Reading
Log For 2007
SECRETS
& LIES
Digital Security in a Networked World (2000)
Paperback (2004) With new information about post-9/11 security
Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
2007-01-13 to 2007-01-20
There's no reason to treat software any differently from
other
products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic
flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system
with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable.
Today if a home builder sells you a house with hidden flaws that make
it easier for burglars to break in, you can sue the home builder; if a
software company sells you a software system with the same problem,
you're stuck with the damages. This makes no sense, and it's the
primary reason computer security is so bad today. I have a lot of faith
in the marketplace and in the ingenuity of people. Give the companies
in the best position to fix the problem a financial incentive to fix
the problem, and fix it they will.
A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to
modify
it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then
you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the
technology.
This book is about those security problems, the limitations
of
technology, and the solution.
- 6: Admiral Grace Hopper: “Life was simple before World War
II. After than, we had systems.”
- 27: Brand theft attack is nothing new. Almon Strowger was
an undertaker in Kansas City to invented the dial telephone in 1887
when he was convinced telephone operators were rerouting telephone
calls to rival businesses.
- 31:
The ability to trail someone remotely has existed for a
while,
but it is only used in exceptional circumstances (except on TV). In
1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Esobar was identified partly by
tracking him through his cellular phone usage: a technique known as pinpointing. In
1996, the Russian Army killed Chechnyan leader Dzholar Dudayev with an
air-to-surface missile after pinpointing his location from the
transmissions of his personal satellite phone. The FBI found the truck
belonging to the Oklahoma City federal building's bomber because agents
collected the tapes from every surveillance camera in the city,
correlated them by time (the explosion acted as a giant synch pulse),
and looked for it. Invisible identification tags are printed on
virtually all color xero-graphic output, from all of the manufacturers.
(These machines also include anticounterfeiting measures, such as
dumping extra cyan toner onto images when the unit detects an attempt
to copy U.S. currency.) Explosives have embedded taggants.
- 32: We are only a few generations away from being able to
record
our entire lives in audio and video and save the data as a defense
mechanism.“Someday not wearing your life recorder may be cause for
suspicion.”
- 34: Traffic
analysis
- Nazis used itemized phone bills to arrest friends of
those they arrested.
- In the hours preceding the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991,
pizza deliveries to the Pentagon increased one hundredfold.
- 36:
The man who burned down the Temple of Artemis in ancient (his name was
Herostratus) Greece wanted his name to be remembered forever.
- 92:
Claude Shannon invented the concept of unicity distance in
1940s:
amount of ciphertext required such that there is only one reasonable
plaintext.
- 92: Message authentication codes (MACs) ensure
authentication and integrity.
- 125 - 126: The Bell-LaPadula model has two main security
rules, regarding the reading and writing of data, including mandatory access controls.
- 136:
Identification and authentication measures are classified into three
areas: something you know, something you are, or something you have.
- 202 - 203: Discussion of why an Ariane 5 rocket
exploded due to some code re-use of Ariane 4 software.
- 239: Digital certificates are a complete sham.
- 247:
subliminal channel: sending a very small secret message in a much
larger message. Example of how a programmer can obtain all the customer
PINs.
- 273: “Security is a process, not a product.”
- 275: Five steps to a successful attack:
- Identify the specific target that will be attacked and
collect information about that target.
- Analyze the information and identify a vulnerability in
the target that will accomplish the attack objectives.
- Gain the appropriate level of access to the target.
- Perform the attack on the target.
- Complete the attack, which may include erasing the
evidence of the attack, and avoid retaliation.
- 279: Three parts to an effective set of countermeasures:
- Protection
- Detection
- Reaction
- 280:
Safe ratings: TL-15 can resists a professional safecracker with tools
for 15 minutes. TRTL-60 can resist the same safecracker with an
oxyacetylene torch for 60 minutes.
- 282 - 283: vulnerability
landscape: describe imaginary, complicated world of
attacks and countermeasures.
- 284:
In 1991 a computer containing a secret briefing on the Gulf War was
stolen from the Royal Air Force. After a very public manhunt, the
computer was returned with the message,“I'm a thief. Not a bloody
traitor.”
- 338:
After the 1988 Morris worm, DARPA funded CERT (Computer Emergency
Response Team) as a computer security vulnerability clearinghouse.
- 367+: Security Principles
- Compartmentalize
- Secure the Weakest Link
- Use Choke Points
- Provide Defense in Depth
- Fail Securely
- Leverage Unpredictability
- Embrace Simplicity
- Enlist the Users
- Assure
- Question
- 372:
Rather than automatically responding to a network query with the
operating system and version number, instead use a warning banner. Let
the attacker wonder if you can trace them.
PLANTING
YOUR FAMILY TREE ONLINE
How to Create Your Own Family
History Web Site
National Genealogical Society
Guides vol. 4 (2004)
Paperback
Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, Tennessee
2007-01-19 to 2007-01-22
MORE
MATRIX AND PHILOSOPHY
Revolutions and Reloaded
Decoded
Paperback
Open Court; Chicago and
LaSalle, Illinois
2007-02-16 to 2007-02-23
The
Matrix
and Plato's Cave: Why the Sequels Failed by Lou Marinoff
- Neo learned from the Architect that history repeats itself.
The deeper message was a confession about the movie itself.
The
Matrix of Control: Why The
Matrix
Still Has Us by William Irwin
- The sequels did not go beyond the first movie to the
original ideas that inspired it.
- Suggests giving the sequels a second chance. They
consistently treat the theme of CONTROL well.
- 16: Votes for candidate not in the two main political
parties seem wasted. To accept the two-party system is to be controlled
by it.
- 20: John de Graff, et
al. define Affluenza as “a painful, contagious,
socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste
resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” As Jack (Edward Norton),
aka “Ikea Boy” learns in Fight
Club.
- 21: quotes on stoicism:
- “Put from you the belief that ‘I have been wronged’, and
with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury and the injury
itself disappears.” —
emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180) in Meditations
- “Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as
you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen
and your life will be serene.” — slave Epictetus (A.D. 50-130)
- 24: “Steal this book or borrow it from the library.”
Only
Love Is Real: Heidegger, Plato, and The Matrix Trilogy
by James Lawler
- 30: Christianity adopts Plato's allegory of the Cave with
its transcendent realm of heaven. This implies a degradation of the
sensory world of earth. “It is a paradox that Christianity, with its
otherworldly perspective, contributes to technological domination of
this world.”
- 31 - 32: Martin Heidegger believed mankind's salvation lay
with National Socialism.
- 32: Socrates tells us in The Symposium, that
his teacher was Diotima of Mantineia.
The
Matrix
Is the Prozac of the People by Martin Danahay
- 38: Marx's quote that “Religion is the opium of the
people.” is widely misunderstood as advocating abolishing religion.
- 38: Marx would view the Matrix sequels as
another example of “hucksterism.”
- 39: The rave after Morpheus's “sermon” is almost a parody
of attempts by religions to appeal to a younger congregation.
- 40: Intermingling of church with entertainment. They do not
name themselves as any particular denomination to appeal to the widest
customer base.
- 41: The common denominator between church services and
movies is capitalism.
- 41: When Neo encounters Seraph, a table has a number of
items: a Barbie doll, a small plastic soccer ball, and other toys, an
image of Jesus and a Buddha, a votive candle and a toy computer. The
table symbolizes how religious icons are treated like any other
commercial product.
- 42: Similarly, the
Matrix offers a bland, feel-good, non-offensive
spirituality.
- 42: Neo fighting Serpah is similar to Jacob wrestling an
angel (Genesis 32), but the violence is not harmful, and therefore not
blasphemous.
- 43: Original context of “A Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law”
(1844) by Marx:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression
of real distress
and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the
spirit of a spiritless situation. it is the opium of the people.
- 44: Marx compared religion to a distorting camera obscura,
but believed that religious belief would become obsolete when the
social conditions were improved.
- 45: The U.S. is very religious despite (or because of)
separation of Church and State. Marx doesn't think property or
religious rights are real freedoms.
