Who are at the Iraqi insurgents, and why are they fighting?

The Mystery of the Insurgency - New York Times

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

The best guesses seem to be that the anti-occupation and anti-government forces are a mixture of millenialist terrorists, straight out simple criminals, Baathist loyalists, Sunni racists, and, maybe, a nationalist agenda.

Compared to other insurgencies, the nationalist theme seems the weakest.

The 'incoherence' doesn't mean the Iraqi goverment and people, and the US, will win. It may be that the insurgents are quite willing to destroy Iraq in order to further their own agenda. Destroying Iraq seems doable.

A retrospective view of Microsoft's Hailstorm

Markl's Thoughts: Don Box and HailStorm

I never had a good sense of what Microsoft's Hailstorm was, except for the central role for identity management. Here a former Hailstorm developer describes it from an engineering perspective. Stripped of all the Microsoft marketing gibberish it sounds like it was quite interesting. Alas, it also sounds anathema to Microsoft's business model, which is entirely based on controlling key data structures.

Bogus science: television and video games improve IQ

baltimoresun.com - Getting enough TV, video games in your diet?

Steven Johnson wants to do for popular culture what the Atkins diet did for red meat - make it OK to enjoy something that's supposed to be bad for you.

It's the "Don't eat your vegetables" approach to life: Watch The Sopranos and 24 on TV, play video games like "Grand Theft Auto," go see the new Star Wars movie and surf the Internet. Then watch your IQ rise!

Johnson is dead serious, however. His new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, $23.95), boasts not only a long title but also a provocative premise. Johnson argues that the complexity of modern culture provides a rigorous cognitive workout and develops skills that are useful in personal and professional settings.

This is ridiculous, but it gets so much press that I feel obliged to kvetch.

Even if IQ is indeed rising over the past 50 years in the nations monitored, let me introduce one equation: correction != causation.

If IQ were rising for whatever reason, one would expect a "smarter" audience to expect more sophisticated entertainment and play more complex games.

Grrr.

As to what might cause such an IQ rise (if is real), I can think easily of one far more persuasive explanation. Consider this sequence.

1. Nothing.
2. Mail.
3. Mail + phone.
4. Mail + phone + fax.
5. Mail + phone + fax + email.
6. Mail + phone + fax + email + cell phone.
7. Mail + phone + fax + email + cell phone + multiple email accounts.
8. Mail + phone + fax + email + cell phone + multiple email accounts + instant messaging.
9. 8. Mail + phone + fax + email + cell phone + multiple email accounts + instant messaging + VOIP/media phones.

And that's just person-person communication. Life is getting exponentially more complex for everyone in every way -- all the time. Just to get through the average day we're pushing old brains into overdrive, starting from birth onwards.

We live in a very high intensity environment. If we're looking for an explanation of why IQ is increasing, forget about the tube. Think about all the rest of life.

The Onion takes on Scientology

The Onion | Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology

Who dares to bell the Scientology cat? The Onion dares ...

Fictionology's central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church's ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted—even encouraged—to view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

'My personal savior is Batman,' said Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Greg Jurgenson. 'My wife chooses to follow the teachings of the Gilmore Girls. Of course, we are still beginners. Some advanced-level Fictionologists have total knowledge of every lifetime they have ever lived for the last 80 trillion years.'

"Sure, it's total bullshit," Jurgenson added. "But that's Fictionology. Praise Batman!"

The American National Identity Card

Godwin Overnight Express | MetaFilter

So we have a national identity card now -- at least for people over 16. We have done it in an ingeniously American way -- by the back door and roundabouts and not all at once. For all that it will happen entirely; eventually it will be common for early teenagers to get a version of the 'drivers license' that is purely an identity card. Perhaps the "driver's license number" will move to a national standard, rather than being assigned by a state, and lastly it will be assigned at birth and serve as both email address and phone number.

Or there will be some other typically messy American solution that will achieve much the same end in a less direct fashion.

This was inevitable, even before 9/11. It will also be inevitably abused. We are the kind of nation that does these things covertly, so be necessity we do not put essential legal protections in place.

Chicago: story of the nation in the nation

Encyclopedia of Chicago

Everything about Chicago. Chicago is that odd nation just below Lake Michigan; the one that takes a day to drive around and longer to drive through. People born there seem to never leave, it drains the midwest. It's a world unto itself, and now it has a web encyclopedia.

The Feynman Letters

Guardian Unlimited | Life | 'This is how science is done'

Feyman's daughter has published a book of her father's letters. A few are excerpted here. The last letter in the set was written to his first wife; she died of tuberculosis 3 years after they were married. He knew she was dying when they were wed, there were no effective treatments for tb then.

Humanity has Joseph Kony. It also had, for a time, Richard Feynman. It's a tough call for the intergalactic center for disease control.

I was, very briefly, a student of Richard Feynman. He had a curious effect; he raised the IQ of everyone in the room with him -- at least a 10 point gain. As long as he was nearby I could understand what he was explaining. Once he left, however, my understanding would fade.

Self-replicating robot

news@nature.com: quicktime

Don't worry about the robots. We still have decades of dominion.

Shock - the pre-election color coded alerts were political

USATODAY.com - Ridge reveals clashes on alerts

Ridge confesses the pre-election Homeland security alerts were indeed driven by the White House. Just as the tin hats suspected.

But there was a real threat you see. Worse even then bin Laden. There was John Kerry ...

