Thursday, May 28, 2009

Hope For The Unimaginable

What hope is there for man? What is man's potential? All my life I've felt like a human raised among wolves, a good wolf, but not of the breed. I have been able to act the part but am full of unexpressed potential. Surely this is a common experience.

Man is busy being man. As mankind becomes ever more a conscious entity, as the common experience of all defines singular understandings, is there some chance that each man could start being all that he can be, and no longer just an echo of what has been? Can man break from the mold of his own conditioning?

Can one become something new without having any idea of what it is?

Monday, May 25, 2009

Can Preventive Detention Be Other Than Punitive?

Detention itself is punitive.

How IS the United States to protect itself against people who really don't like it?

Make friends?

Friday, May 22, 2009

Pay Torture Reparations Monthly?

In a major speech yesterday on detainee policy, President Obama spoke of those who can never be released. He hopes to confabulate some special union of Congress and the Courts and the Executive that can jointly manage secret government, in particular the perpetual extra-constitutional confinement of certain detainees.

Could he include the Fourth Estate - the press - in his formula? They will certainly be a part of whatever happens. Every detainee who is to be held "indefinitely" will inevitably develop his own "Free Mumia Now!" supporter group. Every detainee's story will be a detailed wiki history. Are they are being held forever just because they have physical scars from torture? That should be known. Do they have a family with a story?

There may be a better way to protect America.

Sooner or later, we will need to pay reparations to our released detainees for the torture they have suffered. Why not now? Why not monthly? Keep them interested in our nation's health. Start with the ones we have already released. Could someone ask the ACLU to sue for this?

The whole world is watching. World Court is watching. We are in discovery phase. Cheney is self-identifying as the madman who ruined things. The pox that was upon us will soon be only scars. Transgressors will be detained. We will then owe their - our - victims big-time. Will world courts make us pay our victims big bucks? How much will we want to fight this?

Suppose that we conclude the process by punishing ourselves first? Suppose we grant reparations to the innocent tortured as we release them? Suppose we send them a monthly check for 20 years? Would they be so likely to turn against us?

For each of them this would instantiate the kind of support we would want victims of the past regime to have. While they may show their scars and talk about what the old America did to them, they will also speak for what the new America can do.

Would we still need to detain people forever?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

A Tree Of Bad Apples

President Obama has tasted of the tree?

The very wish to do good efficiently can lead one to do evil. Our President yesterday trivialized the torture of thousands by echoing the words that it had been the work of a few bad apples and they have already been punished.

There was a whole tree of bad apples, Mr. President. Some of those apples are still on the tree.

There was a consulting firm, Mitchell Jessen Associates, that sold the CIA on the idea that torture worked. These guys had a contract manager in the CIA who approved their paychecks. He reported to higher-ups. Do they still have contracts? With who and why?

There was a general, Geoffrey Miller, who took the Guantanamo methods to Abu Ghraib. Says his Wikipedia article,
"Specifically, Miller suggested that prison guards be used to "soften up" prisoners for interrogations."
But as our prisoners discovered that they could survive the soft, then ever-harder regimes of stress and torture, their will was strengthened and preserved. When treated well, they talked. When tortured, they were too busy praying to give the interrogator much attention.

To whom did Geoffrey Miller report? Whose bright idea was it that breaking laws gives an advantage?

There were consultants who did the actual interrogations. There were doctors in attendance. There were deaths when they lost a patient due to torture. To whom did they report?

Now, here in America there is a President, finally elected by the people, who promised to stop secret surveillance. Who promised to end military commission trials. Who promised to close Guantanamo. Who promised that the poor will see justice.

You can bully the truth, Mr. President. But not the people. We have girdled the apple tree with Wikipedia. We Skype worldwide for free. We know that you know that you did not speak the truth yesterday. We know that you know that there are more than a few bad apples. The world knows that you know. Bullying the truth only makes you a liar.

Speak truth, Mr. President. Shake the tree.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Hardware Abstraction Layer

Cars are not all the same under the hood. Their technologies can be very different. To a driver, though, they are made to look the same. The surface a driver touches is remarkably similar from car to car. While innards may differ, the driver sees the same ignition key, brake pedal, steering wheel, accelerator, speedometer, and so on from car to car.

The driver sees an abstraction of a car.

On a desktop computer, never mind what its silicon internals are, the Windows operating system provides a large set of routines that my program can use to do its stuff. The routines look the same to a program regardless of the hardware underneath. The program is running not on a computer but on the generic idea of a computer. The actual computer runs a program that makes it look like the abstract idea of a computer.

This "hardware abstraction layer" delivers a standard view of hardware to the user.

What does it look like from the hardware's side? Suppose one inverts the function. Change "hardware" to "wetware" (humans are wetware), and change "abstraction" to "concretization". Is there a "wetware concretization layer"?

Hardware used to have to deal with peeks and pokes by geeks and nerds. Very uncomfortable, and there was no privacy. Now it is protected for the most part. Tweaks by geeks are more often intended to speed up the motherboard than to peer at the contents of a hard memory location. Hardware can just be itself.

For hardware, human interactions have normalized and are now solidified into a small, well-defined, set of tasks. The hardware has successfully made concrete the nature of the human world above it.

