From gbolcer at endeavors.com Mon May 10 08:28:23 2004 From: gbolcer at endeavors.com (Gregory Alan Bolcer) Date: Mon May 10 08:29:02 2004 Subject: [FoRK] The Draft In-Reply-To: <5CC4D012-A115-11D8-9D21-000A95CFE9DE@place.org> References: <5CC4D012-A115-11D8-9D21-000A95CFE9DE@place.org> Message-ID: <409F9F97.7050501@endeavors.com> Contempt for Meatheads wrote: > > Whether you love or hate Ayn Rand (or both) it is without question that > she occasionally had some very eloquent things to say about certain topics. > > Surfing around today I came across the following site and was reminded > of a particular Rand quote about the draft. Check out: > > http://www.draftisslavery.com/ > Send in the Suede/Denim Mercs Welcome to 1984 Are you ready for the third world war?!? You too will meet the secret police They'll draft you and they'll jail your niece You'll go quitely to boot camp They'll shoot you dead, make you a man Don't you worry, it's for a cause Feeding global corporations' claws Die on our brand new poison gas El Salvador or Afghanistan Making money for President Reagan And all the friends of President Reagan -- Gregory Alan Bolcer, CTO | work: +1.949.833.2800 gbolcer at endeavors.com | http://endeavors.com Endeavors Technology, Inc.| cell: +1.714.928.5476 From gbolcer at endeavors.com Mon May 10 08:38:13 2004 From: gbolcer at endeavors.com (Gregory Alan Bolcer) Date: Mon May 10 08:38:51 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Appropriate Punishment In-Reply-To: <409EDAE0.5070006@permafrost.net> References: <409EDAE0.5070006@permafrost.net> Message-ID: <409FA1E5.9030802@endeavors.com> I'm sure H.R. Geiger could mock something up for you. [1] Greg [1] http://www.english.ilstu.edu/351students/llmorre/identity/kennedys.htm Owen Byrne wrote: > Would be the scumbags running the US to be put in a pile naked and > photographed for all the world to see. > And of course we would have to make sure Bush's penis was touching > Cheney's ass, and Cheney's penis Rumsfeld's > mouth, etc. > Scum, Scum, Scum, Scum. > Owen > http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2 > -- Gregory Alan Bolcer, CTO | work: +1.949.833.2800 gbolcer at endeavors.com | http://endeavors.com Endeavors Technology, Inc.| cell: +1.714.928.5476 From khare at alumni.caltech.edu Mon May 10 11:07:39 2004 From: khare at alumni.caltech.edu (khare@alumni.caltech.edu) Date: Mon May 10 11:06:34 2004 Subject: [FoRK] NYTimes.com Article: Herbal Drug Is Embraced in Treating Malaria Message-ID: <20040510180739.97E813504F@web38t.prvt.nytimes.com> The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu. So why didn't this development make it into the NYT Magazine coverage of DDT as the ultimate anti-malarial last month?? Rohit khare@alumni.caltech.edu /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Herbal Drug Is Embraced in Treating Malaria May 10, 2004 By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. After years of hesitation, world health agencies are racing to acquire 100 million doses of a Chinese herbal drug that has proved strikingly effective against malaria, one of the leading killers of the poor. The drug, artemisinin (pronounced are-TEM-is-in-in), is a compound based on qinghaosu, or sweet wormwood. First isolated in 1965 by Chinese military researchers, it cut the death rate by 97 percent in a malaria epidemic in Vietnam in the early 1990's. It is rapidly replacing quinine derivatives and later drugs against which the disease has evolved into resistant strains. To protect artemisinin from the same fate, it will be given as part of multidrug cocktails. Until recently, big donors like the United States and Britain had opposed its use on a wide scale, saying it was too expensive, had not been tested enough on children and was not needed in areas where other malaria drugs still worked. Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, which procures drugs for the world's poorest countries, opposed its use during an Ethiopian epidemic last year, saying that there was too little supply and that switching drugs in mid-outbreak would cause confusion. But now almost all donors, Unicef and the World Bank have embraced the drug. The new Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has given 11 countries grants to buy artemisinin and has instructed 34 others to drop requests for two older drugs - chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine - and switch to the new one. "We want countries to move very rapidly to use it as a first-line treatment," said Dr. Vinand Nantulya, the fund's malaria adviser. The fund expects to spend $450 million on the drug over the next five years, he said. The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency based in Geneva, estimates that 100 million doses will be needed by late 2005. Malaria causes about 300 million illnesses a year, and at least 1 million deaths, 90 percent of them in Africa and most of them children under 5. Despite more than a century of eradication efforts, the disease is endemic from the Mekong Delta in Vietnam to the Amazon Basin in Brazil, and is particularly severe across central Africa, from the cane fields of Mozambique to the oases of Somalia to the rubber plantations of Liberia. Like many tropical disease drugs, artemisinin is a fruit of military research. Chinese scientists first isolated it in 1965 while seeking a new antimalarial treatment for Vietnamese troops fighting American forces, said Dr. Nelson Tan, medical director of Holley Pharmaceuticals, which makes the drug in Chongqing, China. Another antimalarial drug still in use, mefloquine, was isolated at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1963 for American troops in the same jungles. Under the name Lariam, it is still issued to troops and sold to travelers. Artemisinin, which has no significant side effects, quickly reduces fevers and rapidly lowers blood-parasite levels, which can keep small outbreaks in mosquito-infested areas from becoming epidemics. Two years ago, Dr. Dennis Carroll, a health adviser to the United States Agency for International Development, said artemisinin was "not ready for prime time." But on April 30 at a malaria conference at the Columbia University School of Public Health, he led a session on ways to induce farmers to plant more wormwood. Dr. Carroll said that more evidence had emerged that the drug was safe and that older drugs were not working. Also, the creation of the Global Fund expedited grants for it. Dr. Stewart Tyson, a health expert with the British Department for International Development, said his agency changed its opinion about the drug after its experience in Uganda, where resistance to older drugs had climbed to 31 percent in some areas in 2003 from 6 percent in 2000. The price of artemisinin cocktails has fallen from $2 per treatment to 90 cents or less as more companies in China, India and Vietnam have begun making them. (Older drugs cost only 20 cents.) Novartis, the Swiss drug giant, sells its artemisinin-lumefantrine mix, Coartem, to poor countries for 10 cents less than it costs to make, a company official said. The same drug, under the name Riamet, is sold to European travelers for about $20. As a plant material, artemisinin cannot be patented, said Dr. Allan Schapira, a policy specialist for the Roll Back Malaria campaign of the World Health