Irrational Contagion

Informed, rational debate is a cornerstone of American ideology. The American constitutional republic is a clear implementation of European Enlightenment Rationalist ideals.

Conservatives want government to keep its hands off their Medicare. They're going to get what they asked for and they're not going to like it.



Conservatives claim government can't run anything efficiently, but that government-run healthcare will put private insurers out of business. The healthcare industry seems to be doing just fine despite Medicare and Medicaid; the health care industry is making out like a bandit.

Conservatives criticize Muslims for wanting theocracy, and advocate returning the US to its "Christian roots."

Conservatives think we need to cut back the public sector -- except the military, which at 5% of GDP, is a pretty sizable chunk of the public sector (1/3 of federal spending).

Conservatives claim to oppose subsidies on principle, but promote school vouchers, expect free roads, advocate increased spending on "national security," and hold that corporate welfare is beneficial to ordinary citizens. "National security" is the oldest subsidy program in the United States: 80% of the federal budget under George Washington's administration went to Indian eradication. America was built on subsidies and genocide, not entrepreneurial initiative: railroad subsidies and land grants fueled the Westward expansion, which was more about the advance of technologies like the telegraph than it was about the rugged individualist squaring off against the wilderness. In this sense, conservatives do hold traditional values.

Conservatives believe in traditional values, and uphold entrepreneurs has the epitome of these values, despite the fact that entrepreneurs get ahead by innovating -- that is, overturning tradition. It was the new, urban, bourgeoisie that displaced the feudal system in the Middle Ages, and it was the bourgeoisie that overthrew the monarchy in the 18th Century. Capitalism is the enemy of tradition.

Conservatives want competition, which is unpredictable if it is fair; and they also want stability in the markets to guarantee a return on their investments. They blame regulation for causing "uncertainty," despite the fact that accepting risk is a central feature of entrepreneurialism, which they hold to be quintessentially American.

Conservatives oppose stem cell research because it destroys embryos, but have no problem with fertility clinics, which also destroy embryos.

Conservatives oppose biological Darwinism, but embrace social Darwinism.

Conservatives claim to be religious, but have no compassion for the poor or the sick. They believe we're all sinners, and that we need laws like the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule to guide our behavior; but somehow, we're more trustworthy where large sums of money are involved, and industry suffers from too much regulation.

Conservatives want government to stay out of business, but expect their elected officials to create private sector jobs.

Conservatives oppose "activist judges," but uphold an individual right to bear arms, which is the result of "activist judges." Conservatives often ignore the first clause in the Second Amendment, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State," which, as a preamble, serves the purpose of a legal "whereas" clause. If there is an individual right to bear arms, it is the result of "activist judges." They support the NRA as though it were a civil rights organization, when in fact, it is an industry trade group.

Conservatives disdain the mainstream media, but cultishly adhere to the Fox News worldview -- the most watched cable news channel -- part of a multi-billion dollar media empire, including the Wall Street Journal.

Conservatives want lower taxes so they can "starve the beast," but disparage anybody who is too poor to pay federal income tax.

Conservatives claim to love the Constitution, but despise the federal government.

Conservatives claim to love liberty and marriage, but want to dismantle the Bill of Rights for the sake of national security, and refuse to let gay couples marry.

Conservatives point to dysfunctional government as evidence that government itself is a threat, but would never point to the contemporary rise in divorce rates as evidence that the institution of marriage is a problem that should be abolished.

Anything follows from a contradiction. Even though conservatives believe that their positions represent established, well-reasoned principles, they are conditioned by the media to exhibit knee-jerk reactions in response to stock key phrases. With respect to the vehemence with which conservatives advocate their positions, it is worth noting that hardly anybody ever actually sees the people they elect; voters give authority to "personalities" constructed through the media. The media then uses the authority of these constructed personalities to further shape the behaviors and attitudes of voters.

Reacting to an Epidemic Violence

The reporting around the horrific events at Northwestern Illinois University has, as in past school shootings, focused on the grief of families, biographical details about the suicide shooter, and the tangental issues of gun control, emergency safety procedures, and how society should perceive those with mental illness. It is certainly reasonable enough that reporting should cover these topics, but there are other issues just as much in the public interest.

Many of the shootings that become national events are not presented in a national context, despite commanding national attention. With over 20,000 gun homicides annually in the United States, there are certainly scores of similarly grieving families who do not get a national audience for their suffering, nor a national discussion of the conditions surrounding their personal tragedies.

How does the media choose which events to make into a national spectacle? The answer is not clear, but I think it's reasonable to suppose the decision-making bears a strong relation to what news management thinks consumers and advertisers want to hear about, and what sorts of lessons journalists and officials want to teach.

The narrative is that our society is changing in disturbing and dramatic ways, and that these events are evidence that, among other things, radical security measures are in order.

In this most recent instance, we are told the shooter recently discontinued his psychiatric medication. It is unlikely that discussion of this fact will touch upon why we decide certain thoughts and behaviors indicate a mental illness, or why we should not be at liberty to determine our own brain chemistries (even though corporations can patent our genes).

Perhaps these events are more likely to grab our attention when a shooter ends a rampage with a suicide. There are a number of reasons this should be especially startling to Americans: the perpetrator escapes judicial retribution; the shooter doesn't care about heroism -- however deluded such a conception of heroism might be -- and doesn't appear to be motivated by anything resembling a clear ideology (except perhaps the most brooding, escapist sort of nihilism -- although this shooter seems to have been dedicated to working for public welfare programs). Many people passionately believe suicide is a sin. And there's a frightening -- if not subconsciously-perceived -- similarity to the suicide attacks that we hear about in Iraq.

