Author: geoff

Local warming (think global, act local)

[Updated] This afternoon the temperature here in Brookline hit 61 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normal is about 36.) It’s now almost midnight, and we’re still up at 46. But it’s all downhill from here: 24 hours from now it’s expected to be around 14 7, with several inches of fresh snow, a wind chill of -4 -11, and NW winds gusting to 36 45 MPH. It’s been an odd winter so far….

Distracted

I’ve been getting a little behind in my reading recently… and staying up too late some nights. The reason: I picked up the quad DVD of the complete Firefly series, and I’ve been working my way through it as fast as I could. I’d never seen it on TV; the first I saw of Joss Wheldon’s western/sci-fi ‘verse was when I saw the film Serenity.
I finished it this evening (including the various extras). Man, what a great trip!

We want to watch people die on live TV

In today’s Salon, Patrick”Ask the pilot” Smith had a blistering commentary on the media coverage of aviation:

“On Dec. 20 I awoke to a front-page story in the Boston Globe about a Midwest Airlines jetliner that had returned to Boston’s Logan Airport the previous evening after a minor problem. To my astonishment, I learned that the landing had garnered live coverage on both CNN and MSNBC.
The incident was described — in the Globe and many other places — as an ’emergency landing.’ It was not. The Midwest crew never declared an emergency and requested no special attention from airport authorities. Massport, the landlord for Logan, dispatched vehicles on its own behest, just in case. […]
From a pilot’s point of view, the Midwest ballyhoo was irritatingly similar to the one involving JetBlue three months prior. In both cases, chances of the aircraft failing to land safely were negligible. No matter, it is quickly becoming a phenomenon that any time an aircraft makes an unscheduled touchdown, regardless of how insignificant the trouble, it is carried live on network TV and splashed across the front page.
Last I checked, humanity has been flying for more than a century now, yet we seem to affect a Dark Ages mentality any time we get around airplanes. The how and why of this ignorance falls on several shoulders, but clearly the media, for its part, has lost all grip, spinning situations that present little threat of serious injury as real-time dramas of impending calamity.”

I think it’s quite clear where this “Dark Ages mentality” actually comes from. It’s from the confluence of two characteristics which permeate western society: an obsessive voyeurism, and a love-hate relationship with fear.
The voyeur aspect is easy to understand. Television has turned us all into obsessive voyeurs. It used to be about entertainment: about a relaxing and enjoyable distraction from everyday life. These days, we need to cut out the middle-man – the author, playwright, or actor – and experience Everything. Life. Reality. We can’t bear the thought of missing anything. It’s almost a competitive things: we judge ourselves on the speed of our lives, and the rapidity with which we can acquire information and sensations. We want to be the people telling the story, not hearing it. So we disintermediate the world and watch it.
And this is obviously related to our attitude to fear. FDR may have talked about the fear of “fear itself”, but today we seem to embrace fear, in a horrified fascination. No matter how distant or unlikely some incident might be, we import it into our lives. A child falls down a drain: all drains must be dangerous. A bomb goes off in a distant city, and every small town goes on alert. And if there’s not a real source of fear, we manufacture one, and call it a “reality” TV show.
When we obsess about fear, our judgement is distorted. We look for sources of reassurance. TV knows this, which is why broadcasters seek to create compelling opportunities for fearful voyeurism. It sells. Politicians know this too: witness the cynical manipulation of the “threat level” by Bush and Blair.
There have always been “I remember where I was” incidents. The Kennedy assassinations. Neil Armstrong’s giant step. Princess Di. 9/11. We are coming to anticipate them, to live our lives as rehearsals for those grand punctuations. And the logical conclusion of this is that we want to be there – or at least to be a voyeur.
I fear that it comes down to this. We have become convinced that we live in a horribly dangerous and unpredictable world. We cannot distance ourselves from it, we are convinced that it will touch us. We know that somewhere, some time, an unsuspecting group of people is going to die – suddenly, violently. Of course we don’t want it to happen, but we are convinced that it will. And when it happens, we want to watch it live, on TV.

Reading material for this evening

An assessment of US Army tactics in Iraq, by the British Brigadier who is the Deputy Commander of the Office of Security Transition in the Coalition Office for Training and Organizing Iraq’s Armed Forces. (Couldn’t they have come up with an acronym for that? “DCOST in COTOIAF” sounds much better.) Sparks are flying. As the Guardian reports:

A senior British officer has criticised the US army for its conduct in Iraq, accusing it of institutional racism, moral righteousness, misplaced optimism, and of being ill-suited to engage in counter-insurgency operations.
The blistering critique, by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was the second most senior officer responsible for training Iraqi security forces, reflects criticism and frustration voiced by British commanders of American military tactics.
What is startling is the severity of his comments – and the decision by Military Review, a US army magazine, to publish them.

[Later]
OK, I’ve read the paper now. It’s unfortunate that the media have concentrated on a few easy, inflammatory topics. This seems to be a serious and well-researched study. Much of the data is simply incontrovertible: the absence of COIN (counterinsurgency) training in the US Army, the cultural focus on “destruction” rather than “defeat”, and the surprising “de-professionalisation” of the US Army during the 1990s. I had not previously been aware of the “exodus of the captains”, which led to rushed promotions and a consequent reluctance to trust junior officers, exacerbating the trend towards bureaucracy and micromanagement. (None of these issues should be unfamiliar to business people who have been involved in rapid organizational change.)
And the article closes with another idea that resonates for those of us in commercial organizations. The US Army is showing signs of “silver bullet” thinking. (My term, not the author’s.) It’s recognized many of the issues, it’s establishing programs to address the defects – especially in training – but it still views these changes in terms of its core warfighting mission. It’s like Christiensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma; the US Army doesn’t realize that it has to deliberately replace and supercede its old thinking and culture, not merely patch it up. The author is concerned that the US Army may be starting to congratulate itself on having successfully recognized the need for change and adapted, not realizing that it hasn’t really changed at all. And how easy it is to make that mistake….

