Rhinestones in the Rough

It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually groped on crowded subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance for clearance for a 15-minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get the bit in their teeth they take absurdity to a logical conclusion.  Indeed, it has already begun.  Last September, agents from Homeland Security, TSA, and the US Department of Transportation (assisted by the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office), conducted a counter-terrorism operation on busy Interstate 20 just west of Atlanta, Georgia.  The operation required all trucks to stop and be screened for bombs.  Federal agents used dogs, screening devices, and a large drive-through bomb detection machine.  Imagine what the delays did to delivery schedules and truckers’ bottom lines!  There are also news reports of federal trucks equipped with backscatter X-ray devices that secretly scan cars and pedestrians.  With such expensive counter-terrorism activities, both in terms of the hard-pressed taxpayers’ money and civil liberties, one would think that bombs were going off all over America.  But, of course, they aren’t.  Subsequent domestic terrorist events have turned out to be FBI sting operations in which FBI agents organise not-so-bright disaffected members of society and lead them into displaying interest in participating in a terrorist act.  Once the pretend-terrorist FBI agent prompts all the right words to be said and captured on his hidden recorder, the “terrorists” are arrested and the “plot” exposed.  The very fact that the FBI has to orchestrate fake terrorism proves the absence of the real thing.  Indeed, the TSA’s Gestapo attitude and methods are succeeding in making Americans more terrified of the TSA than they are of terrorists.  (And rightly so.)

And how effective is TSA?  Undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one day in 2006 found that TSA screeners failed to detect concealed bombs and guns 20 out of 22 times.  A 2007 government audit leaked to USA Today revealed that undercover agents were successful slipping simulated explosives and bomb parts through Los Angeles’s LAX airport in 50 out of 70 attempts, and at Chicago’s O’Hare airport agents made 75 attempts and succeeded in getting through undetected 45 times.  One man left a loaded Glock pistol in his carry-on computer bag by mistake and was shocked to find when he arrived at his hotel room and opened the case that it was still there, undetected.  A combination of factors is likely to blame for such persistent failure on the part of screeners: low pay, poor training, and the monotony involved in watching bags pass through x-ray machines.  Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who called on the Government Accountability Office to conduct its own, independent covert tests of airport screening, decried the decision to classify the results as a national security secret.  “Those results aren’t going to help terrorists figure out how to better attack us, and they certainly aren’t going to give them any more motivation to try than they already have,” Grassley said on the Senate floor in September.  “Keeping the results secret will accomplish one thing, however.  It will ensure that the public has no idea how effective our airport screening strategy actually is.”

This site contains a rather detailed, yet appropriately informative, chart showing US Energy Flow Trends in 2005.  I found it surprising just how inefficient electrical power generation and delivery can be and how much energy is wasted in the transportation industry.  The chart from 4 years later shows few changes — but I note that the percentages of both useful and wasted energies went down from 2005 to 2009.  That leaves a lot of energy unaccounted for.  What is that all about?

What Happened to American Health Care Costs?

In 1986, things started rising briskly over a period of years: the Reagan tax simplification got rid of a lot of the ability to expense lifestyle enhancements for workers, but left an important one intact: the deduction for health care.  You can argue that the employee health care deduction basically explains the entire cost differential between American systems and others.  In the image above, the blue lines show per capita spending; the purple, spending as a percentage of GDP.  But roll over the image and you’ll see that same image altered to show what the graph would look like if the approximately 35% tax subsidy given to employer health care benefits were withdrawn.  Suddenly, the US isn’t really such an outlier.

The space 462 feet above the city — at the top of the historic Smith Tower (built by the Smith Corona typewriter fortune) in Pioneer Square in Seattle — is a 10-foot-in-diameter glass globe with 24 window panels that offer the family of 4 who lives there a view in all directions — Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, the Cascades to the east.  From the apartment they call “The Lighthouse,” they can see almost the entire city.  But the city cannot see them.  When Ms Franklin first visited Smith Tower in 1997, the apartment had been empty for more than 10 years.  A 10,000-gallon cast-iron tank had once fed the fire-sprinkler system that was being removed; there were piles of concrete and no stairs but only ladders to get from floor to floor.  When it rained, rain entered in large quantities.  The building, now owned by the Samis Foundation, a Seattle nonprofit supporting Jewish education and culture, was having a $28 million overhaul.  What the Smith Tower really needed, Ms Franklin decided, was a newly expanded 2-story dwelling: 2 bedrooms and 2 baths could be squeezed onto the 37th floor and an open living room/kitchen/dining room would fill the 38th.  Naturally, this fantastic 1,750-square-foot apartment would need an occupant: herself.  She managed to secure a 10-year lease.  But in 2006, the Samis Foundation sold the building to Walton Street Capital for $43 million.  In recent years, the building has lost or shed its major tenants, including Walt Disney Internet Group, Microsoft, and Providence Health and Services.  A proposal to convert the tower to condominiums seems to have stalled and what plans the new owners may have for the penthouse is anyone’s guess.