What could promote those feelings of helplessness here in America which one might otherwise presume to find among suicide bombers over there in Iraq, where citizens have been brutalized for decades by dictatorship, sanctions, war, and occupation? We live in a first-world nation, not a war zone.

To me, it is frighteningly indicative of what despairs such a shooter might have felt when I consider what it might mean to starving or homeless families that 50% of the world's military spending is by America's 5% of the world's population; or what it means to disenfranchised voters or children missing a parent that the United States has as many people behind bars as China and Russia combined. How many people are trapped in indentured servitude to pay off student loans, credit debt, or bad mortgages? How many people lost their retirement when they were laid off, when the dot-com bubble burst, when Enron imploded, when the housing market crumbled? How many people work two jobs but still can't make ends meet? What would the inflation rate be if food and fuel costs were factored in?

Why should anybody be made to feel like a piece of meat manipulated by some bean-counter somewhere with a spreadsheet?

Where I live, televisions have recently been installed on the city busses. There are three televisions on each bus; typical programming on these televisions includes yesterday's weather, news and entertainment headlines, 3-minute cooking shows, inane word puzzles, and an occasionally-crippled route map. And advertisements: frequently for no-name companies asking you to text them arbitrary strings of numbers from your cellphone.

These televisions also speak and play music over the bus's intercom, making it difficult to read a book. The exterior of the busses are sometimes painted over with advertisements, so it's difficult to even look out the windows. You can talk on a cellphone if you talk loud enough so nobody else can think.

On its website, the company responsible for the televisions boasts to prospective advertisers:

"Transit TV's unique medium and compelling programming offer a truly captive audeince [sic.] -- no channel changing, no DVR's -- maximum impact for your message."

A truly captive audience: yes, we are treated as captives even on our way home from work. This is how we are regarded by those who fight for our eyeballs, our pocketbooks, our hearts and our minds.

Although we are raised to believe we live in a republic governed by law-abiding and democratically-elected representatives, we often find ourselves voiceless, powerless, repressed or ignored. Our minds have been occupied and our bodies entrapped: we must try not to be personally offended by affronts to our dignity perpetrated by systemic blindnesses, even as we are systematically alienated -- by identity politics, psychoanalysis, bureaucracies, and institutions -- from the effects of our own lives and from the most profound questions of self-determination from the time we become old enough to think a bit for ourselves.

Politicians rarely speak about citizens any longer -- we are more important as consumers: corporatist serfs rather than citizen electors. We are only seen insofar as we are seen as consumers: predictable statistical constructs defined by feudal corporations. The role of our legislature has been relegated to managing our demographics for the corporate policy-makers, in strict accordance with the tyranny of statisticians and bureaucrats trained in the blind rituals of quantitative reasoning. Our strings are tugged by nationalist rhetoric in the interest of multinational corporations who owe no national allegiances whatsoever.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher in large part responsible for our modern conception of a constitutional republic, suggested that "the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery."

Psychological captivity would seem to be a complex pathology. We see the symptoms more clearly than the cause: the language of disease is familiar, the image plain. We can readily find ways to identify with those who are victimized by straightforward afflictions.

It is easier to identify with young university students filled with potential than it is to identify with the Afghan children about whom General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, remarked: "It is unfortunate that the cluster bombs -- the unexploded ones -- are the same color as the food packets. Unfortunately, they get used to running to yellow."

Even as we offer our sympathies to the victims of this awful crime, and the families of the victims, we should keep in mind that our public discourse about these events will leave important questions unasked -- or decided by numbers long after this story has left the headlines, or incoherent amidst a multitude of obscure details.

The causes for such events are complex, and the despair that makes such actions seem reasonable is not limited to sensational expressions of destructive discontent. We are not made aware of these events for objective or disinterested reasons, nor because it is in each of our best interest to have accounts of such events periodically thrust before us.

Somehow the failure to understand these things is our own failure -- for these events were not random, but rather, performed in a deliberate fashion. Yet the meaning escapes us, and we find only the fierce competition among those who would tell us what this all means. And should this have truly been a random occurrence, for all our analysis it may not in the end be possible for us to know any more sense in these horrors than any among those who witnessed them first-hand.

As we offer up our sympathies to those who have suffered here, we should remember that the shooter too was human and deserving of our sympathies, as this would seem to have been an individual tormented in some way -- whose last thoughts were some terminal nightmare, and whose parting deeds defy all logic. And yet, we can't rightly say what this man will find in the next world.

And though he may not see judicial retribution, we must also remember that justice is not the same as retribution, but rather, that harmony which makes retribution unnecessary.

The rapid police response at Northwestern Illinois University should demonstrate this is not at its core an enforcement issue, but some social problem that is not being adequately addressed in our public discourse. Perhaps the social problem is not that too many people can buy guns, but that too many people want to buy guns. Perhaps the fault here is not with numbers or procedures, but with where we look for faults in the first place.

Practical Electromagnetic Mood Management

How might covert interests acting as a parasite within an authoritarian regime -- with access to trillions of military research dollars annually -- construct a centrally-directed, practical, electromagnetic mood manipulation apparatus that can be implemented by distributed means?

