Thematically-essential rape-and-torture

From a Guardian article, "A study in sexual violence":

Britain is the only country in the EU - as far as I know - in which the state still censors films. At the same time, the issue [of sexual violence] is a real one, apparent to anybody whose cinemagoing extends beyond Harry Potter and cartoons. Sexualised violence has become a staple element of Hollywood entertainments and art cinema alike over the past few years, and a new expression - "extreme cinema" - has been coined to describe the films that feature it.

[...]

Having conquered and wrung dry the former taboos of onscreen sex and violence, filmmakers are now encouraged to conflate the two. Irréversible and Baise-Moi immediately spring to mind; but easily half the reviews I read of low-budget art films by new filmmakers refer, en passant, to "the gruelling but thematically-essential rape-and-torture scene". Cannes, in particular, seems to seek out such films. Now, are these films selected because festival programmers know there's an audience for them? Or are filmmakers, festivals and distributors creating an audience for increasing levels of sexual violence, by making and screening these films?

[...]

From my own experience, I think filmmakers are often encouraged, by their financiers, to include these things. Once, the studios or foreign sales agents were happy with a glimpse of a woman's breasts. Now that nudity is old hat and porn ubiquitous, directors are being jostled to provide something "a bit harder". In 2001, while we were editing Revengers Tragedy, the producers and I received a request from the Film Council to "make the rape scene more violent and explicit". [...] the Film Council may have reckoned a more explicit rape might get us into Cannes, or pick up a few more foreign sales. In other words, this was a pragmatic rape, a money thing.

Fog of War

No doubt, this is old news to you by now:

A former U.S. Army soldier was charged yesterday with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and the slayings of three of her family members in their home south of Baghdad in March, federal prosecutors said.

The Cunning Realist has an observation with a subtle point hidden within:

The idiots who continue to insist that "these things happen during war" have stumbled unwittingly onto a partial truth. Yes, this is part of every war, and that's exactly why preemptive wars carry a unique risk. When the inevitable atrocities occur, they can be just as damaging to the aggressor as defeat on the battlefield---particularly for a nation that defines itself by moral exceptionalism.

In response to atrocity, this meme -- "these things happen during war" -- is being promoted by the apologists of the war in Iraq, more-or-less the same people who promoted the war before it turned into the quagmire and disaster it is today. But they would have you forget their eagerness to start the war in the first place.

If "these things happen during war", that makes the aggressor nation (us) no less culpable.

Social network of 911

Cooperative Research is a good resource for finding organized timelines for various important current events topics (e.g. Katrina, 911). In particular, the timelines are available in XML and easily parsed.

I was able to extract the timeline for 911 and, for each event in the timeline, the players involved in the event. Using the same network tools I've been using the other blog postings I've done recently, I have plotted the social network of the major entities involved.

For each picture, you can get a larger version by clicking on it. Note that a link means only that the two entities were involved in the same event(s), not that they necessarily acted together. Edge color represents the number of separate events in which the attached nodes were both involved, and vertex color represents the closeness score (for the first plot), the betweenness score (for plots 2 & 3) or the number of links (plots 4-6) for the entity.

Entities with top 75 closeness scores:

Entities with top 50 betweenness scores:

Entities with top 100 betweenness scores:

Entities with > 750 links:

Entities with > 500 links:

Entities with > 250 links:

Blog mining

Study this!

Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information:

ARLINGTON, Va., June 29, 2006 – The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said.

See also this article from a few months ago, CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs:

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said.

Finally, cross-reference my article on social networks.

Breasts

Breasts are apparently for men's titillation and enjoyment, not for feeding babies:

Breast-Feeding Moms Protest Victoria's Secret

RACINE, Wis. -- A woman who said she was offended when Victoria's Secret staff asked her to nurse her baby in an employee restroom organized a nursing protest in front of the store as part of a national nurse-in.

Cook said she was shopping at the store with a friend last week when she asked to use a dressing room to nurse her daughter. When she was told no room was available, she offered to sit in the rear of the dressing room hallway but was told that was unacceptable, she said.

[...]

"They opened up their employee restroom, which is disgusting," she said. "I said, 'No, I don't eat in the bathroom and my daughter doesn't eat in the bathroom."'

