Big Advertising Brother

Sometimes, the fun times and the free ride abruptly comes to a halt.

I've been wondering for the last 12 years, ever since the dot com bubble, how some of these internet companies make any money. It seemed to me that they weren't really selling anything, and they weren't charging me for the use of their work, so I could not figure out how it worked. There has been a lot of really cool free websites to choose from. The same is true for podcasts. It seems crazy (but somehow right) to me that so many excellent podcasts are available for free online.

Well, we increasingly see where these companies get their money. Facebook recently incurred the anger and ... well, I was going to say wrath, but actually no one is doing anything against them. They supposedly released a great deal of private information to third party advertisers. However, the general public is posting their private photographs and inane comments on the site all day without any regard for who sees it.

Now Google has started mining the search habits of people to target advertising at them. Not just casual and average Google using web searchers, but particularly the users of gmail, their popular (and FREE! see the pattern?) email service provider. The gmail program was reading the public's emails and targeting popup ads to people based on things they mentioned in private messages. That is kind of creepy, like a stalker staring in through your curtains at night. You can opt out at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

There is another site called Criteo that watches where you go browsing on the web and then targets personalized ads back at you about sites you've already been to. The banner ads on the sides of the screen reveal what the person has looked at before & offer ads targeted at that, serving as constant reminders to go back to the site later. This can be disabled, once you notice it, through a site at http://www.criteo.com/us/privacy-policy

The reaction is not universally bad. Some say it's not all Big Brother but potentially something that can make web browsing more personalized. Some can easily ignore the privacy concerns. They think this is OK if the computer sorts through your web browsing habits and just show them the things they are interested in. After all, if you're going to be exposed to ads, wouldn't it be nice if it was something you were probably interested in? There was a recent Science Friday episode where this was discussed, but the supporter of the ads was in the industry themselves.

I feel strangely ambivalent to this. In one view, you could say that the death of privacy would be great if you could not be discriminated by public disclosures of private facts. There is a certain honesty and surrender to not worrying what anyone might find out about you. And knowing that you are constantly being monitored could be exactly what some people need to help behave honestly and ethically. On the other hand, it sure seems that the potential for harm when someone has the ability to look at your private activities is something that cannot be denied.

Wisconsin Machinations

Suddenly, the bogeyman of the day for the newly elected and empowered state governors is PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS.

While giving away huge tax breaks to major corporations or helping with public funding to steal businesses from other states, thus insuring that their state budgets veer into the red, they are, with the other hand, waving an accusing finger at the public unions. Somehow, school teachers, that's right SCHOOL TEACHERS, who don't get paid enough for the crap they have to take on a day to day basis, and who give up any hope of making a decent living when they agree to teach (usually for the idealistic reason that they want to help the next generation to learn their way in life) are being painted as these greedy people living high on the public dime.

The real calculus here by the conservative governors is a hope that they can break the backs of the unions that usually support and vote for democratic candidates. It's pure political maneuvering. If they spent more time trying to empower teachers and making sure that they had everything they needed to do their jobs, rather than trying to get the science teachers to teach religion in the science classes or get students to drill for standardized tests rather than learn critical thinking, they might actually impress some teachers and make them more likely to treat conservative candidates as something other than a threat to their way of life.

This week, a liberal blogger spoofed big conservative political supporter and contributor, David Koch. He called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and recorded a 20 minute long conversation with him where he got the governor to reveal his true thinking on the matter. What was discussed in an open and unguarded conversation was that the issue is not budget balancing, but union busting, pure and simple.

The conservative Koch brothers are big supporters of the Republican party in Wisconsin, and through their generous contributions, they have had a hand at dictating public policy in the state. They have a scheme that would put the most polluting public power plants up for sale to private sector, where they would be unregulated. Detractors fear that they could set up an Enron-like scheme where the power rates could be jacked up and massive profits could be had at the expense of customers that would have no choice but to pay the price being asked.

Walker is a huge supporter of the union busting efforts and is hoping it will spread to other states. There are signs that it is at work in Indiana and Ohio. If not directly supported by conservatives, these governors have been the benefactors of massive ad campaigns funded by big interests and targeting conservative governor's opponents.

Wisconsin has already limited lawsuits against big companies, meaning corporations that pollute or act against the public in some other way cannot be assessed punitive damages greater than $200,000. Another tactic is a move to try to insure that all regulations will have to be signed off by the governor before they will be enforced. I don't understand if this is a form of a line item veto, or a way that a governor can simply avoid enforcing laws he doesn't agree with without fear of penalty from the legislature.

I heard a comment from some random Tea Partier that "We need a revolution." He probably wants to take down big government and disrupt taxation, but it could just as easily ignite a backlash by people wanting to assert their rights and interests over huge corporate influence and corruption. Perhaps they should be aware what they ask for, as political machinations have a way of backfiring on you.

Arab Uprisings Background: Historical Parallels

Check out the two pictures I found. I saw the first one, which is a map of where protests and uprisings are happening. The second one I searched out because of a memory of a book I read about the rise and spread of Islam. I remembered the extent of the Caliphate because I remember thinking that it was sort of a mirror image across the Meditteranean of the Roman Empire. One of the crazier comments about the uprisings was by Glen Beck, who said it was a conspiracy to start a socialist Islamic Caliphate. So maybe, as truly stupid as the comment was, it helped plant the idea of the Caliphate in my mind.

The interesting thing is that the Caliphate is the area where Islam first expanded out to. In general, Islam was spread at the point of a sword during this initial expansion. Since that time, Islam has spread to some additional areas in the world and diffused out into the rest of the world without state support, but the territory of the Caliphate remains strongly and primarily Islamic and the governments of the region are somewhere between strictly enforcing Islamic ideals to strongly supporting Islam at risk of loosing their authority if they did anything else. So this core of Islam is now a region where most nations have dictators that are strong, intolerent and repressive, and have been in power for long periods of time. It was unbelivable to me how many dictators in Arab countries have been in power for such long periods. We truly do not pay attention to whats going on in the Middle East until it erupts.

Besides the near perfect overlay of the Caliphate and the current unrest, the other correlation I noticed was that some of the best food producing areas in the region rioted the earliest and had the strongest response. They say that part of what initiated the unrest was high food prices, so you would think the food producing areas would be least prone to that problem, not most vulnerable to its effect.

There was an interesting show on Frontline about how organization and unrest spread via social media networks. The governments had been in power for so long that they were older and not technology saavy. One of the things I found amusing about some of the stories was about how they tried to shut down the internet, but the protests had grown too large by then and taken on a life of their own. By the time the figured out that the internet needed to be shut down to hold on to power, it was too late.

There has been some fear and speculation in this country that the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge of Egypt's revolution and that they were trying to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. I knew nothing about them, so I looked them up. Apparently, they had been seen as a threat by Mubaric and suppressed years ago, but they were later allowed to exist as long as they did not get political. The reports say that they were content in this role for years. Before Mubaric, members of the Muslim Brotherhool were responsible for Sadat's assassination (bringing Mubaric into power). Apparently, the group split after that with a milder public part of the brotherhood seeking peaceful co-existence with the Egyptian authorities and another faction radicalized to the point that they supported Bin Laden. In this recent Egyptian revolution, the young organizers worked to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups from making the overthrow of Mubaric a fundamentalist Islamic uprising. They calculated that the revolution could not survive the opposition that would arise if it was only a fundamentalist Muslim movement, and they wanted to include women and non-Muslims in the uprising to maintain support for it.

The story is not over yet. We are not in a position where we understand much of what's going on, let alone could be justified in getting involved in any of the conflicts, but who knows how hard it will be for us to stay away.

To Write is to Dream

I have three blogs. There's this one, which is usually pretty serious. I have another one called Animal Tales at http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/ which is daily observations and attempts at humor. The third blog is called Technically Speaking at http://techequipment.blogspot.com/, which is where I make humorous comments about my work environment under the guise of an official company blog.

Why?

At least in the other two blogs family and coworkers occasionally read the entries. In this blog, to my knowledge, no one reads the material. So the question becomes, why do it if no one is reading it?

