Frank Rich: comments on the forgotten war

Frank Rich used to write about culture and the arts for the NYT, that gives him a special interest in the mass psyche. The most interesting parts of his post-Petraeus commentary are about how the American gestalt has grown bored of War ...

Will the Democrats Betray Us? - New York Times - Frank Rich

SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.

Not that many Americans were watching .... New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn...

...there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland's similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as well of the "repeated successes" of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. "The strategy we're following at this time is the proper one," the general assured America, and "is producing results."

Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there's a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress, regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland's Congressional appearance.

Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears's latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann, our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.

Even if military "victory" were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the "surge." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don't want to hear anything that might remind them of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric's much-promoted weeklong visit to the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast's all-time low. Angelina Jolie's movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint Eastwood's wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its latest season, "24" lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did between January's prime-time address and last week's.

You can't blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the president's real "plan for victory" is to let his successor clean up the mess. They don't want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence...

As a commander in chief Petraeus is at least an improvement on Cheney, though it's a bit worrisome that he wasn't elected. Rich continues his editorial with demands that Obama and Clinton declare a withdrawal date, conveniently forgetting that Edwards has received no support for a similar position. Rich's advice is at odds with his key observation: Americans have forgotten about Iraq -- and bin Laden too, for that matter. They won't respond to rhetorical reminders.

So what should Rationalists be hoping for?

Nobody should have any trust, of any sort in anything coming from executive branch. They're either lying (Cheney et al) or delusional (Bush et al). The Senate, I think, has the constitutional authority to develop their own channels to the truth, but the Senate is only barely Democrat. It won't be easy, and it may not be feasible.

My own recommendation for the Democrats (that should get their attention :-)!) and for Edwards, Obama, Clinton, is to make this their central theme. "We need information we can trust, and we're going to do whatever is constitutionally allowed to get it."

Historian wanted: The American Liberty League and 1930s fascism

I knew that America had had a quite vigorous fascist movement in the 1930s, but I hadn't read about the "American Liberty League"...

Damn Interesting » The Revenge of the Fighting Quaker

In the early 1930s, a secret collection of prosperous men are said to have assembled in New York City to discuss the dissolution of America's democracy. As a consequence of the Great Depression, the countryside was littered with unemployed, and the world's wealthy were watching as their fortunes deflated and their investments evaporated. As men of action, the well-financed New York group sought to eliminate what they reasoned to be the crux of the catastrophe: the United States government.

To assist them in their diabolical scheme, the resourceful plotters recruited the assistance of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a venerated, highly decorated, and considerably jaded former Marine. It was the conspirators' earnest hope that their army of 500,000 Great War veterans, under the leadership of General Butler, could overpower the US' feeble peacetime military and reconstitute the government as a more economical fascist dictatorship...

...The credibility of MacGuire's claims was reinforced when he produced evidence of considerable cash resources and made some eerily accurate predictions regarding personnel changes in the White House. He also accurately described the still-secret but soon-to-be-announced American Liberty League, a high-profile group whose stated purpose was to "defend and uphold the Constitution." The League's principal players were comprised of wealthy Americans, including the leaders of DuPont, JP Morgan, US Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Colgate, Heinz Foods, Chase National Bank, and Goodyear Tire. There are some who claim that Prescott Bush– father to the 41st US President and grandfather to the 43rd– was also entangled in the scheme.

On 22 August 1934, upon his return from a fact-finding trip to Europe, Gerald MacGuire dropped all pretense when he met with General Butler at an empty hotel restaurant. He indicated that his financial backers aimed to assemble an army of half a million disgruntled veterans, sown from the seeds of the original Bonus Army. He also stated that the group would like Butler to be the leader of this force. "We've got three million [dollars] to start with on the line," MacGuire claimed, "and we can get three hundred million if we need it." ...

