pictures of this water, especially if you live in New Jersey. This will tide you through the long months of drinking leaded water between vacations.

Of course, if you don't like nature, you can visit an amusement park, such as DisneyWorld, and get yourself chopped into little itty bitty pieces as the roller coaster mows over you where you fell onto the tracks after you went over that last loop.

Another alternative that I have not yet mentioned is a tropical vacation. This is simply where one takes a vacation in an area characterized by good climate and nice beaches. It is a good idea to bring with you a pair of sunglasses and a bag of Tostitos, because sunbathing is pretty boring, and you might as well make some money filming commercials while you are at it. It is also a good idea to bring items such as long underwear and a heavy parka, in case there is suddenly an Ice Age.

You can have your vacation where you pretend that you are doing something exciting for about a week, and then you must invariably return to your job, and do work. I find it deplorable how few children are willing to do work. They all want to relax, have a good time, have some grown person do the work. I think all the grown people should revolt, and overthrow their nine-year-old masters, and dump them in the Thames river to dissolve. I know this has no relevance to this article, but don't you think it's true?

At your job, you will of course be asked by your boss how your vacation was, and then sent to work photocopying a mound of papers big enough to fill the Titanic and enough typing to give you arthritis of the clavicle.

At this point, it would be a good idea to take a vacation.

(Continued)

^* Which I was seeking because I finally decided to get a cell phone^†, and they wouldn't give me a credit check without it.

^† I acknowledge that I am betraying some sort of principle by succumbing to social pressure and getting one of these things, but I am no longer certain what that principle is (willfulness?).

Space, endpoints

2006-07-12T13:51:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been playing a lot of video games. Actually, I've been playing a lot of video game: Halo 2, the $600 million-selling sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo is a sprawling space epic (or at least it tries to be - the format of first-person shooter is obviously somewhat restrictive). This is my first encounter with Bungie Software, which it seems has a long history of intricate games with detailed backstories and overstuffed plots. I can't say it's particularly inventive, since Halo is an agglomeration of hundreds of ideas pilfered from some of science fiction's best writers.^* But there's neat work in that assemblage itself, which I think earns it a place in the annals of worthy science fiction.

This leads me to ruminate on the central appeal of all good (non-dystopian) science fiction, which I think boils down to "narrative". Not the internal narrative of, e.g., the Halo trilogy, which is compelling in its own right, but the implied, grand narrative for human history. The idea that we have some kind of future at all that doesn't suck. Or rather, that's still tense and full of conflict and purpose, that offers new vistas and directions.

Hungering for this sort of narrative is arguably a pretty juvenile impulse, one which might prompt more sober individuals to tell you to "grow up", and possibly to "get a job". But I've never been afraid of juvenile impulses; I'm probably dangerously attracted to them.^† In this instance, I think the impulse has extraordinary merit.

True, we're hardly in a position to be thinking about such things. It's absurd to even conceive of historical trajectories for humanity when we're parching the ground beneath our feet, and the majority of humanity refuses to acknowledge the humanity of the rest of humanity. But you're never going to cure myopia by staring at the end of your nose. Grand ideas are what's needed, to draw the gazes of us ants away from the dirt and towards the sky. Where, after all, we want to end up, right? We don't want to stay in the dirt.

The grander, the better; preferably, they should be so massive they have their own gravity. So that, even while we're distracted by the idiocy of our lives - our nationalities, our property, our families, our jobs - the individual vectors of our trajectories will tend towards a single direction, and, eventually, hopefully, form a tide.

I realize this is somewhat of a discredited notion, and we're supposed to be living in the end of history where nothing at all happens except possibly the purchase of a new pair of Manolo Blahniks, but I'm tired of postmodernism shitting on the mere idea of imagination. We NEED to imagine something, even if it's false, unattainable, or hopelessly stupid. If we don't imagine something, we're listless and boring. (You may have observed this in your own life. When you cannot imagine your own future, you become unspeakably dull.)

All of which is to bring me around to my fucking point, which is: where do you think we're going? Where do you want us to end up?

^* It piqued my interest at first because it's set on a ringworld (the eponymous "Halo"), first conceived by Larry Niven in the book of the same name.

^† As Lao Tse said, "I don't grow up, I throw up. And when I look at you, I shut up." Insofar as "growing up" means calcification and death, it should be avoided.