I was asked this question by a business associate. It was in the context of a situation where I had two people visiting from a company, one who had read the Technically Speaking blog, and the other who had no idea that I had any blogs. His rhetorical question was why anyone would blog at all. No answer would have satisfied this person, he was actually making a statement, not asking a question. His statement was that it was worthless to write a blog, whether anyone read it or not, but especially if no one read it.

If no one ever read my blogs, it would still be worth it to me. The act of organizing your thoughts and explaining an idea is a useful exercise because it helps to define and refine what you think and believe. It's sort of like practicing a speech before you give it, you familiarize yourself with it. Having an external listener, even if it is a theoretical or fictitious one, helps to focus the explanation to someone outside yourself that is unfamiliar with your thoughts. This is useful because you make no assumptions that anything is a given, nothing is taken for granted, everything must be explained.

Writing is not a new thing for me. I got a Diary for a gift when I was in fifth grade and found that I liked writing down what happened to me and expressing my ideas and feelings about life. When I was in Junior High School, I started keeping a Dream Journal. This was after I read an article about how your dreams work. The premise of this idea was that you have a conscious mind that is aware of itself and under your control and consists of your inner audible thoughts. However, you also have a subconscious mind, the 90% that you "don't use" that sits quietly in the background and observes everything and never speaks to you directly. This subconscious is powerful and very aware, but can only communicate through dreams. It's as if the barrier between the two halves of your mind breaks down under sleep. The subconscious mind is aware of the separation and the dream conduit, and it spends dream time trying to send your conscious mind messages. These messages are usually things that are important or interesting that your conscious mind is missing, but your subconscious mind picked up on and wants to call attention to.

The subconscious is almost like a foreigner, speaking a different language. You don't have a dream that says, "you need to ask this girl out" or "you should cook more often" or "look out for your coworker, she is undermining you to your boss." Instead, the dream makes a little story and weaves it with emotions and memories. I found that by writing all the dreams down, I found they were rich in subcontext. You aren't just trapped in a dim and dirty room in the dream, there is terror in the very fabric of the dream. You don't just walk up to a friend on the street in the dream, you walk up knowing that you haven't spoken in years and that you are finally going to confront him about something that bothers you. In a flash, there are whole background histories embedded in the dream, something that was either in the background or took a second to realize, but might take several minutes to write down in a dream journal. It's sort of like computer zip files. Tiny little packets that open up and are full of lots of information.

The point of keeping a dream journal is to discover what it is that the dreams are trying to tell you. It takes practice and familiarization, but eventually, you get pretty good at it. The point is that you have to spend time at it and learn how to make it happen.

The same is true with blogging. It is a way of practicing explaining something and hopefully, fleshing out the subject and gaining a deeper understanding.

So I have to admit that I really do enjoy writing this blog, which I consider a chance to discuss the deep thoughts and revelations that occur to me, whether they are political, emotional, or philosophical. It helps me to feel like I am figuring out big questions in life and how things work. I have always had daydreams about being that teacher that really gets people to understand things or writing editorials for a newspaper that people really find to be interesting and insightful. The only problem is that I analyze things in too much detail and do not distill messages down to their simple core. I am definitely more of a blogger and not a Twitterer. I often think that no one wants to listen to this shit. I am also writing a novel that has been kicking around in my head for a long time. I started it, and really got going on it, but then I realized that it would not have broad appeal, it would not be a best seller, probably not even get past an editor. Still, I enjoyed writing it, and should not have let the thought that it was not going to be a bestseller stop me from continuing work on it.

If no one reads it, why write? You could also ask why anyone would keep a diary, especially one that you don't intend to let anyone read. After all, a blog or a diary isn't exactly like a diet journal where you write down everything you eat each day. It isn't raw facts that don't have any deeper truth, it isn't a dull accounting of mundane events. But it does have something in common with the a diet journal. If you don't write down what you eat, you often have a complete misconception about the quantity and quality of your diet. Write it down and you can't pretend you didn't do it. With writing your thoughts, memory can't rob you of what you thought or how you felt then, at that moment. You can read it years later and think it was ridiculous, but you can't deny that you said it or thought it.

Actually, there is a much deeper reason for writing a blog. I don't find many opportunities to talk at length about what I think with a real person. I don't know many people interested in the same things as I am. So it is good to have an outlet for what's really on my mind. Also, I am 46 years older than my son, meaning that he will live a significant portion of his life after I have passed away. I don't know how old he will be when I die, but whatever that age is, the chances are that he will not fully know or understand me. And as time passes after I am gone, he will develop a whole life that will not have me in it. There will be times when he might wonder what I would think or wish he could talk with me. There will also be a time when memories of what I was like will begin to fade, and he will forget much of what I was like. But if some of what I am is written down, then I will never completely die, and I will still be able to share some thoughts with him from across time and beyond the grave. I know that sounds sad and morbid, but it feels comforting and self indulgent, like eating something deliciously bad for you and not writing it in your diet journal.

[Actually finished 4/30/11, not back in February when I jotted down the idea and saved it to be written down later.]

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Sometimes it seems like it's been a long time since a movie has come out that is a truly original idea. So many "new" movies are just recycling old ideas or trying a new take on an old familiar character or story. Yet there are many stories and pieces of history that never make it to the movies.

I've always wondered why no one has made a movie about Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. On one hand, it's understandable. Even the respected and admired General Robert E. Lee does not have many big screen movies about him. There just hasn't been much call for any movies about the losing leaders in the Civil War.

Of all the characters of the Civil War, General Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the most notorious. In fact, I would venture to say that Quantrill is the only one that surpasses him, and that is simply because he went so far overboard. But on a good day, Quantrill had half the daring that Forrest had. Forrest managed to be a scoundrel, yet still have honor and integrity. He managed to use guile and deception, but still garnered respect from his adversaries. He usually attacked from a position of weakness, yet still prevailed. He had no formal military training, and not much formal education, yet he rose from private to general, and giving him a command was proven to be justified time and time again.

His strength was in his use of perception and deception. He was a natural military leader. Without being a student of history, his performances mirrored great battles like Trasimene and Agrigentum from ancient Roman times. Many would say he was an Anti-Hero, a villain and a scourge.

Perhaps one of the main reasons no one has ever done a movie about Forrest was because he was a cruel and brutal supporter of slavery. Most high ranking Southern officers owned slaves while the average fighting man did not. Forrest bought and sold slaves, which was much worse than just owning slaves in most people's minds, even in the minds of his fellow Southerners. Forrest hated Northerners and approached war as not only the duty to defend the South, but a great game with the added benefit that you got to kill Yankees. That was his recruiting slogan "come along boys, join up, have a lick of fun and kill some Yankees". He had a dashing personality that appealed to the young Southern hotheads under his command. He could draw more people to his banner more quickly than any other Southern commander. He was always able to put together a new unit of soldiers at almost any point of the war, except near the very end.

He pulled off several exploits that endeared him to his fellow rebels. These events would make many exciting scenes in my hoped-for movie. At Fort Donaldson, when the Southern forces surrendered to Grant, Forrest called the Southern commander a coward and escaped with his soldiers before they could be surrendered. After the battle of Shiloh, Forrest was tasked to guard the rear of the defeated Confederate forces as they were retreating. His rear guard detachment met up with the pursuing Yankees at a place called Fallen Timbers. Some have called this action the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but in reality, it was a one man show. He waited until the Federals were bogged down going through an area thick with fallen trees, and he wheeled his men around and charged them. He soon found himself out in front of his men, alone. He was soon surrounded by Yankees. When they discovered this fact, one charged in and shot him in the side, point blank. Forrest, in a battle frenzy, wheeled around slashing his saber and took off to escape. On his way out of the group of Yankees, he reached down and grabbed a Federal foot soldier. He hoisted him onto the back of his saddle and made a beeline back for his lines. The Federal soldier served as a human shield for the General, and was unceremoniously knocked off the horse when Forrest got back to his own men. The action checked the pursuing Federals and secured the retreat of the Confederate forces, but Forrest had to spend a couple of months to heal from his gunshot wound after the skirmish. So the injury was bad enough to put him out of action for a few months, yet he could still reach down while riding by and pick a soldier up off the ground and put him onto his horse.

