Sunday, November 29, 2009
Hacked off.
I had an interesting debate last night with a friend here in Bath, UK. We were discussing the young fellow with Asbergers syndrome who had penetrated the inner computer files of the Pentagon, purportedly seeking classified files on UFOs. If you haven’t caught the story wherever you are in the world, there is a big campaign to stop him being extradited to the US to stand trial. Maximum sentence is 60 years. (By the way, the extradition process is distinctly one way as very few US citizens are allowed by their government to be hooked out of that land and into the UK). Anyway, my friend’s argument is that there is a due process of law and, Asbergers or not, he should stand trial. We discussed whether a plea of unfit for trial could be brought and he was also against it saying that that was part of the judicial process. Anyway, the debate travelled down its circuitous routes until we ended up with his suggestion that we are all good and bad and the Pentagon is no better nor worse than anywhere else and so we shouldn’t paint it as an ogre.
This got me thinking about something I actually know something about – not necessarily an element in most debates I find myself in! It came to me that the Pentagon is unlikely to enlist people like, say an advertising agency or a retail store or a hundred other kinds of organisation. The process will be highly focused on enlisting staff it can trust to do its business. And its business, as we know, is to be top dog in warfare, in arenas of US interest and in ensuring that the US economy remains strong. These are priorities which outweigh any moral reservations its staff might have about strategy, tactics and their implementation. In fact they can’t afford to have staff who suffer from any concern at all about consequences for human beings elsewhere, that might result from their activities. So, to a great extent, they must enlist staff of a particular psychological make-up with the result that the organisation becomes a monochromatic, self-fulfilling vehicle, carrying out its brief. The same with MI5, or any state police, anywhere, whether it is Mossad, the Stasi or the KGB. As in Orwell’s 1984.
In other words they are not like everyone. They are special in their capacity to deliver a government’s agenda without recourse to the Hamlet-like hand-wringing that you might have, otherwise . So Gary McKinnon is unlikely to get much sympathy for his condition. He hacked and he will be packed off to a US cell.
Given that the British government won’t stop the extradition, all we can do is make a big enough fuss so that the Pentagon show trial becomes an international event that focuses the world’s scrutiny on its judicial processes.
I had an interesting debate last night with a friend here in Bath, UK. We were discussing the young fellow with Asbergers syndrome who had penetrated the inner computer files of the Pentagon, purportedly seeking classified files on UFOs. If you haven’t caught the story wherever you are in the world, there is a big campaign to stop him being extradited to the US to stand trial. Maximum sentence is 60 years. (By the way, the extradition process is distinctly one way as very few US citizens are allowed by their government to be hooked out of that land and into the UK). Anyway, my friend’s argument is that there is a due process of law and, Asbergers or not, he should stand trial. We discussed whether a plea of unfit for trial could be brought and he was also against it saying that that was part of the judicial process. Anyway, the debate travelled down its circuitous routes until we ended up with his suggestion that we are all good and bad and the Pentagon is no better nor worse than anywhere else and so we shouldn’t paint it as an ogre.
This got me thinking about something I actually know something about – not necessarily an element in most debates I find myself in! It came to me that the Pentagon is unlikely to enlist people like, say an advertising agency or a retail store or a hundred other kinds of organisation. The process will be highly focused on enlisting staff it can trust to do its business. And its business, as we know, is to be top dog in warfare, in arenas of US interest and in ensuring that the US economy remains strong. These are priorities which outweigh any moral reservations its staff might have about strategy, tactics and their implementation. In fact they can’t afford to have staff who suffer from any concern at all about consequences for human beings elsewhere, that might result from their activities. So, to a great extent, they must enlist staff of a particular psychological make-up with the result that the organisation becomes a monochromatic, self-fulfilling vehicle, carrying out its brief. The same with MI5, or any state police, anywhere, whether it is Mossad, the Stasi or the KGB. As in Orwell’s 1984.
In other words they are not like everyone. They are special in their capacity to deliver a government’s agenda without recourse to the Hamlet-like hand-wringing that you might have, otherwise . So Gary McKinnon is unlikely to get much sympathy for his condition. He hacked and he will be packed off to a US cell.
Given that the British government won’t stop the extradition, all we can do is make a big enough fuss so that the Pentagon show trial becomes an international event that focuses the world’s scrutiny on its judicial processes.
Labels: Gary MsKinnon. The Pentagon. Enlisting spies and hitmen.
Monday, November 23, 2009
We are star dust, we are golden...
