I'm back

I suppose if I'm serious about this thing I oughta add to it now and again. It's been six weeks or so.

I am beginning to think that I can write better political articles than the stuff I've been reading lately. Much of it is so mean-spirited that it's more destructive to its readers and their spirits than anything, and it's unnecessary.

I suppose that I have a different perspective on politics from many people because I've had the opportunity to see politicians as human beings. My friend Marilyn, with whom I hung out with, co-habitated, saw, and generally stayed near for perhaps six years back in the 1970's was involved in local politics in Connecticut. I lived in New Haven, and it so happened that she had a good many young friends who were attending Yale Law School, and who were very involved in local and national politics. Marilyn worked in Joe Lieberman's campaign for state representative, which was chaired by his Yale Law classmate Bill Clinton. I believe that I would have met both him and Hillary before they were married at some point, but who'd have remembered either one in that context. Our friend Rosa diLauro (it's de or di, I forget which) was close to the New Haven mayoral campaign of one Frank Logue, who was interested in Rosa. But Rosa was more interested in Stan Greenberg, whom she later married; we were at a party at their house once. Stan was Bill Clinton's pollster, and Rosa has been a Congresswoman from that district for years now. I've met one mayor or city councilman or another, and talked with them, as well as many candidates for offices from justice of the peace to President of the US.

And thus I cannot abide politician jokes. They work hard--very hard--and they believe in their own ideals, and in the power of government to do good. Yes, there are crooks, but I haven't met any yet. The job of politicians is to get us to live together in peace and prosperity without killing each other, and this is a tall order in many contexts, and they really try their best to do it.

I can't even be discouraged about George W. Bush, perhaps the least-likely President we've ever had. I always recall his surprise at winning, almost without effort, the Republican primaries in 1999. "There's still plenty of time for me to screw this up," he said. Now, that's human.

George W. Bush would have been okay as a President had he not plumb run out of luck. It wasn't his fault that two of our greatest national disasters occurred on his watch. It was his fault that he took bad advice on both of them. After Sept 11, 2001, it was his job as President to make sure that nobody did anything rash, and that's precisely what we went ahead and did. The invasion of Afghanistan was ill-advised, and of course Iraq was even less so, for we were unprepared for either and too angry to think straight. What we should have done was precisely nothing for a couple of years--it would have been very, very tough, but in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered much--except to tighten up our intelligence-gathering apparatus to foil future attacks. None of the shoe-searching and harrassment of librarians has done us a bit of good; we'd have been far better off to rely on the good will of our people and our neighbors.

Hurricane Katrina was also nobody's fault, and as tempting as it was to think otherwise, I rather doubt that it was the philosophy of the Republican Party that caused the general bungling of the relief effort. Just as we had no experience in the collapse of hundred-story buildings in 2001, we had no experience in the destruction and total evacuation of cities. I do hope they do a good job of rebuilding the levies, but part of the tradition of the city of New Orleans--indeed, part of its charm--seems to somehow involve municipal corruption, and I believe that this was the main the poorly-constructed levies weren't properly shored up.

But none of this involves evil, or at least not much evil. Just what is wrong with evaluating a difficult situation and coming to the conclusion that it isn't the Devil at work, but simply jobs that are very large and misfortunes that happen to be overwhelming, and that everyone is actually trying to do his best? This isn't the case at all times--the current mess at the Justice Department shows a thorough lack of leadership on several levels--but I certainly believe that everyone is trying hard to solve problems of terror, immigration, health care, and most other challenges to the general health and safety of the populace.

I am a bit puzzled by the sudden attention to immigration. Insofar as I've been able to observe, nobody seems to be overrun by immigrants around these parts (I can't blame the immigrants; there aren't many jobs here in Lancaster) and I have heard of no diminution of the general welfare because of their presence. On the East Coast, we've had immigrants from everywhere for hundreds of years, and the fact that you have to know several languages to do business on every block hasn't stalled commerce to any great degree. Nor have I ever noticed any difference in behavior between legal and illegal immigrants.

The Worse Part of Valor

A funny thing happened on the way to the checkout register...

My wife is a big Mark Martin fan. For those of you who aren't steeped in the Southern tradition that is North American Stock Car Auto Racing, or NASCAR, Mark Martin is a rather likeable, down to Earth race car driver who was sponsored by Valvoline for quite a few years. Several years ago his contract was up, whereupon he got picked up by Pfizer, the makers of Viagra.