Organization. Nor can the simple extraction process. Some synthetics, he said, are old and off patent, which public health officials like but pharmaceutical companies do not, because they make a larger profit from drugs on which they have patent monopolies. No company has registered artemisinin in the United States, said Dr. Nick White, a professor of tropical medicine at Mahidol University in Thailand, because sales would be too small to justify the cost of seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Now, with more purchases, fears of a shortage that would push prices up are developing. The W.H.O. estimates that 100 million doses will be needed by late 2005, and the world now has only about a third of that. Though it grows wild even in the United States, wormwood is cultivated only in China, Vietnam and pilot projects in Tanzania and India. It is planted in December and needs eight months to mature. Drug companies want firm orders from donors before they try to triple production. Dr. Tan said he had seed banks ready to plant 62,000 acres, "but we need to pay farmers to give up other crops and arrange for fertilizer." "Time is against us," he said. Even if enough artemisinin can be made, obstacles will arise, experts warned. For example, Dr. Kopano Mukelabai, a malaria specialist at Unicef, said shopkeepers would have to be trained not to sell one or two pills to patients who lacked the money for a full course of 12. And what Richard Allan, director of the Mentor Initiative, a public health group that fights malaria epidemics, called "the love of chloroquine" will have to be broken. That quinine derivative, in use since the 1950's, is now almost useless against parasites, but poor people still buy it because it is cheap and lowers fever as aspirin does. Also, counterfeiting will become a problem. In Kenya in 1997, Mr. Allan said, he found 120 versions of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine for sale, "ranging from very good drugs to talcum powder." A recent study of artemisinin drugs in Asia "found that 38 percent were fakes," he said. "We can expect the same thing to happen in Africa." He favors giving artemisinin away to remove the counterfeiters' profit motive. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/health/10MALA.html?ex=1085212459&ei=1&en=5098773929bb1c43 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company From elias at cse.ucsc.edu Mon May 10 11:32:51 2004 From: elias at cse.ucsc.edu (Elias Sinderson) Date: Mon May 10 11:31:44 2004 Subject: [FoRK] The Draft References: <5CC4D012-A115-11D8-9D21-000A95CFE9DE@place.org> <409F9F97.7050501@endeavors.com> Message-ID: <409FCAD3.2040608@cse.ucsc.edu> Terrible joke I once heard about the draft from an older gentleman my family is acquainted with... this was circa Gulf War I... Why do we draft the 18 and 19 year old men first? . . . So we can have their women. Regards, Elias From jbone at place.org Mon May 10 14:00:41 2004 From: jbone at place.org (Contempt for Meatheads) Date: Mon May 10 13:59:35 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Rumor: Sad if true: Halliburton / KBR to block troops' e-mail Message-ID: <18E06B92-A2C5-11D8-9CA6-000A95CFE9DE@place.org> Via Jrobb: http://jrobb.mindplex.org/2004/05/10.html#a4708 Sad if true. [1] Halliburton's KBR, which supplies connectivity to soldiers in Iraq, has been told to block all inessential (ie. anything that isn't gov't business) e-mail from troops in the field for the next 90 days. Think about this in the context of Boyd's view of grand strategy. Disruption of internal communications is a form of physical isolation that contributes to erratic behavior. [1] http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000549.html From owen at permafrost.net Mon May 10 15:26:48 2004 From: owen at permafrost.net (Owen Byrne) Date: Mon May 10 15:25:02 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Iraqis have brains, according to interrogator Message-ID: <40A001A8.5010005@permafrost.net> jrobb links to a blog from an interrogator further down the page (in the google cache). http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:http://www.am1500.com/personalities/joeryan.htm Love this quote: "and you cannot tell them otherwise because they are not conditioned to play to political spin like Americans are" In other words, they don't soak up the bullshit like the morons back home! Owen From khare at alumni.caltech.edu Mon May 10 19:22:03 2004 From: khare at alumni.caltech.edu (khare@alumni.caltech.edu) Date: Mon May 10 19:20:58 2004 Subject: [FoRK] NYTimes.com Article: The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines Message-ID: <20040511022203.1A26135040@web38t.prvt.nytimes.com> The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu. Gotta love the prima-donna software architects! Rohit khare@alumni.caltech.edu /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines May 9, 2004 By GARY RIVLIN When Anthony Baerlocher makes his monthly visit to the Atlantis Casino Resort in Reno, Nev., he always starts with a ritual he calls ''taking inventory,'' walking several laps around the casino's sprawling 32,000-square-foot gambling floor and noting which machines sit unloved, vainly burping out their come-hither sounds, and which machines have captured players' attention. The Atlantis is home to more than 1,400 slot machines, but so vivid is the mental snapshot that Baerlocher, 35, carries in his head that he immediately registers the presence of a new machine on the floor. Although Baerlocher is a trained mathematician, his interest is far from academic. He is the chief game designer for the country's largest maker of slot machines, International Game Technology of Reno. At the first sign of a new slot machine from a competitor, he goes into action. ''Give me 30 minutes and $60,'' he says, ''and I can tell you pretty much anything you want to know about another company's machine.'' At 8 p.m. on a warm midsummer's night, Baerlocher watched a woman dressed in green polyester pants and a yellow-and-white-striped short-sleeved top play a slot machine he designed called ''The Price Is Right.'' At first, the woman's body language was noncommittal: she stood half-turned from the game, as if no more than mildly curious about the outcome of her wager. ''Price'' is what slot pros call ''a cherry dribbler,'' a machine that dispenses lots of small payouts while it nibbles at your stash rather than biting off large chunks of it. ''You want to give the newbie lots of positive reinforcement -- to keep 'em playing,'' Baerlocher told me. As if on cue, the woman hit a couple of small jackpots and took a seat. ''Gotcha,'' Baerlocher said softly under his breath. Baerlocher also watched players nearby at another machine he designed for I.G.T., ''Wheel of Fortune.'' I.G.T. is to the slot industry as Microsoft is to computer software, and no product contributes more to I.G.T.'s bottom line than what industry insiders simply call ''Wheel.'' How big is it? In its 14-year lifetime, ''Madden N.F.L. Football,'' from Electronic Arts, has made roughly $1 billion, making it one of the most successful home video games ever produced. ''Wheel of Fortune,'' by contrast, takes in more than a billion dollars each year. As in the televised game show, there is an actual wheel, which spins whenever a player reaches the