Another one of my favorite stories about Forrest was a time when he met a Union force that was much bigger than his. He asked the Union commander to come out for a parlay, where he demanded his surrender. In plain view of the conference, he had two of his big guns brought over a hill, down a road and out of sight, toward the front lines. They looked like they were being moved into place for the battle. In reality, the same guns were quietly moved out of view to around the back of the hill where they were brought around again. This was repeated several times, and the Union General, after watching this while speaking to Forrest suddenly exclaimed, "My God, General, how many guns do you have? I've seen 28 so far!" Forrest replies that this must be all that have kept up - implying there were even more. The Union General surrendered without a fight, even though he had Forrest outmanned and outgunned.

In another famous battle called Brice's Crossroads, Forrest correctly predicted the exact course of the battle some two hours before it started. He taunted a larger Union force into hot pursuit on a blisteringly hot day. The column marched too hard and too fast and was tired and blown and strung out by the time they got to Brice's Crossroads, where Forrest had a massive ambush set for them. He chewed up the head of the column, and then the rest of the Federals that fed into the battle piecemeal were eaten up as well. Once they stopped coming on, Forrest counterattacked and pursued them and routed them. His soldiers all fought hard because they trusted him, and time and time again he delivered victories against all odds.

As the war wound down, Forrest's command was one of the last left standing. They could have become a guerrilla force, dragging out the war with the Union for months. Forrest decided to lay down his arms and convinced his men to do so, too, rather than taking them to Mexico to continue the conflict for years.

He settled down after the war as something of a hero to the Southerners, but was soon tempted into an organization that would later become the KKK. He wanted to fight to protect the rights of Southerners as they were re-admitted to the union and he wanted to limit the rights of Blacks to vote and control the new Southern governments. This was not an unusual position for a defeated Confederate. The organization began to transform into one that wanted to intimidate, harass, and harm blacks, and Forrest parted company with them at that point. Yet, his reputation was tarnished for years because of his association with the KKK, which was actually outlawed and went underground for over 30 years, with members being hunted down and arrested in the period just after the war.

This showed that Forrest had limits, and some would question if he was principled. If you asked whether he was he honorable, many of the people of the time would argue both sides of that position. Did he become honorable as time passed? In a strange and tarnished way, I would say, yes he did. Many that opposed Southern Rebellion and abolitionists that hated all repression of the blacks would probably never admit that there was anything honorable about the man. Yet many of those who faced him in battle would have a hard time arguing that he was not a man to be reckoned with.

Galaxy Zoo

I think I heard about Galaxy Zoo on a Science Friday broadcast about 2 months ago. I had heard about it before, but this time I logged on to http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ to see what it was all about.

The premise of the site is for astronomers tasked with classifying distant galaxies getting some help. There are something like 200 billion galaxies in the universe, which is far too many to go through all of them in a lifetime with the number of professional astronomers doing the work. They developed programs to sort out the galaxies, but found that a computer is not good at distinguishing a disk from a sphere or recognizing a disk seen from edge on. Humans are very good at this. So the images were split up by a computer and fed to a site where you can sign on to help. This is known as crowdsourcing, where you use volunteer citizen scientists to help perform a long task. Right now, there are a quarter million volunteers helping with the work. Unfortunately, that still works out to 800,000 galaxies for each volunteer to classify. The work would still not get done in our lifetime at this rate.

We have had so many exploratory space probes, generating so much data over the last 40 years. The average person probably assumes that all this data has been thoroughly analyzed by teams of diligent scientists. The reality is that the information is beyond the ability of scientists to study. It's a simple matter of time constraints. Can you thoroughly catalog all of your personal photographs? Most people probably do not take the time to do this, and that task is simple compared to analyzing the photos from a single fly-by of a satellite.

I used to watch Star Trek and wonder why they wouldn't have everything all figured out by 300 years from now? They are always flying by some red dwarf star or some nebula and stopping to explore like it's a wonderful new thing. I remember thinking, "surely they've seen this before?" It makes sense if you think about it. I have been paying attention to distance and speed in the various Star Trek series and have concluded that Warp 9 is not 9 times the speed of light. It's something much faster. There seems to be an exponential effect to warp factors, because they zip along doing 8 light years in a matter of hours. Even at these impressive rates, 300 years from now, we still have barely scratched the surface of one quadrant of the galaxy. That's just in our galaxy, which stretches for 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars (give or take a hundred billion - we don't even know).

In the past, organizations like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have come up with ways that you can donate your computers processor to help crunch huge numbers. I believe they were analyzing huge amounts of radio spectrum looking for patterns that might be "man made". These efforts used distributed processing to run a large virtual supercomputer, but I have not heard that they have had much success in their efforts. They certainly have not found an intelligent signal, but I would also classify success as analyzing all the available data, and I'm not sure they've reached that milestone, either.

I've heard of crowdsourcing projects that search for habitable planets, supernovae remnants in nebulae, surface features on planets and satellites in our solar system, and protein structures in living organisms. There is a lot of knowledge out there to ponder. Last week, IBM put its new supercomputer called Watson on the game show Jeopardy to see if it could beat the two best Jeopardy contestants in history. It did so quickly and easily. This was seen as a huge challenge for computing, because answering the questions is not a simple database search, but an interpretation with some tricky aspects to it. Not all Jeopardy questions are straightforward, some involve word play and subtle twists. While the computer did admirably, they confessed that sometimes it would just miss the point completely. I witnessed this in the Final Jeopardy question on the second day. It was a question about airports being named after WWII battles and soldiers, and I knew it immediately (only because I stopped and read the historic plaque in O'Hare during one of several incredibly long layovers there). They said that Watson's strength is the ability to go over huge amounts of information in multiple databases, but it doesn't always make good sense of it. One of the possible applications that the IBM team said we could use Watson for was to point things out and make suggestions for a human user or team to quickly discard and sort through. They used the example of putting a patient's symptoms into the computer and having it list several possibilities. The computer could search through all the recent medical papers and all the old archives and do what amounts to an enormous amount of research very quickly. It would take a human forever to read all the medical papers and keep up to date. However, if the computer did that portion of the job for us, we could concentrate on those few possibilities that have a high probability of yielding good results, thus focusing our time and making us more efficient. We can see patterns and connections that the computer doesn't understand.

Our curiosity and need to improve our lives will always push us to learn about all the unknowns. I find it encouraging that we are still finding new ways to think and learn how to learn.

Arab Uprisings

I'm currently going through a period where I am behind on the news. I don't generally know the day's news until a few days later. I see this as a mental health move, in addition to being busy with work and perpetually behind since the blizzard.

I have a coworker that does not seem to be able to let my ignorance last for too long. He asked me about the Egyptian protests one day and suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind it. Suspecting that this information came from Fox News, I took to the internet to better understand the background information. I skimmed through the Wikipedia backgrounds on the Tunisian Revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood, branching out in my search to learn when and how the various countries gained independence and got their current leader, as well as what their politics and society were like. I found out that one of the most probable replacements for Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was Mohamed Elbaradei, a Nobel Prize winner who had worked to control Iran's nuclear weapons program. I also found a map of the Arab world that showed which countries were experiencing revolutions and protests. I could not believe how widespread the movements were or how quickly they came about. In two months, most of the Arab world has seen unrest that could very well topple more governments.

My initial reaction was surprise that the Arab populous had this combination of dissatisfaction and willingness to express it. I think of travelling to an Arab country, particularly the less secular ones, as something I, as a westerner, should not even consider. I would expect the governments to be intolerant and likely to nail me for a crime whether I committed it or not. If you've ever seen Midnight Express, you know what I mean there. I would expect the people of these countries to form an instant lynch mob to help insure that I would be prosecuted for some transgression, most likely one that I had no idea I was doing. I have heard reports of people getting executed for blasphemy, which can be something simple like saying Muhammad or touching the Koran. I'm not saying my fears are completely rational, or that my views are well researched and backed by solid evidence, I'm just saying that my perception of the region is of a place that I could not relate to the government or the people and would not care to visit. I didn't realize this about myself until I started contemplating that these people were in revolt. They are acting more like I expected us to behave, with a thirst for freedom and a willingness to be rebellious.