- 46: “While many may dismiss Reloaded as filler
just designed to get you to pay some money before seeing Revolutions, from
Marx's perspective the movie would be crucial in understanding Neo's
role as a representative of religion and the State.”
- 47: “hucksterism” is when someone makes excessive profit
from selling shoddy goods.
- 49: “Change peoples' real living conditions and they can
stop being batteries and stop watching movies like Reloaded and Revolutions.”
“The
Purpose of Life Is to End”: Schopenhauerian Pessimism, Nihilism, and
Nietzschean Will to Power by Mark A. Wrathall
- 52: In the entire Matrix trilogy, there is only one appeal
ever made to do what is ethical... from Agent Smith to Neo. “The irony
should be as obvious as the implications—no one in the world of The Matrix is
genuinely moved by considerations of justice or what is right.”
- 57: Merovingian's restaurant, named Le Vrai (French for
“The True”) is where Merovingian and Morpheus discuss what the “true”
world is.
- 59: The book Persephone uses to open the trap door in the
Chateau is Schopenhauer's Die
Welt als Wille und Vortellung, The
World as Will and Representation. Merovingian has a
Shopenhauerian view of the world, that it can be regarded in two ways.
Choice,
Purpose, and Understanding: Neo, the Merovingian, and the Oracle
by Theodore Shick, Jr.
- 74: The Architect had to give humans real choice to
introduce an element of indeterminism to the Matrix work, and make it
work.
- 75: The TV screens in the Architect's room illustrate some
of the possible responses that Neo might give.
- 78 - 79: Antonio
Damasio describes his patient Elliot, who lost the ability to
feel emotions.
Why
Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be in One by Nick Bostrom
- 83: The Simulation Argument: If the human species does not
go extinct before having the technology to build Matricies, then we are
almost certainly in one.
Challenging
Simulacra
and Simulation:
Baudrillard in The
Matrix by David Detmer
If some of this is starting to sound a bit dubious to you,
let
me assure you that you're far from alone. I, for one, find Baudrillard
to be a consistently sloppy thinker, readily given to hyperbole and
exaggeration, non
sequiturs, and logical inconsistencies, the routine
misappropriation of scientific concepts and theories, the ignoring of
counterarguments and counterevidence, the issuing of sweeping
generalizations that obliterate needed qualifications and nuances, and
to hiding the weal spots in his project behind pretentious and
incomprehensibly jargon-riddled verbiage, among other transgressions.
Other than that I think he's terrific!
- 98 - 99: The epigraph from the beginning of SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION
is attributed to Ecclesiastes, yet the author dusted off his copy of
the Bible and could not find it! He offers five dollars to anyone who
can point to the relevant passage.
- 108: Six friendly suggestions on how to resist the Matrix.
Music
and The
Matrix:
Where Are We Hearing When We Hear the Future?
by Theodore Gracyk
- 109: Egypt initially banned Matrix Reloaded for
being religiously offensive. They approved Matrix Revolutions
in April 2004 with only small trimming, but left the music intact, and
with it the complex religious statements at the end.
- 110: Very little of the music in the Matrix trilogy is
“diegetic,” meaning it exists within the narrative of the story (i.e.
the characters hear it).
- 114: Egyptian censors removed two lines of dialog that
suggested Neo is divine, but probably did not recognize the music at
the end of the movie, when Neo sacrifices himself as being
stylistically Christian. If the censors were devout Sunni Muslims, they
probably had little exposure to Western music.
- 116 - 117: The new lyrics to the music over the end credits
are Sanskrit chants from Hindu religious texts. If this final comment
serves to show that the Hindu interpretation overrides all others, it
is contained within remarkable musical jokes.
The
Matrix
and Vedanta: Journeying from the Unreal to the Real by
Anna
Lännström
- 126: Vedanta (one of the nine systems of Indian philosophy)
tells us that the world isn't real, but rather maya (cosmic
illusion).
The
Cosmological Journey of Neo: An Islâmic Matrix by Idris
Samawi Hamid
- 143: The Matrix first corresponds to the world of Dunyâ or the
immediate world in Islâmic terminology.
- 145 - 146: In Islâmic philosophy there are three degrees of
consciousness, choice, and action
- faith
(îmân): one
has the sense that there is more to reality than meets the eye and must
take a leap of faith.
- awareness
(taqwâ): as
when Neo wakes up in the Nebuchadnezzar.
- certainty
(Yaqîn): as
when Neo can travel to the Matrix without being plugged in.
- 146: Morpheus even says as much, “You have to let it all
go, Neo: fear, doubt, disbelief.”
- 152: Neo must annihilate his self-identity in the Source so
he can destroy Smith, and achieve the final cosmological state of bayân (clarity).
Faith,
Understanding, and the Hidden God of The
Matrix by William Jaworski
- 156: Faith ≠ Belief ≠ Knowledge
- 157: Commander Jason Lock, like philosopher John Locke,
doesn't think faith is a distinctive form of evidence when discussing
Neo with Morpheus.
- 158: Councilor Hamann, appears to share Morpheus's
understanding of faith, similar to 18th Century philosopher Johann
Georg Hamann.
- 160: Captain Soren of the Vigilant is the
first to answer the call to aid to the Nebuchadnezzar,
even though he lacks understanding. Similarly, Søren
Kierkegaard, saw lack of understanding as an inspiration to
faith, rather than an impediment.
Neo-Orthodoxy:
Tales Of The Reluctant Messiah, Or “Your Own Personal Jesus”
by Ben Witherington III
- 173: None of the central characters pray. In the “opening
prayer,” the Councilor talks to the congregation, not God.
Race
Matters in The
Matrix:
Is Morpheus Black? Is Race Real? by Jorge J.E. Gracia and
William Irwin
- 183: “Sports and entertainment sometimes seem the only way
out of poverty for blacks, but this is another trap, another Matrix.”
Pissin'
Metal: Columbine, Malvo, and the Matrix of Violence by
Henry Nardone and Gregory Bassham
- 188: “Though they may actually live in safe,
friendly neighborhoods, they imagine that they're living in gloomy,
crime-ridden Gotham Cities.”
Reloaded
Revolutions by Slavoj
Žižek
- 204: Reloaded
plays with inconsistencies of the first movie, but introduces new inconsistencies.
- 206:
In Reloaded, the Wachowski brothers thus consciously raised
the stakes, confronting us with all the complications and confusions of
the process of liberation. In this way, they put themselves in a
difficult spot. They confronted an almost impossible task. If The Matrix Revolutions
were to succeed, it would have to produce nothing less than the
appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a
blueprint for the political act the Left is desperately looking for.
Now wonder, then, that it failed miserably—and this failure provides a
nice case for a simple Marxist analysis: the narrative failure, the
impossibility of constructing a “good story,” which signals a
more fundamental social failure.
The first sign of this failure is the broken contract with
the
audience. The ontological premise of The Matrix (Part
One) is a straightforward realistic one: there is the “real reality”
and the virtual universe of the Matrix which can be entirely explained
in the terms of what went on in reality. Matrix Revolutions
break these rules: in it, the “magic” powers of Neo and Smith
extend into “real reality” itself (Neo can stop bullets there
also). Is this not like a detective novel in which, after a series of
complex clues, the proposed solution would be that the murderer has
magic capacities and was able to commit his crime violating laws of our
reality? The reader would feel cheated. The same is true of Revolutions, in
which the predominant tone is one of faith, not knowledge.
But even within this new space there are
inconsistencies.
From The Book
of the Machines (1872)
So that even now the machines will only serve on condition
of being
served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are
not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all
whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all. How
many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines?
How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in
tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are
gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of
those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote
their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?
- 214: “Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the
supremacy of the earth?”
- 215: “Does anyone say that the red clover has no
reproductive
systems because the humble bee (and the humble bee only) must aid and
abet it before it can reproduce? No one. The humble bee is part of the
reproductive system of the clover.”
