Another potential effect of global warming

Just read an interesting article at NewScientist.com (available to subscribers only). It discussed the potential geological effects of global warming which could result from the changing distribution of mass on the Earth's surface as ice melts and flows into the ocean. I.e. less pressure where the ice was located, more pressure beneath the deepening seas.

The climate interacts with the Earth's crust via the changing mass of water and ice that is shifted around the planet. The pressure of water and ice on the crust is considerable: 1 cubic metre of water weighs 1 tonne, while the same volume of ice weighs slightly less, up to 0.9 tonnes. With this in mind, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the loading and unloading of the Earth's crust by ice or water can trigger seismic and volcanic activity and even landslides. Dumping the weight of a kilometre-thick ice sheet onto a continent or removing a deep column of water from the ocean floor will inevitably affect the stresses and strains on the underlying rock.

Apparently the geological record shows significant increases in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions during periods of significant climate change, namely the beginnings and endings of ice ages.

Who knew.

The June 2006 issue of Scientific American also had an interesting column on global warming titled "The Flipping Point." Michael Shermer, a self-described "environmental sceptic," relates the evidence that had him become a believer.

UPDATE ON AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Another who knew: An Inconvenient Truth doesn't open in the SF Bay Area until 6/2! So far it's only screening in New York and L.A. Lots of reviews and other updates on their blog.

Another "Inconvenient Truth" review

A balanced review from Gregg Easterbrook at slate.com.

Waking the sleeping giant

Why do I write?

I've been asked that question recently, and I ask it of myself. And I sometimes wonder if some of my recent posts, such as those about the NSA's domestic survelliance and data mining programs, seem too negative and unaligned with Torqopia's mission:

"Copia" is Latin for "abundance," and this blog explores my belief that abundance is all around us. We live in a world of infinite possibilities, and we have choice about what shows up in our lives. I write about a wide range of topics, and common themes are individual freedom and a world that works for everyone.

In 2003 I took Wisdom Unlimited, a ten month course that explores the question, "What if the most important thing about who we are is not what's going on inside of our heads but what is coming out of our mouths?" Through ongoing homework assignments and weekly course events, participants become aware of what they are saying and how closely it is related to what other members of their immediate community--those they are speaking to on a regular basis--are saying. They look at the age of their conversations and begin to see that much of what they say they've been saying for a long time, often since childhood. This awareness gives participants opportunities to upgrade those conversations and bring all of their adult capacities to their interactions with others. As we say in the course, "If you want a new life, say new things."

This year I am assisting with Wisdom; my primary role is to work with my participants to keep the material present for them between course sessions. At the beginning of the course, each of us assisting in this role were asked who we wanted to be known as during the course. While pondering the question, I remembered sitting in a course session back in 2003, feeling totally alive and inspired by the discourse and the people sharing in it. I looked out the window and saw cars backed up into the distance on I-5 in Seattle, and it occurred to me that humanity was a sleeping giant. I was reminded of the opening scenes in The Gods Must be Crazy which shows some of the absurdities of modern civilization: people rushing from place to place, often engaged in repetitive, mind-dulling tasks, disinterested to those around them.

So when asked last month who I wanted to be known as, I answered, "I want to be known as someone waking the sleeping giant."

What does that mean? It means that I think it's important that people lift their heads up from their day to day existence and try to get some sense of the bigger picture, that they attempt to gain some understanding of what happens at a distance from them but is nevertheless intricately connected to their own existence. In America few people any more are involved with, let alone aware of, how their food is produced or where it comes from. Food... what could be more basic to our lives, and yet it has become simply a product, and one which resembles less and less what people a hundred years ago would have recognized as food.

Waking the sleeping giant also means having people seek some deeper knowledge of the world and to engage in asking What? and How? and Why? It means to think and discuss and ponder on life's mysteries, not to simply accept what one is told.

And most importantly, it means that people recognize that they have choice in their lives. And not simply between Coke or Pepsi, but real choice in who they get to be and what they get to do. And to get that in having choice, they also have responsibility for their lives.

None of this is to say that there's anything wrong with all of the day to day activities that people--including me--are engaged in. All of that stuff is our lives. What I'm saying, though, is that all of that stuff isn't enough to be fully alive as a human being.

And that is why I write. To share information. To offer another perspective. To remind people that abundance--and miracles--are all around them. To quote Wayne Dyer, "Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into."

And I also write to warn. I have been fascinated by science and technology since I was a small child. I absolutely love it. But science and technology are neutral entities; we decide how to use them. And I do have real concerns about how we're using technology.

I think it is dangerous for us to think we can outsmart nature and genetically engineer our food crops... I doubt that anyone has a true sense of the potential consequences. Our ecosystem is amazingly complex and interconnected, and we always seem to leave out one critical factor when we make our calculations.

I worry that we've built our civilization's foundation on faulty assumptions about resources and their costs, not to mention our ability to affect the world with our activities. Systems in balance don't always change linearly; they can sometimes reach a tipping point where an equilibrium is disturbed and conditions change rapidly. Even while we may be reaching the end of cheap fossil fuels, we may have already irreversibly altered the climate in ways we will regret.

And most of all I am troubled when technology is used in ways that chip away at our individual freedoms and at the very essense of democracy. Covert surveillance and drone weapons both diminish our humanity, the one taking away our ability to simply be without being observed, the other reducing our inhibitions to kill. It is all well and good to say that extreme measures must be taken to protect the country in the face of new threats, but where does it end? And what are we protecting? Is the objective simply to keep people alive? Or is it to allow people to live?

I see no simply answers to these questions. We have released many genies from many bottles, and there is only one way to go back: a complete and total collapse of civilization. So barring that, how do we move forward, protecting both our own liberties and cultivating true freedom in the world? What happens when the inevitable happens, that the technologies we have developed--nuclear weapons, genetic engineering--are used against us? Does the state clamp down even more tightly, squeezing ever more humanity from the citizenry? Does the pendulum continue to swing from conservative to liberal as we search for answers to the questions of the day? Or does technology give someone the power to arrest the swing of the pendulum at one of its extremes, locking us in to some unending, dreary, authoritarian future?

I don't have the answers, but that is not to say that they don't exist. Abundance is all around us, and so are the solutions. They are embodied in humanity, in the sleeping giant that only has to wake up in order to say something new.

And so I write.

An Inconvenient Truth -- in theaters now

It's in theaters now... An Inconvenient Truth opens today. The website is requesting that people pledge to see it opening weekend since the theater industry--like most of American business--has such a short term mindset. I pledged to take 5 people with me... so if you are in the SF Bay Area, watch out! I'm coming after you. :-)

Check out Seed magazine's review and comments on Al Gore from Arianna Huffington.

Don't spy on me

The ACLU has launched a nationwide campaign against the NSA domestic data mining program. To join in, click here to send a letter to the FCC.

Open the government...

I found OpenTheGovernment.org today via the Huffington Post, and their Statement of Values fits closely with many of the things that I've been writing about lately. I added my name as a signatory.

What initially caught my eye was their brief video; it highlights the many areas of public policy where the Bush administration is withholding information. Click on the "Are we safer in the dark?" graphic on their homepage.

RELATED STORIES

• Attorney General Gonzales defended the collection of domestic phone records, saying that that data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
• USA Today reports that the NSA is not simply looking for phone calls between specific individuals but rather looking for patterns of calls which match predicted terrorist communications. I.e. anyone's calls may trigger an NSA alarm if the pattern matches what they are looking for.

