Later On

Greenwald:

Even for those who believe they’re inured to the absurdities of imperial irony, this is almost too extreme to process:

The New York Times, Wednesday:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information. . . .

"To this date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court," [the ACLU's Ben] Wizner said. . . . "If this decision stands, the United States will have closed its courts to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers."

Yahoo! News, yesterday:

Iraq to pay $400 million for Saddam’s mistreatment of Americans

Iraq has quietly agreed to pay $400 million in claims to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein’s regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The controversial settlement ends years of legal battles and could help Iraq emerge from United Nations sanctions put in place two decades ago — a step Iraqi leaders see as a prerequisite to becoming fully sovereign. . . . Settling the claims, which were brought by American citizens, has been seen as a key requirement for Washington to be willing to push for an end to the UN sanctions. . . .

Despite Iraq’s potential oil wealth, the country has major economic problems, including widespread poverty, 30 percent unemployment, and an infant mortality rate among the highest in the region. . . .

The settlement is controversial not only because of Iraq’s pressing developmental needs, but because it holds the current government accountable for Saddam Hussein’s actions.

“A lot of blood has flowed since then and a lot of it is Iraqi blood. It’s arguable that the suffering was not caused by the current Iraqi government or the Iraqi people,” says one senior Iraqi official. “This is politics, this is not justice.”

So, to recap:  the U.S. creates a worldwide regime of torture, disappearances and lawless imprisonment.  Then, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the American federal judiciary all collaborate to shield the guilty parties from all accountability (Look Forward, Not Backward!), and worse, to ensure that not a single victim can even access American courts to obtain a ruling as to the legality of what was done to them, let alone receive compensation for their suffering, even while recognizing that many of the victims were completely innocent and even though other countries have provided the victims with compensation for their much more minor role in what happened.  Our courts even ensure that Blackwater guards are shielded from prosecution for the cold-blooded murder of Iraqi citizens.

But we invade, occupy and destroy Iraq — while severely abusing, torturing and killing their citizens — and then demand, as a condition for our allowing the end of crippling sanctions, that they fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to American torture victims, even though it all happened 20 years ago, under an Iraqi regime that no longer even exists.  They hate us for our Freedoms.

* * * * *

See also:  my post from earlier today on Tom Goldstein and the perils of conflict-plagued commentary.

UPDATE:  The excellent novelist Barry Eisler has a new book, Inside Out, which pertains to this theme and many others covered by this blog.  I haven’t yet read Inside Out, but long-time commenter Mona has, and she provides a short review and enthusiastic recommendation in the comment section here.  Aside from their quality, Eisler’s books are well worth buying because, as a former CIA analyst, he writes national security novels from a very unique and valuable perspective:  one that incisively highlights the absurdities, contradictions, and immoralities that drive much of American foreign policy.

UPDATE II:  Related to all of this:  at 5:00 p.m. EST today, I’ll be at FDL Book Salon, hosting a discussion of Bruce Fein’s superb new book,American Empire Before the Fall, which examines the history of America’s imperial hubris and the fundamental harm it is causing on virtually every level.  At 5 pm, my review of that book will be posted at the top of FDL, and both Fein and I will be present to engage with commenters and questioners about the topics covered by the book.

When The Older Grandson was born, I supported “Cannonball” as a middle name.

When I lived in Iowa City, I knew of three brothers whose father was, I suspect, a jazz fan: Glenn Miller Epstein, Benny Goodman Epstein, and Harry James Epstein. UPDATE: I’m pretty sure there was a Tommy Dorsey Epstein, so I may be wrong about BG or HJ. GM owned The Paper Place, a very nice little bookstore later replaced by Prairie Lights.

About the video:

This is from Oscar Brown’s 1962 television program “Jazz Scene USA.” Yes, stuff like this was once on American television.

“Work Song” performed by Cannonball Adderley, alto sax and Nat Adderley, trumpet.  Also in the group  Yusef Lateef, tenor sax, oboe, flute; Joe Zawinal, piano; Sam Jones, bass; Louis Hayes, drums.

