I Dream Awake

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. he is the owner of a large personal library ( containing thirty thousand books), and separates vistors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others - a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You wil accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growig number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Zenpundit comments section

Via: Coming Anarchy.

Sounds strangely familiar…

Countries go to war when they think they have to, and figure out how to pay for it on the fly, including the old favorite “print money”.

1914 is indeed the least encouraging precedent there is. Everyone correctly said, “the great powers cannot go to war, they will ruin the world economy and all go broke.” They did it anyway, and it was worse than anyone predicted in every dimension including financial.

The financial sophistication of the Anglosphere powers over the centuries, their ability to tax and borrow and juggle the books, especially during major and protracted wars, has been possibly the singlem predominant source of strength and cause of victory. The Anglosphere powers have won every hegemonic-scale war for over three centuries. If yo have to bet, the trend is your friend.

A protracted conflict with China would be an unmitigated global catastrophe. I have a friend at PACOM who is the sharpest-clawed hawk I know. His comment, very seriously: “If conflict with China ever goes kinetic it will be the worst thing that has ever happened.” But we will ride out the catastrophe much better than China will if, God forbid, it comes to it. Their system is brittle along many axes.

Pray for peace.

From the always fantastic comments on Coming Anarchy.

You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recored history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe; there is some, though not very much, evidence against you in this matter of motivation and conscience that could be proved beyond reasonable doubt. You also said that your role in the Final Solution was an accident and that almost anybody could have taken your place, so that potentially all Germans are equally guilty. What you meant to say was that where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is. This is an indeed quite common conclusion, but one we are not willing to grant you. And if you don’t understand our objection, we would recommend to your attention the story of Sodom and Gommorah, two neighboring cities in the Bible, which were destroyed by fire from Heaven because all the people in them had become equally guilty. This, incidentally, has nothing to do with the newfangled notion of ‘collective guilt’, according to which people are supposedly guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them — things in which they did not participate and from which they did not profit. In other words, guilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been and excuse for you.

Luckily, we don’t have to go that far. You yourself claimed not the actuality but only the potentiality of equal guilt on the part of all who lived in a state whose main political purpose had become the commission of unheard-of crimes. And no matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. We are concerned here only with what you did, and not with the possible non-criminal nature of your inner life and of your motives or with the potentialities of those around you. You told your story in terms of a hard-luck story, and, knowing the circumstances, we are, up to a point, willing to grant you that under more favourable circumstances it is highly unlikely that you would ever have come before us or before any other criminal court. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder — there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Hannah Arendt, p. 105-107, Eichmann and the Holocaust

It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.”

Hannah Arendt, p. 88, Eichmann and the Holocaust

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

Hannah Arendt, p. 98, Eichmann and the Holocaust

…the right of freedom of speech is only relevant if the speech in question offends. Nobody cares about uncontroversial speech, so it needs no right to defend it. Therefore, any censorship or threat to censor in response to violence or complaints from foreign religious leaders — who are demanding, in effect, that their speech prevail over the putatively offensive speech — eviscerates the freedom of speech in its entirety, not partially as the appeasers would protest.

Cataloging the violence veto by Tigerhawk

Via: Glenn Reynolds

The scientific method requires observation of natural phenomena, the formation of hypotheses about their nature, the testing of those hypotheses through experiment, and the evaluation of the hypotheses in light of the experimental results. Science seeks “elegant” explanations which will account for the observed phenomena without unnecessary complications, and it seeks general laws that will explain phenomena in terms of simpler phenomena. In this way, it builds what Richard Feynman called a “hierarchy of ideas,” which tries to begin with “the fundamental laws of physics,” and lead “up in this hierarchy of complexity” towards “words and concepts like ‘man,’ and ‘history,’ or ‘political expediency,’ and so forth.” This step-by-step understanding is built by forming “invisible-hand explanations” which will seek to describe the explanandum in terms other than that which is being explained—just as a dictionary will avoid using a word in its own definition. The ultimate goal is a unified and empirically sound understanding of the world.

This understanding of the scientific enterprise flies in the face of the Postmodernist theories underlying Trask’s thesis. According to Postmodernism, there is no reality to be understood, or, if there is, it cannot be understood in an objective sense. Instead, what we think of as understanding is really the construction of “narratives”—socially created worldviews which we adopt as “true,” but whose truth value runs no deeper than the language in which they are expressed. Man cannot really connect to nature; he is separated from reality by a kind of invisible and impenetrable bubble of language. And these narratives, or paradigms, are tools or weapons that are manipulated in a struggle for power between populations. The “truth” these narratives allegedly describe is really a trick for controlling people and obtaining resources for the privileged elites who are most responsible for constructing and maintaining our social structures.