bonus round, on average once in every 42 plays. The presence of the wheel allows the slot machine to employ one of the most powerful feints in the slot designer's arsenal: the near miss. When a contestant spins the wheel on the game show and it stops one or two spots past the $1,000 mark -- that's a near miss. The slot machine version of ''Wheel,'' like many of I.G.T.'s most popular slots, is designed to produce these near misses, lots of them: though the wheel is divided into 22 pie slices of equal size, the odds are weighted so that a player is likely to land on some wedges far more often than on others. After a couple of minutes, an older woman, dressed in a sparkly pink sweatsuit ensemble, reached the bonus round. She groaned when the wheel nudged past the ''250 times bet'' wedge and landed on ''10 times bet.'' Her male companion cried out, ''Honey, you were so close!'' Baerlocher's starchy mien melted away, revealing an amused smile. ''You can see it on their faces every time,'' he said. ''They feel they came soooo close. They're ready to try it again, because next time they're going to get it.'' Baerlocher shook his head and laughed in a way that suggested he never gets bored witnessing this moment. He is among a cadre of people inside I.G.T.'s giant slots factory who study addiction -- though unlike their counterparts in academia, of course, he and his colleagues work on the promotion side of things. He is so devoted to the slot machine that he has one in the front room of his town house, in the hills above Reno, and a second one downstairs in his den. We lingered another minute or so, long enough to watch the lady in pink slip another $20 into the machine, confident that this time the wheel wouldn't make those extra couple of clicks. Nearly 40 million Americans played a slot machine in 2003, according to an annual survey of casino gambling conducted by Harrah's Entertainment. Every day in the United States, slot machines take in, on average, more than $1 billion in wagers. Most of that money will be paid back to players, but so great is the ''hold'' from slot machines that collectively the games gross more annually than McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Starbucks combined. All told, North American casinos took in $30 billion from slots in 2003 -- an amount that dwarfs the $9 billion in tickets sold in North American movie theaters that year. Pornography, the country's second most lucrative form of adult entertainment, doesn't come close, either: experts estimate that Americans spend at most $10 billion a year on live sex shows, phone sex and porn in various media from cable to DVD to video and the Internet. Is it any wonder that Baerlocher's boss, Joe Kaminkow, I.G.T.'s head of design and product development, likes to say that he's in the business of creating ''beautiful vaults''? Although it has frequently been controversial -- Fiorello La Guardia and Earl Warren are among those who have made headlines crusading against it -- the slot machine has traditionally enjoyed little status in the world of casino gambling. Slots were where the wives of the high rollers sat, killing time with buckets of coins. But revenues from the games have grown exponentially over the past few decades, according to Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, and now the slot machine is the undisputed king of the casino. Craps, blackjack and roulette -- which once defined organized gambling -- are going the way of tuxedos and diamonds inside the modern-day casino, where the standard dress these days tends toward polyester and athletic wear. Accounting for more than $7 out of every $10 of gambling revenues in casinos across the United States, the once lowly slot machine is the top earner even in glitzy palaces along the Las Vegas strip. Not only have slots been capturing an expanding share of business on gambling floors across the country -- grabbing an ever greater ''share of wallet,'' as industry insiders put it; they have also played a crucial role in expanding the footprint of casino gambling in the United States. Where casinos were legal in just 2 states at the end of the 1980's, today they are legal in more than 30 -- a trend that the slot machine, so easy to learn to play and seemingly harmless, has no doubt helped fuel. ''It's the slot machine that drives the industry today,'' says Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., head of the American Gaming Association. While craps, roulette and baccarat are outlawed in roughly half the states that permit casino gambling, slot machines are widely viewed as a politically palatable solution for elected officials seeking to raise revenues -- the casino equivalent, critics say, of a gateway drug. And the trend is far from exhausted: Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Kentucky are among the states that have recently considered installing slots at racetracks to generate needed tax revenue. Fahrenkopf is reportedly paid in seven figures to praise all things casino, but he can't seem to help taking a poke at the slot machine. He views the transition from table games to slots as symptomatic of the dumbing down of American life. Playing craps means learning a complex set of rules. Blackjack may be easy to learn, but it still requires skill and concentration, and it's not uncommon for the novice player to feel stupid in front of strangers. ''I don't know if it's the education system, or maybe it's that we as a society have gotten intellectually lazy,'' says Fahrenkopf, who headed the Republican National Committee under Ronald Reagan. ''But people would rather just sit there and push a button.'' When I asked one elderly man to explain the allure of playing slots, he replied, ''I don't have to think.'' Slot machines are in fact for those well into the second half of life. Manufacturers design games primarily for women over 55 with lots of time and disposable income, and casinos near retirement communities in and around places like Phoenix and San Diego operate small fleets of jitneys that shuttle back and forth to assisted-living centers. As a come-on, one casino advertises free oxygen-tank refills for its players, and heart defibrillators are increasingly becoming standard equipment inside casinos. If a good portion of the younger set today is hooked on video games, it seems that the over-60 crowd has its own similarly hypnotic fixation. ''For older people, it's a safe environment,'' Baerlocher says. ''There are cameras and security guards everywhere. You can go to one place and shop and eat and be in a crowd even if you don't know anybody.'' As one old Las Vegas hand put it, the country's casinos are now providing ''day care for the elderly.'' The archetypal slot machine was invented in 1899 by Charles Fey, a German immigrant, in San Francisco. But most modern-day slot machines bear little resemblance to the familiar one-armed bandit with its three reels spinning behind a pane of glass and mechanically click-click-clicking into position with each pull of a lever. Today's slot machines feature well-choreographed illusions designed to hide a fundamental truth: at heart they're really nothing more than computers whose chips randomly cycle through hundreds of thousands of numbers every second. A player's fate is determined almost the instant play begins. But to simply