- 216 ftnt: From Erwhon,
Or Over the Range (1872) by Samuel Butler.
Perhaps this is the source of the “Bulerian Jihad” in Frank Herbert's Dune.
THE
GOD DELUSION (2006)
Hardcover
Houghton Mifflin Company,
Boston and New York
2007-01-31 to 2007-03-24
If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it
would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is
usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at
all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your
parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is
true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the
opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of
childhood indoctrination. Mutatis
mutandis if you were born in Afghanistan.
- 3: People should flinch at the phrases “Catholic
child” and “Muslim child.”
- 26: If you want to get excited about affronts to Muslims,
read Amnesty International reports on Syria and Saudi Arabia.
- 27: “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only
in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife
is beautiful and his children smart.” —H. L. Mencken
- 27:
It is in light of the unparalleled presumption of respect
for
religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go
out of my way to offend,but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle
religion any more gently than I would handle anything else.
What impresses me about Catholic
mythology is partly its tasteless
kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up
the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
- 47: Two kinds of agnosticism:
- TAP: Temporary Agnosticism in Practice
- PAP: Permanent Agnosticism in Principle
- 59: “The moment there was the smallest suggestion of any
evidence in favour of religious belief, religious apologists would lose
no time in throwing NOMA out of the window.”
- 63: A study in the American
Heart Journal of April 2006 showed that people who knew
they were being prayed for suffered significantly more complications.
Is a class action lawsuit possible?
- 67: Accuses Michael
Ruse of being part of the Neville Chamberlain school of
evolutionists. Ruse pointed out that Dawkins' criticism of Pope John
Paul II was counter-productive because some religious people are
sympathetic.
- 77+: Thomas Aquinas' ‘Proofs’
- The Unmoved Mover
- The Uncaused Cause
- The Cosmological Argument
- The Argument from Degree
- The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design
- 82 ftnt: The first recipient of the ‘Phillip E. Johnson
Award for Liberty and Truth’ was... Phillip E. Johnson.
- 87: A religious one of his undergraduate contemporaries was
woken by the sound of the devil. Zoologists solved the mystery and
recognized the sound of the ‘Devil Bird.’
- 98 - 99: Lord Kelvin ruled out evolution citing his
estimate of the age of the Earth. In 1903, Sir George Darwin, Charles's
second son, invoked the Curies' discovery of radium to the still living
Lord Kelvin.
- 133: Chief counsel Eric Rothschild chided Michael Behe at
the Dover trial:
Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for
answers to the
question of the origin of the immune system… It's our defense against
debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books
and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking
engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical
conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent
design movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical
knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don't
bother.
- 136: The anthropic principle does not support religious
apologists. The anthropic principle is an alternative to the
design hypothesis.
- 140: Mark Ridley proposes in Mendel's
Demon (re-titled The
Cooperative Gene by his American publishers) that the
origin of the eucaryotic cell was even more statistically improbable
than the origin of life.
- 153 - 154: When Dawkins points out that God would have to
be complex in order to design the universe, and they had always claimed
God was simple, theologians declared
by fiat that God lay outside science.
- 190: Martin Luther was aware that reason is religion's arch
enemy:
- ‘Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never
comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not
struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all the
emanates from God.’
- ‘Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out
of his reason.’
- ‘Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.’
- 228: Pinker
describes the chaos unleashed during a police strike in Montreal in THE
BLANK SLATE.
- 228 - 229: “People say we need religion when what they
really mean is we need police.”
—H. L. Mencken
- 230 ftnt: H. L. Mencken cynically defined conscience as the
inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
- 249: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or
without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people
doing evil things. But for good people to to evil things, it takes
religion.” —Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize winning physicist
- 249: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from religious conviction.” —Blaise Pascal
- 253 - 254: American physicist and evolutionary
anthropologist John Hartug argues that when Jesus
says ‘neighbor,’ He really means ‘other Jew.’
- 271: Dawkins points out that some of the political leaders
during the Civil rights movement did their good deeds because they were
religious.
- 283 - 284: A prominent scientist who did not believe the
Golgi Apparatus was real until he was convinced by a guest lecturer,
whom he thanked. No fundamentalist would ever do that.
- 314: Protestant Little-endianism vs. Catholic Big-endianism.
- 337 - 338: Labeling 4 years olds ‘Sikh,’ ‘Muslim,’
and ‘Christian’ makes about as much sense as labeling
them ‘Keynesian,’ ‘Monetarist,’
and ‘Marxist.’
- 339: “Please, please, please raise your
consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it
happening.”
- 341 - 343: List of Biblical allusions “Be fruitful
and multiply,” “East of Eden,” etc.
- 347: The four roles of religion:
- explanation
- exhortation
- consolation
- inspiration
- 349: Imaginary friends can be useful.
- 350: On Julian Jayne's The
Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
a book that is as strange as its
title suggests. It is one of those
books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius,
nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.
The first thing to say in response to
this is something that
should need no saying. Religion's power to console doesn't make it
true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively
demonstrated that belief in God's existence is completely essential to
human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were
despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst –
none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence
that religious belief is true.
- 354: Thoughts on death:
- “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and
billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest
inconvenience from it.” —Mark Twain
- Thomas Jefferson wrote friends that he faced his
approaching death with neither hope nor fear.
- 367: The ‘Middle World’: where objects that
mattered to our survival are neither very large nor very small.
PUNK'S WING
A Novel of U.S. Navy
Pilots (2003)
Paperback
Signet, USA
2006-11-24 to 2007-05-18
- Sequel to PUNK'S WAR
- Punk is a flight instructor to Lt. J.G. Evelyn Greenwood, a
female pilot whom the Navy is publicizing. Her callsign becomes
“Muddy.” Both she and Punk had uncommanded roll incidents, which the
contractor denies.
- Replacement pilots are known as “coneheads.”
- Cal Workman (“Crud”): Punk's best friend, who is killed in
the accident.
- 60: Recites part of An Irish Airman
Foresees His Death, by Yeats, at
funeral for Cal.
- Pugsley: Lost his wings in the roll-off incident.
- Ferguson Platt (“Big Top”) (p. 164) works
for Senator Meyers.
- Suzanne Workman: Crud's wife. (p. 186)
- Jason: Crud's son.
- Corky McBride (p. 196)
- Admiral Grayson Knowles: Commander-in-chief of the Atlantic
Fleet (p. 198)
- Lafayette Rainno: CEO of defense contractor RDI (p. 198).
- Master Chief Callaghan
- Seamus Callaghan (p. 213): The Master Chief's son. Punk
lets him use the flight simulator in an attempt to straighten him out.
- 221 - 224: Carrier landing grades
- “OK”
5 pts
- “OK” 4 pts
- “(OK)” Fair, 3 pts
- “B” Bolter, 2.5 pts
- “—” No Grade, 2 pts
- “PWO” Pattern Wave Off, 1.5 pts
- “TWO” Technique Wave Off, 1 pts
- “C” [with a horizontal arrow through the center] Cut
Pass, 0 pts
- 225: Punk goes through Mach one-point-zero, but there are
no thumps, no reversing of flight controls.
- Captain Carl “Midnight” Cooper: a black pilot (p. 236)
- Captain “Herder” Shepherd: XO (p. 236)
- Lt. Cdr. “Longo” Longoria: Head LSO
- 248: “Hotel California”
effect = as officers get more senior, the opportunity for shore duties
becomes less. You can
check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
- 261: Dusty disquals.
- 282: Article I, Section 8, Clause 13 of the Constitution
means that Senators can poke and prod all they want.
- 290: Muddy has an in-flight engagement and Creepy refuses
to let her pass.
- 295: The events of September 11, 2001.
- 305: Their buddy Smoke was in the Pentagon and suffered a
broken arm.
- Muddy has an incident with a KC-135 and become afraid of
in-flight refueling. In the final part of the book, she must support a
critical Special Ops mission.
WHAT'S
THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?