Rig vote

2006-07-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

The House voted a few days ago to allow offshore drilling in all outer-continental shelves in U.S. territory. That is, everything more than 50 miles offshore is open for oil and gas exploration and drilling development. The region between 50 and 100 miles is subject to ban by individual states before a specified time deadline (2009 for oil, a single year for gas), but since the bill mandates that 50% of royalties must be paid out to states (instead of almost entirely to the federal government, as it is now), many states might choose to forgo such a ban.

It's unlikely that the Senate would pass anything so grandiose, since offshore drilling favors major opposition from environmental groups, but it's important to remember that this is all happening in the run-up to election season. This year high gas prices are sure to be an important point of debate^*, which will certainly contribute towards people making incredibly bad decisions in the name of easing the lives of consumers.

It therefore behooves us to review why offshore drilling is an incredibly bad idea.

Not so cute now, are ya?

Oil companies are fond of pointing out that oil spills, and offshore drilling in specific, make up a tiny fraction - less than 5% - of the total amount of petroleum pollution that gets into the ocean, and an even smaller fraction if you include natural seepage. Of course, in most of those situations the pollution is relatively diffuse and not nearly as destructive as in the case of an oil spill, when it coats everything and makes life very difficult for otters and other cute animals.

But never mind that; what concerns us is not improbable outlier events, but the routine activities of drilling. In brief: the basic protocol for oil exploration and drilling is: your rig (of whatever type) sets up where you want to drill. Then you cut into the ground, directing your drill where you want it to go until you've reached your source. After that you drop in tubes, seal it in place and start pumping.

The catastrophe you want to prevent here is blowout - when gases or fluids under pressure force their way out of the bore. Blowouts can be catastrophic. The worst oil spill in history occured in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Bay of Campeche when an exploratory well (Ixtoc I) blew out and was uncontrolled for nearly a year, spilling somewhere between 140 and 428 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The way you prevent blowouts is by maintaining pressure in the shaft using "drilling muds" or "drilling fluids". These are usually recirculated in the shaft and re-used, but a significant amount is deposited on the ocean floor. The high-density fluids used in drilling muds, as well as the drilling cuttings from the bore itself, may contain heavy metals like cadmium or mercury in order to give it weight. Needless to say, introducing such toxic metals into ocean environments is not healthy for them, especially in shallow-water environments. Drilling fluids also may contain extremely toxic hydrocarbon lubricants, although safer alternatives to many of these exist or are being developed.

A second important source of pollution is produced water released from the bore - this can contain hydrocarbons, metals, and most significantly, slightly radioactive compounds, like radium, which may precipitate out and settle onto the ocean floor.

I'm tired of saying this, but it's especially disgusting that bills like this one are being passed while there has been no substantial Congressional action to encourage conservation, which could probably offset the bulk of increased production from offshore drilling with relative ease. And, as has been continually pointed out, since oil is traded on a pretty ideal global market and most major oil companies are multinational, there is absolutely no difference in terms of price to the consumer to increasing production at home or abroad.

^* For some stupid fucking goddamn idiotic reason.

unparalleled

2006-07-07T13:26:00.000-05:00

Genuine, no-joke press release from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, dated yesterday:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

*Germany to Help Provide Clean Energy*

Contact: Roxanne Smith, (202) 564-43XX / XXXXX@epa.gov (media only);
Erin Birgfeld, (202) 343-90XX/ XXXXX@epa.gov (technical questions only)

(Washington, D.C. - July 6, 2006) Germany has become the 18th member of the
international Methane to Markets Partnership, a Bush Administration initiative
that promotes the recovery and use of methane to provide clean energy. Germany's
participation in the partnership will help reduce methane emissions and promote
global energy security.

"The Bush Administration has an unparalleled financial, international and
domestic commitment to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Voluntary
programs, like EPA's Methane to Markets Partnership, are achieving significant
reductions by taking methane waste and turning it into wealth," said EPA
Administrator Stephen L. Johnson. "By working with Germany to promote advances
in clean technology, President Bush is helping turn strong economic partners
into good global neighbors."

Hello, is this Erin Birgfeld? Yes, I have a technical question. If two lines are unparalleled, and one is going the right direction, which way is the other one going?