display a long string of numbers on a computer screen, along with an accounting of the money won or lost, would hardly prove entrancing. That said, the computer chip at a slot machine's core does account in part for the exploding popularity of slots -- it means flexibility for game designers. The physical size of the spinning reels in most of yesterday's mechanical machines typically limited them to 22 stops and just over 10,000 possible combinations. Computer technology lets game makers weight the reels so that winning big occurs as infrequently as, say, one in 46 million plays (the odds of hitting the big multimillion-dollar jackpot on ''Wheel of Fortune''). The increased odds make possible today's huge jackpots, which reach into the millions of dollars on some machines. You can double your wager on a hand of blackjack or win 35 times your bet on a single spin of the roulette wheel, but only the slot machine gives you the hope of turning a few dollars into a seven- or eight-figure payoff. Still, to maintain a sense of suspense in games that are over the moment they start, to increase what Baerlocher and his fellow game designers call ''time on device,'' I.G.T. spends $120 million each year and employs more than 800 designers, graphic artists, script writers and video engineers to find ways to surround the unromantic chips with a colorful matrix of sounds, chrome, garishly-painted glass and video effects, which include the soothing images of famous people, from Bob Denver (the actor who played Gilligan on ''Gilligan's Island'') to Elizabeth Taylor, many of whom receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to lend their identities to the machines. The traditional pull-handle, if it exists at all, is nothing more than a vestigial limb; most players now press a button to start the reels, often virtual, spinning. Many slot machines don't even pay out coins but issue ''credits'' on a paper receipt to be redeemed at the cashier's cage. Slot makers have found that their customers don't miss handling money -- coins are heavy and dirty, after all -- and stereo speakers can project the simulated yet satisfying ping and clink of cascading cash. ''We basically mixed several recordings of quarters falling on a metal tray and then fattened up the sound with the sound of falling dollars,'' says Bill Hecht, I.G.T.'s top audio engineer, when describing one of the audio files he programs into a machine. Founded in 1981, I.G.T. dominated the expanding casino slot machine industry until the mid-90's, when video slot machines suddenly appeared. WMS Gaming, based in Illinois, was the first company to cash in on these new machines in the United States. (The marriage of slot machines and video games was first consummated in Australia.) Their popularity took I.G.T. by surprise. Bob Bittman, who was then the company's chief designer, confesses that by 1999 he and his fellow executives were anxious. The company's stock had fallen precipitously, and Bittman recognized that he was hardly the one to turn things around. ''I wasn't left-brain enough -- or do I mean right brain?'' says Bittman, who remains on I.G.T.'s board. That's when the company decided to hire a talented young game designer, Joe Kaminkow, to lead them into this jazzed-up new world. Kaminkow began college thinking he would someday work as a TV weatherman, but soon his ambitions veered toward game making. He was a co-founder of a pinball-design firm in his 20's, and after he and his partner sold the company to Sega, the video-game giant, Kaminkow spent the next seven years overseeing that company's U.S.-based pinball operations. Kaminkow knew virtually nothing about slot machines when he took the reins of I.G.T.'s design and product-development division. Yet five years later, the company has reasserted its supremacy in the slot machine industry. The majority of I.G.T.'s most popular games -- ''The Munsters,'' for example, or ''The Price Is Right'' -- now feature virtual reels spinning on video monitors, touch screens and, in the bonus rounds, video clips. The company has been so profitable during Kaminkow's tenure that if you bought $10,000 worth of stock in I.G.T. and Microsoft in the month of his arrival, January 1999, the I.G.T. shares would be worth more than $70,000 today and the Microsoft shares about $6,000. ''I'm not worthy of being mentioned in the same paragraph as Joe Kaminkow,'' says Brooke Dunn, who had been Kaminkow's equivalent at Shuffle Master, a Las Vegas-based company that made a short-term foray into the slots business. Jerald Seelig, general manager of A.C. Coin and Slot, which occasionally creates machines in tandem with I.G.T., says, ''History will certainly show he's one of the guys who changed the industry forever.'' I was granted my first hour with the man Brooke Dunn calls the industry's god in the winter of 2003. Kaminkow is on the short side, a stocky fellow with a wolfish grin who tends to sport a grizzled, haven't-shaved-in-a-day facial growth. Despite the near-freezing temperatures outside, he was dressed in jeans and a bright short-sleeved shirt that you might wear to a summer barbecue with friends. Through most of the interview, he leaned back in his chair and propped his Nikes up on a table. He wore a red baseball cap on his head. When I told him I wanted to explore the world of casino slots from inside his design unit, he didn't need convincing. From Kaminkow's point of view, it seemed high time someone followed him around with a tape recorder. ''You're very lucky,'' he said. ''You're going to get a million-dollar lesson. You'll be going to Joe U.'' Kaminkow's spacious office is drenched in pop culture. On the walls hang assorted pictures of Kaminkow in the company of any number of B-list stars: Scotty from ''Star Trek,'' Bob Denver and Cassandra Peterson, who, as Elvira, has been featured on a couple of I.G.T. slot machines. His bookshelf includes a pair of collector's editions Monkees videos, several volumes of ''The Addams Family'' TV show and all five ''Rocky'' films. Behind his desk hangs a framed blowup of a photo signed by ''Sopranos'' cast members that, he said, ''cost a small fortune.'' One wall in the office was hidden by a set of metal blinds that Kaminkow showily snapped open partway through our first meeting. ''This is our battle plan,'' he said. There were maybe 100 note cards, each printed with an idea for a game: ''Twinkies.'' ''Dilbert.'' ''That Girl.'' ''Cops and Donuts.'' ''Beverly Hillbillies 3.'' Not too long ago a big-time slots maker might introduce a dozen new games at Global Gaming Expo, the annual gambling trade show held each fall in Las Vegas. That, however, was before the arrival of Joe Kaminkow, a time he refers to as ''pre-Joe.'' By his fourth show, in fall 2002, I.G.T. unveiled 82 games at the expo, and Kaminkow, ignoring the moans from his staff, promised that the company would release 150 games a year later. (Often two years can pass between inspiration and a spot in a casino, thanks to the complications of designing a slot machine and to the onerous approval process imposed by a multitude of jurisdictions.) ''G2E,'' as everyone inside I.G.T. refers to it, is the gambling industry's equivalent of Fashion Week in Paris. And while employees work long weeks in the run-up to G2E, the atmosphere at I.G.T. resembles that of an