Overview

Reading Log For 2004

THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN

Task Force Dagger (2003)

Random House, New York

Read entirely on 2004-01-04

Robin Moore also wrote The Green Berets and composed their theme song. He is not exactly shy with his jingoism. His close relationship with the Special Forces allowed him to get exclusive interviews.
Moore always paints black-and-white portraits of his subjects; either they are bona fide all-American heroes, or worthless yellow-bellied cowards.
6: In an explosion, keep your mouth open so the blast won’t rupture your eardrums.
8: Knowing the worth of the Special Forces, Warlord General Dostum threatened to kill his soldiers and all of the soldiers’ families who allowed any American to come to harm.
19: The author thinks that the Green Berets could have won in Vietnam if they were used in their guerrilla capacity rather than their counterinsurgency capacity!
24: Massive bribes were given to officials from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for their cooperation.
26: While supporting the mujahadeen against the Soviet Army, CIA operative Billy Waugh saw Osama bin Laden almost every day.
27: In order to allow helicopters to take off at high altitudes, it’s fuel was pumped into a large rubber bladder on the ground. Once airborne, the fuel was sucked back on board.
28: While the work of the Special Forces was never widely publicized, a Ranger raid in Afghanistan made the evening news with night-vision camera footage.
29: A Delta Force raid on Mullah Omar’s house was not publicized at all.
81: The Northern Alliance was not familiar with how to take prisoners. TIGER 02 tried to teach them the 5 S’s:

Search Obviously, they did not do this well, allowing the prison riot.
Silence
Segregate
Safeguard
Speed in Evacuation (or Speed to the Rear)

116 - 117: The humanitarian food rations dropped in Afghanistan had several problems. Desiccant packages looked just like spices, but ended up poisoning recipients. Because they were packed in low altitudes, the plastic coverings tore on impact, allowing the food to spoil. Headquarters did not believe there were any problems until retired Green Beret Keith Idema sent them digital pictures.
154 - 155: The notorious secret ISI (Pakistan Intelligence) flights from Kunduz, which may have allowed high ranking Taliban to escape.
180: The book portrays “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh as actively participating in the prison uprising, perhaps even translating between the Taliban and CIA operative John Spann, while he was being interrogated and/or tortured.
216: While task forces RAMBO and TEXAS 12 were attacking a Taliban bridge position, a confused yellow taxi pulled right into the line of fire. Both sides held their fire until the driver could drive out of the kill zone:

“It was totally surreal.”

219: A devastating friendly-fire incident that nearly killed Hamid Karzai was caused by soldiers calling for airstrikes on their own coordinates. The troops were not trained well enough on their GPS system. And it was a classic case of a poor user interface!
221: The Marines would not send in helicopters to help evacuate the wounded.
288: The largest number of American casualties occurred during Operation Anaconda, when Seven Rangers died trying to recover one SEAL, petty officer Neil Roberts, who had fallen from a helicopter.
319: An over-the-top description of G. W. Bush visiting Walter Reed Army Hospital:

After eight long years of neglect and embarrassment, the U.S. military finally had a real commander in chief.

ZODIAC

The Eco-Thriller (1988)

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

2004-01-05 to 2004-01-06

Sangamon Taylor: A chemist, formerly working for industry before joining GEE. Now he travels Boston by bike and Zodiac boat.
3: His huffing of nitrous follows his ethic:

“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.”

“So?”

“Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do. It is my understanding, Tess, that you’ve been referring to me, about town, as a ‘Granola James Bond’.”

Tess didn’t give a fuck. “Who told you about that?”

“You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around.”

“I thought you’d enjoy it.”

“Even a horse’s ass like me can detect sarcasm.”

“So what would you rather be called?”

“Toxic Spiderman. Because he’s broke and he never gets laid.”

Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both problems. Bart broke the silence. “Shit, man, Spiderman’s got his health. James Bond probably has AIDS.”

4: Or is he the Toxic Peter Parker?:

Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he’s a nebbish. No money, no prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you’re meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: “Do those moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I have to take as Peter Parker?” In my case, the answer is yes.

And I hadn’t even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco’s pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power—a hundred thousand times—more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they’ll pass you off as a flake. You can’t get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say “More than twice the legal limit,” they get comfortably outraged.

Taylor specializes in using concrete to plug up pipes used for illegal dumping.
Rebecca: Reporter for The Weekly.
Debbie: A co-environmentalist at GEE, who Taylor begins to see.
Alan Reading
Dan Smirnoff: An eco-terrorist.
Hank Boone: Another eco-terrorist.
88:

Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They’d chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn’t die with their hearts full of venom.

115: While on an island made of trash, Taylor tells some Pöyzen Böyzen fans that he is looking for PCBs, but they thought he said he was looking for PCP.
160: Electrical transformers have PCBs, which are extremely toxic. Maybe that’s what causes the cancer “clusters” near high-voltage power lines, not the electro-magnetic fields, but the PCBs!
172: His advice for PCB exposure:

“Activated charcoal,” I said. “Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal. Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema.”

When the PCBs disappear as he gets closer to the source, he discovers that a genetically-modified bacteria has been used to convert them to inert salt. However, another type of bacteria was modified to do the opposite. Eventually, they could turn all the salt in the ocean to chlorine.

THREAD OF THE SILKWORM (1995)

Paperback

BasicBooks, New York

2004-01-07 to 2004-01-10

From the cover:

The story of Tsien Hsue-shen, the brilliant, enigmatic, Chinese-born scientist who helped pioneer the American space age and, when rejected by the nation he sought to adopt as his own, became the undisputed father of the Chinese missile program.

So did the Red Scare deport an innocent man to Communist China, or was the fact that he embraced the Communist ideology proof that Tsien was disloyal to the U.S.? The bourgeoisie history of his and his wife’s family makes his conversion inexplicable.
3: His name means “study to be wise”.
5: His mother, Chang Langdran, was given an education in the Five Classics: the Book of Rites, the Book of History, the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Book of Poetry, and the Book of Changes.
17: In the early 1920’s, several guests came to Beijing to influence the Chinese educational system: John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.
30: In January 1932, Japanese planes bombed the Zhabei district of Shanghai after a group of Japanese Buddhist priests were beaten.
86: Because of the far-out connotation of the word rocketry, Caltech started using the euphemism jet propulsion instead.
98: L. Ron Hubbard moved into the mansion of John Parsons, who was notorious for throwing wild, black-magic inspired parties.
179: In the 1950s, FBI agents followed the Weibaum family to the ice cream parlor because they were convinced that the flavors picked were part of some secret code.
222: On October 27, 1966, the Chinese tested a nuclear bomb and a new rocket design simultaneously.
227: The first Chinese artificial satellite was launched on April 24, 1970.
229: China detonated its first nuclear bomb on October 16, 1964.
243: A naïve article by Tsien had disastrous consequences. According to Xu Liangying:

“Tsien, who know nothing about agriculture, wrote this article to give Mao’s programs scientific justification. After this hit the newspapers, Mao followed through with his policies. This article had a terrible influence on Mao. And yes, it had an impact on the famine that followed, in which 30 to 70 million people died.”

256: In the 1970s and 1980s, Tsien became swept up in the craze of UFOs and ESP.

GALILEO’S REVENGE

Junk Science In The Courtroom (1991)

Paperback

BasicBooks, New York

2004-01-10 to 2004-01-12

14: The 1923 federal appellate court ruling in Frye v. United States allowed experts in court only if their testimony was founded on theories, methods, and procedures “generally accepted” as valid among other specialists in the same field.
15: However, the Federal Rules of Evidence in 1975 disregarded Frye and allowed for expert testimony:

If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact.

25: The scientific world was excited in the early 20^th Century when René Blondlot “discovered” N rays. Despite being a product merely of imagination, the French journal Comptes rendus published 54 papers on N rays in 1904, while only publishing 3 papers on X rays.
42: The idea that cancers are caused by trauma had less to do with medicine than worker’s compensation laws. Two thousand books and papers were published on the subject in Germany in the latter 19^th Century.
45: In dubio pro laeso = When in doubt, favor the injured.
68 - 69: Incidents of “sudden acceleration” in Audi cars, popularized by 60 Minutes, were found to be physically impossible. When the brake is activated, the engine cannot summon enough power to move. Although it is difficult to believe, all these accidents were most likely caused by the driver mixing the brake and accelerator.
69 - 70: Clarence Ditlow leads the Center for Auto Safety (CAS), an advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader in 1980. When cases against Audi started to become more difficult to win:

Ditlow, more royalist than the king, would continue to insist that sudden acceleration was a diabolical (though as yet unexplained) engineering mystery. Most plaintiffs’ lawyers had more sense. Indeed, they had understood from the beginning that being persistent mattered more than being consistent. In litigation you win some, you lose some, the profit’s in the volume, and the key is to keep on plugging.

78 - 80: Problems such as cerebral palsy were thought to be caused by trauma during birth, leading to lawsuits against doctors. Electronic fetal monitoring (EFM), which traces the heartbeat of a baby during delivery, was introduced in 1972 to determine if this was the case. However, the EFM charts were subject to interpretation, leaving the issue just as murky as before.
80 - 81:

Today, this line of attack has become one of the most spectacularly lucrative enterprises known to lawyers, quite possibly the single largest revenue raiser in all of medical malpractice. About four million babies are born healthy every year. Ignore them. Some four thousand babies a year are born with cerebral palsy. Ignore most of them too. But four hundred (say) of those had a complicated delivery. These are the cases most likely to arrive in court. And there, the facts are reviewed chronologically, so that the jury sees the undisputed trauma first, the disputed negligence second, the undisputed cerebral palsy third. It is a perfect setup for misinterpreting sequence as cause. Litigated a mere forty times with a one-in-two success rate, that setup can yield a small firm $50 million or so, on an upfront investment for expert witness fees and administrative costs of maybe $5 million at most.

111 - 113: Charlotte Brontë literally died of pregnancy in 1855. The FDA approved Bendictin as therapy for morning sickness in 1956. Over 30 years, Bendictin had been used by 30 million pregnant women. William McBride declared it to be the cause of birth defects, like thalidomide.
119 - 120: 700 Babies with vastly different types of birth defects were lumped into a massive class action suit by federal district Judge Carl B. Rubin in Cincinnati. The trial began ion February 4, 1985 with more than 1,100 plaintiffs. The judge was innovative in his methods:

To the horror of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, however, Judge Rubin resolved to run a trial, not a casino. The trial was going to address Bendictin, so Rubin banned the word “thalidomide” from his courtroom. The trial was going to turn on science, not sympathy, so Rubin banned all visibly deformed children. When seventeen parents and seven children staged a protest, Rubin ordered extra security guards, set up closed-circuit televisions for the demonstrators, and retained a staff of nurses to care for the handicapped children while their parents attended the trial. Finally, Rubin declared that the trial would be held in three separate stages. In the first, the jury would decide only whether Bendectin can cause birth defects at all. Only in the subsequent stages—if they were needed at all—would the jury consider whether specific children had been injured, and if so what they deserved in compensation. There would be no playing on jurors sympathies until some basic scientific questions had been resolved.

A total of nineteen experts testified. Both Alan Done and William McBride appeared for the plaintiffs. On March 12, 1985, it took the five women and one man on the jury just four and a half hours to conclude that Bendectin does not cause birth defects.

127: Merrell removed Bendectin from the shelves on June 9, 1983. In the subsequent years, there has been no decrease in the incidents of birth defects.
128:

No other U.S. pharmaceutical company is ever going to expose itself to such legal risks either, so private research into pregnancy-related drugs has virtually stopped. “If you’re suffering from morning sickness,” runs one bitter joke in the industry, “go see your lawyer.”

145: In a case where a teacher was fired for having tuberculosis, the Supreme Court finally ruled in 1987 that citizens enjoy the right to be protected from “discrimination on the basis of mythology” and the “complex and often pernicious mythologies about the nature, cause, and transmission of illness.”
146: The problem comes from whether this counts as a handicap:

Lewis Carroll could hardly have devised a better ending for the chronicles of tuberculosis in court. You are not contagious, and therefore not in fact handicapped. The common citizen believes that you are contagious, however, and you are therefore fired. So the Supreme Court of the United States certifies that you are handicapped, by virtue of the common citizen’s irrational prejudices. Which means that you are legally entitled to be treated as if you were not handicapped. Which you aren’t anyway.