Margaret Talev reports for McClatchy:

It’s hard to believe that Haley Barbour and Verna Bailey attended the same University of Mississippi in 1965, and even sat next to each other in a class.

Barbour, who’s now the governor of Mississippi and a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, recalls that time — when Ole Miss was being forced to integrate — as "a very pleasant experience."

Bailey does not. At times, she said, "I thought my life was going to end."

He’s white. She was the first black female to attend.

Their seats were assigned alphabetically, and he said they developed a friendly rapport. She let him copy her notes when he skipped class.

"I still love her," he quipped.

He remembers her name almost as if it were yesterday, though he’d recalled her middle name as Lee. It’s Ann.

She knows Barbour as a prominent politician who attended her alma mater. Until a reporter called, she said, she didn’t realize they’d met.

Their vastly different impressions of that time expose the challenges that any Southern conservative faces when trying to recast the experience of the civil rights era. They could prove especially sensitive for this white Republican governor of the blackest state in the union if he mounts a challenge to the nation’s first black president.

Barbour’s decision about whether to run in 2012 is still months away. As the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, he says this November’s congressional and gubernatorial contests are his priority. There are factors beyond race to consider. Who else will make up the GOP field? Will Barbour’s long record as a Washington lobbyist hobble him? Do Republicans want to reinforce their stereotype as a regionally based party by rallying around a candidate from the Deep South?

Still, the story of race in Mississippi is an inescapable undercurrent in weighing Barbour’s prospects. Nowhere was the civil rights era of Barbour’s adolescence more violent than it was in Mississippi. When James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss in 1962, there were threats that he’d be lynched. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sent U.S. marshals to protect Meredith as he arrived on campus. Ensuing riots wounded more than 100 marshals and left two bystanders dead.

Barbour’s a veteran political operative who worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which designed a Republican path to power known as the "Southern strategy." As he recently began testing the presidential waters, Barbour, 62, has been contending that his generation of white, Southern Republicans has been characterized unfairly as anti-civil rights.

In an interview last month with the conservative magazine and website Human Events, Barbour said it was "my generation who went to integrated schools. I went to an integrated college, never thought twice about it."

It was the old Democrats who clung to segregation, he said. "By my time people realized that was the past, that was indefensible, wasn’t going to be that way anymore." He said that "the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican (were) a different generation from those who fought integration."

That interview set off a backlash from black commentators, who accused Barbour of everything from being clueless to pushing revisionist history.

Barbour defended those comments Wednesday at a Washington reporters’ breakfast.

"When I became a Republican in the late ’60s, in my state and probably some other Southern states the hard right were all Democrats," he said. "They didn’t want to have Republicans because, in their words, ‘It split the white vote.’ And young people were more likely to be Republicans than our grandparents."

That’s when he brought up Bailey.

He said she was "a very nice girl" who "happened to be an African-American, and, God bless her, she let me copy her notes the whole time. And since I was not prone to go to class every day, I considered it a great — it was a great thing, it was just — there was nothing to it. If she remembers it, I would be surprised. She was just another student. I was the student next to her."

Bailey, reached by phone, reacted to Barbour’s story with surprise that bordered on confusion.

"I don’t remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience for me," she said. "My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all."

Bailey is now the principal of an elementary school in Beaverton, Ore. While she may have seemed like just another student to Barbour, history hasn’t viewed her that way. For her role in the civil rights movement, she was inducted into the Ole Miss Alumni Hall of Fame and has a scholarship named after her.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are many good reasons that sensible politicians consider war to be the very last resort, to be undertaken (if at all) only after all possible alternatives have been explored. Here’s an example of one such reason, reported in The Guardian by Chris McGreal:

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.

Five of the soldiers are charged with murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish stolen from civilians.

In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.

According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army’s criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".

One soldier said he believed Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon".

Investigators said Gibbs, 25, hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a "kill team". While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians. According to the charge sheet, the first target was Gul Mudin, who was killed "by means of throwing a fragmentary grenade at him and shooting him with a rifle", when the patrol entered the village of La Mohammed Kalay in January.

Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field when Mudin emerged and stopped on the other side of a wall from the soldiers. Gibbs allegedly handed Morlock a grenade who armed it and dropped it over the wall next to the Afghan and dived for cover. Holmes, 19, then allegedly fired over the wall.

Later in the day, Morlock is alleged to have told Holmes that the killing was for fun and threatened him if he told anyone.

The second victim, Marach Agha, was shot and killed the following month. Gibbs is alleged to have shot him and placed a Kalashnikov next to the body to justify the killing. In May Mullah Adadhdad was killed after being shot and attacked with a grenade.

The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies.

Five soldiers – Gibbs, Morlock, Holmes, Michael Wagnon and Adam Winfield – are accused of murder and aggravated assault among other charges. All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.

The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.

Two days later members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of "snitching", gave him a beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. The soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the "kill team"…

Continue reading. One can understand the anger and hatred that many Muslims feel toward the US: not only the unprovoked war in Iraq and the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians (continuing to this day with drone attacks), the "Burn a Quran" day in Florida, the arson of mosques in the US, the unreasoning opposition to the Park51 project, the refusal of the US to compensate the innocent victims of its kidnap-and-torture program or even to acknowledge its errors—the US seems to be going through an exceptionally ugly phase of its history.

I’m having problems blogging, as you may have noted. For one thing, politics nowadays seems to be completely insane, with great numbers of Americans enthusiastically embracing positions that strike me as exceptionally stupid and short-sighted. Islamophobia is but one example. We also have Congress turning its back on typical American citizens and families to protect and promote the interests of businesses and the wealthy. Examples include the current efforts to kill Social Security, the difficulty of passing a $50 billion public-works bill (while an $800 billion tax cut for the very wealthy garners enthusiastic support), the distaste for helping those who have lost their jobs in the great economic meltdown, and so on.

And while the public sphere has become increasingly repellant, my interest in reading has grown. Reading, of course, fills few posts.

I just wanted to air the problem. We’ll see how things develop.

Art of Shaving soap today because of a conversation with Mark, one of the nurses at Stanford Hospital, who shops there. The soap—tallow-based, triple milled—is quite nice, though the fragrance is faint. But a very good lather, using the Plisson from Paris, and then the Super Speed, with a Swedish Gillette blade, provided smooth passes and an excellent result. A splash of Paul Sebastian aftershave, and I’m ready for the weekend.

It sounds very tasty indeed. Here’s the recipe.

I posted a note in the ShaveMyFace.com forum about MeAndGoji.com, and one of the replies pointed out this site that has automated for mass-customizing a protein supplement. Very cool for you fitness freaks out there.

A two-day stubble calls for a shave stick and a slant bar, so out came the Irisch Moos and the rhodium-plated Hoffritz. A very fine lather indeed worked up with the Emperor 3 Super. Then three smooth passes with a Swedish Gillette blade in the Hoffritz, ending with a splash of New York: all very good and enjoyable.

I consider this to be good news, though it will piss off Obama, who obviously wanted to slow-walk this to death. From an email:

Los Angeles Times | Sept. 9, 2010 | 6:15 p.m.

Judge declares U.S. military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy openly banning gay service members unconstitutional

A federal judge in Riverside declared the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay service members unconstitutional Thursday, saying the "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy violates the 1st Amendment rights of lesbians and gay men.

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia A. Phillips said the policy banning gays did not preserve military readiness, contrary to what many supporters have argued, saying evidence shows that the policy in fact had a "direct and deleterious effect” on the military.

Phillips issued an injunction barring the government from enforcing the policy. However, the U.S. Department of Justice, which defended "don’t ask, don’t tell" during a two-week trial in Riverside, will have an opportunity to appeal that decision.

Full story.

Same idea as Chocomize: mass customization. MeAndGoji.com lets you pick out the ingredients for a breakfast cereal. Might be worth it. For example, one of the “base” cereals (to which you add the extras) is a very tasty-sounding wheat-free granola.