...In the autumn of 1934, General Smedley "Old Duckboard" Butler finally sprang into action. A crowd of journalists surrounded him as he addressed the nation in a press conference. But the General did not demand the surrender of the United States government. Instead, he related to the reporters the details of the secret pro-fascist plot, and described the principal players. "The upshot of the whole thing," he explained, "was that I was supposed to lead an organization of five hundred thousand men which would be able to take over the functions of government." The Old Gimlet Eye, it turned out, had been playing along with Gerald MacGuire in order to glean information about the plot. Though Smedley Butler had indeed grown weary of being a government-sponsored "gangster for capitalism," he was still a true patriot. Butler's associate– Paul Comly French– was in actuality an undercover reporter for the Philadelphia Record and New York Evening Post. The two men testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), delighted to disclose all they had gathered from MacGuire. Veterans of Foreign Wars National Commander James Van Zandt also testified, stating that he had likewise been approached to lead such a march on Washington.

The Wikipedia article points to a web page with more details and names:

... Who were the men making up this organization? There was, of course, its chairman, Jouett Shouse, a GM executive, former chairman of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party, and former president of the Association against the Prohibition Amendment. Then there were Alfred E. Smith and John W. Davis, former Democratic presidential candidates; Congressman James W. Wadsworth (who would eventually become the father-in-law of Sen. Stuart Symington); Nathan Miller, a director of U.S. Steel and a one-time governor of New York; John Rascob, another GM executive and former Democratic national chairman; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., head of General Motors; Ernest T. Weir of Weirton Steel; Dr. Samuel Hardey Church, head of the Carnegie Institute; David A. Reed, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania; Hal Roach, motion picture producer; Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward; Joseph B. Ely, former Democratic governor of Massachusetts; Howard Pew of Sun Oil; James Beck, constitutional authority; and the Du Pont brothers—Irenee, Lammot, and Pierre.

Nice to see Sloan was into all kinds of management improvements. Note the bipartisan membership, lots of people hated Roosevelt. I wonder what Kerry's wife might have heard about the Heinz family connection, but I doubt GWB will tell us much about his grandfather's role.

There's one book mentioned, but, best of all, there's a BBC History broadcast (7/23/2007) you can listen to, or much better, turn it into a podcast:

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.

Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.

Thomson is asking the right question, the curious thing about this story is how little curiosity there's been about it. Well, maybe the time is right to learn more ...

DI is really a great blog ...

Update 9/25/07: I've finished listening to the BBC History broadcast (7/23/2007). It's not bad, but it suffers from melodramatic narratives, faux suspense, and cloying music. Clearly the BBC History shows are not quite in the same league as "In Our Time". The connection to GWB's grandfather, Prescott Bush, is pretty weak. PB was employed by a company that allied itself with Nazi Germany and had a connection to the people who organized the quasi-fascist Liberty Alliance, but that's all they mentioned. The Heinz, Dupont, JP Morgan, Sloane, etc connections to the Liberty Alliance stronger are stronger; they were probably fascist sympathizers back when that meant a corporate-government union rather than Auschwitz.

The national archives on the affair are remarkably slender, and it does appear that a significant part of Smedley-Butlers testimony was excluded -- indeed, the chair of the "House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities", then chaired by John McCormack (presumably a democrat) and Samuel Dickstein (republican?) admitted as much. The details were to be kept secret pending a full investigation, but that investigation never happened. No record is available now of anything but Butler's accusations, and the NYT article (see below) hints that Butler didn't have any physical or corroborating evidence.

There's a possibly historically significant twist to this. It's plausible that Roosevelt used the bad publicity, and the Liberty Alliance connections, to arm twist force Morgan, Heinz, Dupon, Sloane et al to cooperate with the "New Deal". One wonders if he could have pushed through the New Deal without that leverage. If so, then it's plausible that an american-fascist plot was key to the success of Roosevelt's New Deal, and thus, arguably, to the defeat of Hitler's empire ....

Here's the coverage from the NYT archives for Nov 21, 1934:

Gen. Butler Bares 'Fascist Plot' To Seize Government by Force; Says Bond Salesman, as Representative of Wall St. Group, Asked Him to Lead Army of 500,000 in March on Capital -- Those Named Make Angry Denials -- Dickstein Gets Charge. GEN. BUTLER BARES A 'FASCIST PLOT'
November 21, 1934, Wednesday

A plot of Wall Street interests to overthrow President Roosevelt and establish a Fascist dictatorship, backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and others, was charged by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired Marine Corps officer, who appeared yesterday before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, which began hearings on the charges.

