Rhinocrisy

I would like to think that the San Francisco Police Department has a new and salutary practice for dealing with terrorists: arrest them and treat them as common criminals. Yesterday, an Afghani man, Omeed Aziz Popal, ran down at least 14 people on the streets of San Francisco, most of them in largely African-American and Jewish neighborhoods. Two of the victims were outside the Jewish Community Center. Neither the cops nor the media brought up his ethnicity or that of the victims’ neighborhoods, though today’s SF Chronicle update does describe the ethnicity of the victims. The only mention of terrorism was apparently on local TV Channel 2, which said the driver claimed to be a terrorist. The police denied his assertion.

This is brilliant. Deny the guy the attention he might have been seeking. And refuse to be terrorized. Hooray SFPD.

The sad part is that this probably isn’t a new modus operandi. If Popal had used a gun or a poison instead of a car, the news worldwide would have covered this carnage and there’s no doubt that the word “terrorism” would have been thrown around. The reason it wasn’t, in this case, was most likely because people are so inured to car violence.

It seems Apple is following suit in recalling Li-ion batteries due to overheating/EXPLOSION!!!! This prompts us to a new poll, courtesy of Hedgehog.^*

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^* Specially since that old one actually reached statistical significance for the first time ever. I’m a bit disappointed with the results, actually - more public support for flying belts might actually spur investment dollars into researching them. I want to own a fucking flying belt before I die, damnit. Plus, there’s only one damn Battle Cat, people, you’re not all going to be able to ride him.

Jon’s post this morning got me thinking about Israel again. I find much of the discussion about its conflicts to be irrelevant. I don’t think the abrasion between Israel, Palestine and their neighbors can be solved by trying to assign blame for specific actions and wars. It’s much more useful to look at the structural conflict and to seek ways to resolve it.

Maybe the problem is that Israel is an ethnically based state — and one imposed on a region where its dominant ethnicity was a minority at the country’s founding. Ethnic states are archaic. Ethnic states run by a minority fell out of fashion before I started humming “Free Nelson Mandela.”

It’s fashionable for peaceniks to push for a 2-state solution. I think this is doomed to fail. Who will be in which state? Who gets the airports, seaports, fresh water? Will the world keep dissecting into smaller units, each devoting its best and brightest to defending a border?

Why not a 1-state solution, with Israel accepting full human and civil rights for all those who live there? It’s sad that even here in the U.S., which was the first country based on the notion of inalienable rights, this is a controversial view.

I believe such a state would be more stable and healthy for both Palestinians and Jews because of improved prosperity. More minds working on problems, less money spent on internal security, more food security for all, and if other prosperous but historically torn societies are any gauge (England vs. Ireland?) fewer people feeling the passion of a blood feud. Israel could live up to its moniker of being the only democracy in the Middle East.

There is a reason why there are more Jews in the U.S. than there are in Israel — it’s a more prosperous place. Our prosperity is largely because we have eschewed the 16th-century ideal of being an ethnic homeland (despite some people’s efforts).

Many Jews and Zionists think full rights for Arabs would betray Israel’s mission of being a Jewish homeland. The country could soon revert to being minority-Jew, and the Knesset could be dominated by people who oppose Israel’s very existence.

This risk is real. On the other hand, being a more peaceful and prosperous place, perhaps more Jews would move there. And more importantly, making it a better country could help save the religion. I was born a Jew but if I’m supposed to identify with that homeland, I’ll stick to atheism and stay out of shul. The U.S. is the Jewish homeland for now, and I think it will remain that way unless Israel backs off and figures out how to be a functioning part of the modern world, rather than, like its Islamic Republic neighbors, a relic of a more tribal time. As is, it is driving some of us away from the religion without creating paradise on earth for itself.

(Cross-posted from Tiny Revolution.)

I’m only three years late discovering this - maybe I heard it before and it slipped my memory. Yes, yes, that will do nicely.

Anyway, it was a bit about Iran offering a fairly comprehensive negotiation with the U.S., including ending support for armed groups, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting much tighter IAEA controls, in exchange for access to “peaceful nuclear technology”, normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and a two-state solution for Palestine. Some more detail is here, including the incredible U.S. response:

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Astounding. I think my blood is actually boiling - steam is coming out of my ears.

