Rhinocrisy

I went and saw this Narnia movie on Christmas. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is an allegorical work by C.S. Lewis, meant to make the concepts in Christianity more accessible to children. In this story, Jesus is represented by a giant lion named Aslan, and Satan is represented by an evil witch named Jadis. The allegory is fairly clumsy, but it does succeed in admirably demonstrating the fact that the fundamental notion of evangelical Christianity makes very little sense.

The high point of the book is the death of Aslan, who gives up his life to atone for the “treachery” of the boy Edmund, in order to satisfy the “deep magic”. He is bound and shorn by the witch’s henchmen, and then slain by the witch on a stone table. Like Jesus, he is discovered by two women, who witness his mysterious and poorly-explained resurrection. This is a plot device of the same caliber as a four-year-old who gets shot playing cops-n-robbers and hastily invents some bulletproof armor for himself. “So I’m not really dead! Nyah!”

We can’t, of course, blame Lewis for this, since this particular lame plot device is two thousand years old (sometimes called “The Greatest Story Ever Told”). The original evangelists had much worse than mere plot problems to deal with: they had to explain away the fact that their cherished meshiach had just been executed by the Romans. This must have been especially embarassing around the time when the first Gospels were written, when the Jewish Temple was being destroyed and Jerusalem was in flames. What’s remarkable is that the early Christians accrued any Jewish followers at all.

All the problems inherent in the Gospel account remain in Lewis’s story. Where the hell was Aslan for the long, miserable period when Narnia was suffering under the rule of the White Witch? How come Jesus waited four-thousand odd years to show up and offer humankind the hope of salvation? What possible relationship could there be between Aslan’s meager suffering and human redemption, and why is the former a prerequisite for the latter? Especially since we’re given to understand that Aslan himself made the rules, that Jesus is the Word made flesh? The fundamental redemptive act is islam, surrender - acknowledging the authority of God. Whether or not Jesus suffered during the Passion should have little bearing on that acknowledgement.

The movie also does an excellent job of conveying the awkwardness of the notion of divine justice and moral law that prevails in Christianity. The sin of Edmund, after all, is hardly his own - he is a child thrust into an adult’s world, reacting based on his child’s understanding to the apocalyptic events unfolding around him. His sin, if anything, is innocence - not comprehending the serious consequences of his minor crime, petty vengeance on his cruel older brother. Aslan is unrelenting, admitting no mercy on Edmund’s behalf and no willingness to acknowledge the gray nature of crime and culpability. At no point does divine law admit what the humans readily acknowledge: the fault lay equally with Edmund’s siblings.

As a final note, I’ll point out the movie’s (and the book’s) role in the despicable War on Christmas. Halfway through their travels in Narnia, the children are visited by Father Christmas, who bestows presents on them. This, we are told, is the first time that Christmas has been celebrated in Narnia in a hundred years. Whazza? What could they have possibly been celebrating? Christmas… meaning… the birthday of Christ, wholly unknown in Narnia? Or some sort of orgiastic Saturnalia? Lewis never clears up this point, which suggests that for him, Christmas isn’t intimately tied to the Savior’s birth. Tsk, tsk. Linus van Pelt would be disappointed.

I recently needed to better understand the concept of electron hole migration. I looked in Wikipedia, which had the sweetest, simplest explanation imaginable.

Hole conduction can be explained by the use of the following analogy. Imagine a row of people seated in an auditorium, where there are no spare chairs. Someone in the middle of the row wants to leave, so they jump over the back of the seat into an empty row, and walk out. The empty row is analogous to the conduction band, and the person walking out is analogous to a free electron.

Now imagine someone else comes along and wants to sit down. The empty row has a poor view; so he does not want to sit there. Instead, a person in the crowded row moves into the empty seat the first person left behind. The empty seat moves one spot closer to the edge and the person waiting to sit down. The next person follows, and the next, et cetera. One could say that the empty seat moves towards the edge of the row. Once the empty seat reaches the edge, the new person can sit down.