• This tree seems to appear in several ads talking about the national tree of India, the Banyan (called the Indian fig tree Ficus bengalensis); it grows over a large area and its roots then give rise to more trunks and branches.  Because of this characteristic and longevity, it is considered immortal and sacred, an integral part of the myths and legends in India where it is, even today, a focal point of village life.  The only thing is, I don’t think this looks like a banyan and I wonder if it’s even a real photo of a real tree.  I think probably not.  Perversely, I still like it.
• This tree is identified by the photographer as “Odd Tree” — it was taken in 2007 and appears to be located in Parque del Retiro in Madrid.  But with the angle of the ground shown, I wonder if perhaps this is a branch, not a tree?  They do have some sculpted cypress trees that make for pretty odd trees — perhaps a part of one of them is in this shot?
• Philippe LePrince, Toutes ses.  The picture is apparently called Sécheresse (“dryness”).  That’s all I know.  I’m going with “real” on this one.  (But did it grow like that on its own?)

Three Female Celebrities

1. Matt Damon attended Cambridge Rindge & Latin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduating in 1988.
2. Harrison Ford graduated from Maine Township East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois in 1960.
3. In 1976, George Clooney was a freshman at Augusta High School in Augusta, Kentucky.
4. Diana Spencer has no age given for this photo, but I think she looks about 9 years old, so I’m going with this picture having been taken around 1970 (but I could be wrong).
5. Helena Bonham Carter, actress and wife of director Tim Burton, is great-granddaughter of H H Asquith, UK Prime Minister 1908 — 1916.  Asquith’s daughter Violet (close, lifelong friend of Winston Churchill, who published a book about him in 1965) married Mark Bonham Carter; they had 4 children, including Raymond, Helena’s dad.  Raymond was a merchant banker and alternate UK director representing the Bank of England at the IMF in Washington, DC during the 1960s.  Maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, was a WWII hero: as First Secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Paris, he worked with Portugal to issue more than 30,000 transit visas to Jewish people so they could cross Spain to reach asylum.  When the Spanish Foreign Minister, a Nazi sympathiser, discovered this, he had Eduardo transferred to Morocco.  Helena’s Jewish maternal grandmother, Hélène Fould-Springer, was the daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (French-born banker) and Marie Cecile von Springer (daughter of industrialist Baron Gustav Springer).  Hélène Fould-Springer’s sister was French philanthropist Liliane de Rothschild (1916 – 2003), wife of Baron Élie de Rothschild; her other sister, Therese Fould-Springer, was mother of British writer David Pryce-Jones.  Edward Bonham Carter, Helena’s brother, is a UK financial executive and regularly appears on a BBC finance show.  Cousin Crispin Bonham Carter also acts and has been in Bridget Jones’ Diary, Pride and Prejudice and Absolutely Fabulous.  Another cousin, Jane Bonham Carter, is a British politician.
6. Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah Mitford (the last living Mitford sister) has written a new memoir in which she talks about chickens, her famous siblings, and having tea with Hitler.  Debo’s supposed illiteracy was famous.  [Her sister] teased that she had only ever developed the intellect of a 9-year-old; Evelyn Waugh made her the subject of an elaborate prank: Said Debo, “His new book arrived and I thought how nice and felt rather superior.  NOT BEING A GREAT READER, to get the damned thing straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, so I undid it and read something like 'To Darling Debo, in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion.’  Naturally I didn’t look any further.”  But, said her visitor, “Emma and my wife who were sitting there, bagged it and started to turn the pages which were ALL BLANK, just lovely sheets of paper with gold edges and never a word on one of them.  'That’s the sort of book which suits me down to the ground,’ [Debo maintained].”