168: Joan Berry claimed that Charlie Chaplin was the father of her daughter. However, Joan had Group A blood, and her daughter had Group B blood. Her father must have had either Group B or AB, but Chaplin was Group O. This made no difference in the case.
198 - 199: Should judges believe a scientist based on credentials? This is dangerous because:

Strings of letters appended to last names do provide a useful initial screen against professional incompetence, but only a very course one. Even yesterday’s stellar achievement offers little assurance that today’s opinion is correct: many a great scientist takes off sooner or later on some foolish frolic. Isaac Newton, for example, ended up in alchemy. Johannes Baptiste van Helmont, the seventeenth-century scientist who invented both the term and the concept of a “gas,” later extolled the curative powers of magnetic forces. David Starr Jordan, one-time president of Stanford University, who coined the term sciosophy (“shadow wisdom”) to describe the junk science of his day, was a dyed-in-the-wool eugenicist. The modern patron of clinical ecology in a Harvard-trained, board-certified allergist. Individuals change; yesterday’s competent medical student or even Nobel-caliber chemist can become tomorrow’s crank.

208 - 209: Richard Feynman proposed that expert witnesses make a declaration at the outset:

“In keeping with my professional responsibilities, I will promptly publish anything of scientific note that I may learn in our consultations, regardless of whose legal interests my findings favor.”

217: Galileo is said to have muttered, “eppur si muove” = “nonetheless it does move”

A LEG TO STAND ON (1984)

Paperback

Touchstone, New York

2004-01-11 to 2004-01-15

While hiking in England in 1974, Sacks seriously injures his leg (running away from a bull). Since nobody knew to look for him, his rescue that day was very lucky. The descriptions of his injury and painful recovery will make anyone cringe.
28 b: Medical terminology differences between England and the U.S.: A houseman is an intern, a registrar is a resident, surgeons are called “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”, and the chief nurse on a ward is called the Sister.
57: He wrote about “The Man with the Missing Leg” 15 years before his accident.
This book was filled with hyperbole, everything was either “infinite”, “monstrous”, “instant”, etc.
183: The Afterward describes another fall in 1983 where he seriously injures his other leg.
191:

I repent, I retract, my Kantian aberration now; but I was driven to it, I think, by the limitations of physiology.

CONFUSIÓN DE CONFUSIONES (1688)

Introduction by Martin S. Fridson

Paperback

Wiley Investment Classics, New York

2004.1.27 – 2004.1.29

125: Introduction (1996)

Whoever comes to know Joseph Penso de le Vega’s Confusión de Confusiones will recognize at once that he is concerned with a literary oddity. Here is a book written in Spanish by a Portuguese Jew, published in Amsterdam, cast in dialogue form, embellished from start to finish with biblical, historical, and mythological allusions, and yet concerned primarily with the business of the stock exchange and issued as early as 1688. Such a volume obviously requires a good deal of explaining.

147:

Shareholder: I really must say that you are an ignorant person, friend Greybeard, if you know nothing of this enigmatic business which is at once the fairest and most deceitful in Europe, the noblest and most infamous in the world, the finest and most vulgar on earth. It is a quintessence of academic learning and a paragon of fraudulence; it is a touchstone for the intelligent and a tombstone for the audacious, a treasury of usefulness and a source of disaster, and finally a counterpart of Sisyphus who never rests as also of Ixion who is chained to a wheel that turns perpetually.

158 - 159: The Shareholder’s advice on speculation:

Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because where perspicacity is weakened, the most benevolent piece of advice can turn out badly.
The second principle: Take every gain without showing remorse about missed profits, because an eel may escape sooner than you think. It is wise to enjoy that which is possible without hoping for the continuance of a favorable conjuncture and the persistence of good luck.

The third principle: Profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins. At one time they may be carbuncle stones, then coals, then diamonds, then flint-stones, then morning dew, then tears.

The fourth principle: Whoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money, since the values are so little constant and the rumors so little founded on truth. He who knows how to endure blows without being terrified by the misfortune resembles the lion who answers the thunder with a roar, and is unlike the hind, who, stunned by the thunder, tries to flee. It is certain that he who does not give up hope will win, and will secure money adequate for the operations that he envisaged at the start. Owing to the vicissitudes, many people make themselves ridiculous because some speculators are guided by dreams, others by prophecies, these by illusions, those by moods, and innumerable men by chimeras.

176: The Shareholder gives a history of Amsterdam:

The Dam is a square which is faced by The Palace [i.e., the town hall]. In Dutch Dam means a dyke against the floods, for at this place once a dyke had been constructed in order to protect the town against the Amstel, the river from which the town got its name, as Amsterdam was originally called Amstel Dam.

211: Final section:

Merchant: I on my part thank you for the instruction. I esteem business but hate gambling. I have a notion that my faculties do not suffice for such complicated transactions. If I nearly lost my sense when I wanted to learn about the speculations, you may conclude of what importance to me is the conduct of Exchange transactions. It is possible that I shall become a holder of shares and shall deal [in shares] in an honest way, but I am very sure that I shall never become a speculator.

Philosopher: I will take the same course because I am too old to defy dangers and to endure storms. I shall keep my shares until it shall please God that [after the recent downfall of the prices] I can get out of them in peace, for I will only save myself and not gather wealth.

All schools of philosophy teach that the soul is nobler than the body, life nobler than death, and the existent nobler than the non-existent. But, as for the stock exchange, I approve the paradoxical opinion of the Platonic musician that the non-existent is better than the existent. I think it much better not to be a speculator, [and in making that statement] I have in mind real speculation, not the honest business in shares, for what is fair in the latter is dubious in the former.

LIES ACROSS AMERICA

What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999)

Paperback

The New Press, New York

2004-02-02 to 2004-02-14

Besides pointing out bona fide factual errors on historic monuments, the author takes issue with the euphemistic terminology of historical injustices. He makes numerous comments about European “discovery” of inhabited lands as well as the “state’s rights” justification of the Civil War.
37: Kiswahili speakers of east and central Africa divide the deceased into two categories:

sasha = the recently departed whose memory remains in the living.
zamani = revered ancestors from long ago.

52: Mount McKinley was known to the natives as Denali.
99 - 102: Correct names of Native American tribes. Many of the names used by European settlers were derogatory terms used by rival tribes. Most of the names translate as something like “we the people”.

Navajo means “thieves” to rival Tewa Pueblo Indians; prefer Diné.
Apache means “enemies” to Zunis. Related linguisticly to Navajos, they also called themselves Diné.
Papagos of southern Arizona means “bean eaters” to nearby Pimas; prefer Tohono O’otam = “desert people”.
Pimas, another southern Arizona tribe, means “I don’t know”, their reply when asked their name by a Spanish explorer; prefer Akheemult O’odham = “river people”.
Anasazi means “ancient enemies” to Navajo.
Eskimo means “those who eat raw flesh” to Crees; prefer Inuit.
Sioux was shortened from Nadouwesioux, meaning “little snakes” or “enemies” to Ojibwes; prefer Dakotas or Lakotas.
Ojibwes, or Chippewas, refer to themselves as Anishanabes = “people of the creation”.
Mohawk means “cannibal” in Algonquian; prefer Kaniegehagas = “people of the place of flint”.
Salish were called Flathead Indians by the British.
Two groups were called “Gros Ventres” = “big bellies” by the French.
Nimipus were called “Nez Percés” = “pierced noses” by the French.
Lenape were named after De La Ware by the British.

103: Voltaire quote:

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

113 - 115: The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum in Leadville, Colorado is supported by mining corporations and does not mention how terrible working conditions led to labor unions, nor famous labor leaders including:

Big Bill Haywood helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Clarence Darrow won his acquittal of assassinating the former governor of Idaho. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail for sedition during the Woodrow Wilson administration and fled to the Soviet Union.
IWW leader Joe Hill was executed in Utah in 1915.

137 - 141: Typical Spanish-American War monuments list the dates of the war from 1898 to 1902. A better description would be from May 1, 1898 to August 13, 1898. At that point, the U.S. had destroyed the Spanish Pacific fleet in Manila Bay, compelled the the surrender of Santiago de Cuba and taken Puerto Rico with only 379 American deaths and 1,604 wounded. However, hostilities in the Philippine-American War began on February 4, 1899 and Theodore Roosevelt declared victory on July 4, 1902. Serious incidents continued as late as 1916. Of the 125,000 troops sent to the Philippines, about 10,000 died; 4,234 deaths were in combat and 2,818 were wounded.
195 - 197: Texas has more historical markers than the rest of the United States put together. But the history is selective.

The official state markers might look less like “a big joke” if Texas marked the sites whee these events happened, none of which is currently commemorated on the landscape:

- Reconstruction violence (not one site marked).
- The notorious Brownsville race riot of 1906.
- The hundreds of lynchings in Texas, including the killing of at least eighteen African Americans in Slocum on July 29-30, 1910.
- Sweatt v. Painter, the first successful school desegregation lawsuit in modern Texas history and an important precursor in 1950 of Brown v. Board of Education.
- The first woman juror in Texas, in 1954.
- The founding of La Raza Unida, the first major Chicano political party, in Crystal City in 1969.

These are all matters of statewide if not national importance.

249: The Scottsboro Boys were accused of raping two White women on March 25, 1931. Despite there being no evidence that rape actually occurred, the nine Black defendants served a combined total of more than one hundred years in jail.

298: Richmond does not mention one of the great female spies of all time, Elizabeth Van Lew, who worked for the Union during the Civil War.

319: Quote from poet John Harington:

Treason doth never prosper,
What’s the reason?
For if it prosper,
None dare call it Treason.

328: Panels at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, dedicated in 1943, take his quotes out of context.

The first panel misquotes the Declaration of Independence downplaying the unity of the 13 Colonies.
The second panel, on religious freedom, takes a sentence written to James Madison out of context, wrongly implying that he thought absolute codes came from religion:

I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.

The third panel falsely implies that Jefferson was against slavery. They appear to attribute liberty to God, when they are actually about taxes and the impact of slavery on Whites.

331: Polish Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciusko made Jefferson the executor of his will, which stipulated using $17,000 in securities to buy, free, and educated young African Americans. Jefferson used the money for other purposes.
352: The Cannon-Johnson Gang ran the largest kidnapping ring in the history of the U.S., stealing free Blacks from the North and selling them into slavery in the Deep South.
363: The winter encampment at Valley Forge was not nearly as bad as it is portrayed.
367: President James Buchanan was thought to have a homosexual relationship with William Rufus King, but this is not a topic of discussion at his house, Wheatland, in Lancaster, PA.
369 - 370: Lincoln was called “Honest Abe” because the previous Buchanan administration was so corrupt.
380: Wilson secretly sent Americans to fight alongside the Russian Whites, who had little enthusiasm.
381 - 382: One of the fastest policy reversals in U.S. military history was the “strict legalistic interpretation” of the international law that required submarines to allow crew and passengers to evacuate targeted ships. The conduct of German submarines in WWI was one of the reasons that America declared war.
406: Sociological terms on human reactions to complex moral situations:

wertrationalität = “value rationality” is when people act in accord with their basic values.
zweckrationalität = “technical rationality” is when they act in accord with the organization in which they belong, such as “only following orders”.

408: Gregory Peck starred in the film version of Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel Gentleman’s Agreement, about the unwritten agreement not to sell real estate to Jews in Darien, Connecticut. Darien used to be a “sundown town” which forbade African Americans and Jews to remain overnight.
417: Helen Hunt Jackson wrote A Century of Dishonor (1881), a scathing exposé of U.S. policy against Native Americans.
425: The phrase, “That takes the cake!” comes from the outrageous Cakewalk performances on antebellum slave plantations.
452: On Senator John A. Logan:

Logan was born in southern Illinois in 1826 and like most people of the region and time became a Democrat partly because he agreed with the party’s white supremacy. His experience during Sherman’s March transformed him as he came to know African Americans and realized they were not inferior beings. Becoming an equalitarian, he transferred to the Republican Party and helped manage the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Johnson was impeached (but not convicted) partly because he refused to carry out Congressional mandates for equal rights for ex-slaves

Wasn’t one of JFK’s Profiles in Courage about one senator who refused to vote against Johnson? This makes for a different interpretation of the nobility of that act.

