Guardian Unlimited | Fundagelism ....

Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | God save America ...

The word 'fundagelism' has never appeared in the columns of this newspaper. The term is, however, current in the blogosphere - that cyberforum which nowadays carries the most interestingly paranoid political debate. 'Fundagelism' is not a word that trips easily off the tongue. It's a crunching together of the even more mouth-boggling compound 'fundamentalist evangelism'.

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This Guardian article is itself a bit extreme, but extremism seems to be indicated nowadays. They claim 90 million evangelicals will vote for Bush -- that seems higher than the numbers I've read -- but I have little faith in the numbers.

Sharp Blue: Consilience & The Naturalistic Fallacy

Sharp Blue: Consilience

... the naturalistic fallacy, the idea that what is natural is also moral.

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Great review -- I'd heard of consilience but this review has put it on my read list. I also loved the name for a terribly common fallacy, a variant of which is the idea that "that which is natural is also healthy" -- the herbal medicine fallacy.

MSNBC - Rough Justice in Iraq - Janis Karpinski is NOT going quietly

MSNBC - Rough Justice in Iraq

More on the POW scandals. It seems that even a one star general can be dangerous when angry. Karpinski is not going to go quietly, and she'll talk to any media outlet anywhere. She's giving the scandal legs even as Bush & Co try to put it to sleep.

The Barbara Walters adoption game show

Adoption Isn't A Game Show (washingtonpost.com)

Tonight ABC's weekly news program '20/20' is to air Barbara Walters's profile of Jessica, a pregnant 16-year-old who will select among five couples vying to adopt her child. Jessica will participate in an open adoption, an increasingly popular practice that allows adoptive parents and, in many cases, the child to maintain contact with birth parent.

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I wonder what state she's operating out of? In many states child protective services would be looking in very closely.

Barbara Walters has fallen a long way. ABC must share a deep desperation with her.

The bright side of living in a nation with zillions of laywers is that you know they're all figuring out how best to sue ABC.

American Express: Reliable service is hard to provide

American Express Personal Finance, Business Solutions, and Travel Services

It's very hard to provide reliable 24x7 service. American Express ought to do well, but they don't. For example:

1. AMEX service for downloading credit card transactions to Quicken is out of order. This is an important function for me, so I use their online email service to complain.

2. I get an email saying they've got a reply online.

3. A week later I return to the AMEX online email service to read their reply -- but it's "temporarily out of order".

Why some companies can provide 24x7 service, but most cannot, would be a great topic for a Harvard Business Review study.

The prisoner affair: The New Yorker (Hersh) provides extensive coverage

The New Yorker: Fact

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One of the few publications to provide coverage. The question -- where does the buck stop? At Rumsfeld? At Bush? And what about Guantanamo? There is at least one hero though:

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P whose role emerged during the Article 3 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobec said that Darby had “initially put a anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.

Of course, knowing this administration, SPC Darby will pay a high price for his courage. The other hero, who Bush will be searching for, is whoever leaked the secret report. The accused, on the other hand, have promising careers ahead on talk shows and in the off-Hollywood movie business.

It appears that many of the abuses began with the the now standard procedures for CIA interrogations of "high value" captives. These have been discussed in articles in the Atlantic and NY Times Magazine; in the dark world of semi-civilized torture these are considered mainstream techniques. In the hands of amateurs, including a few who may have had some serious flaws to begin with, these methods were applied more widely and with increasing creativity at Abu Gharaib. Such is the peril of the "slippery slope".

Rumsfeld has known about, and approved, the interrogation methods used in the "war against terror". He should resign -- but he won't.

The defense attorneys will use techniques that have been effective in past war crimes. They will threated to broaden the inquiry up the chain of command. This technique normally causes the military to back down, but in this case they're not alone. The cashiered General is not going quietly into the night. From the New York Times:

But the officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the 800th Military Police Brigade, said the special high-security cellblock at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, where the abuses took place had been under the tight control of a separate group of military intelligence officers who had so far avoided any public blame.

In her first public comments about the brutality — which drew wide attention and condemnation after photographs documenting it were broadcast Wednesday night by CBS News — General Karpinski said that while the reservists involved were "bad people" and deserved punishment, she suspected they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation.