Internet start-up at the height of the bubble: video and pinball games are scattered in hallways throughout the design building, and Kaminkow had a slush machine and a popcorn maker put in the communal kitchen. Included in last year's G2E lineup were two games that represented such high-stakes gambles for I.G.T. that Kaminkow at first alluded to them only cryptically as ''the big kahunas.'' Kahuna 1 turned out to be a ''Star Wars'' game -- and a coup of the first order. ''Baseball and 'Star Wars,''' Bob Bittman says, ''have long been the two untouchables'' in the world of themed slot machines. But Kaminkow had signed deals with George Lucas for ''Star Wars'' pinball and video games before, and after four years of lobbying he apparently wore down the director-producer. ''George said, 'I recognize and understand that my audience has matured,''' Kaminkow told me. '''They're spending time in Las Vegas and in other casinos and on riverboats.''' The question, though, is whether this game targeting a younger demographic will justify the millions I.G.T. has spent on what Baerlocher calls the ''most expensive title we've ever done.'' I.G.T. says it does not know when the game will appear in casinos. Big Kahuna 2 was ''Drew Carey's Big Balls of Cash,'' and it also represented a considerable risk. Typically, Kaminkow engages the services of a celebrity sure to provide an air of comfortable nostalgia -- for instance, Dick Clark (who holds the company record for most games, at seven) or Robin Leach, from ''Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.'' Drew Carey is not only more expensive; his image is also far more provocative. When I.G.T. flew Carey to Reno for a day of taping at the company's state-of-the-art film studio, his caustic wit was a constant. Encouraged to improvise, Carey read only occasionally from the prepared script; instead, the comedian ad-libbed most of his own lines: ''Ohhhhhh, I'm so sorry. I guess that means another walk to the A.T.M.'' ''Don't give up, we want to build another wing on the casino.'' ''Why don't you go get another old lady so I can take her Social Security check, too?'' ''Step right up -- we need another sucker.'' Among the first things Kaminkow did when he arrived in Reno in 1999 was spend as much time in the local casinos as he could learning more about the games he was now responsible for designing. ''I'd feed a twenty into a machine, and it'd be gone in two minutes,'' he recalls. The word he uses to describe the experience is not suitable for a family newspaper. The problem, he decided, wasn't the vanishing $20 -- taking people's money, after all, is the whole purpose of these beautiful vaults -- but the speed with which it disappeared. He instructed his mathematicians to design most of I.G.T.'s new video games so that the typical player would get at least 15 or 20 minutes on a machine before needing to reach into her purse for another bill. He also wanted games that paid more frequent, smaller payouts. Inside I.G.T. they call it ''Joe's $20 test.'' One of the first games released on Kaminkow's watch was based on the old television sitcom ''I Dream of Jeannie.'' It was Kaminkow who pioneered slots based on old TV shows; he chose ''Jeannie'' as his first, he says, because ''every woman wanted to be Jeannie'' (played by Barbara Eden), and every man wanted -- paraphrasing Kaminkow -- to get to know Eden's character intimately. The ''Jeannie'' machine, which made its debut in 2000, included the show's big-band theme song, Eden's voice (on small payouts you sometimes hear her say, ''I can do so much more for thee, master'') and reel icons tied to the show: a bejeweled thin-necked bottle, a space capsule splashing into water and so on. And when you have lined up the symbols just right, you enter a bonus round that includes a spinning wheel and a short clip from the show that lasts maybe 10 seconds. ''For your $20, you should at least get to see a little of Jeannie,'' Kaminkow says with a wink. Over the years, Kaminkow has handed down a long list of edicts that I.G.T. designers call ''Joe's rules.'' Early on, for example, the sidekick he brought with him from Sega overheard an older man complain to his companion that he had left his reading glasses in the room and couldn't see well enough to play. Kaminkow declared that henceforth the lettering on all I.G.T. machines would be large enough so that pretty much everyone but the legally blind could play. Sometimes he would reach the bonus round in a game but win no money, so that became another of Joe's rules: no zonks; players who experience the fanfare of a bonus round receive at the very least a consolation payout. He also dictated that whenever a bonus round offered players a choice, the machine would reveal the values of the options not selected. ''You want the player to have the feeling, 'I almost picked that one; I'll get it next time,''' says Randy Mead, a game designer at I.G.T. The games also include periodic free spins and other gimmicks designed, as Mead puts it, ''to give players time for a small break -- to light a cigarette, order a drink, to stand and stretch.'' ''Joe brought this way of thinking, Look, we've got to wow them,'' says Dave Forshey, a graphic designer who arrived at I.G.T. shortly before Kaminkow. ''It's not just push the red button and watch the wheels spin. Make people want to sit there. Use sight and sound and everything at our disposal to get people's juices going.'' Before Kaminkow's arrival, I.G.T.'s games weren't quiet -- hardly -- but they didn't take full advantage of the power of special effects like ''smart sounds'' -- bright bursts of music. So Kaminkow decreed that every action, every spin of the wheel, every outcome, would have its own unique sound. The typical slot machine featured maybe 15 ''sound events'' when Kaminkow first arrived at I.G.T.; now that average is closer to 400. And the deeper a player gets into a game, the quicker and usually louder the music. ''I'm not sure players even notice,'' says Bill Hecht, I.G.T.'s top sound designer, ''but the effect is to get them more excited.'' Every time the reels spin on ''Jeannie,'' a player hears a few seconds of the show's theme song, and Hecht even orchestrated a bossa nova rendition heard only when someone reaches the bonus round. ''Something for the regular players to look forward to,'' he says. ''We want to get your heart rate going a little.'' It wasn't Kaminkow who devised what are called multiline games -- multicoin games that allow you to win on 1, 15 or 25 lines, assuming you wager enough coins. (Picture an enlarged tic tac toe board that lets you win in any number of crazy zigzag ways.) But under his stewardship, I.G.T. has taken full advantage of whatever design changes have allowed penny and nickel games to earn like dollar machines. ''It used to be that the goal of casinos was to move their nickel players to quarters, the quarter players to dollars, the dollar players to five dollars,'' Baerlocher says. ''Now they don't bother, because we've figured out how to get nickel and even penny machines to play like dollar machines.'' How? By offering jackpots in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. A penny machine like I.G.T.'s ''Beverly Hillbillies'' can be played for a penny a spin, but in most jurisdictions you're eligible for the big prize, which