Memetix

"The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion"

2007-07-28T10:45:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty conflicted about abortion, but I am crystal clear about egregious and unambiguous hypocrisy. This article (originally published in 2000 but recently posted to DailyKos) is a fascinating read:

Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women - abortion.

...

"We too have seen our share of anti-choice women, ones the counselors usually grit their teeth over. Just last week a woman announced loudly enough for all to hear in the recovery room, that she thought abortion should be illegal. Amazingly, this was her second abortion within the last few months, having gotten pregnant again within a month of the first abortion. The nurse handled it by talking about all the carnage that went on before abortion was legalized and how fortunate she was to be receiving safe, professional care. However, this young woman continued to insist it was wrong and should be made illegal. Finally the nurse said, 'Well, I guess we won't be seeing you here again, not that you're not welcome.' Later on, another patient who had overheard this exchange thanked the nurse for her remarks." (Clinic Administrator, Alberta)

...

"Recently, we had a patient who had given a history of being a 'pro-life' activist, but who had decided to have an abortion. She was pleasant to me and our initial discussion was mutually respectful. Later, she told someone on my staff that she thought abortion is murder, that she is a murderer, and that she is murdering her baby. So before doing her procedure, I asked her if she thought abortion is murder - the answer was yes. I asked her if she thought I am a murderer, and if she thought I would be murdering her baby, and she said yes. But murder is a crime, and murderers are executed. Is this a crime? Well, it should be, she said. At that point, she became angry and hostile, and the summary of the conversation was that she regarded me as an abortion-dispensing machine, and how dare I ask her what she thinks. After explaining to her that I do not perform abortions for people who think I am a murderer or people who are angry at me, I declined to provide her with medical care. I do not know whether she found someone else to do her abortion." (Physician, Colorado)

...

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique - not like those "other" women - even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call "sluts" and "trash." Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for "convenience".

As an interesting side note, this is completely parallel to the stories of Christian ministers who end up hiring gay prostitutes.

Most vote machines lose test to hackers

2007-07-28T10:36:00.000-04:00

According to an article in SFGate:

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.

True porn clerk stories

2007-07-28T10:33:00.000-04:00

This is pure fun (although interesting in its own right for its anthropological content).

Back in February of 2002, Ali Davis began keeping this journal of stories about her experiences working at a video store. For a while, it was a well kept secret how good her journal was. Then she appeared on NPR's "This American Life" and all hell broke loose.

Within days, the link of her journal started circulating around the internet via blogs, emails and chat rooms. It peaked at number two on the Daypop Top 40. Over a million people have come to read this journal so far.

An excerpt:

One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine!" and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching.

Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!" The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.

The polite fiction of the porn section is that, while people do generally use porn for the purpose of masturbation, there is no reason to believe that this particular customer will be doing so. He could be using them for his Master's thesis. Hell, he may not get around to watching them at all. We all like to believe that. When it becomes all too clear to everyone involved that said customer did, in fact, not only lube up, watch the tape, stroke himself to orgasm, and then grab the goddamned thing without even taking the basic courtesy of washing his goddamned hands first, we all get uncomfortable.

On the existence of time

2007-07-28T10:03:00.000-04:00

Discover Magazine has published an article on physicists who study time. The long and short of it is that time doesn't really exist in the way that we think it does:

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.

But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”

...

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says [physicist Seth] Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.

“What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

In my online interactions throughout the years I've maintained that I don't believe in time. John Zerzan's essay Time and its Discontents most succinctly describes why:

We have gone along with the substantiation of time so that it seems a fact of nature, a power existing in its own right. The growth of a sense of time--the acceptance of time--is a process of adaptation to an ever more reified world. It is a constructed dimension, the most elemental aspect of culture. Time's inexorable nature provides the ultimate model of domination.

The further we go in time the worse it gets. We inhabit an age of the disintegration of experience, according to Adorno. The pressure of time, like that of its essential progenitor, division of labor, fragments and disperses all before it. Uniformity, equivalence, separation are byproducts of time's harsh force.

...

Paul Valry (1962) referred to the fall of the species into time as signalling alienation from nature; ``by a sort of abuse, man creates time,'' he wrote. In the timeless epoch before this fall, which constituted the overwhelming majority of our existence as humans, life, as has often been said, had a rhythm but not a progression. It was the state when the soul could ``gather in the whole of its being,'' in Rousseau's words, in the absence of temporal strictures, ``where time is nothing to the soul.'' Activities themselves, usually of a leisurely character, were the points of reference before time and civilization; nature provided the necessary signals, quite independent of ``time''. Humanity must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before any explicit distinctions were drawn among past, present, and future (Fraser, 1988). Furthermore, as the linguist Whorf (1956) estimated, ``preliterate [`primitive'] communities, far from being subrational, may show the human mind functioning on a higher and more complex plane of rationality than among civilized men.''

...

``No time is entirely present,'' said the Stoic Chrysippus, and meanwhile the concept of time was being further advanced by the underlying Judeo-Christian tenet of a linear, irreversible path between creation and salvation. This essentially historical view of time is the very core of Christianity; all the basic notions of measurable, one-way time can be found in St. Augustine's (fifth- century) writings.

...

Time's arrow--irrevocable, one-direction-only time--is the monster that has proven itself more terrifying than any physical projectile. Directionless time is not time at all, and Cambel (1993) identifies time directionality as ``a primary characteristic of complex systems.'' The time-reversible behavior of atomic particles is ``generally commuted into behavior of the system that is irreversible,'' concluded Schlegel (1961). If not rooted in the micro world, where does time come from? Where does our time-bound world come from? It is here that we encounter a provocative analogy. The small scale world described by physics, with its mysterious change into the macro world of complex systems, is analogous to the ``primitive'' social world and the origins of division of labor, leading to complex, class-divided society with its apparently irreversible ``progress''.

I understand physics well enough to know that the scientific work in the field of time does not exactly prove Zerzan's position. But in my mind it goes a long ways in making it plausible. Fascinating.

Memetix Report on the State of America

2007-06-15T23:18:00.000-04:00

OK, it's time for me to switch gears and present links to a dozen representative articles that reveal the mimetic state of the United States, as of June 2007.

On reality cognition: First, what everybody already knows about SUVs ... it's all about vanity, and the illusion of safety without any of the reality:

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"—perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"—what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it. " Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that. " According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls. " Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills. " One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a. m."

Speaking of the illusion of safety: when the EPA discovered asbestos in their Little League fields, the residents of idyllic El Dorado Hills rushed to protect themselves—from reality:

The civic leaders of El Dorado Hills had spent many months trying to stave off [asbestos] tests, scrambling to protect the community not from potentially toxic substances, but from the EPA's potentially toxic information. Taking the lead was Vicki Barber, the superintendent of schools. A stout woman with compressed lips and an unwavering gaze, she recently won an award for being "a person who does not accept the word 'no'...when it comes to what is good for students." After asbestos was found during the construction of a high school soccer field in 2002, Barber questioned a costly epa-mandated cleanup. When a citizen formally asked the epa to test the town's public areas for asbestos in 2003, Barber quickly emerged as the agency's most determined local foe. Before the study was even under way, she began writing to the epa as well as to senators and congressmen, questioning whether the agency had the "legal and scientific authority" to conduct what she called a "science experiment" with "limited benefit to the residents." At least four state legislators and one congressman responded by putting pressure on the epa, which in turn agreed not to declare El Dorado Hills a Superfund site, regardless of what it might find there.

And while we're on the subject of environmental disconnects: Massacres and paramilitary land seizures are behind the "Biofuel Revolution":

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Oh shoot, while we're here, we might as well deal with the externalization of environmental costs to developing nations:

It was once a gently flowing river, where fishermen cast their nets, sea birds came to feed and natural beauty left visitors spellbound. Villagers collected water for their simple homes and rice paddies thrived on its irrigation channels. Today, the Citarum is a river in crisis, choked by the domestic waste of nine million people and thick with the cast-off from hundreds of factories.

See the picture above. That's a river, not solid ground! A related article: Polymers Are Forever. Don't even get me started on China and Walmart.

On the illusion of anonymity: Kevin Flaherty reports on the ugly truth about online anonymity:

So, you want to be anonymous in a world that was thought up by the U.S. Department of Defense? Most computer users don’t have what it takes, in terms of technical skills, or discipline, to pull it off. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s absolutely true.

...

As you might already know, I studied information warfare in college and I did several years of time in corporate IT environments. I knew about the types of surveillance and control that are possible at the client, server and network levels. I looked at the challenge as all IT people look at all IT related challenges: Assume the absolute worst. I went even further with this. I made irrationally negative assumptions. I assumed that everything I did online was compromised. I assumed the worst tinfoil nightmares about commercial operating systems. I assumed that my ISP was a subsidiary of the NSA, etc.

Got the idea?

As if Kevin were prescient, EFF released unredacted court documents related to the ATT/NSA intercept case. Kevin summarizes:

A company called Narus has developed the NarusInsight Intercept Suite: a purpose built network surveillance system that is capable of analyzing (in real time) ALL of the data passing through the largest network nodes in existence. This system is capable of applying sophisticated targeting rules to the traffic, as well as recording entire, individual sessions for later analysis.

This leads us to our next topic...

On the snarling police state: Man faces seven years in prison for videotaping traffic stop; woman faced jail time for “staring” at a police dog.