The fully NYT (PDF) article has more details:

• MacGuire was a bond salesman for Grayson M.P. Murphy & Co, I think Grayson was supposed to have created the Liberty Alliance.
• General Hugh Hackson, an NRA administrator was alleged to be the dictator in waiting
  
• JP Morgan and Co was supposed to be leading donors
• Only the two chairs of the House committee heard the testimony

Reading the NYT article today it feels as though the uncredited journalist was a bit skeptical ...

Fallows on the Iraq Speeches: Edwards amazing, Giuliani insane

James Fallows (The Atlantic) watched yesterday's Bush speech (Iraq) and the responses -- twice. Unsurprisingly, it drove him to near-madness, but I appreciate his sacrifice.

Bottom line: Giuliani is a raving loon. Bush is Bush. McCain is finished. Edwards impresses - a lot, and a CNN journalist appears to have become sentient.

Fallows has two posts. I'm embedding his f/u statements in with quotes from the first version.

James Fallows (September 14, 2007) - Man from Mars perspective on tonight's speeches

... Just now CNN International did run Bush's latest speech; plus the Larry King followup with candidates Obama, Giuliani, Edwards, and McCain; plus an Anderson Cooper followup from Iraq. So what do you notice if you haven't seen these people in action in a long time?

- Bush: no surprises. At this point you buy the argument or you don't. Simply as performance, this struck me as being in the higher end of Bush's range... Bush was sobered but looked less rattled than he has in many of his previous "we are at a crucial moment" speeches about Iraq.

...How long has John Edwards been sounding like this? Wow!

Of the three Democratic responses to the president in this hour on CNN -- Jack Reed, Barack Obama, plus Edwards -- Edwards was by a mile the most impressive. To apply the Man from Mars perspective: if you'd heard of none of these politicians before, based on this sequence you'd immediately assume that Edwards was the dominant one from either party (including the actual president)...

... Those crisp arguments were all, and only, what Edwards presented. I don't have a transcript, but the gist was: we're patrolling a civil war, nothing matters without political progress, and that's not happening; it's shameful to keep making the link to 9/11 that does not exist, etc. Compared with the last time I'd seen Edwards handling foreign policy questions on live TV, he has come a very long way in knowledgeability and confidence..

[next day comment on Edwards: "Senator Edwards: Again I saw, Wow. What a powerful, no-nonsense appearance. In his heyday Bill Clinton could deflate a Newt Gingrich argument by saying: Look, here's what's really going on. Edwards was Clintonesque in that good sense tonight."]...

- Republicans: Wow, in a different way.

John McCain: Sigh. He looks like an old man, and a man who has lost and knows it. Making no inside-politics assessment here: just reporting on snap reaction to the TV shots after not seeing him speak for nearly a year.

Rudy Giuliani: He looks like a man who is crazy. Making no clinical diagnosis here, just talking about his affect as it comes across on TV. I am sure this is partly just my unfamiliarity with his tic of stressing a point by opening his eyes so wide you can see the whites all the way around. He does that a lot, and at first glance it's odd. But beyond that is the eerie sense of how strongly he resembles the earlier, cockier G.W. Bush of two or three years ago.

... Great certainty about "staying on the offense" against terrorism; zero displayed knowledge of what that means or indeed what he was talking about at all. Giuliani added to this sloganeering impression with his repeated invocations of "General Petraeus" as the answer to all problems, notwithstanding Petraeus's deliberate narrowing of his claimed expertise to the progress of his own mission, not the largest strategic questions about Iraq.

[next day, Fallows reconsideration on Giulian "...Is this how he's been all along? To start with, he doesn't know anything. To be more precise: not a single sentence that he utters suggests any familiarity with what people have been saying and arguing -- about terrorism, Iraq, the situation of the military, security trade-offs, etc -- for the last few years. He's out of date in two ways: He displays the "fashionable in 2003 and 2004" assumption that if you say "nine-eleven, nine-eleven, nine-eleven!!" enough times, you end all debate about military policy. He displays the "fashionable about three weeks ago" assumption that if you say "General Petraeus, General Petraeus, General Petraeus" enough times, you've offered an Iraq policy. And through it all he seems totally self-confident. Hmm, have we seen anything like this combo before?"

