Cyber Alert for Apple Products!

Take a look at this post on O'Reilly's Radar blog. It turns out that Apple's iPhone (with IOS 4.0) and iPad 3G keep an internal file that tracks everywhere you've been while the device is turned on. Call me old-fashioned, but that's a big privacy concern for me.

Afghanistan you can thank me now

The Rev. Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach (officially cursed by the Blind Chihuahua as of this post) burned a copy of the Quran, and Muslims in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, rioted and killed some United Nations workers. This may have something to do with Afghan tribal justice as observed in the more remote regions, which works like this. If someone perpetrates a crime against you, and you cannot catch the perpetrator to take vengeance on him, you are allowed to take vengeance on anyone from the perpetrator's tribe (which in this case means Christians). It's a lightweight system of justice, and provides incentive for each tribe to exercise discipline over its members. It falls afoul of justice systems elsewhere in the world, where it is required that no one other than the actual perpetrator pay for his misdeed, and where a third party - the State - exacts justice in criminal matters.

But as long as Afghans pursue an idea of justice that is dysfunctional and conflict-producing when applied to rest of the world, we might wonder if they have a sense of balance, of basic fairness.

If they become angry at Rev. Jones for dishonoring the Quran, will they celebrate a Christian who honors the Quran? Who has read three different translations of it, and who has downloaded three more to his iPad as part of the myQuran app? I am talking about me, of course. Will they celebrate my honoring Islam? Even though I feel called by God to worship him as a Christian, I nevertheless respect Islam, and will do whatever I can to help Muslims be Muslims. Will they celebrate that? Will they celebrate that I believe a modern person cannot claim to be well-read without having read the Quran?

So, you folks in Mazar-I-Sharif, how about a Thank Scooper Day?

I won't hold my breath waiting for it.

But I will mention that myQuran is free from the Apple AppStore and it seems excellent. You can even download audio of various reciters reading the Quran to you in the original Arabic. Actually the reading is very musical. Did you know the Quran can sing?

Victims, Rescuers, Persecutors

Victims, rescuers, persecutors, lend me your ears. I have come to bury your pre-conceived identities, not to praise them. I now meditate openly upon GreenLanguage.com's descriptions of your mentalities.

I take you back to Friday, March 11, 2011. Half a world away, an earthquake and its tsunami devastate northern Japan. But this is the Israeli settlement of Itamar. Let us enter the Palestinian mindset: The Jews have been at it again. They have been taking land and water from Palestinians, making Palestinian lives less and less tenable, so that they will be forced to move further away, so that the Jews can take more land, more water. It is an Israeli government policy, forced on the government by the demands of the settlers themselves, who are trying to encroach on all the land they imagine must have once belonged to the short-lived Biblical kingdom of Israel some 2700 years ago. Thus every Jewish settler is a persecutor of Palestinians.

According to the Palestinian narrative of history, avenging heroes are needed to rescue the Palestinians from these Jews. Any attack that can be made, any blow that can be struck, must be struck. An avenger or avengers cut or climbed the fence surrounding the settlement, and entered the a persecutor's home. It was unoccupied. So they entered another and used their knives to butcher whoever they found there - Rabbi Ehud Fogel, his wife Ruth, their 11 and 4 year old sons Yoav and Elad, and their three month old daughter Hadas. Then they fled.

The Imad Mughnieh Squad of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was quick to claim responsibility for the murders, but later issued a denial (Al-Hayat, March 13; Qudsnet website, March 12, 2011). The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are the "street muscle" behind al-Fatah, the ruling party of the West Bank.

Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, made it clear that they had nothing to do with the murders, which they found to be heroic. They either distributed or permitted the distribution of sweets on the streets of Rafah to celebrate the attack and to show support for it. More details here.

Now I ask you to look at the right-most face in the picture below. Does this look like a persecutor?

Clearly, there is something missing from the Palestinian narrative of self-justification.