An amusing episode the other day concerned my partner’s aunt who, at eighty, is as sharp as a porcupine’s quill and who, on listening to a debate we were having on time travel and teleportation, offered the following:
“I saw on the news that they had teleported a table one metre.”
This being Ghana I did not offer too much disparagement of what I thought of as a nugget of fool's gold. “Are you sure,” I asked, “I think the latest breakthrough involves teleporting one photon from one place to another.” My partner quickly cut in, “Perhaps you meant futon, Auntie.”
At the moment there’s stuff in the media every day about the micro world of atoms, particles and sub-particles, nano-technology and the infinitely small worlds beyond instrumentation. At the same time there is a continuing fixation with astrology. Humans are like that. Rationality and belief as bedfellows.
In an attempt to bring these various areas of scientific and quasi-scientific exploration together, I ask myself, under what conditions would astrology work? First, think of what happens after conception. Cells divide and stem cells gradually take on the role of developing specialised bits of the human form. DNA (as recently discussed here) seems sensitive to environmental influences and, as a consequences, changes its formula in modelling a unique human entity. At this time, the sac of cells with their dna may also be influenced by great bodies in space, the sun and planets, just as in the old days, when grooves on cylinders were formed by playing music live and having a needle cut the wax in symbiosis, so that the phonograph could reproduce the same music later, if another needle ran along the sound sculpted groove. Thus our dna may be influenced when it is exposed to planetary shifts.
We have little sense of how the sub-atomic universe is fashioned and refined. We tend to think of ourselves as separate entities with clearly defined edges but we are not. Atoms are making a constant fuzzy storm as they enter and leave our external surfaces. We also contain atoms from all the people who ever lived and died - up to twenty years or so before we were born. There are atoms in our bodies that have travelled across galaxies, in and out of suns. It would be sillier to imagine that none of this has any influence on our biologies and psyches than imagining the opposite.
In The Fly, Cronenberg’s hero teleports himself and does not realise a fly is in the pod with him. The resultant mix provides the horror and tragedy of the narrative. A gripping fiction but, at the heart of it, there is science ...
They may be teleporting photons now but it will be futons in the future.
An amusing episode the other day concerned my partner’s aunt who, at eighty, is as sharp as a porcupine’s quill and who, on listening to a debate we were having on time travel and teleportation, offered the following:
“I saw on the news that they had teleported a table one metre.”
This being Ghana I did not offer too much disparagement of what I thought of as a nugget of fool's gold. “Are you sure,” I asked, “I think the latest breakthrough involves teleporting one photon from one place to another.” My partner quickly cut in, “Perhaps you meant futon, Auntie.”
At the moment there’s stuff in the media every day about the micro world of atoms, particles and sub-particles, nano-technology and the infinitely small worlds beyond instrumentation. At the same time there is a continuing fixation with astrology. Humans are like that. Rationality and belief as bedfellows.
In an attempt to bring these various areas of scientific and quasi-scientific exploration together, I ask myself, under what conditions would astrology work? First, think of what happens after conception. Cells divide and stem cells gradually take on the role of developing specialised bits of the human form. DNA (as recently discussed here) seems sensitive to environmental influences and, as a consequences, changes its formula in modelling a unique human entity. At this time, the sac of cells with their dna may also be influenced by great bodies in space, the sun and planets, just as in the old days, when grooves on cylinders were formed by playing music live and having a needle cut the wax in symbiosis, so that the phonograph could reproduce the same music later, if another needle ran along the sound sculpted groove. Thus our dna may be influenced when it is exposed to planetary shifts.
We have little sense of how the sub-atomic universe is fashioned and refined. We tend to think of ourselves as separate entities with clearly defined edges but we are not. Atoms are making a constant fuzzy storm as they enter and leave our external surfaces. We also contain atoms from all the people who ever lived and died - up to twenty years or so before we were born. There are atoms in our bodies that have travelled across galaxies, in and out of suns. It would be sillier to imagine that none of this has any influence on our biologies and psyches than imagining the opposite.
In The Fly, Cronenberg’s hero teleports himself and does not realise a fly is in the pod with him. The resultant mix provides the horror and tragedy of the narrative. A gripping fiction but, at the heart of it, there is science ...
They may be teleporting photons now but it will be futons in the future.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
With God on Our Side
Reading the papers in Ghana throws interesting insights into the political and social processes of a country redefining itself as a real democracy. There is certainly freedom of expression and nothing seems to my eye to be too sacred to be raked over. In the Daily Graphic yesterday there was a tough article on the way that Ghanaian Christianity, whether in its orthodox or evangelical forms, is bleeding the people dry to feather the nests of priests in Armani suits and gold chains. Indeed the article pointed out that Ghana would be the holiest country in Christendom if you measured it in acts of worship rather than secular acts. If you quantified it by the latter, then the picture would be somewhat different!