I'm going to sketch something out for you step-by-step:

Spend some time at www.aolstalker.com, and think about whether it's not a little bit like reading somebody else's mind. Then think about what commercial advertisers and the National Security Agency are doing with your searches, and think about the possibility of electromagnetic Google Advertising for the psyche.

What sorts of electromagnetic fields might be useful in this context?

To start thinking about this, we have to first understand something called "stochastic interference." In this context, its relevance is related to the idea that discrete randomness can create the appearance of global statistical continuity.

Here's a useful analogy:


1. We know that some types of electromagnetic radiation cause cancer

2. We know that the radiation from powerlines probably doesn't cause cancer

However, we also know that:

3. The radiation from powerlines (in the countryside and in your walls) is pervasive

4. The radiation from powerlines is not EXACTLY 60hz


Point 4. is important. If we view the 60hz Alternating Current on the power lines as a signal, we must recognize that there will be some noise on the line. Because the electrons "traveling" down the power lines interact with the material of the powerlines, the powerlines will resonate at different frequencies. The 60hz AC signal will bleed into other frequencies.

So we can accept points 1. and 2. above, but we should also ask: can we get cancer from the radiation emitted by power lines PLUS all the other sources of electromagnetic radiation in our environment? Can the radiation from powerlines interact with LOCAL radiation sources to produce cancer-causing radiation?

Scientists who study "stochastic interference" study these sorts of problems.

So what sorts of electromagnetic fields might be useful for practical electromagnetic mood management?

It turns out that there are all sorts of devices in your environment that can produce very specific types of electromagnetic radiation, which can be made to stochastically interact with a global signal.

Tempest for Eliza, a piece of open source Linux software, will allow you to use a conventional CRT monitor to broadcast an AM radio signal. You can broadcast MP3's to your radio from your computer monitor!

Now think about how close people sit to computer monitors all day, and examine some of the patents recently issued to Hendricus Loos.

Now imagine the capbilities of the previous two links delivered to you in secret (either as a virus like the FBI's Carnivore system, or else built into your commercial software at the request of a central government).

What would the goal of such a system be?

Well, think about clocks. We often think about clocks as tools used to measure out the day. But from the perspective of systems theory, clocks are also a way to synchronize the behavior of large numbers of humans, who are not otherwise in direct contact with oneanother. Clocks are pretty amazing, really.

We all know we've found all sorts of great uses for clocks. They're especially good for industrialists.

Systems theory tells us that many diverse types of organized systems can be found to exhibit the same mathematical behaviors. The math for thermodynamics, optics, entropy, and image compression is all related.

I wonder what other sorts of uses the NSA has for this patent on synchronization methodology.

How might electromagnetic radiation be put into the environment in sufficient quantities and with sufficient control to affect a mass manipulation of mood?

It turns out that there are all sorts of suitable facilities under the control of central governments. Consider the US Government using HAARP and ELF transmitters such as that at Clam Lake to broadcast a range of acceptable mood alterations. Devices in your local environment with processing capabilities, such as your cellphone or your computer, may then generate radiation that cancels out or enhances certain resonances in the ambient environment. The appropriate signal for a local device to generate can be selected algorithmically according to your Internet browsing behavior.

Regarding the Implications of MySpace Link Filtering

Perhaps the days of the "Googlebomb" are drawing to a close.

MySpace has begun to re-code outbound links from user pages in an effort to mask the URL to which these links refer.

Outbound links from MySpace pages are being redirected through www.msplinks.com in a move that is perhaps related to MySpace's recent advertising agreement with Google, and directed towards ensuring that MySpace spam doesn't interfere with Google's PageRank algorithm.

People who have grown up with Google might not recognize what a dramatic improvement it represented, compared to earlier Internet search engines. Previous to Google, many search engines essentially ordered results according to the frequency with which a user's search phrase appeared on indexed pages. Yahoo, the pre-Google Internet search authority, wasn't strictly a search engine, but took a "brute force" approach to presenting the Internet in an ordered manner (focusing its efforts on creating a human-edited directory, rather than on developing sophisticated algorithms for sorting indexed pages).

Before long, spammers learned to exploit the page-sorting algorithms commonly used by search engines by filling pages with invisible text that wasn't really relevant to a user's query.

In response, various improvements were made to popular methods of relevance ranking. But the big breakthrough in Internet search technology responsible for Google's success was really a psychological insight.

The basic psychological assumption that underlies Google's PageRank algorithm is that humans defer to authority; the more humans defer to a particular source, the more authoritative that source is considered to be. Thus, the page that comes up first in a Google search is the page that has the most pages linking to it under a given search phrase. Each time a page links to another, that link is considered a vote in favor of viewing the link's destination as authoritative.

Thus, the ability of MySpace spammers to produce large numbers of links that are indexed by Google represents a threat to Google's (economically successful) definition of authority.

The point of indexing and algorithmically analyzing web pages for the purposes of an Internet search is to uncover patterns in the collected data. Search engines seek to identify the same types of patterns that human cognition would identify. In a very direct sense, Google's algorithm can be viewed as a statistical description of certain aspects of human behavior. And what is dangerous about the MySpace link redirection scheme is that it seeks to "edit" the observable results of human behavior in order to make the collected data fit the mathematical descriptions upon which Google's business model is based.