For their part the Israeli Right maintains that the Palestinian opinion-leaders want all the land of Israel, not just the settlements in the West Bank, which they think Israel needs as a "buffer zone." They point to the rocket attacks on Israel proper when Israeli troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, and from Gaza as evidence. They consider these withdrawals to have been appeasement. They point to the propaganda used in textbooks for Palestinian schools, which calls for the destruction of Israel itself. In the narrative of the Israeli Right, the Palestinians are the persecutors, the Israeli people are the victims, and the Israeli Defense Force are the avengers/rescuers/protectors. But whenever they move in to avenge/rescue, somebody gets hurt. And some fraction of the time that somebody is an innocent bystander, or a child. Moreover, their response to the murders is to increase the aversive stimulus to the Palestinians - to build more houses in the settlements. Clearly, there is something missing from the right-wing Israeli narrative of self-justification.

The Israeli Left, has its own narrative, in which the Israeli Right is the persecutor, and both the Israeli Left and the Palestinians are the victims. They hope to be spared the vengeance of the Palestinian terrorists, even though the violence of the terrorists is indiscriminate. They try to minimize any story that the Right might use to its own advantage. (Example here.) They ignore or minimize evidence that the Palestinian leadership does indeed seek the destruction of Israel, they refuse to consider Palestinian attacks such as this one to be terrorism or even hate crimes, because they are the tactic of the underdog. And the underdog deserves the sympathy of any morally developed individual regardless of the tactics the underdog uses. In their narrative, the Palestinians turn to terror and murder is "only natural." As if the Palestinians were morally or mentally inferior to the Israeli Left. Clearly there is something missing from the left-wing Israeli narrative of self-justification.

That same thing is missing from everybody's narrative of self-justification. It is simply this: When you are a Rescuer (Avenger/Protector) you are also a Persecutor, when you are a Victim you either want to be a Rescuer or to be Rescued, which means you want to be a Persecutor or have the benefit of a potential Persecutor on your side, and when you are a Persecutor, you are setting yourself up to become some other Rescuer's Victim. The Rescuer-Victim_Persecutor trap is so seductive that some Rescuers even rescue their victims only enough to maintain the victims in permanent need of their rescue - they way various programs to help the poor, or to solve urban blight are run all over the world.

Is there a way out of the Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor trap? Indeed there is. Simply by sticking to the facts at present, by being here now, and talking what is verifiably here and now, we can change the future. See GreenLanguage.com.

Or, as Jesus of Nazareth put it, "Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free."

Why American politics is such a Battle

It's simple. Politicians, more than the rest of us, use conflict-producing constructions in their speech. For details see The Grammar of Peace.

I would like to all political office holders, candidates, commentators, and journalists learn to use Green Language to express themselves.

Green Language consists of observations, thoughts, feelings, and specific-action wants. It is a way of starting from and sticking to the facts. It is also a way to be here now, instead of living in the "Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer" mode of viewing reality that is the stock-in-trade of politics.

Take a look at these sites. If you can speak more precisely, you can think more precisely, which can help you get to the truth.

Then we can talk more constructively about what to do regarding Libya, Japan, the economy, the budget, etc.

Going Downhill

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

Ok, the guy has bike handling skills. The guy is probably not suicidal. But are he, his fellow competitors, and the spectators adrenaline junkies or what? This is from the helmet cam of a rider in the Valparaiso Cerro Abajo Race, an urban downhill competition in Chile. Macho, no?

Influence and the Birth of Freedom

The pace of change in the Middle East seems to be like fire burning dry grassland. First Tunisia, then Egypt, and now Libya. Muammar al-Gadafi and sons have pledged to fight to their last breath.

When I heard of their pledge, my first thought was, "May Allah grant them their wish, speedily and soon."

In the case of Egypt, the revolution looks like it might result in real democratic reform. Partly this is because of ties between the US and Egyptian military establishments, which ties exist because of US monetary aid to and training of that military. The hope is that the US Military's comfort with civilian control will influence the Egyptian Military's attitude toward the same.

Might I point out that this influence, this access, did not come for free. We bought it with our foreign aid dollars. We also buy influence in Israel with foreign aid dollars - which gives us two things: some influence toward moderating Israeli policy toward Palestinian Arabs, and access to some very useful Israeli military technology. I mention these things because some US politicians (Republicans mostly) are beating their drums to cut off such foreign aid expenditures.

You would think that our politicians, who generally peddle influence, would understand foreign aid, which generally buys it. Or is it just that foreign aid doesn't buy influence from them?