Boiled down to the simplest summary of the situation in Egypt, it is a popular uprising of people wanting freedom from a tyrannical dictator who is corrupt and oppressive. Is that not an exact match in the description of America's own revolution? The differences are there, too. Egyptians are not taking up arms, they are stopping work and taking up banners. These protesters are militarily defenseless. After the common examples of what usually happens to freedom loving protesters in oppressive dictatorships, you would expect only one outcome, a Tiananmen Square style slaughter. People rounded up and put into re-education camps if they were not executed immediately. Worst, people simply disappearing without a trace.

The fact that the revolution worked - worked in overthrowing Mubarak, not necessarily giving them the better country that they want - is a miracle. The fact that it is spreading is also a surprise. At the time of this writing, protesters have been shot and killed in Pearl Square in Bahrain, and the movement in Libya is showing signs of evolving into a civil war. Not one country in the region is not dealing with unrest.

Many people credit Facebook & Twitter for enabling these movements. Governments are forced to attempt to shut down the internet to control the uprisings, and by then it's too late. The flow of information is too difficult to stop. The media has also been taken completely by surprise by the uprisings. Al Jazeera seems to be the only media outlet with eyes on the street in many of the areas of unrest. I find it ironic that the media outlet that conservative Americans were furious about for reporting unfavorably on the Iraq War are now the one outlet defying local Arab governments and reporting on the protests.

I see parallels between the use of Facebook and Twitter to get the facts out and WikiLeaks' recent influence on world events and opinions by bringing secrets out to the public eye. I grew up during the Cold War and entered the military during the Reagan era when we trained exclusively to face off against the Soviet Union. We were raised to fear this monolithic country that maintained power by lying to and oppressing their people. We felt that fighting the Chinese Communists was not as likely as fighting the Russians, but the adversary was similarly corrupt and oppressive. Both communist behemoths maintained their grip on power by a steady diet of misinformation and by blocking the truth from getting out. This is why we had Voice of America, a U.S. government run radio network whose only goal was providing our truth to the poor slobs trapped behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. We all knew what would happen if you stood up against the government in those countries. Death, torture, or re-education were the most likely possibilities. We felt we were better because we had free elections, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, along with economic freedoms. I find it ironic that we have evolved to the point where we have participated in torture, where the governments are more interested in staying in power than telling the truth, and where a few very powerful corporations are increasingly in control of policy if not elections. When someone rips the veil off of our government and shows some glimpses behind the scenes, you actually have citizens that are rising to the defense of our government to keep secrets and take hideous actions in the supposed best interest of our country.

Even though the protesters say they want democracy and freedom, there are those in this country that do not trust or believe it, and further, they do not trust Muslims to have these freedoms because they fear they will be used against us. I hear the stories of how some conservatives fear the rise of Islam if Arab populations are free to elect their own leaders, and there are also Glen Beck style rants that are so far into left field that you can just classify them as "the sky is falling" assertions of pure panic, and not reasoned analysis. I cannot believe that people can abandon their ideals just because they can't relate to the people that profess those same ideals.

What amazes me even more is how unprepared the U.S. was for these revolutions. Here we are again, using a page from the old play book that we never seem to learn from, which is backing oppressive leaders simply because they behave as we like them to in the global or regional political arena. The irony I find in the events is to recall some of the things that George W. Bush professed and to wonder if he was right, even if it was for all the wrong reasons? The Iraq War was started under the pretext of self defense. Later, when the weapons of mass destruction were not found, the reason transformed retroactively to "Spreading Democracy in the Middle East". I remember at the time thinking that it was so much hogwash, because you can't have someone else's revolution for them. If they don't fight for freedom themselves, it doesn't mean much, and if you occupy a country, you can't truly say that they are a self governed democracy. Bush made several speeches where he touched on his desire for the Middle East to be transformed by Democracy. Then, in the Palestinian Elections of 2006, the radical Islamic Terrorist group Hamas was elected by the Palestinians in their first really free elections. What did the freedom and democracy loving West do at that time? They immediately denounced the elections and declared that they would not deal with the new government and things have gone downhill since. So while a look at George W. Bush's opening remarks in his May 2008 speech at the World Economic Forum in Egypt provides one with an eerie foretelling of the events in the last two months, I still do not think that we were ready for the actual possibility (let alone the speed) of popular uprisings, nor are we willing to allow them to take their natural course, if that means fundamentalist Islamic governments taking power.

I do not think Iraq was a starting point for this revolution. I understand that the youth in Iraq are less religious because of the way their country was torn apart by religious violence. I think that their youth spent an inordinate time growing up on the internet, because it was too violent to go outside. I am curious to see what they do with the democratic society we are trying to establish there. It's been 8 years, and you can't say the government is stable or not corrupt. It's just not as oppressive as it was under Hussein. I keep thinking about Iran in this crisis. They already had a revolution, back in the 70's and the Islamic Fundamentalists that seized power after that uprising turned the clock back in that country to a level of progress and technology from years ago. They are facing their own uprisings, first the 2009 and 2010 ones following an election that many felt was stolen and did not reflect the will of the people, and in recent days, a continuation of that unrest inspired by the success of the uprising in Egypt.

Even the Israeli society is undergoing a transformation of sorts. There is a movement of ex-Israeli soldiers speaking out against the actions in occupied territories. The group Breaking The Silence has been collecting recordings of anonymous Israeli soldiers telling about their experiences, and mostly questioning the stories coming from and the policies of the Israeli government. It reminds me so much of what could happen in a world where there were dozens of Wikileaks and the information on what America is really doing behind the scenes came out for the consumption of the general public. While painful, I think this would be a good thing. How can we form honest opinions about our government, that we are charged to select, if we do not get to see what it is that they are really doing and why? How can we correct corruption and misdeeds if we remain blissfully ignorant of them? Why should we blindly support a government that will not share the information of what they are doing and why? Are we small children that cannot be trusted with the truth?

While my coworkers comments on the Muslim Brotherhood were a reflection of the fears that many in this country hold over the possibility of a more fundamental Middle East, I do not share these fears. Better to be dealing with a government willing to express the will of their people and hopefully have some chance of solving many of the intractable problems than to continue on as we have been. Let them elect their devout Muslim countrymen, we seem to make Christian beliefs a prerequisite for getting elected in this country, why shouldn't they make Islamic principles the basis for electing their leaders? I'm not saying I think religious people should rule any country, I think that's a disaster. I'm just asking why we are so blatantly hypocritical of the practice and unable and unwilling to see that our stance is inconsistent?

Whatever happens, the situation is fascinating. The thing about history that is constant is that things get shaken up from time to time. Sometimes, things seem to get jostled into place more firmly, the revamping of society is like an urban renewal project that cleans out the blight and sets things right. Sometimes the revolution pushes things out of control and makes us wish for better days. I think it's good to sit back and watch groups of people struggle for their freedom. If you aren't inspired by this, what side are you on?

Power Plays

In my opinion, it is no question which side of the political divide exerts more sway on public opinion. The Republicans have a much more unified effort at pushing their political agenda. Through Fox News and conservative talk radio conservative talking points are continuously hammered into the public's brains. Don't give me this bull about the liberal media - conservative viewpoints dominate the media in all meaningful ways, and if you doubt me, look at advertising revenue and market share. This is a well oiled machine, this way of pushing a certain viewpoint out on the public. There are many people I know repeat the same talking points and if you ever wonder where they get these ideas, tune in to Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly for a week and then listen around for how often you hear their remarks being parroted. The true brilliance of this approach is that people are walking around making smart sounding arguments and assertions about subject that they know absolutely nothing about. Hey, it sounded good on the radio or TV, no reason to research it and see what it's all about, you're armed and ready, just get out there and shoot your mouth off. It's the great American pastime.

I heard about the Wisconsin Representative walkout and efforts by the Governor to end collective bargaining by government employees. I saw the initial reports that were shaping it up to be a union breaking effort by a heartless Republican on one side of the argument and a reining in of overpaid and over-privileged fat cat government workers on one had. I did a little research and found that the salary comparisons were said to be unfair, as you are looking at a mostly degreed, well educated and professional government service population being compared to everyone from CEOs to minimum wage workers in the private sector. Apparently, the government does very little blue collar work, and what labor intensive functions they do have, they take care of with private sector contractors. One report said that the Wisconsin legislature just passed a package of tax breaks for large corporations in the state that exceeds the budget shortfall. They then pointed to the budget shortfall, conjured up a government employee boogie man and had all the justification they needed to try to do something they really wanted to do anyway, which is to pull the teeth of the unions.