On appreciation of beauty: The Washington Post arranged to have one of the best classical musicians in the world play some of the most difficult and beautiful music in history on a three million dollar Stradivarius, anonymously in a DC Metro station. And almost nobody noticed, except... every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

On terrorism and security: The head of Arkansas GOP openly states that we need more ‘attacks on American soil’ so people will better appreciate GW Bush. Read that again...

Psyche as a Dynamical System

2007-06-13T06:21:00.000-04:00

In my last post I presented a physical interpretation of the concept of spirit, making use of the idea of nonlinear dynamical systems and essentially equating the emergent behavior of a (sub)system with a personality (egregore), a practical implication being that one could interact with such a personality if one knew how. A more detailed account would equate a personality or aspect of spirit with an attractor of the system, that is (roughly speaking) a set of states towards which the system evolves and stays.

One could also apply this approach to the concept of psyche, considering the personality (or personalities) of an individual human being, since the human organism is nothing if not (at least) a complex dynamical system. In fact, Chris King makes this suggestion in great detail, describing a possible physical basis for consciousness. In many ways this article is one that I would have liked to author, but with King's breadth and depth of knowledge he makes a far more competent case than I could.

To be clear about my position on positivist/reductionist materialism: I am not saying that human beings are simply meaningless bits of dust (a relatively common position in 21st Century and a fundamental subtext of much current culture, as I remark in my previous post). In fact, I take somewhat the opposite viewpoint: everything is conscious and meaningful. King obliquely hints at this perspective by citing a work by David Chalmers

Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level.

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Stephen Lehar makes the point more explicitly:

If we accept the materialist view that mind is a physical process taking place in the physical mechanism of the brain, and since we know that mind is conscious, then that already is direct and incontrovertible evidence that a physical process taking place in a physical mechanism can under certain conditions be conscious. Now it it true that the brain is a very special kind of mechanism. But what makes the brain so special is not its substance, for it is made of the ordinary substance of matter and energy. What sets the brain apart from normal matter is its complex organization. The most likely explanation therefore is that what makes our consciousness special is not its substance, but its complex organization. The fundamental “stuff” of which our consciousness is composed, i.e. the basic qualia of color and pain, sadness and joy, are apparently common with the qualia of children, as far back as I can remember, although I also remember a less complex organization of my experiences as a child. It is also likely that animals have some kind of conscious qualia on logical grounds, because the information of their perceptual experience cannot exist without some kind of carrier to express that information in the physical brain. Whether the subjective qualia of different species, or even different individuals of our own species, are necessarily the same as ours experientially, is a question that is difficult or maybe impossible in principle to answer definitively. But the simplest, most parsimonious explanation is that our own conscious qualia evolved from those of our animal ancestors, and differ from those earlier forms more in its level of complex organization rather than in its fundamental nature.

The natural reluctance that we all feel to extending consciousness to our animal ancestors, and even more so to plants, or to inanimate matter, is a stubborn legacy of our anthropocentric past. But the history of scientific discovery has been characterized by a regular progression of anthrodecentralization, demoting humans from the central position in the universe under the personal supervision of God, to lost creatures on the surface of a tiny blip of matter orbiting a very unremarkable star, among countless billions of stars in an unremarkable galaxy amongst countless billions of other galaxies as far as the telescopic eye can see. Modern biology has now discovered that there is no vital force in living things, but only a complex organization of the ordinary matter of the universe, following the ordinary laws of that universe. There is no reason on earth why consciousness should not also be considered to be a manifestation of the ordinary matter of the universe following the ordinary laws of that universe, although expressed in a complex organization in the case of the human brain. A claim to the contrary would necessarily fall under the category of an extraordinary claim, which, as Carl Sagan pointed out, would require extraordinary evidence for it to be accepted by reasonable men.

Nevertheless, I believe it is valuable to model consciousness from a physical perspective, both because it removes the "woo-woo" factor from discussions about consciousness, and because it actually clarifies certain points, for example the value of meditation. Let me explain further.

If you are sufficient self-aware of your own mental processes (either by formal meditation or simply by being an astute observer) you will eventually come to the realization that you are not one personality. There are in fact multiple yous inhabiting the same body, and each becomes active under different circumstances and stimuli. This phenomenon is a more complex version of multistability, where a system alternates between multiple semi-stable states (or, informally, partial attractors). A characteristic of a psychologically healthy individual is an ability to move flexibly among multiple semi-stable states under appropriate stimuli, so multistability of personality is in fact normal and necessary. The critical issue ultimately boils down to the topology of the attractor set.

For example, certain pathologies can arise. The schizophrenic will have a highly chaotic consciousness, with little apparent organization or system stability. Interestingly, the dissociative identity disorder (which is often incorrectly associated with schizophrenia) apparently involves the opposite problem, in that consciousness is fragmented into multiple states that are rigidly isolated. Mood disorders and less severe cognitive disorders have a more normal attractor topology, but they might be characterized by having too few semi-stable states, with consequent maladaption to environmental conditions (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorders and clinical depression), or too numerous semi-stable states with insufficient isolation between them (e.g. bipolar disorders).

If you happen to be a garden-variety neurotic of the type that is common in Western civilization, i.e. that your consciousness follows a dynamical system that is reasonably normal in terms of attractor topology, then you might still find it beneficial to have more control points in your consciousness, with checks on the cascade from one semi-stable point to another. That is, you may wish to have more control over the transitions between your individual personalities, (assuming of course that you have such a you), having more flexible responses to environmental stimuli or fewer tendencies to react maladaptively to uncomfortable or threatening situations. You may even wish to spawn new semi-stable states that offer perspectives that are distinct from existing ones. In short, you may seek to achieve a "meta" personality that adaptively integrates all existing personalities.

One way to do this is to build a new personality that is trained to monitor other internal states. This is essentially what one learns to do in some forms of meditation: observe the mind and its workings. By collecting data on subsystems, a portion of your mind is trained to maintain a coherent ("still") observational state.

Buddhists will suggest that the aim of meditation is to achieve a state of emptiness or apprehend the "ground-of-being". I think it bears mentioning that the "void" of the physical universe is somewhat less than fully empty, as Chris King points out:

The theories describing force fields such as electromagnetism through the interaction of wave-particles are the most succinct theories ever invented by the human mind. Richard Feynman and others discovered the field is generated by uncertainty itself through particles propagated by a rule based on wave spreading. These particles are called virtual because they have no net positive energy and appear and disappear entirely within the window of quantum uncertainty, so we never see them except as expressed in the force itself. This seething tumult of virtual particles exactly produces the familiar effects of the electromagnetic field and other fields as well... Even in the vacuum, where we think there is nothing at all, there is actually a sea of all possible particles being created and destroyed by the rules of uncertainty.

Repeating Chalmer's proposition, that "a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental", it seems that the void is merely raw experience itself, and that the emptiness towards which meditation strives is a kind of root or unitary collective consciousness.

It's hard to know what Chalmers, King, or Lehar might think of equating their concept of fundamental experience with a super-collective consciousness or anything like a deity. Indeed, Buddhists themselves would caution against over-interpreting the ground-of-being or imputing features that are anything like our own normal human consciousness. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to talk about raw undifferentiated consciousness (whatever features it has) as a fundamental aspect of reality. The practical significance is that the state-coherence developed by meditation practice approximates a more direct and fundamental form of experience, in a physically interpretable manner. In addition, this state-coherence can stabilize a maladaptive system by altering the topology of the attractor space.

In conclusion, I believe that meditation is a physical process that produces empirically verifiable alterations in consciousness that have practical implications in the normal life of a human. In addition, there is a there there: consciousness is something that is real, and worthy of a dignity and sophistication that it is afforded less and less this century.

Science, Fundamentalism, and Faith

2007-05-06T12:40:00.000-04:00

Recently perusing the comments in a blog I read, I came across the following statement:

Spirit stuff, by definition, cannot exist. It is usually defined as that which cannot be seen, felt, touched, heard, tasted or detected by any instrument now or in the future.

This definition doesn't quite match up with the numerous dictionary definitions of the word spirit, which range from "the principle of conscious life" through "incorporeal being". However, it pervades much modern thought, especially a strain that I call scientific fundamentalism. For example, an L.A. Times book review of The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (by Natalie Angie) states the following:

Her first chapters cover familiar, if important, ground: The foundation of science is evidence; we can't always predict where pure research will lead, so we need to support the scientific dreamers; math is "unreasonably effective" at making sense of nature. And science is our most powerful weapon against fear and superstition — our "candle in the dark," as Carl Sagan so eloquently put it.

In and of itself, I mostly agree with the statement. A fundamental requirement for accepting a proposition or a theory should be evidence. However, scientific fundamentalism (which The Canon appears to champion) places severe, and in my view unnecessary restrictions on what constitutes evidence. Furthermore, it excludes all but hierarchical modes of knowledge and learning, therefore excluding much of what is and can be experienced in the phenomenological world.

Defining spirit to be "that which cannot exist" and then following it up with the conclusion that spirit does not exist exemplifies circular reasoning, is operationally useless, and serves only a Cartesian dualism. A more useful definition, one that may be closer to the dictionary definitions listed above, is the following: a spiritual phenomenon is that which is of a higher order than can be subjected to investigation by repeated experiment. This includes in situ human emotion, friendship, intuition, consciousness, meaning in general, as well as the emergent properties of large-scale complex systems; that is, phenomena that can be experienced but not studied.