Whether this is evidence of a central authority administered by distributed means or is evidence of an "invisible hand" may become clear insofar as whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.

The benefits of such a scheme to a central authority should be evident to anybody sufficiently acquainted with distributed systems, cognitive science, systems theory, or the current political situation in the United States. If the emergent features of Google's algorithms can be considered as presenting authoritative accounts of opinion (as in the case of the "failure" Googlebomb) as well as authoritative accounts of fact, then the manipulation of the algorithm may be able to effect the manipulation of opinion (and thereby, the perception of fact).

If MySpace spam is a problem for Google, wouldn't it be easier for Google to exclude MySpace profiles, and index only official MySpace content? Is Google's advertising agreement with MySpace a buyout, rich-guys-scratching-eachother's-backs-and-the-public-good-be-damned, or subsidized (directly or indirectly) by interests in the US central government?

The significance of MySpace link redirection may be more subtle, however. This may be evidence of "flocking behavior" among powerful corporations, whose behavior is entangled with and constrained by political interests. The financial interests of various types of organizations may be converging on certain types of social interaction.

It is also important to consider whether such a link redirection scheme can be used as a form of censorship.

However one wishes to account for the appearance of this practice in our present online environment, it will be vitally important for the preservation of personal liberty that those private individuals whose trade subsists in free expression - everybody from the scientist to the artist - be allowed to carry out his or her work in the absence of censorship. Developments in online communications are having a profound impact on culture and social organization. Censorship has a ripple effect in these types of social systems.

In any event, it will be important to watch whether or how such link redirection schemes proliferate.

The Weaponization of the Magnetosphere

I recently came across some lumbering bit of bureaucratese called "Radiation Belt Remediation."

Previously, I had only heard the word "remediation" used in the sense "to repair," as in "environmental remediation," and so my first thought was some concern that, like our air, fields, and waters, we screwed everything up real good in our magnetosphere too.

There seems to be an aspect of doublespeak in this term, however. An article called The Atmospheric Implications of Radiation Belt Remediation implies that “Radiation Belt Remediation (RBR)” describes "studies...being undertaken to bring about practical human control of the radiation belts."

The charged particles in our upper atmosphere have been the object of scientific and military research for many years. Projects from Starfish Prime to HAARP have sought to understand and manipulate various properties of the Earth's electromagnetic fields.

But it would appear that RBR is not so much a "program" as a "doctrine" or a "goal." Institutional goals and doctrines have a strange life of their own: a new President every 4-8 years has little effect on most of the day-to-day functioning of the government; a lot of bureaucrats spend their whole lives behind the same desk.

Because it is not a program, but rather a more general sort of institutional goal, it is an organizing principle for many programs. There are all sorts of studies underway at various facilities around the world probing various aspects of the earth's electromagnetic fields.

I suspect that facilities like HAARP and the Clam Lake ELF transmitter work in concert, using constructive and destructive interference to generate local effects from global signals. That is, I suspect these facilities function together as a system - like a radio telescope array - about which different researchers make different types of observations.

I imagine some scientists use this system to influence the magnetosphere, to observe and model how the magnetosphere responds. They probably use all sorts of advanced computing technologies in the process. There are probably lots and lots of military dollars involved in many different places, with dual-use projects left and right.

The military is clearly interested in the ability to manipulate the earth's electromagnetic fields. What, specifically, might the military's interest be?

It turns out there are all sorts of military applications for the earth's electromagnetic fields.

The most straightforward application is communications: a part of the atmosphere can be used as a temporary antenna in much the same way as the ionization trail of a meteorite can be used as a temporary antenna. The advantage of such a technology has to do with security: if an adversary doesn't know where a signal is going to come from, it is more difficult to detect and decode that signal.

Some applications have to do with defense ("defense" in a literal sense, not in the American sense in which "defense" is a euphemism for "war"). If you can focus a large amount of energy at one place in the atmosphere, you can use this energy to heat a column of air. Such a mechanism may be sufficient to disrupt the course of a ballistic missile.

Some applications have to do with offense. A powerful, focused, electromagnetic pulse can disrupt communications or disable a power grid. Some applications may be oriented towards the weaponization of space.

Beyond the twisted irony in the doublespeak of the word "remediation" in this case, I find it extremely troubling the extent to which persons in my government are willing to turn EVERYTHING AROUND ME into a weapon.

Does anybody know who these people are and why they should be trusted? Do they really know what their experiments are doing to our planet?

In Praise of Hippasus, His Turn in the Endless Golden Braid

From the Proceedings of the Invisible Order of the Pythagorean Hydra 314.

Why the President is a Puppet

To understand why the President is a puppet, it is important to think of the President as primarily a communications hub. The volume of sensitive information passing across the President's desk makes the President a valuable intelligence-gathering target.

This is why the President is always surrounded by so many people: it is important to pass information directly from person to person because, for many communications, the use of communications technology is a counter-intelligence liability.

The President probably doesn't carry a cellphone all that often. Since the FBI can access your cellphone's GPS chip, or can remotely activate the microphone, so can some disgruntled Nokia or AT&T employee. The President needs to have many person-to-person communications for security reasons.


The content of the communications with which the President is entrusted contain implicit or explicit instructions regarding how the President ought to behave. Either a piece of information is not to be divulged, or it may only be divulged under certain circumstances. Every communication the President receives says either "do this" or "don't do this," and the President is entrusted with skillfully discerning and faithfully following these instructions.