I'm not a huge fan of unions, as they are strong on protecting their rights and benefits and short on holding their membership accountable or enforcing the need for standards and continued education. I get tired of the thought that seniority is everything and exceptional performance is not being rewarded in union controlled labor sectors. I find this to be a fatal flaw of unions, because it kills the possibility of continual improvement and exceptionalism.

I do see some merit in the charge that the budget crisis was created in order to limit the power of the unions and thus permanently tilt the balance of power in favor of the Republicans. I might be open to the possibility that this was not their intent, but it is certainly the effect. And it's hard for me to believe that the Republicans would not want to take credit for this accomplishment if they can pull it off.

State Legislatures do not have filibusters and there is no way to prevent a vote or force those that want a vote to be in the supermajority if they want to proceed. The action of fleeing the assembly does not strike me as cowardice as much as desperation. Running away is not a sustainable tactic in the long run. As politics go, the only way that this tactic works is if you can get strikes and protests to turn up the volume while you delay the vote. If the pressure rises during the delay, it might cause some of the Republicans to retreat or reverse their positions. I doubt the Democratic opposition is well enough organized to pull that off. It's not as if the public is going to rally behind the government workers, either.

What I can't believe happens in these debates and in some elections is how teachers are vilified by conservatives just because they are in unions. It's like wanting to hit your mother. I can't see tearing down the people that teach our children, and I don't understand why anyone supports those that do. I've yet to hear a convincing argument that teachers are harming our children.

This reminds me of the great Texas Redistricting Fiasco of 2003. The Republicans in the state finally took control from Democrats and immediately sought to redistrict the state to form more favorable conditions for Republicans. The Democratic legislators fled the state and Texas actually called on Homeland Security to try to track them down. The Democrats failed and the Republicans solidified and gained stronger control of the Texas election system. Some analysts assert that the Republican efforts have permanently tilted the balance of power in the state.

It's not hard for me to believe that political operatives look for opportunities like this and are quick to implement power grabbing plans when they come up. We've also seen it in textbook review boards that are trying to force textbook publishers to rewrite history more favorably to the conservative cause and Republican point of view. In Kansas, the state board of education is notorious for being taken over by conservatives every other election with the result being that they immediately try to get evolution out of the science classes and creation inserted, sometimes under the guise of Intelligent Design.

I see a system that is being continually gamed to the advantage of whoever can successfully peddle their influence. If they can't get to the people in power, they try to put people in power that they can control. We live in a system where the rich get obscenely richer and the poor and middle class just slide a little further down the socioeconomic scale every year, losing ground, losing influence, and losing power. In cycles in the past in this country, money has exerted its power until the conditions reach the breaking point for the masses and they push back. Some of the conservative propaganda you hear, the constant talking points that are parroted endlessly, are centered on how the Europeans are "Socialists". People that parrot this phrase do not truly understand what Socialism is. Socialism is not taking over industry in Europe. You do not have governments controlling the production of goods. You have government providing a broad and extensive safety net in the way of retirement pensions and medical care, but this has not resulted in a massive bureaucracy or horrible health outcomes. What Americans fail to understand is that Europeans are getting the type of system they want. They are electing officials that support these systems and demanding that they be continued. They cannot understand our system that allows the people at the bottom of the economic spectrum to be neglected. It's a little like the elementary school boy that is being teased by his friends for liking a girl. In this case, the little boy is looking at his tormentors and going, "yes, I like her. Why is this a problem for you?" The barbs and the insults are not considered derogatory to the target, so they do not have the power to sting or influence them.

Is the U.S. system of large corporations and political parties pulling power plays on the rest of society a good thing? Are we more productive and prosperous because we have this way of doing things built in to our society? Are there less European multibillionaires than there are in the U.S.? Does the European system have more immunity to the few powerful people purchasing influence and trying to reshape the world in their image? Is it true that the average American is not in favor of limiting the power or advantages of the rich because they hope and expect to be rich some day?

Americans are not a timid people. The same rebelliousness that caused us to seek independence still thrives in the hearts of our supercapitalists that want to do business as they see fit with no interference from the government or the people. The problem is that the people come from the same stock, and when you ride over them for long enough, they will start pushing back. In the end, our competitive and rebellious nature will force us into confrontations and conflicts. We haven't evolved to the point where we can have empathy for our opponents and seek solutions that provide the best outcomes for both sides. We run our Power Plays and hope for the best.

Deficit Mania

The 2010 election spawned the whole political movement of the Tea Party and now the interpretation is that these are strict constitutionalists with a strong aversion to big government and a desire to drastically cut spending.

In fact, the main stream Republicans can talk about little else than the deficit. I consider the Tea Party to be a radical subset of the Republicans, more conservative, more militant and insistent in their beliefs.

The Republican Political Playbook has for years used the phrase "Tax and Spend" as a way of tarring and feathering their opposition. Some within the Republican ranks will tell you that cutting taxes puts more money into the hands of people and makes them spend more and therefore stimulates the economy. This lately has translated into a full blown concern for the deficit, which is a different thing. Democrats may argue that money should be spent by government to stimulate the economy, and really they are doing just the same thing as Republicans. The only difference is that they are unbalancing the budget by adding debits while the Republicans are unbalancing the budget by reducing credits. Both are poor accountants.

The Republicans felt that deficit spending was justified to fight a war in Iraq (which some said was not justified in and of itself, much less not justified to spend that much money). The Democrats are willing to run deficits to pump money into the economy in order to shore up the unemployed or stimulate the economy. No one has ever been willing to actually address the deficit in a truly decisive manner. In the 1990s we had a surplus, partly because the end of the Cold War freed up a lot of money we had been pouring into the military, but also because the economy was cranking along nicely and energy prices were low. What did our friends in Congress argue about when there was a surplus? True to form, the Republicans argued about cutting taxes and the Democrats argued about increasing spending.

No one tried to pay down the debt. No one tried to adjust entitlements, which is best to do when times are robust than when times are lean.

Politicians are not fiscally responsible and they are not serious about wanting to be fiscally responsible. You don't diet by eating whatever you want and trying to exercise all day and you don't believe that a healthy way to lose weight is to starve yourself and never exert yourself. This doesn't make sense. You work on both ends of the equation in order to keep yourself healthy and on the right track.

It's the same way with the federal budget. We need modest tax increases coupled with modest spending cutbacks to meet in the middle in the least painful way. We need to do simple things to balance the books on entitlements, which means looking at each system and making them balanced. Social Security is easy to fix, you float the retirement age to the neutral revenue point. This would mean raising it up a few years now, but then letting it float so the change would be gradual. Eventually, the age would come back down when the baby boomers started to exit the system at the other end of retirement (how's that for a nice way to say it?).

I've heard many people argue that big government programs and federal spending were working to reverse the Great Depression and one year FDR went along with the deficit hawks and cut spending and the depression started to come back. People argue that WWII got us out of the depression and I have to ask, how is that not a program of unprecedented government spending, as well as high taxes? The Keynesian Economists swear that you need a lot of government spending to reverse economic downturns. While it's impossible to know if the bailouts and stimulus bills staved off utter collapse of the economy, it's hard to argue that they didn't work to improve things. People have largely forgotten that the bailout/stimulus spending began under a Republican administration and was widely supported by both sides initially. Now the Democrats are left holding the blame for rising the deficit and debt, but get no credit for saving the economy.

Many people believe that one role that big government does well is to fund basic research and development. Many assert that this spending is like an investment with very high payoffs in the future, which I believe, but find hard to prove. Some people think that private industry should be doing the research and development, but Corporate America is less and less willing to spend money on the future in this way any more. If big government really wants to put their thumb on one side of the scale to help tilt this, I wouldn't mind if we tied tax incentives for big corporations to the amount they pour into R&D (or hiring people and creating new jobs for that matter). If you're going to burden the taxpayers with an expense, at least pick something that will work like an investment and earn you something down the road.

I do not believe that the general public or our elected officials have a good idea of how to manage government spending and I see nothing on the horizon that will change that.