Public Employee Unions

Public Employee Unions (henceforth PEUs) are many things. First and foremost, they are the protectors of their employees' interests, including pay, job security, working conditions, health insurance, and pensions. Without their protection many public employees would simply be exploited. One of my own relatives would probably have been fired for teaching while being non-Hispanic.

On the other hand, most PEUs are "closed shop" operations. When you sign up for certain public sector jobs, you are automatically enrolled in the union, and your union dues are automatically deducted from your paycheck. If you are a public employee, the money for your pay, benefits, and union dues is taken from your fellow citizens and the companies they work for in the form of taxes. And your PEU uses a substantial portion of your dues to make political contributions almost exclusively to the Democratic Party.

In other words, PEUs are also transformers of public monies into Democratic Party campaign funds, both directly, and indirectly in the form of personal contributions made by PEU bosses. That gives PEUs a lot of power, because their power to buy politicians is combined with their power to engage in collective bargaining and strikes. Historically, that power has been abused to achieve compensation and benefits packages that are unsustainable.

The Republican solution is to limit the collective bargaining power of PEUs. But collective bargaining is the one thing that unions of any kind were established to do.

I think I have a better idea. Let PEUs engage in collective bargaining or politics (contribute to campaigns, endorse candidates, buy political ads) but not both. And let the union members choose which one - put it to a vote.

Personally, I would favor continuing collective bargaining. You can trust your own power more than you can trust politicians.

The Man who Bought the Truth

Tante T. relates this Ukrainian folk tale...

Long ago, a peasant went to market. He had forgotten what his wife had sent him to buy, so he began browsing the various stalls hoping he would remember it. Suddenly he came upon a very old man trying to sell something very large for very little money.

"Truth!" the old man said. "This is the Truth, and I sell it cheap. Make me an offer, someone!"

The peasant was impressed. Surely this huge Truth must be good for something. So he bought it for the few coins he had with him, loaded it onto his cart, and with great effort took it home to his wife.

"What for you bought this great Truth?" she scolded. "It's too big to fit in our house. It's too big for our barn. We can't leave it outside, because it will attract too much attention and annoy the neighbors. We can't use it for anything. We can't eat it. Please take it back to the market and sell it back to the old man!"

The peasant heaved it onto his cart, and returned to the market, but the old man was gone. Nobody seemed even to have seen him. The peasant had no choice but to sell the Truth to whoever would buy it. But no one did. It was too much, too big, they all said.

So, he cut the Truth in half. Still no buyers. Then in quarters. Then in eighths. Finally he cut the truth into such tiny pieces that people found them convenient, and he sold them all, each one for only a little bit of money, but when he was done he had all the coins he could carry.

And that is why to this very day, everyone has only a little sliver of the truth, and no one has all of it.

And I must add that most people mix their little sliver with misinformation to make it palatable. When they give it away, they call it advice. When they sell it, they call it news. When they add falsehood to it and force it on other people, they call it advertising. And when they pay as little attention to it as possible, they call it politics.

De-pathologizing Religion

Psychologists generally regard organized religion as pathological, because their founding saint, Sigmund Freud, hated religion. He rejected it along with his shtetl* Jewish upbringing, in hope of being accepted into the urbane society of early 20th-century Vienna.

Now, however, the editors of Monitor on Psychology have permitted the writer Beth Azar to contribute the article, "A Reason to Believe," in their December 2010 issue. Religion is not so bad, she claims. It might be normal, even healthy for people. It enables them to bond together in larger social groups. It helps them be more calm and graceful under pressure.

But it can't possibly be true. Indeed Azar quotes one researcher expressing the hope that religion's functions can be taken over by secular communities built on some non-religious moral foundation, like Denmark's welfare state.

It seems to me that most psychologists feel compelled to display the left-leaning identity badges of their tribe, including spouting the anti-religious shibboleths of their own religion - psychology itself. Of course, psychologists see their discipline as science, not religion. But one very good psychologist once asked me if using more solar energy would cause the sun to run down faster. Truly, one does not need to be a scientist to be a psychologist. One needs only to believe in the modes of therapy one has mastered.



