a thaumaturgical compendium

OK, I’m swearing off political posts for a while. But here’s a summer prediction. There will be a terrorist attack on US soil before the presidential elections, and this will win Bush the White House. The White House is already predicting that this will occur. Bush plays the perfect foil for Al Qaeda—they say the west is arrogant, duplicitous, and hypocritical, and we play right into that image. Can you imagine how much such an effort must fear the idea of an American president who wants to foster the international rule of law rather than play the bully, a president who pushes for human rights at home and abroad?

Am I saying that the Bush administration will precipitate an attack on US soil? No, I’m saying they already have.

Local newspaper sent out a photographer to take my picture for an article on hypertasking. After being rudely tossed out of Starbucks, we ended up in the student center. I had planned on wearing a regular dress shirt, but since Sam reminded me that my wardrobe had a heavy Hawaiian influence, I went that way instead…

Henry Copeland of Blogads has posted the results of his survey. Unfortunately, given that it isn’t a sample, the results have to be taken with a huge chunk of salt. If there is any question of this, some of the demographic items indicate a US-centric skew, among others. Other items strike me as intuitively pretty far out there (20% of bloggers subscribe to the New Yorker? Don’t think so.)

I’m sure that this will be of much more interest to the sites that hosted links to the survey. Provides a neat gauge of their own readership. Also is a helpful selling point for Blogads.

Joi Ito picked up on a posting over at Smartmobs suggesting that the military (and specifically Rumsfeld) has is banning digital cameras and camera phones from the military.

Now, leaving aside that there is thin evidence that this is a real news story (the original link has evaporated and I find nothing similar via Lexis-Nexis), I am shocked that this is in any way surprising. The completely utopian side of me thinks that if military operations truly were transparent, we would see an end to large-scale warfare. But if there were ever an organization in which secrecy was a strategic asset, the military would be it.

Some will say that this the genie is already out there, that defending against picture-taking is going to be impossible. While in the long run, I suspect this is true, in the short run, it seems prudent to establish regulations that restrict when pictures can be taken during a military operation. No, I don’t like it, but it certainly is not surprising. And despite the timing (and again, given the provenance of the story, I don’t know that this timing really exists), I can’t imaging a military commander who would argue for the free and open use of surveillance equipment by its forces.

Now, the really interesting part of this is that the cameras are not the problem. After all, many of our troops in the most revealing areas have cameras mounted physically on them. The military is probably on the bleeding edge when it comes to the penetration of wearable surveillance and computing devices. The problem comes in when those images can be transmitted outside of the normal bounds. What makes cameraphones particularly threatening is their ability to be universally addressable. The same is true of any digital photography, when it is combined with the Internet.

It’s difficult not to like a book that begins “It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute.” Tom Robbins has a habit of saying plainly ridiculous things, and then spending a lot of time explaining to you why they are plausible, whether this is a person with a pyramid-shaped head or a parachuting tankuki. Villa Incognita, which I picked up for the flight to NY, is no different in this regard, but it sounds a bit like something your great-unkle—an excellent story teller on most days—tosses off to placate you because he’s had a long day and wants to go to bed. The plot is mechanical, there is little to draw you in. It’s a book that is not hard to put down. It seems, especially in comparison to some of Robbins’s other efforts, to lack any sort of continuing tension.

It’s not a bad book. There is no doubt that Robbins can turn a phrase, and you feel after reading this that you’ve just spent a few hours with him over some drinks. But in the long run, the book feels like someone trying to write like Robbins: clown loving seattlite sisters, MIAs waxing religious in Laos, and a circus to make the global ties; throw them in a blender and spin the connections.

A father and daughter were recently “discovered” living in a large urban park in Portland. I find the reaction, both by the police and the media, to be astounding. The discussion on MF gets at my discomfort in the story.

The father was getting by on a disability check of $400 a month. He and his daughter cultivated vegetables and he taught her. The police found the 12-year-old to be well spoken and in excellent health. They went to town once a week to go to church and the bank and do some shopping. The father made the very sensible decision of moving into the park rather than exposing his daughter to the street.

With the help of the authorities, he now lives in a trailer and is mowing lawns. I know this might be short-sighted of me, but I have to wonder whether they are really better off. The “authorities” have noted that she is reading and working at a 12th grade level, and is articulate and bright. No doubt, this was in large part exactly because of the environment in which she lived. Now, she gets to go to public school while her father mows lawns.

I don’t have enough information to really know, and I do know how badly the media can skew news when they decide to invade people’s privacy, but I can’t help but think that this child was lucky to have had the experience she did, especially considering many of the alternatives.

The television station has set up a college fund for her. Money may be donated at any Bank of America for “Ruthie’s Education Fund.” I hope she decides to go somewhere that will fit her interests. Heck, if she goes to Evergreen or UCSC, she can move back into the woods.

I initially found no reason to watch the video of the apparent killing of Nick Berg. But when CNN notes that Zacarias Moussaoui used Berg’s hotmail account in the US, it is bound to trigger conspiracy theorists. Perhaps it is simply a coincidence, but it seems like a pretty strange one. Of course, it’s hard to know what the chances are of a meeting between a terrorist and an unrelated person who then provides the terrorist with his email password, but I suspect this happens pretty infrequently.

There is always room for doubt, but this list of issues on kuro5hin is worth a look over. It was enough to spur me to download and watch the gruesome video. I haven’t seen enough beheadings to be able to compare them, but the suggestion that Berg was dead when decapitated does not appear to be inconsistent with the video. Neither is it obvious that this was the case. I find it silly to think that this was an orchestrated attempt to “wag the dog,” but it does seem like there are some strange coincidences and contradictions in the story. Does it change the gruesome nature of the killing if, for example (and there is no evidence of these examples), Berg was already dead when decapitated, or if Berg was working for US intelligence. I think it would clearly change the rhetorical place of Bergs killing.