In many instances, specific phraseology is important. Between the nuances of jargon, inner-circle meetings, and the spin-doctor's propaganda marketing prescription, one word or a few letters can make a world of difference to different people. "At the end of the day," "make no mistake," "going forward," "support the troops," "family values" -- people pledge allegiance to these terms. The President needs to identify which phrases serve as proper nouns, which as verbs, which as convenience, which as ornament; and the President needs to know how to act accordingly.

In many instances, the President may not know what a specific phrase means to a specific group of people, although the phrase may fit quite comfortably inside a sentence of otherwise ordinary speech. The President just follows orders. It was no excuse at Nuremberg, but it's how our present government operates. This is why third-party candidates have difficulty breaking into Washington politics: third-party candidates are outsiders who don't know what phrases motivate various interests, or which phrases tell various interests "I understand what you really want, and I'll help you get it." The consolidation and perpetuation of this pass-phrase system is why the central government seeks to expand its influence into local realms.

Most of the Administration doesn't turn over every four years. The phraseology and popular parlance of various departments have a life of their own, to which any new President must adapt. The concept of "Homeland Security" was already in use among various military circles in the 1990's. This is a concept which has lived in the Administration for years. Sami G. Hajjar discusses "homeland defense" in the 1998 report, "Security Implications of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East." The Department of Defense Advanced Concepts Technology Demonstration program proposed the Homeland Security Command and Control several months prior to September 11, 2001. Although I can't recall ever thinking of my country as my "Homeland" until after 911, it would seem a good number of military professionals have been working out this doctrine for some time. The Department of Homeland Security is not something the President thought up in a pinch, it is something the President assembled for entrenched political interests. The President may not be fully aware of the scope of the communications he issues, but one thing is clear: whenever the President talks about "homeland security," there are groups of people all over the place who behave according to decades of doctrinal development.

And so the puppet is also a puppeteer, albeit one with a limited understanding of the drama that is unfolding. And so this is why a Washington outsider would serve the American people better than a career politician from the ranks of the political aristocracy: an effective outsider would need to ask all sorts of people what they mean when they speak, whereas a Crown Prince who has lived his life immersed in the secret incantations need not understand them to see how they are used.

Surveillance Society for Fun and Profit

I'm looking at this satellite image from Google of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and it occurs to me this world must be totally mad. 8-year-olds have access to technologies that, 50 years ago, only the CIA had.

I call up D to express my utter amazement at the state of affairs here in this Earth-World, and he replies quite casually that it's because the people in charge fear no man or woman.

What will you, human, be able to do in 50 years with your computer? This is a good question to ask when you wish to consider what your government can do with their computers today.

Consider street-level surveillance. The new Google Street View is provoking all sorts of reactions, ranging from fascination with the new feature's novelty to outrage at the new feature's intrusiveness. The ability of governments to surveil citizens at the street-level far surpasses what is offered by Google Street View.

Imagine typing any person's name into a database, and automatically being able to watch him or her everywhere he or she goes. All those private surveillance cameras everywhere - in ATMs, in stores, in bars and resturaunts - are not so private. All electronic devices give off electromagnetic radiation that can be detected and decoded. All those private surveillance cameras are really un-secure wireless cameras. It is possibe to geolocate an individual camera based on slight differences in the time at which its signal is detected at different locations. This geolocation information can be correlated with the GPS data transmitted by your cellphone tracking device.

Whether a scheme like this is currently in use or not, it is not far-fetched. Authoritarian regimes have an interest in making the populace at all times aware of the possibility of surveillance. If nothing else, this makes the populace more likely to self-censor.

Of course, many people are not too worried about the threat of constant surveillance. Many people break no laws. This is fine.

But if we are, in fact, watched so closely, it is because we are managed like cattle.

The War in Iraq is a Decoy

We are told that the War on Terror is a New Kind of War, and that the War in Iraq is the central front in this War.

Why is it, then, that our government and our media go to such great lengths to paint us a picture of a conventional war, when we are in reality engaged with an unconventional enemy?

The War in Iraq has nothing to do with the War on Terror, except insofar as it serves to distract the public from the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, and from the careful establishment of legal precedents by a rogue Administration bent on paving the way for Fascist rule.

One advantage of this approach is the fragmentation of opposition. We have been told there would be more fierce opposition to the War on Iraq were there a draft; we are not often told that the War on Terror does, in fact, have a draft.

One reason we have not heard more about the War on Terror's draft is that those who are drafted are not allowed to discuss it. This means that the 150,000 or so persons who have received national security letters since the start of the Iraq War, and who have been compelled to become agents of the national intelligence infrastructure, are silent warriors in this New Kind of War, with no citizens to rally around them.

Who are these people? What are their duties? To whom do their duties pertain?

We cannot know the answers to these questions. How then can we know that the Constitution is being upheld? How can we be informed voters, or claim to participate in a Democracy with our votes?

Failure in Iraq?

Our multi-headed National Strategy for Victory in Iraq is organized around "Eight Pillars." These "Eight Pillars" represent distinct strategic objectives, each with a "corresponding interagency working group."

Considering that Islam is defined in large part by a doctrine called "The Five Pillars," I fear it may be difficult to underestimate the negative impact of this verbiage in our battle to win the "hearts and minds" of the Muslim world. Islam, according to Huston Smith, "joins faith to politics, religion to society, inseparably."