[...]

A spokesman for Limited Brands Inc., the Columbus-based parent company of Victoria's Secret, said the company has a long-standing policy that allows mothers to nurse in their stores.

"In this incidence it was not adhered to. We regret that and apologize for that," said spokesman Anthony Hebron.

[...]

"It's kind of ironic that Victoria's Secret, which plasters breasts everywhere, is offended at seeing breasts used for their intended purpose," said Anna Mauser-Martinez, who organized [a] nurse-in.

A year ago, lawmakers legalized breast-feeding in public places in Ohio.

In Wisconsin, State Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, introduced a bill last year that would have allowed women to breast-feed in any public or private place where they were authorized to be, but the bill died in committee in May.

The purpose of a system is what it does

The purpose of a system is what it does. This principle, or POSIWID, was proposed by Anthony Stafford Beer, a luminary in operations research and management cybernetics, also known as systems theory. Although it is dangerous to use this principle to infer intent on the part of individual actors in a system, it is useful for analyzing the emergent behavior of a system. It certainly cuts through a lot of crap about unintended consequences.

If you don't know this already, I'm a big proponent of the idea of the egregore, the spirit-of-a-thing, the emergent personality of a system. If one wishes to know the "personality" of a system, that is, its egregore, then one simply observes what the system does: the purpose of a system is what it does.

There is a site called Systems Thinking, which describes several archetypal examples of systems: Accidental Adversaries, Fixes that Fail, etc. One classic system is the Tragedy of the Commons , which also comes up in game theory (i.e. mathematical microeconomics) and is related to the Prisoner's Dilemma. The term "Tragedy of the Commons" derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population:

The parable demonstrates how unrestricted access to a resource such as a pasture ultimately dooms the resource because of over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, while the costs of exploitation are distributed between all those exploiting the resource.

Let's look at some classical systems. One of the well-known dyanamical processes in evolutionary biology is the Lotka-Volterra system, also known as the system of predator-prey equations, proposed by Alfred J. Lotka in 1925 and Vito Volterra in 1926. Nowdays they are seen as over-simplistic, but they are sufficient to illustrate a point.

The prey are assumed to have an unlimited food supply, and to reproduce exponentially unless subject to predation. The predator population grows in proportion to the probability of a predator meeting a prey, and dies naturally at an otherwise constant rate. The solution depends upon the various rates and initial populations, but a typical solution to the equations looks like this:

Here, blue represents the population of the prey and red represents the population of the predator. The populations oscillate over the course of time, with a spike in prey populations followed by a spike in predator populations. A system where there are two predators for the same prey has a solution that looks something like this (where orange represents the second predator):

In a system where the competition between two predators intensifies when the prey is scarce, the solution depends on the relative initial populations of the predators and their relative degree of competition. When both predator populations are initially equal and both predators are equally competitive, the system oscillates until it reaches an equlibrium:

When the predators differ in initial population or in the degree of competitiveness, one of the predators can die out:



This is the mathematical intuition behind "survival of the fittest".

All of these systems are archetypal features of the "natural world". However, suppose the rate of prey consumption is large relative to the rate at which the prey replenishes itself. Then there will be a spike in the population of the predator(s), followed by a rapid decrease and re-equilibration:


In the limit, when the "prey" cannot replenish itself (or represents a finite resource such as oil), then there will be a spike in population followed by a gradual die-off. One can think of this as the systems picture illustrating the Tragedy of the Commons:

Note that the "resource" need not diminish completely to zero for the predator popluation to become extinct.

Now suppose there is a finite resource and that the intensity of competition between the two predators is inversely proportional to the amount of the resource left. The resulting system looks something like this:

Note the precipitous die-off. The corresponding rate of decline for such a system looks like this:

What this means is that there is a huge spike in resource consumption, followed by a corresponding spike in deaths of the predator(s).

The purpose of a system is what it does. In a system where actors are forced to compete for a common finite resource, and to compete more intensely as the resource disappears, the purpose is to kill off the actors in a bloodbath.

Any questions?