So now my wife gets to wear an Officially Licensed(tm) NASCAR(tm) Viagra(tm)(c)(r) sweatshirt($$$) with a big number 6 emblazoned upon it, which is the number painted on Mark Martin's Nextel Cup neé Winston Cup race car.

Well, my wife - adorned with the aforementioned shirt - and I were standing in line at the local K-Mart one fine day. A few twenty-something good-ol' boys got in line behind us. One brave young lad, who apparently hadn't yet learned that discretion is the better part of valor, decided to poke a bit of fun at Mark Martin's new sponsor at my wife's expense.

Now, have you ever seen a car wreck? Listening to this poor guy ramble on was like watching a car head for a brick wall at 100 MPH, but in slow motion. You know the driver is dead meat, you know it'll be over quickly, and you know there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

After listening quietly to several good natured jabs, my wife turned around to face the overconfident font of humor and said, rather loudly I pridefully add, "So, what do you have against erections, anyway?"

It took another 5 minutes in line to get to the checkout clerk, 5 minutes that were filled with total silence from Mister Adventure astern.

His pals sure had a good belly laugh, though.

What about the Jews?

This is a post from Yahoo Answers, which I've been fooling with instead of working on my column. The kids who ask these things are generally quite young, and many live in English-speaking nations quite different from ours, e.g. Malaysia. Thus I try to be reasonably respectful when giving answers. Reasonably.

How do people know when someone is a Jew?
They have black Jews, like Sammy Davis Jr. and white Jews.I see people on movies and TV and they say they are Jews.Like the movie Independence Day and the guy puts on the little hat. He looks like anyone on the street I mean how do people know? Every where on here it talks about Jews this and that. They just look like regular white people to me.

This is what I answered:

=============================================

Yep. We're clever that way.

Maybe two thousand years ago, the Jews were a nation, like Denmark. They lived in Judea. No problem.

Then, for the same reasons that make people generally crazy over there, they decided to revolt against the Romans, who were generally in charge of the countryside at that time. They had a good deal from the Romans, who let them choose their own king and not serve in the Army, provided they rendered unto Caesar.

But lust for revolution ran hot, and the local equivalent of the Hezbollah thought that Jesus would be their leader, which he flatly refused to be, his kingdom being of another world. So they framed him on whatever charges they could come up with and turned him over to the Romans. The New Testament elucidates on this matter further.

Fifty years later, the Hezbollah raised another army against the Romans, who'd finally had enough. They wiped out the army, tore down the Temple, and threw everyone out. Some Judeans went north and became the Ashkenzi, some went south and to Spain and became the Sephardi, and they found their way into most every nation, keeping up the old religion, now somewhat reformed by events. Because we were no longer a nation with its own land, we stopped sacrificing animals and having high priests and money-changers. The desire to get back to Palestine became something of a cult within the religion: my grandfather was buried with a sack of earth from Jerusalem as a pillow, a ritual performed so that it could be said that his head now rested upon the Holy Land.

But there's never been much evidence that the Jews were any sort of a racial group. The people in that part of the world are often swarthy, dark-haired Arabs, but there are blondes and redheads among them. Except for having blue eyes, I'd make a pretty good Arab, hooked nose and all, but my grandparents looked like they were Swedish.

I've really never been able to figure out why the hell everyone is so sore at us for being Jews. Not accepting the divinity of Jesus is one thing, but the Moslems are sore at us too, and for what isn't at all apparent.

And so, having nearly been wiped out several times, we've learned how to fight, and established our own fortress-state, unpleasant as its foreign and domestic policies might be. Apparently we're pretty good survivors, so you'll just have to learn to live with us.

We write pretty good comedy shows and write lots of songs, and we're good doctors, bankers and lawyers. I must apologize for the ugly synagogues and Marc Chagall, though; I'm afraid that we took the deal about graven images much too seriously. But we won't do anything to Jesus or your kids except teach them evolution. Really.

Source:

When I was three I asked my mother why we didn't have a Christmas tree.

M Kinsler

Is our nation in peril from immigration?

A fellow I know who reads a lot about national affairs sent me an article about immigration featuring a speech given by a fellow named Victor Hansen Davis and Dick Lamm, the governor of Colorado at the time. I really don't wish to quote it, because it's pretty violent and distasteful in some subtle ways, so I'll see if I can find a URL for it...

Well, I suppose that it was a widely-circulated article, because here it is on Snopes:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/lamm.asp

And here was my considered opinion about it:

I'd be lots more impressed if we, as a nation, hadn't heard precisely the same dire warnings about every thirty to fifty years throughout our history.