The Value of Voting

During a recent Freakonomics Podcast, which I listened to on 1/26/11, the host stated that you should not feel bad about skipping voting because it does you no good. I wrote the following letter to them:

"Ignoring my visceral response to your comment that it is a waste of time to vote, it doesn't ring true to me. If the premise of the question is whether or not your individual single vote makes any difference, I can understand the answer. Voting is not an individual act, but a collective one. Choosing not to vote as an individual may have little impact, but encouraging individuals not to vote (I should say dissuading people from voting) has a large collective impact. Further, failure to research issues prior to going into the voting booth to cast a vote, I believe already has an adverse collective impact, as seen by the government we get. A self-serving (or special interest serving) group of elected officials with a 98% incumbency re-election rate is a disservice to our country and a danger to any true progress or problem solving.

"To test the validity of the premise that voting makes no difference, please substitute other activities for voting, such as polluting. Those who grew up in the 60's and 70's, like me, probably remember the polluted lakes and streams and the roadsides littered with garbage. Your individual effort of throwing trash out of your car window or picking up trash a single piece of trash alongside the road might be meaningless, but the collective efforts of the nation to change our behavior has made for a cleaner and better world. The same would be true for voting if we took it more seriously and did it more consistently and with more care.

"I realize your intent was to analyze a particular question without any moral bias, but I couldn't help but hope as I heard you tell people that their votes did not make any difference that this would not influence people to give up their right to vote.

"Could you please re-address the original question with the thought in mind of the results of collective actions? Your coverage of the savings account lottery is another example of collective behavior making a difference when individual behavior seems insignificant. Without all the investors, there is no prize in the savings account lottery."

But I have to say, voting today is a lot more like cleaning up stinky garbage. I might argue that it's worthless to vote because it doesn't ever seem to change anything or fix any of our problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

The History of Torture

I honestly do not remember why I put the search term torture in the search bar that day. I was in my public library's catalog, where I get most of the books I read, and something in the news or some minor thing that came to mind made me put the term in. It came up with The History of Torture by Brian Innes at the first hit. There were two other books in the search that I will discuss further on, but first, an overview of the title book.

This book was written in 1998, before the recent Bush era forays into torture by the United States came up.

I personally have had many arguments about torture with people. The gist of the argument always seems to me to be that if we are doing it, it isn't torture, or these people that were rounded up are guilty, or it's not that bad, you could hardly call it torture.

While our efforts against radical fundamentalist terrorist do bring up unique challenges, they do not justify torture in my mind. The problem with declaring a war on terror is that there is no President, Prime Minister, Emperor, or Fuhrer to surrender, thus winning the whole contest. Each hostile enemy individual is his own war effort, in effect his own country. He's certainly not taking orders from any country recognized by the U.N. and would not surrender unless individually captured. For this reason, declaring war seems to me to be inappropriate. This is individual people not acting under any government direction, so it is criminal activity. You never stop fighting crime, but wars are costly, require a lot of people and effort, and you want to be able to end them at some point. A guerrilla war is similar, although in that case, fighting groups may be supplied and may take direction from a government group.

I was trained by the U.S. Army in the Geneva Convention. We were taught that nothing justified mistreatment of a prisoner. It didn't matter if their side mistreated our guys or if an attack was imminent, or if we caught someone in the act of some war crime, you can never abuse a prisoner. Once captured, he is no longer a factor in the armed struggle. At that point, you may interrogate him, but it never seemed to me that there would be much information of any use that they would offer freely or give up under simple questioning. Often, during the Civil War, captured prisoners would reveal much, but only accidentally, after being tricked, and usually because both sides had a common culture and could goad or enrage prisoners into talking. I always believed that torture was wrong, and often worried about how I would stand up to it if I was ever captured in a conflict. I have always assumed that I would be singing like a canary in a very short time. To me, avoiding being a torturer was necessary in order to keep up the edge we had for decades of being the honorable opponent. In a close situation, soldiers will sometimes surrender rather than fight on if they know they will be treated well, so it was always better to foster that way of thinking in the enemy. Plus, we always talked about how much better and how much more moral we were than then. This is what steeled many people of my generation for the decades of the cold war. We deserved to win because we cared about people and were better human beings.

One of the things I learned along the way was that torture never works. Under a painful interrogation, the prisoner will quickly decide that the pain must end and therefore, the people asking the questions should be told what they want to hear. It's the only reason they'll stop asking questions, when they believe they have the answers. I've always known that I would tell someone whatever they wanted to hear if I was being hurt in a terrible way. The information gained from torture is always suspect. You cannot assume that any of it is true.

The History of Torture talked about how the ancients used torture and brought that forward to the Middle Ages. Just as the Romans occasionally tortured a Christian (before The Roman Empire was a christian empire), the Christians didn't take long to adopt as an instrument of state during the middle ages. A depressingly large swath of the middle of the book is about the inquisitions. I did not realize there were more than one, or that they were started over such trivial matters. Does God interfere in day to day events or has he kept his hands off since shortly after creation? This question was responsible for kicking off the inquisition. I'm guessing that many churches today have people that believe both ways in the same congregation. Can you imagine being accused of something as trivial as this and being disfigured under the hands of torture until you gave over the names of others that were thinking or doing as you did?

It kept striking me throughout the middle of the book that elaborate and widespread torture was mostly religiously motivated and taken out by members of the church or their agents. Religion has been responsible for more torture than anything else over the years. How do you believe? Be careful, the wrong answer could give you a trip to the rack.

I thought that by reading the book, I would become numb to the thought of torture, and I must say that this was the case. After hearing dozens of details of pain inflicted on individuals in order to change their beliefs, I found myself unimpressed by the procedures. I never did lose my sense of unfairness at all the poor people that were unjustly accused, who later confessed to belief or acts which they did not hold or did not commit.

The next book I checked out was Barry Eisler's Inside Out. Mr. Eisler was an actual ex-CIA covert agent. He only did it for 3 years, but even so, you get the feeling that you're hearing things you're not supposed to know. He had fictional government agents that used to torture and now were trying to bring down the government by revealing the extent of their torture. Mr. Eisler had a character in his book state something that I believe he believed himself. He said that people don't use torture because they think it works, they use it because they want to hurt people.

The last book I checked out was The Torture Memos by David Cole. It went over the legal justifications for torture during the Bush administration. The book had a description of an interrogation of a terror suspect, and it did not look easy to endure. It amazes me that there was no one prosecuted over the affair.

Also mentioned in The History of Torture is another older book not available through the library, called: A History of Torture by George Riley Scott. I have not yet checked out or purchased this book (they did not have it at the bookstore), and I may not. It seems to me that everything that needs to be said on torture already has.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

I must have originally heard about the Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on the radio or in a podcast, I can't remember. It was published in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

This is a book about how humans colonized the planet, with particular emphasis on discoveries and inventions - how we developed.

There are many aspects of the book which I was already familiar with, in the broad strokes. I knew roughly how we came out of Africa and swept across Europe and Asia, and how we domesticated plants and animals and settled into more and more civilized cities with more and more specialized technology and pursuits.

So you might wonder how much more you can learn from 440 pages of heavily footnoted text. The short answer is not a lot of basic broad historical strokes, but a lot of nuance. Some surprises on human migration, like the colonization of Madagascar from southeast Asia were completely unexpected and fun to learn. The isolation of Australia after it's initial colonization and the self-enforced isolation of China were two things that I had never heard about before, and were fascinating.

There were some very interesting broad concepts, like the wide stretch over the same lattitude of Eurasia being the perfect developing ground for the spread of domesticated plants, while the north south axis of the Americas were a hinderance to spreading of advances.


It was interesting to see how scholars and scientists have shed light on the spread of humanity by analyzing language similarities and by tracking genetic studies of populations. While these were not particularly surprising methods, it was fascinating to see how some details they illuminated were unexpected. For example, we think of Africa as this melting pot where humanity emerged and then changed as they spread out, but Africa used to have more diversity, and studies have shown that other groups of humans with other cultures and languages had been subjugated and absorbed in some migration that occurred after humans had already spread out of Africa.