My Chocomize chocolate bars arrived: extremely tasty, and the mini-chipotles have a nice lingering spiciness.

UPDATE: MeAndGoji is definitely worth checking out. As you add the ingredients, the nutrition facts label shows you the nutrition information so far—so that, for example, if you find your mix is high in sugar and low in fiber, you can readily go back and add and subtract ingredients. Mine turned out to be quite low in sugar, high in protein and fiber—and I was just picking the things I like. I’ll report back when I have it for breakfast.

Browse their recipes before creating your own: you can pick up some ideas and tricks. For example, you can add multiple shots of ingredients if you want to go heavy on the strawberries or chocolate, for example.

I recently watched this video:

And it occurred to me that it would be quite interesting to see a video on how string cheese is made: it’s obviously extruded directly into the packaging, and I guess the manufacturers think watching this would make people queasy. And then I got to thinking about all the other "manufactured" foods we eat, and how videos of the process are unavailable. I guess people really don’t want to see how sausage is made.

This is The Wife posting to say that LG has just called from the recovery room. The procedure went well, his coronary arteries look great, and he’ll be home this afternoon. Yay!

In a few minutes, I’ll be on my way to Stanford for an angiogram. Little blogging today. “Back tomorrow” is my plan.

You can break any law you like so long as you can tie it to a secret. Charlie Savage reports in the NY Times:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.

The sharply divided ruling was a major victory for the Obama administration’s efforts to advance a sweeping view of executive secrecy powers. It strengthens the White House’s hand as it has pushed an array of assertive counterterrorism policies, while raising an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule for the first time in decades on the scope of the president’s power to restrict litigation that could reveal state secrets.

By a 6-to-5 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the Central Intelligence Agency to transfer captives to other countries for imprisonment and interrogation. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the case on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured in captivity — and that Jeppesen was complicit in that alleged abuse.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher described the case, which reversed an earlier decision, as presenting “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” But, he said, the majority had “reluctantly” concluded that the lawsuit represented “a rare case” in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have a day in court.

The administration’s aggressive national security policies have in some ways departed from the expectations of change fostered by President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, which was often sharply critical of former President George W. Bush’s approach.

Among other policies, the Obama national security team has also authorized the C.I.A. to try to kill a United States citizen suspected of terrorism ties, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the C.I.A.’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers — though the administration has forbidden torture and says it seeks assurances from other countries that detainees will not be mistreated.

The A.C.L.U. vowed to appeal the Jeppesen Dataplan case to the Supreme Court, which would present the Roberts court with a fresh opportunity to weigh in on a high-profile test of the scope and limits of presidential power in counterterrorism matters.

It has been more than 50 years since the Supreme Court issued a major ruling on the state-secrets privilege, a judicially created doctrine that the government has increasingly used to win dismissals of lawsuits related to national security, shielding its actions from judicial review. In 2007, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a similar rendition and torture ruling by the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va.

The current case turns on whether the executive can invoke the state-secrets privilege to shut down entire lawsuits, or whether that power should be limited to withholding particular pieces of secret information. In April 2009, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit adopted the narrower view, ruling that the lawsuit as a whole should proceed.

But the Obama administration appealed to the full San Francisco-based appeals court. A group of 11 of its judges reheard the case, and a narrow majority endorsed the broader view of executive secrecy powers. They concluded that the lawsuit must be dismissed without a trial — even one that would seek to rely only on public information.

“This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security,” Judge Fisher wrote. “Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them.”

Ben Wizner, a senior A.C.L.U. lawyer who argued the case before the appeals court, said the group was disappointed in the ruling.

“To this date, not a single victim of the Bush administration’s torture program has had his day in court,” Mr. Wizner said. “That makes this a sad day not only for the torture survivors who are seeking justice in this case, but for all Americans who care about the rule of law and our nation’s reputation in the world. If this decision stands, the United States will have closed its courts to torture victims while providing complete immunity to their torturers.”