starts at $200,000, only if you wager the maximum bet per spin of $2.50. The odds of winning that big jackpot may be in the tens of millions to one, but there's a 100 percent chance you'll be kicking yourself for eternity if you see five Beverly Hillbillies line up on the machine's reels after you bet less than the maximum needed to win. ''The truth is, nowadays you can lose more money faster on a nickel slot machine than at a $10 blackjack table,'' says Nigel Turner, a scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The true brilliance of the industry's emphasis on nickel and penny machines is perhaps best seen by comparing how much of ''the handle,'' or the total amount wagered, they pay out compared with dollar machines. The average nickel machine pays back to winners somewhere between 88 and 92 percent of the money wagered, Baerlocher says, compared with the roughly 95 percent that dollar machines pay out. Early on, Kaminkow's secretary, Pam Foster, told him, ''The way you spend money, you'd better be good.'' Apparently all the millions he spent have paid off. By the time I first visited I.G.T., in 2002, the company had a 70 percent share of the domestic slot market, and Kaminkow no longer saw himself as competing against Bally, WMS Gaming and the Australian-based Aristocrat so much as competing for the attention of the tens of millions of Americans who had yet to discover the magic of his slot machines. Although the number of men who are playing the slots is increasing, they tend to be on the far side of 60, and women in their late 50's still represent the slot machine's most trustworthy devotees. So Kaminkow is devoting a sizable portion of his time to what he benignly calls ''expanding his market.'' To appeal to a younger, male cohort, he signed licensing deals with the people behind ''South Park'' and ''Austin Powers'' (with mixed results) and then negotiated the even bigger deals with Drew Carey and George Lucas for ''Star Wars.'' At the same time, he has been pursuing the potential of the Latino market by designing a line of games that lets gamblers play in Spanish with the push of a button. ''I want my competitors to cry when they see my new games,'' he says. ''I want them unable to get out of bed because they realize, Damn, they've done what we didn't even think possible.'' The makers of slot machines may rely on the lure of life-changing jackpots to attract customers, but the machines' ability to hook so deeply into a player's cerebral cortex derives from one of the more powerful human feedback mechanisms, a phenomenon behavioral scientists call infrequent random reinforcement, or ''intermittent reward.'' Children whose parents consistently shower them with love and attention tend to take that devotion for granted. Those who know they'll never be rewarded by their parents stop trying after a while. But those who are rewarded only intermittently -- in the fashion of a slot machine -- will often pursue positive outcomes with a persistent tenacity. ''That hard-wiring that nature gave us didn't anticipate electronic gaming devices,'' says Howard Shaffer, director of the division on addictions at Harvard Medical School and perhaps the country's foremost authority on gambling disorders. ''The slot machine is brilliantly designed from a behavioral psychology perspective,'' says Nancy Petry, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. ''The people who are making these machines are using all the behavioral techniques to increase the probability that the behavior of gambling will reoccur.'' She refers to intermittent reward and ''second-order conditioning'' -- the lights and sounds that go off when a player wins, for example, or the two cherries in a row that convinces people they're getting closer. ''No other form of gambling manipulates the human mind as beautifully as these machines,'' concludes Petry, who has studied gambling treatments since 1998. ''I think that's why that's the most popular form of gambling with which people get into trouble.'' Anti-gambling activists refer to slots as ''the crack cocaine of gambling.'' Though gambling's loudest critics tend to be alarmists, the crack analogy may be apt. Just as crack addicts have frequently seemed to self-destruct much faster than those abusing powdered cocaine, there is abundant, albeit still largely anecdotal, evidence suggesting that the same is true of today's computer-driven slot machines -- video-based slots especially. Where social workers once found that the woes of a typical problem gambler tended to mount gradually -- with a period of 20 or more years commonly passing between a first wager and a bottoming-out event like bankruptcy, divorce or even suicide -- addiction cycles of a few years are, if not typical, commonplace among slots players. ''Treatment folks are definitely identifying people who are experiencing what we call 'telescoping' -- a shortening of the period of time that it takes for someone to get into trouble,'' says Rachel Volberg, president of the National Council on Problem Gambling and the author of ''When the Chips Are Down: Problem Gambling in America.'' Volberg, who runs Gemini Research, an organization that specializes in gambling-related investigations, says it remains to be seen whether the problem lies in ''something special about these machines or in the people who prefer playing them.'' Female slots players in particular, Petry says, ''tend to experience this telescoping phenomenon -- and we know from research that women are quicker to seek treatment.'' Gambling counselors regularly encounter people like Ricky Brumfield, a working-class Phoenix woman who won $3,700 the first time she ever touched a slot machine -- a day that turned out to be the unluckiest of her life. That was in 1997, when Brumfield, then 43, traveled to Las Vegas to help a friend celebrate the Fourth of July. Within nine months, she had hocked her jewelry and gone through $100,000 in cash and credit-card debt. She only stopped, she confesses, because the Sheriff's Department arrested her on child-abuse charges for leaving her two young kids locked in a car in a casino parking lot while she played the slots inside. ''I knew it was really wrong to do that, but the urge to go into the casino was stronger than my instincts as a mother,'' Brumfield says. She had only recently had back surgery, but she found that when she played, she never felt pain. ''I think the dopamine and serotonin levels, when they kicked in -- that blocked off the pain,'' says Brumfield, who now works for the Arizona Council on Compulsive Gambling. ''You feel hypnotized by the machine. You don't think of anything else.'' Near the end, the hold the machines had over her, she says, was akin to that of an unfaithful lover. She would fall into a jealous rage when a favorite machine paid a jackpot to another, less devoted player. ''Slot machines have a different impact on the brain than other forms of gambling,'' Howard Shaffer says. Unlike table games, which are played in groups, slots are played in isolation, and therefore they lack the same safeguards social situations provide. ''And because the video form is faster than the mechanical form, they hold the potential to behave in the fashion of psychostimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines. They energize and de-energize