OTHER NEWS

• The latest Bush administration exercise of broad executive power has raised Constitutional concerns amongst GOP congressional leaders, even though the target of the FBI raid was a Democratic representative.
• While I've never been much of a pothead, this report may have many who are breathing more easily. :-)

Bizarre... and scary!

I just checked out Force Ministries' website... too strange! But here's the DailyKos post where I heard about them, which moves them into the realm of the creepy.

NSA UPDATE

The FCC issued a statement that it is unable to investigate complaints of telecoms handing over phone records to the NSA because it cannot obtain classified material.

NSA and other updates

The latest on the NSA domestic data mining and surveillance story from DefenseTech, including a link to Wired's piece on evidence provided by a former employee about AT&T's cooperation with the spy agency.

NPR has a page summarizing some of the legal arguments around the NSA wiretapping story that surfaced last December.

THE "PROSECUTING REPORTERS FOR ESPIONAGE" story actually showed up a month ago in The New York Times. And while most mainstream media outlets reported on Gonzales' comments, few had editorials. The Washington Post did.

THE PRICE OF ETHANOL DOESN'T REFLECT government subsidies to corn farmers. But then the price of gasoline doesn't reflect the military costs of keeping petroleum flowing from the Middle East, either.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY... relevant both for its content as well as the fact that Joseph McCarthy began his public anti-communism battle on May 22, 1949, and Edward R. Murrow prominently attacked McCarthy's tactics 5 years later on See It Now, stating:

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Clergy for Fairness say "no" to the Federal Marrriage Amendment

The New York Times is reporting that Clergy for Fairness, an interfaith coalition of clergy members, has started a petition drive to urge Congress to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment.

A vote in the Senate is currently scheduled for the week of June 5.

Besides the petition, CFF's website also has sample sermons for a variety of faiths and postcards that people can send to their Senators.

The Human Rights Campaign also has a postcard campaign targeted at defeating the FMA.

The Gospel of Judas... reviewed

Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish pointed me at a fascinating review of The Gospel of Judas, the new book that contains both the text of this recently translated 1600 year old gospel and information about the early history of the Christian church to place it in context.

As most anyone with whom I have discussed religion has heard me say, the Bible can either be a spiritual guide to the mysteries of what it is to be human, or it can simply be a list of whom to throw stones at. These days far too many people let it simply be the latter. The authors of this review are clearly in the former camp. From the review:

The understanding that this gospel gives its readers of themselves is complex. Its theology of good and evil is far from a simple, world-hating dualism; one could argue, for example, that it presents a more nuanced universe than the New Testament Gospel of John, with its stark images of darkness and light, divinity versus the devil. The Gospel of Judas teaches its readers that they were created by inferior angels, yet in the divine image of perfect humanity; that they have the potential to reclaim their authentic heavenly identity, and also the potential to die without ever realizing who they really are. Salvation in this text is certainly related to knowledge and revelation, but it is also a matter of ethics.

First Amendment under fire

Earlier today I posted on the importance of monitoring our government, given the power it now has over nearly every aspect of our lives.

I missed a story that has been developing since Sunday when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared on ABC's "This Week." During his interview, Gonzales stated that some laws on the books would allow the government to prosecute journalists who reported on classified information.

DailyKos published part one (and now part two) of a two part piece on this attack on the First Amendment. Here are two powerful quotes, the first written by Supreme Court Hugo Black in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case:

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.

And the second from Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes, writing in 1937:

The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.

It is easy to forget in these troubled times that the cause which so many men and women have valiantly fought and died for is not simply the safety of those back home. The American Revolution was not born out of fear and a yearning for security. The United States was created on the principle that the people, and not the government, are sovereign. Almost any form of government--monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy--can ensure the security of a nation. But only a government "of the people, by the people, for the people" can provide the liberty that George Bush asserts "is the right and hope of all humanity."

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The end of the period?

As a gay man I don't have many occasions to be concerned with menstruation (many, many years ago my good friend Andrew and I spent a car ride to L.A. coming up with alternative meanings for "menstruation" and other words which just didn't have much use in gay conversation).

Still, I found this article fascinating as it's a phenomenon that I've been completely unaware of: the use of birth control pills for eliminating women's monthly periods.

Another kind of domestic surveillance

Given the size, reach, and power of the federal government, the necessity of monitoring our elected leaders, the laws they are passing, and the resulting bureacracy is more clear than ever. When bills are hundreds of pages long, the average citizen--already caught up in his or her own daily race--has no hope of keeping up with what's going on in Washington. Meanwhile the mainstream news media, particularly on television, continue to transform themselves into entertainers and provide little in-depth analysis.

In The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, author David Brin argues that the coming ubiquity of surveillance in our society doesn't necessarily result in a loss of freedom. As long as we are all watching each other--and watching the government--technology may actually safeguard our liberties.

While I've only read reviews of the book and not the book itself, I remain skeptical that the citizenry is much of a match for the government, especially post-9/11 (Brin's book was published in 1998). Having said that, the only sane course of action for the citizens in a democratic nation is to remain alert, to question, and to share information with our fellows. And given our government's scope, ten million pairs of eyes are better than ten thousand. (The blogosphere has a real role here.)

This morning I ran across an interesting site run by the Center for Media and Democracy. They have two projects which drew my interest:

• SourceWatch, a collaborative wiki which aims to produce a directory of the people and organizations involved in shaping public debate
• Congresspedia, a component of SourceWatch that bills itself as "the citizen's encyclopedia on Congress"

Both sites allow anyone to contribute information but have a paid editor and a strict policy of requiring authoritative references.

For an example, see their page on "network neutrality" to get a sense of the debate on whether internet providers, like the telcos, should be required to treat all data the same regardless of who sent it. The site also details how much money from those companies various members of Congress have received and how they have been voting.

Update on McCain and his commencement speech

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, Senator John McCain chose to give the same commencement speech at three different universities this year: Liberty University (as I noted in an earlier post), Columbia, and the New School.

Apparently his speech was not well received at the New School in New York. Jean Rohe, one of the student speakers at the commencement ceremony there, took advantage of the fact that she knew exactly what McCain would say and used her time to challenge him directly. Here is her story and her speech.

BEST OF TORQOPIA

For readers new to Torqopia, here are a few posts which will introduce you to the range of topics that I write about:

• Waking the sleeping giant (the context for why I write)


• You are what you eat


• Circle of life


• The middle


• This moment, and you, are unique


• Music, memory, and youth


• They come when they come


• I, robot


• This too shall pass


• Choice, freedom, and deja vu


• Images from the seventh grade


• 1,000 miracles a day


• Housing and happiness


• Fill 'er up with ethyl, uh, make that ethanol???

And for the latest, go back to the Torqopia homepage.

Food notes

I recently ran across an article in The New York Times which profiled Armandino Batali, the owner of Salumi, a Seattle charcuterie. He is being given credit to be the first to cure culatellos, known as "the prince of hams," here in the United States.

I forwarded the article to my foodie friend Seth. (Seth, incidentally, was responsible for my lunchtime entree today: the tasty skirt steaks he procured from Travis, his meat supplier who has a booth at the weekly Crocker Galleria farmer's market.)

The Times article included this comment from food writer Edward Behr:

"The Italian government and the European Union," as Mr. Behr reported with disappointment, "threaten ever more stringent standards, usually in the guise of improved sanitation, and even when the costs of the changes aren't prohibitive, the new methods tend to eliminate the precise qualities that make the traditional products superior."