Speaking in a telephone interview from her home in South Carolina, the general said military commanders in Iraq were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and the reservists.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

She said the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen in the large prison and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations.

She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they "sickened me."

The burning shame of the US media

BBC NEWS | Americas | US media grapples with Iraq horrors

But Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington Post, told the BBC that the White House has not made an effort to quell the reports. [of criminal torture and humiliation of Iraqi POWs]

Mr Kurtz said that one possible explanation as to why the story was not receiving greater coverage in the US was that Democrats, the party in opposition, were not making the allegations an issue.

'We, in the media, are a little hesitant to start the debate ourselves, but if some member of the Democratic Party were to start a debate over this, we would be on it in a flash,' Mr Kurtz said."

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I have little outrage left, but this almost shocked me. With great brevity, Mr Kurtz has demonstrated how low our media has fallen. We're talking lower than a snake's belly.

If I were the editor of the Washington Post, I'd have the entire staff over for a first order tirade.

This does explain why our media never covered the smallpox hoax. (Bush's faux vaccination program, which was dropped as soon as we invaded Iraq.)

Understanding war crimes -- American GIs in Iraq

The Memory Hole > Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel

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War is brutalizing in the best of times. For the US military in Iraq this is not the best of times. Under conditions of extreme stress and inadequate support they are breaking down, just as warriors did in Vietnam and Algeria and the Pacific Islands and the Russian Front ...

Bush has lost his war. America has lost its reputation, its honor, its credibility, and many many lives. Bush has sacrificed so much. Even if his intent were just (and history will judge that), the execution of his plans was criminally incompetent. He should stand for court martial along with these GIs.

Defeating the pandemic of online news registration requirements

The Washington Monthly

More newspapers are requiring registration; it's becoming a real annoyance. It turns out there's a longstanding solution -- a "public" identity.

un: cyberpunk
pw: cyberpunk

The thread I link to (above) claims this is an old net tradition; that for years the net equivalent of Kilroy has been cyberpunk.

I just tested it for the LA Times. It works. Alas, it provokes some interesting responses from Hotmail and Yahoo suggesting they invalidated this one a while ago.

Eventually this un/pw will become invalid. But others will take its place.

I don't recommend using this approach -- it is certainly dishonest and arguably it's a form of theft. On the other hand ...

Capitalism's challenge: attaching value to public goods

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004): a Weblog

Social value is drifting away from potential profitability, and this threatens to become a huge problem in our collective social resource allocation mechanisms. Google needs to grow to approximately ten times its current profitability and then maintain its market share and margins indefinitely in order to justify the $20 billion valuation. And that's hard to see: high sustained profits are the result of effectively-maintained barriers to competitors--think Microsoft, think Intel. What is going to be Google's counterpart permanent edge?

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Writers are compelled to communicate. Coders are compelled to code. If writers and coders aren't paid for what their compulsions, they exercise them anyway. Writers create blog entries for their mothers and spouses, coders (being more useful) produce open source applications.

The internet allows the more marketable writers to reach an audience, and it allows distributed collaboration on software projects. Complex systems interact over time and produce new adaptations, such as very complex distributed software collaborations.

None of this activity is following market demands. It is compulsion-driven (historicallly always true for art and writing). The modern difference is that software creation can have large economic consequences (eg. Linux). To some extent the writing compulsion may also propagate memes at higher velocities, raising the "world IQ".

It would be historically consistent that even as capitalism stands unrivalled, odd cracks in the facade are emerging. These cracks are of great interest to economists, much as physicists are thrilled by miniscule errors in the predictions of the "standard model".

See also my post on market failures and a recent personal experience with a toy bank.

Pain of America's soldiers: at least five times the published fatality rate

The Lasting Wounds of War (washingtonpost.com)

While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action -- more than 100 so far in April -- doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.

More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes -- injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair...

The neurosurgeons at the 31st Combat Support Hospital measure the damage in the number of skulls they remove to get to the injured brain inside, a procedure known as a craniotomy. 'We've done more in eight weeks than the previous neurosurgery team did in eight months,' Poffenbarger said. 'So there's been a change in the intensity level of the war.'

Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month's injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion...

... "We're saving more people than should be saved, probably," Lt. Col. Robert Carroll said. "We're saving severely injured people. Legs. Eyes. Part of the brain."....

... Accurate statistics are not yet available on recovery from this new round of battlefield brain injuries, an obstacle that frustrates combat surgeons. But judging by medical literature and surgeons' experience with their own patients, "three or four months from now 50 to 60 percent will be functional and doing things," said Maj. Richard Gullick.

"Functional," he said, means "up and around, but with pretty significant disabilities," including paralysis.

The remaining 40 percent to 50 percent of patients include those whom the surgeons send to Europe, and on to the United States, with no prospect of regaining consciousness. The practice, subject to review after gathering feedback from families, assumes that loved ones will find value in holding the soldier's hand before confronting the decision to remove life support.

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For every one dead, about 9 are seriously wounded. Of the wounded, a large fraction (1/3?) will die within weeks. Most of the remaining survivors will have significant or severe lifelong disability. Some will never work again, some will never do anything again.

For the purposes of measuring the burden borne by US forces, including reservists and the National Guard, and comparing it to previous conflicts, we should probably multiply the published fatality rates at least fivefold. I suspect, after such an adjustment, we're in the range of Vietnam era combat intensity.

Why is this? How can a relatively modest insurgency inflict such suffering on US forces? I suspect it's the same reason a relatively small group of fanatics can inflict great pain on civilizations. Technology has made effective weapons, techniques, and military infrastructure very affordable. The cost of inflicting harm has fallen faster than the cost of providing defense.

A conservative brit is fed up with the vacuous grins of GWB

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | While Europe is a eunuch, America is our only shield

So much bad news turned up at Chequers over the weekend that the prime minister might be forgiven if he failed to spot the latest barrage of suicide bombings in Iraq. But Britain's 8,000 troops on the ground noticed, and are not happy. They are prisoners of an American command whose incompetence is manifest, whose soldiers are unsuited to their task, whose failures of policy have been laid bare...

... when Blair made his case about weapons of mass destruction, I believed him. By, say, October 2002, it became evident the Americans were determined to invade. If the Atlantic alliance was to survive, it seemed necessary that British troops should participate. I nursed a further delusion - that Britain might thus be able to exercise marginal influence on Washington's behaviour. We could press Bush to seek international legitimacy, to behave more even-handedly towards the Palestinians.

In all those things, I was wrong. To quote Berger again, the Bush administration believes the US "does not need to seek legitimacy from the approval of others. International institutions and international law are nothing more than a trap set by weaker nations to constrain us."

Yet the most likely outcome of the forthcoming presidential election is still a Bush victory. There is no reason to suppose this president will behave any differently in a second term. Unlike Clinton, the cynic and adulterer, Bush is a true believer. We are learning the hard way that, in power, true believers can be far more frightening and dangerous than cynics....

... If we are really fed up with Bush, if we recognise that no future US president is likely be entirely to our taste, we should surely get on with creating credible European armed forces. As it is, no European nation - with the possible exception of France - shows the smallest interest in spending money or displaying spine for this purpose.

Until we address this, and against the background of a struggle against international terrorism that is likely to grow more alarming rather than less, America remains the indispensable ally and shield. That means George Bush. At the very moment when most of us feel surfeited with the president's vacuous grin and impregnable moral conceit, we cannot walk away from his follies unless or until Europe makes itself something quite different from the eunuch it is today.

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This guy is a conservative brit, in the mold of the Economist. He's spitting mad and a bit frightened. As I wrote earlier, America the Arational is likely to reelect Bush. For the rest of the world, this means more incompetence and greater danger. How to deal with an America that's no longer susceptible to reason

His answer is that the rest of the world needs to reorganize for its own defense, and figure that America will be as much a hindrance as a help.

Bush strategy: abortion access = Democrat = al Qaeda lackey

CNN.com - Transcripts

BLITZER: There is a clear difference when it comes to abortion rights between the president and his Democratic challenger, John Kerry. In your opinion, Karen, how big of an issue will this abortion rights issue be in this campaign?