In the process everyone in the row has moved along. If those people were negatively charged (like electrons), this movement would constitute conduction. If the seats themselves were positively charged, then only the vacant seat would be positive. This is how hole conduction works.

Hooray for Wikipedia.

When I first started using e-mail in the early 90s, I knew people who had gotten Pretty Good Privacy encryption software, better known as PGP, and who insisted on sending their messages encrypted. But I quickly realized that the headers were unencrypted — anyone who could tap a message could still see who was sending what to whom and with what frequency. It seemed to me that knowledge of networks was at least as important as knowledge of the specific words transmitted around those networks. If anything, I told my friends, PGP was a good way to attract attention; there’s no better way to silence a room than whispering.

It turns out I was in smart if ignoble company. The New York Times reports Saturday that the National Security Administration spying that has gotten some of us atwitter this week was un-search-warrantable because it was not literally listening in on specific conversations so much as developing network maps.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called “pattern analysis” on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The NSA pulled this stunt by working with the telephone companies to get access to the main switches.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

“All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there’s been much more active involvement in that area,” said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

“If they get content, that’s useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis,” he said. “Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden’s circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny.”

POTS phone calls are not the only place where someone with access to the pipes can assemble a network map of human relationships. E-mail would be even easier. With access to the billing systems at the VoIP providers, someone could include those calls in a map. And on the Web, it is possible to map who goes to what websites, thanks especially to systems like the now-retired Carnivore and whatever secret system replaced it.

The result of all this data could be a gigantic Friendster-style map of who knows whom — but far better than Friendster or MySpace or Tribe, in that it could recognize one-way relationships as well as quantify the frequency of contacts, the growth rate in contact frequency, and whether contacts seem anomalous (like frequent 3 a.m. phone calls within a time zone, for example).

Of course, it’s hard enough to map out MySpace. Mapping all electronic contacts? Sounds like that could cause someone to be late for lunch. Is that where the tens of billions of classified dollars go in the intelligence budget? Perhaps my favorite social networking maven could find out from her new pals at the CIA.

Update: The California state constitution offers a right to privacy. I wonder if a resident of that state could sue the phone company for giving the NSA access to the switch logs.

Update II, the sequel: I’m surprised at how few analysts grasp the notion of social networking. AmericaBlog, which I usually find quite observant (even if I think the authors have a sweetly but dangerously benign image of the USA) is spreading the ridiculous notion that the NSA was taping every conversation in the country. And the usually incisive William Arkin, figures the NSA was looking for suspicious patterns — like if someone is suddenly making lots of phone calls to Pakistan. That’s possible, but it seems like it would suffer from the classic problem of adding dots to be connected, rather than connecting those dots already known. I think it’s more likely that the spy campaign was aimed at mapping social networks.

Christian children all over North America might be asking themselves just such a question. But I refer not to a surprise gift. Rather to Dick Cheney’s iPod. From the Associated Press, in which Nedra Pickler describes the ordeal of working on Air Force Two while most of the electrical outlets were out(let) of commission:

“Working passengers began lining up their laptops to share the power from a couple of working outlets - particularly the reporters who urgently needed to prepare their articles to transmit during a quick refueling stop in England.

“But when Cheney said his iPod needed to be recharged, it took precedence above all else and dominated one precious outlet for several hours. The vice president’s press staff intervened so a reporter could use the outlet for 15 minutes to charge a dead laptop, but then the digital music device was plugged back in.”

What is on the iPod?

I have burrowed to Boulder, Colo., where the front page of the Camera screams that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is threatened again. As I wrote last month, when ANWR shows up in a bill, it is wise to look at the rest of the document. It will likely be filled with horrors unthinkable, yet the liberals will predictably chase the ANWR flare, will most likely succeed, and will then crow over their accomplishment.

