And Its Location?

The NY Times on Qatar:

And Qatar still has its secrets. According to knowledgeable officials, Qatar has allowed the United States to store ammunition at a secret facility in the desert. It is called Falcon 78.

Long Bet: Fascism in Western Europe within 25 Years

You heard it here first, perhaps? More on this soon.

Hoo-RAY: Trade Liberalization

We need more of this:

The US will on Tuesday unveil a bold proposal to eliminate tariffs on manufactured goods, calling for countries in the World Trade Organisation to sweep away all duties no later than 2015.

This was interesting:

A recent study by the National Foreign Trade Council, a US business lobby that provided the blueprint for the US scheme, says developing countries pay $80bn a year in tariffs, more than 70 per cent of it on trade with each other.

I'd also like to see extension of NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere, and free trade with Oz. If there were a way of trading Britain for Quebec I'd do that too.

Moore's Law

Yes this sounds like a daft Larry King observation, but it only just occurred to me how apt the name "Moore's Law" is. Good thing he wasn't named Gordon Less. We just take it for granted that technology will keep getting exponentially better each year: the law of MORE. In historical terms this never was the case, and it can't continue indefinitely either-- even if things keep going well and we don't get nuked back to oblivion, we've got to plateau out at somewhere, since even demigods can't keep doubling in power every 1.5 years indefinitely. We belong to the exponential generations, a rare inflection point in humanity--the Real Gen X.

(That medieval theocratic fanatics are at our throats during this period, does heighten the drama.)

Matching Campaign Funds

Here's an explanation of matching funds. I didn't realize they came solely from the "$3 Tax Checkoff" on the personal income tax return.

The law requires that priority be given first to party nominating conventions, then to general election nominees and last to primary election candidates

So the two major parties have voted to first defray the costs of their own conventions with these funds.

It would be a truly "voluntary" contribution if the checkoff item increased your tax by three dollars. Imagine, for example, we make it a $1,000 checkoff--so a mere million citizens could choose to redirect a billion of our communal money into their cause. But it's OK because it was their "voluntary" choice. The real subsidy comes in placing the checkoff item on the form at all.

And didn't it used to be one dollar? Has this grown faster than inflation?

These funds are an insidious way of introducing all sorts of restrictions on free speech into campaigns, for once you accept them you come under a whole regime. (Read the explanation above). But if you refuse the funds, you must compete with campaigns strengthened by them.

In the main the restrictions seemed designed to damp down competition from third parties. There's a chicken and egg problem in getting any alternative view before the public: to get the word out you need money, and to get money you need the word out. Wealthy eccentrics allow you to cut through this, and get other views out there. They may not succeed but you can at least buy some television and print to present them. That's why these $1000 (or even $100) caps that have been suggested on personal donations are so shrewd. While seeming to strike at "big money" influence on the two major parties, they in fact strangle off opposition to these two parties and make this chicken and egg problem insuperable.

As a general rule any "campaign finance reform" coming from Washington will have goals the two parties can agree on, which are these: defray their own costs from public coffers, and keep out competition.

Continuums of Hypocrisy

This is a philosophical musing, entirely non-political.

Imagine we try to arrange beliefs in some kind of continuum, possibly in two dimensions, in increasing severity of hypocrisy.

In the limit there is a point of zero hypocrisy. Beliefs professed here have these two qualities:

• 1. integrity of formulation: we arrived at it freely after due consideration: not under coercion, not under hypnosis, etc.
  
• 2. integrity of execution: we will stick to in spite of duress or temptation.
  

A popular example of hypocrisy would be the fellow who says he believes in the sanctity of marriage, then commits adultery on the sly. So most definitely we need point 2.

But would we really call someone a hypocrite for violating something he was hypnotized into believing? Or something that he'd thought about so casually that he hardly believed it himself? So I have thrown in point 1 as well.

So imagining an X and Y axis with the point of zero hypocrisy at (0, 0) in the lower left, beliefs could deviate from this limit point by failing to some degree on integrity of formulation (X axis) or integrity of execution (Y axis) or both.

But let's shift to imagining this graph used mainly to help us think about accusations of hypocrisy. "You say this belief of yours is here near (0, 0), but I say it is actually out here, that it would crack under a little pressure."

Let's pick some tangible examples so we have a very firm grip on what we're talking about here. Imagine we are examining a woman who professes a belief in the pro-life side of the abortion debate, and we first question this from the integrity of execution side.

• Zero accusation. We take her integrity of execution at face value.

• Burden/Heartache. What if a test revealed your fetus to have Down's Syndrome?
   Or something worse like elephantitis?
    Or something even worse, ensuring a painful life of at most 2 days?
     ...

• Money. What if someone gave you a thousand dollars to join a pro-choice march?
   Or a million dollars?
    Or ten million dollars?
     ...

• Coercion. What if your husband were to lose his job if you don't march in that march?
   Or you were to also lose your house?
    Or also be tortured?
     ...

We could also imagine various attacks on her belief from the integrity of formulation side:

• Zero accusation. We take her integrity of formulation at face value.

• Undue Influence. You were programmed to this belief by drugs and starvation
   You were programmed to this belief by a cult over the weekend
    You were programmed to this belief by growing up in an evangelical church with no opposing beliefs around.
     You were programmed to this belief by growing up in an evangelical church with some opposing beliefs around.
      ...
• Mental defect. A deficiency of some chemical makes you incapable of killing anything (even insects).
    ...