Seth had this to say about the article, and I thought his comments were worth passing on:

Perhaps they're (meaning the government, prompted by huge agribusiness) threatening more stringent standards precisely to shift the business from small family to huge agribusinesses, in an effort to eliminate a category of competitor. The debate gets focused on topics like clealiness, modernization, etc - never mind that there's plenty of evidence that the methods are safe (at least in the context that they are practiced e.g. not with industrially-raised animals). It's an artisanal product made with incredible attention to detail, pretty close to the opposite system of what is considered modern in our food business.

Sort of similar to the discussions advocating produce irradiation here - what family farm is going to be able to afford the gear to do it (or even the space for it)? A parallel to foie gras discussions, too - make the issue not about it being a delicacy or different by any other qualitative aspect, but rather about cruelty to the animal (neglecting to do any followup investigation like how cruel is it objectively, or relative to practices orders of magnitude more common and results widely consumed).

If Kraft had an opportunity to put out of business all the micro artisan cheesemakers in one fell swoop, wouldn't the folks at Kraft be obligated to make that effort, expanding potential future market share or some other maximizing-stockholder-value silliness? (I'm crossing my fingers Cowgirl and MarinFrenchCheeseCo stay below their radar.)

SPEAKING OF BIG AGRIBUSINESS, there has been evidence for some time that industrial farms, as well as other sources of organic pollutants, are having an adverse effect on wildlife: feminization of male organisms, changing ratios of male and female offspring, disrupted development, and declining populations. Now Scientific American reports that recent research is providing a new explanation for the dramatic rise in twin births in the United States: the use of growth hormone on cattle to increase their milk and meat yield. It seems that growth hormone in the diet increases the amount of insulin-like growth factor in the bloodstream, and that in turn, increases ovulation. Women who drink a single glass of milk a day from cows treated with growth hormone experience a 10% rise of the growth factor in their systems.

Concerned? Buy organic milk or milk that specifically states that it doesn't contain rBGH or rBST hormones.

Fill 'er up with ethyl, uh, make that ethanol???

I've been following the discussion of ethanol as a fuel for awhile now, and it's interesting how much momentum the idea of turning corn into fuel is gaining. The general belief that I've always had, which to some degree originated with the research of Cornell professor David Pimentel, is that ethanol as a fuel results in a net energy loss, i.e. that more energy is used to plant, harvest, and process corn than contained in the resulting fuel. His analysis isn't universally accepted, however, as noted in this blogpost about the government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's response to some of Pimentel's findings.

Iowa farmers and big agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland are moving rapidly to capitalize on the wave, sparking a building boom of processing plants based on the current technology, the one that Pimentel believes is ultimately a step backwards.

Morningstar, on the other hand, is recommending that investors exercise caution, noting that the viability of ethanol as an alternative to petroleum is still being debated and that a huge investment in infrastructure will be required to match the petroleum distribution system already in place. But they also remind readers that:

... there is a very powerful ethanol lobby behind this push. At the end of the day, expanding ethanol's use may be more a matter of political will and special interest influence than anything driven by fundamental economics.

An article in last Friday's Salt Lake Tribune also casts some doubt on the wisdom of using corn as an alternative fuel but points to another approach, the conversion of cellulose into ethanol. This technique would be significantly more efficient and could be used with a wide variety of fuels, including switchgrass which President Bush somewhat opaquely alluded to in this year's State of the Union address. (A more indepth article on cellulosic ethanol can be found here.)

I had been already been thinking about writing on this topic when I ran across a post from James Kunstler on The Huffington Post. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency (which I highly recommend), makes the point in his post that we are trapped in the paradigm of the car. Rather than inquiring into more fundamental approaches to addressing the problems associated with dwindling reserves of fossil fuels, we're simply taking the approach of replacing one liquid fuel with another:

The idea that it's all about cars is probably natural for a nation that has succeeded in literally driving itself crazy with driving. And so a great wish arises for a rescue remedy, some alternative fuel that will allow us to keep the easy motoring fiesta going.

One of the key premises of The Long Emergency is that no alternative fuel is going to save us. Simply put, the energy content of the oil, coal, and natural gas that we burn each year is the result of many years worth of solar energy captured and stored by ancient plants. This would suggest that we're not going to be able to match that fossil fuel energy content by using crops as fuel, since those crops can capture only a fraction of the solar energy available in the fuels they would be replacing. (I'll let you read the book to see how he dismisses the idea of hydrogen as an alternative fuel.)

Further, and as also noted in Against the Grain, Kunstler points out in his Friday post that our food supply is also at risk:

As we get into big trouble with our oil and gas supplies, we will concurrently get into big trouble with food production. Our mode of industrial agriculture requires vast "inputs" of fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides to keep those seemingly endless truckloads of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi Cola coming. Just in the past five years, due to steeply rising natural gas prices, more than half of our fertilizer production has moved out of the country -- much of it to the Middle East, making us now hostages to them for our food as well as our motoring fuel. We are going to have to make other arrangements for feeding ourselves, and the signs all point to a much more profoundly localized, smaller scale, organic mode of farming, probably requiring a lot more human labor. I would go as far to say that farming will come closer to the center of American mainstream economic life than anyone now living in this country can remember. This will have enormous implications, by the way, for how we regard the remaining undeveloped rural land outside our towns and cities.

Kunstler's central message is that our entire way of living is built on cheap fossil fuels, and while civilization may not fall when they inevitably run dry, we won't be able to find any solution that lets us go on with business as usual:

Now, the plain sad truth of the matter is that no combination of alternative fuels or energy systems that we know of will permit us to continue the easy motoring fiesta in the face of the permanent global fossil fuel crisis. You can state this categorically, too. We are not going to run the interstate highway system, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney World on any combination of tar sands and oil shale distillates, bio-diesel, ethanol, hydrogen, solar power, wind power, uranium, or used french-fry oil. We'll use all these things -- we'll use everything possible -- but we're not going to run the current set-up with them. They will not add up to compensate for our losses in oil and natural gas. They would be very useful in helping us make other arrangements, but first we have to get over the wish to keep the current set-up running.

Finally, I'll point you at Michael Ventura's column, "The Million Mile Commute," which illustrates the almost unimaginable mountain of resources, not to mention waste and pollution, that a lifetime of driving entails.

Too good to be true...

Wow... I just read "The Perfect Mark" in the May 15 The New Yorker. It's a tale of John Worley, a Massachusetts psychiatrist who ended up losing tens of thousands of dollars and, in a bizarre twist, being convicted of bank fraud and money laundering for his role in a Nigerian email scam, like this one at snopes.com:

WE ARE TOP OFFICIAL OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONTRACT REVIEW PANEL WHO ARE INTERESTED IN IMPORATION OF GOODS INTO OUR COUNTRY WITH FUNDS WHICH ARE PRESENTLY TRAPPED IN NIGERIA. IN ORDER TO COMMENCE THIS BUSINESS WE SOLICIT YOUR ASSISTANCE TO ENABLE US TRANSFER INTO YOUR ACCOUNT THE SAID TRAPPED FUNDS.

This isn't the kind of thing that I'd normally want to write about, but the fact that someone would not only fall victim to a scam like this but also end up being prosecuted for it astounded me.