It’s always nice to hear from a security professional who cares about security more than he cares about getting on CNN. Bruce Schneier is such a person. His new column at Wired News is worth a read.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want….

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

I’ve been saying for years, the best response to terrorists is to treat them as particularly meddlesome criminals, not as threats to the basic essence of society. That gives them too much credit and our society too little. The only reason bin Laden and friends were able to destroy much of American democracy is because of their allies in high places.

At the local vegan cafe, the dishes are all named for positive affirmations. You can ask for the “live bruschetta” and the waiter will say, “One `I am bountiful,’ coming up.” You might want a pecan pie, but you will be served an “I am perfect.” Yerba mate chai is “I am triumphant.”

It’s a bit like Starbucks, where you can order a medium coffee and hear the clerk — who is either a barista or a partner, depending on the context — call out, “Grande Americano!” But it’s worse because at least “Venti Americano” has a single referent. Its cloud of meaning in the mind is concentrated and precise. It doesn’t hijack perfectly good words and herniate their meanings. To me, Cafe Gratitude’s menu is Operation Iraqi Freedom all over again.

It would be harmless except that I’m kind of dumb. Euphemism fogs my thoughts. The best thoughts come directly and unencumbered, like a great dancer leaping up, tapping her feet together a few times and returning silently to the stage. But my thoughts rarely do that. They are tied up with mental fascia that drag on my mind just as fascia tissues drag on my legs when I try to jump a high-hurdle. If the word “freedom” is tied in the mind to aerial bombardment, and the word “graceful” is tied to steamed quinoa with fresh basil-almond pesto, those words will flow less freely in my head, language will become more cumbersome, thoughts come more slowly and arrive laden with distracting and antisocial subtexts.

Worse yet is the lack of sincerity. A close pal of mine works at a school where the staff have routine 15-minute staff meetings where people can offer a shout-out, thank yous, apology or call-outs — you know, a STAC. ^* If I’m happy with someone, I tell them face-to-face. I think public affirmations are a way of showing off. They are mainly about making the thanker look good, not the thankee. Formalizing and mandating thanks for other people replaces a beautiful feeling with an often-empty public display. People who do this too often can come to confuse the public display with the real feeling. I have known performers — actors and other showoffs — who become so good at ersatz feeling that they lose the capacity for the heartfelt variety.

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^* Even the name of the ritual is an offense against language. What does it have to do with any of the meanings of “stack”? A neat pile of flat objects, a bunch of speakers, a series of computer memory addresses, boobs — doesn’t this word carry enough meanings already? Why make an awkward, phonetically ridiculous acronym for a something people already know?

Over at UFO Breakfast, Cmdr. J. Alva Scruggs is complaining about leechers on BitTorrent downloads. This is a pretty classic kind of example of people defecting from a mutual aid scenario.

My own morning was beclouded by the discovery that my spam filter has been a mite too strict. Leaving aside the possibility of spam poetry and the fact that it led to my favorite post ever, we should consider spam a serious problem. A large study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group concluded that something like 80-85% of incoming e-mails are spam messages. This is an alarmingly high number.

But spam isn’t a tragedy of the commons scenario like the above; leechers damage the efficacy of torrents roughly proportionately - if there are few leechers, the system survives and isn’t really bothered. On the other hand, according to Spamhaus, a mere 176 spammers are responsible for 80% of the spam generated worldwide. Your pardon for doing this, but the best analagous situation I can think of is terrorism in an open society - open structures demanded by a free society allow the possibility of massive harm by a few malicious individuals.^*

At present a grand debate over how to properly treat such malicious individuals is being played out on the world stage, with on the one side those advocating “draining the swamp” and weakening the pins that hold up the philosophical edifice that drives many terrorists; and on the other those who advocate a muscular militarism as the appropriate response: kill them all and show others what will happen to terrorists.

This is extremely bad policy with regards to terrorism, but I’m not certain the same is true for spam. It’s certainly impossible to drain the swamp - the simple motivating factor is profit, and there will always be enough gullible idiots who are interested in purchasing bulk quantities of Cialis that profit is irremovable. Technical solutions seem to be mostly ineffective. However, the judicious application of punitive measures (not necessarily catching one of them in a public restroom and administering a severe caning) might prove efficacious. Imagine the class action lawsuit that could be brought to bear, for example. That would certainly be intimidating to future spammers.