WAY OUT THERE IN THE BLUE

Reagan, Star Wars And The End Of The Cold War (2000)

Frances Fitzgerald

Hardcover

Simon & Schuster, New York

2004-02-18 to 2004-02-22

The title comes from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
19: President Reagan gave his famous “Star Wars” speech on March 23, 1983 to make ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete”, much to the surprise of virtually everyone in Washington, D.C.
20: On July 31, 1979 (before becoming president) Reagan toured the underground NORAD command center at Cheyenne Mountain. Answering a question, General James Hill said that the personnel would only be able to watch the monitors helplessly if a single missile were launched at an American city. Martin Anderson claims that this made a bit impression on Reagan.
22: Reagan often quoted from movies without attribution. For example, his retort to Bush that “I’m paying for this microphone” was from a film called State of the Union. He sometimes cited movie plots as fact, such as A Wing and a Prayer.
30: In 1954 Reagan agreed to be a spokesman for General Electric on TV and as a traveling speaker. In the late 1950s, the speeches became more right wing, denouncing New Deal measures such as rural electrification and Social Security. These speeches were full of anecdotes and statistics about the inefficiencies of communism, but Reagan never provided sources. Years later, when meeting with Gorbachev, Reagan repeated some of these anecdotes and jokes inappropriately.
53: Testifying during an anti-trust trial of Music Corporation of America (MCA), Reagan exhibited “forgetfulness”.
95: Nuclear strategy as chess:

This tower of conditionals resting upon a hypothetical “window of vulnerability” struck some defense experts as a Rube Goldberg contraption. Lawrence Freedman, the British historian of nuclear strategy, wrote that the methodology involved reminded him of Stephen Potter’s advice to the chess player in Gamesmanship: if you want to one-up a more experienced opponent, make three moves at random and then concede defeat, explaining that your situation is hopeless given the brilliant checkmate he will make twenty moves hence.

111: The famous line:

In the presidential debate on October 28 Reagan talked about his devotion to “world peace,” and when Carter said, quite accurately, that his opponent had begun his political career campaigning against Medicare, Reagan clinched the debate, as far as many were concerned, by shrugging his shoulders, looking over at his opponent forlornly and saying, “There you go again.”

117: Because each MX missile was to powerful powerful, they would be likely targets for a first strike. Defense Secretary Harold Brown proposed in 1979 to randomly move them along a “racetrack” that would ring six thousand square miles.
135: Problems with Edward Teller’s X-ray laser pointed out by Daniel Graham:

Instead he attacked the concept on political and tactical grounds. The American public, he said, would never stand for a nuclear weapon in space—and besides, this weapon had a fatal flaw. “It may be a technical marvel,” he told Teller, “but it involves a military paradox. If someone fires a weapon at this kind of satellite, its only reaction is to destroy itself or be destroyed. It can only protect itself by blowing itself up.”

138: When two Navy fighters shot down two Libyan jets on August 19, Edwin Meese did not bother to wake Reagan.
144 & earlier: By DoD rules, contractors are not allowed to testify about the “necessity” of the Strategic Defense Initiative. This is probably why, years later, they get “think tanks” to shout about the need for National Missile Defense.
158:

According to [David] Stockman [in The Triumph of Politics (1986)], the administration’s decision to spend $1.5 trillion on defense over five years owed in large part to his own mistake in arithmetic.

159: Stockman had agreed with Frank Carlucci and William Schneider to increase the defense budget by 7% a year in real dollars base on 1982, while the Reagan campaign figures were all based on 1980. Stockman had forgotten that Congress had raised the 1981 budget by 9% and Reagan had added more, so the baseline had started at $222 billion, instead of $142 billion as he had assumed.

It meant that the defense budget would grow by 160 percent in just six years. Stockman stormed about his office, but by that time the defense-budget figures were out and there was nothing he could immediately do.

170: When Reagan was shot on March 30, Haig announced from that White House press room that, “As of now, I am in control here.” It turns out that there was good reason for him to do so because Weinberger might have raised the Defcon and the White House press secretary was not sure whether the government was running. Haig had meant only to convey that the government was functioning as normal, but he was breathless from running up the stairs.
223 - 224 ftnt.: National Security Council member Leslie Lenkowsky was appointed director of USIA in September 1983. He was never confirmed because he lied about the existence of a blacklist of 95 people (including Walter Cronkite, Paul Samuelson, Senator Gary Hart, and Coretta Scott King) who would not be permitted to go on USIA trips. He is famous for testifying:

“I’m prepared to stand by what I meant to say.”

249:

In a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1984, administration officials, questioned closely about the Star Wars concept, acknowledged that a system capable of shooting down Soviet missiles in the boost phase would have to be triggered on such short notice that the command decision might have to be made by computer.

“Well, that would argue that in the 1990s we should run R2D2 for President,” Senator Paul Tsongas (Democrat of Massachusetts) said, referring to the robot in the movie Star Wars. “[At least] he’d be on line all the time.”

“Has the President been informed that he’s out of the decision-making loop?” Tsongas continued.

“I most certainly have not [informed him],” George Keyworth replied.

Robert S. Cooper, director of DARPA, chimed in with the suggestion that the President could carry a strategic-defense trigger “even into the bathroom.”

Senator Joseph Biden (Democrat of Delaware) then asked if the proposed defensive weapons might be fired accidentally—provoking the Soviets to launch an attack. “Now, let’s assume that it was a mistaken judgment,” he began.

“We’re not ready to assume that,” Dr. Cooper interrupted, “because we don’t know but what in that time period we couldn’t create technologies that would not make such a mistake possible.”

“O.K.,” Biden said. “You’ve convinced me that I don’t want the program in the hands of a man like you.”

Richard Perle came to Cooper’s defense. “Frankly,” he said, “I think that question of Presidential intervention or any other intervention is a minor, second-order issue when the real issue is whether you do or do not stop the destruction of the United States.”

“How does the President feel about your viewing him as a minor, second-order level of decision-making?” Tsongas asked.

“I said the decision is a minor decision because it does no harm if it turns out there is not an attack, and if there is an attack . . .”

“Some of us believe that nuclear war in not a minor decision,” Tsongas said.

250: Eventually Senator John Glenn (Democrat of Ohio) broke out in exasperation his skepticism that the technology was available yet anyway.
292: SDI advocates became re-interpreting the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to allow for the deployment of “future technologies”. Despite numerous attempts by Congress to reinforce the “restrictive interpretation”, the “broad interpretation” kept cropping up from the Reagan Administration. This set a dangerous precedent for the Executive Branch of government to effectively break treaties agreed to by the Legislative Branch.
332: In the spring and summer of 1986, the U.S. made several provocative moves against the Soviet Union and Libya.
382: The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal was ineffective on its face because while three Americans were released, three more were abducted to serve as bait for more weapons.
408: Gorbachev tells his assistants that the they will only have to spend 10% as much as the Americans spend to overcome SDI. The Soviets never spent much to overcome SDI, because the U.S. never fielded a system to overcome. Many neoconservatives rewrite history by claiming that Reagan forced the Soviets into bankruptcy.
409: Gorbachev allows Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow from internal exile on December 23, 1986. He criticized Gorbachev’s tying offensive-arms reduction agreements to stopping SDI research. See “EVERY MAN SHOULD TRY” (1999)
418: Months after the Marines had confessed allowing penetration of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the Naval Intelligence Service concluded that they had been pressured into confessing falsely. There was no serious security breach.
422: On June 12, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Reagan demands that Mr. Gorbachev, “tear down this wall!” This was not as romantic as it sounds, because by this time Gorbachev had already made significant reforms. Reagan was planning to take credit for things that the Soviet Union was going to do anyway.
426: After years of stalling, the INF treaty only reduced the number of nuclear warheads by 4%.
428:

In his opening remarks Reagan said, “We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim. The maxim is doverai, no proverai—trust but verify.”

“You repeat that at every meeting,” Gorbachev interjected, chuckling.

“I like it,” Reagan answered, and the room erupted in laughter.

However, despite his demanding to inspect Soviet sites, Reagan would never allow Soviets to inspect U.S. nuclear sites or SDI research facilities.
474 - 475: CIA estimated that the Soviet Union did not bother to match U.S. increases in military spending.

TRUST US, WE’RE EXPERTS!

How Industry Manipulates Science And Gambles With Your Future (2001)

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Hardcover

Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, New York

2004-02-22 to 2004-02-24

23: PR firms distribute video news releases (VNRs) which are run as news stories by television stations who have lost reporting budgets over the years.
45: Edward L. Bernays was the “father of public relations”:

“Mr. Bernays has . . . created more institutes, funds, institutions, and foundations than Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Filne together,” observed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a nonprofit educational organization that flourished in the years following World War I. “Typical of them was the Temperature Research Foundation. Its stated purpose was ‘to disseminate impartial, scientific information concerning the latest developments in temperature control as they affect the health, leisure, happiness, and economy of the American people.’ A minor purpose—so minor that rarely did Mr. Bernays remember even to mention it—was to boost the sales of Kelvinator refrigerators, air-condition units, and electric stoves.”

46 - 51: General Electric (formerly, the Edison General Electric Company, before J. Piermont Morgan took it over) threw an elaborate party to honor an ailing, 82 year old Thomas Edison, and divert public attention away from inquiries into its monopolistic practices. Light’s Golden Jubilee was held on October 21, 1929, three days before Black Thursday.
51: British economist John Maynard Keynes lost the equivalent of £1 million in the Depression. A fact that should be remembered by those who espouse his teachings.
56: Karl Popper defines the main difference between science and pseudoscience to be that the former is “falsifiable”.
75 - 77: Perhaps thousands of miners died from silicosis by sandblasting at Hawk’s Nest, West Virginia in the 1930s, yet the tragedy is largely forgotten.
106: The Public Relations industry uses the formula of Peter Sandman to determine the fallout from bad publicity: “Risk equals hazard plus outrage.”
176 - 177: Unlike its traditional creation method, genetically engineered L-tryptophan caused a toxic byproduct which led to severe problems in consumers who bought it at “health food” stores.
220: Typical conflicts of interest:

The public today is bombarded with scientific information regarding the safety and efficacy of everything from drugs to seat belts to children’s toys. Eating garlic bread brings families closer together, says research sponsored by Pepperidge Farms bakeries, which makes frozen garlic bread. Eating oat bran lowers cholesterol, according to research sponsored by Quaker Oats. Eating chocolate may prevent cavities, says the Princeton Dental Resource Center, which is financed by the M&M/Mars candy company and is not a part of Princeton University. A daily glass of red wine reduces your risk of heart disease, say the doctors hired by the liquor industry. Chromium picolinate taken as a dietary supplement will help you burn off fat, says the dietary supplement industry. Zinc lozenges might shorten the duration of the common cold, reports a researcher who happens to hold 9,000 shares of stock in a zinc lozenge company.

223 - 224: Discusses the book GALILEO’S REVENGE (1991) by Peter Huber, and disputes the cost of liability lawsuits, but does not refute any of the specific incidents convincingly.
226 - 227: The scare from spraying apples with alar in 1989.
237: The libertarian magazine Reason receives funding from Philip Morris.
248 - 249: “Junk Science” crank Steven Milloy. I started reading Milloy’s www.junkscience.com after it was recommended by Popular Science magazine. I took it seriously for a while, until I realized how hopelessly biased it was. Even well-established science about DDT was ridiculed!

STAR CORPS

Book One Of The Legacy Trilogy (2003)

Ian Douglas

Paperback

EOS, New York

2004-02-24 to 2004-02-25

Years after SEMPER MARS (1998), LUNA MARINE (1999), and EUROPA STRIKE (2000), Marines have been sent to the planet Ishtar, to investigate the Ahannu, a reptilian race with access to ancient technologies. Humans have been slaves to the Ahannu for thousands of years. Rather than fight for their freedom, they protect their masters from their “liberators” with a religious frenzy.
John Esteban (Garroway): His great-grandfather is “Sands of Mars Garroway” and his grandmother is Caitlin, who he read about in Ocher Sands.
Gavin Norris: Corporate troubleshooter, whose mission is to
Noumenon = opposite of phenomenon, and therefore not reality. Synonym for cyberspace.
83: Marine terminology: floor = deck, ceiling = overhead, door = hatch, stairs = ladder, bed = rack, pants = trousers, hat = cover, upstairs = topside, downstairs = below deck, room = compartment, bathroom = head.
229: Not all the Marines were informed of the high death rate during the voyage in suspended-animation, about 3%. Due to relativistic effects and suspended animation, Earth will age 10 years, but the crew will only age a few months.

THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT (2002)

Kim Stanley Robinson

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

2004-02-26 to 2004-02-29

An alternate history where the Black Death wipes out virtually all of Europe. The main characters are reincarnated through the ages. After dying, they always end up in the bardo. Occasionally, they avoid drinking the potion that makes them lose their memories before heading back to Earth. Of course, this can be taken on many levels, that eventually humanity collectively decides to learn from its past and stop repeating the same mistakes.
While scouting for Temur The Lame, Bold Bardash reports that plague has destroyed the Magyar kingdom. Bold escapes being killed by Temur and wanders the dead cities until being captured by slavers. He is sold to the Chinese fleet of Zheng He and befriends Kyu. Kyu and Bold are victims of the power struggles between the Emperor and the eunuchs.
Kokila and Bihari are young girls in a small village in India.
115: Kya, the Tigress, saves the life of Bistami. While serving Akbar, Bistami is exiled to Mecca. He discusses philosophy with other Sufis.
133: In a previous incarnation, Bistami was a servant of the Twelfth Imam.
157: Sultan Mawji Darya and Sultana Katima lead a band of outcasts up the Iberian peninsula to create a utopian city. Katima opens a madressa while Ibn Ezra investigates the natural sciences.
184: When Sultana Katima is about to confront invaders, Bistami warns her that she will be killed as in a previous life. Throughout the book, the Muslim women attempt to reform Islam in favor of women’s rights, but it is a very long process.
While invading Nippon for the glory of Chinese Wanli Emperor, Admiral Kheim’s fleet is swept away to the New World where they meet the Miwok. Their doctor, I-Chin, recommends teaching Mandarin to a young girl, Butterfly. Peng gives smallpox to the natives. Heartbroken, the Chinese leave, but Peng swam ashore. Later it is learned that Peng help to inoculate the entire continent. They travel south, to a gold-laden empire. While escaping with Butterfly, Kheim starts to enjoy the power derived from his pistols. Just before arriving home, Butterfly is killed in a storm.
In central Asia, the alchemist Khalid has a hand chopped off for trying to fool Sayyed Abdul Aziz. He gives up alchemy in favor of the scientific method. Together with Bahram and Iwang, they make great progress in the natural sciences and weapons technology, but are laid low by plague.
372: Busho escaped Nippon to Turtle Island (North America) after the Chinese invaded. Traveling east, he acquires the name Fromwest. He arrives at the Hodenosaunee Long House to discuss government with the natives.
384 - 385: Fromwest describes how Peng traveled east and inoculated the natives from smallpox.
The Widow Kang takes in a traveling monk, Bao Ssu-nen and his son. Bao is accused of cutting off queues, and is tortured and killed. Defying all expectation, the Widow Kang marries a Muslim, Ibrahim, and they move west, to central Asia.
402 & 432: Life stages: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, and widowhood.
The doctor of the Sultan, Ismail, witnesses the capture of Konstantiniyye by the Travancore league, from India. Ismail is invited to Delhi to meet the abbess Bhakta, with whom he corresponded on medical matters. He meets The Kerala, the man responsible for the astounding technological and military ascendance of Travancore.
538: The flooding at Gold Mountain is an opportunity for the Nipponese settlers of the Gold Gate, and for Nippon itself, to revolt against the Chinese. The young servant Kiyoaki is excited to work against his Chinese mistress.
549: The Long War lasted for the better part of a century. The war began as Dar al-Islam fought China. Travancore and Hodenosaunee were swept up, creating a global conflict.
554: Three Chinese, Bai, Kui, and Iwa, are trapped in the seemingly endless trench warfare.
603: Scheherazade is the fictional storyteller of 1001 Arabian Nights. Every night, she told a story to, King Shahryar, but kept the ending in suspense to stay alive one more day.
604: In post war Firanja (Europe), the young Muslim girl Budur moves in with her liberal aunt Idelba and takes a college course taught by a radical woman named Kirana.
616: Ibn Khaldun wrote the earliest critical study of history in Muqaddimah (1377).
642: Idelba is involved in a conspiracy to split the alactin. They eventually conclude that nuclear energy and weapons are not practical.
677: Badur attends an international conference of scientists. These conferences started with developing international systems of weights and measures, even beginning a new calendar. Eventually this evolves into a de facto world government.
695: One session is about a village in Tibet that was covered by an avalanche. A message names several village members, who are all possibly incarnations of the main characters.
709: Bao Xinhua and Kung Jianguo fight for personal liberty in China. Kung was assassinated while meeting with another revolutionary leader, Zhu Isao.
738 - 739: Years later, after Bao has retired, he attends a class taught by an elderly Zhu Isao. They discuss the collection-of-lives genre including “The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew”. In some literature, the names all beginning with the same sound is not to be taken literally, but is merely a device.
761:

All was at peace. Bao wished for a second that Kung had lived to see this scene. He had fought for something like this little age of peace, fought so full of anger and hilarity; it seemed only fair that he should have gotten to see it. But—fair. No. No, there would be another Kung in the village someday, perhaps that little girl, suddenly so intent and serious. Certainly they were all repeated again and again, the whole cast: in every group a Ka and a Ba, as in Old Red Ink’s anthology, Ka always complaining with the kaw of the crow, the cough of the cat, the cry of the coyote, kaw, kaw, that fundamental protest; and then Ba always Ba, the banal baa of the water buffalo, the sound of the plow bound to the earth, the bleat of hope and fear, the bone inside. The one who missed the missing Da, and felt the loss keenly, if intermittently, distracted by life; but also the ones who had to do whatever possible to keep things going in that absence. Go on! The world was changed by the Kungs, but then the Baos had to try to hold it together, baaing their way along. All of them together playing their parts, performing their tasks in some dharma they never quite understood.

One of the students in Bao’s class is a rebellious-looking girl named Kali.
Often the cast is reincarnated as the mortal enemies of their previous incarnations.

FASHIONABLE NONSENSE

Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse Of Science (1998)

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Hardcover

Picador USA, New York

2004-02-30 to 2004-03-01

Originally Published in France as Impostures Intellectuelles.
The story behind this book began with Sokal submitting a parody of meaningless new age fluff and pseudoscience entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the Duke University journal Social Text, which they published in 1996.
7 - 8: On the contention that these quotations are marginal:

When ideas are accepted on the basis of fashion or dogma, they are especially sensitive to the exposure even of marginal aspects. For example, geological discoveries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries showed that the earth is vastly older than the 5000-or-so years recounted in the Bible; and although these findings directly contradicted only a small part of the Bible, they had the indirect effect of undermining its overall credibility as a factual account of history, so that nowadays few people (except in the United States) believe in the Bible in the literal way that most Europeans did only a few centuries ago. Consider, by contrast, Isaac Newton’s work: it is estimated that 90 percent of his writings deal with alchemy or mysticism. But, so what? The rest survives because it is based on solid empirical and rational arguments. Similarly, most of Descartes’ physics is false, but some of the philosophical questions he raised are still pertinent today.

12 ftnt: Noam Chomsky is often challenged on his credentials to comment on social issues. He writes:

Compare mathematics and the political sciences—it’s quite striking. In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is the concern for content.

39 ftnt: Julia Kresteva seems to subscribe to the “Sapir-Whorf thesis” that language radically conditions our view of the world. Pinker, for example, criticizes this theory.
61: Karl Popper writes in The Logic of Scientific Discovery that true science must be falsifiable. As mentioned often, including just a few books earlier.
71 -78: Discussion of Thomas Kuhn’s work, including The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
78: Paul Feyerabend criticizes science in works such as Farewell to Reason, but does not go as far as other irrationalists.
110: Luce Irigaray wrote an essay entitled “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” claiming that fluid mechanics has not been worked on as thoroughly as solid mechanics because solidity relates to men and fluidity relates to women. As someone who studied how difficult fluid mechanics can be, would that it were so!
121: Feminist writer Suzanne Damarin, who writes approvingly of Irigaray, says that the “female mind-body” has difficulty with geometry.
141 - 142: The idea that mathematical systems (such as weather) are extremely sensitive to initial conditions, a foundation of chaos theory, was discussed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1877 and Henri Poincaré in 1909.
153: End of chapter on Jean Baudrillard:

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard’s work a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard’s thoughts if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

211: What can come after post-? Something I’ve often wondered.
259: David Lodge defines a law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s peers.
265: G. H. Hardy, who took pride in working in mathematical fields with no applications, predicted in 1941 that number theory and Einstein’s relativity would never have military applications.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GARGOYLE (1998)

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche

Paperback

Ace Books, New York

2004-01-26 to 2004-03-07

This is an anthology of short stories dealing with gargoyles, although the relation to some stories is tentative. There is a wide range of style and audience.

How Do You Think It Feels by Neil Gaiman

This one is serious, including explicit sex scenes, as contrasted with the very next story.

The Gargoyle’s Shadow by Katherine Kurtz

This could best be described as juvenile.

Scylla and Charybdis by Don D’Ammassa

48: If I had to pick a favorite, it would be this one. However, even this story had its flaws.

101: According to legend, a nun carved the Little Dedo statue at Notre Dame.

Now Entering Monkeyface by Marc Levinthal and John Mason Skipp

187: deals with the Cydonia face on Mars.

206 & 210: Sheela-na-gig are exaggerated Medieval carvings of female exhibitionists. I can’t help thinking of the P. J. Harvey song with that name.

Bleeding Stones by Harlan Ellison

246: About gargoyles coming to life and immediately killing everyone in the most gruesome ways possible. This story was not clever at all, just an absurd description of meaningless carnage.

GHOST WARS

The Secret History Of The CIA, Afghanistan, And Bin Laden, From The Soviet Invasion To September 10, 2001 (2004)

Steve Coll

Maps by Richard Furno

Hardcover

The Penguin Press, New York

2004-03-02 to 2004-03-14

5: Mir Amal Kasi killed two and wounded three CIA employees on January 25, 1993, then fled to Pakistan. The few CIA agents in the region in 1996 were dedicated to tracking him rather than reporting on the Taliban.
11: Between 2,000 and 2,500 Stinger missiles had been given the the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Presidents H. W. Bush and Clinton instituted a highly classified buy back program of between $80,000 to $150,000 per missile.
12: Gary Schroen was sent by the CIA to reopen contact with Ahmed Shah Massoud, hoping to fund him by buying his Stingers. Schroen was shocked to discover that only 8 missiles had ever been delivered to Massoud, despite his reputation as the fiercest anti-Soviet leader. The CIA confirmed that Pakistan had funneled most missiles to their favored factions.
17: Soviets referred to the CIA-supplied Afghan rebels as duhki = ghosts.
27 - 28: Conspirators against the Saudi government massacred dozens of pilgrims in Mecca’s Grand Mosque on November 20, 1979. Saudi Arabia tried to keep the incident as quiet as possible. Despite being perpetrated by radical muslims, rumors blamed the United States and Israel.
27 - 34: The rumors about U.S. involvement in the Grand Mosque attack contributed to a riot which nearly destroyed the United States embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan on November 21, 1979. The Pakistani military dragged its heels to restore order, thinking that the staff (including Gary Schroen) could not have survived, while Marine Stephen Crowley lay dying.
30 -31: A Pakistani police lieutenant pretended to go along with the protesters but drove the staff’s families to safety, preventing them from being taken hostage.
60 & 63: The CIA generally did not play favorites when providing assistance to the Mujahedin, leaving Pakistani dictator General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq to manipulate the funding to fit Pakistan’s goals. He instructed Akhtar Abdur Rahman, director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) not to be too effective in attacking the Soviets, lest it turn its eye toward Pakistan.
65: The Saudi royal family matched the CIA in funding the Mujahedin, dollar for dollar.
75: During their ascension in the early part of the Twentieth Century, the al-Saud family became allied with desert preacher Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, founder of the strict Wahhabi doctrine.
91: Texas Democratic Representative Charlie Wilson championed the CIA war in Afghanistan, subscribing to a romanticized view of the Mujahedin. He often traveled to the region to impress his girlfriends.
96 - 97: CIA Director William Casey was notorious for mumbling. Many people, including Reagan and Bush, could not understand a word he said when giving briefings about critical issues.
100: On the changes in foreign policy between administrations:

Zia told Casey that being an ally of the United States was like living on the banks of an enormous river. “The soil is wonderfully fertile,” he said, “but every four or eight years the river changes course, and you may find yourself alone in a desert.”