the brain in more rapid cycles. The faster on, faster off, the greater the risk.'' Colleagues of Shaffer have compared the brain scans of people high on cocaine with those of people while gambling: similar neurocircuitry is lighted up in both sets of images. Shaffer predicts that in time electronic games will ''protect players.'' Just as the car industry implemented basic technologies like seat belts to save lives, he expects the gambling industry (which finances many of his studies) to eventually employ strategies to interrupt people when they play too fast. As Bill Eadington, the University of Nevada, Reno, professor and a consultant to Indian tribes, governments and casinos around the world, puts it, ''I worry that we're burning out players too fast.'' The typical slots player initiates a new game every six seconds. That works out to 10 games per minute, 600 per hour. If the average player bets $2 a spin, that player is wagering roughly $1,200 every hour. Slot designers have experimented with machines that play even faster, but the industry standard remains a six-second cycle. ''It wouldn't be much fun if we took your money any faster than that,'' Kaminkow told me with a slight shrug of his shoulder, suggesting that just how fast people play is entirely up to him. I asked Kaminkow if he ever worried that the potent mix of TV, technology and the prodigious talents of his creative people will produce machines that are too powerful. ''What kind of question is that?'' he replied. In his natural state, Kaminkow is a breezy and sarcastic jokester who revels in politically incorrect jokes. But he suddenly sounded as if he were addressing a Rotary Club. ''I take responsible gaming very seriously,'' he said. ''We're not an alcohol, we're not a drug.'' He is in the entertainment business, he added, a ''maker of small little movies'' that bring a touch of joy and laughter to the lives of the elderly and others. ''I'm not looking for people who say, 'I spent my milk money,''' he said. ''I think people need to be very responsible in their gaming habits. I know I am.'' The million-plus-square-foot facility that houses I.G.T.'s Reno operations sits in the Sierra foothills south of downtown. Workers use bicycles and golf carts to get around a complex that is larger than the Reno airport. Roughly 1,600 employees staff the nine assembly lines that I.G.T. operates for two shifts a day, five days a week. The warehouse where parts are stored evokes the government warehouse in the final scene from ''Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' Maybe most impressive of all is what the company calls its finished goods area: hundreds of gleaming machines are stacked in row after row of shelves that reach several stories high. ''My job is basically to keep feeding the beast,'' Kaminkow likes to say, and toward that end he summoned a group of his top designers to his office in the fall of 2002 to discuss a game he was then calling ''Mega Money Ball.'' He loved the idea of a lottery-themed game that gave the illusion of costing just a penny to play, and he needed a big name to ensure that it was a hit. The group considered some of the company's regulars, like Dick Clark and Regis Philbin, who was already under contract with I.G.T. for two games, and also Max Baer Jr. (Jethro), who had three games, with several more on the way. Eventually Kaminkow decided they needed a comedian. Dennis Miller (too angry) and Jerry Seinfeld (too expensive) were among the names bandied about before Kaminkow suddenly bellowed, ''Nancy!'' The name that had just crossed his mind was Drew Carey; Kaminkow was so excited that he ignored the group and yelled for Nancy King, who runs the company's licensing program. Negotiations with a celebrity's people sometimes stretch over months (''Let's just say a lot of C celebrities think they're A's,'' King says), but Carey proved easier than most. ''I thought, Oh, it'd be fun to be involved in the making of a slot machine,'' Carey says, adding that he asked himself if it would hurt his chances of ever doing movies, a goal of his, and concluded that it would not. ''That's almost all the thought I put into it,'' he says. It helped, of course, that his was a multigame deal that several people inside the company confirmed is worth in the millions even before annual royalties are figured. Every slot machine starts with Kaminkow. ''Has Joe told you his prima donna rule?'' several people had asked by the time Kaminkow shared it with me (and then repeated on successive visits). ''I tell people I've got my one-prima-donna rule: there's room for only one prima donna here, and I've already got the job,'' he says. But when work began on the machine, the design team had received little direction from the boss beyond a broad-brush mandate to create an interesting lotterylike game that took full advantage of Carey's talents. ''We get this pile of vagueness,'' Baerlocher says, ''that we have to start making into a game.'' A core group of about a dozen people -- including Baerlocher and a junior mathematician, a couple of computer programmers and assorted artists and other creative types -- were assigned what was now being called ''Big Balls of Cash.'' They all read Carey's book ''Dirty Jokes and Beer'' and then sat down to brainstorm. ''Basically we throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks,'' says Randy Mead, the game designer charged with coordinating the multitude of moving parts that would become the Carey machine. ''So many of our gam es are based on older themes that are perfect for our audience,'' Mead explains. ''They're the same graphics, the same songs, the same voices that those ladies really desire.'' The Carey machine, though, offered a chance to work on ''something much edgier and fun.'' Given the size of Carey's contract, ''Big Balls'' had to be an important machine, important enough to slap a wholly visible wheel on it. From almost the beginning, Kaminkow's crew understood that the main bonus round would mimic those commercial-like TV spots in which numbered Ping-Pong balls are used to pick a winning lottery number. They dressed Carey in a tuxedo and filmed him standing beside a beautiful model in a low-cut dress. Given this premise and the elaborate staging, a spinning wheel would seem superfluous -- except that in the world of slot machine design, spinning wheels are never superfluous. Baerlocher likes to recount the time a man lined up the three ''Wheel of Fortune'' symbols on a $1 machine. Bells rang, lights flashed and the machine locked up, as it is programmed to do whenever anyone hits the big jackpot. ''The casino host comes over -- 'Congratulations, sir, you've won the big jackpot. We're going to get people here to verify it.' And he was like, 'Don't I get to spin the wheel?' He had just won over a million dollars, but all he wanted to do is spin the wheel.'' There are two basic elements to any slot machine, Baerlocher says -- the art and the math: ''The art is used to attract a player. That's our lure to get them to sit down and play. That's when the game math takes over.'' The math, he says, gives a game its personality. Baerlocher decided that ''Big Balls'' couldn't be a cherry dribbler, because it offered so bountiful a top prize, but he didn't want it to be as tight as a game called ''Megabucks,'' which was already