HUGHES: Well, Wolf, it's always an issue. And I frankly think it's changing somewhat. I think after September 11th the American people are valuing life more and realizing that we need policies to value the dignity and worth of every life.

And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions.

And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own.

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Expect to see a lot of this. This is Willie Horton on steroids. Bush et al will consistently say in every possible way "a vote for Kerry is a vote for bin Laden" and "Democrats are terrorists".

Maybe it's time to drop the "Karen Hughes is a sweet innocent" masquerade.

Bushworld and America the Arational: Why Bush is likely to win.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Orwellian Olsens

The Orwellian Olsens
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: April 25, 2004

It's their reality. We just live and die in it.

In Bushworld, our troops go to war and get killed, but you never see the bodies coming home.

In Bushworld, flag-draped remains of the fallen are important to revere and show the nation, but only in political ads hawking the president's leadership against terror.

In Bushworld, we can create an exciting Iraqi democracy as long as it doesn't control its own military, pass any laws or have any power.

In Bushworld, we can win over Falluja by bulldozing it.

In Bushworld, it was worth going to war so Iraqis can express their feelings ("Down With America!") without having their tongues cut out, although we cannot yet allow them to express intemperate feelings in newspapers ("Down With America!") without shutting them down.

In Bushworld, it's fine to take $700 million that Congress provided for the war in Afghanistan and 9/11 recovery and divert it to the war in Iraq that you're insisting you're not planning.

In Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.

In Bushworld, it's O.K. to run for re-election as the avenger of 9/11, even as you make secret deals with the Arab kingdom where most of the 9/11 hijackers came from.

In Bushworld, you get to strut around like a tough military guy and paint your rival as a chicken hawk, even though he's the one who won medals in combat and was praised by his superior officers for fulfilling all his obligations.

In Bushworld, it makes sense to press for transparency in Mr. and Mrs. Rival while cultivating your own opacity.

In Bushworld, you can reign as the antiterror president even after hearing an intelligence report about Al Qaeda's plans to attack America and then stepping outside to clear brush.

In Bushworld, those who dissemble about the troops and money it will take to get Iraq on its feet are patriots, while those who are honest are patronizingly marginalized.

In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America.

In Bushworld, you can claim to be the environmental president on Earth Day while being the industry president every other day.

In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying and the Taliban are running freely around the border areas, hiding Osama and delaying elections.

In Bushworld, imperfect intelligence is good enough to knock over Iraq. But even better evidence that North Korea is building the weapons that Saddam could only dream about is hidden away.

In Bushworld, the C.I.A. says it can't find out whether there are W.M.D. in Iraq unless we invade on the grounds that there are W.M.D.

In Bushworld, there's no irony that so many who did so much to avoid the Vietnam draft have now strained the military so much that lawmakers are talking about bringing back the draft.

In Bushworld, we're making progress in the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists.

In Bushworld, you don't need to bother asking your vice president and top Defense Department officials whether you should go to war in Iraq, because they've already maneuvered you into going to war.

In Bushworld, it's perfectly natural for the president and vice president to appear before the 9/11 commission like the Olsen twins.

In Bushworld, you expound on remaking the Middle East and spreading pro-American sentiments even as you expand anti-American sentiments by ineptly occupying Iraq and unstintingly backing Ariel Sharon on West Bank settlements.

In Bushworld, we went to war to give Iraq a democratic process, yet we disdain the democratic process that causes allies to pull out troops.

In Bushworld, you pride yourself on the fact that your administration does not leak to the press, while you flood the best-known journalist in Washington with inside information.

In Bushworld, you list Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" as recommended reading on your campaign Web site, even though it makes you seem divorced from reality. That is, unless you live in Bushworld.

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I thought this was a pretty long list, until I realized she omitted economics, the environment, civil rights, health care, etc.

The comprehensive list would be at least 3 times as long.

Yet Bush will likey be reelected -- despite what "people like me" consider one of the worst records in the history of the presidency. Only Bush II could make the first term Reagan look good. (Second term Reagan, when his dementia was inescapable, was really Howard Baker -- a good middle-of-the-road president).