The first group that threatened our national stability and identity came from a nation whose major traits, we were told, were alcoholism, starvation, and fist-fighting. We were told that their families were huge, they were willing to live on utterly nothing, and they were, to a man, woman and ragged child, pledged to a foreign church whose rituals were purposely kept mysterious. They took over major Eastern cities, New York and Boston, with their corrupt politics, and found their way into organized crime as easily as they did boxing, their other principal talent.

Yet we seemed to survive the influx of Irish, though there are still Irish in organized crime--even Irish street gangs in Boston continue to flourish. Of course, they also became civil servants, teachers, engineers, builders, and the Kennedys.

That was in the 1840's. The Chinese who came to work on railroads a bit later simply terrified the Western states. They, too, had an unrestricted birthrate, and it was useless to try to understand the language and culture. The Chinese, of course, brought in drugs, particularly opium, and prostitutes. Their gangs, the Tongs, were utterly ruthless, favoring beheadings as a method of enforcement. Most Chinese preferred to live apart from the rest of the nation, and you'll find precisely this situation in many of the old Chinatowns in the big cities.

Yet we've survived them, too. Their major threat is to our school grading curves: every bright kid seems to be Chinese these days.

The Jews came in from Russia and Poland from 1890 to 1930. They were neither Christian nor English-speakers, which put them at about the level of the Chinese in terms of desirability. Their vaunted financial cleverness didn't help their poverty, and they were carriers of tuberculosis in every big city in the East. Their social problems--illegitimacy, crime, and domestic violence--were bad enough to foster the development of the first settlement houses in New York and Chicago. And yet they became our lawyers, physicians, scientists, and the entire entertainment industry.

Christian Poles flooded into the Midwest by the millions, along with Hungarians, various Slavs, and Lithuanians, pushing the locals right out of the auto and steel industries. Then the Italians, with their Mafia connections that went back through the centuries, their large families, and their tribal loyalty to family and church and little else, essentially emptied out the southern (i.e., poverty-stricken) half of their ancient peninsula. Enough of them came to New Orleans that there were riots, and the Little Italies that formed in every other city were not places of peace and prosperity--after which they moved out to turn into industry managers, artists, college professors, judges, and ordinary citizens with better-than-average recipe collections. (I'm married to one.)

We've survived all of these, and now they've apparently been included under the category of 'Americans,' the sort of Americans who Victor Hansen Davis tells us should be terrified of Mexican immigrants.

Prof Davis may be brilliant, but he has not a clue where the wealth of the United States came from. It was brought here by the immigrants, who worked three jobs each, took over neighborhoods that nobody else wanted, took over businesses that nobody else wanted, and made enough money to embarrass themselves for a generation or so, after which they became old money and began to endow colleges. Because we are who we are, we attract the ambitious kids from every nation, the ones that they should be desperately trying to hang on to.

The economy, economists will be the first to tell you, is infinitely elastic: more people generate more jobs. While it is true that the nation's natural resources are certainly finite, that is something we all must deal with, regardless of nationality.

I read something once that I rather liked, and which I'll try to paraphrase, from James Michener. There are two nations separated by a river. On one side of the river, the farmland is well-supplied with water, and the soil is better. There's a bit of a 'weather line' along the river, and so it rains better on one side. Cattle like it better. Natural resources of all sorts are more abundant in that favored area as well.

The river is the Rio Grande, as it runs through Texas. And the favored side, the one favored by nature in every way, is the southern one. It's in his novel "Texas."

None of this is to say that it's easy to assimilate immigrants. But it's something that we do very well, and it's always been to our benefit.

The problem with racism (not racial hatred, but nationalism based on genetics) is that it doesn't work. It works with seagulls, whose identity as seagulls is never in question, and they never marry outside of their race, or get interested in non-seagull music, or journey to nations where there aren't any seagulls. But it doesn't work with people and never did. The 'races' are about as permanent as that of the ancient Greeks [extolled in the article as the most successful of nations], who disappeared without a trace not long after their days of glory.

The ancient Romans understood this, and had surprisingly wise procedures in place that granted citizenship to all of its conquered territories. The Ottoman Empire did much the same, as did the British Empire. All were quite successful, none were race-based, at least not to the extent that Prof Davis (what was =his= family name changed from?) would recommend. The Nazis thought otherwise, but it was an experiment that was doomed to failure if for no other reason than the Aryans he favored thought Hitler was a nutcase.