118 -119: Massoud negotiated a (short-lived) truce with the Soviets in the spring of 1983. Because the U.S. and Pakistan wanted war more than peace, this helped strengthen his rival Hekmatyar.
128: In the 1980s, the CIA and KGB settled into an unwritten agreement not to murder and kidnap each other’s salaried officers.
134: Mujahedin fighters did not advocate suicide attacks, unlike Arab volunteers later.
134 - 135:

Afghan fighters also often refused to attack bridges or trade routes if they were important to civilian traders or farmers. The Afghan tolerance of civilian commerce in the midst of dire conflict frustrated visiting Americans. A congressman on tour would fly over Afghanistan, see a bridge standing unmolested, and complain loudly on his return to Washington that it ought to be blown up. But when the satellite-mapped attack plan was passed down through ISI to a particular Afghan commando team, the Afghans would often shrug off the order or use the supplied weapons to hit a different target of their own choosing. The livelihood of their clan often depended on open roads.

160: The U.S. would not work with Gorbachev to stabilize Afghanistan.
162 - 163: Osama bin Laden and fifty Arab volunteers held out for a week against the might of the Soviet army in April 1987 at the fortified cave compound at Jaji. More than a dozen of his men were killed and he suffered a foot wound. Coverage by Arab journalists solidified his reputation as a warrior.
169:

The CIA director [Robert Gates] bet Armacost $25 that the Soviets would not be out of Afghanistan before the end of the Reagan administration. A few months later he paid Armacost the money.

175: After the Soviet withdrawal, Pakistani President Zia announced openly that he would continue to meddle into internal Afghan affairs.
176 -177: The CIA traded a half dozen Toyota pickup trucks and some BM-12 rockets with the ISI for a captured Soviet SU-25 aircraft. The Soviet pilot, Alexander Rutskoi, declined the usual CIA defection offer. Years later he lead an uprising against Boris Yeltsin.
182: Ahmed Shah Massoud’s older half-brother Dean Mohammed was killed after applying for a visa in Peshawar. ISI’s Afghan cell was suspected.
195 - 199: State Department official Ed McWilliams disagrees with the CIA policy of supporting anti-American Afghan factions, but his warnings were ignored.
204: Osama bin Laden names his network al Qaeda.
222 - 223: A senior Saudi prince and theologian Khalil A. Khalil met with bin Laden in Jedda. Bin Laden demanded a meeting with the king to argue for using his own army against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He was not permitted to meet with the king but was allowed to pitch to Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister, Prince Sultan. So much for the bin Laden-Hussein connection.
226: In the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the CIA shipped abandoned Iraqi T-55 and T-70 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery pieces to Pakistan, where the ISI supplied them to Jallaladin Haqqanni, Hekmatyar, and the Arab volunteers for use against Najibullah’s Afghan army. Despite the refusal of Hekmatyar and Sayyaf to publicly support Saudi Arabia against Iraq, Saudis still secretly gave them cash.
228:

All this detailed intelligence reporting about international Islamic radicalism and its sanctuary in Afghanistan gathered dust in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. The Gulf War, the reunification of Germany, the final death throes of the Soviet Union—these enormous, all-consuming crises continued to command the attention of the Bush administration’s cabinet. By 1991, Afghanistan was rarely if ever on the agenda.

A senior CIA operative who had worked on the anti-Soviet jihad found himself talking in passing about the Afghan war with President Bush. The president seemed puzzled that the CIA’s covert pipeline through Pakistan was still active, as the officer recalled it. Bush seemed surprised, too, that the Afghans were still fighting. “Is that thing still going on?” the president asked.

232: Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin pledge to cut off arms to Najibullah and the Afghan rebels on January 1, 1992.
236 - 237: Convinced that he would control Kabul by morning, Hekmatyar turns off his radio and goes to sleep. He awoke to discover that Massoud and Dostum had outmaneuvered him.
252: During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had sent two-man terrorist teams to strike at American targets. The agents were issued passports with sequential numbers and were captured.
264: Bill Clinton does not sent Agency for International Development (AID) funds to Afghanistan, in favor of the neediest African countries.
269: In 1994 four Arab volunteers tried to assassinate Osama bin Laden for not being pure or radical enough.
283 & 285: The Taliban hinted that they might bring back the exiled King Zahir Shah.
337: About 600 of the 2,300 Stinger missiles were still missing by the time the Taliban took Kabul. Prices ranged from $70,000 to $150,000 per missile.
379: A group of Afghans hired for a “snatch operation” claim to have almost captured bin Laden in 1998.
396: CIA director Tenet never presented the Tarnak Farm raid plan to Clinton because it had a very low chance of success.
403 - 404: American embassy bombings at Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on Friday, August 7, 1998.
411: Osama bin Laden may have missed the retaliatory Tomahawk missile strike by a few hours. 75 missiles (at $750,000 each) struck Zawhar Kili.
421: Senior members of the CIA were not informed that submarines were placed off the coast of Pakistan to send cruise missiles, should bin Laden be spotted.
421 - 422: When Clinton sent cruise missiles against the Iraqi intelligence headquarters in 1993, one missile had fallen short and killed a prominent female Arab artist.
456 - 457: Uzbek radicals, supported by bin Laden, attempted to kill president Islam Karimov with six car bombs on February 16, 1999, killing sixteen people. Karimov arrested at least two thousand Islamic activists in retaliation.
460: While Hamid Karzai tried to negotiate with the Taliban, his father was assassinated.
476: Perez Musharraf plans and executes the seizure of the strategic Kargil height in Kashmir by Pakistani soldiers disguised as jihadists. This could have sparked a war between India and Pakistan, now both nuclear powers.
478 - 479: Nawaz Sharif tries to replace General Musharraf while he was flying to Pakistan on October 12, 1999. Musharraf takes over the government. Meanwhile, a secret commando team organized to capture bin Laden dissolves overnight.
482: Jordanian police arrest two Islamists who planned to destroy the Radisson Hotel and release cyanide inside a movie theater during the millennium celebration.
483: A team of suicide bombers tried to attack the USS Sullivans in a similar manner to the USS Cole, but the overloaded boat sank and they were not noticed.
491: Hundreds of civilians, related to Massoud’s commanders, were massacred by the Taliban on the Shomali Plains, yet the Americans never talked about it.
515: Karzai and Massoud’s aids traveled to Washington in the summer of 2000 to plead with Congress for support. Hardly and congress members paid any attention. At a typical meeting, perhaps one or two staff members would attend.
532: The attack on the USS Cole killed 17 American sailors and wounded 30 more. CIA analysts determined that the bombers might easily have killed 300 and sunk the Cole.
543: Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton brought back the cruise missile submarines off Pakistan during the transition to the George W. Bush administration.
576: The CIA leaked the death of Massoud to CNN.

LONE WOLF & CUB (1970)

Koike Kazuo

Illustrated by: Kojima Goseki

Trade Paperbacks

Dark Horse Comics

re-read complete series 2004

BODY OF SECRETS

James Bamford

Anatomy Of The Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From The Cold War Through The Dawn Of A New Century (2001)

Hardcover

Doubleday, New York

2004-03-21 to 2004-04-06
paperback:

One of the opening quotes was already mentioned in PUNK’S WAR (2001):

“In God we trust, all others we monitor”
—Intercept operator’s motto

Chapters are named for their metaphorical parts of the body: Memory, Fat, Muscle, etc. Each chapter begins with some encrypted text.
16 - 17: At the end of WWII, Germans turned over their Russian code-breaking equipment (TICOM) to the U.S. and British. This was a major help to the allies, because they had focused their research on breaking German and Japanese codes.
23: Suddenly in 1948 the Americans were no longer able to read Soviet messages, in what became known as Black Friday.
28 - 29: Intercepted clues (in retrospect) indicated that the Chinese would intervene in the Korean conflict.
35: President Eisenhower authorized the boldest espionage operation against the Soviet Union in the spring of 1956. Project Homerun sent daily flights of reconnaissance bombers into Soviet airspace.
38: The bomber overflights, a heavily-guarded secret until recently, caused the loss of more than 200 Americans and more than 40 aircraft during the Cold War.
40:

Soon after Nasser nationalized the canal, Britain joined France in an ambitious plot to take back the canal by force. Rather than appear as an aggressor, however, France secretly enlisted the help of Israel. The intrigue involved Israel launching a war against Egypt. Then, once Egypt began defending itself, England and France would go in as “peacekeepers.” As part of the “peace,” the canal would be taken from Egypt and kept by Britain and France. Israel would capture the Sinai from Egypt. It was a deceitful plan, which smacked of a return to the worst days of colonialism. Nevertheless, it was fully agreed to by Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, defense minister Shimon Peres, and armed forces chief Moshe Dayan. Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden, informed of Israel’s planned key role, likewise gave his country’s approval. For all involved in the cabal, it was essential to keep the precise details of the elaborate conspiracy hidden from Washington. At the same time, however, it was also essential to win Washington’s support once the hostilities began.

The NSA had relied on Israeli intelligence in the region, which suddenly became silent.
58 & 61: Eisenhower suborned perjury when his Cabinet members testified about the secret Soviet overflights to hide his direct involvement.
68: Four retired generals wrote critically of Eisenhower. He looked into the idea of recalling all four to active duty to court-martial them.
71: The Joint Chiefs of staff developed a plan to stage an attack on the United States troops at Guantánamo Bay and frame Cuba. General Lemnitzer, Joint Chiefs Chairman, gave approval just before Eisenhower left office.
77: During the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, the Navy offered to evacuate Brigade Commander Pepe San Roman, who refused.
79: Robert McNamara relieved Major General Edwin A. Walker of command for indoctrinating his troops with John Birch Society propaganda. Walker protested the enrollment of a black student in Oxford, Mississippi in September 1961. Robert Kennedy arrested him for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion, for which he was jailed five days.
82:

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every other member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

89: The Joint Chiefs planned more “pretext” operations against Cuba even after Lemnitzer left:

The report even suggested secretly paying someone in the Castro government to attack the United States: “The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro’s subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on [the U.S. naval base at] Guantanamo.” The act suggested—bribing a foreign nation to launch a violent attack on an American military installation—was treason.

101: Signal Intelligence ships, such as the Oxford, used a moon-bounce dish to communicate, which only worked about 12-hours a day, when the moon was in sight.
125 - 126: Following the Cuban missile crisis, the NSA did everything it could to keep Cuban radios working, including secretly selling them spare parts!
160: As early as WWII, U.S. intelligence realized that the East African desert of Eritrea had optimum “hearability” of prime targets.
164 - 165: The U.S. acquired the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian ocean from the British, and forcibly removed the 2,000 residents. It remains a very secure facility.
197 - 198: Discussion of lead-up to Israeli attack on the Liberty, but not as extensive as in THE PUZZLE PALACE (1982).
201: The Israeli army killed several Indian UN peacekeepers.
212:

As the Israelis continued their slaughter, neither they nor the Liberty crew had any idea that witnesses were present high above. Until now. According to information, interviews, and documents obtained for Body of Secrets, for nearly thirty-five years NSA has hidden the fact that one of its planes was overhead at the time of the incident, eavesdropping on what was going on below. The intercepts from that plane, which answer some of the key questions about the attack, are among NSA’s deepest secrets.