I read this as we meandered through the traffic, leaving at 9-40 precisely as this is a window when we can do the journey to work in about a half hour. My column reading is interrupted by beggars banging on windows, the beep of the horn at some indiscretion on the part of a tro tro driver and sudden braking.
The business pages often point to the barriers to economic progress caused by sinning from Monday to Saturday - by this I mean nepotism, backhanders, sharp practices often concerning Government officials buying land cheaply and then selling to foreigners and land being sold several times over – and then recanting passionately on Sunday. There are further barriers which are not mentioned. Imagine going to business meetings and finding people being asked to pray before the meeting. Imagine receiving emails which begin or end with phrases invoking God’s beneficence and His love of you. Indeed, sometimes you wonder whether anyone believes he or she is responsible for anything! Only God is. However, He is never the culprit when things go drastically wrong! The whole business leaves one wondering whether many Ghanaians are too scared to expose their performance to critique. I have found in many settings that engendering critical self-examination of performance is akin to some kind of Spanish Inquisition in colleagues’ eyes, so unused are they to tough cross examination of the quality of outcomes. This attitude seems to stem from the Ghanaian national character where courtesies are far more important than substance. It is a shame when you meet it because the other aspect that dominates the psyche here is a very welcome warmth and desire for peace.
For the country to succeed in its endeavours, it needs to accept that God has His rightful place in the temples, synagogues and churches where He can set to work remodelling moral and spiritual standards while people go about their daily business, accepting absolute responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
Reading the papers in Ghana throws interesting insights into the political and social processes of a country redefining itself as a real democracy. There is certainly freedom of expression and nothing seems to my eye to be too sacred to be raked over. In the Daily Graphic yesterday there was a tough article on the way that Ghanaian Christianity, whether in its orthodox or evangelical forms, is bleeding the people dry to feather the nests of priests in Armani suits and gold chains. Indeed the article pointed out that Ghana would be the holiest country in Christendom if you measured it in acts of worship rather than secular acts. If you quantified it by the latter, then the picture would be somewhat different!
I read this as we meandered through the traffic, leaving at 9-40 precisely as this is a window when we can do the journey to work in about a half hour. My column reading is interrupted by beggars banging on windows, the beep of the horn at some indiscretion on the part of a tro tro driver and sudden braking.
The business pages often point to the barriers to economic progress caused by sinning from Monday to Saturday - by this I mean nepotism, backhanders, sharp practices often concerning Government officials buying land cheaply and then selling to foreigners and land being sold several times over – and then recanting passionately on Sunday. There are further barriers which are not mentioned. Imagine going to business meetings and finding people being asked to pray before the meeting. Imagine receiving emails which begin or end with phrases invoking God’s beneficence and His love of you. Indeed, sometimes you wonder whether anyone believes he or she is responsible for anything! Only God is. However, He is never the culprit when things go drastically wrong! The whole business leaves one wondering whether many Ghanaians are too scared to expose their performance to critique. I have found in many settings that engendering critical self-examination of performance is akin to some kind of Spanish Inquisition in colleagues’ eyes, so unused are they to tough cross examination of the quality of outcomes. This attitude seems to stem from the Ghanaian national character where courtesies are far more important than substance. It is a shame when you meet it because the other aspect that dominates the psyche here is a very welcome warmth and desire for peace.
For the country to succeed in its endeavours, it needs to accept that God has His rightful place in the temples, synagogues and churches where He can set to work remodelling moral and spiritual standards while people go about their daily business, accepting absolute responsibility for the consequences of their acts.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Mad or bad
I see that John Allen Muhammed was executed by lethal injection this week for murdering a number of people in Washington DC. What to make of it? The assumption in most western law is that if you are sane then, wherever they observe the niceties of state execution, you could eventually leave Death Row for the last walk of your life. Administrations that maintain the death penalty often execute the sane – who might have some chance of rebirth as an inoffensive person – and keep alive the insane, who have a more limited potential for beneficial change. Unless, of course, you are in a country like Iran or Afghanistan, where being publicly stoned to death doesn’t differentiate between the sane and the insane but focuses on acts that are found, for whatever reason, to be unacceptable. Acts that can range from going to a school if you are a woman, through adultery to murder. (In the US, too, it is possible to make executions public to provide closure for family and friends of victims when they observe the last thrash of a killer’s limbs.) The nature of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is embedded in the structures of all early societies. Vengeance is served hot or cold for it avers that the enemy might not repeat the mistakes of its individuals and cause you harm again. The notion that someone may not suffer the death penalty owing to his or her mental state, is relatively recent. The French once enshrined in law, crime passionel, to cover an emotionally distraught act of killing for which you were not held wholly responsible. In the US they have a plea for the same emotional aberration which is called, temporary insanity.
