Rhinocrisy

I remember this cycle from the 80s. At some point, the science-fiction pork-train hits the wall of reality. And today, we learn that the quarter-trillion-dollar Joint Strike Fighter might not survive the inevitable military budget cuts of the post-post-9/11 period.

Which is to say that there is a silver, or at least carbon-fiber, lining in the dusty fog of Iraq. One less tool for global military domination.

Now if they could just get rid of that missile defense system….

Wolcott strikes again: the 101st Fighting Keyboarders are now the Couch Potato Pattons. Ouch.

But as Saurabh has pointed out before, there is a certain lack of vim on our side of the revolution, too. If religion was the opiate of the masses, the Internet must be concentrated Oxycontin. Because I have never seen such a bunch of doped-up activists on either side of this war.

So what should we call the people who spend their time looking at computer screens instead of, say, fucking shit up, or arguing with real live war supporters, or working on counter-recruitment, or just getting some sleep.

I would look for wit to my favorite snarky asshole right-wingers. But their terms for lefties are laced with fear and disgust at our supposed lack of concern about terrorism, rather than with good-humored amusement at our fecklessness.

So it’s up to us. How about — Hedgehog? OK, that wasn’t very funny. How about the “Molotov CD-burners” who “picket lines of code” and “organize their desktops” while “pro-testing their motherboards”? Are we “memory stick radicals”? Or “link-lulled leftists”? Maybe we’re “blue-screen black flaggers” or “blustering bloggers.” Your thoughts?

I was going to write about SEIU and the Teamsters splitting off from the AFL-CIO (with rumblings of UFCW and UNITE HERE to follow), but the Bengali version of me did it first.

I don’t think this site actually gets enough traffic to make it worthwhile, but I have inserted a poll to the left. We’ll see how it goes.

Forty pages of disgusting filth go here. Just imagine you’ve been watching someone vomit into a gas station toilet for the past half-hour, that should set the atmosphere.

My license has been suspended, apparently. This particular saga began last october, when I drove to the airport to pick up my friend. On the way out, I was ticketed for going 35 mph in a 15 mph zone. This zone is the exit ramp heading towards the Ted Williams tunnel. It is a blind curve, and anyone going 15 mph on this ramp is in grave danger of being whacked by a taxi. 15 mph, don’t you know, is incredibly slow. You could probably run this fast without too much trouble.^* Clearly a speed trap, placed there for no reason other than to generate revenue via speeding tickets.

So I earned a $190 moving violation fine. Argh.

This being my first offense, I determined to contest it in court; though I had sinned, my sin was not great, and maybe I could have pled my way out of it. I dutifully filled out my slip, requesting a hearing, and mailed it in.

I heard nothing from the RMV until I received notification in February that if I failed to pay the citation by the end of the month, my license would be revoked. I harumphed for a while; clearly the official machinery had hiccuped and my hearing request had gone unnoticed, lost on the mailroom floor. But in the end I paid the citation online, via the RMV website, now including a $35 late fee.

I heard nothing more and assumed the matter was closed. Until the other day, when I was at my parents’ house. My father opened some mail from his insurance company, where it informed him that one of the people on his auto insurance (myself) had been removed for reason of suspension. “Wuzzah?” I said.

So I called the RMV. It seems the official machinery had burped AGAIN, and somehow my online payment had not gone through; there was no record of the transaction at all. My license had been suspended, and a $100 reinstatement fee would have to be paid as well. $330 in toto.

I summoned up a towering rage and turned into a demon. My eyes became bloodshot, and the grinding of my teeth was like thunder in the heavens. I bellowed and walls shook down; file cabinets containing records of hundreds of meaningless infractions dissolved into dust. Desks burst into flames and crumbled on top of their occupants. Some ran around screaming, their skin crackling away in black flakes and their vitreous humor frying in their eye sockets. Others scrambled through the rubble, desperate to escape, even as I swept them up into my gaping maw. Skulls popped, ribs snapped, fluids spurted across my tongue. I could hear the pitiful wails and shrieks of all the petty officials and state troopers, desk clerks and bureaucrats who were responsible for this dereliction, as I ground their flesh to a fine paste between my molars. Horror of horrors, injustice, sweet revenge.

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^* Okay, maybe not. But for an automobile it’s terribly slow. Try driving that slow sometimes. Then try driving that slow on a highway and see what sort of response you get.

I rather like this NZ Herald article about Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man shot to death by British police in the “heightened security” atmosphere resulting from the London bombings. I won’t deign to call his death senseless, since by now it should be abundantly clear that life isn’t actually supposed to make any kind of sense.