Security dimension

This topic must be active in the collective unconscious. Kevin at Cryptogon gets what I'm talking about. Mincing no words:

I haven't read this book [Gardening When It Counts : Growing Food in Hard Times], but I have read the introduction and the contents. As far as I can tell, the book ignores the security dimension of the situation that "backyard gardeners" will be facing in a collapse situation. If you live in a city and actually had to use this book, the local warlord would take a look at your backyard garden, rub his stomach and think, "Yummy!"

Then what are you going to do?

This is where the Berkeley vegans, Kerry-2004-bumper-sticker-on-the-hybrid drivers and other associated crackpot liberals will try to change the subject.

[...]

You take the state out of the picture for a day or so in an urban environment and someone is going to be pointing a gun at your head, making demands that you will probably find less than appealing. (I breathed the smoke of Los Angeles burning during the 1992 riots. I saw troop carriers and U.S. Marines on the streets. I didn't see any free love ecotopia breaking out.)

[...]

If you're not surrounded by neighbors who already have the mind-set that you have.... good luck trying to sway converts when armed men, taking orders from their stomachs, are roaming the streets. You either need to work on building a collective security plan with your neighbors now, or you need to find new neighbors who already get it; meaning, you need to move.

[...]

So, having said all of that, if you are planning on staying put, with your idiot, Jesus fish-embellished-SUV driving neighbors and their ADHD kids, sure, why not learn how to grow a backyard garden?

I'm always accused of being negative, probably rightly so. But if we're going to look at the future squarely in the face, we need to deal with at least the possibility of collapse, and not recoil from the full implications.

I agree with what Zac at Alchemical has to say about this: ultimately the solution has to involve the (for lack of a better term) spiritual dimension of the problem. Without that we are completely fucked.

The sky is falling (....maybe)

Two stories that came up today:

Small asteroid to fly by Earth without danger

An asteroid will pass Earth at a very close distance in the predawn hours of Monday, astronomers reported on Friday, noting that there won't be any danger of collision.

The asteroid, coded 2004 XP14, was first picked up in December 2004. It is believed to be 370 to 800 meters in diameter, according to astronomers with the Near Earth Object Program (NEO) of U.S. space agency NASA.

Colorado Springs Air Force installation on heightened alert

An Air Force installation in Colorado Springs and one near Denver are operating with heightened security.

The Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, which houses NORAD, is now at "Bravo-Plus".

There are five levels of alert: normal, Alpha (low), Bravo (medium), Charlie (high) and Delta (critical). “Bravo-Plus” is slightly higher than a medium threat level.

Okay, so this may be an unfair juxtaposition. But in any case, I decided to do the Wikipedia network thingie I've been talking about. Below are two plots for the center of the network obtained by using the keywords Near-earth_object, NORAD, and Impact_event (45861 nodes and 131354 edges, pruned to 340 nodes and 12130 edges). The first shows the nodes that capture the upper 65% of the betweenness, the other captures the upper 80%. (The shading of the nodes is a new feature I introduced, representing the relative betweenness, darker colors representing higher betweenness scores.)


The appearance of May 12 in the middle of the network is easy to explain:

During the 2006 return to perihelion, which for the main fragment C takes place on 2006 June 6 (just inside the Earth’s orbit), the comet began to fragment into more than 30 additional pieces. All of the observed fragments in 2006 will pass relatively close to the Earth during the interval May 12 through May 28 but none will pass closer than 5.5 million miles. These passages of the fragments past the Earth offer astronomers an excellent opportunity to examine the cometary breakup process and hopefully these observations will shed some light on just why some comets disrupt. Apparently some comets have very weak internal structures and perhaps rapid rotation or the pressure of vaporizing interior ices, as the comet approaches the warming sun, causes these breakup events.

I couldn't find anything interesting about August 1 or September 12.

I'm treading here on Goro Adachi's territory, and I find myself wondering if this type of analysis can be used in the same way Goro uses his geodetic (and semiotic) analyses. Certainly, rather than becoming unhinged at the possibilities of various catastrophes, it's best to take Goro's dispassionate approach to the whole thing and try to learn what we can about the world and about ourselves.

For the record, I'm not pulling a Chicken Little/Cassandra here. I'm just pointing out two interesting stories and trying to see how memetic analysis can illuminate them.