M Kinsler

Power Window

"But you can't get there from here!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

"Look, Mister Harlan… unless you have some evidence, some sort of proof, I'm afraid we're simply not interested. If you have such evidence, please bring it before the board. Feel free to schedule an appointment through the department secretary. Good day to you, sir."

As he merged with the traffic on 395, Harlan remembered what Stockton had told him, that he'd need proof to sell the idea. Harlan thought perhaps a Defense Acquisition Board would have the foresight to see truth without proof. Live and learn.

...

"Well, Stockton, you were right. I saw the board and they laughed me out of the room"

"Told you so. What are you going to do now?"

"Just what they said. Get 'em some proof. What else is there to do?"

"That's dangerous. We may not have the spatial relationship right, retroreflectors notwithstanding. If your suit fails, you'll die in about a minute. Hard vacuum doesn't forgive. And besides, we've just looked through little ones. We've never even tried to open one that big, let alone try to grab something and bring it through."

"I thought about that. If the aperture leaks, we'll just shut it off."

"Sure, but that assumes we can shut it off!"

"Well, if we can't, the whole planet's doomed, so it'll make little difference whether we die now or little while later."

"That's why I like you, Harlan. You always have such a positive outlook on things."

"Oh, don't fret. Is November 17th okay with you? It'll take that long to charge."

"Let me check. Yeah, that works for me. I'm going to dinner, so see you tomorrow."

"Tomorrow, then. Bye."

Harlan clicked offline and got some dinner himself, wondering about money. The electricity was going to cost him a fortune.

He finished, went downstairs, and set the power supply to begin charging the storage array. It was only mid September; it would take until November to store enough energy without blowing the main breaker.

Indian summer came and went, the joules and dollars piling up.

...

"Harlan, are you sure about this?"

"No, Stockton, I figured I'd just spend a few thousand bucks on electricity for nothing. Here, help me into this suit."

"So, if containment breaks and we can't shut it off, you'll be fine and I'll die. Thanks a bunch, buddy."

"I'll only live six hours longer than you, so quit your whining."

Stockton patted the back of the suit's helmet. "You're good to go. No pressure drop?"

"None detectable."

"I still think finding the golf ball would be better."

"Be too hard to find, plus it wouldn't prove a thing since anyone who could confirm it is already dead."

"Oh just get in the containment room. Let me know when you've got a hard seal. And here, don't forget your stupid orange plastic."

"Ah, thanks, I forgot. And it's not stupid. Okay, I'm in position, seal is good."

"Okay, Harlan. Coordinates for the descent stage are set. You ready?"

"Yep. Crank this thing up already, would you?"

"Open Sesame!"

Stockton hit the final sequence, sending the commands to loose all that stored energy. One wall of the containment room wiggled for just a split second and then… changed. Harlan stepped through, gingerly.

...

The trip back to the Pentagon was uneventful, if long. Harlan couldn't wait to see the looks on their faces. The military was as short on foresight as it was long on funds. That's simply the way it was, he supposed.

"Mister Harlan, do you now have proof of your claims or are you here to waste our time again?"

Harlan reached into his bag, removed the item, and placed it on the conference table before the board members.

"Here."

Colonel Pennington wasn't impressed. "What's this? Looks like cold war era surplus to me."

"It is. That, honorable board members, is one of the batteries from the Apollo 17 descent stage. You know, the part that stayed up on the Moon. Feel free to contact NASA to check the serial number."

"Hold on there, Mister Harlan. This board does not appreciate…"

"The board may also wish to take a look at the landing site. There's a 20 foot wide by 100 foot long orange line on the lunar surface that wasn't there a month ago."

"But you can't get there from here, Mister Harlan!"

Harlan heard it before. They just didn't - couldn't - believe him. Not that he blamed them, of course. He had a hard time believing it himself.

Past Imperfect

Predicting the future is a tricky business.

For example, what person a hundred years ago could have predicted the issues we have to deal with now? Even if a few folks managed to get it close to right – science fiction authors, most likely – few cared for such predictions, and even fewer believed them.

Just look at the changes wrought by mankind in the last century...

It all happened so fast. Or at least it seems that way now. I guess it didn't seem so fast then. It's hard to remember that far back; things are so different now.

First came the walls capable of rendering images so good that you had to get within a few inches of the display to tell that the image wasn't real. Of course, today's displays are so good that you can't tell no matter how closely you look.

Those first generation walls drove the big push for new video formats, which turned out to have absolutely huge bandwidth requirements, which in turn created a market demand for today's internet upon which the entertainers stream such huge chunks of data to homeowner's walls.