- CNN: ... CNN's Michael Ware joins John Edwards as the star of the night. As noted recently here and here, on a show earlier this week Ware had (surprisingly) followed what is apparently the new CNN diktat, in using the plain term "al Qaeda" to refer to "al Qaeda in Iraq" and Iraqi insurgents more generally. But this evening, Ware did not use that term (that I noticed) -- and responded to President Bush's claims in a withering, rapid-fire, highly-detailed, and devastating way.

Remember when Anderson Cooper made his break to the big time, thanks largely to his genuinely-outrage-seeming, borderline-impolite questioning of federal officials about Hurricane Katrina? "Brownie" and others would say: we're doing our best. Anderson Cooper (and others) would say: what the hell are you talking about?? There are bodies floating down the street!

That was Michael Ware's approach to the claims in Bush's speech. Is Iraq returning to normal life? Oh, sure, if normal means living in the dark most of the time, huddling for fear of being shot, etc etc etc. There are moments in journalism that can't be faked, when reporters on the ground are so disgusted by what they hear from remote official spokesmen that they just can't contain themselves. That was Ware's reaction this evening, and in a way it was the most important response to the speech...

I'm glad Edwards is back on track, he'd seemed a bit lost recently. If Giuliani, but some horror, were to become our next President I think a lot of Rationalists would be considering whether it was time to move to the Idaho mountains ...

iPhone vs. Windows Mobile: Reflections on why Windows Mobile has been such a dud

Ouch. It's rare to read such a harshly honest review of anything ...

iPhone alternative for the cheap, patient user - Geek Guide - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

After my wife got an iPhone, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of having a handheld device for phone calls, taking photos, e-mail, Web browsing and other minor computing tasks.

Since I'm cheap (and a family plan for two iPhones starts at about $110), I was excited to pick up a refurbished AT&T 8525 for $200 in late July. For an extra $20 a month on top of my wife's iPhone bill, we have a pool of 550 minutes for phone calls and I can use the device's WiFi to access the Internet (AT&T wanted another $40 for unlimited data service through its network).

With the phone's slideout keyboard, I looked forward to the device boosting my productivity.

My excitement about the phone soon turned sour. The phone's Windows Mobile 5 operating system and user interface is garbage compared to the iPhone. And unlike the iPhone, which was easy to setup, I spent hours trying to set up the WiFi...

Jeff hates his 8525, largely due to the limitations of Windows Mobile 5. I suspect Windows Mobile 6 is little better. If he needed Outlook integration (PDA functions) as I do, he'd probably have had better things to say about WM, but this review is significant because he's comparing media-phone functionality. In that domain it's easy to see how the iPhone would trash the competition.

This is also the first discussion I've read that talks about family use of the iPhone. I'm waiting for the first true family users to realize that iTunes (esp. on Vista and OS X) is configured for a single user, not multiple users ...

Lastly, the silence about Windows Mobile, and its many, many name and branding changes over the years, has always made me suspect there was something very wrong with it. Paired up with Outlook/Exchange, it was good enough to cause Palm to self-destruct, but it seems that was just about all it could do. Blackberry squashed Windows Mobile like a bug.

Why has Windows Mobile been such a dud? Was it because each device manufacturer (for many years) had their own version and they, not Microsoft, controlled the user experience? Was it a deep architectural flaw? A business problem? Microsoft's incompetence? All of the above?

Canine cognition - at last, respect

Ten years ago I was a bit frustrated that dogs weren't getting much respect as a fascinating species*. Co-evolved with their human symbiotes, they likely altered human evolution even as they evolved at a terrific pace. Fantastic phenotypic plasticity, extreme variation in aging rates ... this is an animal worth understanding (affectionately, of course).

Now canine studies are everywhere, including a German institution specializing in canine cognition ...

Canine Smarts: Behavioral Science Turns to Dogs for Answers - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - New...

... For serious scientists, Lassie and her friends were deemed little more than dumbed-down ancestors of the wolf, degenerated into panting morons by millennia of breeding. But a younger generation of researchers has set out to restore the reputations of our beloved pets. 'Dogs can do things that we long believed only humans had mastered,' says Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Evolutionary Anthropology in the eastern German city of Leipzig."