I wrote recently about how our genes are affected by our experiences in life – quite a paradigm shift given that we assumed genetic structures were fixed at birth. Research published this week shows that mice who are traumatised in their early months by separation from their parents, have a much decreased capacity to handle stress and behave normally. Since psychopathy can, therefore, be attributed to either an at-birth incapacity to know what is socially acceptable or not, or the result of later traumas changing genetic structures so that a person no longer has the power to control his or her actions, we can only execute them if we adopt ancient practices and rid ourselves of the problem of determining who is sane or insane.
So how do you judge a man such as Muhammed? If sane, he surely could not have done what he did, day after day, because a person capable of such gross acts is not like you or I. He is not sane. If he is insane, therefore, he cannot be held responsible. In truth, if we take into account how people who have killed in war suffer a guilt-ridden stress at their acts, we know that for a sane person, killing is not good for the psyche, no matter what the circumstances.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Taxi slogans in Accra
Returning to a theme which permeates these blogs, I saw a taxi in Accra with Side Issues in flashy letters on its back windscreen. This form of advertising is a rudimentary form of Facebook. The rear screen in a car is small so the advert has to encapsulate a lot in a few letters. If you remember I got to wondering what makes a driver decide to choose a particular phrase. I think my partner suggested that these must have been the only individual letters left in the ‘bin’ at whatever wholesale depot was selling them (bright orange, fluorescent in this case). So the driver had to make up the sign he wanted to display on his cab from a bunch of leftovers. Think Scrabble and anagrams. Most drivers seem to buy ready made up slogan such as Judgment Day, Gethsemane , God is Good. There are very few which, even at a stretch of the imagination, might be construed as secular.
Side Issues is one of these. Or is it? What has persuaded the driver to make up this phrase? Does it mean that he is willing to pick and drop customers but, en route, take you round the houses as you knock a few extra minor ‘must dos’ off your list? Or does it mean that he actually believes in God but he has a few reservations which he is parking for the moment? Was he alluding not to his own but to Jesus’ side issues? For example, persuading His disciples that Mary should always sit at His right hand at the table or that poor Judas was in a no-win situation since he had no choice but to play out the drama which hastened His death by kissing Him in the garden.
In other words there is something in the phrase side issues which puzzles the more you think about it. It is either redolent with meaning, as suggested above, or it is offhand and dismissive, almost saying, I could advertise something really significant but am not bothering.
Watching it weave its way through the traffic (taxi drivers here often drive just as you or I might make our way along a crowded platform in the Underground, dodging left and right, accelerating and braking, expecting everyone to telepathies with the sudden switches, I suddenly realised that the driver was actually stating a fact. For him, everything on the road, including me, was a side issue. The only issue that mattered was his fearless path through the groaning rush hour traffic.
Returning to a theme which permeates these blogs, I saw a taxi in Accra with Side Issues in flashy letters on its back windscreen. This form of advertising is a rudimentary form of Facebook. The rear screen in a car is small so the advert has to encapsulate a lot in a few letters. If you remember I got to wondering what makes a driver decide to choose a particular phrase. I think my partner suggested that these must have been the only individual letters left in the ‘bin’ at whatever wholesale depot was selling them (bright orange, fluorescent in this case). So the driver had to make up the sign he wanted to display on his cab from a bunch of leftovers. Think Scrabble and anagrams. Most drivers seem to buy ready made up slogan such as Judgment Day, Gethsemane , God is Good. There are very few which, even at a stretch of the imagination, might be construed as secular.
Side Issues is one of these. Or is it? What has persuaded the driver to make up this phrase? Does it mean that he is willing to pick and drop customers but, en route, take you round the houses as you knock a few extra minor ‘must dos’ off your list? Or does it mean that he actually believes in God but he has a few reservations which he is parking for the moment? Was he alluding not to his own but to Jesus’ side issues? For example, persuading His disciples that Mary should always sit at His right hand at the table or that poor Judas was in a no-win situation since he had no choice but to play out the drama which hastened His death by kissing Him in the garden.
In other words there is something in the phrase side issues which puzzles the more you think about it. It is either redolent with meaning, as suggested above, or it is offhand and dismissive, almost saying, I could advertise something really significant but am not bothering.