I finished reading the book with the given title, penned by Herr Werner Heisenberg, a few days back. I don’t really know much about physics at all, but I’ve always been impressed by the fact that physicists don’t run around tearing their hair out and screaming “AAUUUGGHH!!” all the time. I dated an atomic physicist for many years (she might even be reading this), and as far as I can tell she never ran around screaming “AUUGHH” (except on account of my not having done the dishes).

The reason why I expect such behavior of physicists is probably familiar if you’ve explored quantum physics in even cursory detail. H. Heisenberg’s preferred example is the famous double-slit diffraction experiment first performed by Thomas Young, which suffices to establish the key confundments in a simple fashion.

The setup is simple: you have a screen which has two narrow vertical slits in it, a monochromatic light source on one side and a detector screen on the other. Light strikes the first screen and is scattered^* as it passes through the slits; the two waves of light interfere with each other (reinforce when their peaks coincide, cancel when they are in opposition), producing a characteristic “diffraction” pattern on the detector screen, with bright peaks where the waves reinforced and darkness where they canceled.

It is important to note that this reinforcement pattern is a definite result of the interference of two waves. That is, if we were to only have a single slit, we would get a different pattern on the screen, and the pattern produced from a double-slit diffraction experiment is very different from a simple overlay of the patterns produced by two single-slit experiments.

Well and good, so far. Now comes the bizarre part.

Herr Heisenberg points out that the interaction of light with the detector screen is a quantum phenomenon - that is, it involves a single photon interacting with an atom. It implies fixing precisely the position of the photon in space. In fact, we can decrease the intensity of our light source to the point where we can actually observe single photons striking the screen (if, say, the screen is actually a CCD camera). Now, a single photon must be traveling through one slit or the other. If we send photons through the apparatus one at a time, then, it must behave just the same as it would in a single-slit experiment. We should thus expect to see NO interference pattern, but instead the aforementioned overlay of two single-slit patterns.

Not so: observe the results to the right obtained by a Princeton group that performed exactly this experiment. Despite the ability to watch the progress of individual photons striking the detector, the interference pattern STILL emerges. That is, the photon passes through both slits and interferes with itself.

If this doesn’t raise the hairs on the back of your neck, consider this experiment instead: we can place a detector on either the receiving screen (as above), or we can place detectors along the slits themselves. This can be done by simply recording momentum transfers as photons pass through the slit, so that it need not disrupt the process. In the first instance (we learned above), we see a diffraction pattern. In the second instance, we see none. WE SEE NONE! The simple act of observation affects the behavior of the photon. (At this point you should flip out and run around screaming.)

Herr Heisenberg would have us believe that a fundamental epistemological principle that we all accept, i.e. contradiction, is simply not true at the quantum mechanical level. That is, there are actually THREE conditions: true, false, and undecided. For quantum phenomena, there are instances where the impenetrable mystery, the unknowable, cannot be resolved. We cannot say which slit the photon passed through after it has struck the receiving screen, because it was not decided at that point. There was a fundamental uncertainty, and so long as it was not resolved, both mutually contradicting conditions were equally true.

And, vexingly, the act of observation plays an inseparable role in this process. UNTIL we observe, the contradiction exists. But as soon as we do, it vanishes. Thus the totally bizarre result in the final experiment. By simply observing which slit the photon passes through, we decide its mode of behavior. I.e., we establish the truth by observing it.

I think this should be enough to fray anyone’s mental fiber and keep them up at night, sweating furiously. But I don’t know what to make of it beyond that; so, existence is bizarre and runs against our deepest expectations. Is some other truth hiding behind that quantum mechanical uncertainty?

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^* This scattering is itself a result of the uncertainty principle, actually, which says that we can never know both the position and velocity of a particle to an arbitrary degree of precision; there is a fundamental limit (based on Planck’s constant), below which we must sacrifice one for the other. Since we know that the light has passed through the slit, its position becomes known precisely, and its velocity can therefore take a broader range - it might pass in any direction at all.

Every so often I dig through my home directory and come across some tidbit of writing I began but never managed to complete. Here’s a sample I just stumbled across (fully equipped with abortive ending):

It was precisely because Viola was not interested in cleanliness that they acquired a robot. Not that she was slovenly; rather, she did not make a habit of cleaning. Maintaining a clean home is a task requiring some measure of dedication, and Viola lacked such fastidiousness.

As it happened, the matter was taken out of her hands. “After all, a Muslim must be clean,” Ayoub told her. And he went out and bought a robot. In retrospect, Viola wished that she had had the foresight to make this move preemptively, because Ayoub, being a man, lacked the necessary insight, and came home with an utterly unsuitable model.
At this time, their son Afzal was three years old, an age at which scattering objects across the floor is a favorite activity. Viola had assumed the mother’s duty of cleaning up after her progeny, but gleefully announced her retirement from this line of work after the arrival of the robot.