I first received an email like the above back in 2002, and it was so odd that I didn't know what to make of it. Given that people are willing to bankrupt themselves by participating in these schemes, I thought the more visibility they get, the better.

I will also take this opportunity to refer people to Snopes, an urban legend site that separates fact from fiction. It's one of the first places I go when I hear something that doesn't sound quite right, or perhaps, too good to be true. Given the ease with which both information and misinformation can spread via the internet, fact checking is critical.

Barbara and David Mikkelson maintain Snopes, and they have this to say:

We don't expect anyone to accept us as the ultimate authority on any topic, which is why our site's name indicates that it contains reference pages. Unlike the plethora of anonymous individuals who create and send the unsigned, unsourced e-mail messages that are forwarded all over the Internet, we show our work. The research materials we've used in the preparation of any particular page are listed in the bibliography displayed at the bottom of that page so that readers who wish to verify the validity of our information may check those sources for themselves.

One more time, do your own research as well! :-)

Hezzek re'iyyah, Big Brother, and you

Last Friday I listened to an NPR report on the lack of concern that many Americans have about recent revelations of government monitoring of domestic phone call records. In the report, Alix Spiegel referred to hezzek re’iyyah, a concept in Jewish law that Professor Jeffrey Rosen discusses in his book, The Unwanted Gaze. (The book, interestingly enough, was published in 2000, before the 9/11 attacks, the passage of the Patriot Act, and the creation of the NSA surveillance programs within the United States.)

In testimony before the Senate in 2000, Rosen described hezzek re’iyyah as follows:

This uncertainty about whether or not monitoring is taking place has a high social costs. The title of my book, The Unwanted Gaze, comes from a passage in Jewish law that describes the anxiety and inhibition that results when citizens are unsure about whether they are being observed without their knowledge. Jewish law, for example, has developed a remarkable body of doctrine around the concept of hezzek re’iyyah, which means “the injury caused by seeing,” or “the injury caused by being seen.” This doctrine expands the right of privacy to protect individuals not only from physical intrusions into the home but also from surveillance by a neighbor who is outside the home, peering through a window in a common courtyard. Jewish law protects neighbors not only from unwanted observation, but also from the possibility of being observed. Thus, if your neighbor constructs a window that overlooks your home or courtyard, you are entitled to an injunction that not only prohibits your neighbor from observing you through the window but also orders the window to be removed. From its earliest days, Jewish law recognized that it is not only surveillance itself, but also the uncertainty about whether or not we are being observed, that forces us to lead more constricted lives and inhibits us from speaking and acting freely in private places. [emphasis added] The consensus among medieval jurists, therefore, was that a window overlooking a common courtyard had to be removed even the individuals whose privacy was violated failed to protest.

I googled "hezzek re'iyyah" and found "The Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century: Technology, Privacy, and Human Emotions," an interesting paper by law professor Andrew Taslitz. In it he notes that the U.S. Supreme Court "generally, though not always, conceives of privacy as a cognitively driven issue, divorced from human emotion," and argues that this in incongruous with our actual experience of having our privacy violated. He proposes reconceptualizing privacy in such a way that allows us to retain a level of privacy even when in public, declaring privacy to be "more about civility, respect, intimacy, and recognition" than simple management of the risks of disclosure when venturing out into the physical--or virtual--world.

And with respect to government surveillance, Taslitz notes:

The implications for growing state surveillance into our lives are unattractive. If the means to surveil electronically the inside of the home become more widespread, then police viewing of our intimate activities may be possible without a warrant or reasonable suspicion. If tracking devices that monitor our movements on the street -- in cars, on foot, in stores, or at ATMs -- improve, then so does the likelihood of secret police monitoring of our lives. Our growing use of e-mail, the Internet, and online banking might expand the risk of government access to personal information. To be sure, political forces may eventually curb the worst abuses, but too many insulting personal invasions may happen along the way, and those with reduced political power may never gain protection against them.

It has been a long time since I've read 1984, but I'm thinking it's time to refresh my memory. A couple of interesting looks at how 1984 (and Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed) foreshadow contemporary times can be found here and here. I'll also reference a couple of passages here:

... practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations — not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive....

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.

Want to weigh in? Contact your senators.

False realities...

Quote from Al Gore who is promoting An Inconvenient Truth, the new documentary on global warming:

One can only attempt to create one's own reality for so long. Reality proper has a way of insisting itself upon you.

And speaking of creating your own reality, just saw Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. If you haven't seen it, it's a great look at the whole Enron scandal. I was particularly interested by the connection made between Chairman and CEO Ken Lay's close relationship with George W. and the 2001 California electricity crisis, which largely led to Governor Gray Davis' recall and Schwarzenegger's election. The federal government's refusal to step in and institute price controls when Enron, as was later discovered, was literally robbing the state of $30 billion had a significant impact on Gray's demise.

A verdict is expected this week in the trial of Lay and Jeff Skilling... as someone who sat through the rolling blackouts in 2001, I hope they spend a long time behind bars!

And then this... in Senate confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, Bush's nominee to be the new CIA director wouldn't answer Senator Feinstein publicly as to whether waterboarding qualifies as torture.

UPDATE

In light of the current controversy over NSA data mining of domestic phone call records, NPR reports on old ties between the NSA and the phone companies.

I was listening to NPR on Friday and amazed at how many people on the street don't seem to care that the government is monitoring their phone usage, with the predominant sentiment being that only people doing something wrong should worry about it. Can't help but think of Senator Padme Amidala's comment in Revenge of the Sith, "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause." And this:

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

-- Bertrand de Jouvenel

A quote before my dreams...

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever...

-- Isak Dinesen

Update on NSA domestic data mining

More on the story of the NSA's data mining of domestic phone calls as well as BellSouth and Verizon's denials of involvement. Note in particular the 3:20pm update which details a May 5 presidential memorandum and an associated law that allows the National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal its actions if related to national security.

Pork... it's what's for breakfast in Washington

Last July Harper's magazine published "The Great American Pork Barrel" by Ken Silverstein. The article detailed how the process of pork spending had become a cottage industry in Washington, DC. He highlighted how the practice has become vastly more common in the past few years:

Last year, 15,584 separate earmarks worth a combined $32.7 billion were attached to appropriations bills—more than twice the dollar amount in 2001, when 7,803 earmarks accounted for $15 billion; and more than three times the amount in 1998, when roughly 2,000 earmarks totaled $10.6 billion.

Perhaps the biggest problem with process is that the earmarks--specific dollar amounts appropriated for specific projects--are attached to spending bills at the last possible minute. The Senator or Representative responsible for attaching them is usually not known, and legislators rarely have time to read the modified bills with the new earmarks before voting on them.

Despite some efforts to reduce the problem, it sounds like it's business as usual according to the Associated Press.

May 17 is International Day Against Homophobia

The International Lesbian & Gay Association (ILGA) announced that today is the second International Day Against Homophobia:

Today around 80 countries in the world still criminalize homosexuality and condemn consensual same sex acts with imprisonment, of these 9 (Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen) still have the death penalty. Discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation and gender identity is still not recognized formally by the member states of the United Nations (even though human rights mechanisms such as the Human Rights Committee have repeatedly condemned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity).

ILGA also released a short video. Thanks to DKSF in South Africa for the heads up!

Rove to be indicted???

Well here's an interesting story from the online world... and as Andrew Sullivan says, it's either going to make Jason Leopold "a huge media star" or "the blogosphere's biggest embarrassment in quite a while."