Watching it weave its way through the traffic (taxi drivers here often drive just as you or I might make our way along a crowded platform in the Underground, dodging left and right, accelerating and braking, expecting everyone to telepathies with the sudden switches, I suddenly realised that the driver was actually stating a fact. For him, everything on the road, including me, was a side issue. The only issue that mattered was his fearless path through the groaning rush hour traffic.
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Thank you for your time
Time is relative said Einstein and Hawking’s Brief History of Time underlined the fact, though, it is said that the time to write the quasi-populist tract and the time to read it actually belong to two different universes. Let us call them the apple universe and the pear universe. The time to write it was obviously finite, let us say a couple of years , while the average time it takes to read it is beyond my mathematics O level capabilities. The latter equation is complex because a large proportion of readers never completed reading it and so the time they are taking over it is stretching inexorably towards infinity. I don’t know how to work out the average when part of what you are averaging is infinite. For example what is the average of one hundred pears eaten over anything between one minute and ten minutes when added to pears that are not eaten? Can you do it? Do tell. I expect there is some remarkable math involved that covers several blackboards in chalk hieroglyphics.
In the main, though, time seems to be measured relative to one’s own existence. A lifetime. Politicians govern on the basis that thinking about anything beyond their time in office is redundant. Witness global warming, species’ depletions, education, health services and on and on. It’s all short termism to reflect well upon them and get them into power next time round.
I saw an Israeli settler the other day in some sequestered part of Palestine, stating that he was only taking back what was Jewish land 3000 years ago. On that basis an African tribe that began the repopulation of the world many tens of thousands of years ago, actually owns everything, including Israel. I saw an indigenous Indian from North America demanding that the Prairies be returned to his tribe, a tribe that tried to stop the carbon dating of a skeleton, on the basis that the skeleton was sacred. Anyway, morally right or wrong, the scientists chipped a bit off the old blockhead and dated it, discovering it was from some European tourist, who travelled there across the frozen north west, many thousands of years before the most extreme dating of any North American Indian’s remains.
Time is relative to an argument. The passionate rush of blood in the young, demanding answers and actions this minute becomes irrevocably replaced by the indifference of age. Thus it is that nothing much changes, except through terrible acts by people for whom time is immaterial because it is virtual while stuff you touch is what must be possessed. The Egyptians spent their entire lives preparing for death because they reckoned that infinity is a better reward than the limited lifespan in this world. For them, the mathematics of averaging out infinity and limited time was not the problem I find it.
Time is relative said Einstein and Hawking’s Brief History of Time underlined the fact, though, it is said that the time to write the quasi-populist tract and the time to read it actually belong to two different universes. Let us call them the apple universe and the pear universe. The time to write it was obviously finite, let us say a couple of years , while the average time it takes to read it is beyond my mathematics O level capabilities. The latter equation is complex because a large proportion of readers never completed reading it and so the time they are taking over it is stretching inexorably towards infinity. I don’t know how to work out the average when part of what you are averaging is infinite. For example what is the average of one hundred pears eaten over anything between one minute and ten minutes when added to pears that are not eaten? Can you do it? Do tell. I expect there is some remarkable math involved that covers several blackboards in chalk hieroglyphics.
In the main, though, time seems to be measured relative to one’s own existence. A lifetime. Politicians govern on the basis that thinking about anything beyond their time in office is redundant. Witness global warming, species’ depletions, education, health services and on and on. It’s all short termism to reflect well upon them and get them into power next time round.
I saw an Israeli settler the other day in some sequestered part of Palestine, stating that he was only taking back what was Jewish land 3000 years ago. On that basis an African tribe that began the repopulation of the world many tens of thousands of years ago, actually owns everything, including Israel. I saw an indigenous Indian from North America demanding that the Prairies be returned to his tribe, a tribe that tried to stop the carbon dating of a skeleton, on the basis that the skeleton was sacred. Anyway, morally right or wrong, the scientists chipped a bit off the old blockhead and dated it, discovering it was from some European tourist, who travelled there across the frozen north west, many thousands of years before the most extreme dating of any North American Indian’s remains.
Time is relative to an argument. The passionate rush of blood in the young, demanding answers and actions this minute becomes irrevocably replaced by the indifference of age. Thus it is that nothing much changes, except through terrible acts by people for whom time is immaterial because it is virtual while stuff you touch is what must be possessed. The Egyptians spent their entire lives preparing for death because they reckoned that infinity is a better reward than the limited lifespan in this world. For them, the mathematics of averaging out infinity and limited time was not the problem I find it.