Complex systems, in particular, create difficulties because they are by definition nonlinear and therefore impossible to characterize in any finite sample. I submit that they are ultimately easier to understand in terms of personalities, i.e. angels and egregores, than in terms of stochastic differential equations. I believe that pre-literate cultures understood this; far from being"superstitious", they possessed modes of knowing that were able to comprehend natural processes by relating to them, rather than studying them, in much the same way that we come to know another individual by relationship rather than cold, impersonal observation. There is evidence that that pre-literate knowledge systems, obtained through deep intimacy with their subject matter by relational means, enabled their stewards to live sustainably for aeons in a way that we are unable to do in a short 500 year period.

Bear in mind that a truth about pre-literate peoples lies somewhere on a continuum between two propositions: either they have lived at the harsh boundary between survival and extinction, in which case systems of knowledge that confer a competitive edge would be favored over those that do not; or they have been fortunate to live a life of relative ease that facilitates the development of unnecessarily ornate and colorful belief systems that have no place in the grim modern world. The latter proposition negates a commonly held assumption that our current science and technology is an unambiguous benefit to collective humanity. In either case, one has to consider the possibility that scientific fundamentalism is severely limited in terms of its ability to facilitate human happiness and long-term survival in a complex biosphere.

The blog commenter I quoted at the beginning of this article makes another assertion, "Science is really a conversation with nature." This is a mis-characerization of the nature of scientific inquiry, especially in certain biological sciences such as toxicology. From the perspective of "Nature" (a reification that I'll accept in this posting), science is less a conversation than an interrogation bordering on torture. See, for example, the critiques of Carolyn Merchant and William Kotke.

The LA Times book review casually mentions a glaring omission in The Canon:

Oddly, though, [the author] barely mentions the two most profound and beautiful ideas physics has ever cooked up — relativity and quantum theory — even though they underlie it all.

Yes, and why is that? Why is there no mention of the cracks in the foundation of scientifc fundamentalism, the apparent fact that matter itself ultimately consists of puffs of probability floating in a curved and twisting void? Could it be that these topics spawn too many questions that cannot comfortably be answered without equivocating basic assumptions about modern reality? Might it risk dispersing the collective attention away from focus on a materialistic narrative that serves only a narrow range of interests?

We are at an inflection point in our collective history where current modes of apprehending the natural world no longer serve us. The existing paradigm of hierarchical knowledge obtained at knife-point no longer has practical application in a self-reinforcing system of domination, wherein honest speakers of truth (whether or not they be conventional scientists) have no voice against powers that would use knowledge only to further entrench systems of hierarchy and empire at the expense of a sustainable biosphere. We need to accept modes of knowing and learning that acknowledge relationship with rather than domination over Nature.

To that end, I will now define faith, not as the belief in a proposition without evidence, but rather an openness and willingness to engage in relationship with the unknown, with nature, and with larger intelligences.

Good, Evil, and Karma: Manifolds and Systems

2006-10-07T00:26:00.000-04:00

Tim Boucher, ever eager to open up a philosophical can of worms, addresses the age-old liberal conundrum, what to do about tolerating evil. Reflecting on a criticism of megachurch Christianity, Tim writes:

Isn’t this person saying that in order for a religion to be moral, then they must actively tolerate evil itself? I know that’s not what this guy is probably trying to say, but I think it’s only a short hop into that territory. Even though I’m only partly in favor of the Spiral Dynamics model championed by Ken Wilber and others, the comments by this person seem to reflect a very typical “green meme” attitude wherein nothing is better than anything else; everything is strictly egalitarian; and hierarchy is bad.

...

One of the only ways out of this apparent thought trap seems to be to recognize the inherent right of people everywhere not to tolerate what they think of as being bad or evil. If you think this church is evil, and if this church thinks somebody else is evil, then - hey - that’s okay. No one is really discredited in the process. We’re just recognizing that groups and individuals have likes and dislikes. Why should we force people to tolerate evil?

I've commented exensively in his thread, but I want to collect my thoughts into a coherent essay, because there are some important distinctions to be made.

First off, let's just get it out of the way up front: there is no Good or Evil. The fact is that the universe is terrifyingly amoral.

Now, before you accuse me of moral relativism, of advocating a green-meme free-for-all, hear me out. At this point it is useful to borrow from manifold theory and use the idea of a manifold as a metaphor or analogy for the way morality operates in our universe.

A manifold is an abstract mathematical space in which every point has a neighborhood which resembles Euclidean space, but in which the global structure may be more complicated.

A technical definition is beyond the scope here, but a manifold is essentially a complex "space" with a coherent structure that can be patched together by gluing together smaller linear spaces, called atlases. Any point in a manifold space has a neighborhood that is locally linear and appears to have clear axes and directions, even if the global space does not. Some manifolds are orientable in the sense that concepts of direction apply globally (e.g. a circle is a one-dimensional manifold that has two definite directions, clockwise and and its opposing direction, counterclockwise). But not all manifolds are orientable. The Moebius strip is an example of one that is not.

With this bit of mathematical theory in hand, we can now talk about moral compass and axes of good and evil. I submit that in any context that applies to a given being or group of beings at a particular moment in time, there is a moral atlas that provides a local meaning to the concepts of good and evil. That is, there is a more-or-less clear "good" direction and a clear "evil" direction, discernable without intellectualizing and ultimately getting twisted into a logical pretzel. In context, there are right and wrong actions. Wrong actions are those that are harmful, in some sense that is clear in context, while right actions are those that are beneficial, also in some sense that is clear in context. However, problems arise when you try to patch together these local moral atlases into some absolute moral system: you just can’t, because different entities will always have different concerns, often competing ones. To the primitive human, a lion might be "evil" because it destroys, but to the lion, a human is a good source of protein.

Now, allow me to repeat: in a given situation with a given individual and/or group of individuals, there is, most of the time, a clear axis of “good” and “evil” that is defined by the context and concerns of the person(s) involved, but that there is no such global/absolute axis that applies universally to all people and situations. This is a fine distinction.

This view brings up another facet of (let us call it) moral calculus. You can focus on a very narrow context which appears to have a clear “right” answer, but if you follow the time-evolution out far enough along that axis, it turns out to be the clear “wrong” answer. Example: it is clearly in the economic interests of Community X to clear-cut the nearby forest, because doing so will provide resources and jobs the people of X obviously need. It’s to everybody’s benefit, except of course the owls, but who cares about them? Unfortunately, cutting down the forest externalizes various costs to the future and ultimately destroys the physical environment upon which Community X depends. So (as suggested by Tim Boucher commenter Prunes), the moral manifold of the universe really is something more like a Moebius strip, i.e., non-orientable.

As they say, karma is a bitch, and it is so because actions have a way of coming back to you from some direction you may not have forseen. We can talk about karma in the context of nonlinear dynamical systems, more popularly known as chaos theory. Dynamical systems are usually defined with respect to manifolds, so we are still on-topic. Ecologies are the best examples of such sytems, and an essential feature of an ecology is the feedback loop, where aspects of a system feed back on themselves, thereby either regulating behavior (negative feedback) or cascading to a snowball effect (positive feedback). In our moral model of the universe, actions feed other actions, and the consequences return via feedback. One can view feedback as a physical manifestation of karma. You need not believe anything metaphysical; in very real terms, what you do returns to you or your children. In our example, the children of Community X will reap the consequences of clear-cutting the nearby forest.

Now, I’m not pretending that mathematical analogies are for everybody, and certainly are not Reality, but they do help me. In fact, I do believe in a “metaphysical” portion of the universe, that is to say, one not directly measurable by the senses or by equipment calibrated to “ordinary” matter and energy. But even within the so-called physical universe there are time scales and complexity scales beyond the ability of the human mind to contemplate, and these too also take on the flavor of the metaphysical. Somewhere at the juncture of the nonordinary manifestations of energy, geological timescales, and planetary complexities, lie the consequences of feedback from our own present actions. This provides a reasonable, spiritually-neutral definition of karma appropriate to 21st century linguistic needs. If you acknowledge that we are living in a universal ecology, you cannot help but conclude the existence of karma, as manifested in system feedback. In addition, a local moral coordinate system can be discerned by considering the lines along which actions evolve in time and flower into consequences, whether or not you consider the agency of such consequences to be metaphysical.

A common misperception (at least here in the West) is to view karma as an equivalent to Yahweh's divine retribution, and therefore to ignore it entirely (since pretty much nobody outside the megachurch crowd pays attention to Yahweh anymore). In my observations, it seems that karma is more a feature of the mundane universe, and nonlinear dynamics, if viewed from the right perspective, gives a plausible model for how it works.

It is ultimately impossible to know the true long-term consequences of even the smallest action. This principle is captured in the butterfly effect, well known in chaos-theory, by which an infinitesimally small action can have enormous consequences. It is therefore fruitless to perseverate on Good and Evil in the global sense. An obsession with absolute morality can be a supreme distraction, allowing the mind to twist itself into logical pretzels that lead nowhere. It often enables inaction when action is required, and sometimes even enables action when inaction is necessary. I find it more useful to think about Duty, which I define in this context as an injunction to follow the "good" axis in a local moral coordinate system. If you recognize and accept the fact that the universe itself respects no absolute axis of Good and Evil, it becomes easier to recognize the local landscape and allow yourself to be led by a moral compass that is calibrated to your context. It becomes easier to do your own Duty, and also to allow others to do theirs even if it may conflict with your own.