If nothing else, Postmodernism represents a direct attack on the Enlightenment legacy, and particularly on science. The entire idea of formulating a unified, reliable, objectively true description of the nature of the universe clashes with the postmodern vision that there are different “ways of knowing” that are equally valid—women’s ways of knowing, Eastern ways of knowing, and so forth. Science’s dream of discovering laws that can be understood by all humanity regardless of their various cultures is therefore doomed. “If, as postmodernists would have it, meaning and truth are inexorably bound to context and historical setting, then the whole point of scientific theorizing would vanish, and science itself would have to be abandoned.”

Timothy Sandefur, Reason and Common Ground: A Response to the Creationists’ ‘Neutrality’ Argument, Chapman Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2008

Via: Glenn Reynolds

Free Tibet, originally uploaded by abhinav.arts.

Found on Flickr.

“…each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist–provided he is wise enough to understand that the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny.”

p.18-19

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presense of others, and hence against reality as such.”

p. 20, Eichmann and the Holocaust, by Hannah Arendt

Bruce Webster on Clarke’s influence: “He was the last of the Big Three — Isaac Asimov, Clarke, and Robert Heinlein — to pass away, and we shall not see their like again. It is hard to overstate the impact that these three authors had upon not just one, but at least two or three generations of scientist and engineers in the Anglosphere, particularly those of us who grew up in the 1950s through the 1970s.”

Arthur C. Clarke Has Died

A new book, “Unknown Waters,” recounts the 1970 voyage of a submarine, the Queenfish, on a pioneering dive beneath the ice pack to map the Siberian continental shelf. The United States did so as part of a clandestine effort to prepare for Arctic submarine operations and to win any military showdown with the Soviet Union.

In great secrecy, moving as quietly as possible below treacherous ice, the Queenfish, under the command of Captain Alfred S. McLaren, mapped thousands of miles of previously uncharted seabed in search of safe submarine routes. It often had to maneuver between shallow bottoms and ice keels extending down from the surface more than 100 feet, threatening the sub and the crew of 117 men with ruin.

Another danger was that the sub might simply be frozen in place with no way out and no way to call for help as food and other supplies dwindled.

The Queenfish at one point became stuck in a dead end. The rescue took an hour and tense backtracking out of what had threatened to become an icy tomb.

“I still dream about it every other week,” Dr. McLaren, 75, the book’s author, recalled in an interview. “It was hairy.” The University of Alabama Press is publishing his recollections of the secret voyage.

Sylvia A. Earle, an oceanographer and the former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said such feats in perilous waters made Dr. McLaren a genuine hero. “The sub could have disappeared, and nobody would have known anything about it,” she said. “But they came through. That’s exploration at its most exquisite.”

I want this book.

What does it mean that the second study found that identical twins who have their first sexual experience earlier than their siblings are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior? The authors seem to feel they have no choice but to conclude that there is probably no relationship between these factors at all. Perhaps that is exactly what they would have found statistically if they had used a Bonferroni correction for their dozen or so analyses. Either that, or delinquency is caused by sexual frustration, and the problem of misbehaving teens is now solved.

Biotunes.org | Teen sex - is it bad or good for society?

QFT.

This analysis does a pretty good job showing the common flaws in studies of human behavior and deviancy. It’s worth a close read, and even closer further study. I think the final line nails it: the problem of misbehaving teens was solved all along.

Tags: SocialScience, Teen Sex

I just had to reinstall the Verizon connection manager for my laptop card. It had been working really well until now, but suddenly it refused to show any networks at all. The connect button wasn’t clickable either. At least now it’s working again, after a complete uninstall-reinstall cycle. Still frustrated at the wasted time…

THE NEW REPUBLIC | Blogs

I would hope there would still be significant pressure against China for its terrible record on human rights, its colonization and violent suppression of Tibetans, and its support of the regimes in Sudan and Burma, even if they weren’t hosting the 2008 Olympics. But they are, so I hope they enjoy (and reform in reaction to) the spotlight of the entire world’s attention. Whether they are humiliated by that pressure, and that humiliation makes them angry, is less important than holding them accountable for how humiliating for all parts of the world that claim to respect human rights their own non-reaction to Chinese abuses is; or than the anger we ought to all feel towards China for their actions.

Tags: China, 2008 Olympics, Tibet, Burma, Sudan, Human Rights, Free Speech

A homeless John Sally look-a-like walked up and hovered over me while I was taking a picture near Astor Place tonight. He started lecturing me about responsibility, asking insistently why I hadn’t called someone to report the bucket full of water I’d been taking pictures of, and then throwing 2 pieces of hard candy at the closed window of a passing car. He didn’t say anything when I pointed out how that wasn’t very responsible of him.

Gothamist: Tibetans Demonstrate Outside U.N., At Least 9 Arrested

Hopefully the drumbeat of attention to Tibet just keeps getting louder as the Olympics in Beijing get closer.