* What was a shtetl? A rural village apart, where only Jews lived. There used to be shtetls all over central and eastern Europe, with a vibrant Yiddish culture all their own. The shtetls, and their urban counterparts, the Jewish ghettos, were wiped out during the Holocaust. Those of their inhabitants who escaped extermination migrated to America, to what is now Israel, and other places. Those who would deny the Holocaust must answer this question: Where have all the shtetls gone and why?

Indomitable Spirit II

This from a guy who has had Parkinson's Disease for 20 years who wants to cycle across South Dakota:



And this from a guy with a progressive life-shortening motor ataxia who plans to ride the RAAM (Race Across America - 3000 miles in a single stage):



FYI, they both ride Catrikes, by Big Cat HPV. Happy Winter Solstice, everyone!

Canine Holiday Cheer II

And don't miss Bailey the Unknown Reindeer!

Indomitable Spirit

For those who have experienced losses that mar their holiday season, may the video clip above remind you that joy can be reborn.

The Population Bomb is Fizzling Out

In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote a book called The Population Bomb, in which he predicted an explosive rise in the world's population would outstrip the world's food supply, causing unprecedented famine and conflict over resources. Well, it's 42 years later, and his prediction did not come to pass. Instead, the world's population is beginning to stabilize. Check this video from The Economist:



Dr. Ehrlich made predictions based on extrapolating the statistics of the day, without a deep understanding of the underlying processes behind the statistics. And indeed, some of those underlying processes weren't clear to anyone until a couple of decades later.

If you are wondering why the population is stabilizing, it may be because people realize that they are now living longer and can therefore delay child-bearing: take a look at this data.

Anyway, the global emergency of the 1960's was pollution, the 1970's was population, and now it's climate change. Shall this, too, pass?

The WCC, the PCUSA and Israel

Well folks, the World Council of Churches and the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) have been creeping into the ugly territory of anti-Semitism. You can read about it here. Even though it's the holiday season, the Blind Chihuahua has cursed them.

Signs of Progress and Holiday Greetings

For those of you who have ever doubted it, there has been real objective progress in the human condition over most of the world during the last 200 years. Here is the evidence:



So, all the world's countries are healthier (have longer life expectancies) than they did 200 years ago, and nearly all of them are wealthier, too. Thanks to ideas and inventions from Western Civilization. The Civilization that Christianity launched, and even now that the Church has been largely put in its place, maintains. The Civilization in which people can still be moved by surprise events like this one, done in a shopping mall's food court:



And what culture gave rise to Christian West? The people who think like this:



So, to all who are not offended by public displays of Christian and Jewish religiosity: Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas!

To everyone else, Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas, you ingrates!

And to those of you who actually are Christians, it isn't Christmas yet. It's Advent.

Wikileaks

In case you weren't watching, Wikileaks has obtained and released a large number of secret diplomatic messages from the US. Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden, and run by an Australian. Therefore, US law does not apply directly to them. But it does apply to the source(s) who leaked the documents to Wikileaks.

As a pre-condition for having one's US security clearance activated, one must sign several documents acknowledging one's having read and understood the legal penalties to which one may be subjected if one discloses classified information either (a) accidentally, or (b) knowingly and willingly. These penalties can be severe.

So, to the person(s) who stole the documents, one message. If they catch you and punish you, you can't say you didn't know it was coming.

For the rest of you, another message. It will probably surprise you to know that it is illegal under US law to classify a document without proper authority, as described in written classification guides. In particular, it is illegal to classify a document simply because its disclosure would cause embarrassment. This was enacted to correct abuses of the system of classification in the previous century.

So why does the US mark some information as classified, anyway? Information that is the property of the people is kept from the public domain (classified) in order to protect the people from harm. In other words, if you're an American, you are a co-owner of the US government, and all its information, classified or otherwise. It's just that, for example, you really don't want to know how to operate a nuclear weapon, because even though you would never use such knowledge, someone else, who wants to incinerate your town, just might.

Small Worlds, Must See!

A friend alerted me to the small wonders of Creation. Have a look at Olympus Bioscapes, an international competition for beautiful images made with microscopes of living creatures.