245 - 282: Discussion of the Pueblo incident with North Korea, also in THE PUZZLE PALACE (1982).
295 - 297: The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the pretext for U.S. intervention in Vietnam was based on several lies. The Maddox mission was designed to purposely provoke a response, including being timed to coincide with commando raids, implying that it was supporting them.
299: The “unequivocal proof” of hostile intentions on August 4, used by President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, turned out to be NSA intercepts from August 2, which turned out to be no proof at all.
306 - 307: Several anecdotes on how poor Communication Security (Comsec) lead to several disasters in Vietnam. Viet Cong radio intercepted communication in the clear, and also sent disinformation in English.
342 - 343: NSA intercepted a ground-to-missile signal to Soviet SA-2 missiles, which had been downing dozens of U.S. aircraft. By dissecting the signal, the U.S. was able to jam it and save lives, until the enemy caught on and changed frequencies.
360 - 361: To test the ability to extend the range of signals by bouncing, a rocket containing toxic aluminum oxide and cesium nitrate was launched from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and detonated in the atmosphere. The test successfully allowed reception well beyond line of sight.
362: Soviet radar signals bounced off the moon and were received at Arecibo.
362: NSA developed a way to trick Soviet satellites into broadcasting information. The system was not used because it would set a bad president.
368: Alice Springs, Australia, was chosen as the location for the ground station Rhyolite satellite, to avoid Soviet interception.
370 - 374: Operation Ivy Bells, where the submarine Halibut tapped a Soviet underwater cable; also discussed in BLIND MAN’S BLUFF (1999).
375: Despite an embargo, the NSA and Naval Intelligence smuggled sensitive electronic equipment to the racist government of South Africa in return for intercepts from Russian spy ships and submarines.
382: James Guerin, who helped with the smuggling to South Africa, among many other illegal operations to which the CIA turned a blind eye, was convicted of masterminding a $1.4 billion fraud.
385: The NSA learned about the Iranian hostage rescue operation from intercepted communication. It warned Air Force General David Jones about his poor communication security, and he overcompensated by ordering complete radio silence. This inadvertently contributed to the missions disastrous failure.
386 - 387: NSA director Bobby Inman turned down an offer to become secretary of defense. Although he denied rumors of homosexuality, some other aspect of his private life were problematic.
397: Shakespeare mentions the practice of intercepting mail in Henry V:

The King has note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.

410:

According to information obtained for Body of Secrets, NSA regularly listens to unencrypted calls from suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden, in hiding in Afghanistan. Bin Laden uses a portable INMARSAT phone that transmits and receives calls over spacecraft owned by the International Maritime Satellite Organization. This is the same system used by most ships and some people who travel to remote locations, such as oil explorers. According to intelligence officials, Bin Laden is aware that the United Sates can eavesdrop on his international communications, but does not seem to care. To impress cleared visitors, NSA analysts occasionally play audiotapes of Bin Laden talking to his mother over an INMARSAT connection.

425: Former CIA director R. James Woolsey on European bribery:

And it’s true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords . . . That’s right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies’ products are often more costly, less technically advanced, or both, than your American competitors’. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.

426 - 427:

One snippet of NSA or CIA information concerned an Egyptian immigrant, Nasser Ahmed, who was seeking asylum in the United States. The secret information led to his arrest; he was denied bail and held for more than three years in solitary confinement pending his deportation. Despite years of efforts by his attorney, Abdeem Jabara, once a subject of illegal NSA surveillance himself, he was never told what the “secret evidence” consisted of, where it came from, or how the United States obtained it. In this Kafkaesque world, he could not fight the charges because he was not told what they were: they were secret. It was only after considerable pressure from the Arab-American community that the Justice Department finally ordered some of the information released. Ahmed was then able to successfully challenge it and win his freedom.

Nevertheless, others are still held on “secret evidence”, despite some judges finding the practice unconstitutional.
428 - 429: At the request of the several government agencies, the NSA spied on U.S. Citizens, including folk singer Joan Baez, Benjamin Spock, Jane Fonda, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
451: The NSA’s main computer suffered a massive failure on Monday January 24, 2000.
465: It is suspected that the Seawolf-class submarine USS Jimmy Carter is intended to tap undersea fiber optic lines, in the same manner that the Halibut. Tapped copper cables.
483: The NSA center, dubbed Crypto City, consumes more electricity than Annapolis, with a monthly electric bill of $2 million.
485: The culture at NSA includes several interest groups, including a Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual Employees club (GLOBE@nsa) named after Alan Turing, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
512 - 513: Systems are being developed to share intelligence within DoD better. For example, Air Force Captain Scott O’Grady was shot down over Bosnia in June 1995 because he was never informed of the known anti-aircraft missile batteries.
526: Frank B. Rowlett, who was one of the original SIS codebreakers along with William Friedman, was head of the crypto team that broke the Japanese PURPLE code in 1940.
527:

But in 2001, the light of the outside world was pushed even further away as construction continued on one more high fence stretching for miles around the entire city. By then Crypto City had become an avatar of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and monstrous, where all the world’s knowledge is stored, but every word is maddeningly scrambled in an unbreakable code. In this “labyrinth of letters,” Borges wrote, “there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.”

537: Polygraph testing was first used by the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1951. The limited statistics on this page from the 1983 to 1984 indicate that many people were rejected as contractors to the NSA purely on polygraph results. They make extensive use of EPQs (Embarrassing Personal Questions). It is scandalous that so many good people have been rejected because of polygraph examinations. The government needs to get that message that POLYGRAPHS DON’T WORK!
540: However, polygraphs can extract unexpected confessions, according to the anecdotes here.
542: A Department of Energy scientists notes that even if the error rate is 2%, 100 innocent people out of 5,000 had their reputations ruined.
590 -599: Seymour Cray, inventor of the famous line of supercomputers, has a hobby of digging a tunnel beneath his Wisconsin home. Known as the “Hermit of Chippewa Falls”, he died in 1996.

QUICKSILVER

Volume One Of The Baroque Cycle (2003)

Neal Stephenson

Hardcover

HarperCollins, New York

2004-05-08 to 2004-06-07

Enoch Root recruits Daniel Waterhouse to return to England from Boston Common in 1713, then reminisces about their meeting in 1655, making Enoch inexplicably well preserved.
Several mentions of the CRYPTONOMICON (1999) by John Wilkins.
While aboard the Minerva, Daniel begins writing his recollections on the dispute over the invention of the Calculus, that Newton described the “tangents” to him back in 1665.
85 - 88: Newton negotiates with a Jewish lens-grinder over some prisms at Stourbridge Fair. At this time, there really was no such thing as standard currency.

“You must have made a mistake,” said the Jew. “Which is perfectly all right—we all make mistakes. You reached into the wrong pocket and you pulled out your black money*—the stuff you throw to beggars.”

“Ahem, er, so I did,” Isaac said. “Pardon me—where’s the money for paying merchants?” Patting a few other pockets. “By the way, assuming I’m not going to offer you black money, how many shillings?”

“When you say shillings, I assume you mean the new ones?”

“The James I?”

“No, no, James I died half a century ago and so one would not normally use the adjective new to describe pounds minted during his reign.”

“Did you say pounds?” Daniel asked. “A pound is rather a lot of money, and so it strikes me as not relevant to this transaction, which has all the appearances of a shilling type of affair at most.”

“Let us use the word coins until I know whether you speak of the new or the old.”

*Counterfeits made of base metals such as copper and lead.

“I have heard that this is the practice in China,” Isaac said sagely. “But here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”

“No matter how little it weighs!?”

“Yes. In principle, yes.”

“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”

“How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.

“A trick of the light.”

The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”

They are interrupted by a man dying of the plague.
265: Daniel meets Leibniz.
309: Upon discovering that the Ham Bros. Cellar was empty while surrounded by muttering depositors:

RALEIGH: “I knew it would be bad. But—my God—there’s not even a potatoe.”

STERLING: “It is a sort of anti-miracle.”

LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF THE REALM: “Go up and tell the musketeers to go and get more musketeers.”

369: Jack Shaftoe (a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds) saves Eliza.
389:

No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

430:

Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.

448: Jack meets Enoch Root, who provides amazingly accurate medical advice for the era.
535: Jack’s syphilis starts to drive him mad.
555: Eliza meets stockbroker Aaron de la Vega in Amsterdam. Is he related to (or the same person as) Joseph de la Vega, author of CONFUSIÓN DE CONFUSIONES (1688)?
636: The King is dead. Long live the King!
639: Eliza enciphers letters from Versailles with the I Ching.
683 - 684: Daniel asks Newton why God had to be so oblique about Nature.
690: Eliza and William of Orange converse on the beach:

“In a way, a slave is fortunate, because she has more head-room for her dreams and phant’sies, which can soar to dizzying heights without bumping up ’gainst the ceiling. But the ones who live at Versailles are as high as humans can get, they practically have to go about stooped over because their wigs and head-dresses are scraping the vault of heaven—which consequently seems low and mean to them. When they look up, they see, not a vast beckoning space above them, but rather—”
“The gaudy-painted ceiling.”

695: Eliza meets Jack’s brother Bob Shaftoe, who asks for help purchasing his girlfriend, Abigail Frome, from slavery (705).
748: Daniel Waterhouse, Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers, and Eliza are dinner guests at the home of Christiaan Huygens.
776: Daniel finds himself before the infamous Star Chamber, though it was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641.
778: Fatio had warned William of Orange about an attack on his person by French dragoons:

“Jeffreys! Fatio is a Swiss Protestant who warned the Dutch of a French plot, on Dutch soil . . . and for this you call him a traitor?”

785: Sample binary cypher.
793: Daniel spends some time in the Tower of London. His jailkeeper is Bob Shaftoe.
796: Daniel’s mistress Tess had died a gruesome death of smallpox.
812: Map of the continent.
824: Eliza uses needlework and her native Qwghlm language as a cypher. What is even more improbable is that someone managed to crack the code.
832: The rocking motion of boats betray their cargo.
Daniel has a blockage in his bladder, which is a death sentence if left untreated, as he witnessed happen to Wilkins (p. 272). Pepys had his removed and carries it in his pocket. Daniel’s Royal Society friends take it upon themselves to force him to take surgery.

PATTERN RECOGNITION (2003)

William Gibson

Hardcover, signed “WM GIBSON”

G. P. Putnams’s Sons, New York

2004-07-08 to 2004-07-13

Cayce Pollard: Freelance consultant for corporations, specializing in logos. She has a disorder which manifests as a physical aversion to “bad” corporate logos. She scratches off all the brand names from her (bland) clothes, turning each into a CPU = Cayce Pollard Unit. I read an interview with Gibson where he was ambivalent about having a main character whose name is a homonym for the protagonist in NEUROMANCER (1984).
78: Upon being confronted with logo trauma, she invokes the cadence of “He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.”
Blue Ant: Her current client.
Damien: Her friend in London at whose flat she stays.
Parkaboy: Fellow devotee of the mysterious films that have been appearing on the Internet.
22:

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he [Parkaboy] says. Both a gift and a trap.

29: Cayce mistakes mechanical Curta calculators as “math grenades”. These amazing devices were invented by Curt Herzstark while a prisoner at Buchenwald. I just read about the the Curta calculators in Scientific American.
28: Hackers are known as “black guests” in China.
69: Bigend, founder of Blue Ant, hires Cayce to track down the creator of the mystery footage, something she has an interest in anyways.

“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as a ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”

134: Wingrove Pollard: Her intelligence operative father, who disappeared in Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
Overall, this novel was mediocre at best. For example, the rivalry between Cayce and Dorotea was comical. The characters took themselves far too seriously, considering none of them did honest work for a living.

DID ADAM AND EVE HAVE NAVELS?

Discourses On Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, And Other Dubious Subjects (2000)

Martin Gardner

Hardcover

W.W. Norton & Company, New York

2004-07-13 to 2004-07-17

13: Some Young Earth Creationists argue that God created light already on its way, and that the trees in the Garden of Eden already had tree rings that would appear many years old.
18: British biologist and liberal Catholic St. George Mivart argued in The Genesis of Species (1871) that God’s help was needed to transition between species. He was excommunicated and denied a Christian burial for his trouble. Today, the doctrine of the Catholic Church regarding evolution is nearly identical to Mivart’s.
25: Philip Johnson wrote an August 16, 1999 piece in the Wall Street Journal about a Chinese paleontologist who disagrees with Darwinian evolution. When confronted, Johnson refuses to name the mystery paleontologist.
124: Hillary Rodham Clinton had sessions with New Age guru (and channeling believer) Jean Houston, though they insist that Clinton’s imaginary dialogue with famous dead people were merely mental exercises.
131: Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell is into the psi scene, including Jean Houston.
144: Chapter 14 is devoted to Alan Sokal’s hoax article in Social Text.
154: H. G. Wells had many hits and misses in his fictional accounts of the future. A remarkable hit was The World Set Free (1914) which involves Germany invading France and the creation of “atomic bombs” dropped from airplanes.
175: Senator Claiborne De Borda Pell from Rhode Island is notorious for being interested in psi phenomena.
177: Pell was angry at James Randi for a spoon bending performance.
199: The self-reinforcing delusions of Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Trousdale Nettles (a.k.a. “Bo” and “Peep”), founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult, are what psychiatrists call an “insanity of two”. The mass suicides in March 1997 were inspired by the arrival a spaceship supposedly trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
212: Thomas Edison was once a staunch materialist. Eventually, he became a believer in the afterlife, even to the point of trying to invent a device to communicate with the dead.
242: It was suggested that Isaac Newton was a repressed homosexual regarding his relationship with Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (see QUICKSILVER (2003)).
269 - 271: Long excerpt from a letter by Darwin on his gradual disbelief in religion.

the Old Testament was not more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos.

Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt, if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery or of happiness; whether the world as a whole is a good or bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails, though this would be very difficult to prove.

Hence it has come to pass that most or all sentient beings have been developed in such a manner, through natural selection, that pleasurable sensations serve as their habitual guides.

276 - 277: Some of the legends of the Wandering Jew (see TALES OF THE WANDERING JEW (1991)) were probably based on Jesus’ prophesy in John 21:

“If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”

307: George Gamow described science as an expanding sphere on a sphere; it reaches a maximum size, after which it starts to contract until no more knowledge about the universe remains. Maybe I missed it. Is this related to the metaphor of knowledge to an expanding circle; as it grows, it is surrounded by more and more unknown.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY (2000)

Michael Chabon

Paperback

Random House, New York

2004-07-17 to 2004-08-03
2001 paperback:

Josef Kavalier: Raised in the Jewish Prague Ghetto; intrigued with illusions and escapism (to the point of almost killing himself). His parents pay enormous bribes to allow him to leave the inevitable Nazi occupation, but he is sent back. His escape coincides with that of the famous Golum of Rabbi Loew.
Bernard Kornblum: Josef’s magic teacher and member of the Hofzinser Club, which Josef so desperately wants to join.
Thomas Masaryk Kavalier: Josef’s younger brother whom he spares no expense to try to get to America.
37:

Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism of his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. “Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”

Samuel Louis Klayman (a.k.a. Sam Clay): Josef’s distant cousin in Brooklyn.
74 - 75: Description of comic books:

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant. It aspired to the dimensions of a slick magazine and to the thickness of a pulp, offering sixty-four pages of gaudy bulk (including the cover) for its ideal price of one thin dime. While the quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best, its covers pretended to some of the skill and design of the slick, and to the brio of the pulp magazine. The comic book cover, in those early days was a poster advertising a dream-movie, with a running time of two seconds, that flickered to life in the mind and unreeled in the splendor just before one opened to the stapled packet of coarse paper inside and the lights came up. The covers were often hand-painted, rather than merely inked and colored, by men with solid reputations in the business, journeyman illustrators who could pull off accurate lab girls in chains and languid, detailed jungle jaguars and muscularly correct male bodies whose feet seemed really to carry their weight. Held in the hand, hefted, those early numbers of Wonder and Detective, with their chromatic crew of pirates, Hindu poisoners, and snap-brim avengers, their abundant typography at once stylish and crude, seem even today to promise adventure of a light but thoroughly nourishing variety. All too often, however, the scene depicted on the label bore no relation to the thin soup of material contained within. Inside the covers—whence today there wafts an inevitable flea-market smell of rot and nostalgia—the comic book of 1939 was, in the beginning, a necessary, highly fertile period of genetic and grammatical confusion. Men who had been reading newspaper comic strips and pulp magazines for most of their lives, many of them young and inexperienced with the pencil, the ink brush, and the cruel time constraints of piecework, struggled to see beyond the strict spatial requirements of the newspaper strip, on the other hand, and the sheer overheated wordiness of the pulp on the other.

77 - 78:

Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation. The artist, Joe Shuster, while technically just barely apt, seemed to understand from the first that the big rectangular page of the comic book offered possibilities for pacing and composition that were mostly unavailable in the newspapers; he joined three panels vertically into one to display the full parabolic zest of one of Superman’s patented skyscraper-hops (the Man of Steel could not, at this point in his career, properly fly), and he chose his angles and arranged his figures with a certain cinematic flair. The writer, Jerome Siegel, had forged, through the smelting intensity of his fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps and their antecedents, a magical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes from Samson to Doc Savage, one with its own unique properties of tensility, hardness, and luster. Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superman was born in the pages of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this miraculous parturition, the form finally began to emerge from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves. Comic books were Kid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.

Sheldon P. Anapol: President of the Empire Novelty Company. Instead of purchasing ever-increasing advertising space, Sammy makes a pitch to Anapol to create his own line of comics. Sammy and Josef have the weekend to come up with another Superman.
93:

“You’re right,” said Sammy. “The Lion, I don’t know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let’s see.”

They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle his opponents.

“Be serious,” Joe chided again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, forget animals. Everybody’s going to be thinking of animals. In two months, I’m telling you, by the time our guy hits the stands, there’s going to be guys running around dressed like every damn animal in the zoo. Birds. Bugs. Underwater guys. And I’ll bet you anything there’s going to be five guys who are really strong, and invulnerable, and can fly.”

121: They come up with... the Escapist! He doesn’t just fight crime. He frees the world of it.
131:

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

141: In order to qualify as magazines, and therefore be mailed second class, comic books had to have at least two pages of (usually half-hearted) prose.
156: Anapol brings in George Deasey as editor:

“So it’s to be comic books, now, is it?” he said to Anapol as they shook hands. “The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward.” He took his pipe from his hip pocket.

Anapol accepts, but is afraid to publish the first issue with the cover with the Escapist providing a right cross to Hitler, even offering more money if they change the cover. They stick to their guns, and the rest is history.

The Escapist gains superhuman powers, the better to take on the Nazis (or their stand-ins). While the Escapist has all but wrapped up the War, Joe feels the need to fight himself, to the point of picking fights with random German immigrants. In the meantime, he saves all his money in an effort to obtain a visa for his brother.
265:

A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Non in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, séances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different—far more destructive—than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences’ constant, keen awareness that, in spite of the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated p. In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.

267: The next logical character is a female superhero:

On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry and chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again.

Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!

Luna Moth likes to wear a skimpy costume as she fights crime.
Tracy Bacon: Radio voice of The Escapist, and later Sammy’s boyfriend.
368 - 369: Citizen Kane challenged comic book writers to produce more complex narratives, often told from the point of view of minor characters.
Joe Kavalier joins the Army immediately after Pearl Harbor, and is sent to a listening post in Antarctica. He does not read letters from his girlfriend Rosa, who carries his child. After losing Tracy, Sammy marries Rosa and raises Tommy as his own.
After an absence of many years, Joe reappears to perform a death-defying stunt on the Empire State Building.
535: Kornblum told Josef about an incident with Houdini:

“It was Bess Houdini,” he said. “She knew her husband’s face. She could read the writing of failure in his eyes. She could go to the man from the newspaper. She could beg him, with the tears in her eyes and the blush on her bosom, to consider the ruin of her husband’s career when put into balance with nothing more on the other side than a good headline for the next morning’s newspaper. She could carry a glass of water to her husband, with the small steps and the solemn face of the wife. It was not the key that freed him,” he said. “It was the wife. There was no other way out. It was impossible, even for Houdini.” He stood up. “Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.” He wiped at his raw cheek with the back of his hand, on the verge, Joe felt, of sharing some parallel example of liberation from his own life.

Sammy is called to testify before Congress about the corrupting influence of comic books, especially the whispered rumors for why adult superheroes have a tendency to take on strapping young lads as their ward sidekicks.
585: Joe’s masterpiece is a comic about the famous Golum:

“I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes.”

“Well, it’s a comic book.”

“This is what I’m thinking.”

“Jewish superheroes?”

“What, they’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”

THE LESSONS OF TERROR

A History Of Warfare Against Civilians: Why It Has Always Failed And Why It Will Fail Again (2002)

Caleb Carr

Hardcover

Random House, New York

2004-08-13 to 2004-08-16
paperback:

13: The response to terrorism:

preemptive military offensives aimed at making not only terrorists but the states that harbor, supply, and otherwise assist them experience the same perpetual insecurity that they attempt to make their victims feel. The methods must be different, of course, for, as stated, terror must never be answered with terror; but war can only be answered with war, and it is incumbent on us to devise a style of war more imaginative, more decisive, and yet more humane than anything terrorists can contrive.

25 - 26: The German commander Arminius led a provincial revolt against Rome, while renouncing the Roman methods of attacking civilians.
33: Augustine of Hippo wrote about the concept of a “just war”.
39: Terms of war were spelled out at Toulouges in 1027, including the agreement that war could only be waged Monday through wednesday, and never during Advent or Lent. The Council of Narbonne declared in 1054 that no Christian should kill another Christian for any reason.
51: Erasmus quote:

Dulce bellum inexpertis = War is sweet to those who know nothing of it.

57: Two condittieri, Paolo Vitelli and Prospero Colonna, wrote:

wars are won rather by industry and cunning than by the actual clash of arms.

71: Cardinal Richelieu’s policy of raison d’état (“reason of state”) justified even the most heinous action as long as it served France’s interests.
80: Thomas Hobbes writes that people will endure pain in exchange for security.
107:

But as they reached this terrible understanding, the [Eighteenth Century] European soldiers and settlers also began to practice those same tactics, rationalizing their behavior with the infamous logic that “to defeat a savage one must become a savage.” It is an argument, as already noted, that is often invoked today in the context of our war against terrorism; and it is just as self-serving and hollow now as it was 250 years ago.

126: The Total War espoused by Clauswitz in his On War would have horrified Frederick the Great.
160: General Kitchener delighted in using Maxim guns on Sudanese warriors (and women and children) later invented “concentration camps” during the Boer War.
190: For a report solicited by Eisenhower, Lieutenant General James Doolittle writes approvingly of the tactics of the CIA.
241- 242:

It would be difficult to imagine a move that would send a more powerful signal to other countries that the United States intends to change the way it does global business than abolishing the CIA. But this should not even be a consideration unless it would heighten rather than diminish American national security. And we can quickly see that it would, first by putting other intelligence agencies on notice that they are also expendable and had better start doing their investigation, research, and analysis jobs better than they were done prior to the September 11 attacks, and second by closing those avenues of threat that the questionable loyalties of certain key CIA operatives have kept open.

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS (1956)

Jean-Paul Sartre

Translated from the French and with an Introduction by Hazel E. Barnes

Hardcover

Gramercy Books, New York

2003-10-2 to 2004-08-27
paperback:

Yes, I really did spend about a year reading this. And no wonder it took so long to finish. Overall, this is perhaps the most over-wrought work I have ever read. Actual content was few and far between.
The word evanescence is used hundreds of times throughout the book. Was this his term, or that of the translator? About the time of reading this, the music group by the same name was just becoming popular.
Originally entitled L’Être et le néant.
xlix: Being is simply the condition of all revelation. The existent is being-for-revealing (être-pour-dévoiler) and not revealed being (être dévoilé).
liii: Heidegger’s expression: revealing-revealed = révélante-révélée
lxii: The being-for-itself (l’être-pour-soi) vs. the being-in-itself (l’être-en-soi)
lxvi: Being is superfluous (de trop)
14: Hegel states that being and nothingness are opposites, as thesis and antithesis, and the difference between which is only a simple “opinion”.
21: Realities such as absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, etc. are inhabited by negation as a necessary condition for their existence, called négatités.
39:

All these trivial passive expectations of the real, all these commonplace, everyday values, derive their meaning from an original projection of myself which stands as my choice of myself in the world.

47: Irony:

But there exist more subtle behaviors, the description of which will lead us further into the inwardness of consciousness. Irony is one of these. In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has not being other then its nothingness.

48: Attitude that does not direct its negation outward, but toward itself is bad faith (mauvaise foi).
55:

Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach;” that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behavior to what is in the present; she does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background. The man who is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square, as the wall coloring is blue or gray. The qualities this attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux. This is because she does not quite know what she wants. She is profoundly aware of the desire which she inspires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which would only be respect. ... But then suppose he takes her hand. ... And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.

We shall say that this woman is in bad faith. But we see immediately that she uses various procedures in order to maintain herself in this bad faith. She has disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is, will recognize its transcendence.

74: Is this where Ayn Rand got this phrase?:

The principle of identity can be said to be synthetic not only because it limits its scope to a region of definite being, but in particular because it masses within it the infinity of density. “A is A” means that A exists in an infinite compression with an infinite density.

