The morning after the eve of destruction
This end-of-summer pause, as the headlines fly about the latest bombing attack in Iraq, is an appropriate occasion to revisit my "Eve of Destruction" post, which occasioned so much comment back in March. In particular, I look back at my summary of Thomas Powers' prescient prediction of the likely course of events following from a U.S. invasion of Iraq: "...a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes."

So here we are. The daily death of American soldiers has now become so commonplace it does not merit much coverage. The postwar period has now cost more lives than the active war. I trust that the reader who mocked my use of the phrase "sitting ducks" is now reconsidering his tone; what other phrase makes sense? Iraqi democracy does not seem in the offing in the short or medium term. We are incapable of protecting moderate Iraqis from extremists; we are incapable of protecting our own troops from random assault. Major bombings, like that of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad or today's atrocity at the Najaf mosque, are on the rise.

Is it more money that we need? Since the Bush administration has made cutting taxes its top priority, it refuses even to admit that any Iraq-related expenses should be included in its budget forecasts. Is it more troops that we need? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld insist that that's not the problem. We should just sit tight and let them handle it. They Have A Plan. I guess they're just not sharing it with us. Or with our allies. Or with the Iraqis.

There's a limited set of possibilities here: Either the government has no strategy at all; or it has one that is not working; or it has one that is so devious or immoral or inexplicable that it cannot reveal it to its own citizens.

There is a monstrous credibility gap here -- yes, the phrase is from the Vietnam era, the last time the U.S. government undertook to justify a chronically deteriorating military situation by making increasingly incredible statements. It took years for the press and the public to cotton to the credibility gap then; this time around, we ought to be a little more savvy. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:56:56 AM -

My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:

1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!

2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them

3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them

4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer

5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies

6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers

7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears
More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:40:28 AM -

This does not appear to be a joke -- I guess it proves there is a market for anything.

Always be prepared to handle life's little disasters. [Memepool]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:15:09 AM -

Suppose that you go to a Whole Foods-style supermarket, at which all manner of incredibly delicious gourmet items are for sale. You spend $200 to stock the fridge. But really you ought to eat all the fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods while they are fresh. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Suppose that you go to a reasonably nice restaurant, costing $20-30 per person. The menu will list an incredibly tempting array of food. It all sounds so great that you order an appetizer and a main dish. You have a tough time deciding among the main dishes and you're sad that you can't order two. The appetizer is actually big enough that you are beginning to feel full when the main dish comes. The main dish is heroic in size, the kind of feast that Homer describes the heroes at Troy as having consumed. You're not really all that hungry but you ordered it so you feel like you should eat at least half. The result: massive gluttony and weight gain.

Eat at home or eat at a restaurant. Either way you get fat.

The solution is McDonald's. If you can remember one piece of medical advice from my brother ("Don't eat anything a caveman wouldn't have eaten"), you skip the fries. For a beverage it is unsweetened iced tea or Diet Coke. So far, zero calories. All you need now is a sandwich. The bread isn't really on the Atkins diet but otherwise a McDonald's sandwich is vastly smaller and lower in calories than anything you'd get in an upscale restaurant. Best of all, the menu at McDonald's won't tempt you into excess. The sandwiches aren't all that delicious. If you're really hungry they can taste pretty good but have you ever been sad that you couldn't order both the Big Mac and the Quarter Pound with Cheese?

Market opportunity: write a book entitled "The McDonald's Diet" that explains how to lose 5 lbs/week eating only in McDonald's. By philg@mit.edu (Philip Greenspun). [Philip Greenspun Weblog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 7:32:41 PM -

Professor Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, explores how our increasingly intimate interactions with technology are shaping us. In particular, the computer and the technologies extending from it are not merely tools, she says; rather, they are objects that are changing the way we see ourselves and our world in profound ways. We thus will have an increasingly "evocative" relationship with our machines, something for which we don't even have a conscious vocabulary. The advent of our "computer culture" has also created new possibilities for our engagement with each other. What is needed, Professor Turkle says, is a psychoanalytic theory to examine this along the same principles as the one attributed to Freud, which also dealt with "object relations," those objects being the roles that people play in our lives.

I have to say that thinking of robots as my "companions" in my old age pushed the limits of my imagination; this despite my love of Star Trek and its artificial but sentient characters. The kicker was considering the following:

The possibilities of engaging emotionally with creatures that will not die, whose loss we will never need to face, presents dramatic questions that are based on current technology...