Born in the '50s: Beliefs, Now and Then

As I was driving home this evening, I caught an interesting little story on NPR’s All Things Considered entitled Born in the ’50s: Beliefs, Now and Then

As Judge Samuel Alito testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Robert Siegel talks with Alito’s contemporaries — those who are 55 or so — to see how much they and their views have changed since they were 35.

And so they interviewed a number of people who, like Alito, were born in 1950, and asked them how their views had changed over the last 20 years. And I found this particularly interesting, because I too was born in 1950. So how have my views changed over the last 20 years?
In 1985, the most important things in my life were my children – then 11 and 8 – and my job; I’d just joined Sun Microsystems. I didn’t pay too much attention to US national affairs, because I hadn’t quite adjusted to the fact that we weren’t just going to be here “for a couple of years”. But I didn’t think much about England, either: I was appalled by Maggie Thatcher’s selfish ideology. I was a citizen of the world! Of course politics was important, but the critical issue was the life-or-death concern with nuclear confrontation. Those were the days of films like Threads and The Day After, and Reagan joking about nuking the Soviets. But I don’t remember people at work arguing about these matters: they were distant, and we were curiously impotent.
And nobody talked much about religion. For the most part, it was a respectful and tolerant period: the arguments in schools were about Title IX (equal funding for girls’ sports), not evolution. I was active on Usenet in the alt.atheism newsgroup, helping to author the FAQ and starting to read philosophy of religion texts. But it was only for my personal interest.
Today? I think my views have hardened over the years, not mellowed. I’m appalled by the excesses of intolerance and hypertolerance that have sprung up. We have seen the emergence of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and unprincipled relativism, both of which have no time for reason, debate, and balance. Whether it be Pat Robertson’s ayatollah-like pronouncements, or Tony Blair seeking to make it illegal to say things that might upset someone, the world seems to have gone mad. And I do blame religion for much of it, for elevating the myths of a bunch of Iron Age nomads above reasoned debate in the here-and-now.
But, friends tell me, this is unfair. There are many people who are both religious and tolerant, observant and scientific. And of course this is true. Yet I can’t help feeling that many of these people give aid and comfort to the bigots by refusing to live up to their principles. A topical example: Pat Robertson explaining Ariel Sharon’s illness as divine retribution. Why can those who argue with Robertson not take the next, logical step, and rip out of their Bibles those texts which support Robertson’s thesis of a bloodthirsty and vengeful deity? If they don’t believe in such a deity, why do they treat those gory texts as “holy”? Surely their ethical principles are more important than a piece of text that was arbitrarily included in a book by a bunch of old men in the fourth century? (And, yes, the same applies to the Koran, and every other “sacred” book.)
I know, I know: if you start doing that, the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Rational thought has no place in this domain. Even Thomas Jefferson couldn’t pull it off.
This abuse of religious ideas permeates so much. We have an immoral war being fought with callous disregard for the lives of the innocent and the moral integrity of the USA and UK, with government-sanctioned torture, and it is all justified in Apocalyptic, almost Manichean language of freedom-lovers versus evil-doers.
I am much more cynical than I used to be, and less hopeful. I look at my grandson, Tommy, and I worry more about the world he will face than I did with my children. Do all grandparents feel that way? I hope I’m wrong. On the other hand, I’m learning so much these days – in computing, science, philosophy, travel. I’m still an engineer, but I spent more of my time thinking about how we practice engineering, as a collaborative, community effort. I expect to get back to product engineering in a year or two, but for now I’m learning and contributing in a different way. And that’s satisfying.
And curiously, I find myself more emphatically English than ever before. In part, it’s because America has become so alien. When George Bush Senior said “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God”, I thought he was just pandering to his base. I was wrong. But in part it’s because of the Internet, and global communications. I read British newspapers every day, I watch English football and cricket, and PBS and BBC America bring me the news and the kind of entertainment that I grew up with. I never watch US programs (except for House, and the star of that series is as English as they come). I work with people around the world; in this respect I am a citizen of the world. Once or twice a year I return to England, and get in the rental car, and drive to Oxford: onto the M25, and then up the M40. And as I drive over the Chiltern scarp at Stokenchurch, and see the landscape spread out before me, I know I’m home.

A knock-down analysis

Geoffrey R. Stone posts a fascinating analysis by an impressive squad of constitutional scholars of Bush’s law-breaking. (I wonder if any Senator will read this into the record and ask Alito about his opinion.) It’s long, but surprisingly readable. Bottom line:

In conclusion, the DOJ letter fails to offer a plausible legal defense of the NSA domestic spying program. If the Administration felt that FISA was insufficient, the proper course was to seek legislative amendment, as it did with other aspects of FISA in the Patriot Act, and as Congress expressly contemplated when it enacted the wartime wiretap provision in FISA. One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open to the President–or anyone else–to seek to change the law. But it is also beyond dispute that, in such a democracy, the President cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable.

Of course the next questions is, “Is anyone going to do anything about it?”