76: A reflection (reflet) which is its own reflecting (reflection).
91: Being and consciousness form a dyad.
91:

A feeling, for example, is a feeling in the presence of a norm; that is, a feeling of the same type but one which would be what it is. This norm or totality of the affective self is directly present as a lack suffered in the very heart of the suffering. One suffers from not suffering enough. The suffering of which we speak is never exactly that which we feel.

102: Circuit of selfness (Circuit de ipséité) = the relation of the for-itself with the possible which it is.
150: The English word “reflection” has two meaning which have distinct words in French. The “reflection-reflection” (reflet-reflétant)dyad refers to that which is reflected in a mirror. The subject in this section is reflexion, which means mental reflection and introspection.
216:

This time appears through trajectories. But just as spatial trajectories decompose and collapse into pure static spatiality, so the temporal trajectory collapses as soon as it is not simply lived as that which objectively implies our expectation of ourselves.

221: Shame is not originally a phenomenon of reflection, it must manifest itself in relation to somebody. For example, making a vulgar gesture does not lead to shame unless you realize someone else saw it.
222:

Moreover the very notion of vulgarity implies an inter-monad relation. Nobody can be vulgar all alone!

223 -: The Reef of Solipsism.
232: Leibniz recourses to God for the Other.
290:

Black masses, desecration of the host, demonic associations, etc. are so many attempts to confer the character of object on the absolute Subject. In desiring Evil for Evil’s sake I attempt to contemplate the diving transcendence—for which Good is the peculiar possibility—as a purely given transcendence and one which I transcend toward Evil. Then I “make God suffer,” I “irritate him,” etc. These attempts, which imply the absolute recognition of God as a subject who can not be an object, carry their own contradiction within them and are always failures.

And I might add that such misguided absurd practices lead the all-too-common misperception that atheism is somehow “Satanic”, which is absurd on its face.
338: Defines Nausea, and refers to his book by the same name.
366 - 367:

The notion of “ownership,” by which love is so often explained, is not actually primary. Why should I want to appropriate the Other if it were not precisely that the Other makes me be? But this implies precisely a certain mode of appropriation; it is the Other’s freedom as such that we want to get hold of. Not because of a desire for power. The tyrant scorns love, he is content with fear. If he seeks to win the love of his subjects, it is for political reasons; and if he finds a more economical way to enslave them, he adopts it immediately. On the other hand, the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. he is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess the automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need only try to persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened. If Tristan and Isolde fall madly in love because of a love potion, they are less interesting. The total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover. The end is surpassed; if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.

405: One of the best explorations of torture and sadism is the end of Faulkner’s Light in August.
441:

This freedom is not a being; it is the being of man—i.e., his nothingness of being. If we start by conceiving of man as a plenum, it is absurd to try to find in him afterwards moments or psychic regions in which he would be free. As well look for emptiness in a container which one has filled beforehand up to the brim! Man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all.

462:

One must be conscious in order to choose, and one must choose in order to be conscious. Choice and consciousness are one and the same thing.

468: Leibniz had three criteria for freedom. that man is free who:

determines himself rationally to perform an act;
is such that this act is understood fully by the very nature of the one who has committed it;
is contingent—that is, exists in such a way that other persons committing other acts in connection with the same situation would have been possible.

531:

Thus the bourgeois makes himself bourgeois by denying that there are any classes, just as the worker makes himself a worker by asserting that classes exist and by realizing through his revolutionary activity his “being-in-a-class.”

544 - 545:

“Does history have a meaning?” That is, “is history completed or only terminated?” This question is not resolved. Perhaps it is insolvable since all answers which can be made to it (including the answer of idealism: “The history of Egypt is the history of Egyptology”) are themselves historical.

546:

In other words human reality would remain finite even if it were immortal, because it makes itself finite by choosing itself as human. To be finite, in fact, is to choose oneself—that is, to make known to oneself what one is by projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others.

576: Three big categories of concrete human existence: to do, to have, to be.
615: Last paragraph before conclusion:

Generally speaking there is no irreducible taste or inclination. They all represent a certain appropriate choice of being. It is up to existential psychoanalysis to compare and classify them. Ontology abandons us here; it has merely enabled us to determine the ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value which haunts it. Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself and a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.

627:

But ontology and existential psychoanalysis (or the spontaneous and empirical application which men have always made of these disciplines) must reveal to the moral agent that he is the being by whom values exist. It is then that his freedom will become conscious of itself and will reveal itself in anguish as the unique source of value and the nothingness by which the world exists.

This freedom chooses then not to recover itself but to flee itself, not to coincide with itself but to be always at a distance from itself.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS

Based On A True Story (2000)

Dave Eggers

Paperback

Simon & Schuster, New York

2004-09-10 to 2004-10-23

The novelty of this book is not necessarily the content, but rather the self-referential manner of the author. For example, he lists his height, weight, and sexual-orientation (on a 1-to-10 scale) on the copyright page. He lists which sections of the book the reader may feel free to skip as well as exactly how much money he made writing the book.
The content in a nutshell: Dave loses both his parents from cancer in the span of about a month. Despite being the least responsible of his siblings, he takes custody of his younger brother, Toph, and moves to Berkley, California.
The main claim-to-fame of his home town is Mr. T.
121 - 123: At a party, he invents an elaborate lie about how Toph is off hitchhiking after shooting a schoolmate:

“Don’t tell Moodie about this.”

“Okay.”

“He’ll worry.”

He and some fellow youngsters create the alternative magazine, Might, to show off their hipness and brilliance.
146: He accuses a group of Mexicans of stealing his wallet, but later finds it on his bedroom dresser.
161: Interviewing as a potential cast member of The Real World: San Francisco.
220: Puck picks up a stray dog (who was probably from the neighborhood) when visiting a Might photo shoot.
264: Dave addresses presents to Toph as from God:

“Thank you,” he says.

“Thank who?”

“I don’t know. You?”

“No, not me. Jesus.”

“Thank you, Jesus?”

“Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”

“He did?”

271: Chapter IX is when Might pulls off the practical joke of faking the death of Adam Rich from Eight is Enough (after Robert Urich says no).

CEREBUS

Dave Sim, Gerhard
Aardvark-Vanheim Press

Cerebus is not to be confused with Cerberus, the five headed dog guarding Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
Here’s an interesting case where an author slowly cares about his audience less and less over the course of his massive 300-issue opus. Many would suggest (and I am not inclined to disagree) that one can actually follow Dave Sim on the path to insanity (his admitted use of massive amounts of cocaine might account for that as well). Contrast Cerebus’ happy-go-lucky swashbuckling of the first book with the religious crankiness of Latter Days.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of insight, not to mention entertainment, located here. Unfortunately, the quality portions are usually interspersed between long-winded, mind-numbingly boring sections. In some cases, the long build-up is exactly the means of effective storytelling. Who can forget how Cerebus, who has lost everything, sits for weeks holding his sword and a doll belonging to the only woman he ever loved? He had been the Pope, and then the Prime Minister, but was reduced to catatonic state for most of Melmouth. Then, while sitting alone lost in his thoughts, he overhears a conversation between two women soldiers, joking how they beat and tortured Jaka. All at once, the rage in Cerebus spills over into a kinetic frenzy that inspires the beaten down male populous to take up arms against their oppressors.
What is initially told as metaphor, like how power corrupts Cerebus, first in the political world in High Society, then in the religious world in Church & State, is later spelled out directly to the audience. The author stops trusting the audience’s ability to divine meaning for themselves by adding longer and longer prose pieces. First these prose pieces are welcome, for those who appreciate literature, as they help flesh out this world. Then the author starts replacing the voice of the characters with his own.
This series was marked by another interesting phenomenon regarding it’s audience. At first, the readership was composed of a large female audience, an unusual circumstance in the realm of comic books. Then the author included an appendix describing a conversation he had with other artist/writers (he has no shame when it comes to name-dropping), where he contended that women will always be intellectually inferior to men. Female readership dropped immediately. One might give him credit for this honestly conveying his (unpopular) opinion, but this brings up another question: who owns a story, the author or the audience? Can an author say that the audience doesn’t deserve to be exposed his genius? Such is obviously vanity, as everyone who reads a work will bring their own interpretation and make it one’s own.

MUTANTS

On Genetic Variety And The Human Body (2003)

Armand Marie Leroi

Hardcover

Viking Penguin, New York

2004.11.12 – 2004.11.27

8: Teratology = literally, the study of monsters.
8: Sir Thomas Brown published an early book debunking superstitions, Pseudodoxia epidemica, or, enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths (1646).
18: Every embryo has about 100 mutations that its parents did not have, about four of which will affect amino acid sequences.
19:

Who, then, are the mutants? There can only be one answer, and it is one that is consistent with our everyday experience of the normal and the pathological. We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.

53: Parasites differ from conjoined twins merely by asymmetry. Cases where fully developed individuals have small, under-developed attached siblings.
55 - 56: Situs inversus, a mirror-imaging of internal organs, is found in 50% of side to side conjoined twins, always on the right (from their perspective). About 1 in 8500 non twins have situs inversus.
57 - 58: About half of people with Kartagener’s syndrome have inverted viscera. Symptoms of Kartagener’s include a poor sense of smell, sterility, and susceptibility to bronchial infection due to defective cilia.
158: Osteogenesis imperfecta, known as glass bone disease, has four forms.
194 - 196: Cretenism is caused by iodine deficiency.
205 - 206: James Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, had Proteus syndrome.
231: Birds have W and Z sex chromosomes, rather than X and Y. Females are WZ and males are ZZ.
263 - 264: Rita Hoefling, a white house wife in Cape Town South Africa, was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease at the age of 40. Her skin turned black, and she was shunned by apartheid society. Years later, she spontaneously turned white again. She had Nelson’s syndrome, which affects one third of patients whose adrenal gland was removed.
304 - 305: Alexander Graham Bell compiled lists of longevity records in an attempt to encourage “positive” eugenics. Could this be the source of the character in the Heinlein novels who starts the Howard Families?

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Reading Log For 2004

THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN

Task Force Dagger (2003)

Maps by David Lindroth

Random House, New York

ZODIAC

The Eco-Thriller (1988)

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

THREAD OF THE SILKWORM (1995)

Paperback

BasicBooks, New York

GALILEO’S REVENGE

Junk Science In The Courtroom (1991)

Paperback

BasicBooks, New York

A LEG TO STAND ON (1984)

Paperback

Touchstone, New York

CONFUSIÓN DE CONFUSIONES (1688)

Introduction by Martin S. Fridson

Paperback

Wiley Investment Classics, New York

LIES ACROSS AMERICA

What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999)

Paperback

The New Press, New York

WAY OUT THERE IN THE BLUE

Reagan, Star Wars And The End Of The Cold War (2000)

Hardcover

Simon & Schuster, New York

TRUST US, WE’RE EXPERTS!

How Industry Manipulates Science And Gambles With Your Future (2001)

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Hardcover

Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, New York

STAR CORPS

Book One Of The Legacy Trilogy (2003)

Paperback

EOS, New York

THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT (2002)

Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

FASHIONABLE NONSENSE

Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse Of Science (1998)

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Hardcover

Picador USA, New York

IN THE SHADOW OF THE GARGOYLE (1998)

Edited by Nancy Kilpatrick and Thomas S. Roche

Paperback

Ace Books, New York

How Do You Think It Feels by Neil Gaiman

The Gargoyle’s Shadow by Katherine Kurtz

Scylla and Charybdis by Don D’Ammassa

Now Entering Monkeyface by Marc Levinthal and John Mason Skipp

Bleeding Stones by Harlan Ellison

GHOST WARS

The Secret History Of The CIA, Afghanistan, And Bin Laden, From The Soviet Invasion To September 10, 2001 (2004)

Maps by Richard Furno

Hardcover

The Penguin Press, New York

LONE WOLF & CUB (1970)

Illustrated by: Kojima Goseki

Trade Paperbacks

Dark Horse Comics

BODY OF SECRETS

Anatomy Of The Ultra-Secret National Security Agency From The Cold War Through The Dawn Of A New Century (2001)

Hardcover

Doubleday, New York

QUICKSILVER

Volume One Of The Baroque Cycle (2003)

Hardcover

HarperCollins, New York

PATTERN RECOGNITION (2003)

Hardcover, signed “WM GIBSON”

G. P. Putnams’s Sons, New York

DID ADAM AND EVE HAVE NAVELS?

Discourses On Reflexology, Numerology, Urine Therapy, And Other Dubious Subjects (2000)