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^* This isn’t quite appropriate, since spammers actually do cause widespread harm, as opposed to the mostly hypothetical harm caused by terrorists, who on average kill only a few thousand people a year.

An old girlfriend of mine is interning at a company that is looking for found materials to make their products out of - in this case, durable cloth-like materials.

This morning I removed some old keys from my keychain - some of them I can’t even remember what they’re for. I didn’t know what to do with the old keys afterwards. They can’t really be recut and they’re more or less useless in other contexts. Hallowe’en costume, maybe - the Keymaker from The Matrix Reloaded.

A few weeks back I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about pollution in Morocco resulting from their prolific olive oil industry. Apparently they have tremendous problems from the remainder, the pulp produced in the olive oil production process, being dumped into waterways, where it produces an oily olive-oil slick and all sorts of other nasty problems.

One of my utopian schemes has been as follows: after the Revolution, garbage collectors ought to actually play the role of “sanitation engineer”. That is, after they’ve picked up the trash, they go back and figure out what to do with it - categorize the kinds of trash received, which ones are problematic, which ones can be easily recycled and have amazingly useful second lives. This seems like it would actually be a fantastically entertaining and profitable line of work. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t happen already…

Egad! All this talk of exploding Dell laptops raises some fears in me: is my plan to make an Electric Mini actually a plan to create a 1200-pound death-box that might burst into flames at any moment? You see, it turns out that the lithium electrolyte solution in lithium-ion batteries is highly flammable. Some people allege that the acrylonitrile polymer solution in lithium-polymer batteries is less flammable, but this is not necessarily comforting.

What’s a mad scientist to do? There’s other possibilities; this guy claims to have invented a flywheel for use in electric cars. That’s at least more intriguing - instead of exploding, you could send a spinning disk, hurtling through the air at several times the speed of sound, into a nearby crowd, decapitating dozens before it lodges itself in the “B” of a nearby Baskin Robbins sign.

You might want to check out this column in the Guardian lamenting a recent poll which found 30% of British school kids believe in Creationism or “intelligent” “design”.^* Personally, the response this evokes in me is a desire to run outside, find the nearest religious nut and sucker-punch him in the gut until he explains the workings of his mind to me.

The other day I met a born-again Christian who was willing to cop to the charge - but she refused to tell her audience why she became born-again, because she was afraid we would think it was hokey. This really blows my mind… if you, yourself find your beliefs hokey, why in the name of Christ do you hold them?

I’m also unable to appreciate the disconnect between the otherwise rational behavior of religious types, who as far as I am able to tell can operate can-openers, make their way through revolving doors and drive manual transmission automobiles, and their absurdist, counter-intuitive belief systems. I would honestly be much happier if the religious people in the world moved in constant trepidation, afraid that their dog might, without a moment’s notice, change into a sofa (or vice-versa), that the fibers of their living room throw rug would spontaneously de-interlace and crawl worm-like into the corners of the room, or that the color of the sky is constantly cycling like someone is fiddling with its “hue” tuner. This, at least, would be consistent, and consistently crazy. As it is I have to believe one of two things:

• They are all putting me on.
• There is a “religious nuttery” mental faculty that I am missing that allows this dissonant state of mind to exist.

Perhaps it’s better to gawk than to experience first-hand, but religious people seem to enjoy what seems to me to be an addled state. I can’t help feeling I’m missing out.

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^* Yes, they’re doing way, way, better than we are. I am crying in my soup as I write this.^†

^† I am not actually eating soup. I am eating chocolate s’mores!^‡

^‡ No, not that either. But who wouldn’t want to eat a nice chocolate s’more? Why, I remember in my youth, when I would go on camping outings with my Boy Scout troop^§, we would roast s’mores over the campfire and enjoy their creamy, chocolatey goodness while we sang hymns in praise of Lord Baden-Powell. Ah, memory… tis enough to make a man cry into his soup.

^§ Actually the only thing I remember being roasted at a Boy Scout outing was a live chipmunk some disgusting little puke had caught and thrown in the fire. What a travesty… I bet Lord Baden-Powell is looking down from Heaven right now, crying in his soups’mores.