It was a dome-shaped thing about the size of a bulldog, made of some glossy black material. It had no apparent inlets or appendages. Viola, who had never owned an autonomous cleaner before, took its simplicity to be a sign of sophistication, and for several weeks was greatly enamored of it, even after it ate a pair of her husband’s slippers.

But in that much time, she noted its major flaw: though it was quite intelligent and could distinguish between a jelly donut smeared across the carpet and a chocolate éclair smeared across the carpet, and was equipped with all the accoutrements necessary to deal with these diverse scenarios, it was guilty of the error of omission. When it made the decision that a particular bit of chaos was not a mess, it would diffidently ignore it. So piles of Afzal’s toys quickly began to accumulate around the house, like various archeological excavations. The robot lacked the capacity to tidy: it could not return things to their place.

Like a good Catholic, Viola immediately assumed the fault was her own, and spent many evenings poring over the robot’s instructional manual, searching for the setting or mode that would cause it to begin tidying. When she at last realized that no such configuration was possible, and the robot was well and truly impaired, she felt the shock of betrayal.

She confronted Ayoub with this scandalous information and succeeded in precipitating a major crisis in their young marriage. He remarked on her laziness, and she remarked on his enforcement of antiquated gender roles. In the end, after many tears and one hurled vase (promptly cleaned up by the attentive and oblivious robot) and even the threat of a phone call to Ayoub’s mother, Viola ended up sleeping on the living room couch, and Ayoub ended up sleeping under the kitchen table. Afzal had the bed all to himself.

The next day they both repented and made up with many sweet kisses and murmured apologies. She made him tea and he made her crevettes-a-l’ail, and they never spoke of the robot again. Both of them began picking up Afzal’s messes. In time Afzal himself outgrew the phase when such profligate mess-making was considered permissible, and he had to pick up his own messes.

This state of affairs lasted two years, until one day, when the aging cleaner ate two pairs of slippers in a single morning, tried to gorge itself on a newly-acquired kitten, and was beaten to death by an outraged Ayoub.

The purchase of a replacement was taken as a given; by this time they had acquired the habit of luxury. Viola insisted on being solely responsible for the selection of this new cleaner, and Ayoub gave way without argument. He was more than a little shocked by the sudden derangement of the device, and felt a bit of shame for having purchased it. And he had not forgotten their fight of a year ago (such things stand out in a young marriage).

Viola found

Bill Keller, of the New York Times, referred to Matt Cooper’s abrupt non-incarceration as resulting from “deus ex machina.” There’s nothing like a little Latin to put me in mind of Greek tragedy, and soon enough the word “hubris” was rattling in my tiny skull like a ball-bearing in a bicycle tire.

Karl Rove was on TV today, wandering around a parking lot, cell phone to the ear. I was in a few U.S. Senators’ offices last Thursday and the phones were about to burst into flames from all the anti-Rove phone calls. And he just keeps digging in deeper.

But what’s more shocking than Rove himself is that his style of life-as-war has already so completely infected the young. Rove, the man who used voter disenfranchisement and dirty tricks to become head of the College Republicans, could be about to fall. But today, the young have learned all too well from him:

- Paul Gourley, new head of the College Republicans, won his election despite being wrapped up in a scandal in which his boss, the old head of the organization, raised money by lying. Michael Davidson, of California, challenged Gourley but lost because the South Dakotan kicked out the pro-Davidson voting delegates of two states. When they complained to the “credentials committee” at the convention, the committee turned a blind eye — it was controlled by Gourley supporters.

- In Nevada, the Young Republicans convention just wrapped up, $25,000 in the red. The head of the state party was accused very early on of walking off with — go figure — $25,000, if this report is to be believed. Now he’s trying to shake down the state’s Republican Congressional delegation. At last check, they were busy lighting one another’s cigars and competing for how much smoke they could blow in their young leader’s face.

- In New Jersey, Steve Damion, the head of the College Republicans, might have known before he became chairman that the group exists to offer volunteers and to train kids in the arts of grassroots politics and fundraising. But instead, he decided to take a quick shakedown route to the top, demanding pay from the state party in return for his volunteers. The state party, staffed largely by former College Republicans, looked at him rather like a drill sergeant might look at a recruit who says, “drop and give me 50.” He’s since been forced to quit in disgrace.

The good news is that the Republicans will soon be as decrepit and empty-shelled as the Democrats. The bad news is that civil society in the most powerful country in the history of the world will then be left entirely to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

WASHINGTON — President Bush, whose White House is facing increasing pressure in the investigation of the public identification of a covert CIA operative, said today that he would fire anyone found to have committed a crime.

He added, “We will also be firing any aides who are found to have died.”