Some plaintiffs in the case said they were tortured by C.I.A. interrogators at an agency “black site” prison in Afghanistan, while others said they were tortured by Egypt and Morocco after the C.I.A. handed them off to foreign security services.

The lead plaintiff is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and legal resident of Britain who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claimed he was turned over to the C.I.A., which flew him to Morocco and handed him off to its security service.

Moroccan interrogators, he said, held him for 18 months and subjected him to an array of tortures, including cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wounds.

Mr. Mohamed was later transferred back to the C.I.A., which he said flew him to its secret prison in Afghanistan. There, he said, he was held in continuous darkness, fed sparsely, and subjected to loud noise — like the recorded screams of women and children — 24 hours a day.

He was later transferred again to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was held for an additional five years. He was released and returned to Britain in early 2009 and is now free…

Continue reading. Not the US we celebrate, nor the US we used to have.

Parts of the Long Argument.

Previously discussed were how in nature complex systems come together that exhibit properties and behaviors impossible to predict simply from knowing the components of the system: reductionism works in many situations, but it cannot cross the gap from components to complex systems.

Life, which developed using matter and natural forces, all components following their natural path of least effort, was an important emergence—particularly to us—and human culture was the next development. By "culture," I mean all of humanity’s inventions, including but not limited to:

Language, manners, morals, customs, songs, stories, rules, offices, weapons, law government, sculpture, painting, theater, dance, buildings, works of civil engineering (roads, bridges, dams, etc.), crops, foods, cookery, mating customs, family structures and obligations, fabrics, modes of dress and accompanying rules, medical/health practices, religions, and so on.

As is well know, evolution is inevitable when you have this situation:

1. A replicator that makes copies of itself that carry its characteristics

2. Some little variation in the copies

3. Limited resources for which the copies must compete

Once those conditions are met, evolution automatically kicks off, almost by logical necessity: the little replicators will multiply, and some will be able to make better use (or get more of) the limited resources, and those will make more copies of themselves while the less successful replicas are displaced and die off. In the case of life, the replicator is DNA, and we can see what the process has done by looking around us: a wild variety of lifeforms, but strong similarities among groups (e.g., animals rather than plants or fungi; herbivores among animals; deer among herbivores; and the varieties of deer). These family resemblances were what led to the discovery of evolution, and over time an all-seeing observer would see various branches prosper and proliferate and variegate, while other branches die out—displaced by more efficient competitors, or due to random accidents (e.g., an asteroid strike). But the process never stops, and even now humans are doubtless evolving in response to environmental pressures and competition.

The same thing happens with culture. Richard Dawkins postulated a "meme" as the cultural equivalent of a gene, and you can see over time a kind of evolution as some memes prosper, spread, and variegate, while others fall aside—sometimes to be picked up and given a renewed life.

Look at the necktie as a meme, for example: it started as a neck scarf and then gradually its form, use, and meaning changed. It variegated somewhat (long tie, informal bow tie, formal bow tie, etc.), and it was influenced by other memes (men’s fashion, for example, or holidays or wars or whatever: ties with Valentines, ties that proclaim your school or regiment, etc.). The codpiece, OTOH, seems to have died out: a cultural line that wasn’t able to compete.

Lifeforms compete for food, which often is a competition for territory. Cultural forms—memes on up—compete for mindshare. The more people keep the meme in mind and copy it (e.g., tell others about it), the more successful the meme.

I went quite far along this exploration before I recalled that this is actually quite an active field of study: memetics. (I was thinking about the emergence and evolution of culture and writing in my journal about it, but hadn’t remember the "meme" idea.)

It’s been observed that culture shaped humanity as much as humanity shaped culture. Indeed, our large brains are thought by some to be the result of the influence of memes (and having to successfully remember them): over time, those best able to remember more memes (e.g., the meme of how to chip flint; how to make a clay pot; how to make a fire) were more successful and had more offspring. Quite a few memes deal with how to treat others in a society or community, and doubtless the thickies who couldn’t grasp those were culled from the group directly.