Are "The Eight Pillars" of our National Strategy some bit of cultural insensitivity, or worse yet, a sick joke by the planners of this occupation? It would seem, if nothing else, the use of such religiously-loaded language is profoundly unhelpful in the context of a religio-political people under military occupation, as the Qur'an states: "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256).

Imagine how you would feel if a foreign occupation of our country was guided by "The Thirteen Commandments."

Paul Wolfowitz has asserted that our mission in Iraq is "not a crusade," although we can perhaps forgive those in the Middle East who may believe otherwise: our President has himself used that very term, and the Administration consistently frames the violence as religiously-motivated, even as we push our "Eight Pillars" on these people. Our strategy to "isolate enemy elements from those who can be won over to the political process by countering false propaganda" would seem to amount to imposing a heretical doctrine on a subjugated people, while marketing this heresy as salvation.

Although we undoubtedly possess the raw military strength to "bomb Iraq back into the stone age," such a move would be politically suicidal for much of Washington. As General David Patraeus put it, "there is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq." At present, we would seem also to lack a viable diplomatic or political approach.

Among the top goals of the National Strategy is the reform of Iraq's economy, "which in the past has been shaped by war, dictatorship, and sanctions." The United States of America is in no small part responsible for the war, dictatorship, and sanctions that shaped Iraq's economy in the past, and we have done almost nothing to bring about meaningful reform. We have only brought more war, caused more damage to Iraq's infrastructure, and propped up a puppet government in a fortress far removed from Iraq's citizenry.

While the politicians in Washington warn us against the risk of failure in Iraq, it is important to recognize that our present conflict is itself an acknowledgment of our previous Iraq policy's failure. This acknowledgment compounds the failure of our previous policy by failing to rectify our previous mistakes.

We need to dramatically alter our direction if we are to stop compounding our own mistakes. Our current policy is simply to add fuel to the fire and stir the pot.

A Poem for Lulabell, Sweet Petunia

green to the cripple’s wilderness,
a newcomer sees ash as soil...

where abominations of
animate stone lie senseless
before the sea, far beyond the
deep worn grooves tread into
the earth by the sleepwalkers
muttering in their sleep, as if
to their sleeping brethren,
following one another endlessly
past the same dark horizon...

were the moon to rise, they
would follow its light away
from the sun, if only to prove
what others before them
have proved perfectly well.

just one could stop and hold
up an eternity, cause endless
marchers to climb up out of
their trenches, bring them

to stand at the threshold of the
mechanical hall of mirrors, to
listen casually as the crack
of doom shocks the airwaves.

when the wise man blames
the fool, and the fool does
blame the wise man, leaving
each to babble oath below
the burning rivers,

as many living souls as leaves
on trees shall yield their hold
on boughs and through the
early frost of autumn fall,

blind prey unto the blue-eyed
terror between the framers
of meanings, formless
yet everywhere, animate
amidst the static emblems
of a virus creed...

until some of the morning, when
broken records of phantom
histories might yield a strange
light falling, symmetries of the devil
and the emergent efficiencies
of flame...

weaving silence and discourse
while white snow flies in midsummer,
and the moon ablaze in the water
at noon sows discord from the
only sounds after prayer.

for only sound remains, a melody
amidst the machine and my
heartbeat, a shock of thunder
to disturb the haunted church
music infused with a pious fury

at the inarticulate dementia
that is salvation for the blind,

who demand that time shall
yield to the sufficient and convenient
brutalities of our profane sciences
of need...

leaving a trail of puberties and
constellations across surrendered
visions of extroverted rodents,

all their conscientious fascinations
and inhuman suppositions, weather
forecasts, divinations, and salient
tenderness abandoned for an
abyss that dissipates gradually...

enduring in silence or ignorance
the midnight bloom of the saintly
mathematician’s treatise on the soul,

a concrete echo set free from
the ghostly image of the builder,
slain by the architect’s hand.

once more these vacant dreams
abide beside the grotesque adornments
of perverse determinations, delights in
slights and envies, indulgent to no end...

such that only those overcome by the
opaque terrors of conviction remain,
befriended to the tangled mountains,
like sculptures, when toppled by the wind.

What Are We Really Doing in Iraq?

The Admministration has given the Citizenry of the United States of America varied and malleable rationale for our invasion and occupation of Iraq, ranging from false pretenses to revisionist propaganda.

While the Executive refuses to relinquish its ideological crusade, and the Legislature squabbles over the political ramifications of sparing thousands upon thousands of soldiers and civilians unnecessary suffering, We Citizens, strong-armed into funding this war, are deprived by Our Federal Government of all but the most basic figures regarding the true human and economic costs of this man-made disaster.

The Administration and its Neocon allies have played the Press like a fiddle, and the Press has obediently followed along.

Who really benefits from this war? Is it really right to view the Iraq conflict as "a war" in the singular sense of the word?

Are We an occupying force confronting a nationalist insurgency?

Are We fighting terrorists in the Global War on Terror?

Are We fighting a proxy war in an ideological standoff with Iraq's neighbors?

Are We peacekeepers working to quell sectarian violence?

Are We a police force suppressing opportunist criminals?

Are We liberators there to cast off Sunni fascists?

Are We a scapegoat for Shi'ite bitterness after the 1991 uprising?

Are We in the middle of a pan-national conflagration of Anti-American Arabs upset about the situation in Palestine?