How Conservatives Won The
Heart Of America (2004)
Hardcover
Henry Holt and Company,
New York
2007-05-20 to 2007-05-23
- 5: The Great Backlash against protests of the 1960s marries
conservatism with pro-business economic policies.
- 6 - 7: Politicians never actually deliver social policy
promises: abortion is never halted, affirmative action is never
abolished, etc.
- 20+: A red-stater
is:
- humble
- reverent
- courteous, kind,
cheerful
- loyal
- a regular, down-home
working stiff
- 53: These people receive mediocre wages for doing what is
statistically the most dangerous work in industrial America.
- 54: “This is economic growth, yes, but it is the sort of
growth that makes a city less
wealthy and less
healthy as its population increases.”
- 64:
For agribusiness, however, farm overproduction is the ideal
situation. From their perspective, lower farm prices means higher
profits and even greater power in the marketplace. Overproduction and
all-out competition between farmers are thus to be encouraged by all
available political means.
- 64: According to William Heffernan of University of
Missouri, if four companies control 40% of market share in a given
field, it is no longer competitive.
- 65 - 66: Subsidies are handed out according to production,
so the large farms that need it the least get the most.
- 71: Sam Brownback, “studying the leadership
secrets of Hitler.”
- 73: Brownback was the Kansas secretary of agriculture,
which did not answer to the people at all. A lawsuit pointed out the
unconstitutionality of the situation, and he was forced to make his way
by other means.
- 75: Brownback allows radio deregulation, which leads to the
very vulgarity he campaigned against.
- 82: Right-winger Fred Koch's intellectual empire is known
as “the Kochtopus.”
- 83: Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal according to
“backlash mythology.”
- 101:
The Cons have altered the
state's political environment
considerably, but their record as legislators is more mixed. Like their
faction nationally, they have made virtually no headway in the culture
wars. They have not halted abortion in Kansas or secured a voucher
program or even managed to keep evolution out of the schools. Indeed,
the issues the Cons emphasize seem all to have been chosen precisely
because they are not capable of being resolved by the judicious
application of state power.
But such people aren't liberal. What they are is corporate.
Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and
taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to
Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time,
after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on
the nature of “change,” punk rockers dispense leadership secrets,
shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech
billionaires build rock 'n' roll museums, management theorists ponder
the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead
hails the dawn of the New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos.
Conservatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded
with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business
culture's usual priority—profit.
And as corporate types, these Mods are the primary
beneficiaries of the class war that rages against them. Although the
Cons vituperate against the high and the mighty, the policies they help
enact—deregulating, privatizing—only serve to make the Mods higher and
mightier still. And while it may hurt the Mods' feelings to overhear
their secretaries referring to them as RINOs, the many rounds of tax
cuts the Cons have accomplished have surely made the sting subside. The
Mods win even when they lose.
- 113: Class, according to conservatives, is not about money,
birth, or occupation. It is about authenticity.
- 122 - 123: the plen-T-plaint
is a horizontal, rather than vertical, mode of criticism amassing of
hundreds of stories of petty beefs, that offers no method of resolution.
- 163: Jack Cashill wrote the novel 2006,
in which America is enduring the second term of the Al Gore presidency
and liberalism runs amok.
- 172: State senator Kay O'Connor spends her own money to
promote the voucher effort. “Why would a person of limited means make
such great sacrifices for a politics that can only leave people like
her worse off.”
- 196: Educated intellectual Republicans, “are now chagrined
to find the same language turned on them for, say, believing in the
theory of evolution. Here, too, the old-fashioned Republicans are
reaping the whirlwind, trapped by the success of their own strategies.”
- 198: The AMA for decades blocked any effort to set up a
national health program.“It was no friend of the working class.”
- 233: Phill Kline, Republican campaigning for Kansas
attorney general, says that more Kansans need to go to jail. In the
1990s, the rate of incarceration went up 44% in Kansas, but 71.7% in
the rest of the nation.
- 243: “New Democrats” stand rock-solid on pro-choice, but
make “endless concessions on economic issues.”
ELEANOR RIGBY
(2004)
Hardcover
Fourth Estate, London and New York
2007-05-25 to 2007-05-30
GOD
IS NOT GREAT
How Religion Poisons
Everything (2007)
Hardcover
Hachette Book Group USA,
New York
2007-06-06 to 2007-06-10
- 8: Gazing through the Hubble space telescope makes a
“burning bush” rather unimpressive.
- 9: The complete context of the “Opium of the people” quote
from Karl Marx.
- 11:
I once wrote a book about George
Orwell, who might have
been my hero if I had heroes, and was upset by his callousness
about the burning of churches in Catalonia in1936. Sophocles showed,
well before the rise of monotheism, that Antigone spoke for
humanity in
her revulsion against desecration. I leave it to the faithful to burn
each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always
be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes.
When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head. I once even observed
etiquette of an ashram in India, though this was a trial to me.
- 12: Philippians 4:8 is essentially a secular injunction
which shone out from the nonsense that surrounds it.
- 22- 23: Virgin births that predated Christianity
- Greek demigod Perseus born of Jupiter and virgin Danaë.
- Buddha born through an opening in his mother's flank
- Catlicus caught a ball of feathers and hid it in her
bosom, and Aztec god Huitzilopochtli conceived.
- ...and many more
- 30: Attempts on the life of Rushdie, his
translators, and publishers.
- 30 - 31: Regarding Rushdie staying at Hitchens'
apartment:
However, it did put me on notice
of what I already knew. It is not
possible for me to say, Well, you pursue your Shiite dream of a hidden
imam and I pursue my study of Thomas Paine and George Orwell, and the
world is big enough for both of us. The true believer cannot rest until
the while world bows the knee. Is it not obvious to all, say the pious,
that religious authority is paramount, and that those who decline to
recognize it have forfeited their right to exist?
- 31: The Taliban had slaughtered the Shiite Hazara
population. Iran considered invasion in 1999.
- 40: Ibn Warraq and Hitchens have a theory about Semite
prohibition of consuming pig flesh:
According to many ancient
authorities, the attitude of early Semites to
swine was considered something special, even privileged and
ritualistic. (This mad confusion between the sacred and the profane is
found in all faiths at all times.) The simultaneous attraction and
repulsion derived from an anthropomorphic root: the look of the pig,
and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the
evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of
the human Porcophobia—and porcophilia—thus probably originate in a
night-time of human sacrifice and even cannibalism at which
the “holy” texts often do more than hint. Nothing
optional—from homosexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless
those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a
repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the
police-man who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very
offense for which he plies the lash.
- 44 - 45: Religious conspiracy theories against polio
vaccination stifle the elimination of the disease.
- 54: Hitchens off-handedly mentions the “hole in the sheet”
myth.
- 63 - 64: On the “impressive” faith of Aquinas or Maimonides:
Faith of that sort—the sort that
can stand up at least for a while in a
confrontation with reason—is now plainly impossible.
- 66 - 67: Laplace (1749-1827) response to Napoleon “Je n'ai pas besoin de cette
hypothèse.”
- 120 - 122: Regarding the story of the woman taken into
adultery (John 8:3-11) who was to be stoned, including how it does not
seem to fit into the literary style of the rest of John.
- 186 - 187: Evelyn Waugh (author of the novel Brideshead
Revisited) was often asked how he reconciled his private
conduct with his public beliefs. He asked his friends to imagine how
much worse he would be if he were not
a Catholic.
- 188 - 189: Barbaric Uganda militia of “Lord's
Resistance Army” (LRA), lead by Joseph Kony, is based on rule of the
Ten Commandments.
- 202: On religious effusions that assume what has to be
proved:
Scientists have an expression for
hypotheses that are utterly useless
even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even
wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
- 205: List of immoral precepts of religion:
- Presenting a false picture of the world to the innocent
and the credulous
- The doctrine of blood sacrifice
- The doctrine of atonement
- The doctrine of eternal reward and/or punishment
- The imposition of impossible tasks and rules
- 221:
In the first place we begin as
tiny
forms that are amphibian, before
gradually developing lungs and brains (and growing and shedding that
now useless coat of fur) and then struggling out and breathing fresh
air after a somewhat difficult transition.