This is an order of magnitude more profound than how the automobile changed our "relationship" with our social and cultural spaces. And what's more, before we can think of this, what should we make of the very idea of what we understand as a "machine" playing the role of a companion to living, breathing humans? One could say that Professor Turkle is being alarmist by drawing our attention to the challenge that this poses to our assumptions of "the irreducibility of human beings" since in all likelihood most of us are not going to have to deal with this in our lifetimes; besides, most people on the planet do have more basic needs that are going unmet. Well, technology in various forms is, for good or bad, making its way to the god-forsaken corners of the world (think satellite dishes on bull-drawn carts in Indian villages that do not have roads or running water).

Such a discourse in our often over-prejudiced cultures tends to veer into value judgements on the amorphous idea of "Technology." While judgement may very well be called for, it is premature before we have grasped what it is that we are judging. A way to get our hands around these emerging promises of technology is precisely what Professor Turkle is proposing.

Among the ways in which computers have changed our lives that we do know is the ubiquity of this vast, awesome network of information, ideas and, yes, communities of people to which we have all come to belong. When my hard-drive crashed a few weeks ago, I was told that sending it off to the manufacturer for repair or replacement would mean that I would not have a functioning machine for over two weeks. That was unacceptable, I had just begun to blog and I could not tolerate being cut off from the Internet for that long because I had barely begun to get noticed and such a protracted absence, in blog-time, could classify me as "churned." In contrast, if my car ended up in the shop for the same amount of time, I'd live with the inconvenience of a long commute to work by public transportation for those two weeks. You may judge me to be obsessed but the fact remains that my connection with the blogging "community" has come to provide enough fulfillment that I'd want to minimize my time away from it.

While I'm on the subject of blogging, here's one of the "right-on!" moments I had when reading Professor Turkle's lecture:

For some, computation offers the promise of perfection, the fantasy that "If you do it right, it will do it right, and right away." Writers can become obsessed with fonts, layout, spelling and grammar checks. What was once a typographical error can be, like Hester Prynne's Scarlet Letter, a sign of shame.

I took up blogging in order to build my writing muscles but as soon as I started I found myself staying up every night making my templates look just right, which of course they never will. While I was doing that, I'd check out other blogs and lament to all who'd listen that most blogs out there valued form over substance and, by the way, I still think that.

My other "right-on!" moment was:

Cyberspace opens the possibility for identity play, but it is very serious play. People who cultivate an awareness of what stands behind their screen personae are the ones most likely to succeed in using virtual for personal and social transformation.

Many moons ago, when I first got on the Internet, I was excited about being online as someone I wasn't. I wanted to liberate those aspects of me that for some reason I had been unwilling to show the light of day. Turns out that I only needed to do that once. I ended up going along with someone else's game, playing someone I hadn't intended to play and doing so convincingly. That's all it took to begin getting used to those hidden aspects and incorporating them into my "real" persona. Yes, I'm making it sound too easy and no, I ain't gonna give any details but you get the point...

In the industrialized, urban cultures, we've now accepted the tinkering of our personalities through psychopharmacological agents. I know the argument that this ain't the tinkering of one's personality as much as it's bringing forth the personality that has been subdued due to chemical weirdness in the brain. I'll buy that too, which is to say that it is not evident which is the "real" personality, the pre or the post. As Professor Turkle mentions in her conclusion, does this amount to reducing the mind to a biochemical machine?

So there we have it. My own, little psychoanalytic investigation is underway. I was a (very unhappy) mechanical engineer in my previous life. I like to say that I prefer being a few degrees of abstraction away from the nuts and bolts of reality, which is what computer science offered me. This distance however does give me a clearer view of reality...I think.

--aslam

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:23:08 PM -

Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq... (Brian Eno). Lessons in How to Lie About Iraq... (Brian Eno) [Common Dreams]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:44:17 PM -

One of the books I'm delighted to have had the chance to read here is Bruce Schneier's latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. I reviewed three or four drafts of this while Bruce was working on it, and I am completely delighted with how it turned out.

In Beyond Fear, Schneier has utterly demystified the idea of security with a text aimed squarely at nontechnical individuals. He takes his legendary skill at applying common sense and lucidity to information-security problems and applies it to all the bogeymen of the post-9/11 world, and asks the vital question: What are we getting in exchange for the liberties that the Ashcroftian authorities have taken away from us in the name of security?