Gotta love those unparalleled commitments. It reminds me of two speedskaters, one bolting with determination for the finish line while the other pours salt on the ice, moons the camera, and wanders off into the crowd. "My commitment to victory is unparalleled!"

Or to put it another way (PDF):

German emissions are 18.5% below 1990 levels, within reach of its 21% emission reduction target. Germany is expected to meet its targets without the use of flexibility mechanisms such as international carbon trading. Ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has offered to set a target of reducing German emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2020 if the EU accepts a 30% reduction target. The new coalition government under Chancellor Angela Merkel has maintained a strong stance on climate change action...

As of 2003, the report says, Germany needed to cut another 3 percent from its carbon emissions to meet its Kyoto commitment. The USA needed to cut 21 percent, a number that rises with every record month for gasoline consumption. Hooray for April! We sure stuck it to Exxon that month!

Smells like election season

2006-07-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

Gosh, two terrorist plots in a month. The FBI at work, protecting the homeland.

The agency's top-notch cybersleuthing skills were on display. Just a day after a consultant pleaded guilty to hacking the bureau's computers and acquiring the password and social security number of each employee including the director! The FBI regained the advantage over cybercriminals. The bureau found these criminal masterminds by monitoring what my sources call "open Internet chat rooms."

Other sources, within the FBI, tell me that enforcement actions will increase in September. As schools reopen, college sophomores across the U.S. will be arrested for quoting aloud from the first paragraphs of The Communist Manifesto while preschoolers, having built tall towers out of wooden blocks and Legos, can expect to be questioned if they levy credible threats against the structures.

The agents who will be assigned to Operation Schoolyard will become available after the FBI disbands 110-member Unabomber task force. Its continued existence was criticized earlier this year after an agent found the bomber at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. The bomber was turned in by his brother in April, 1996, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Following the high ethical bar of my competitor, the New York Times, I must disclose why I granted these sources anonymity. They didn't want their names used because they are my imaginary friends and it would embarrass me to have everyone know what I call them. Right pooky-monster?

Summer photo season

2006-07-03T11:36:00.000-05:00

I just had to snap this off at the Triborough Bridge in New York.

I'm glad I took off my kaffiyeh.

Violence, violence!

2006-07-01T13:12:00.000-05:00

Dennis Perrin has a good bit about the latest nonsense in Israel/Palestine, including a nice debate between Norman Finkelstein and some guy from AIPAC.

Our own government has responded about as expected. This:

Israeli forces entered the southern Gaza Strip this past week as part of efforts to free [captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit]. Israeli forces also detained more than 60 officials of Hamas, the Islamic militant group, which won the last Palestinian election.

prompted this:

President Bush says the key to ending the crisis in the Gaza Strip is freeing [Shalit].

This, following Israel tearing in and shutting off all power in Gaza (read: hospitals and water supply).

Virgin deaths?

2006-07-01T11:46:00.000-05:00

Screw virgin births - how many people who live to puberty die as virgins? My guess - 0.7%. But I have no idea how to confirm this.

War crimes

2006-06-29T14:13:00.000-05:00

The U.S. government wanted to prosecute Osama bin Laden's driver, a dude named Hamdan, for war crimes. They wanted it so bad they went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to promote their interpretation of Congressional, Constitutional and U.S. treaty requirements. Oops - the court decided that the war crimes tribunal was itself a war crime, as it violated the Geneva Conventions. It's nice when hubris runs into itself, at least a little bit.

Press credentials

2006-06-29T11:56:00.000-05:00

The news has been wall-to-wall debates over whether the New York Times should lose its White House press passes because of its treasonous act of reporting on this "secret" organization along with the Wall Street Journal and L.A. Times. Leave aside the fact that this is the most ridiculous demagoguery ever: it is getting tremendous traction among the kind of people who vote in cable-TV call-in polls and is almost certainly a more popular idea than the idea of leaving Bush in charge of the country for another week.