The analogy of dynamical systems in the context of metaphysics is not exactly new, and appears in certain writings by the Chaos magick proponents and adherents. But to echo a diatribe given by Zac in his excellent new systems-inspired series, it appears to me that karma is not adequately addressed in that corner of the occult world. If you’re going to work the chaos theory angle, it’s foolish to ignore the most salient feature of nonlinear dynamics, which is the feedback loop. I'm a big proponent of using the fine-scale unpredictability of the universe to your own advantage, leveraging energies as needed to solve the problems of your community. But it is moronic not to factor in long-term consequences. Sustainability, people.

Bottom line: don’t shit in your own well. Unless of course you like the taste.

Thematically-essential rape-and-torture

2006-07-14T14:52:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-04T22:52:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-04T19:44:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-04T01:37:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-04T01:27:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-02T16:12:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

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)

2006-07-01T23:16:00.000-04:00

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.

Meme creep: redefining "wiretap"

2006-06-30T08:24:00.000-04:00

Man charged after videotaping police:

NASHUA [, New Hampshire] – A city man is charged with violating state wiretap laws by recording a detective on his home security camera, while the detective was investigating the man’s sons.

Michael Gannon, 49, of 26 Morgan St., was arrested Tuesday night, after he brought a video to the police station to try to file a complaint against Detective Andrew Karlis, according to Gannon’s wife, Janet Gannon, and police reports filed in Nashua District Court.

Police instead arrested Gannon, charging him with two felony counts of violating state eavesdropping and wiretap law by using an electronic device to record Karlis without the detective’s consent.

Memetic analysis of Apocalypse

2006-06-30T00:50:00.000-04:00

Following up on the apocalypse meme, I decided to use some of the tools I've developed over the past week to conduct a "memetic analysis" of Apocalypse, at least from the English Wikipedia perspective.

Starting at the Wikipedia entries for Apocalypse and Eschatology, I crawled down two levels on each Wikipedia link in the two base pages. The result was a network of 21,831 nodes and 51738 edges, impossible to analyze on my home computer. I culled the nodes that did not link back to any other node in the network, resulting in a smaller network with 266 nodes and 4406 edges: easy to analyze but hard to visualize. Therefore, I conducted a betweenness analysis for the smaller network, resulting in a number between 0 and 1 for each node, representing the extent to which the node serves as a "bridge" for a large number of paths between other nodes (1 being the most "between" and 0 being the least). Finally, used this betweenness measure to filter out the least important nodes in the network, varying a threshold until I obtained a visually digestible network image. Here is the result for a threshold of 0.01:

What emerges is that Apocalypse, at least as understood by English-speaking Wikipedia contributors, is overwhelmingly a Western concept, with Christianity, Jesus, Satan, God, etc. in the center of the network. There are a few nodes from Eastern religions on the outer edges of the network, notably Maitreya and Kali Yuga. Oddly, Maya civilization is included in the network, even though the Wikipedia entry does not seem to mention the associated 2012 eschatological speculations. The following figure shows the result of a higher threshold of 0.05, where it is clear that Jesus, God, Satan, and the Bible sit squarely in the middle of the network. So far, nothing too surprising.

Next, I added a Wikipedia page Peak oil, once again traveling down two levels on each link. The result was a network of 74,726 nodes and 30,714 edges. Using the same strategies to cull the data to obtain a visually digestible network image, here is the result:

Clearly Apocalypse and Peak oil separate into largely distinct clusters. What is interesting is what lies in the middle: United States, Sun, Canada, Israel, and Venezuela (and to some extent Doomsday). Note that Pope Benedict XVI now emerges as a bridging node. Readers familiar with Christian apocalyptic thinking will no doubt recognize Israel as a key player (and perhaps Benedict also). Note that Transhumanism and Technological singularity are also in the center.

Finally, I included Global warming, using the same methodology as described above. The result:

With the addition, the clusters seem to merge a bit, with Global warming and Peak oil on one side, Christian apocalyptic thinking on the other, and numerous countries sitting in the middle of the network. Note that George W. Bush and Pope Benedict XVI appear to be the only living persons sitting in the middle of the network.

The results of this analysis highlight which countries and present day personalities are central to the joint themes of Apocalypse, Peak oil, and Global warming. Predictable players emerge as nodes in the network, including one (Maya civilization) that seems to have no explicit mention of apocalypse eschatology in the main page. The results also shows how some of the other millenialist themes of Transhumanism and the Technological singularity travel along as companion memes.

Apocalyptic Thinking

2006-06-30T00:10:00.000-04:00

My post at Round Earth League, Sustainability vs. Apocalypse, generated a little discussion between Wally and myself. He reacted rather negatively to a quotation by Ran Prieur, who can admittedly be heavy-handed and difficult to accept out of context. There is this idea in some corners of the internet that we are on the verge of an energy apocalypse (i.e. the whole peak oil / global warming thing), and Ran sees this somewhat as an opportunity to shed some collective baggage, i.e. the power asymmetries that have emerged and intensified with fossil fuels and the technologies they enable. I quoted Ran in my post a couple of weeks ago, South Central Farm, where he rather succinctly lays out the power dynamic that predestined the outcome there. While I don't necessarily agree with Ran on the likely long-term outcomes (or even necessarily the desired outcomes), I think he's pretty good at describing our present situation.

The fact is that there are very powerful and pernicious forces that would make people utterly dependent upon them, and have the firepower to enforce their desires. When food becomes a serious issue because of (1) global climate change and (2) the lack of petroleum for fertilizers, this will come to a head. Tonight I read a story posted via Heretic Fig that serves as an example:

New Delhi, May 8 - The Uttar Pradesh government was conducting raids on farmers for stocking up their own wheat produce, environmental activist Vandana Shiva and Bharat Krishak Samaj executive director Krishan Bir Chowdhary alleged Monday.

They assailed the double standards of the authorities for taking no action against multinational and private companies like Cargil, ITC and PepsiCo for buying wheat in large quantities even as the government was seeking to import 3.5 million tonnes of wheat to meet its buffer stock norms and public distribution system supplies.

While the government seemed reluctant to buy wheat stock from farmers at prices higher than Rs.650 per quintal, it was proposing to import stock at prices over Rs.950 per quintal.

Ran's position, not necessarily mine, is that things will take care of themselves in the very long run: lack of fossil fuels means that eventually all the terrible firepower will go away, or at least the transportation capabilities that makes it easy to deploy over a large geographical range. I don't think that's necessarily the case, since there is always nuclear power available to people who know how to use it and have the will to do so.

My personal belief is that it is important to develop sustainable technologies and also a sustainable food supply. It's also important to consider architectural changes, i.e. construct communities that are close to food supplies and do not require automobiles for daily life. That stuff is a no-brainer: we have to do it.

The real difficulty is how to deal with the political problem of power. As Wally suggests in our discussion, power and its enforcing structures are here to stay, and any disruptions would make things much worse in the short run (meaning our lifetimes). Katrina is a perfect example of this.

My only solution, at the moment, is to try to make people at least aware of the problem. If enough people have their antennae up about it, cultural solutions may emerge.

A separate issue is why people gravitate towards apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic scenarios are ultimately unproductive: you can never prepare for an apocalypse and expecting one only saps your productive energy. But I understand why some people gravitate towards this meme, and while I despise the violent apocalyptic frames of Christianity, I have sympathy for the people who are looking to them as a release from the pain of living in a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to negotiate. I think many (if not most?) people intuit the power asymmetry I'm talking about, sense that something is about to change, and fear the ramifications. Apocalyptic Christianity (or apocalyptic environmentalism) is a cognitive strategy some people use to grapple with it.

When looking to the future, we need to consider the meaning of this.

WikiMemes!

2006-06-28T17:57:00.000-04:00

I've been playing around with network algorithms, trying to find a way to use them to illuminate memetic research. I've discovered that Wikipedia is a great resource for this kind of "computational memetics". Wikipedia does have its flaws, but it is a continuously updated network of concepts with a regular data format that can easily and quickly be accessed and processed.

It's remarkably simple: you pick a topic (or several) and find the corresponding Wikipedia entries. Then you crawl down the links a predeterimed number of levels, record the linkages, and finally visualize them. In order to do this efficiently there are some technical computer-science issues to deal with, but conceptually that's all there is to it.

My most recent posts addressed (1) organic certification and (2) treason and journalism. The following pictures show you the Wikipedia neighborhood of these two concepts.

For the network that visualizes organic certification, the base-level keywords were Organic_certification, Organic_food, and Sustainable_agriculture. The network shows a cluster involving business and legal issues and another involving organic farming methods. For the network that visualizes treason and journalism, I used both words as base-level keywords. Words like terrorism and sedition appear in the center of the network.

I've also shown a network for Panopticon, which comes up with 1984, Big Brother, and surveillance.

It will be interesting to see how far I can push this. In particular, I'd like to come up with a useful ways to uncover "hidden" memes and track meme-creep.

Meme creep: redefining "organic"

2006-06-28T08:51:00.000-04:00

Apparently there is a growing trend to label as "oranic" milk from cows that live in feedlots but are fed organic grain:

A different kind of organic dairy farm is emerging out west _ corporate-owned feedlot operations with thousands of cows that are fed organic grain but, according to critics, get little chance to graze.

Fears that big operations will muscle out family farms have produced a backlash, including a boycott by the Organic Consumers Association against the country's biggest organic milk brand, Horizon Organic.

Organic farmers and consumer groups are hoping the U.S. Department of Agriculture will level the field. The agency is considering whether to mandate that milk bearing the "USDA Organic" seal come from cows that have significant access to pasture, a move smaller producers say would give them the protection they need.