Border collies in particular, and working dogs in general, have been found to be unusually smart. Interestingly, changes in dog rearing practices may be elevating demonstrated canine IQ. Dogs are being raised more like children, and they're getting smarter as a result.

Dog owners are eager to demonstrate the brilliance of their canine masters. Of course a smart dog is not necessarily an unalloyed gift; our Kateva is brilliantly subtle at stealing food and is almost never caught in the act.

I wonder how far they'll go ...

* Many animals show up in science fiction stories -- but never dogs. Apparently they're left behind on earth. The one noteworthy exception is Vernor Vinge, who did a wonderful job of imagining a world of sentient dogs (of course they were supposed to be some dog-like alien critter rather than the human canine, but we know what he was up to).

Asymmetric Polygamy: the problem of the leftovers

Marginal Revolution discusses the economics of polygamy, though in fact they're really talking about polygny (one male, multiple female). The discussion was triggered by a NYT story on the abandoned teenage males surrounding a pseudo-Mormon cult.

Humans have often practiced polygyny (with rare polyandry), but polygyny is rare in technological societies. I'm sure sociologists have theories about why this might be so, but it's interesting to speculate about how the leftover male problem changes over time.

Leftover males have to be eliminated -- or they'll cause problems. The least disruptive way to eliminate them is probably through continuous warfare. At some point in the development of human cultures I wonder if war started to get more costly, at the same time that the value of the males increased, such that it became too expensive to have leftover males ...

PS. Many people worry about China's current leftover male problem. Polyandry in China would help restore the critical balance ...

Update: I fixed my typo in the title. (was assymetric)

Why can't we manage botnets?

The Storm botnet has been in the news lately ...

Storm botnet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... The Storm botnet, or Storm worm botnet, is a massive Storm worm driven botnet that is estimated to number in the 1,000,000 to 50,000,000 range of infected computer systems. It is estimated to be more powerful than some of the world's top supercomputers. The botnet, or zombie network, is comprised entirely of computers running Microsoft Windows as their operating system, the only operating system which can be breached by the Storm worm. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 computers alone are being used just to help propagate and spread the worm; 1.2 billion virus messages have been sent by the botnet including a record 57 million on 22 August 2007 alone.

Wikipedia reports claims that 25% of Windows PCs are part of a botnet. I assume the real number is maybe 5-10%, but of course that's way too many.

I haven't been able to figure out if it's possible to determine which ISP is transmitting botnet packages. I understand it may be hard to track them to the source machine, but if it is possible to track them to the ISP then the obvious next step is to begin decreasing the level of service of packets from responsible ISPs. That would translate to unhappy ISP customers, which would force ISPs to address the problem.

How could ISPs address the problem? I can think of a few obvious things an incented ISP could do:

1. Discount costs for computers that aren't involved in botnets: machines running Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X. This would encourage migration to non-participating machines.
   
2. Work with antiviral vendors to deliver an XP/Vista solution that alerts an ISP to infection, so they can respond to it
3. Develop technologies to track botnet traffic to individual machines and send staff to service them or terminate traffic.

If we incent ISPs to deal with this problem they will. If we don't, they won't. End users also have insufficient incentive to avoid bots (otherwise they'd buy Macs or stop using the net), but they may also lack the capability to manage the problem. So we need to incent the ISPs first, then they'll incent the users and provide solutions.

Update: clarified last sentence.

Mind expanding books: a list

It's easy to be ready for the future -- just read a certain kind of science fiction. No, not Asimov, rest his soul (my fave: The Gods Themselves, for its take on the generation gap). Nor Ellison, he wrote about people and horror, noteworthy but different. Not LeGuin, she wrote about sociology.

No, these days, the memetic fiction to read is produced by a handful of writers who often have credentials in the sciences. Whatever the outward appearance, there's a core set of ideas that are better developed and more persuasive than any effort at traditional futurism. These writers often try hard to imagine what humans will be like in very different environments or with very different abilities.