I'm not going to argue against this idea. Plenty of smarter people have. Instead, I like to think about what would happen if they did lose their press credentials. I think it would be the best thing to happen to them since the Pentagon Papers. They now dedicate at least one reporter for half of every workday to sitting around in a crumbling little room transcribing non-denial denials and noncomittal assents from a guy who doesn't know, doesn't even want to know, squat about turkey. It's worse when the POTUS travels, as they have to send some fancy-pants reporter along to see -- usually nothing. It's partly what the wire reporters call deathwatch: you just need to be there in case the guy gets shot. But as far as news, it tends quickly to turn into stories about what the press was interested in or how the grounds are kept at Crawford, because the president and his flaks don't provide information. They barely provide entertainment. I doubt that a picture of the president on the cover of a newspaper sells as many copies as a picture of a pretty sunset.

Meanwhile, the White House press corps does more for the President than he does for them. They continue to quote his lies, put his ugly mug on the front page, and otherwise treat him like a celebrity and important character rather than the pathetic pawn he is. He needs them to prop up his image more than they need him to improve sales or to enhance truth.

Instead, that $100,000+ a year top-notch high-speed reporter could be spending day after day pursuing news containing has both information and entertainment value. Sell papers and support democracy at the same time.

Does Sy Hersh have a White House press pass? He might, but you can't tell from his stories. Still, he has helped the New Yorker become a serious news organ while exposing some of the worst crimes in Iraq, such as Abu Ghraib. How about it?

Why not give up the little plastic cards? The White House soon will learn -- they are much better off keeping you inside than forcing you to go out and write real news.

$600,000 and $1.25 will get you a bagel and cream cheese

2006-06-29T02:24:00.000-05:00

But it won't get you a good review from Andrew Bacevich. He reads liberal hawk Peter Beinart's new The Good Fight so we don't have to:

The Good Fight is insipid, pretentious and poorly written. At points it verges on incoherence. As history, it is meretricious. As policy prescription, it is wrongheaded. Beinart has perpetrated his fraud twice over.

I just wish Beinart would set me up with one of those $600,000 advances. For that kind of dough, I'd happily be insipid, pretentious and almost incoherent. Hell, I do it here for free.

Read a book!

2006-06-26T14:02:00.000-05:00

One of the problems with being poorly-read is that the occasional flashes of insight you might have on any particular subject are fragmented and disconnected, and at best represent pinpoints of understanding in what is most probably a vast corpus that has been explored and assembled into a huge body of knowledge and theory by hundreds of people, most of whom were far more clever than you are.

Exemplis gratia: I was about to write something for myself relating to something else^* when it occurred to me that there's really no mode of writing or speech that allows you to actually write to yourself. You're always writing to an imagined audience, maybe of a necessity since the whole enterprise of speech and writing involves communication, and one can't very well communicate something to one's self without a touch of dissociative identity disorder.

I thought this was a clever bit of insight, and I was about to congratulate myself on it and explore it further when it occurred to me that someone else had probably thought of it sometime in the fifteenth century and written a treatise on the subject. This was so disheartening that I immediately gave up thinking about it. Most of my interesting trains of thought are wrecked in this fashion.

^* No, you can't know what.

$39,000 more for the USPS

2006-06-26T04:29:00.000-05:00

Yes, the U.S. Postal Service, beleaguered by e-mail, abandoned by lovers, relegated to sadly delivering bills, jury summonses and credit card solicitations, still has a niche: carrying misinformed whackjobbery to the United Nations. The good news is these windnuts just donated $39,000 to one of my favorite institutions, one which they consider flatly horrible -- the ever-leveling democratic Post Office.

Draw the blawger

2006-06-19T17:37:00.000-05:00

I was just reading my daily dose of Jonathan Schwarz over at Tiny Revolution and it occurred to me that I had a mental image of what he looked like. This would be normal at a blerg like Bob Harris' or Saheli*'s, where there are photos of the blawgers, but I do it with everyone. When I saw Tom Tomorrow at a book reading, I was suprised at how little he looked like his characters. I expected him to be a white man in a plain beige suit with slicked down hair, sort of a much geekier Tom Wolfe, and to be a bit short and squat. I won't ruin the surprise for everyone, but let's just say I was right. He was white. Similarly, I met regular commenter Saurav, who to my eyes was much more hyper, rather than laconic, than I expected, and just generally more of a clean-cut New Yorker rather than a dreadlocked chain-wielding punk. Among other differences.

What about the rest of us? What do we look like? Describe your favorite blawger-you-never met. I want to know. Later I'll post my description of Schwarz.