I suppose organic grain is an improvement over the standard industrial practices. But feedlots clearly violate the spirit of "organic". (For an entertaining lesson on industrial beef, see the McDonalds game.)

[Via Cryptogon]

Two tales of memetic pathology

2006-06-27T21:43:00.000-04:00

I have two stories that are essentially unrelated except that they came to my attention today:

The first story is that a Hardball guest says the NYT editor is guilty of treason. From ThinkProgress:

The White House has launched an assault on the New York Times for publishing a story about the administration’s secret program to monitor bank records. Yesterday, President Bush said the paper’s conduct was “disgraceful” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow implied they were undermining Americans’ “right to live.”

The right-wing echo chamber is taking the argument a step further. Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball, talk show host Melanie Morgan said that New York Times editor Bill Keller is guilty of treason and that “Keller and his associates” should be thrown “in prison for 20 years. Watch it.

[Via Atrios, who argues that this is the consequence of years of failure to stand up to GOP encroachments on journalism.]

In other news, Media Matters reports how Newsday's James Pinkerton says that the media frame Iraq coverage by portraying the U.S. military as "evil", "bad people", and "killers". Arguing that proper coverage would factor in the harsh realities of war, Pinkerton says:

[T]he correct frame, I believe, [...] it’s a minority view, but it’s correct, is [exemplified by a] fellow named Gary Brecher, who writes a [...] column called “War Nerd” for a Russian magazine online. And he makes the point, “Look, this is a war. What do you expect? This is not a police action, this is not a humanitarian mission. This is a war, and you’re going to get Hadithas.”

Unfortunately, as Sadly No! points out, War Nerd is a parody. Another passage from War Nerd states the following:

I’m a war nerd. A backseat sergeant. I know what I am. All I have to do is look down at the keyboard and there’s my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there’s crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft’n'chewy big cookies in the vending machine downstairs.

So why am I calling attention to this? The reason is that I think these are two distinct symptoms of serious late-stage memetic pathology settling into our collective psyche. On the one hand, it is now a matter of serious debate to discuss whether a story on the invasion of privacy and related abuses by our elected government constitutes treason, and on the other, there are people who are seriously advocating positions that are so extreme that they exceed the realm of parody.

We're circling the drain, folks.

Joint social networks of media and defense

2006-06-27T09:24:00.000-04:00

Following up my post on media giants and their relationships via interlocking directorates, in this post I'll look at the connections between media giants and major defense contractors. I was surpised to find that there are few (if any) direct connections. The major defense contractors most connected to media giants seem to be Honeywell and Northrop Grumman. Honeywell has a 2nd degree connection to CBS via Merril Lynch, a 2nd degree connection to Disney via Edison International, and a 2nd degree connection to GE via Verizon. Northrop Grumman is connected to GE via Deere and Chevron, to Disney via Washington Mutual, and to CBS via Merrill Lynch.

Haliburton and Raytheon are connected to Time via Citigroup. Lockheed is connected to News Corp via Ford Motor, and to Time via Dell. (Note that News corp is relatively isolated from the other media giants.)

At this point, I think it would be more enlightening to focus on individual directors and their biographies, to see if there is anything there. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Enforcing the boundary: illegal memes

2006-06-26T07:33:00.000-04:00

GOP Congressman Calls for Criminal Charges Against New York Times:

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration Sunday to seek criminal charges against The New York Times for reporting on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.

Rep. Peter King blasted the newspaper's decision last week to report that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.

"I am asking the Attorney General to begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times -- the reporters, the editors and the publisher," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous."

[via Americablog]

NetVocates

2006-06-26T07:20:00.000-04:00

Speaking of PR, which is an important tooll in memetic engineering and a key weapon in memetic warfare, there is apparently a company called NetVocates which is a PR firm focused on blogging. Steve Lagavulin summarizes Robin Hamman at Cybersoc.com:

I won't steal all of Robin's thunder, and you should definitely take a peek over at his weblog for a better take on what his research dug up. But the gist of it is that NetVocates appears to offer a service whereby they will target weblogs which might "impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways", and they then hire individuals to post comments on those weblogs which will, presumably, help to create more "controlled" and "expected" impacts.

Chip Griffin, founder of NetVocates, offers his side of the story:

NetVocates was founded earlier this year to provide online analysis and advocacy services to clients. What does this mean? NetVocates gathers data about blog posts of interest to its clients, uses proprietary software to blend multiple data sources and electronically sort the information. We then have a staff of experts who review the information to provide reports to clients outlining trends in the blogosphere of interest to our clients.

... For some – but not all – clients, NetVocates works to develop advocacy programs. These programs can take many different forms – steps the client might take to communicate more proactively through its own blog, to work with bloggers to provide information on products and issues, or to address misinformation published in blogs.

Steve has a followup article on the issue. He call attention to the silver lining:

But as a counter-point, let's look at the bright side of NetVocates as well: they pay people to surf the web! Does that sound like your idea of a dream job?

McDonalds -- the videogame

2006-06-26T07:11:00.000-04:00

This is hilarious. Like Steve Lagavulin who found it, I did not play the game but I also found the tutorial very educational. Some examples of the information you will need to play this on-line sim-City-esque videogame: on managing your "Agricultural sector":

If we had to rear all the cattle we need in our part of the world, our cities would drown in an ocean of cow shit. Pastures and soy culture need a lot of land and South America is one of the best places for it. Obviously you have to conquer your land as our forefathers did. Remember the old saying: "under every forest there is a lawn".

On managing your brand, one of your weapons is the PR office:

The public relations office develops countermeasures against our detractors (environmentalists, consumer associations and other bands of radicals).

While we're on the subject of resource consumption, check out MyFootprint.com! [Via C. Carico at Expanding Universe].

Fear meme watch: Sears Tower

2006-06-25T17:47:00.000-04:00

The Independent reports on the underwhelming truth behind the Sears Tower Plot: Tall stories: The plot to topple Chicago's Sears Tower was not all that it seemed.

The alarming news flashed across America's TV screens on Thursday evening: government agents had thwarted an al-Qa'ida plot, using home-grown American terrorists, to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago in a ghastly repeat of 9/11.

When the dust had settled barely 24 hours later, a rather more modest version of events had emerged. The seven young black men arrested at a warehouse in Miami and Atlanta had never been in touch with al-Qa'ida, and had no explosives. Their "plan" to destroy America's tallest building was little more than wishful thinking, expressed by one of them to an FBI informant purporting to be a member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation.

[...]

That did not deter the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, from summoning a press conference in which he denounced an attempt to "wage war against America". But the threat, even he admitted, was not immediate - and those who posed it were in fact merely a few semi-unemployed men, most of them petty criminals, from Liberty City, a poor black neighbourhood close to the centre of Miami.

If the case has any significance in America's "war on terror", it is not as a present danger, but as a harbinger of possible future risks.

[Via Americablog]

The social lives of media giants

2006-06-25T14:43:00.000-04:00

Following up from my last post about social networks and interlocking directorates of corporations, I now have the top 300 companies in my database (minus 15 companies that are not publicly traded and plus 17 other companies of interest, for a total of 302 companies). The top five "bridging" companies are Citigroup, Pepsico, AMR (American Airlines), Target, and GE, with betweenness measures of 2582, 2151, 1540, 1390, and 1349, respectively.

This post illustrates the social neighborhoods of media giants, defined (as previously) by interlocking directorates.

The first graph shows the social neighborhood of NewsCorp (Rupert Murdoch's spawn), taken out to two degrees of separation from NewsCorp. Note the direct connections to Ford and Amex.

The next graph shows the 2-degree social neighborhood of Disney.

This one shows CBS.

General Electric and TimeWarner have complicated 2-degree neighborhoods, so I'm only showing 1 degree for each. In particular, TimeWarner is connected to CitiGroup, which is hugely connected.

Finally, here's Viacom, the apparently shy media giant (although note the connection to CBS).

The betweenness measures of these companies are 1349 (GE), 580 (Disney), 359 (TimeWarner), 321 (CBS), 122 (Viacom), and 27 (News Corp).

What should we learn from this? Well, it doesn't seem like there's any overall general pattern in terms of cross-memberships on boards, other than that a couple media giants are well-connected. However, I think these figures are a useful reference for suggesting how a particular media message may be slanted. For example, we might be alert to the subtexts of media products produced by NBC, Universal Pictures, Universal Studios, Focus Features, Rogue Pictures, MSNBC.com, msn,com, and NBC.com, all subsidiaries of GE.

This has been an interesting exercise, and I hope to conduct similar analyses of defense contractors, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, and food companies.

Social networks of corporate citizens

2006-06-24T22:28:00.000-04:00

The name of this blog, Memetix, reflects my interest in the propagation of memes¹. A related idea is that of social networks, about which much theoretical material has been written. Memes propagate from node to node (person to person) along the “edges” (technical term for links between people) of the network, and spread faster if they hit a node which is “central” in some sense.

As you can imagine, sociologists are quite interested in social networks. However, the study of social networks is also a big deal in business circles. A recent Wharton Business School article describes how and why companies are becoming interested in studying social networks:

Mapping social networks can be useful in many ways, but [Wharton management professor] Rosenkopf says there are at least two reasons why corporate interest in the subject is growing: Companies want to be able to identify key performers and get a better understanding of the nature of the interaction among employees.