In this case, the proposal to drill for oil in that precious spot is included in a $363 billion defense appropriations bill. Some of the key items elsewhere in the document, as described in the House committee report:

• $3.5 billion for Iraq, of which “not less than $2,500,000,000 is available only for classified programs.” This line includes $13 million for 8.1 million rounds (at retail prices) of .50-caliber cartridges, each one of which can rip the organs out of a human at 5,000 feet.
• A $45,254,619,000 slush fund for the war on terror — an amount intended to cover only the first six months of the fiscal year, ending March 31.
• Not a cent for peacekeeping in Darfur, despite support from Condi Rice for $50 million toward a mission.
• The defunding of one of the more ecology-minded programs in the budget, Demanufacturing of Electronic Equipment for Reuse and Recycling (DEER2)
• Another $7,631,531,000 for the Missile Defense Agency (actually a cutback from last year)
• The continued erosion of the notion of “defense” in “Department of Defense,” most obviously in the Navy’s continued elimination of coastal defense vessels — from 13 in 2004 to 9 in 2005 to 8 in 2006.
• A cut of some $2 billion in military payroll, spread among all forces. (Note that Alaska Natives have among the highest enlistment rates among ethnic groups in the USA.)

Now remind me, what is the biggest threat faced by Alaska’s caribou and the Gwich’in people?

Everyone should read Khaled el-Masri’s account of his wrongful imprisonment and torture.

I won’t say that the United States has turned a corner and come to a place of unadulterated evil; that would be rather naive. What’s clear is that this behavior cannot, must not, continue. Clear as daylight. And the people who perpetrate these sorts of outrageous acts should be utterly reviled, remembered in history on the same pages as Pol Pot and Robespierre. That much, at least, is in our power to effect: we can blacken the names of these people and make them wear the ugly brand of “torturer”.

By all accounts this is a low point for this country.

Many people in Europe were upset to find out that some European countries may have been hosting secret CIA detention centers, implicitly condoning the legal and probable human rights abuses going on there. Some EU officials even went so far as to threaten sanctions against any countries that had been found to have aided the CIA in such a fashion. (Strangely, no one seems to have suggested sanctions against the United States itself, which, presumably, was the most responsible party.)

As if that weren’t enough, the American president seems to be the worst one ever. He has now admitted to what is surely a flagrant violation of the law, for no other apparent reason than the fact that he could.

Never fear. I have devised a way for all of us to profit from these developments.

In fact, you might say my revolutionary scheme will solve a great number of problems for the entire world, like that whole ‘peak oil’ business we’re always worried about here at Rhinocrisy. Things are going to start looking up for humanity. Way, way up!

Like most good ideas, this one came to me on the pot. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that this is a place where a lot of good thinking can be done. (Garbage out, garbage in, as they say.)^*

Although I have not provided any working prototypes of my idea, I think the concept is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require extensive proving. The basic premise is this:

Over the years empirical observation has taught us that outrages committed that offend the memory of the deceased causes them to revolve in their graves. (I’m a bit rusty on my Maxwell’s equations, but the direction of rotation should be given by the right-hand rule, or something.) Since we know there is conservation of angular momentum, this means over the years some of our ancestors will have acquired quite a high rate of revolution. Someone like Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson is probably running at a good two or three million RPMs.

This is a huge amount of stored rotational energy that needs to be tapped right away. A simple belt and turbine device, as illustrated, will suffice to capture the energy.

Even if it is not very efficient, I think it will be hugely beneficial, since this will basically result in another energy boom comparable to the discovery of petroleum. (Even better, this one produces zero emissions, and it’s renewable, to boot. We’re putting more dead people in the ground every day.) The great thing is, everything you do will outrage SOMEONE. Gays being persecuted? Harvey Milk is incensed! Fags getting hitched? Richard Nixon just sped up by a few hundred clicks.