Now consider what might be called the mechanistic view of human consciousness: the hypothesis that our mental life is entirely the result of atoms in our brains obeying the laws of physics. This is the prevailing scientific view today, and it dovetails nicely with evolutionary biology.

What's interesting to me is that if you imagine all our accusations of hypocrisy above and think about how nicely they can all be picked up and pointed at the woman as if they had a sort of handle and a sharp tip--this theory has exactly the same sort of handle and tip--the shape of a sword.

(Which, as an aside, makes me wonder if it is not so much a testable scientific theory, as a something else--but I'd need to be inspired to say anything about that and I'm not).

Put another way, imagine we have something like baseball trading cards for each of those different accusations of hypocrisy (card 1: you'd crack if given 10K, card 2: if given a million, etc). We can arrange these cards on the table by category and severity, to form continuums. It's interesting that the mechanistic hypothesis has its own card that can be arranged just like all the others, and even intermingled with them. It seems like a scientific hypothesis, but in some way it's also qualitatively similar to telling a woman she'd cave if given a million dollars.

And its accusation of hypocrisy is extreme: in fact it's a kind of infinite limit point in both the X and Y axes. It's the next step more dire than "forced to it by drugs and starvation", since it means physics is playing the role of perfectly effective drugs and starvation (something unanswerable and irresistible) every moment, in every respect of your mental life. It's a limit point because physics isn't denying the opportunity for some "true you" to emerge--it's that that's all there is--it's all drugs, it's all starvation--there is nothing else.

As for integrity of execution, well, we know by simply tweaking some atoms we can make you sing any pro-choice song we'd like. And we're not denying you anything...because that's simply all there is--just the atoms bouncing around. By not tweaking your brain, all we're doing is letting other brute and aimless atoms decide your actions.

Movie Review: NAQOYQATSI

Third in the series that began with "Koyaanisqatsi", "world out of balance" as the Hopi Indians would have it, and we've now reached the "Naqoyqatsi": "war as a way of life".

By this he means that technology...well...if I try to paraphrase Yoda I'll only screw it up. From the official NAQOYQATSI website:

Technique, while promising comfort and happiness, means power, means control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a condition of war that is at once universal and unseen. The explosive tempo of technology is war; the untellable violence of relocation in technology is war. All of us are refugees driven from our human state.

In other words, "Rousseau: The Movie".

Like Greens grappling with the number of trees felled to make their books, here is the obligatory vexed rationalization from the "STATEMENT" section of the website:

It must be noted that the production of NAQOYQATSI employs the very medium that it questions. In doing so, we embrace the contradiction of using technology to question technology. Given the intention of the film is to commune, to connect, we employ the franca lingua of the technological order - what Baudrillard terms 'the evil demon of images'. The image becomes our location. We relocate onto the image, onto our venerated familiar, the iconic, as we reshuffle the deck to offer an iconoclastic experience in the form of a film. Indeed, the subject of NAQOYQATSI is itself the manufactured image, a horizonless digital landscape, devoid of reality yet full of promise. The tools that produced the film are themselves our subject.

And finally no manifesto like this would be complete without some murky metaphysics about why its author has done something trangressive:

Now let me turn the tables; if a picture's worth a thousand words, without a picture, can you describe the world we inhabit in words? To rename our world is perhaps our most important opportunity in life. The power of language, the word, in a state of tragic humiliation, is our anecdote to the conformity of the hyper-real image. To take back our language, to name the world, is the essence of freedom and, in this world, a dangerous act.

Godfrey Reggio

I like the dramatic signature, but I wonder if it's wise. The Technology Gestapo will, no doubt, catch up with Reggio at a movie opening one of these years. Watch out, Godfrey!

Incidentally wouldn't "Dangerous Acts" be an apt title for a coffee table book tracing the history of absurd (and absurdly safe) acts of protest? Concluding with the word "PEACE" spelled out in that naked woman font. I'm just not letting that one go am I?

Anyway my notion about the best way to critique a movie like this...and by "a movie like this" I mean one that shows scenes of a seemingly nice American family eating dinner... with an ominous soundtrack...interspersed with scenes of missiles taking off...the best way to critique something like this is not by attempting a point by point refutation ("you're saying Americans are evil, why?"), that's a fool's errand for Reggio will only claim to be making an artistic point and it is I the reviewer who am jumping to conclusions...rather the best way is with a movie in the same style, about Mr. Reggio.

Assuming we could get sufficient footage from Reggio's life, imagine:

His agent negotiating deals, pressing for more money. Then a second time. And a third. Finally we have 16 simultaneous boxes on the screen, each with his agent pressing someone else for money. 16 copies of his agent in 16 different offices, speeded up so they look like marionettes.

Then cut to a scene of dollar signs descending on a black background (yes there was something like that in NAQOYQATSI)...

Then Reggio himself hitting the old movie tour. Attending openings, going on various talk shows. Again speeded up to look like a marionette. More dollar signs...

And an interlude showing some nasty scenes of his personal life. His fights with 10 different girlfriends over time, slowed down artistically: their tears, his harsh words. 16 different boxes showing him make women cry on 16 different occasions.

And ending with Reggio himself being an obsessive user of technology. His electric toothbrush (hundreds of times), his TV remote, playing with the sunroof of his luxurious Mercedes, back and forth, juxtaposed against stoic hopeless poor sitting on the curb as he drives by.

That's the proper sort of review for a movie like this. Cheap shots deserve their like.