Leopold reported on Friday that Karl Rove would be indicted in the CIA leak case within 24 hours (he's apparently also been quoted as saying "24 business hours"). CBS has also weighed in with some questions about the story. Note that a week ago the Washington Post reported that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is close to making a decision on whether or not to indict Rove.

The link to the original report by Leopold is no longer valid, which makes me wonder if someone is backpedaling, but I found it cached on Google.

Time will tell!

Losing the war on terror?

Here's an awesome DailyKos blogpost which asks, "How can we declare success when we have allowed terror to so greatly redefine American society?"

The terrorists' most dangerous weapon isn't anthrax or planes or dirty bombs; it's fear. Fear is their most destructive weapon because it operates in a stealth manner. Fear is what has caused our government to turn on its citizens and brag that it does so out of courage in the fight against evil. And in that sense, by goading the greatest democracy on earth to view 300 million citizens as the potential enemy, fear has proved to be the most effective weapon of mass destruction of all.

I could hardly agree more.

UPDATES

Interesting denials from both Verizon and BellSouth with regard to whether they provided domestic phone call records to the NSA. So if this isn't going on, why didn't the President deny it when speaking about the program last Friday? Of course, if you were involved in a classified surveillance program and were being sued for breaking the law by not protecting your customers' privacy, what would you say?

Georgia's constitution, like that of many states, has a clause requiring that ballot issues address only a single issue. A judge today overturned the 2004 state constitutional amendment that banned same sex marriages because it also barred any laws which granted other rights to same sex couples.

Next up in DARPA's plan for a robotic military force: the "Urban Challenge," a competition to be held in 2007 "in which autonomous cars or trucks will have to maintain an average speed of 10 miles an hour while negotiating a mock city, crossing busy intersections and even merging into moving traffic." Not terribly proud that my alma mater is planning to participate...

Faster than a speeding bullet...

The Justice Dept. today provided the first video of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

I watched the video, and I can't say that it's now clear to me without a doubt that it was a 757 that caused the destruction at the Pentagon. First, the impact happens so quickly, and second, the resolution of the internet video clip that I saw on CNN wasn't good enough to see clearly what was happening. But my initial impression was that the plane seen in the video seemed smaller than a 757.

Two videos were released; only one shows an impact. Judicial Watch, the organization which sued to obtain the videos, had actually requested a total of four different tapes:

The video requested by Judicial Watch was taken from security cameras at the Pentagon, the Sheraton National Hotel, the Nexcomm/Citgo gas station, and Virginia Department of Transportation traffic cameras.

Choice, freedom, and deja vu

Three years ago to the day, I was in Landmark Education's "four days and an evening" Advanced Course, and one of the key concepts that I walked away with was a new understanding of our power to choose: to choose between our automatic, learned reactions and a possibility we create in the moment; to choose between being stopped by failure and forging onward; to choose our lives and everything in them just as they are and just as they aren't.

In college I had witnessed friends agonize over certain decisions, and I can't deny that I didn't as well on occasion. But over time I developed the idea that maybe all of those individual decisions don't really matter, that it was instead the pattern of choices that we make which end up defining us. For example, my decision to attend Stanford rather than USC had me living in the Bay Area, not Los Angeles, interacting with a different set of people than I would have down south. Yet perhaps what made more of a difference in whether I was happy or not was the the pattern of my choices, or thought of another way, the manner in which I went about choosing.

But still, there was the inescapable fact that if I were flying home for the holidays, my flight from SFO might crash while all of the flights from LAX landed safely. That would make a big difference!

In the midst of pondering choice and the meaning of it all, I read "Parallel Universes" by Max Tegmark in the May 2003 issue of Scientific American. The article explained that parallel universes are no longer simply "a staple of science fiction" but rather now "a direct implication of cosmological observations."

Tegmark described four different levels of parallel universes that follow from current scientific theory and evidence, and I was most fascinated by the first which implies that we each have an infinite number of alter egos out in the cosmos. The explanation proceeds as follows: the amount of the universe we can observe--a so-called "Hubble volume," the volume of space bounded by the distance light has traveled since the big bang--can hold only a fixed amount of matter, and the matter can exist in an extremely large but finite number of states. So if we imagine an infinite universe divided into an infinite number of bubbles, each the size of our own Hubble volume, eventually we will find other bubbles that started out with exactly the same conditions as our own, and in those bubbles we would find our alter egos.

And given random quantum effects since the formation of the universe, it's possible that each of our alter egos are taking slightly different paths than the ones we are taking. Perhaps this morning one of my alter egos decided to have eggs rather than the cereal that I ate; perhaps another sat down in the Oval Office (hopefully that instance of me isn't ignoring the Constitution!).

(This reminds me of an early episode of Weekend Update on SNL: scientists were reporting that a second Earth had been found orbiting the sun 180 degrees away from us, which explained why the planet hadn't been discovered earlier. Apparently everything on this other Earth was exactly like our own, except that over there people held their corn on the cob vertically instead of horizontally. :-)

The implications of all of those Me's out there were breathtaking... and profoundly liberating. What I saw in this was that I no longer had to worry about making the right decision, I only had to make the choice that I made. The other Me's would try out the other paths, and together we would collectively experience all possible outcomes.

In 2004 I saw What the Bleep Do We Know!? and made another connection. The movie explores the interconnectedness of people and the universe and our ability to affect reality. In one scene a woman sees herself leaving a theater as she enters it. What is the explanation? Is this one of her alter egos from some other parallel universe?

I was immediately reminded of a mid-1990s winter night in Reno, Nevada. I was spending the weekend with friends in Tahoe, and we had driven to Reno to have some drinks at a bar. As I walked across the room, I saw a man approaching me, and the closer he came the more I realized that he was my doppelganger. You might think that in such a situation I would have said "wow" and "hello!" but instead I turned and fled. The experience completely unnerved me, and that odd feeling of seeing someone who looked exactly like me has never gone away.

Now, I had another explanation: perhaps I had somehow had experienced a momentary connection with one of my alter egos in some far away corner of this infinite universe. And then this thought: perhaps deja vu has nothing to do with some quirk in the storage of a short term memory, nothing to do with past lives we've led. Perhaps deja vu is some fleetingly short window into the existence--right now--of one of our other Me's.

There's no way to know, of course. But I love the idea.

More on the NSA domestic spying story

Check out a couple of interesting posts on Digby's Hullabaloo blog regarding parallels between spying in the Bush and Nixon administrations; the second includes an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Nixonland:

• The Enemy Within
• Same As It Ever Was

And Steve Chapman wrote a great column in yesterday's Chicago Tribune entitled "A nation of suspects in land of the free." A quote:

In December, it emerged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the contents of phone calls and e-mail messages between Americans on U.S. soil and people abroad. That program was of doubtful legality, and so is this one. As a rule, federal law forbids phone companies from turning over calling records to anyone, and it forbids the government from getting call records without a court order or a national security letter....

Even if you don't care about the privacy of your phone records, you might care that we have a president who feels no obligation to obey the law. You might care that if the government was secretly doing this, it may be doing other things that are even more worrisome. And you might care that one day, we may find that the free society we claim to cherish has become a police state.

And the FBI today confirmed that it's much easier to get reporters' phone records than in years before George W. took office, according to ABC News:

"It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.

Subscribe!