"Hopefully, you have organized your company the best way to get the job done," she says. "But mapping out a network will give you a sense of whether actual work flow and communication flow match what you hope to achieve. Maybe there are bottlenecks where one person is managing all interactions. If you expect two groups to work together closely, and you don't see them doing this, you might want to create liaison roles or other relationships to make information flow better. On the other hand, you may see groups talking to each other too much. When managers see network diagrams, they often realize they need to reconfigure their organizational chart."

The internet is a gigantic social network, and has been studied by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, an important mathematician. An MIT researcher, C. Marlow, is interested in studying how news travels through the blogosphere:

We have constructed a system to track memes within the weblog community. As a meme diffuses through social ties, our system documents the time and location for each posting that is observed. Based on these data, webloggers can be categorized by their adoption characteristics, ranging from early- to late-adopters.

Yes, dear friends, you are being studied.

I am starting to learn some of the techniques used by social network theorists. As an example (which has its own semi-enlightening results), in this article I will present a preliminary analysis of the network formed by our “corporate citizens”. As UCSC sociology professor G. William Domhoff states,

Interlocking directorates -- defined as the linkages among corporations created by individuals who sit on two or more corporate boards -- have been a source of research attention since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, when they were used by famous muckraking journalists, and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, to claim that a few large commercial and investment banks controlled most major corporations.

Drawing inspiration from the site They Rule, which provides a graphical tool for researching corporate board memberships and interlocking directorates, I consider two corporations to be linked if they share a board member (or if an officer in one company sits on the board of another). Unfortunately, the data at They Rule is from 2004 and not available in a format necessary for social network analysis. Consequently, I spent the day downloading board information from Reuters. The data used for this analysis consists of the top 100 companies (in gross revenue), minus six companies for which data were difficult to obtain and including an additional 27 companies that are involved in defense, media, or pharmaceuticals. Clearly the 27 extra companies reflect the bias of my own personal interests. Eventually I plan to expand the analysis.

A few screen shots of the network (excluding isolated companies) appear above. Table 1 below shows the non-isolated companies, sorted by centrality degree (number of ties to other companies) and showing betweenness (how much of a bridge the company is) and closeness (how close the company is to others in the network). Unsurprisingly, Citigroup is a huge bridge and very linked, while General Electric, Verizon, and Honeywell are well-linked and represent bridges in the network. Oddly, Pepsico and Target are at the top of the table as well.

A statistical test for betweenness produces a significant P-value (~0.01), demonstrating that this network is more centralized by betweenness than the typical random network of the same size and density, i.e. there are a few key corporations. The corresponding test for degree centrality not significant (with respect to network size, P~0.6), indicating that this network is typical in terms of linkage when compared with other networks of its size.

Thus, it would appear that this social network of corporate citizens seems to have a very large conduit of corporate governance memes in the form of Citibank and perhaps few other companies. It is interesting to compare the results to Domhoff's article, where he uses Citibank as an example, and to the statistics mentioned in this 2002 USA Today article.

This is a work in progress. Please let me know if you have comments, any interesting ideas (or you would like to help download Reuters data!!)

¹Thought of more informally than in the most technical academic sense.

Table 1: Social Network Measures for Individual Companies

	Centrality	Between	Close		Centrality	Between	Close
Company	Degree	ness	ness	Company	Degree	ness	ness
Citigroup	34	1089	0.42	Dow Chemical	8	182	0.34
General Electric	20	455	0.38	Edison International	8	102	0.32
Pepsico	20	435	0.38	General Motors	8	52	0.33
Verizon	20	471	0.37	Hewlett Packard	8	74	0.31
Honeywell	18	337	0.35	Lockheed Martin	8	126	0.30
Target	18	400	0.38	New York Times	8	48	0.32
Du Pont	16	169	0.35	Northrop Grumman	8	65	0.30
Pfizer	16	123	0.34	Sears	8	112	0.31
Procter & Gamble	16	262	0.37	United Parcel	8	109	0.32
Walt Disney	16	322	0.33	Wachovia	8	123	0.32
Boeing	14	191	0.34	Yahoo	8	108	0.31
Chubb	14	261	0.34	ADP	6	58	0.33
Coca Cola	14	159	0.35	AIG	6	38	0.28
ConocoPhillips	14	183	0.36	Albertson's	6	27	0.27
Dell	14	166	0.34	CVS	6	129	0.25
Exxon	14	137	0.34	Federated Dept	6	102	0.28
Ford Motor	14	296	0.35	Google	6	114	0.27
Goldman Sachs	14	130	0.34	International Paper	6	22	0.31
IBM	14	236	0.35	Kroger	6	39	0.30
United Technologies	14	262	0.36	Lowe's	6	131	0.31
American Express	12	187	0.34	Merck	6	19	0.31
Bristol Myers Squibb	12	189	0.37	News Corp	6	5	0.30
Deere	12	135	0.35	TimeWarner	6	46	0.33
Dow Jones	12	111	0.34	United Health	6	21	0.31
FedEx	12	123	0.33	Viacom	6	38	0.28
Home Depot	12	241	0.34	Wellpoint	6	61	0.27
Merrill Lynch	12	147	0.32	WeyerHaeuser	6	29	0.28
Metlife	12	123	0.31	Wyeth	6	5	0.31
Motorola	12	127	0.36	Borders	4	15	0.26
Sprint Nextel	12	68	0.32	Calpine	4	0	0.30
Walmart	12	138	0.34	Costco	4	5	0.26
Wells Fargo	12	241	0.35	HCA	4	0	0.31
Abbott Labs	10	87	0.35	Ingram Micro	4	19	0.27
Alcoa	10	64	0.34	Lehman Brothers	4	8	0.30
Allstate	10	92	0.32	McKesson	4	29	0.28
AT&T	10	87	0.30	Raytheon	4	14	0.31
Bank of America	10	192	0.28	St. Paul Travelers	4	0	0.28
Cardinal Health	10	114	0.32	Sysco	4	0	0.23
CBS Corp	10	166	0.30	Washington Mutual	4	19	0.27
Chevron	10	152	0.32	Aetna	2	0	0.25
Cisco	10	210	0.34	Altria Group	2	0	0.26
Haliburton	10	84	0.35	Amazon.com	2	0	0.21
Intel	10	130	0.31	Barnes & Noble	2	0	0.24
Johnson & Johnson	10	117	0.34	Coca-Cola Bottling	2	0	0.24
Marathon Oil	10	99	0.34	Comcast	2	0	0.30
Microsoft	10	92	0.34	General Dynamics	2	0	0.24
Prudential Financial	10	70	0.33	Genzyme	2	0	0.27
Berkshire Hathaway	8	77	0.30	Hartford Financial	2	0	0.27
Caterpillar	8	18	0.30	Monsanto	2	0	0.23
Choicepoint	8	139	0.29	Safeway	2	0	0.22
Coca-Cola Enterprises	8	25	0.32	Sunoco	2	0	0.20
Consolidated Edison	8	199	0.32	Walgreen	2	0	0.26

Labor camps

2006-06-24T09:08:00.000-04:00

Republican gubernatorial candidate has called for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants:

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."

The article described Goldwater's plan as a "concentration camp" for migrants.

Goldwater, a candidate for governor in Arizona, said in a statement Friday that his comments were taken out of context. He said he was calling for a work program for convicted nonviolent felons, similar to "tried and tested, effective and accepted practices" used by state and local jails

True, labor camps for immigrants may be no worse than using felons as slave labor. But as Miriam at No Capital comments, "A Final Solution... Perhaps not THE final solution".

This brings to mind the conspiracy hysteria over "FEMA detention camps", which flared up a few months back when USACE expanded a contract by Haliburton subsidiary KBR to build facilities for "foreign-born refugees". Rotten has a good historical perspective, ending with the following warning :

After a flurry of public protest, the "detention camp" discussion went sub rosa. But under existing presidential authorities and executive orders issued both before and after 9/11, there is no need for public discussion. The camps could (under the sketchy legal justifications drafted by current and previous administrations) be open for business without a word ever being spoken in public.

I'm not going to reach for my tinfoil hat just yet, but it is very worrying that the idea of labor camps is now acceptable enough that a candidate for governor can openly espouse it.

(Cross posted to Round Earth League)

Traces from Beyond

2006-06-20T19:54:00.000-04:00

I want to plug Tim Boucher's Traces from Beyond. This is a perfect negative (positive?) example of what I mean about the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Tim's premise is that we all have had "strange" experiences that seem to touch the world beyond the veil, but we refrain from discussing them because they are not acceptable topics of conversations among "serious" people.

He has graciously provided a space where people can share their personal stories. Some of them are inspiring, some of them are really scary, all of them are interesting!

Following up on reactions to South Central...

2006-06-20T19:44:00.000-04:00

Steve Lagavulin has a commentary on the South Central farm. In essense, he agrees with Ran (as do I). He also has a similar story from his home town:

It reminds me in a way of a local restaurant here in Minneapolis called The Loring, which was such an innovative and cool place that it became a legendary hipster-scene here in the city for young bohemian artists (and the people who love them...). The Loring single-handedly rejuvenated a failing city-central Loring Park area, and brought great prosperity to a full city-block of real estate. And over time the restaurant expanded into an entertainment lounge, and then a theatre/performing arts space. But alas The Loring is no more, because as successful as it had become the owner never actually bought the building it was housed in. So that all the while Loring Park area was becoming regentrified and trendier, the real estate there was becoming more and more desireable. Finally, about three years ago, The Loring was booted out in favor of a more mainstream-kind-of-trendy restaurant, with deeper pockets.