This is possibly the most important question of this decade, and that makes Schenier's book one of the most important texts of the decade. This should be required reading for every American, and the world would be a better place if anyone venturing an opinion on electronic voting, airline security, roving wiretaps, or any other modern horror absorbed this book's lessons first. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:11:29 PM -

In 1694, an 80-gun British warship called the HMS Sussex set sail for southern France loaded with as much as 3 million pounds sterling and 6 tons of gold. The bounty was intended for the Duke of Savoy, a bribe to keep him allied with England in its war against Louis XIV. The Duke never did get the money. Severe gales whipped up off the north coast of Africa. The Sussex foundered along with a dozen other ships in the British fleet, taking all its riches (and the lives of 1,200 crew members) to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Ultimately, the Duke threw his support to Louis XIV, and England's battle with France raged for seven more years before ending in a stalemate.

The plight of the Sussex left behind two huge questions, the first for historians: What if the mission had been successful? It's conceivable that England would have beaten back Louis XIV and annexed parts or all of France. If so, the British government might have been less concerned with a group of 13 rebellious colonies across the Atlantic and allowed them to split off to form a commonwealth - like Canada. The other question, for the rest of us: What happened to all that loot?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 2:27:20 PM -

Joe Jennet (my blogshare patron) is starting a new blog devoted to the BlogShare virtual economic system:

Getting Started. I've just released the site to get it listed at BlogShares while I'm still getting it all together. More coming soon... [ShareBlogs]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 10:52:48 AM -

Posted by Candidia Cruikshanks

From Vicki Robin in Simple Living via Indigo: We must begin to talk about our consumption and challenge the conspiracy of silence. We can't solve a problem we won't acknowledge. Challenge yourself. Challenge others. Risk being uncomfortable. Risk offending others. Ask:

• Should we be able to buy whatever we can afford, no matter what the effect on others or the earth?

• Should we allow credit cards to lure us into excessive debt?

• When is personal consumption a matter of public concern?

• Who or what will set limits for us, if we won't do it ourselves?

• Does overconsumption really make us happy?

Very helpful. I have cut The Happy Tutor's pay in half. Dick Minim is on bread and water. With the money I save I am going to hire policmen to follow Vicki Robin around and stop her before she buys a second cup of coffee.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:34:34 AM -

# [7F13] "Here Comes the Coast Guard"
# [8F01] "Preacher With a Shovel" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F03] "The Revenge of Abe Lincoln"
# [8F03] "The Wackiest Covered Wagon in the West"
# [8F14] "Calling All Quakers" (with Dolores Montenegro)
# [8F14] "Gladys The Groovy Mule"
# [8F14] "Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die" (1)
# [9F07] "Dial M for Murderousness"
# [9F07] "The Erotic Adventures of Hercules"
# [9F20] "'P' is for Psycho"
# [9F20] "The President's Neck is Missing!"

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 12:58:36 AM -

Wednesday, August 13, 2003 1:22 PM. SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF ENGLAND

"Imagine Tom Clancy mated with William Gibson, with James Michener acting as a midwife, and you begin to get the idea."

--SEATTLE TIMES review of CRYPTONOMICON


[William Gibson]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:36:31 PM -

Spotlight on Julie/Julia
Congratulations to Julie Powell for the lengthy and well-deserved profile in today's New York Times. For the record, I should note that I said a lot of nice things about the Julie/Julia project to the Times writer, Amanda Hesser, that did not make it into her piece, which sensibly focused on Ms. Powell, Ms. Child and the food. And that, contrary to what the Times article says, "Salon's blog editor" is not now nor has it ever been my title. These blogs don't have editors, as most of you know! That's sort of the point... [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:45:28 AM -

More grist for Mill
Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty." It's part of the series we've been running called "Documents of Freedom" -- a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here's the full list so far.)

David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill's too-rational vision: "Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism's calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle."

I think it's probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us -- steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives' optimism. And yet it's also clear to me that "On Liberty" intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways -- to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 4:15:10 PM -

I've used clinical hypnosis since I was 12. Most recently, I saw a hypnotherapist to address a five-year bout of writer's block that ended when I was 26, and then, a month ago, to help me quit smoking. In both instances, I've had unqualified success. I started really selling fiction in earnest in my mid-twenties, and I have gone a month without a cigarette and without any serious cravings (I've been using the patch to cope with the physical component, but I've tried that before, unsuccessfully -- the hypnosis addresses the habit, not the addiction).

Hypnosis is really fascinating to me. It comes down to playing games with your own mind. In the case of smoking, for instance, the point is to come to seeing yourself not as an ex-smoker (someone who resists the urge to smoke every moment of every day), but as a non-smoker -- someone who doesn't have the urge. I'm a non-drinker. I'll have some Irish whisky at Christmas and chamagne at New Year's and a martini at my brother's wedding, but I won't drink a drop otherwise, and I don't miss it. Getting to that place with cigs, and as quickly as I have, after 18 years of pack-a-day smoking, was pretty cool. Made me feel like I'd attained root on my own brain.