Turning to Soviet and Chinese Stalinism, with its exorbitant
cult of
personality and depraved indifference to human life and human rights,
one cannot expect to find too much overlap with preexisting religions.
For one thing, the Russian Orthodox Church had been the main prop of
the czarist autocracy, while the czar himself was regarded as the
formal head of the faith and something a little more than merely a
human. In China, the Christian churches were overwhelmingly identified
with the foreign “concessions” extracted by imperial powers, which were
among the principal causes of the revolution in the first place. This
is not to explain or excuse the killing of priests and nuns and the
desecration of churches—any more than one should excuse the burning of
churches and murder of clergy in Spain during the struggle of the
Spanish republic against Catholic fascism—but the long association of
religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to
go through at least one anticlerical phase, from Cromwell through Henry
VIII to the French Revolution to the Risorgimento, and in the
conditions of warfare and collapse that obtained in Russia and China
these interludes were exceptionally brutal ones. (I might add, though,
that no serious Christian ought to hope for the restoration of religion
as it was
in either country: the church in Russia was the protector of serfdom
and the author of anti-Jewish pogroms, and in China the missionary and
the tight-fisted trader and concessionaire were partners in crime.)
- 249: Jonathan Wells dedicated his book The Icons of
Evolution to “Father,” aka Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
BEYOND
FEAR
Thinking Sensibly About
Security in an Uncertain World (2006)
Hardcover
Springer Science+Business
Media, LLC, United States
2007-07-06 to 2007-08-09
- 39: Nokia spends about 100 times more per phone on battery
security (to prevent customers from using third-party batteries) than
voice security.
- 42: Good summary of the book:
In economics, what is called an externality occurs when one
player makes a decision that affects another player, one not involved
in the decision. It's the kind of problem that surfaces when a company
can save substantial money by dumping toxic waste into the river, and
everyone in the community suffers because of contaminated water. The
community is the player that gets stuck with the externality because it
is not involved in the company's decision. In terms of the overall good
to society, it is a bad decision to dump toxic waste into the river.
But it's a good decision for the company because it doesn't bear the
cost of the effects. Unless you understand the players and their
agendas, you will never understand why some security systems take the
shape they do.
- 51: Despite Hollywood portrayals, stagecoaches were
ponderous vehicles that couldn't negotiate steep hills. All robbers had
to do was find a big hill and wait for everyone to get out and push.
- 53: High security prisons do nothing by the clock. Some
drug dealers sell only during police shift changes.
- 64+: types of attackers:
- opportunist
- emotional attacker
- friends and relations
- industrial competitors and journalists
- the police
- intelligence organizations
- 80: Vikings attacked monasteries because that's where the
money was. Because Vikings weren't Christian, they had no fear of
retribution in the afterlife.
- 93: Neal
Stephenson coined the term “metaphor shear” when
technological complexities smooth over actual functions. For example,
people may be surprised that “emptying the trash” does not
delete files from a computer.
- 95: In the 1970s the Shah of Iran installed some intaglio
currency printing presses with the help of the U.S. government. After
the revolution, these were used to make “supernotes” that are almost
indistinguishable from real ones.
- 106: The Iroquois Theater in Chicago was advertised as
“absolutely fireproof” because of an asbestos curtain. A fire broke out
on 30 December 1903 and 602 people died. In fact, the curtain was
mostly made of cotton.
- 131: Controversial trade-offs regarding security disclosure.
- 147: Prevention, Detection, and Response form a triad.
- 150: Sheep sleep in short bursts totaling only 8 minutes a
day.
- 167: Responses fall into five categories
- Reaction, directed against the attacker, defends
- Mitigation, focused on the assets, limits the effects of
the attack
- Recovery repairs the security system after an attack
- Forensics, post-attack analysis
- Counterattack
- 176 - 177: Refusing to pay kidnappers.
- 177: The government spends more money to prevent
counterfeiting than the value of the counterfeited currency itself. Yet
they must create deterrence.
- 184: Authorization and identification are often muddled.
But knowing who someone is and what they are allowed to do are
different.
- 188: The Social Security Number is good for identification,
but not authorization.
- 198: Map makers routinely add fake features to determine if
someone copies the information.
- 204 - 205: A case study with National ID Cards. Concludes
they are not worth it.
- 211: Diamonds have been sent by ordinary parcel
post while a diversionary plan was leaked.
- 220: When the implied retaliation is worse than the
original attack, the attacker is deterred.
- 220 - 221: Being distasteful may be a defense, such as when
a group of Venetians stole the body of Saint Mark and covered the body
in pork to get past Muslim customs inspectors.
- 222 - 223: Not being a target is a related countermeasure.
- 224: Protocol: series of steps that some trusted person
carries out.
- 226: Protocols can make mediocre security countermeasures
effective (e.g. a velvet rope in a nightclub).
- 226: Procedures: steps carried out in response to an
anomaly.
- 227: Planning improves the efficacy of response.
- 227: “Let him who desires peace prepare for
war.” —Vegetius,
Fourth Century Roman military strategist
- 228: Training and practice.
- 228: Testing is one of the hardest things in security.
- 229 - 230: Denny's stores closed for Christmas in 1998, for
the first time in 35 years, but many stores did not have locks, because
they are generally open 24 hours.
- 230: Execution of the planning.
- 246: People living in societies with the most freedoms are
the most secure, because they are the ones who come up with innovative
defensive ideas.
- 260: “The point is, security is never done; it's a
never-ending process.”
- 263 - 264: Larry Lessig defined four “environmental”
constraints on security decision-making behavior
- Law
- Market forces
- Technology
- Societal
norms
- 271:
Security is a tax on the honest.
Fear is the barrier between ignorance and understanding.
It's
paralyzing. It makes us fatalistic. It makes us do dumb things. Moving
beyond fear means freeing up our intelligence, our practical common
sense, and our imagination. In terms of understanding and implementing
sensible security, moving beyond fear means making trade-offs openly,
intelligently, and honestly. Security is a state of mind, but a mind
focused on problem-solving and problem-anticipating and
problem-imagining. Security is flexible. Fear is also a state of mind,
but it's brittle. It results in paranoia, paralysis, and bad security
trade-offs.
- 281: According to the world's smartest ex-burglar,
Malcolm X,
the best way to protect against intruders is to leave your bathroom
light on all night.
PARENTING
BEYOND BELIEF
On Raising Ethical, Caring
Kids Without Religion (2007)
Paperback
American Management
Association, New York
2007-07-10 to 2007-08-19
Foreword:
A License to Secular Parenthood by Michael Shermer
- Michael Shermer and his wife are raising their daughter
Devin without religion.
Navigating
Around the Dinner Table by Julia Sweeney
- 8: Instead of saying “Under God” during the pledge, they
say “Under Laws.”
Good
and Bad Reasons for Believing by Richard Dawkins
- Written as a letter to his daughter Juliet, who was ten at
the time.
My
Father's House by Dan
Barker
- 27: Wrote Losing
Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
- 30: Was asked to represent atheism at the 2005 World
Religions Conference.
The theme of the conference
was “salvation” and each us was
asked summarize our respective
positions on the topic. After
pointing out that “sin” is a religious concept,
hence “salvation” is merely a solution
to a religious problem—would we respect a doctor
who ran around cutting people with a knife in order to sell
them
a bandage?—I ended with these
words: “If salvation is the cure, then
atheism is the prevention.” Many in
audience laughed at that
comment, some who should not
have been laughing. They got
the point: Much of religious
education is an endeavor to
solve a non-problem. It is a
confusing waste of time.
Passing
Down the Joy of Not Collecting Stamps by Penn Jillette
There is no god, and that's the simple truth. If every trace
of any single religion were wiped out and nothing was passed on, it
would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some
other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of
science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a
way to figure it out again. Without hype, Lot's salt-heap ho would
never be thought of again. Without science, the Earth still goes around
the sun and someday someone will find a way to prove that again.