And so it goes. As always.

Enforcing the boundary: Anglicans and Homosexuality

2006-06-19T17:37:00.000-04:00

Enforcing the boundary of acceptable Christianity: U.S. vote triggers more trouble for Anglicans [note the slight ideological slant of the headline]:

Anglicans faced a new crisis on Monday after the U.S. branch of the church elected a liberal female leader who said she believed homosexuality was no sin and homosexuals were created by God.
One English bishop warned that Anglicanism was in danger of splitting into "two religions" after the election in the United States of Katherine Jefferts Schori to lead the 2.3-million-strong U.S. episcopal church.

This is really an old and stale drama, and I barely care about it. Back when I was a Christian, I attended an Episcopal church, and the parish itself was a great place. But conventional Christianity, with some exceptions, is mostly about the panopticon God, now essentially irrelevant to my spiritual concerns.

One would think that positions on war, human rights, economic and environmental justice, ethical government -- the kinds of issues that would seem to resonate with the mythic Jesus -- would be more prominent than the sexual proclivities of a relatively small percentage of individuals. Instead, it is almost a fetish with Christianity to micromanage sexual behavior. When one Christian sect dares to suggest that perhaps energies are better spent focusing on other problems, we have a theological crisis.

Whether you think homosexuality is moral or not is beside the point. Its effects on any society are minor. It is a total nonissue when its destructive potential (if there is any at all) is compared with, oh, say, the Enron scandal or the war in Iraq.

I'm almost sure I'm preaching to the choir here. But I think it needs to be said again. [/end rant]

Whales

2006-06-19T07:12:00.000-04:00

News item: Small nations lead vote to resume commercial whaling.

A slim majority of nations on the International Whaling Commission voted Sunday in support of a resumption of commercial whaling, but pro-whaling nations still lack the numbers needed to overturn a 20-year-old ban.

with a followup:
The International Whaling Commission narrowly voted that a 20-year ban on commercial whale hunting no longer was necessary because marine mammals have recovered from near extinction.

Chris at AmericaBlog summarizes my sentiments:

The public reasoning behind these moves are incredible, essentially blaming whales for depleting fish populations around the world, so they must now be controlled. No, dwindling fish populations have nothing to do at all with over fishing just like the dwindling whale populations in the past had nothing to do with over whaling. It was the whales that were limiting their own populations and harpooning themselves into near extinction, not whalers.

So, the mindless slaughter of non-humans may now be resumed. This post pretty much stands on its own without comment: either you understand the moral dimensions of non-human genocide, or you don't.

However, I would like to take this opportunity to plug a science fiction novel I enjoyed reading a few months back. (Don't worry, I promise I'll tie this back to whales in a moment.) Hyperion, written by Dan Simmons and named after the unfinished poem by John Keats, is typically marketed as a sci-fi horror novel that concerns a monster who threatens seven pilgrims on a quest to visit the "time tombs". I was motivated to read it after coming across a recommendation somewhere in my internet travels and receiving an intuition that the book would be helpful in my spiritual journey. (The library angel often visits me in this way.)

Throughout much of the novel I was annoyed with the apparent technophilia that in general turns me off to the genre. However, one of the compelling features of the novel is how the author assumes an about-face, in fact repudiating the ideology of the machine. It turns out that the pivotal issue is the fate of cetaceans.

The structure of the award-winning novel is often compared to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in that the plot is propelled by the narration of six of the seven pilgrims, each of whom tells their own story, how they came to accept a pilgrimage that would almost certainly end in gruesome death. The introductory narrative is given by the "Consul", who is commanded by the "CEO" to make the grim journey, and is told matter-of-factly that there may be a spy or traitor among his fellow pilgrims.

The history of Simmon's made-up civilization is told in a fragmented way through the narratives of the characters. In particular, we learn of an interstellar empire (the "worldweb") bound together by a unique mode of transportation, and a particular planet, an unwilling member of the empire, populated by an ecologically conscious, simple people who live in harmony with the dolphins and sentient floating islands (which I imagine as gigantic manatees). We learn how their rebellion against the forces of capitalism and technology was brutally crushed by this interstellar empire, and how the dolphins and the bigger cetaceans were slaughtered. And we learn of the "shrike", the monster that is worshipped by the "Church of the Final Atonement", and that somehow has escaped his tethers to the time tombs and now possibly threatens humanity.

[Spoiler alert] The shocker is who the traitor is. It is in fact the Consul himself, who tells his story last: he is the grandson of the leader of the rebellion that had been crushed over a century ago, and has carefully bided his time, waiting for a moment when he could strike back. After discovering how to set the Shrike free, he does so.

Hyperion was unusually moving for a sci-fi novel, mostly because the characters seem to be driven by very human motives and because the Consul, the anti-hero, acts to strike a blow against the culture of the machine. That the author really is talking about the ideology of the machine becomes apparent in the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, which completes the story of the war started in the first novel and in which the true enemy ends up being the artificial intelligences who have quietly declared war on humanity.

Science fiction is at its best when it explores the consequences of the culture of the machine, which is really the culture of the panopticon. The moral pivot of Hyperion was in fact the dolphins, whose destruction makes the moral case against the machine.

Would that we take heed: humanity will be judged by how we treat our nonhuman brethren.

Deathmobile

2006-06-18T23:04:00.000-04:00

I can't figure out which is more disturbing: the fleet of mobile execution vans deployed by the Chinese government, or the fact that 48% of AOL readers think this is humane.

And, anyway, why do they have to be mobile? This isn't like spaying your cat or getting screened for STDs.

[via PopOcculture]

Memetic Trojan Horse? Da Vinci Code

2006-06-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

Tim Boucher has a post about how a Chinese company is offering a DNA test (for the equivalent of $125) that will prove whether or not you are related to Confucius. He then speculates on the implications of the Sangreal (royal bloodline) idea, though he doesn't take it completely to its logical conclusion. So I will.

The Da Vinci Code (both the book and the movie) got a lot of free publicity when the Catholic Church came out against it. I avoided the book, since I already knew about the Holy Blood Holy Grail thing. I did watch the movie, which seemed to me simply a repackaging of the Merovingian-as-descendant-of-Christ narrative promoted by the original book by Baigent in a somewhat irritating thriller format.

Conventional wisdom says that the Catholic Church is merely trying to protect its turf. In particular, the One Church would rather not call attention to the First Council of Nicaea, which consolidated the Christian faith from what had previously been a veritable mob of competing mythologies into a central dogma that was subsequently enforced in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Now, the Catholic Church may be evil. But it's not stupid. It would seem to me that the pointy-headed wonks (pun intended) at the top of the Catholic food chain would know that controversy is one the best ways to advertise a new product. (Got New Coke?) This is an old and well-tested formula.

What if instead of trying to stifle the DaVinci Code, they were trying instead to promote it?

Now, why would they want to do such a thing?

One of the insidious ideas I found lurking in the subtext of the Da Vinci Code is the idea of holy bloodlines: the Sangreal, or Royal Blood. If the descendants of Christ are still wandering about in the PostModern age, surely one of them will soon announce His or Her esteemed heritage and offer modern-day salvation? Such a worthy heir would surely be a leader around whom we could rally!

This is a disturbing reemergence of the Divine Right of Kings meme, a seed of proto-fascism.

I don't mean to be paranoid. But we should all be on the lookout for disturbing subtext hidden within ideas that seem, on the surface, to be subversive.

Enforcing the boundary: Smithsonian removes electric-car exhibit

2006-06-18T12:39:00.000-04:00

Enforcing the boundaries of acceptable discourse: Smithsonian removes electric-car exhibit:

Just weeks before the release of a movie about the death of the electric car from the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has removed its EV1 electric sedan from display.
The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise.
...

GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors.

[Via Cryptogon]

The Panopticon God

2006-06-17T15:00:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Derrick Jensen's book, Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control. Rather than being an investigative piece, it is largely a polemic about the culture of control that pervades our civilization. After letting it percolate for awhile, I find myself most drawn to the model he uses to focus his ideas: the panopticon. First proposed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the panopticon is a prison designed to maximize the asymmetry between the observer and the observed:

The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience"

...

The architectural figure "incorporates a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells [...] are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen.

The panopticon as larger metaphor is nothing new. Michel Foucault was one of the first to suggest the panopticon as a model for contemporary (post-Enlightenment) society, emphasizing the power asymmetry inherent in many of our institutions.

Jensen reflects on the God we've subsequently created in our own image. His first paragraph sets up the spiritual dimensions of surveillance:

When I was a child, I was taught -- as a fundamentalist Christian -- that while the devil could not read my mind, he watched everything I did, scanning for the slightest shift of my body or expression that would reveal my thoughts. He did this, I was told, because he wanted to know me. And he wanted to know me not because he loved me -- as God did, who watched me also and who knew in addition what went on in my head and in my heart -- but because he wanted to tempt me and even control me.

However, the God that is worshipped in mainstream Christianity often resembles something more sinister than the loving father for which so many of us long. Why does this God so often, instead, become the abusive alcoholic parent? The message given to us by purveyors of acceptable religious discourse is that God loves you, but if you don't do what he says he'll punish you severely, maybe kill you, or maybe even kill somebody close to you.

This God sounds much like the description of Ialdaboath, the Demiurge, the false deity who (according Gnostic beliefs) interposes between humanity and true divine wisdom. From the The Apocryphon of John:

Now the archon who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.