Read this gang, and nothing will surprise you. I've put a sample of books together in one place for your mind-expanding pleasure: Amazon.com: "Mind expanding fiction". Warning -- don't read these all at once. I suggest starting with vintage Vinge (superficially less radical) or Iain M. Banks (superficially conventional) before tackling Egan or Stross. Excessive consumption by an unprepared reader may result in explosive cranial decompression.

Oh, and yes, they all take a stab at resolving the Fermi Paradox.

Update 4/26/10: Current names on the list, in alphabetic order with one exception...

Greg Egan: Egan goes first because he's 90% mind blowing. He's the straight whisky and black espresso of mind expansion. Don't start with Greg, you need to work up to him. It can be hard to find his books [2], they are a bit too demanding to stay long in print (mind expansion is not a commercially optimal strategy). Incandescence, for example, walks the reader through the derivation of neo-classical orbital mechanics in an environment where general relativity is personally relevant. It also obliges one to think of the relationship of individuality to the hive and the historical peculiarity of renaissance.

Charles Stross: One of my favorite writers, like any mind expander who's going to be commercially successful he balances novel ideas with character and plot. Of this list he's probably the most story-driven and least idea-driven -- which of course can make him very readable. Halting State is one of his most idea-centric works.

Greg Bear: Greg has largely moved on to the more profitable thriller/horror genre, but his early works (Eternity, Eon) earn him a lasting spot on the list.

Iain M. Banks: Iain is the gateway drug of mind expansion. Some his culture books seem like mind candy, but they're laced with the hard stuff. Soon you work your way to Consider Phlebas, Feersum Endjinn and Matter.

Robert Sawyer: Despite an atypical sympathy for deity, he definitely pushes the envelope.

Stephen Baxter: An excellent introduction. Evolution is astounding. [2]

Vernor Vinge: Like Banks and Stross he's relatively approachable. Another great place to start.

[1] Here's hoping eBooks will one day be a friend to writer and reader alike.

[2] Update 8/23/2010: One of my favorite scenes in Evolution concerns sentient spear using dinosaurs. Baxter makes a great case for a sentient, warm blooded, raptor-with-digits dino. In the story they hunt their primary prey to extinction - with obvious consequences. I thought that was quite original, but today I read Asimov's "Day of the Hunters" (1950) published in "Buy Jupiter and Other Stories" (1975). It's a less sophisticated version of the same story! Asimov was gem.

Fossett: is this the same search everyone gets?

The lost wealthy adventurer Steve Fossett is getting such an intense search that it's turning up wrecks never seen before...

ABC News: Old Plane Wrecks an Ominous Sign

...The intense, weeklong search for aviator Steve Fossett has turned up no sign of his plane, but it has revealed a graveyard of other small aircraft that have crashed sometimes decades ago in the rugged, concealing landscape of western Nevada. Search teams have spotted nearly one uncharted wreck a day since the search began Tuesday. To some, that is an ominous sign of how hard it will be to find Fossett...

I sure hope they find Fossett, and that he's alive. I do wonder, though, would a 60 year old black man get the same search? Military planes, satellite images ...

Update: This reminded me of the search for James Gray, also a wealthy man, sailing alone, who received a very impressive search effort including extensive coast guard resources. Mr Gray's disappearance remains a mystery (Wired has a comprehensive article on that search.).

Amazon's Flexible Payments service

This is the best explanation of Amazon's new payment system I've read ...

Mobile Opportunity: Impact of Amazon Flexible Payments Service: Computing as a utility

... FPS is a web service, meaning it's a set of online APIs that the creator of a website or web application can use to perform tasks. What FPS does for you is billing -- you can use it to accept payments for something you sell online. Basically, you transmit the customer's info to Amazon, and they take care of the credit check, credit card processing, billing, and so on. They send you the money, less a percentage cut that they take. That's not at all revolutionary. PayPal and Google Checkout offer the same thing already. Amazon's cut is about the same as PayPal -- about 2% to 3% of your revenue, depending on the amount of business you do, plus 30 cents per transaction.