Science is so important because it's a way to the truth, but the truth
doesn't depend on it. Reality exists outside of humans, religion does
not. The bad guys have to try to get the kids early to keep their jive
alive. We good guys should try to get the truth out there, but the
stakes just aren't as high for us. Most anyone who is serious about
science will lose some faith. Maybe not all their faith, but they'll
lose a hunk of it before getting that Nobel Prize. No matter how bad
the polls on Americans look, the people that do science for a living
aren't being fooled. The polls on belief in evolution make the USA look
bad, but maybe Turkey is the only Western country with worse pollsters
that the USA, ever think of that?
Choosing
Your Battles by Stu Tanquist
We have two explicit “rules” posted in our home: (1) Always
question
authority; (2) when in doubt, see rule 1.
Humanist
Ceremonies by Jane Wynne Willson
- 77:
Norway has well-established religious coming-of-age ceremonies for
14-year old children. The Norwegian Humanist Association campaigned,
and received, an alternative secular ceremony.
Seven
Secular Virtues: Humility, Empathy, Courage, Honesty, Openness,
Generosity, and Gratitude by Dale McGowan, Ph.D
The second reason is even more daunting. As noted above,
religion primarily evolved not to provide answers but to console fears.
The idea of death (if I may jump right to the big one) is terrifying to
a living being. Evolution has made sure of that—the more indifferent an
animal is to death, the more quickly it will achieve it, and the less
such unwise indifference will appear in the next generation. An
afterlife illusion addresses the fear of death by simply denying it
really happens. Not much integrity in such a plan, but if you can get
yourself to believe it, the comfort will be undeniable.
What
Your Kids Won't Learn in School by Annie Laurie Gaylor
- 141: Some famous atheists and freethinkers:
- Lance Armstrong: rejected religion during his fight with
cancer
- E.Y. “Yip” Harburg: wrote much of the screenplay and all
the lyrics for The
Wizard of Oz.
- 142: U.S. Patriot Col. Ethan Allen (1737-1789), who
organized the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont during the American
Revolution, wrote the first rationalist book in America: Reason:
The Only Oracle of Man (1785)
- 144: Frederick
Douglass (1817?-1895) who noted “I prayed for twenty years
but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
THE TRAP
Selling Out To Stay Afloat In Winner-Take-All America (2007)
Hardcover
Henry Holt and Company, New York
2007-08-22 to 2007-08-26
- 2: Hegemony is a system that can contain all of the
dissenters.
- 7: The rise in concentration of wealth reshapes markets,
inflating the prices of goods whose supply is fixed, like homes within
a reasonable commuting distance of a major city or degrees from top
colleges.
- 7: When income tax rates went up to 91 percent...
- 14: “And yet, as is plain to see, the conservative
philosophy is wrong.”
- 21: David Callahan dubs America's post-Reagan order the
“Banana Republic economy.”
Manhattan has income disparity on par with Namibia, the most unequal
country in the world.
But Callahan intends a double entendre. In each of the four
hundred outlets of the chain clothing store Banana Republic, a
subsidiary of Gap, Inc., there is only one employee, the store manager,
who makes a middle-class income, enough to support a family. The retail
workers toil away at or near a minimum wage that has lost 20 percent of
its value since Reagan's 1980 victory. It would take these workers an
entire day's wages just to buy a single Banana Republic polo shirt,
priced at $42. It doesn't take a Wharton MBA to figure out that high
prices and low wages make for big profits. And where do those profits
go? To the shareholders, to Gap, Inc., founder Donald Fischer, a
billionaire several times over and a major Republican Party donor, and
to the salaries of the high-end professionals at Gap, Inc.,
headquarters—the marketing gurus, sales number-crunchers, and financial
deal-makers who manage the company.
What is missing from Callahan's analysis of the
redistribution
of wealth is a geographic component. While most Americans now own token
amounts of stock, more than 40 percent of all shares are owned by the
wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. The top 5 percent own about
two-thirds; the top 10 percent, more than three-quarters. Needless to
say, the wealthiest Americans are not equally distributed across the
nation, but are clustered in fancy urban neighborhoods like the Upper
East Side of Manhattan, in tony suburbs like Palo Alto, California, and
in exclusive rural enclaves like Aspen, Colorado. Similarly, while
Banana Republic has stores all across America, the vast majority of its
managerial positions are located in its headquarters, which, like so
many other “hip”
corporate headquarters, is in San Francisco.
With so many well-heeled young
professionals working in San
Francisco, the local cost of living there goes up for everyone else.
- 23: The San
Francisco Chronicle calls it's local property column
“Surreal Estate.”
- 29: “After all, how could you possibly raise your own
family in a good school district on a teacher's salary?”
- 50 - 51: Ikea targets people with elite educations and
taste of style, but without elite incomes.
- 55: In Free
to Choose (1979) Reganomics mastermind, Milton Friedman,
hailed 19th Century Victorian England as “a golden age.”
- 61: Friedrich August von Hayek argued in The
Road to Serfdom (1944) that government policies of
equality would lead to totalitarianism.
- 75: The best you can hope for is to become what novelist Douglas Coupland
termed a Microserf.
- 139:
The think tanks take a similar tack in thwarting broadly
popular reforms. With polls showing overwhelming support for universal
health insurance, millions of dollars are pouring into conservative
think tanks working against reform. Defending the indefensible is an
expensive proposition, but it seems money is no object. For
self-interested corporations, this isn't charity, it's an investment
(regardless of what the IRS thinks). In addition to the usual
suspects—AEI, Cato, Heritage—the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based
think tank best known for championing the teaching
of “intelligent design” in public school science classes, has
even jumped into the debate. Apparently, no one has told them that it's
intellectually inconsistent to reject Darwinism while embracing Social
Darwinism.
- 156 -157: While running for governor of California, Ronald
Reagan
promised to investigate campus radicals (he didn't). More
significantly, however, when elected he overturned a hundred year old
tradition at Berkeley and for the first time started charging in-state
tuition.
- 160: When announcing his candidacy for president,
Regan chose the tiny southern town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. This
was the site where two white civil rights workers (Michael Schwerner
and
Andrew Goodman) were lynched.
LETTER TO
A CHRISTIAN NATION (2006)
Hardcover
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Read entirely on
2007-09-04
- 10: Despite Christian claims that Jesus rejected the
barbarous laws of the Old Testament, he clearly endorsed them in
Matthew 5:18-20.
- 27: Regarding the HPV vaccine, etc.
American teenagers engage in about as much sex as teenagers
in
the rest of the developed world, but American girls are four to five
times more likely to become pregnant, to have a baby, or to get an
abortion. Young Americans are also far more likely to be infected by
HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rate of gonorrhea
among American teens is seventy times higher than it is among their
peers in the Netherlands and France. The fact that 30 percent of our
sex-education programs teach abstinence only (at a cost of more than
$200 million a year) surely has something to do with this.
- 30-31: Regarding the idea that life begins at conception.
But let us assume, for the moment, that every
three-day-old
human embryo has a soul worthy of our moral concern. Embryos at this
stage occasionally split, becoming separate people (identical twins).
Is this a case of one soul splitting into two? Two embryos sometimes
fuse into a single individual, called a chimera. You or someone you
know may have developed in this way. No doubt theologians are
struggling even now to determine what becomes of the extra human soul
in such as case.
- 42-43: On the canard that atheist states are mass
murderers.
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of
Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become
too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers
of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like
yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith
entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not
accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of
Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with
Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem
of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever
suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support
of their core beliefs.
- 54: Regarding survivors who thank God for their safety.
It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and
self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it
is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a
loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once
you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious
fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and,
indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the
most harrowing abridgments of their happiness for no good reason at
all.
The truth is that no one knows how or why the universe came into
being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the
creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived
only with reference to time, and here we talking about the birth of
space-time itself. >>>>>
- 77 gill sacks?