Since reading the book, I have heard the results of some recent studies that touch on the same subjects that Jared Diamond touched on in his book. He stated that he thought that the megafauna extinctions, particularly of Australia, but of North and South America, too, were the result of overhunting by humans. The megafauna were large mammals that existed on those continents up to the time man migrated in, and then were extinct shortly after the appearance of man. Many people are familiar with the woolly mammoth and the saber toothed tiger, but there were all kinds of other large mammals that used to exist that became extinct right around the time man showed up. Recent studies have drawn the opposite conclusion, stating that the extinctions had climatic or other reasons, but could not have been by overhunting given the time frame that they occurred. Scientists currently disagree on this point.

The other theory that I have heard was that the migrations of humans out of Africa did not originate from the area around Kenya, but from North Africa. The Sahara Desert was a jungle not too long ago, and humans inhabited it. There is evidence that suggests that these are the groups that first migrated off the continent into what is now the area around Israel. Each year brings on new discoveries to flesh out our understanding of this time period.

The main question he is addressing in the book is why some bands of humans were able to out-compete others. The main answer is right in his title. They had guns (superior warfare tactics), they had diseases which they were more resistant to, and they had steel (better developed technology).

The interesting thing that came out of my version of the book, which has an afterword added some years after the original book was released, was that many large corporations were looking at the book and seeing if it applied to corporations and companies. What makes one company out-compete another.

While dense with information and difficult to plow through, the book is also rich with interesting details and well worth the time to work through it.

Privacy

The recent Wikileaks controvercy had me thinking about privacy and how it is applied to certain groups.

When the accessibility of the internet grew, several phenomena grew with it. We have the explosion of social media and the ability of simple online searches to expose a lot of your personal information to anyone with an internet connection. Law enforcement agencies started putting cameras on police cars, and sometimes drove with camera crews - like the show Cops. They put surveillance cameras more and more in public places and then started thinking about putting them on roadways as speed traps or red light enforcers. When 9/11 hit, government officials started to devise ways to improve security. Some of these ways involved not just more intrusive searches on people at airports, but the possibility that your email might be read by someone in the government. Some people see no problem with this increased scrutiny. You will often hear proponents of increased government power of surveillance of individuals saying that we live in a different world and you shouldn't expect as much individual privacy today.

If this is such a good idea for individual people, why is it not a good idea for governments or large corporations? What's fair is fair, right? After all, if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide? That's what I'm being told as a justification for losing my privacy, so shouldn't that apply to government and industry too?

We are expected to vote for people and then re-evaluate their performance during the next election and decide whether to re-elect them or not. It's like a performance review for a job. If we don't know what they are doing or how they are doing it because they get to classify their actions and hide their activities behind a veil of security, then we really can't judge the job they are doing and cannot in good conscience decide whether to vote for them or not. I'm not talking about exposing CIA operatives, and endangering secret agents. I figure that the best kept secrets like that are already better protected and will be the last secrets to be exposed anyway. The exception was the Valerie Plame affair, and that was done from the inside. What I am talking about exposing is why we go to war, what corporations are pulling government strings, and why decisions are being made. I don't need to know the name of or get a picture of a field agent doing his job, but I want to know if the government sent him out to perform assassinations or subvert governments or abduct people for interrogations.

Secrecy allows you to torture people, imprison them without cause, assassinate inconvenient rivals, start wars, and ignore festering problems. Secrecy allows you to conspire to fix prices, put unsafe products into the public's hands, continue to practice unsafe procedures in the workplace, and pollute without any control. The worst an individual could do with secrecy might be to defraud someone, injure an individual, or do drugs. The harm anyone as an individual can do is so much less than governments and corporations can do, yet why are people arguing that my secrecy must be sacrificed to protect the rest of the public and they aren't arguing that the big players that have much more impact and can do much more harm need greater protections from public scrutiny?

Some have expressed disappointment in President Obama, feeling that he has not lived up to his campaign promises (obviously, his opponents express disappointment just that he's in office). I have heard a defense of Obama that speculated that if you knew what he knows, if you saw all the inside information that he now has access to since he went into office, you'd understand why he is acting the way he is. This justification is not acceptible. If every new elected official gets to go to Washington and disappear behind a veil of secrecy and ignore what they were sent to office to do, their campaign promises mean nothing. If we can't expect anyone we elect to do the things they say they are going to do, then it doesn't do any good to vote for anyone. We as voters are responsible for our leaders actions, and how can we evaluate how they make decisions if we can't even see what they see?

There were serious misuses of privacy in the previous administration, and the hope in electing Obama was that things would roll back and revert to times when government was more accessible. Vice President Cheney in particular used to claim executive privelige in order to do his job unencumbered, unquestioned, and without interference from the public. That started with his work with energy corporations in drafting policy in his energy task force. The particulars of those meetings never did see the light of day. In the absense of hard evidence, I assume that energy corporations were given the ability to effect legislation and enforcement in ways that circumvented restrictions and benefited the bottom line of the company at the expense of the general public. The result was an unneccesary war in Iraq and $4 per gallon gasoline. The other assertion that Cheney used to make was that our security measures had prevented many terrorist attacks. When asked for specifics, he couldn't tell us about them for "security" reasons. This supposedly justified torture, detainment, rendition, and the erosion of individual privacy. If you were able to rip away this veil of secrecy and found that there were no attacks repelled and the questionable actions made no difference in our security, you would have a clear case to remove the perpetrators from office. But since they got to say what it was we got to see, it was easy for them to simply restict this information, which gave them more freedom to do whatever they wanted.

I say we should open up the files and look at the information. People in government and industry should always act in a way that they will not be ashamed of when it comes to light in the public. What they do has a broader effect and they expect no less from us.

Lame Duck Session

I was listening to an interesting exchange on the Slate Political Gabfest about the lame duck session of Congress.

Emily Bazelon explained that some people were so incensed about lame duck sessions that they were thinking of making them illegal, and at least the laws that came out of them had the feeling of something that was unconstitutional, because these people had just been voted out. She commented that this time the lame duck session might be a good thing because cooler heads could prevail and decisions could be made without regard for re-election prospects.

In repeating the other's complaints, she described the session as an undemocratic time, but I believe we are seeing a political calculation-free zone. Our elected officials are, during these interludes, able to make decisions divorced from political machinations. For a while, the motivation can be what's good for the country and not their next election. Instead of paying back their small group of core campaign contributors they can do what’s right for the majority. The irony is that more campaign promises that usually amount to nothing more than rhetoric seem to be fulfilled during the lame duck session than during the regular session. Actions that are for the greater good of the country can be openly considered in this brief period where there are no glaring klieg lights of politics that do not allow for any political cover.

This tells us that politics and the things politicians do to get re-elected are distorting the way they govern. Additionally, the political calculations did not work for the Democrats. All the issues that they would not make a stand on before the election were avoided because they felt it would make them un-electable. These were exactly the issues that their core supporters expected them to address all along. The irony is that their political second guessing and maneuvering was counterproductive. If they had worked toward some of the legislation they've been free to approach during the Lame Duck Session, I believe they would have had better chances at being re-elected. Showing some backbone and tackling issues that the right painted as completely unacceptible would have energized their base.

The independent swing voters who turned to the Democrats in hopes that they would be anti-Republicans were sorely disappointed by their behavior since the 2008 election. The gutless way that Democrats wouldn't even consider legislation and make their agenda happen during a sweeping supermajority is what hurt them and caused the enthusiam gap among those swing voters. The behavior of the Democrats during this lame duck session proves that they had the ability to get some things that needed to be done completed despite Republican blustering. If they had exhibited some courage over the last 2 years, I believe the election would not have been as successful for the Republicans.

Prior to the election, the Republicans were taking advantage of a situation where obstructionism and not cooperating meant they were not working for the good of the country, and yet this put them back in a position of power. They were rewarded for bad behavior. The lame duck lesson that should be transmitted to the regular session is to do what’s right, not what you think you should do because of election politics.