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I missed Al Gore on SNL last weekend, but here's a link to the video. Pretty good stuff. :-)

Be careful, Deep Throat

A source in the government has told ABC News that its reporters' calling patterns are being analyzed as part of an investigation into government leaks. As the Daily Kos reports, even hinting that such a review was underway could have a chilling effect on the willingness of whistle blowers to come forward.

Big Brother is alive and well!

John McCain's Liberty University commencement address

Though I question McCain's decision to give the 2006 commencement address at Liberty University, he brought grace, humility, and a deep respect for American values to the students there on Saturday. An excerpt:

We are not a perfect nation. Our history has had its moments of shame and profound regret. But what we have achieved in our brief history is irrefutable proof that a nation conceived in liberty will prove stronger, more decent and more enduring than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

As blessed as we are, no nation complacent in its greatness can long sustain it. We, too, must prove, as those who came before us proved, that a people free to act in their own interests, will perceive those interests in an enlightened way, will live as one nation, in a kinship of ideals, and make of our power and wealth a civilization for the ages, a civilization in which all people share in the promise and responsibilities of freedom.

UPDATE: The New York Times has published a new article related to my recent posts on both the Federal Marriage Amendment and James Dobson's Focus on the Family organization.

This too shall pass

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.

It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.

If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter of 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act

I was recently speaking with a woman I know who is involved with Inspiring America, a network of leaders who are working to create "a bold, compelling vision for America." Their aim is to build a new progressive movement that moves beyond the single issue constituencies of the many existing liberal movements--civil rights, feminist, LGBT, environmental, peace, labor, etc.--and envision a vibrant future for America as an alternative to the framework and agenda articulated by conservatives and neoconservatives.

I suspect Jefferson would support their efforts were he here today.

I SPENT THE DAY AT STINSON BEACH with my friend Marcus, and we discussed a wide range of topics: our lives, science, history, politics. As we wrapped up lunch, Marcus asked me what I wanted to generate out of all of this. For a moment I was unsure, and then I realized that what I have to offer is the same thing that everyone else has to offer: speaking my mind, contributing to the "marketplace of ideas" that has long been key to America's enduring promise. We talked about how things change in the world and agreed that it all starts with a conversation. What it took for the abolition of slavery to occur was people talking to and, over time, transforming the opinions of people around them. The same is true for women's suffrage, gay and lesbian rights, and every other similar movement. But it's also true of the rise of Nazism in Germany or the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

What makes a difference is our speaking, of taking a stand for what we believe in. And just as critical is listening, of being willing to hear other points of view and remaining open to adjusting our perspective.

My biggest concern with America today is that we seem to have lost sight of the common good. I wrote the following letter a few days before the November 2004 election:

What troubles me about the current state of affairs in the good ol' United States of America is that civil discourse seems to be dying. The candidates say nastier and nastier things about one another. The old agreed upon rules, such as redistricting once every ten years after the census, are abandoned if one side sees an advantage. Profanity is used in the Senate which used to be a place where people spoke with great respect for one another. The political parties are rallying armies of lawyers to prepare legal challenges to an election that hasn't even happened yet. Companies hired by the parties to register voters throw out registration cards for members of the other party. The candidates for the most powerful position on earth come up with 35 pages of rules to govern a simple debate. If they are so unable to think on
their feet, should they really be running the country?

There used to be a shared ideal called the common good. There were elections and political parties and, yes, politics. But there was also a commitment to coming together and doing what was right for the country. That seems to be more and more abandoned as the years pass. We are all to blame because we play right into this. We make up our minds based on negative advertising (don't say it's not true... they keep using those ads because they have gotten results over the years). We don't really try to learn much about the issues. And we don't get that mad when we find out that we've been lied to (unless it was someone from the other party that lied to us, of course!).

When November 2 rolls around, remember that we have a chance to be something special in the world. We can be a great nation. Or we can be a strong nation that bullies its way toward what it wants. We can fight the symptoms of the disease that is terrorism... that is, wait until we sense a danger growing and then bomb the hell out of them. Or instead look at how we create most of our own enemies... we used to pay Osama Bin Laden to fight the Soviets... we helped Saddam when he was fighting Iran... the list goes on. We pay and train and equip nasty people who later turn the tables on us. We are so short-sighted that we never seem to learn from this mistake.

We only worry about our own safety and will do just about anything to protect it, even if that means walking roughshod on the backs of others. Three thousand people died on that horrible day, 9/11. Over 30,000 have died in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq since then. What of the countless lives among that 30,000 that were innocent: the women, children, mothers, fathers, and elders who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or Saddam's empty dreams of WMD? Who is responsible for that debt?

In the end we are all connected. You can move into a gated community and lock the doors and not give a damn about the people outside. But your children will care... or their children. When we ignore suffering and poverty and hunger in the world and only protect our own interests, we create a fertile ground for people to sow the seeds of hate.

And there will likely always be people who hate us. But we can limit how many ears will listen to them. The world has become a dangerous place--we have made it so. We split the atom and discovered DNA, and so we're stuck with nuclear bombs and biological weapons now. There is no single decisive victory that is ever going to make us safe. All we can do is engage and work with our neighbors, the billions of other people that share this planet with us. We have to be committed to doing that today and tomorrow and the day after that.

So when you vote, ask yourself who you want to be in this world. Ask yourself how you want others to think about you. Ask yourself lots of questions. If you choose a black and white world, you may encourage others to do the same, and more likely than not you'll end up on their list of enemies. If you are willing to accept that the world is more complex, then just maybe there's a bit more room for dialogue with others. And perhaps that dialogue is the path to divining this mystery of life.

And having re-read that, I think it's worth repeating. :-)

More on the NSA's monitoring of phone records

From The Moderate Voice.

Federal Marriage Amendment Vote Scheduled for June

The Senate is expected to vote on the Federal Marriage Constitutional Amendment in June. The text of the Amendment:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

HRC will be hand delivering postcards urging a "no" vote to Senators during the week before the vote. You can add yours to the stack at the HRC Action Center.

Back in 2000, Michael Ventura wrote a great column on the controversy over gay marriage. Andrew Sullivan wrote a critical response to President Bush's radio address on the FMA during the 2004 election campaign. And The Economist has written two fine articles as well: "The case for gay marriage" and "New fuel for the culture wars."

No one died when Clinton lied...

and very interestingly, a new CNN poll finds that Americans believe Clinton was more honest than George W. Bush, not to mention naming Clinton the more effective of the two presidents on both domestic and foreign policy issues.

And here's a well stated point on the irrelevance of whether or not Americans support domestic surveillance by the NSA and other government agencies. Let's hear it for the good old Fourth Amendment. :-)

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Also, check out the NY Times for the latest on Cheney's role in developing the NSA's domestic surveillance program.

If you haven't already seen it, check out Judson Laipply's video "Evolution of Dance." If he doesn't have you laughing in recognition, you've either never stepped foot on the dance floor or you're under 20. :-)

Laipply is an "inspirational comedian" according to his website, and he seems to be getting rave reviews. When I was working at C-COR in Portland, ComedySportz led a one day team building day for the management team. It was totally a blast, and by the end of the day, we were all relating to each other as people, not as "that #&$@ jerk down the hall." Good stuff!

Who have you been calling? Somebody knows... and it's the NSA as reported in today's edition of USA Today. Concerned? Sign the ACLU's petition and email your senators.