(My hypnotherapist isn't taking on new clients, so please don't ask for a referral)

Last year, Stanford University psychiatric researcher David Spiegel used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to watch changes in brain function in volunteers who were highly hypnotizable.

The hypnotized volunteers were told to see colour. Then, regardless of whether or not the researchers showed them colour, the areas of the visual cortex that registers colour would fire. When the researchers told them to see "grey" objects, the volunteers had less activity in the colour zones of the brain.

"When they believed they were looking at colour, the part of their brain that processes colour vision showed increased blood flow," said Spiegel, who is presenting hypnosis research at the Toronto conference today.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:19:08 AM -

by Steven Berlin Johnson

Attention Please, May We Please Have Your Attention

One of the other personal insights that comes out of thinking about yourself through the lens of neuroscience is an increased awareness of the different mental states you cycle through in a given day. The general categories -- sleepy, alert, energetic, thoughtful -- break into more precise sub-categories, like the folkloric tales of Eskimos and their rich vocabulary for snow. Subtle shifts of attention and awareness seem more vivid, because you know something about the neurological changes behind them.

One way to appreciate these different states is to take any number of attention tests, designed to pinpoint your particular skills at the various subsystems that make up the macro category of attention. You have systems that specialize in "sustain": remaining focused on a single item for extended stretches of time; and systems dedicated to "encoding": transferring that incoming data to your working memory.  Each of the sensory inputs has its own channels as well: so you can be very skilled at visual encoding, but weak at auditory sustain. You can take tests to evaluate your skills at these and other attention tasks. Learning your strengths and weaknesses can help you compensate in the appropriate situations, at least until the neuroceuticals arrive to improve our weak links directly.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 8:49:15 PM -

Hey Barlow-San

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:12:11 AM -

What if more of us started writing down the obvious in black and white?

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:02:39 AM -

Would Somebody Please Explain to Me....

Would somebody please explain to me how it can be that Fox polls routinely have George W. Bush's approval-minus-disapproval rating twenty percentage points higher than Zogby? I mean, this isn't rocket science: this is polling. If I wanted to generate such huge differences--differences that dwarf sampling standard deviations at least five-fold--I wouldn't know how to go about it. How do they do it?

[Semi-Daily Journal]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 11:32:44 PM -

"Candidia"

On the Price of Global Prsoperity

I love reading this crap. Indigo, if Nature listened to you, we would all be slime molds. We make progress by reproducing the strong and eliminating the weak. Why should my heart bleed for the middle class programmers? They don't support the poor. I don't support them. Yet through the Miracle of the Market, who benefits most? The poor progammers in India! They get the jobs, and I get the in-the-money-options. The good just keep on getting better. And you, Indigo, will always be a loser.  

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:36:59 PM -

''[Expletive] you. Stay the [expletive] out of my bag you [expletive] sucker. Have you found a [expletive] bomb yet? No, just clothes. Am I right? Yea, so [expletive] you.''

You know, the more I think about this the worse it gets. The TSA is poormouthing at Congress, saying that it's run out of money and can't adequately defend our skies, and yet it can spare its highly trained crack professionals to go chasing off on ridiculous power-flexing exercises like this?

And before anyone posts the inevitable, "But the kid showed poor judgement in putting that note in his luggage," comment in the Discuss link, let me point out three things:

1. He is a kid; kids are supposed to have poor judgement -- that's why we don't let them vote. If our national security depends on teenagers abstaining from foolishness, we are doomed.
2. The TSA screeners are adults. What's more, they're adults who are supposed to be professional risk-assessors. If the people who found that note couldn't evaluate its risk any better than they did at Logan airport, we are doomed.
3. Look me in the screen and tell me that you haven't had the exact same thought while having some blank-eyed bureaucrat rummaging through your dirty underwear. If that sentiment endangers aircrafts, we are doomed.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 9:12:11 PM -

Dear Japanese people:

Please stop exploring your sexuality. It really freaks us out.

Love, American People.

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:16:18 PM -

This was just too funny to not share - it's Zen Judaism!

"Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with posture like that.

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: get rid of the motorcycle. What were you thinking?

The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao is not Jewish.

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkes." [PeteBevin.com, from the book Zen Judaism by David M. Bader]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 3:36:32 AM -