Hardware sees a wetware concretiziation layer.

We march to its drum.

Friday, May 08, 2009

A Justice Served

In Boing-Boing,
"Scalia Scoffs at Calls for More Data Privacy Protection, Students Surprise Him With Dossier of His Own Data."
There's no hiding place up there...

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Trailer Loads Of Body Parts

'“The governor said that the villagers have brought two tractor trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the casualties that had occurred,” Mr. Farahi said. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”

Mr. Farahi said he had talked to someone he knew personally who had counted 113 bodies being buried, including those of many women and children. Later, more bodies were pulled from the rubble and some victims who had been taken to the hospital died, he said.'

So reports an Afghan legislator in the New York Times today, May 7th, 2009. (Buy your copy now.)

Special Forces troops had gone into a village. An hour after the fighting stopped, our bombing began. Once again, we bombed houses where civilians had taken refuge.

The governor, seeing the trailer loads of body parts, then phoned the Afghan Parliament and spoke to them over their sound system, describing the carnage. Lawmakers demanded the regulation of foreign forces. The Parliament's chairman has called on President Karzai to draft an agreement within a week that would "legalize" the American presence and limit our actions. We are no longer there legally, according the the Afghan Parliament.

How did we reach this impasse?

The Times continues,
'Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for the United States military in Kabul, confirmed that United States Special Operations forces had called in close air support in the area on Monday night, including bombs and strafing with heavy machine guns. “There is a heavy insurgent presence there,” he said.'
Insurgent? We are fighting insurgents? People who won't vote for Karzai in the summer elections, undoubtedly. We are certainly recruiting to his opposition. We've been told we were fighting the Taliban. We are fighting insurgents.

We are so heavy-handed. Perhaps the yet-untold story will be that fighting had died down because the Special Forces were pinned down. Perhaps they called for a kill zone around them so they could escape. So we killed a village to free them. Otherwise, why did we begin bombing an hour after fighting had stopped? To punish the village?

If we have no better solutions to such simple problems, we guarantee our defeat.

“People are ready to rise against the government,” said Mr. Farahi, the legislator, according to the Times.

Even as that same government now calls our presence illegal.

We Americans think we are fighting extremists in Afghanistan. But we are fighting insurgents. We are fighting those who resist us. Bullies do that. Will this war become Vietnam all over again? Will our need to fight a military air war - our kind of war - force the conflict into the failed Vietnam template?

We are fighting neighborhood organizers with an air war that kills neighborhoods.

Our loss.

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Can A Government Convict Itself Of War Crimes?

It may be clinically impossible. But if we don't do it, other countries will try us and convict us. As the Obama Administration, averse to dissension, tiptoes backwards into tomorrow, already the blogosphere has become a Truth Commission. Facts will be known.

Already I read that two army psychologists were contracted to set up and monitor the CIA's torture methods after the CIA scientific community refused to do so. So, who asked for torture? Who asked the CIA scientific community to set up a torture program so bad that they went on strike? Tomorrow the world will know.

ForeignPolicy.com observes that Mr. John Kiriakou, the CIA operative who "spilled the beans" on CIA waterboarding back in 2007 without any censure or punishment from his bosses, is suffering embarrassment.
"In 2007, Kiriakou famously went on television to describe waterboarding, and discussed the single incidence in which Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded. After just 30 or 35 seconds, Kiriakou said, Zubaydah started singing and never needed to be tortured again.

But Kiriakou wasn't there for the waterboarding -- he was half a world away, in Langley -- and Zubaydah was waterboarded more than 80 times. The New York Times first noted the difference in the two stories."
Mr. Kiriakou now says that he got his information second-hand.

From whom? Within a week the world will know.

As facts become known in ever greater detail, can this government do other than indict? Can a jury do other than convict?

In the shaming presence of the internet, can a country do other than set things right?

The Prime Oscillation

Play two tones at once on an organ pedal board. If they are five notes apart - the do-re-mi-fa-sol interval - you will produce a tone that is an octave lower than the lowest note you played. This is a church organist's trick used to get 32 foot sound from 16 foot pipes. Tones in the lower octaves of a piano can produce the same effect. Play C and G and you will hear another C an octave lower. It will wobble a little because of the tempered scale.

When the lower C itself is played, tones sound within it, overtones. These include the C an octave up and the G a fifth beyond that, sounding at their fundamental pitches - true pitch, not tempered. They are overtones of the lower C. When they are played, they reconstitute the lower tone. Any pair of tones will tend to construct a lower tone. Any pair of tones can be in an overtone series.

Oscillating masses in the universe - rotating planets revolving around their star, galactic aggregates - all connect gravitationally. Each influences the others' paths.

Not all planets are playing in the key of C, but they may be overtones of an overtone that does.

Suppose C and G construct CC, the tone an octave below C. Suppose G and the D five notes above it construct GG. Then CC and GG construct CCC. C and G and the D beyond it construct CCC.

Is there a lowest tone? Can there be there a slowest oscillation in the universe?

The universe is infinite. Can the pitch then be infinitely low, the motion of the oscillation infinitely slow?

What is infinitely slow?