Loose change (and gold hit $728 an ounce today)

In response to my 5/9 posting, my friend Jason (yes, the one who arrived late to the 9/11 documentary :-) sent me a link to a documentary titled Loose Change. You can see it on Google video or check out their website where you can also download the movie or order the DVD.

I just watched the documentary which is an hour and 20 minutes long (and if you watch it to the end you'll understand the significance of my noting the price of gold). Like other videos I've seen, it highlights anomalies in the evidence surrounding the World Trade Center and Pentagon incidents. What was new for me was information about government plans to stage terrorist attacks on Washington, DC, as early as 1962 in order to justify certain military responses, such as invading Cuba, and discrepancies in the explanation for what happened to United flight 93.

Watching the interviews with eyewitnesses of the events of 9/11, it's easy to make one of two opposing arguments: on the one hand, that the shock and horror of that day led to confusing and contradictory accounts of what happened, and on the other, that that same confusion was then used to obscure what really happened.

Two scenes from the documentary stand out for me. First, the opening sequence detailing government plans for simulated terrorist attacks in the years before 2001 and the odd confluence of events that left America's air defenses so totally unprepared to deal with a real threat on 9/11. Second, the interview with the chief flight instructor at Freeway Airport who refused in August, 2001 to rent a single engine plane, to Hani Hanjour, the man whom the government says flew American 77 into the Pentagon. Why the refusal? Because Hanjour seemed insufficiently skilled as a pilot in a pre-rental test flight just a month before 9/11. And yet somehow he flew a Boeing 757 through such high-skilled maneuvers on his way to the Pentagon that air traffic controllers at Dulles Airport thought that flight 77 was a military plane.

The truth is out there...

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.

-- from "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a September 2000 publication of the Project or the New American Century; the list of authors includes Paul Wolfowitz, formerly Assistant Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration and now President of the World Bank, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, formerly VP Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff (who resigned in October 2005 after being indicted by a grand jury)

Definition of the day!

Hat trick : a succession of three victories, successes, or related accomplishments

UPDATES

After I wrote my 5/10 robot conspiracy theory posting, I thought some more about the potential impacts of transforming our military into a predominantly robotic force.

One thought is this: robots don't find themselves in moral quandaries. It is far easier to send robotic forces against targets that human soldiers might balk at attacking. A soldier on the ground will likely question an order to shoot a child; a robot would simply follow its program. Even the use of a remote controlled drone makes a morally suspect action easier, as the human controller sitting in a far away command bunker sees only through the limited sensors of the drone, not with his or her own eyes. So much easier to push a button that launches a missile from a thousand miles away than to aim and pull the trigger with the target just across the street.

The April 2006 edition of Harper's included a panel discussion on the possibility of an American coup d'etat by the military. One of the arguments made against such an action ever taking place is that Americans aren't going to take up arms against their neighbors. Reading some of the statements in this article (excerpts here), as well as about the complaints of religious bias at the Air Force Academy, I found myself wondering if that is really the case, given that our all volunteer military is now hardly representative of the population.

But a robotic force has no allegiance to anyone, or any principles, other than its programming. How much easier to send a bunch of automated tanks and drones against a rioting crowd, a noisy minority, or a political opponent! What dangers to the republic will we experience 20 years down the road if DARPA's strategic plans are realized?

(For some related thoughts, see Michael Ventura's April 28th column "Wild Cards.")

THE SIERRA CLUB recently posted an article on the cost of transporting food, and they've also got a site focused on the True Cost of Food. For a more detailed look at the costs of transporting food, one of the themes in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, see "Why Our Food is So Dependent on Oil." One interesting statistic: it takes 127 calories of fossil fuel energy to transport one calorie of food energy (iceberg lettuce is their example) from the U.S. to England. Hmm...

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, the new documentary on global warming featuring Al Gore, opens May 24. Let's all go see it (and don't forget your sunscreen).

I, robot

And speaking of conspiracy theories, I've decided it's time to publish mine. Sure, it contains elements that others have picked up on, but I have a twist that will surely chill you.

I've been following a couple of stories develop over the last few years. The first is our military's increasing development of unmanned weapons like the Predator drone aircraft. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored the "Grand Challenge" last year, a competition in which autonomous vehicles, using only onboard sensors and computers, raced their way across the desert. The military, in fact, is exploring a wide range of unmanned drones for future deployment, including a robot warrior.

In 2000, the 106th Congress passed a law which included the following goals:

SEC. 220. UNMANNED ADVANCED CAPABILITY COMBAT AIRCRAFT AND GROUND COMBAT VEHICLES.

(a) Goal.--It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that--

(1) by 2010, one-third of the aircraft in the operational deep strike force aircraft fleet are unmanned; and
(2) by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned.

Until 2004, the military had actually been working to achieve a robot-reliant force by the year 2012, a plan known as Future Combat Systems. Now the drive is to first deploy some of the fundamental infrastructure for such a robotic army, including the System of Systems Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE), a Linux-based platform providing common interfaces, services, and applications upon which computer-operated weapons will be based.

Also in 2004, I read an article about the Pentagon's plans for the Global Information Grid (GIG), envisioned as a military internet for linking our command centers, soldiers on the ground, and, alarmingly, all of these new robotic weapons.

Yesterday I found a DARPA document titled "DARPA's Strategic Plan" which summarizes the work on Future Combat Systems as well as other areas of research, including "network centric warfare," "enhanced system performance" (the creation of "new systems with the autonomy and adaptability of living things"), and the "brain machine interface program." Spookiest of all is the "cognitive computing" section, which includes this description of the program's objectives:

In response, DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) is returning to its “roots” to take on Licklider’s vision again in a strategic thrust called “Cognitive Computing.” Cognitive computers can be thought of as systems that know what they are doing. Cognitive computing systems will have the ability to reason about their environment (including other systems), their goals, and their own capabilities. They will be able to learn both from experience and by being taught. They will be capable of natural interactions with users and will be able to explain their reasoning in natural terms. They will be robust in the face of surprises and avoid the brittleness and fragility of previous expert systems.

I'm not the first to notice the eerie resemblance of all of this to SkyNet, the globally networked supercomputer system in The Terminator which was responsible for nearly wiping out humanity. But since 2004 I've also been following another thread which, together with DARPA's plans and the new Global Information Grid, began to have me believe that The Terminator movies weren't something more than your typical Hollywood action flicks. What if instead they were a sick joke from the future?

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has been talking up the Equal Right to Govern amendment which would remove the Constitution's restriction that only native-born Americans may become President. In its place, the Constitutional would now allow immigrants who have been naturalized citizens for at least 20 years to run for president and vice president.

California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a friend of Senator Hatch's, is widely seen as the intended beneficiary of this admendment. And Schwarzenegger, of course, starred as the killer robot from the future in The Terminator.

It all began to make sense. Arnold is the terminator. He really is a robot sent from the future. We're building our SkyNet, and he'll become president and push the button to activate the system.

Who says robots don't have a sense of humor?

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.

-- From The Terminator

[After I wrote this, some less humorous thoughts occurred to me... read them here.]

My first mobile post! Sent this pic from from my phone... very cool.

My roommate Scott is in the green shirt; he moved down from Portland with me. Josh on the left moved down here as well, and Jason in white is holding down the fort up north.

Monday night my roommate Scott and I went to see United 93. Through most of the movie I found myself squirming in dread; twice I noticed that I had actually stopped breathing. For two dizzyingly fast hours--once flight 93 takes off the film proceeds in real time--all the confusion, shock, and pain of that morning was back. We knew now, of course, exactly what was happening, how the events would follow from one to the next. When the screen went black at the end, there was a moment when I didn't know what to say.