What We are doing in Iraq?

When Our Government fails to give Us clear answers, We often turn to the free Press. Yet We must be wary that, if the fallout from the recent Walter Reed scandal is to serve as an indication of a free Press's power, it must also serve to warn Us of the power of a manipulated Press.

As so many of Us watch in horror and dismay while the Administration discusses open war with Iran, We, as Citizens, must take it upon ourselves to write Our Press, Our Senators, and Our Congressional Representatives; it is not enough to vote periodically. We must clearly express Our feelings about the current state of affairs, demand forthright governance, and prompt action. And as We find Ourselves in the midst of a psychological war waged against Us by the Administration, We must seek out alternative sources of information with which to arm Ourselves against that most potent weapon, ignorance.

On the Importance of Media Literacy

We teach our children to spell, we teach them to take tests, we teach them about the imperceptible atoms and molecules that make up the material of our world, and yet we teach them next to nothing about the media that saturates their daily lives.

Who has Tom Cruise married most recently? How many children does Britney Spears have? Why do we know these things and how does this knowledge affect us?

What does it mean to see, every evening, all the conflicting interests of television programs and commercial advertisements juxtaposed one against the other for hours on end?

I firmly believe that, even as we teach our children the language of daily discourse, it is equally important to teach them the language of motion pictures.

Much of our cultural discourse is carried out in this second language, and given the number of television outlets in our country -- in homes, in bars, in storefronts, on busses, and now on telephones and computer screens -- literacy in this second language is more important than ever to appreciate the responsibilities of citizenship and informed consumer behavior.

The basic language of the motion picture dates to Soviet times: the montage theory of Sergei Eisenstein is the foundation of almost every edited motion picture sequence. His theory was built upon the work of Lev Kuleshov, who was in turn deeply influenced by Ivan Pavlov's view of Behaviorist psychology.

These names are a part of history, but they also live with us every day. These names are as important to understanding our culture as the names of Plato, Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These names have shaped our civilization in dramatic ways.

We now live in an age when multinational corporations, who pledge no national allegiances whatsoever, depend on Eisenstein, Kuleshov, and Pavlov for their revenue as much as they depend on Henry Sheffer and Alan Turing for the ability to manufacture consumer electronics. As citizens and consumers, we must ensure that all of our children share an equal entitlement to the heritage of these names, that these names do not remain the sole purview of the profiteers behind the curtain of our collective televised understanding.

As much as we depend on John Locke for our concept of liberty, and as much as we depend on Mahatma Gandhi to inspire us to struggle for peace, we depend on our educational institutions to provide our children with the means to succeed in this world. While we concern ourselves that no child be left behind in our schools, we must concern ourselves with a literacy of media, lest we leave behind a whole generation. As it stands, there are few teachers who understand the language of the media, and this is to the great detriment of our nation.

Rationale for the Iraq War

One reason President Bush gave as justification for an invasion of Iraq was the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein would give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda.

Our inability to locate these weapons is often attributed to a failure of intelligence. However, the threat of Saddam Hussein giving WMDs to terrorists represents a deliberate effort to mislead the American public.

The most obvious problem with the Administration's rationale is that Al Qaeda viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy. Saddam Hussein was the head of a secular regime, which did not require women to wear a burka and which allowed women to go to college.

Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was a dictator, and a dictatorship is about control. Why would a dictator in possession of a WMD yield control of such a device by giving it to an enemy?

Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before we invaded, and we are now deploying the same types of weapons on the battlefield which we, as grounds for our invasion, accused Iraq of attempting to acquire. This is untenable. Our colonial occupying force is actively breeding the very sentiment we ostensibly sought to confront.

While we worry about the rise of Fascism abroad, we omit the threat of Fascism in our Homeland (Fatherland, Motherland). We must be vigilant against Fascism both here and abroad.

Taxation Without Representation

The reason the National Security Agency wants to read your email is because they are trying to use algorithms to detect terrorist activity. This invasion of privacy is based on the assumption that terrorists use the Internet in ways that are statistically distinct from the ways ordinary Americans use the Internet. In order to statistically detect online terrorist activity, the governmet needs a large sample of "normal" Internet use.

Although this may seem reasonable when we are confronted with an indistinct enemy, fighting on ill-defined battlefields, this really amounts to an unconstitutional indirect tax. Just as the Federal government incorporated FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security to hide the cost of creating the largest bureaucracy in the history of civilization, the government's use of private citizens' Internet service for surveillance purposes is used to hide the true cost of the War on Terror.

When the government compels private corporations to comply with national security directives, without compensating these corporations for the cost of implementing such directives, the cost is passed on to consumers.

Because the Administrative branch of government refuses to inform Congress as to the nature of these programs, these programs amount to taxation without representation.

Beyond violating the 4th Amendment right to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, this practice also violates the 5th Amendment, by effectively situating military operatives within private homes, taking private property for public use, and opening up the potential to compel private citizens to, in effect, unwittingly testify against themselves. Not only do these practices appropriate private citizens into the Federal intelligence infrastructure without compensation, but citizens are furthermore charged for this.

Our current Administration has a constitutional duty to either halt these programs, or to fully inform Congress as to their nature. In lieu of such disclosures, we as citizens have a duty to remove these criminals from office.

Art is Not the Tablescraps of Commerce.