"Mutations" in memes come about through inventions of one kind or another, and this holds for all areas of culture. Take food—some mutations might be: new kinds of food, new recipes and their influence on old recipes, and so on. Recipes survive surviving because of broad appeal or intense loyalty among a minority (Southern cooking, for example). Indeed, it’s almost the same pattern as certain infectious diseases: a big outbreak will occur affecting a great number (7-layer salad, for example). After a while, the outbreak collapses (people move on) except in some hotspots (Iowa) where the dish remains popular/endemic, perhaps leading to another outbreak years later. And some persist for millennia: flatbreads, for example, such as tortillas and other forms of bread easily and quickly cooked.

Elements of culture are "real", in that they really exist in the universe, but it’s a different sort of reality. Some parts reside in the material world: a building, for example, or a painting, or a musical instrument. But the material content is not that important—well, for jewelry, perhaps, but even then it’s the immaterial aspects—the human-contributed aspects—that are the point: the use of the building, the meaning of the painting, the design and social purpose of the jewelry (e.g., an engagement ring is not just a ring of metal with a jewel).

This finally resolves something that has nagged at me for years: the reality of the unicorn. It’s not real in the sense that a horse is real, but it is real as a part of human culture, with paintings of it, stories and legends about it, images of it: it a real part of human culture.

This sort of invention is constant in all areas of culture. Sometimes it’s just a matter of faulty transmission (e.g., a change in a recipe that people turn out to like), sometimes it’s due to new resources, and sometimes it’s just somebody thinking up something new. Look at invention in, say, fragrances, musical forms, styles of poetry, modes of dress (fashion as well as style), chemicals, fabrics, tools, source4s of energy, modes of transport, weapons, courtesy, and so on and on.

The "system" of culture is the kind of a system in which every element influences and is influenced by every other element—similar to the material bodies in the solar system working on each other through gravity, for example. It’s like a closely linked network in which pressure on any point is transmitted through and absorbed by the entire network. When the Great Lisbon Earthquake struck in 1755, for example, the event reverberated through human culture in all sorts of ways.

These complex systems have some degree of resilience: damage one part and it affects the whole, and the whole responds in some way. This sort of system—every element affecting and being affected by every other element—is not the only sort, of course. You might have a system where a given element affects only one other element, which affects only one other element… like a mechanical clock. This sort of system is not robust: taking out one element altogether could bring the whole show to a halt.

Remember the video of this little replicator making a protein? Obviously no magic: just elements and chemical compounds following the path of least effort to create the little systems that likewise operate not via volition but the path of least effort.

It occurred to me that our brains are evolved to do something similar to that replicator. What the brain takes in the current state of the body (hunger, cold, thirst, tension, pain, etc.) and the current state of the outside world (presence of predator, stick at hand, large rock, etc.) and everything the brain has accumulated of human culture (the predator’s habits and weak points, how to use a club, etc.), and the brain then immediately finds the "best" (optimal) response for the individual.

Note that this response can be shaped by culture: if you’ve been raised with high cultural values for honesty and integrity and you are happy and full, you are not likely to steal something that a person who has not learned to value honest and who is starving would steal in a second—the two brains reach two different conclusions because of the differing circumstances, but they do it quickly.

Tolstoy (in War and Peace) describes the notion that individuals automatically follow the path of least effort through this multi-dimensional cultural space as well as through the material world. Although at the time we may believe we are choosing freely, looking back years later, we generally say something like this: "You know, looking at the person I was then, with my upbringing and beliefs, and in that situation under those circumstances, I really could not have acted in any other way. I felt I was choosing, but I see that—given who I was and what I faced—I could not have chosen otherwise. I was following a path of least effort for me.

So there goes free will. What we have is NOT determinism: the system is too complex and chaotic for that, and chance events affect outcomes all the time. But so far as our making choices: no, we don’t. We follow cultural currents and trends, and the culture that we follow/make may have little to do with popular culture but is rather the product of our family and the town in which we were raised and what we were taught, all of which might put us in strong (albeit unchosen) opposition to popular culture. Example: the way that I shave.