The Unusual

1. David Gelernter — “Taken as a whole, the internet is a startlingly complex collection of computers (like brain cells) that are densely interconnected (as brain cells are).  The net grows at many million of points simultaneously, like a living (or more-than-living?) organism.  It’s only natural to wonder whether the internet will one day start to think for itself.  (Or is it thinking already?)  These questions are important not only to the internet but to each individual computer.  The ultimate goal of artificial intelligence is to build a mind out of software, a thinking computer — a machine with human-like (or super-human) intelligence.  A computer-created increase in the world-wide intelligence supply would be useful.  Computers dump huge quantities of information into the cybersphere every day.  Can they also help us evaluate this information intelligently?  Or are they mere uncapped oil wells pumping out cyber-pollution — today, a distraction but it might actually be slowly paralysing us: our choices and information channels are proliferating out of control.  Each of us is surrounded by a growing crowd of computer-paparazzi all shouting questions and waving data simultaneously.  There are no security guards anywhere.  But no computer will be able to think like a man unless it can free-associate, unless it can hallucinate, and unless it can inhabit its thoughts (can disappear into its own mind).  As the philosopher Paul Ziff insisted, “intelligence” can only mean human or human-like.  (We assume an animal’s mind is human-like to the extent that the animal itself seems human-like.)  Some people believe that the internet will develop an entirely new form of intelligence, but this is nonsense — like saying that you’ve discovered a new flavour of chocolate.  The flavour called chocolate is exactly what we say it is — there’s no other definition.  If your “new flavour” tastes like chocolate, it isn’t new; if it doesn’t, it isn’t chocolate.  If your new form of intelligence is human-like, it’s not new.  If it isn’t human-like, it isn’t intelligence.  As far as we know, there’s no way to achieve consciousness on a computer or any collection of computers.  However — and this is the interesting (or dangerous) part — the cognitive spectrum, once we understand its operation and fill in the details, is a guide to the construction of simulated or artificial thought.  We can build software models of consciousness and memory and then set them in rhythmic motion.  The result could be a computer that seems to think.  It would be a zombie (a word philosophers borrowed from science fiction and movies): the computer would have no inner mental world, would in fact be unconscious.  But in practical terms, that would make no difference.  It would ponder, converse and solve problems just as a man would.  And we would have achieved simulated thought.”  Personally, I think major parts of some humans are already simulations at least routinely.  If humans can be part machine, or machine-like at least some of the time, then perhaps machines can manage to be part human, or human-like at least some of the time?
2. Retired US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, in a detailed, candid and critical essay (in a recent New York Review of Books), wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with “regrettable judicial activism,” had created a system of capital punishment shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.  The ex-Justice was explaining why he had reversed his opinion on the desirability of the death penalty between 1976 (when he voted its reinstatement) and 2008 (when he wrote a concurrence saying he had come to believe it unconstitutional).  Stevens’ essay is remarkable in itself.  But it is also a sign that at 90, the author speaks his mind on issues off limits while he was on the court.  During World War II, Justice Stevens served as Navy cryptographer at Pearl Harbor for more than 2 years.  On returning to Hawaii in 1994, he had an emotional reaction to seeing Japanese tourists at a memorial there.  “We shouldn’t allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor,” he remembers thinking.  He added that he understood why some New Yorkers would have a similar reaction to the proposed Islamic centre near ground zero.  “But then, after a period of reflection, some of those New Yorkers may have second thoughts, just as I did.  The Japanese tourists were not responsible for what some of their countrymen did decades ago; the Muslims planning to build the mosque are not responsible for what an entirely different group of Muslims did on 9/11.”  The essay is actually a review of the book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition by David Garland, a professor of law and sociology at New York University.  The book compares American and European approaches to the death penalty, and Justice Stevens appears to accept its major conclusions.