David Brin on modernism, majority rule, the implied expectations of Bill Frist, and the role of propaganda

Contrary Brin: Modern(ist) Political Subtlety - or Why "Majority Rule" is a Deadly Ruse

David is a deep thinker, and this one reads like he spent some time on it. Fascinating. BTW, he also references Monbiot's exceptional article.

God = Bush. The BushFish

BushFish.org: Supporting God and Country

I actually think this is not a parody. But it could be. Decide for yourself.

The Beast was Nero, 616 was his number, and Revelations was about Rome

National Post

I'm sure the 'Left Behind' guys will fold their franchise now. Sure they wouldn't persist in delusion?

... fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil's prime number.

"This is a very nice piece to find," Dr. Aitken said. "Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast."

The tiny fragment of 1,500-year-old papyrus is written in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, and contains a key passage from the Book of Revelation.

Where more conventional versions of the Bible give 666 as the "number of the beast," or the sign of the anti-Christ whose coming is predicted in the book's apocalyptic verses, the older version uses the Greek letters signifying 616.

"This is very early confirmation of that number, earlier than any other text we've found of that passage," Dr. Aitken said. "It's probably about 100 years before any other version."

The fragment was part of a hoard of previously illegible manuscripts discovered in an ancient garbage dump outside the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Although the papyrus was first excavated in 1895, it was badly discoloured and damaged. Classics scholars at Oxford University were only recently able to read it using new advanced imaging techniques.

Elijah Dann, a professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Toronto, said the new number is unlikely to make a dent in the popularity of 666.

"Otherwise, a lot of sermons would have to be changed and a lot of movies rewritten," he said with a laugh. "There's always someone with an active imagination who can put another interpretation on it.

"It just shows you that when you study something as cryptic and mystic as the Book of Revelation there's an almost unlimited number of interpretations."

The book is thought to have been written by the disciple John and according to the King James Bible, the traditional translation of the passage reads: "Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

But Dr. Aitken said that translation was drawn from much later versions of the New Testament than the fragment found in Oxyrhynchus. "When we're talking about the early biblical texts, we're always talking about copies and they are copies made, at best, 150 to 200 years after [the original] was written," she said.

"They can have mistakes in the copying, changes for political or theological reasons ... it's like a detective story piecing it all together."

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone's name, she said.

"It's a number puzzle -- the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero."

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. "It's a very political document," Dr. Aitken said. "It's a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it's written in coded language and riddles."

This is only one of many discoveries waiting to be discovered in a crumbling ball of old Egyptian garbage. Doubtless planted by Bill Clinton, the AntiChrist.

If I lived in Grand Rapids Michigan, I'd be worried now.

World War II: The Historian's view

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Ideas / how_good_was_the_good_war

I came to this one via Metafilter, which is hitting on all cylinders today. It's a good update for those who don't follow recent historical analyses of WW II. Few American papers would dare today to print this.

The Triumph of the Will: How to believe the earth is cooling down.

George Monbiot Junk Science

...For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.”(1) His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?

He wasn't. It turns out Bellamy was deluded and, based on his age and prior reputation, is perhaps now a bit demented.

That's the story, however. In an appropriately footnoted article, more like a journal article than an essay, Monbiot tracks down the source of some common statistics championed by those who wish strongly to believe that the earth is not getting warmer. He follows the numbers to the door of ... Lyndon Larouche.

Larouche. That is one heck of an influential nutcake.

Monbiot has done a fantastic job. This article deserves to be featured in many a university.

Dominionism - a term for the ideology of the violent christian theocracy

Orcinus

Orcinus has a long posting on totalitarianism. It's all interesting, but this quote from a Chris Hedges interview stood out. Dominionism is a good word. Emphases mine.

...If you look at the ideology that pervades this movement, and the term we use for it is dominionism, it comes from Genesis, where the sort of founders of this movement, Rousas Rushdoony and others, talk about how God gave man -- this is a very patriarchal movement -- dominion over the land. And dominionists believe that they have been tasked by God to create the Christian society through violence, I would add. Violence, the aesthetic of violence is a very powerful component within this movement. The ideology, when you parse it down and look what it's made up of, is essentially an ideology of exclusion and of hatred. It is a totalitarian ideology. It is not religious in any way. These people quote, as they did at this convention, selectively and with gross distortions from the Gospels. You cannot read the four Gospels and walk away and tell me that Jesus was not a pacifist. I'm not a pacifist, but Jesus clearly was. They draw from the Book of Revelations the only time in the Bible, and that's a very questionable book, as Biblical scholars have pointed out for centuries, the only time when you can argue that Jesus endorsed violence and the apocalyptic visions of Paul. And they do this to create an avenging Christ.

They have built a vision of America that is radically -- and a vision of this -- and latched onto a religious movement or awakening that is radically different from previous awakenings, and there have been several throughout American history. In all religious revivals, Christian religious revivals in American history, the pull was to get believers to remove themselves from the contaminants of secular society. This one is very, very different. It is about taking control of secular society. And, of course, I think, as you and others have done such a good job of pointing out, they have built this dangerous alliance with the neoconservatives to essentially create across denominational lines. And we saw this at the convention with the, you know, radical Catholics with -- even there were even people from the Salvation Army; they have recently begun reaching out to the Mormons -- a kind of united front. Those doctrinal differences are still there and still stock, but a front to create what they term a 'Christian America.'

Interesting quote on involving Mormonism, I've wondered about that. I have only studied the early religious awakenings, but I can believe we are entering new terrain in our history.

There's more in the post.