As we left the theater, we began to talk about some of the anomalies surrounding the events of 9/11. The inexplicable destruction of WTC 7 (yes, there were three World Trade Center buildings that were destroyed that day, not just the two towers). The odd facts related to the destruction at the Pentagon. The June 1, 2001 change made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff transferring intercept authority from Air Force and Air National Guard commanders to the Secretary of Defense. The incredible piloting accuracy of the three successful attacks.

While living in Portland, I had attended a meeting of the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance and watched a screening of Hijacking Catastrophe, a documentary examining how neoconservative Republicans used the events of 9/11 to advance their agenda. I felt subversive sitting in that darkened room, discussing with strangers the unthinkable possibility that the government might have actually played a role in allowing the attacks to proceed, perhaps even planning them, and when the door opened midway through the meeting, the first thing I thought was "It's the cops!" (Thankfully it was only my friend Jason arriving late. :-)

That night I considered the notion that the government could be complicit in the 9/11 attacks, and in doing so I was left with something untenable: giving up so much of what I have always believed about the world, about America, and about people. Of course I know that our government has lied many times and acted secretly to carry out actions contrary to what we say our American values are. And I know that people are capable of carrying out horrific acts. Still, there is that deeply rooted desire to believe that we, here and now, are different. Is it possible that the government actively or passively supported the 9/11 attacks? It is. But who really knows?

I still have questions about what happened that day. Did 9/11 play out as it did due to the unfortunate but simply human failures of our airport security and military forces or from something more sinister? I suspect that I will never get truly satisfactory answers. And if I were to accept the belief that the 9/11 plot was hatched not in Afghanistan but in Washington, DC, how would I live? What would I do?

What I can do is read. And discuss. And think. I can maintain a healthy level of skepticism. I can stand with the ACLU and all the others working to protect our rights as Americans.

And I can remember and honor the real heroes of that day, including the passengers and crew of United 93.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Science and art commingled in one post... :-)

One of my favorite quotes...

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

-- Pablo Picasso

... and a website with some interesting information on how atmospheric optics contribute to the special qualities of sunrises and sunsets.

I read about an interesting organization in the May 9th issue of The Advocate. Soulforce was created in the late 90s by Mel White and Gary Nixon to support "freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious & political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance."

Current actions that the organization has underway include:

• A seven week Equality Ride which is taking 33 young adults across the nation to confront college which ban the enrollment of LGBT students
• The 1000 Watt March, Vigil, and Concert in Colorado Springs in July to apply pressure on James Dobson's Focus on the Family, an organization which "depicts LGBT people as miserable, lonely, disordered, sick, and sinful" (I had to sit through a few days of Focus on the Family videos when I was in junior high or high school... a public school, I might add!)

Given the growing influence of fundamentalist and evangelical religious organizations in American government and the willingness of some national religious leaders to suggest that what they see as America's acceptance of gays and lesbians is somehow responsible for horrific events such as 9/11 and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, Soulforce's direct response to the use of religion to condemn gays and lesbians feels right on target to me.

Music, memory, and youth

Few things can rouse long dormant memories for me more strongly than music. Five years ago I put on a CD of dance anthems from 1996 and was treated to images as vivid as if I'd opened a photo album. I remembered what I was doing during that time, what I was feeling. I remembered the absolute freedom I felt dancing to Robert Miles' "Children." I remembered people I had kissed and what it had been like to be with them. It had been a year of beginnings and endings, and I had not expected to have those experiences roar onshore so powerfully when I pressed PLAY.

There is one song in particular that evokes a time and a place for me, not so much as a milestone that I've passed once but more like the "12" on a clock... a lap marker for my life.

It was the summer of 1986. I had moved to California the autumn before to begin my sophomore year at Stanford. One of the first people I met--and friends that I made--was Helen, my next door neighbor in my residence hall. That summer Helen was taking classes at Berkeley, while I had stayed on campus to make some money.

Helen had invited me to spend the weekend in Berkeley with her, and after a day of enjoying the street scene, yogurt, and, no doubt, multiple slices of Blondie's pizza, we found ourselves eating dinner at her apartment, sitting on the floor, and listening to Billy Joel's "Piano Man." It feels as if we listened to the song several times over, but that may be a grace note I've added to the memory. Maybe we heard it just once, and it has been my replaying that night over and over in my head which has had the song come to define the experience.

The lyrics and the mood of "Piano Man" captured me that night and have never really let go. In the past few years, I've begun to wonder what it was about a song that speaks so clearly of unrealized dreams that could have had such a profound an impact on a 20 year old man just starting his own adult journey.

TWO THOUSAND AND FIVE marked the 20th anniversary of my move to California, and I flew down from Portland to visit Helen and the few other friends that had turned out to be, as I had predicted, my "Big Chill" friends. We shared a wonderful dinner and conversation, and we all learned something new that night about what we had each been thinking two decades earlier as our friendships were forming.

A week later I received an email from my high school English teacher, a surprising coincidence given that I had shared with Helen and my other friends something that I had learned from Marcia all those years ago. One day in English class, she and I had been discussing writing and memory, and she had shared the idea that we can only remember our past through the prism of our current perspective. And the continuity that this provides gives us a sense of identity, of having a fundamental self that does not change over the years.

It was a notion that stuck with me, something which I simply accepted as truth because it resonated so with how things seemed to me. And in reminding Marcia of that conversation, I connected this wisdom of hers with something that my friend Michael's father had shared with him the year before, not long before he died. Michael and Gale had been talking about life. Like me, Michael was transitioning from his 30s to his 40s, and he had told his father that his life was not at all what he expected it would be like. His father responded that it had never been so for him either, that no milestone yet had ever had the flavor that he'd expected it to have. That no matter how old he was, he always just felt like himself.

Here was some more proof, I thought, of the continuity of our identity and the power of the present, of the right now, to shape our experience. And this took me back to "Piano Man" and again, that question: why did it affect me so that night?

I began to think that we have it all wrong about youth. We live in a youth-oriented, perhaps even obsessed, culture, with so many trying to remain young, to look young, too often without much grace. But the reality of youth matches neither the expectations we have of it or the nostalgia for what it was. In my youth there was so much longing for experiences that hadn't happened yet. There was that feeling of dying for things to happen. At 20 I hadn't come out yet. I'd never been in love. I wanted that, in particular, so incredibly strongly, and it was those unfulfilled romantic dreams which had "Piano Man" figure so powerfully in my consciousness. I was not a middle-aged, broken down, lonely man at a bar. I was instead someone who hadn't even felt the freedom to love yet.

And here I am almost 20 years older than that night when I sat yearning in Berkeley. I have loved. Several times. And I've lost those loves only to gain so many friends. I've finally become comfortable with myself, just as I am and just as I'm not. I've had enough time to fulfill some dreams, and for me, it's the things I've done and the happiness I have with where I am which overshadow the things I haven't done yet. I get that what I thought life was going to be like was made up by a child, namely me. And I understand now that I am free to create the rest of my life on my terms, designed here and now by my adult self, not the child that I was. Yesterday as I left a job interview, I had a marvelous thought: this is my journey. This is my own precious life.

And I am free to choose what it looks like.

We’re all in the mood for a melody
And you’ve got us feelin’ alright