- 78 ftnt: whydoesgodhateamputees.com
- 92: recommendations
- [More analysis to come when I get my copy of the book
back!]
INSIDE DELTA FORCE
The Story of America's
Elite Counterterrorist Unit (2002)
Command Sergeant Major,
USA (ret.)
Paperback
Bantam Dell, New York
2008-09-07 to 2008-09-08
- 57: Haney was reading THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO
during selection.
- For legal reasons, members of Delta Force are called
“operators” so as not to be confused with members of other agencies.
- 117: Police officers often miss because they are looking at
their opponents when they fire, but were trained to look at their
sights.
- 118: The surest way to identify a Delta Force Assault Team
member is by the callus on their firing hand.
- 122: Witnessing a mock hostage situation in the Shooting
House.
- 142: Master Sergeant Larry Freedman (aka “Super Jew”) later
worked for the CIA and became the first American killed in the Somalia
intervention.
- 144: Buildings are given a color code to designate sides:
front = white, back = black, target's own left = red, its right = green.
- 145: Psychological characteristics used to weed out
potential snipers: “Texas Tower Syndrome” = tendency to keep
shooting because of sense of power. “Munich Massacre Syndrome”
= sniper identifies with target and can't shoot when ordered.
- 163: It is amazing how many “dead drop” signals (chalk
marks) can still be seen in Washington, D.C. and New York.
- 165: Israeli Mossad agents mistakenly killed someone in
Sweden they thought was involved with the Munich terrorists.
- 226: NEST = Nuclear Emergency Search Team.
- 227: The President can suspend Posse Comitatus if the
attorney general determines the criteria have been met.
- 318 - 319: Believes that the Nixon Administration knew the
Vietnamese held American POWs, but the CIA had to thwart recovery
operations.
BATTLESPACE
Book Two of The Legacy
Trilogy (2006)
Paperback
HarperCollins, New York
2007-09-13 to 2007-09-16
- Speech patterns have changed over time, making it difficult
for returning troops to re-integrate into society (similar to THE FOREVER WAR).
- 83 - 85: Description of environmental degradation, leading
to wars. New religious have sprung up.
- 94: Description of Marine Interstellar Transport Chapultepec, one of
the battle group bound for the Sirius gate as Task Force Isis.
- 150: Phoenix-like re-emergence of the United States of
America.
- 151: New anti-matter ship design.
- 200: Old joke about the meaning of the word secure:
Tell the Army to secure a building and they would occupy it.
Tell the Navy to secure the building and they'd go in, turn off all the
lights, and lock the doors.
Tell the Marines
to secure a building, however, and they would respond by assaulting the
structure using both vertical envelopment and armored amphibious
assault vehicles, capture it, clear each floor and room, and set up
defenses with interlocking fields of suppressive fire and support
weapon strong points, with remote sensors, UAV overwatch, and recon
patrols on the outer defense perimeter, with satcom channels to call in
Marine Air close-support, armor, and arty. Finally, they would prepare
for CQB—close-quarters battle—as the situation required.
The Aerospace Force would secure the building by taking out
a
three-year lease with an option to buy.…
- 249: CCN locks: Combat Coordination Net link.
- 260:
In December of 1942, a detachment of 449 U.S. Marines on
Wake Island
had held off a vastly superior Japanese invasion force for two weeks.
As two thousand Japanese special landing force troops stormed ashore,
the last radio message received from the garrison read: Enemy on island. Issue still in
doubt.
STAR MARINES
Book Three of The Legacy
Trilogy (2007)
Paperback
HarperCollins, New York
2007-09-16 to 2007-09-22
- 35: General Clinton Garroway: Uncle of Gunnery Sgt. Travis
Garroway
- 69: A Xul starship had been destroyed by a boarding party
of Marines, including Garroway's great-granduncle Corporal John Esteban
Garroway.
- 230 - 231: Primer on quantum physics, including the Casimir
Effect and Richard
Feynman.
- 314: “Consensual reality” within the Xul fortress.
SOUTH
PARK AND PHILOSOPHY
You Know, I Learned Something Today (2007)
Paperback
Blackwell Publishing
2007-11-01 to 2007-11-17
Flatulence
And Philosophy: A Lot of Hot Air, or the Corruption of Youth?
by William W. Young III
- 6: In Plato's
APOLOGY,
Socrates must defend himself from charges of impiety and corrupting the
youth of Athens. The important part is the way he defended himself, by
leading his accuser through a process of reasoning.
- 8 - 9: Cartman's banality of evil could be because he
simply consumes evil as easily as Cheesypoofs. Kyle and Stan's reasoned
dialogs stand in contrast.
- 12: In the episode “Spooky Fish,” characters from
an “Evil”
mirror universe visit. The “Evil” Cartman is actually
good.
The
Chewbacca Defense: A South
Park Logic Lesson by Robert
Arp
- 40: Arp summarizes the Chewbacca Defense as a good example
of a fallacy.
Cochran
Why would a Wookiee, an
eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to
live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks?
That does not make sense!
But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do
with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do
with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me.
I'm a
lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about
Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making
any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to
remember, when
you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation
Proclamation,
[approaches and softens] does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen
of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If
Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!
The defense rests.
- 49: An example of the fallacy of hasty generalization:
Even Officer Barbrady commits the
fallacy of hasty generalization in
the episode “Chickenlover” when, after reading a copy of Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged,
he concludes that all books must be this bad, and
reading “totally sucks ass.”
The Invisible Gnomes and The Invisible Hand: South Park and Libertarian Philosophy by Paul A. Cantor
- 102:
Libertarianism is grounded in the Austrian School of economics by
Ludvig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992).
- 108 - 109: The significance of the “Gnomes” to the main plot:
In short, the underpants gnomes are an image of capitalism and
the way it is normally – and mistakenly – pictured by its
opponents. The gnomes represent the ordinary business activity that is
always going on in plain sight of everyone, but which they fail to
notice and fail to understand. The people of South Park are unaware
that the ceaseless activity of large corporations like Harbucks is
necessary to provide them with all the goods they enjoy in their daily
lives. They take it for granted that the shelves of their supermarkets
will always be amply stocked with a wide variety of goods and never
appreciate all the capitalist entrepreneurs who make that abundance
possible.
South Park and the Open Society: Defending Democracy Through Satire by David Valleau Curtis and Gerard J. Erion
- 114: Karl Popper (1902-1994) makes a distinction between a closed society and an open society. An open society can use reflection and discussion to change its taboos, rules and laws.
THE
SHOCK DOCTRINE
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)
Hardcover
Metropolitan Books, Henry Hold and Company, New York
start 2007-12-11
- 7: Says that Milton Friedman “acted as an adviser”
to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet and “facilitated” human
rights abuses.
- 8: On L. Paul Bremmer's mass privatization of Iraq: “When
Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies
and minds met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less
metaphorical.”
- In general, Klein argues that free market fundamentalists
take advantage of financial crises to force their own systems.
- 11:
There have, of course, been
cases in which the adoption of free-market policies has taken place
democratically—politicians have run on hard-line platforms
and won elections, the U.S. under Ronald Reagan being the best example,
France's election of Nicolas Sarkozy a more recent one. In these cases,
however, free-market crusaders came up against public pressure and were
invariably forced to temper and modify their radical plans, accepting
piecemeal changes rather than a total conversion. The bottom line is
that wile Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially
imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the
implementation of its true vision.
To kick-start the disaster capitalism
complex, the Bush administration outsourced, with no public debate,
many of the most sensitive and core functions of government—from
providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to
gathering and “data mining” information on all of us.
- 13: Thomas Friedman declared in the New York Times in
December 1996 that “No two countries that both have McDonald's have
ever fought a war against each other,” which was proven wrong two years
later.
- 14: Prefab Canadian houses are somehow a bad thing.
- 15: Friedman wanted to free the market from the state, but
Bush-Cheney actually subsist off the state. A system that erases the
boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is “corporatist.”
- 17: Friedman believed that history “got off on the
wrong track” when governments started listening to John Maynard Keynes.