I think it's important to keep some perspective on how we imagine God, for two reasons. The first is that, as we march towards a form of theocratic fascism, Dominionism, we need to be aware of the overarching meme that is driving this social current. Dominionism is about control, not only over what one does, but also over what one thinks. The second reason is that the extent to which we enjoy stewardship over our own mental real estate is directly related to the character of the God we worship. As Jensen seems to suggest, it is irrelevant whether or not you explicitly worship any form of diety: your brain is formatted in a way that produces a comfortable residence for some god.

Zac at Alchemically Braindamaged talks about culling your inner cokehead. In particular, he focuses on quieting the part of your brain where your controlling ego resides. This urge towards control, which is a response to the fear we all experience in the face of the utter annihilation that comes with death, is the genesis both of our often dysfunctional egos and their associated neuroses, and of the need for surveillance and control that is currently our collective experience. The seat of the ego is the McMansion in our head wherein resides the Demiurge.

Perhaps you are an atheist, you say you don't believe in God. That's okay, you probably worship Him in His other form: the rational spirit of science. The central doctrine of science and technology is that of control. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), often called the "father of modern science," advocated a vicious control of nature, often using the language of the existing penal system:

Much of the imagery Bacon used in delineating his new scientific objectives and methods derives from the courtroom, and, because it treats nature as a female to be tortured through mechanical inventions, strongly suggests the interrogations of the witch trials and the mechanical devices used to torture witches.

Interestingly, Bacon advocated such ruthless treatment of nature in order to serve God against the technological devices of the Antichrist:

An important figure in the development of modern Western science is Francis Bacon. But for Bacon, science meant primarily technology and mechanical arts - not for any esoteric purpose but for utilitarian goals. One interest of his was that the Antichrist not be in sole possession of technological tools in the coming apocalyptic battles. He wrote that:

"Antichrist will use these means freely and effectively, in order that he may crush and confound the power of this world... the Church should consider employment of these inventions because of future perils in the times of Antichrist which with the grace of God it would be easy to meet, if prelates and princes promoted study and investigated the secrets of nature."

Bacon also believed, like others, that technological know-how was an original birthright of humanity which had simply been lost in the Fall. Writing in his Opus Majus, he suggested the contemporary gaps in human understanding stem directly from Original Sin: "Owing to original sin and the particular sins of the individual, part of the image has been damaged, for reason is blind, memory is weak, and the will depraved."

So for Francis Bacon, one of the early lights of scientific rationalism, the pursuit of knowledge and technology had three reasons: First, so that the benefits of technology would not be the sole province of the Antichrist; second, in order to regain power and knowledge lost after the Fall in Eden; and third, in order to overcome current individual sins and achieve spiritual perfection.

Torture in the service of God, for the purposes of control over the other, victory over the devil. We must come to expect the Inquisition, which to me represents the mature fruit of the consolidation of Christianity under the Nicean Creed, the product of The First Council of Nicaea, convoked by Emperor Constantine I. Since that time, Christianity has served the interests of the state, almost always assisting the powerful against the powerless, and often resorting to physical force and violence. So much for a loving God.

The central purpose of the panopticon is that of control. However, there is another important aspect of the panopticon: that of alienation. To repeat the quote above, "The occupants of the cells [...] are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls." The panopticon God seeks to keep us alienated and isolated from each other. As we advance into late modernity, we find ourselves more alienated from each other, more isolated within our hi-tech entertainments, distractions, and simulacra. The spirit of technology seems to seduce us with toys, while the old Judeo-Christian god punishes us for straying outside proscribed boundaries of social interaction. We hear the Dominionists speak of "traditional family", yet the impoverished family structure they promote bears little resemblance to the large multigenerational families of yesterday (and of the developing world).

The God to which we pay homage, either explicitly through intentional prayer, or implicitly by way of habituated thought patterns, determines the architecture of the space where our private thoughts happen. If our God is the Demiurge, the panopticon God, then all we perceive will be placed in the context of a prison: islolating ourselves from other human beings, and alienating our consciousness from our inner selves.

If we wish to be free, we must free our minds from the internal panopticon God who enforces what ideas are acceptable and what ideas are not and we must free ourselves from perceiving the world as divided between those that are worthy (in the inner ring of the panopticon) and those that are unworthy (in the outer ring of the panopticon).

We must oppose the panopticon God.

On concentration of media ownership

2006-06-17T11:25:00.000-04:00

Matthew Yglesias, with whom I often agree, has a post about media concentration. He argues that the media has become less concentrated than ten years ago, and that the internet has opened up new sources of information to the general public:

[T]he media's become less concentrated. They're up to six giants from just four -- General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that's six.

Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.

...

On top of all this, the Internet is greatly enhancing peoples' range of options. Actual "new media" -- blogs, etc. -- play a relatively small role in this. The main thing is that, unlike it past eras, it's now really, really easy for somebody living in St. Louis to read The Los Angeles Times or The Boston Globe or, for that matter, The Guardian or The Independent if they're interested in a different perspective on world or national affairs.

...

This is getting very longwinded. But suffice it to say that while I have major -- major -- complaints with the reality of most media content, I don't find it especially plausible to attribute these problems to overconcentration.

Well, okay. But, as one of his commenters observes,

I don't think it's about how many companies, I think it's about how many viewpoints. It is ENTIRELY the corporatist viewpoint now.

The problem is that the boundaries of acceptable discourse are now more narrow than ever before. One concrete example: a recent rejection by three major networks of a paid advertisement by the United Church of Christ. Apparently the ad was too inclusive, thereby violating the strictly enforced public definition of Christian morality. An older Alternet opinion piece reflects on the previous time a UCC ad was rejected (oddly in a hopeful tone):

[The UCC] commercial has more power to shock us — into either agreement or rage — than the most erotic sucking of food or miming of the sexual act; the grossest feat of survival; the most lurid tale of incest on The Jerry Springer Show. We're as shallow as we can get, as a society, yet we're still capable of being engaged by the deepest questions of community, sacredness, and ethics.

Corporatist media strictly enforces which viewpoints are acceptable (laissez-faire Capitalism, short-term profit over long-range benefit, materialism, mindless hedonism, human chauvanism) and which are not (environmental concsiousness, the complexities of spirituality, respect for all life). And while the internet is currently a rich marketplace of information and knowledge, how long will that last when net neutrality is imperiled? And how can you be sure that NSA isn't watching what you view?

Another problem is the impact of various kinds of media. Moving images constitute an incredibly powerful form of communication. Podcasts notwithstanding, the ability to broadcast such images is concentrated within a handful of large corporate media outlets that conform to a narrow ideology. Their carefully crafted images are ubiquitous, and succeed in formatting a large segment of the public consciousness. All the reasoned arguments on a thousand alternative blogs have but a miniscule effect against the force of these images. The medium is indeed the message.

I agree with Yglesias that the problem is more complex than concentration of media ownership per se. But it is definitely part of the problem. I'm not naive: I realize we have little control over dealings in the corporate stratosphere. However, to the extent that we constitute the marketplace of eyeballs, we have some influence over our corporate masters. In particular, we can demand a richer menu of offerings, simply by seeking out a wider range of ideas and sources of information.

South Central Farm

2006-06-17T09:52:00.000-04:00

The latest brouhaha at the fringes of the blogosphere involves the destruction of the South Central urban farm:

The struggle to save an urban farm that has drawn celebrities and media from around the world came to a halt on Tuesday as 100 police evicted farmers and their supporters from the site.

Ran Prieur gets it right, I think. Since he doesn't have a permalink, I'll just lift what he has to say, in its entirety:

I've been withholding my attention from the issue because I recognized it as a psychological operation designed to reinforce our subconscious awareness that we're in hell, while our conscious minds refuse to accept it and we go gradually insane. Our chance to save the farm was exactly the same as the chance that the audience of a performance of Hamlet can convince the actors to not have everyone die at the end.

I often feel like I'm in the trenches of WWI, and the other side is fighting effectively, while half the people on my side are saying, "They're shooting at us! I can't believe they're shooting at us!" There is a fucking war on. The forces that destroyed the farm have no empathy, and are not subject to reason, unless it's reason about how to more aggressively exterminate and dominate. Tree-sitting is masochism, and I think even sabotage is masochism, until most ordinary people understand and agree with it.

If people without jobs want to be self-sufficient in food, the first thing we need to understand is that the world is ruled by a satanic collective consciousness that cannot stand for anyone to live outside its control. Then, instead of offering up a highly visible urban farm for ritual sacrifice, we'll fight effectively, with subtle edible landscaping and guerrilla gardens. The domination system does not have the skills or resources to go around the city killing tens of thousands of berry bushes and edible weeds.

Taking up the gauntlet...

2006-06-17T09:14:00.000-04:00

My friends have been starting up their own blogs. Competitive spirit that I am, they have succeeded in shaming me back into the blogosphere. (Not to mention, I can't place comments in their blogs unless I reactivate my blogspot membership.)

So here we go!!

Since my last attempt at blog authorship fell flat, over a year ago, I've had time to retool and think about what I'm about. Dcarto says his new blog is about energy independence. That's key, but so is something else: information independence. So that's what I'm now going to try to focus on.

I'm no fool: I know how the internet is supported, I know how centralized the media is, and I know that most of my links will be hosted (directly or indirectly) by corporate media outlets. But it's important to start moving towards the idea of information independence.

The space between your ears is the last frontier, and by now it's hardly virgin territory.

And for the spooks: ... as ramlette says, "I cock a snook at you".