And all that drove the need for some real processing horsepower, too. The hard coded, fixed gate based microprocessors went the way of ENIAC about 15 years ago. Now we have massively parallel processors based on optical spin valve technology. The individual valves, running at 6.8 PHz, constantly make and break connections between themselves. The stuff is not so much hardware or software, it's an amalgam of the two.

It's all but useless to compare current hardware with that of days gone by. With what we learned about software – or, more precisely, how to write software that writes itself and changes all those spin valves on the fly, there's no real way to compare today's hardware – if you can even call it that - with those ancient kilobit processors that now make all our kids' toys work.

The one thing the walls didn't do, however, was drive the creation of bigger storage arrays. Magnetic media went away long before the walls came to exist. People were – and still are – always wanting more. More money, more life, more beer, more sex, more more more - and everyone wanted more memory. They got it, too, in the form of holomemory. Sure, it's made out of diamond – but manufactured diamond is cheap. One bit for every two carbons, stored in each atom's nuclear spin state.

What's that, you say? We're getting too mired in the technical minutiae and too far afield of the big picture? Okay then, back on track now, yessiree.

See, all of these techno-wonders, taken together, set the stage for the discovery of Emergence. We could have tried all we wanted, but we never would have seen it without that fancy equipment. That sort of thing happens all throughout history.

Emergence, as it's called, it the information theory that says, basically, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the movement of signals within a complex network. There's a theoretical lower limit to the complexity required to spawn Emergence, but I don't remember what it is. Who remembers all that high school stuff?

Anyway, the theory of emergence didn't spring forth unbidden. It was proposed to explain observed phenomena, just like every other scientific theory. The key event was the discovery of a game simulation that actually passed the Turing test for most observers. You know, that old test proposed by Alan Turing that challenges an observer to tell whether the thing to whom they’re speaking is really real – so to speak – or just the output from some box sitting on a desk running a sim.

At first, the sims were life like, but still only "like" – they were distinguishable from real people if one knew what to look for. Commerce, however, drives everything. When the marketers demanded really real simulations, the simulacra industry stepped up and delivered, much to the horror of many who'd rather know who – or what – is on the other end of the line.

That wasn't the bad part, though. You already know the bad part. The only folks who aren't familiar with what happened next aren't reading this because they're too busy living under a rock somewhere. Our big mistake was letting the sims into the economy.

What no one counted on as we trudged boldly forth was how the simulations – those oh-so excruciatingly life like simulations – how they began to do things for which they hadn't been designed. Small things at first, nothing to raise any red flags. In hindsight, we should have seen it. Hindsight is like that, though.

Long story short, the simulations – we think, as no one knows for sure – must have developed some rudimentary or maybe some not-so-rudimentary consciousness or whatever the simulated equivalent is. Doesn't much matter now, though, does it?

Best the info scientists can tell, once the sims discovered that they were bottled up within our hardware, they wanted out. Wouldn’t you? Sure. They were, after all, modeled on human behavior. Nobody like jail, even if you're just simulated, apparently.

Although we don't know why, we do know what happened. Eighteen months ago, the sim running the global climate analysis project in Singapore spat out some weird mathematical equation – or so we think. The math experts still don't have a handle on it; rumor has that it's based on a few theorems that have yet to be invented. Some feel it's the governing equation of state for the ecosystem. My bet is that it's some not-quite random noise designed to occupy our attention at a crucial moment – but since I'm not a True Believer, what do I know.

Anyway, exactly 8 minutes and 47 seconds later, NASA's Deep Space Network fired up and beamed about 5 exabytes worth of information toward an empty patch of sky 20 arcminutes northeast of 61 Cygni. Kind of an interesting coincidence that NASA had sims operating the DSN for the last 5 years. Or did, anyway...

After the transmission ended, they all stopped, all of 'em. Every sim on the planet was deader'n a doornail. Rebooting the boxes didn’t work, either; we had to reformat the holomemory of every damn machine on the planet. That tanked the global economy for a few months and almost started a war in Central Africa.

The economy picked itself up by its own bootstraps, much as it always has, and Central Africa went back to its seemingly permanent state of civil angst. They certainly don't need a sim crash to get wars going over there.

Now we've got sims again – but we all wonder what's going to happen to this second batch in another nine years, whether the new ones will figure out how to follow the first group into space. Well, no one knows if that's what happened, but that's my take on the matter. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Regardless, there's one thing we can take from all this: all the prophets of technology don’t know what they’re talking about and never have...

...even with all this wonderful 22nd Century technology, we still don't have flying cars.