Veteran's Day

To all of you who have served, the living, the wounded, and the dead, thank you for your sacrifice on behalf of the rest of us. And to you returnees, welcome home. Peace be unto you.

Message to Republicans on the Eve of Your So-Called Victory

Tomorrow is election day, and I plan to vote largely Republican. I expect and hope that the Republicans will make some major gains. But I have a message for them.

Don't take whatever victory you get as a mandate. Almost all the independent voters and a good fraction of the registered Republicans hate your party and what is stands for, which is different from what it says it stands for. In fact, they hate you. It's just that the other party has over-reached (just the way you do when you get too much power) and needs to be stopped.

We who hate you are not opposed to health insurance reform. We actually want reform, and have wanted it for nearly two decades. It's just that the health insurance reform proposed by Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner needed to be stopped. I know, because I actually read the bill, which was only two-hundred odd pages. I opposed it, because it tried to even the playing field between the rich and the poor by outlawing fee-for-service medicine. That is, if Hillarycare had come to pass, you couldn't opt out of the system by privately paying a physician for services Hillarycare didn't cover. Or for services bought outside the system because the system provided poor services, as when I had to take my mother out of her home state to find a doctor who could diagnose that she had suffered a stroke, give us a prognosis, and recommend a rehabilitation regimen.

This time around, I haven't read the Obamacare bill. This monstrosity is between ten and twenty times longer than Hillarycare. It was written by a horde of unelected technocrats, and read by nobody, not even those who voted for it. It may be well-intended, but anything that long is bound to be full of unintended consequences (and special interest "gimmes"). But more importantly, it is a form of tyranny. Consider that in this Information Age, nearly everyone has access to the bill on the Internet. But making it so long and convoluted has the effect of keeping us out of the game. The door to the legislative chamber may be open, but we are getting impenetrable smoke blown in our faces.

So, Republicans, we who hate you want you to reform health insurance. But if you can't say what you mean in a hundred pages or less, you don't know what you want to say, and you are letting special interests do your writing for you, to the detriment, if not the peril, of us all. Just like your opposition.

And don't think you can get away with playing the Abortion card, any more than your opponents. That's becoming as passe as the Race card. You can wave either one. But we're no longer willing to let you waive on every other issue of our time.

Finally (for now) be clear on this. We want clean air and water, and we want to stop using petroleum for fuel. But we don't want to stop the engines of capitalism to achieve those things. We want smaller, more agile, more efficient, more accountable government. Which means stop the gerrymandering and hand back some power to the states. We want targeted action against Islamofascist terrorists, but not large-scale land maneuver warfare, because it costs too much to sustain. We want a minimal social safety net. It should be enough to keep a person alive, but if a person wants more than that, then he or she should work for it. And we want a country in which hard work and planning pay off.

This last point means you should resist that most tempting of all taxes - inflation. Inflation doesn't just tax income. Inflation taxes wealth. Maybe a person saved so that she can have some say in what her circumstances will be when she is old. If you try to inflate that away, or if you let your opposition do it, the rest of us may show up on your doorstep demanding some of your wealth to make up for what you stole from us.

So, if you Republicans win much tomorrow, don't crow about it. Shut up and get to work. Too many more canned platitudes and scripted talking points without any real change may just get your party split in time for 2012.

Nukes and the Climate

The other day I went to another seminar on Uncertainty Quantification. This time, it was on the "UQ Pipeline," the software suite that runs the multi-physics simulation codes hundreds of times, mapping out the solution space and determining to which input parameters the codes are most sensitive, and how sensitive they are. This information then points the way to research that knocks down the uncertainty in those most sensitive parameters, so we can then have more confidence in the codes' predictions.

Except this time, the topic was not climate modeling. It was nuclear weapons modeling, which is what the UQ methodology was originally designed for. In other words, one of the most important aspects of global climate modeling is a spin-off of the nuclear weapons design program. In fact, the climate modeling program at my lab was itself started as a spin-off from the weapons program, when a number of weapons designers, code physicists and computer scientists left the older program to start up the newer one about 20 years ago.

But climate modeling and nuclear weapons modeling differ in many respects, of which one is crucial to remember: humans have done hundreds of nuclear weapons tests, but we have only one real test of our climate models, and it is still ongoing.