- 18: When dictatorships started
falling, “the masses
demanded Reagonomics alongside their Big Macs.”
- 19:
Any attempt to hold ideologies
accountable
for the crimes committed by their followers must be approached with a
great deal of caution.
- 19 - 20: Gives a back-handed pass to authoritarian
followers of Communism.
- 20: Uses language like “hot fronts of the Cold War”
and “dirty fight against Communism.”
- 25 - 48: Chapter 1 is entirely about literal shock therapy
by MKUltra, which is of course only a metaphor.
- 29: Subjects of CIA shock therapy studies. Analogy with
Shock Doctrine.
- 51:
Like all fundamentalist faiths, Chicago
School economics is, for its true believers, a closed loop. The
starting premise is that the free market is a perfect scientific
system, one in which individuals, acting on their own self-interested
desires, create the maximum benefits for all.
- 52: Unsourced implication that Friedman is against all
unions and collective bargaining.
- 58: Latin America's dream of economic independence.
- 58 - 59: John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had worked for
a law firm which represented companies like the Cuban Sugar Cane
Corporation and the United Fruit Company.
- 63: Calls the Chile Project an “expensive bust.” Klein
jumped from the 1950s to the 1970s and admitted that the Chicago Boys
had no influence.
- 66: Despite years of American dirty tricks, Allende was
still in power in 1973.
- 79: Klein claims that Pinochet closely followed the Chicago
Boys (except cutting military funding), but inflation came
anyway.
- 80: March 1975: Friedman arrives in person.
- 82 - 83 ftnt: Some claim that West Germany's elimination of
price controls by Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard in 1948 was the first
experiment in “shock therapy.” Klein points out that the cuts did not
affect heavily subsidized social programs.
- 85: “The facts behind the “Chilean miracle”
remain a matter of intense debate.” Pinochet never privatized Codelco, the
state copper mine (nationalized by Allenda) that generated 85% of
Chile's export revenues.
- 86: Mussolini's “corporatism”
ran a police state where government, businesses, and trade unions were
allied.
- 86: Reference 50 - Klein cites Alejandro Foxley's interview
from The Commanding
Heights.
- 92: “The results of this training are unmistakable in all
the human rights reports from the Southern Cone in this sinister
period.”
- 94: Rodolfo Walsh intercepted and decoded a CIA telex that
blew the cover off the Bay of Pigs invasion, which allowed Castro to
prepare and repel it.
- 96: So the KGB were not involved?
- 111: Just a
decade earlier, the economies of the Southern
Cone were doing very well.
- 114: Mentions the Khmer Rouge.
- 118: Amnesty International gets its funding exclusively
from members.
- 121:
- 119: Amnesty International, winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace
Prize, takes pains to be impartial. They listed all the junta laws, but
not the economic decrees.
- 124: Blames the Ford Foundation for not getting involved in
politics.
- 125: Mentions Marcos, the Shah, Saddam, etc. Yet no mention
of the Soviets in Czechoslovakia, Vietnamese torture of American
prisoners, etc.
- 133: Nixon applied rent control in the U.S. in
1971.
- 134: Friedman wrote an economic liberalization program for
the Chinese Communist Party when it decided to convert to a market
economy.
- 134:
Leftists in the developing world have long argued that
genuine
democracy, with fair rules preventing corporations from buying
elections, would necessarily result in governments committed to the
redistribution of wealth. The logic is simple enough: in these
countries, there are far more poor people than rich ones. Policies that
directly redistribute land and raise wages, not trickle-down economics,
are in the clear self-interest of a poor majority. Give all citizens
the vote and a reasonably fair process, and they will elect the
politicians who appear most likely to deliver jobs and land, not more
free-market promises.
- 137: According to a biographer, Margaret Thatcher
practically gave Argentina an invitation to invade the Falklands.
- 140: Bolshevik theory notes that hyperinflation is one step
closer to destroying capitalism.
- 141: The Great Depression was the crisis that brought us
Keynes.
- 149: The ideas of Jeffrey Sachs were able to cap
hyperinflation to 10% in Bolivia. Klein complains that real wages were
down.
- 152: Regarding the Bolivian Miracle: “There is one major
problem: it isn't true.” Klein argues that it did not happen
democratically, or without repression. Paz essentially lied to the
Bolivian people by getting elected making a promise, and then doing
something completely different.
- Paz arrested/kidnapped Union leaders temporarily in kind of
a “junta lite.” But was it unconstitutional in that country?
- 156: Yes, onerous foreign debts run up by dictators in
developing nations are bad.
- 159: A “price shock” occurs every time a commodity like
coffee or tin drops by 10% or more.
- 160: During a price drop, currency traders cause the value
to plummet.
- 164 - 165: The IMF and the World Bank only require serious
reform in response to a serious crisis. Klein says, “It was a
staggering admission.”
- 166: The Cavallo Plan stabilized the Argentine peso.
- 168: Factories could not compete and jobs were lost.
- Some more snarks about Sachs.
- 172: Solidarity fights for the right of Unionization in
Poland.
- 177: Sachs and Soros go to Poland.
- 180: Prescription for Poland.
- 181: Finance minister Balcerowicz explains that he pushed
through policies antithetical to Solidarity out of necessity, which
Klein calls “a democracy-free pocket within a democracy.”
- 182: Nearly 100 countries were in transition in the first
half of the 1990s.
- 185: Friedman tutors Chinese leadership:
Friedman's definition of freedom,
in which political freedoms were incidental, even unnecessary,
compared with the freedom of unrestricted commerce, conformed nicely
with the vision taking shape in the Chinese Politburo.
- As is so typical for a bold statement, no source is cited.
- 187: Wang Hui argues in China's
New Order (2003) that the Tiananmen Square protests were
about economics, not political freedom.
- Blames the Tiananmen crackdown on capitalism.
- 191: The Tiananmen Square massacre took place on the same
day as Solidarity's election sweep in Poland, June 4, 1989. In Poland,
the effects of the shock eventually wore off because the government
didn't use “gloves-off” methods, and the results were far more
ambiguous.
- 191: The shock therapy “made a mockery of the
democratic process since it directly conflicted with the wishes of the
overwhelming majority who cast their ballots for Solidarity.”
- 192: High unemployment and low wages persist in Poland. As opposed
to sham employment under Communism and hyperinflation. Hyperinflation
is equivalent to plummeting wages.
- 192
-193: When workers were giving Solidarity a “free pass” there were
“only” 250 strikes and 62% of Poland's industry was still public.
- 193: In China, “the drive for free-wheeling capitalism rolled over democracy in Tiananmen Square.”
- The African National Congress (ANC) originally wanted wealth redistribution.
- 203:
A clause was added to the new South Africa constitution protecting all
private property, making land reform virtually impossible.
- 206
- 207: As soon as Nelson Mandela left prison, the South African stock
market collapsed, currency dropped 10%, and De Beers moved its
headquarters to Switzerland.
- 211: Sooka, the head of South Africa's Foundation for Human Rights, says that she would only devote one hearing on torture.
- 218+: On Russia: much like in China, the “newly elected” were just the old guard rebranded.
- 228: “Communism
may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but
Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of
gunfire to defend itself... all to defend Russia's new capitalist
economy from the grave threat of democracy.”
- 234: Wayne Merry mentions representative democracy.
- 242: Klein mentions the 1994 U.S. bailout of Mexico known as the Tequila Crisis.
- 249: Sacks requested loans for Russia, but the IMF would not provide them.
- 252 - 253: With the Soviet collapse, capitalism had a global monopoly, so there would be less compromise.
- 256: Williamson openly calls for creating a phony crisis to facilitate reform.
- 264 - 265: The Asian crisis started as a rumor, and caused the construction bubble to collapse.
- 272: Sachs criticizes the IMF for “shouting fire” regarding Asia.
- 278: Thomas Friedman says that the Asian crisis is a good thing.
- 279: Klein mentions the WTO protests in Seattle, but not the violence, destruction, or looting.
- 280:
MNRay.net