3. Chalmers Ashby Johnson (died November 2010) was an American author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego.  He served in the Korean war, consulted for the CIA 1967 – 1973, and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley 1967 — 1972.  He was president and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute (now at the University of San Francisco), an organisation promoting public education about Japan and Asia.  He wrote numerous books including, most recently, 3 examinations of the consequences of American Empire: Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.  Johnson felt that the enforcement of American hegemony over the world constituted a new form of global empire.  Whereas traditional empires maintain control over subject peoples via colonies, since World War II the US has developed a vast system of hundreds of military bases around the world where it has strategic interests.  A long-time Cold Warrior, Johnson applauded the collapse of the Soviet Union but at the same time experienced a political awakening, noting that instead of demobilising its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political.  The result of this was terrorism against the US and allies, loss of core democratic values at home, and eventual disaster for the American economy.  Specifically, maintaining an empire abroad requires resources and commitments that inevitably undercut domestic democracy and ultimately produce a military (or civilian equivalent) dictatorship.  US founders understood this and tried to prevent this by creating a republic.  But Johnson felt the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, and ruinous military expenses destroyed this republican structure in favour of an imperial presidency.  The US may lose its democracy for the sake of keeping its empire.  Once a nation starts down that path, dynamics applying to all empires come into play — isolation, overstretch, uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy.  Via Tywkiwdbi.
4. Mitsutaka Uchikoshi , 35, was found last October lying in an ice-cold field on Japan’s Rokko Mountain, a bucolic hiking spot north of Kobe.  He was presumed dead as he had no detectable pulse or respiration and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit (21.6 degrees C).  While returning alone from a party on the mountain, he had stumbled and hit his head; he spent the next 24 days sprawled unconscious in the frigid air without food or water.  But when he arrived at Kobe City General Hospital, something remarkable occurred: he woke up.  To the astonishment of doctors who treated him for severe hypothermia and blood loss, Uchikoshi made a full recovery without a trace of brain damage.  “I was in a field, and I felt very comfortable.  That’s my last memory,” he said.  Scientists have long said human hibernation is theoretically possible and could potentially be put to use to slow cell death when treating brain hæmorrhaging and other fatal conditions.  Apparently the trick is being starved of oxygen first.
5. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, head of Shas’s Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator, says that the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.  “Goyim were born only to serve us.  Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the People of Israel,” he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat.  According to him, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity to prevent losses to Jews.  “In Israel, death has no dominion over them…  With gentiles, it will be like any person — they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity.  Why?  Imagine that one’s donkey would die, he’d lose his money.  This is his servant…  That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for his Jew.  Why are gentiles needed?  They work, they plow, they reap.  We will sit like an effendi and eat.  That is why gentiles were created.”  (To me, this sounds a bit like the description of black slaves or of undocumented migrant workers.)  The 90-year-old rabbi’s sermons include many controversial statements.  He recently caused a diplomatic uproar when he wished a plague upon the Palestinian people and their leaders, a curse he retracted a few weeks later, blessing them along with Israel’s other “peace-seeking neighbours”.
6. Ted Bundy — A product of his times?  Infamous crimes almost always raise anxieties of the period in which they occur — what child abductors were to the 1920s and serial killers were to the 1970s and 1980s, terrorists are to the early 21st century.  After the US terrorist attck of 11 September, fear of social unraveling was replaced by anxiety over airplanes, bombs, and instant mass annihilation.  Sensational crimes that don’t play to a larger societal narrative fade away.  In fact, the number of confirmed serial murders in the US declined almost 70% in the past two decades, perhaps because serial killers lost their hold on America’s cultural angst after the 2001 attacks.  (Does this imply that if such crimes aren’t publically reported, they will decrease?)  Ted Bundy confessed to 30 murders, though it is suspected that he committed far more, possibly in excess of 100.

• Skyline (1995) “I remember that I kept thinking, 'If only I could be in the middle of the river on a large enough platform this picture would work.’  Finally we found a barge company in Staten Island which had the perfect barge (a floating dock) that they would tow for us.  Even though I was shooting directly east, I wanted to take a chance and shoot early in the morning; directly into the sun.  Luckily, my favourite weather occurred and I didn’t have to deal with the sun as a heavy mist and grayness had settled in upon us.  As we manœuvered into location, I was informed that the barge could only hold that spot for a few seconds; the current was just too strong.  So while the barge was making large circles, we quickly dressed all the models.  Just as we were finally beginning to get into location, it started to rain harder.”  (The models dressed on a flat barge?  On the Hudson River?  In the rain?  Perhaps they actually earned their salaries that day?)
• Frankfurt Bahnhof — This seems to capture the spirit of train commutes.
• Life in the Desert: 50 Stunning Photographs — I have this personal affinity for the desert.  I’m fascinated.  I love it. — Erika Slezak