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that is now a movie staring Viggo Mortensen. The movie came out last summer and I heard a review on the podcast Seen/Unseen Movie Reviews. The host said that he loved the book and was fearful that the movie would screw it up. There was something about his passionate description of the book that stuck in my mind, and made me decide that I had to read it. I purchased the book some time back, and I have a paperback that came out since the movie, so it has a picture of Viggo Mortensen and the actor who plays the boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, on the cover. I used to be a read the book first purist, but I've relaxed on that account somewhat. I realized that in this case, it was too late, just seeing the movie trailers would have been enough to put Viggo Mortensen's face on the man when I read the book. I do like that pure book experience where you have these vague, fantasy-like visions of the characters in your mind. I'm always afraid that putting an actual face on the character distracts you from accepting the character as a pure person, whom you can relate to and understand their motivations and desires. When the movie arrived in the mail from NetFlix, I realized I had to get off my butt and read the book.

That was three days ago, and I finished the book last night. It's that good. You sit down and read it from front to back. In contrast, I've been plugging away at Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond for 2 years (with long gaps where I put it aside), but can never seem to read more than about 10 pages in a sitting (after which, I fall asleep).

The book reminds me of the perfect subject for a high school essay. The themes are numerous, and the old thesis style of finding the hidden meanings in the book is a perfect way to view the novel.

The style is almost more poetry than prose. It follows a simple pattern alternating stream of consciousness with simple dialog and spare descriptions.

I had no idea where it was going. There are a few things that you realize they have left out of the novel. They never say what part of the world the characters are in. I kept thinking they were in California, but it could just as easily been parts of Georgia. The point is that it's not important because the world has been so radically changed that nothing is recognizable anymore. The cause of the end of the world or the downfall of civilization is not clear, but I suspect it was meant to be nuclear war and the ensuing nuclear winter. However, why were there not more references to radiation? I suppose it could have been a comet or asteroid strike.

They never say the boy's name or the man's name, and it doesn't matter. He's "the man" and his son is "the boy".

The novel sets up a good versus evil theme. This is not some underlying message you have to guess at, the boy is often questioning the man about whether people they encounter are good people. Unfortunately, they do not encounter any good people, only victims and predators. The struggle between the boy and the man is to remain good and survive. The boy's watchfulness keeps the man from devolving into savagery and the man's example gives the boy a clear idea of good and evil.

You find yourself asking why they keep going on. You wonder what it is that they are hopeful for. Is there some unscarred territory where people are still normal and life is going on with something resembling order?

You get the sense that the desolation following the original conflagration went in stages. This is what makes the novel interesting. There are no explicit narrative explanations, just bits and pieces that you pick up along the way. You begin to understand that the survivors have swept over the landscape in waves, with each successive wave being diminished. At some point, people began to turn on each other, and when we see the boy and the man on their journey, they have reached the point where they can't trust anyone. They will either be attacked or robbed by anyone they meet, and some bands will slaughter them for food if they can.

You get the sense that the man was once a police officer or a soldier, but he was also well read and intelligent, so there's no telling what he might have been. One thing is clear, he's been very lucky. He was lucky to have survived the initial collapse, and then lucky to have been able to raise the boy, who it appears was born after the disaster. He was lucky to have had someone to be with him and help him survive, and he was lucky to always be able to find food or shelter or evade attackers when they came after him.

At one point in the book, they encounter an old man who is so defenseless and impoverished that he poses no threat. He turns out to be somewhat blind, and you wonder how in the world he survived for as long as he did. At the boy's insistence, they give him some of their food, even though they don't really have the food to spare. It is interesting how the man defers to the boy on these matters. He actually lets him make the decisions. In some ways, it seems that the man is realizing that many of the decisions they might make are random and there is no way to foresee where they will lead, so he might as well let the boy decide. In another view, you might say that he is using the boy as a moral compass. The old man asks about the boy and the man says that the boy is a god. When I read this, I thought that the man was being a smart ass, but then I thought that even if he was, it was a telling remark. What if the boy was somewhat of a god. What if the whole point was that the boy had to survive because some day he would be instrumental in rebuilding civilization? Or maybe the boy was a god in the sense that you don't question why you believe in him, you just do.

After a while, I began to realize why the book was resonating with me so much. I was identifying with the man. His way of consulting and deferring to the boy reminds me of the way I approach my son. I often let him do or try things when it doesn't really matter one way or the other. I figure he's going to learn to be an independent and thoughtful adult quicker if he is allowed to work things out himself. The man also has a curious way of trying to tell the truth and not sugar coat bleak realities, while at the same time explaining why that's not necessarily bad to face reality, it helps to deal with reality if you are fully aware of it. Yet the man wants to give a hopeful view to his son, so he is more ready to tell him when he doesn't know what the truth and reality of the situation is, but what he hopes it is. The boy responds to the honesty and openness by accepting the bad things in life, but not being absorbed by them. They say something to the effect that once you see something, you can't unsee it, you can't make it go away. Once you let it in, it stays in. And yet they come to understand that this is better than not seeing the bad things. They see to have been able to be exposed but not tainted by all the bad things they see. Perhaps this is part of their survival. By understanding what forms of evil they will be confronting, they are able to avoid them.

Despite the fact that the story had no hope, that the world was irreparably damaged and there did not seem to be anywhere to go to get away from the cruel fate that the changed world imposed on them, you found yourself having hope for the boy and the man, wishing them well and wanting them to make it to safety.

Upon further reflection of the book, I have decided that I really relate to the man because of the way he would lose sleep worrying about and protecting the boy. He would listen late at night and his own health probably suffered in order to stay vigilant and protect his son. It was interesting how the transition to a post-apocalyptic setting changes how you raise your son. While he still spent time teaching him to read (not in the time of the novel, but there were flashback references to the fact that he had been teaching him even while they struggled to survive), he had long since come to grips with the fact that he could not shelter and protect him from the realities of life. They had a saying about how once you see something, it's in your mind. They were seeing some fearsome and gruesome things, from the overall destruction of the world to the painful and cruel ways that people suffered and died. The man decided to let the boy see these things, and then talk about them and understand them for what they were. These things were horrible, but they were reality, and should be faced if a person was going to be better able to survive.

The result was that the boy was often struggling with accepting the horrible things in life, but never accepting that these things were right. He had a keen sense of right and wrong, and in his moral universe eating other people or even just hurting or taking from them to get ahead or survive was always wrong. He lit his father know this in many ways, subtle and overt. The man refers to him as a God to one old decrepit traveller that they shared food with. I think this was a telling moment in the book because the man did use the boy as a God in the sense that he was a being that the man had to live up to, he had to please the boy that he was a one of the good people, much the way religious people seek to do good to be in the favor of God and gain entry to Heaven. In the end, I think the man made it to Heaven with plenty of room to spare. His last parting gift to his son was to give them hope, "you've always been lucky - you will find some good people to be with" was his last message to the boy before he died. This depressing novel ended with a strangely bittersweet assurance that the boy would be OK when the good people found him as he stood vigil over his dead father, wondering what to do next. It was a strange emotional mixture that I have rarely seen in a writing, where the sadness of the loss of the man is tempered with the relief that the boy would be safe and would still have a chance to hopefully find something good in life. You kept wondering if there was an untouched place out there with good people in it, shelter and a lack of hunger, and you hoped they would find it. Someone has to carry on the human race.

Another less emotionally satisfying aspect of the book was the parallels this charred and wrecked world has with our relatively pristine world. I kept thinking about the way that the people that they encountered had no problem getting ahead (or staying alive) at the expense of the boy and the man. Their entire journey was one of not letting the others capture or harm them, or at least steal their meager possessions that they owed their life to. I realized that this is how nations act toward each other, this is how governments look at other nations. How do I get on top? What does that other group have that I need? This is in some ways the essence of how capitalism works. Stick it to the other guy and get ahead. This type of gain at the expense of others is shown in stark relief in the world of The Road, but really, it's present in the world around us today. Sure, we're well fed and dry and warm in the cold winter, but we still claw to the top of the pack standing on the backs of others. I've always felt that this was not right, in some way. I'm not a communist, one who thinks that all things go into a big community pot and then everyone pulls back out from it equally. I just believe that a higher form of success would be possible if we thought about ways to get ahead that pulled those around us or those we are dealing with up with us. Why can we not find mutually beneficial solutions to the problems we all face? Why must my success come at your expense? Why would I deserve to succeed if I knew it was hurting you? While The Road shows this in stark relief, I believe that in life, this is the road we are all travelling.