There’s only a few problems I can see with my scenario. One is that my own country will be at a distinct disadvantage, since we’re in the habit of burning our dead and have no buried ancestors to exhume and strap into a generator device.^†

The other is that people will probably end up trying to increase ancestral outrage in order to increase power production. Funerals will be disrupted by people pissing on the casket during the eulogy. Babies will be given absurd names like “Mushelda” and “Smelly Poopy Pants”. Carrot-Top will be elected Pope and will do prop comedy on the balcony of Saint Peter’s basilica.

In the extreme, we might see the development of “outrage factories”, where electrical workers would have orgies featuring farm animals, copious quantities of Johnson’s baby oil, and the current crop of Mouseketeers, all while reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards. Parents would strive to raise the most ill-mannered, loutish children they possibly could.^‡ In other words, the immoral will become moral, and there will be an almost total breakdown of the social fabric. However, this all becomes worthwhile when you consider that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to fill up your tank of gas in fifteen years.

Finally, it should be made clear that this boom time won’t last forever. We can expect the law of diminishing returns to apply, as existing generations suffer from “outrage fatigue”, and later generations will be forced to do more and more outlandish things to outrage the deceased. It’s possible there will be breakthrough advancements in outrage technology (e.g. mime cloning), but we shouldn’t count on these.

^* Fortunately I had the good taste and presence of mind not to run out of the bathroom, half-naked, shrieking “Eureka!” when I had my idea, unlike SOME people I could mention.

^† Note that while cremation seems like a bad idea in general, some laid-back people who are not easily outraged (e.g. stoners) are just a waste of valuable graveyard plots and definitely should be incinerated at death. This probably comprises a good portion of my readership, but there’s nothing for it.

^‡ I know it seems like parents are already doing this, but this is apparently an unrelated phenomenon.

I’ve gone through some U.S. government websites and learned that of all the agencies that could be taking part in the hurricane recovery in New Orleans, hardly any continue to release weekly progress reports. FEMA continues to update us on Mississippi housing. I found one for the Energy Information Administration, which each week updates us on how oil and gas are faring in the wake of this disruption.

FEMA filed its most recent Louisiana recovery “weekly” report December 3, almost 2 weeks ago.

The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security stopped filing routine statements a month ago. Not that they were anything special — what kind of Inspector General files an 11-line summary as his/her “inspection” of a $15 billion project? Hell, if that’s all a CPA does, sign me up.

The next day, the EPA filed its last “Activities Update.“weekly.

But the good news is that the Preznit has kept his destruction-prone self out of the region for two months. Relief, of sorts.

With all the pedagogical hubbub over Darwin, someone forgot that what the world needs is better poetry. Forturnately, Pakistan is on the case:

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to meet every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real.
Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn’t conform to the usual mould,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight won’t do,
Never backs down when he sees what is true,
Tells it all straight, and means it all too.
Going forward and knowing he’s right,
Even when doubted for why he would fight,
Over and over he makes his case clear,
Reaching to touch the ones who won’t hear.
Growing in strength he won’t be unnerved,
Ever assuring he’ll stand by his word.
Wanting the world to join his firm stand,
Bracing for war, but praying for peace,
Using his power so evil will cease,
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must.

I hope that this time next year, this masterwork will have replaced all that crud about, you know, “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.” Most of the world’s people doesn’t even live in snowy climates. I think The Leader is much more universal.

This dream was too weird not to write down.

When I was young, in the war I was in the army. Except I never saw any action. All I did was take part in one mission where I was dropped in to blow up some hotel, I’m not sure why. Except at the last minute I was pulled out and never actually blew up anything.

After the war, I was in one of those G.I. bill work programs, to help you get by. But for some reason, they had written in my file that my expertise was social work, in advising people on pregnancy of all things. So they made me a pregnancy counselor for the rural hospitals in my area. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that the only relevant experience I had was that I aborted on some balcony.

This is where my memory cuts out… I meet someone equally strange while I’m at the hospital and he tells me something.