Tags: Tibet, UN, China

MX02~Courage-Mary-Anne-Radmacher-Posters.jpg (JPEG Image, 400×396 pixels)

Timely.

“In the water Millicent wished she could stay.” Wall Art by Lisadee - RedBubble

This is the pretty.

Tags: Arts, Stumble Upon

OBAMAGANDA: CHANGE AND OBEY. YOUR CHOICE? @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Beautiful artwork. Much respect there. Creepy personality cult politics… not so much.

Yes we can do much better than this in our national political dialog. Yes we can rise above the empty slogans and zealous populism which would make any student of political history shudder; if not for the assumption (well founded I think, and hope) that this generation of fill-in-the-blank-o-crats is mild and clumsy rather than a sweeping new religion of change (whether we non-believers like it or not). I do believe this movement, and its iconography, is well intentioned. I also believe it ignores the corrosive effects of this (pop-)cultural revolution brand of identity politics at its own peril… and in smaller ways, all of ours.

Tags: Politics, Art, Change

So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

village voice > news > David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’ by David Mamet

via Karol @ Alarming News

Doesn’t seem tragic to me. As I see it, human nature is not a given to be good or bad. It is more uncertain and adaptable than anything else. There are core good and bad choices in any given situation, for both individuals and groups of any size. But then there is a great diversity of more specific to circumstance strategies for good or bad results relative to ever-shifting interests. How better, at what cost, and according to whom… that is the only selecting principle that I think is consistently good in that dynamic evolutionary scrum, beyond a very simple core ethics.

What ethic is this? Do not do anything to undo, corrode, or otherwise degrade or destroy the ability to do in the first place. Do not make void your own basic strengths through your actions towards others. Do not do unto… and do not salt the earth — unless, of course, you damn well mean to take the onslaught of consequences that come. If this core ethic and this optimal strategy for maximizing better outcomes are all you have, they are also all you need. They are all I need anyway.

All the rest is commentary… All the rest is detail… And so then, as detail, is the product… Q.E.D.

Now I go back to study.

Tags: Contemplation, Human Nature, Ethics, Violence, Self Interest, Politics, Theatre

Like a lot of smart guys (or, at any rate, guys who think they’re smart), Fallon seems to have outsmarted himself. He thinks the war in Iraq is a distraction from formulating “a comprehensive strategy for the Middle East,” according to the profile. The reality is that the only strategy worth a dinar is to win the war in Iraq. If we fail there, all other objectives in the region will be much harder to attain; if we succeed, they will be much easier.

Fallon didn’t get it - Los Angeles Times

Yep.

Tags: Iraq

Momofuku Ko (F&F) 003, originally uploaded by Cocktailian.

I want … +1.

Momofuku Ko (F&F) 004, originally uploaded by Cocktailian.

I want.

As with so many other fundamental concepts, there is no saying what change is, the formula or form of words change is defined either with a knowing shrug or some verbal flourish patently the same as the concept under analysis. Change is growth. But growth is transformation. And transformations are changes. In talking about change, philosophers have made use of a vocabulary essentially no different from that engagingly presented by the ancient Greeks. There is the dusky river from which a dripping Heraclitus emerged, convinced improbably that he could never step into the same river twice. There are the paradoxes of Zeno, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. And there is not much else. But the analysis of change has been the mathematician’s stock in trade at least since the seventeenth century. It is change that is the concern of the calculus and the interpretation of change that brings a coordinate system to vibrant life; and if the mathematician cannot define change he cansort out its characteristic forms, the ways in which it appears in this, our crowded world.

We all of us live within hearing of the muted or monstrous sounds of a great clock, now ticking faster, now slower, but inevitably and inexorably ticking, and it is by reference to the clock that we measure the terrible and depressing changes in our own bodies, stomach expanding, skin sagging, arches falling, the story inconveniently reflected in the morning mirror, where a suspiciously familiar impostor apparently holds court. Such somber talk has at least the instructive effect of suggesting that change in something—change in anything—takes place against an assumed background in which time itself is changing, sagging skin sagging with respect to the time then and the time now, although how it is that time might change without some other standard of time to measure that is another mystery of the sort which mathematics is strangely replete.

p. 61-62, A Tour of the Calculus

The singularity came a long time ago, with the beginning of human existence. “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” no more a new idea than wheresoever I go, there I am. So we cannot predict with certainty anything of which our understanding may be ever imperfect… What more is new? So we may be the prey of others yet more intelligent than ourselves, alien and as yet unfathomable they might be… When has it ever been otherwise? We may still create the new, still race towards the infinite, mapping the continuous, erasing and drawing anew the previously assumed limit and making known to ourselves whatever was before an unreachable god of our imaginations, fretfully living in the gaps of our experience. Let forever come, unpredictably. We will remain the equation of which death has no proof, for as long as yet one human heart leaps.

What is unlikely is life.