Maybe it's time for "people like me" to step back and think about why this is so. Bottom line -- it's the role of rationalism. Rationalists (of which Star Trek's Spock is the mythic paradigm), even when they are not scientists, respect science and logic. We have models and beliefs, but we test them. When they fail, we at least consider the possibility that the models are no longer making useful predictions. This doesn't mean rationalists agree on everything -- scientific disputes are often vicious. Very few rationalists are atheists, but we may speculate widely about the nature of deity/deities. Many rationalists have conventional religious beliefs, but they rarely expect God to intervene directly in the material world. Rationalists (at least the human ones) have feelings, emotions and intuitions, but we recognize them and balance them with logic and reason.

Rationalism, the respect for logic, empiricism, and science, is a distinct worldview. Rationalism came to fruition in the enlightenment. The "founding fathers" were extraordinary rationalists. Jefferson and Madison agreed on little, but their arguments referenced "reason".

Rationalism is not the only way of looking at the world. Faith and intuition are also powerful. Many very effective people have combined faith, intuition and rationalism in various parts. Faith is not my strong suite, but I think it's fundamentally advantageous; even in the purely material world a capacity for faith an adaptive trait. Many successful CEOs (and even more failed CEOs) seem to have an extraordinary faith in their own correctness -- despite making as many mistakes are most people.

Bush is not a rationalist; he is arational. He's not "irrational" or "stupid" or "insane", he is something far more effective. He operates on intuition unbridled by science and its burden of logic, analysis, and internal consistency.

Evangelical conservatives are also arationalists; this is not a matter of their faith -- it's that their stated beliefs are internally inconsistent. It's the ability to function happily with profound internal inconsistency throughout one's belief structure that marks the arational. Bush is likewise internally inconsistent, yet he is superficially effective in the exercise of power. (GWB is fundamentally ineffective -- unless his true goal is to bring on the apocalypse. Of course if God is speaking with Bush, then apparently God also wants the end-time to come, in which case I have an eternity in Hell to look forward to.)

Why will Bush get reelected? Because 21st century America has a strong arational streak, as does, the middle East, Africa, Russia and eastern europe. It's strong in politics, in the media, in battles over the definition of science education, and in the rise of non-science based healthcare.

Conversely, I think rationalism may be rising in China and India. If we were living in the 19th century this would result in a turbulent but survivable transition in power and influence from arational to rational nations. Unfortunately, we live in the 21st century, with weapons that can annihilate humanity a dozen different ways all at once.

If I were Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Warren Buffett, rationalists all, I'd be pouring every billion I had into trying to change the outcome of the near-term election, then trying to rebalance America. Only 10-15% of Americans will be strong rationalists, and I suspect it's wise to have 10-15% be strong arationalists. Now, however, the ratio is more like 10% to 50%. That's a threat not just to the American future, but to the future of humanity.

Recruiting for Iraq -- reminescent of a zillion science fiction stories

The New York Times > Business > World Business > Halliburton, in Iraq for the Long Haul, Recruits Employees Eager for Work

Is Iraq the right destination for a 48-year-old with eight grandchildren? Cynthia Johnson, the grandmother in question, laughed at the query as she tried on an airtight yellow jumpsuit that might protect her from a chemical weapons attack.

Ms. Johnson and hundreds of others hired by the Halliburton Company packed into what used to be a J. C. Penney store at the Greenspoint Mall here this week to prepare to go to Iraq. She said her job there, serving food to American troops, was more promising than her previous occupation, cooking on an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

'The money's better and there's the feeling I'm doing something useful,' said Ms. Johnson, a native of Deridder, La. 'My daughters and grandchildren worry for me, but a job like this doesn't come up every day'...

... until passing background checks and absorbing the description of the risks associated with working in Iraq, which include graphic photos of wounded employees returning home.

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Everyday life continues to turn into science fiction. It's a cliche of a zillion space operas that barren and lethal "postings" run by brutal corporations are staffed by hardy desperados with few prospects. The cliche, of course, is rooted in myth and history -- the move to the frontier in the hope of a better life.

I hope they know what they're getting into. I suspect many of them actually do understand the risks; it sounds like Halliburton wants them to be well informed.