Julio García Espinosa has argued against the refined “reactionary” arts, and for a revolutionary art which is “no longer interested in quality or technique.” By this he does not mean to assert that aesthetics should not be a concern for those devoted to artistic exploration, but rather, that an aesthetics of “art for art’s sake” is insufficient when confronted with an aesthetics of hunger.

Espinosa recognizes that art possesses “its own cognitive power,” while asserting that this power resides not in elite academies, but in art’s potential to express the diversity of culture as a whole. He rejects claims that art must be seen as either “committed” or otherwise, purposeful or self-serving, and suggests that art might be liberated from these arguments if it is viewed as an activity fundamental to daily life.

Only if art is regarded as a life activity, produced by all for the appreciation of all, can it be a pure and uncommitted activity, while at the same time serving to further revolution.

Only if every man and woman has incentive to become a man or woman “of culture” can the artist be freed of struggling at the margins of society, and thereby allow art to diffuse from the domain of the elite to the domain of the many. Because revolution is an ongoing process – one which is never complete – revolutionary art ought to address itself to this incompletion. An art wholly entrenched in timeless institutions cannot change as culture changes. Only a popular art can do this: an art which fails to engage the popular idiom will fail to reveal the processes by which a society expresses and transforms itself. At the same time, it should be noted that a revolutionary art demands an awareness of the materialist histories against which the reactionary arts define themselves.

A revolutionary art is an assertion of Life. Art is a basic human activity, like eating, sleeping, or making tools. Only when it is controlled by elites does it only yield its pleasures by engaging “the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity.” Such a condition undermines the role of art as a basic human activity. The elites who control distribution thereby dictate the terms of production, and transform art into employment. When art is regarded by industrialist societies as employment, it becomes subject to Fordist pressures to specialize; a specialized art as employment demands the full devotion of an artist, too often to the exclusion of other human endeavor.

The dissolution of contemporary controls over the means of artistic production and distribution demands not just a democratization of these means, but also a decentralization of them. Art must be free to express what it finds wherever it finds it, and must not be relegated to illustrating statements that “can also be expressed through philosophy, sociology, [or] psychology.”

To the industrialist, an artist engaged in developing a style is engaged in a process of branding his or her self. The industrial artist cultivates an image, and uses this image to engage the markets of spectacle.

To give one’s image to commerce is to surrender control of how one’s image is used. This is the basis of the commercial arts. To use images for commerce is often to analyze, reduce, and reproduce them, appropriating conventions from the fine arts.

The commercial potential of art relies upon the conventions of the fine arts, which supply the commercial arts with the material history by which artistic expression is rendered identifiable as a sequestered facet of our culture. The commercial arts exploit copyright to manipulate the conventions of the fine arts (which are produced by consumers of commercial art). Current definitions of copyright are political tools to secure the profitability of commercial art (do you assume a political message whenever you see an advertisement?).

Industrialists have this interest in reinforcing the illusion that art is an elite practice: scarcity creates value.

Who is Being Brainwashed?

Regarding recent articles on government "mind control" in The Washington Post and on Wired:

An important area of operation for contemporary intelligence gathering agencies is data aggregation: collecting information from multiple sources and creating meaningful connections between these disparate sources of information. Increasingly, this is being carried out by government agencies with the cooperation or coercion of private infrastructure. The intrusion of military intelligence operations into the private sector is especially troubling because it represents the ability, facilitated by the Web, to not only appropriate private citizens and organizations into a federal intelligence infrastructure, but also to manipulate these individuals and organizations for obscure motives (given our present state of government secrecy).

Consider the potential of combining the functionality of MySpace with that of Google, if the actions of users are mapped to a set of IP addresses or a MAC address:

The value of MySpace for intelligence purposes extends beyond the content of individual postings or personal data stored in a user’s profile. Every time a MySpace user does or does not click on a MySpace porn bot's solicitation, the result of that user’s decision is recorded. The way in which users respond to eachother’s social cues, the way blog posts are categorized, and the frequency or methodology with which one seeks to extend one’s social cluster are not only recorded, but furthermore represent a psychological model of that individual user.

Google also keeps track of user behavior. This data, which is recorded for advertising purposes, can be used to reveal word-by-word accounts of how users view language, associate specific terms, and, in a sense, what users are thinking about.

If intelligence agencies have access to user logs for both MySpace and Google, they have, on the one hand, a psychological model to describe an individual, and on the other hand, a semantic database to explain that individual's decision-making. This information could be combined to not only predict how individuals will respond to various stimuli, but to provide stimuli whereby certain behaviors are likely to be provoked. Such a semantic-behavior model could be tested by inserting specific search results into a list returned by Google and recording if and how a user responds.

Other, more direct methods of manipulating individuals have been investigated. Several recent patents issued to Hendricus Loos discuss a variety of ways in which, for example, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by cathode ray tube monitors can be used to manipulate an individual’s central nervous system.

Beyond the potential for illegal government experimentation or sadistic behavior on the part of rogue contractors, the proliferation of these technologies and the diffusion of these abilities into private hands will present to law enforcement a new and serious challenge. Frightened governments, faced with a problem which they have no idea how to detect or mitigate, may be part of the reason why people complaining of “mind control” are actively marginalized.

It would seem that governments concerned with serving the interests of their citizens would want to halt such research, assess the state of things, and begin to make disclosures. How can citizens ensure that their interests are being served if they cannot discuss the actions of their own government?