Google is a tad cheaper, plus you get AdSense credits for using it. (For more information on FPS, there are good articles here and here). What impressed me about FPS is its flexibility. Amazon says you can set different payment terms for every customer, set up subscriptions and multiple payment schedules, manage a store in which you pass payments from a customer to your suppliers, set up either pre- or post-payment systems, and most importantly you can manage micropayments down to a couple of pennies per transaction ..."

Mace talks about the other implications for online commerce -- it's well worth a read. Google checkout is not available internationally, so if Amazon can extend this outside the US it could be a real winner -- esp. for selling software. It's a big deal because, like Google Checkout, it seems to work around the high transaction costs that credit card companies charge, thus allowing small charges to be cost-effective.

Forgotten things: dial phones, record players, rust

Boomer geezers often talk about the things their children don't recognize, such as dial phones and record players. Actually, our children know those. They had childhood toy dial phones, and their preschool used a record player.

What they don't know is rust. I knew rust very well. In my childhood my father drove an ancient 1965 Valiant held together, honestly, by multiple layers of duct tape. Yes, the apple does not fall far, my father was a bit of an eccentric. Every so often we'd have to add new layers of duct tape, as gaping holes appeared along the top front sides of the Valiant.

Rust was everywhere in my world, but it's rare in our children's world. Cars don't rust. Plastics don't rust. Even their metal toys barely rust. Rust is passing into history...

Cruelty of the young, or how to tell you're a geezer

Every so often, I wipe out. Flip, bump, spin, skid, slide, etc. Bright red road rash patches here and there (looks worse than it feels). It's bad enough, but invariably there's some young whipper-snapper who, despite my gray hair being under a helmet, instantly calls out "Sir! Are you hurt?!" in a terribly anxious voice.

Hmpp. Bad enough I've botched a move, but there's no need to remind me I'm a Geezer. The young are cruel.

Shared music, shared ringtones, iPhone - uh-oh

Despite all chatter about iTunes and DRMd iPhone ringtones nobody seems to have caught on that Apple is going to make it very, very, hard to share a family music library. Apple is has the same goals as NBC -- eliminate sharing of music and videos among family members. They're just much smarter about it (so much for Jobs anti-DRM message!).

The problem is that an OS X music library belongs to a user account. So do the contacts, phone backup, DRMd ringtones, etc.

So what happens if two people in a family both have an iPhone? They need to sync within their user account. That means they can't share music, because only one account can own the music library.

There are workarounds, but they're awkward, unsupported, and Apple can break them at any time. I've posted a few times about this topic, this 2005 post is the most extensive.

Senator Klobuchar and cell phone contracts: America, bow before Minnesota

It's hard to believe, but Minnesota wasn't always the coolest state. I confess when I lived on the coasts I didn't really know where it was, and when I moved here 15 years ago the twin cities were only beginning the ascent to greatness. Now, of course, the coasts bow down to us.

Klobuchar is one of ours:

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) today unveiled legislation aimed at empowering the 200 million cell phone customers nationwide to make informed choices about a wireless service that best fits their needs and their budget. The Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 will require wireless service providers to share simple, clear information on their services and charges with customers before they enter into long-term contracts; a thirty-day window in which to exit a contract without early termination fees; and greater flexibility to exit contracts with services that don’t meet their needs.

Of course I have to take some credit here, because I'm sure my senator was inspired by a Jan 2007 post of mine:

Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies (Jan 2007)

...The bottom line: If you don't want to change your contract expiry date, you go to a Sprint store and pay full price, or you buy a used phone on eBay or Craigslist. I'm told some Radio Shack stores will sell used phones, but I distrust the quality there. I have a visceral distrust for eBay, so it's Craigslist or list price.

Lastly, looking over the scam I first documented above, I'm thinking Amazon's a part of the deal too. In other words, they sold out. Well, it's not the first time.

The next time a politician hits me up for a donation, I won't ask them about healthcare reform or global warming, I'll ask them if they'll vote to require any cellphone vendor to accept a compatible unlocked phone.

Ok Amy, send me another request for a donation.

Dang, I really thought he was dead

Google News: The Bin Laden stuff

Honestly, I figured he was dead. For an egomaniac he was awfully quiet.

Does this guy take longevity lessons from Castro? If all the atheists of America claim to convert to Islam would that make him happy?

No, I didn't think so.