So people, like the pebbles in interstellar space, continuously find the optimal path—the pebbles through space, we through all the forms and functions of our culture. The summation of everyone’s individual paths will occasionally form strong currents that carries many things along—the French Revolution, for example—just as natural events can occasionally push things along—the Black Death, for example. But "choice" is illusory.

More anon.

Including a surprise task: I didn’t realize that today was the cleaning ladies. But everything worked out. So I’ve not only washed all the dishes, I hard-boiled (well, 8 minutes) a dozen eggs, made veg broth and used it to poach two chicken breasts, thus producing chicken stock—well, broth: I didn’t use any chicken bones, but perhaps next time I’ll include a couple of backs for extra richness. Got a haircut, bought things for the trip (string cheese, apples, big bottle of water), picked up a book at the library that likely will come in handy. All told, looking good.

From the Feedback column in New Scientist:

Windows 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, is generally agreed to be pretty good. But Feedback has fallen foul of a serious oddity. Its search function, which can rapidly find keywords buried inside thousands of documents stored on a hard disc, has a disagreeable foible: it ignores the content of some files. For example, if the part after the dot at the end of a file name – the "extension" – is "DOC" and the file was not created by Microsoft Word, the search skips it.

Website forums bristle with questions about this. So Feedback asked a senior manager, who looked worried and promised to investigate, but after two weeks clammed up and referred us to a press spokescreature, who referred us to the support team in India. There followed 6 hours over two days spent trapped on the phone while an engineer remotely tampered with the PC, asking questions like "What word processor do you use now?"

Finally, after two weeks’ consultation with Microsoft in the US, the engineer phoned to agree that the problem does indeed exist. "But it’s not a fault," he insisted. So what is it – a feature?

Lacking actual help from Microsoft, by trial and error Feedback found a fix. Make copies of the old files, with ".TXT" as their extension, and Windows 7 will happily search these. The quickest tool for this copying is probably the XCOPY command,

Today’s is worth reading. It consists of many short topics. Here’s just the first:

Time Magazine has a lengthy new article examining — and largely deriding — the intensifying fight over net neutrality.  Just as was true for prior articles on this topic, Time does so without bothering to mention that the corporation which owns it, Time Warner Inc., is vehemently opposed to net neutrality and is pressuring the FCC to refrain from enforcing its principles.  As both a cable provider and owner of massive amounts of entertainment content, Time Warner loathes net neutrality.  One would think that ought to be disclosed by the corporation’s news magazine when purporting to report on the issue.  Moreover, as the article note, many of the anti-net-neutrality groups — including those purporting to be grassroots groups — are covertly funded by large telecommunications companies, but the article says nothing about whether any Time Warner properties provide any such finding.  The nature of a corporatized media is such that these conflicts are so pervasive that ignoring them is the norm.

That is amazing, and you can be sure that other major news outlets will ignore the story: they have conflicts of this sort of their own to hide.

Actually, let me give you two more:

(2) Sheriffs in North Carolina are lobbying to be given full access to "state computer records identifying anyone with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances."  That would allow all sheriffs and their employees to know of every prescription drug obtained by all residents.  I’ve written before about these prescription drug databases — 39 states now maintain such databases and allow access to federal law enforcement authorities — but this underscores just how sweeping our Surveillance State has become:  even programs that receive relatively little attention, like this one, are incredibly invasive.  So little of what you do is unrecorded and unlinkable to you, and the category of information that is genuinely private shrinks continuously.  We haven’t come close to thinking about the short- and long-term effects that this loss of privacy will have for us as individuals, and on our culture and society.

(3) Slate‘s Tim Noah has written what is truly an excellent series on the vast economic inequality in America (Part I is here).  A sample:

[I]ncome distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic.

Combined with what Larry Lessig writes about today — "a government captured by the economically powerful in society, as they find a way to convert economic into political power" — a very compelling case could be made that this financial-based inequality, this growing oligarchy, is the premiere problem in America , the overarching issue infecting all others.

Read the whole thing.