in casinos and which rarely rewarded players with any money unless it was bestowing multiple millions of dollars on some lucky soul. The Carey game, the creators decided, would pay some small and medium jackpots, but with nothing like the frequency of machines aimed at the neophyte gambler. ''Our thinking was that people don't want to come to a machine advertising a multimillion bonus and walk away with a $20 or $40 win,'' Baerlocher says. The other big question confronting the design team was how often to initiate the bonus. Baerlocher was aiming for a bonus that would kick in once during every 10 to 15 minutes of play, but Kaminkow was pushing for something that would hit more often. ''That's Joe,'' Baerlocher says. ''He wants a machine that pays a ton of small pays, lots of medium-size plays and a huge jackpot. In other words, he wants us to do the impossible.'' Apparently Baerlocher accomplished just that. ''Big Balls of Cash'' was a huge hit at last year's G2E, along with ''Star Wars'' and ''Elizabeth Taylor Dazzling Diamonds'' (described in I.G.T.'s press materials as an ''exciting new merchandise-dispensing game'' that allows you to wear home your winnings). I.G.T.'s designers killed many of Carey's more candid wisecracks so as not to anger its most important customers -- the casino executives who will decide the machine's fate -- but there remained an undeniable bite to the machine just the same. The company took 150 new games to G2E, but there was often a wait to play one of the two ''Big Balls'' machines. They were ''gaffed'' -- rigged -- to go immediately to the bonus round, and over the three-day show it provided endless laughs for the slots floor directors looking for new stuff. ''You've got a real winner here,'' person after person told Kaminkow, who hovered around his two big kahunas and ''Dazzling Diamonds'' like a proud father. (''Big Balls'' is expected to make its debut in casinos at the end of this year or early in 2005.) Most of the people I met inside I.G.T. told me they never played slot machines on their own time. Anthony Baerlocher turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. Kaminkow's wife, Kim, says she plays only ''when Joe hands me $20 and tells me I'm supposed to play some new machine.'' Even one corporate P.R. staff member couldn't resist shaking her head in disbelief as she described scenes of people lining up to play a new machine. ''It was unfathomable to me,'' she told me. When I asked one I.G.T. artist if he ever plays, he acted as if I had insulted him. ''Slots are for losers,'' he spat, and then, coming to his senses, begged me to consider that an off-the-record comment. ''Big Balls of Cash'' was designed to hold roughly 10 cents for every dollar played, but saying the obvious inside I.G.T. -- that the very math of the slot machine makes it a loser's game -- would not be a very good career move. Every so often during my time inside I.G.T. someone let me into a locked showroom just off the building's main lobby. Inside, I would find myriad machines clamoring for my attention. They were in what slot designers describe as ''attract mode.'' A ''Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve'' kept announcing, ''It's a cold one in Times Square tonight.'' A voice that sounded vaguely like Yosemite Sam asked: ''Do you want to be rich? Oil rich?'' A familiar voice from my TV past cried out, ''Come on down!'' Applause emanated from a machine in the corner, and I heard Frank Sinatra's voice: ''Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.'' On my first visit to the showroom, I jumped from game to game, but on my second visit I stuck with a single game, ''The Price Is Right,'' which Baerlocher designed expressly for the uninitiated. The showroom machine had 8,000 credits on it -- $400. It wasn't my money, so I played the maximum of $2.25 per spin. The machine constantly emitted noises: clapping sounds, little bright chimes, the occasional yodel. The show's theme song never stopped, driving me batty, until finally I hit a bonus -- suddenly that theme song turned sweet. Slot designers call it a ''rolling sound'': the more credits you win, the longer the song plays. At first I seemed to be winning, gathering credits on every second or third spin. But after about 15 minutes, I was down nearly 7,000 credits. I was winning the virtual equivalent of 15 or 20 nickels every time I scored -- but I was spending more than twice that with every spin. After 45 minutes, I was down below 5,000 credits. If I were playing for real money, I would have lost more than $150. Playing free credits is nothing like playing with your own money, of course, so at 2 a.m. one sleepless night I slipped a 20-dollar bill into a ''Jeannie'' machine in the Sands casino in Reno. That bought me a full 25 minutes on the machine and one brief bonus glimpse of Jeannie. I'm pretty much the age of those Kaminkow is targeting with his newer machines -- and in fact I grew up dreaming of Jeannie -- but it's hard to imagine being seduced by any celebrity he might trot out, even Neil Young or Lou Reed. My brief crack at slots left me feeling somewhere between stupid and glum. At that hour there were no cheery tourists in brightly-patterned shirts amid the chirping of the slots, no sunny smiles on the faces of elderly women happy for a few hours out on the town. Several machines down from me an older man sat slumped in his chair. His T-shirt was riding up his overabundant belly, but he didn't seem to care. He stared at the video screen in front of him in a toddler-staring-at-television kind of way. Other players around me were dressed in sweatsuits and slippers, and there was even a woman in curlers. The hairstyles were generally what you would expect if a fire alarm forced people out of bed in the middle of the night. It wasn't pleasure I saw on their faces so much as determination. The scene called to mind an evening one year earlier when I spent time with several undercover cops who work for Colorado's division of gambling. Walking the casinos of Black Hawk and Central City, a pair of side-by-side mountain towns with dozens of casinos, we came across a woman who had just won $5,000 playing a dollar slot machine. The people at the Isle of Capri Casino had trotted out a photographer and an oversize poster-board check, but the woman wasn't smiling. In fact, she looked sad. ''I'll tell you,'' said Michael Lask, one of the undercover officers, ''she probably lost $10,000 to win that $5,000. And she knows that next week she'll be giving that $5,000 right back.'' For the most part, the only smiling faces I saw while delving into the realm of slot machines were on the faces of I.G.T.'s designers, unless you count the players posing on the oversize pictures that hang in the atrium of the company's entrance. Gary Rivlin covers Silicon Valley for The New York Times. He is the author of ''The Plot to Get Bill Gates.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/magazine/09SLOTS.html?ex=1085242122&ei=1&en=ca53079c51207d6d --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company From joe at barrera.org Mon May 10 19:49:48 2004 From: joe at barrera.org (Joseph S. Barrera III) Date: Mon May 10 19:49:00 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Tragically, as many as 9, 625 out of every 10, 000 individuals may be neurotypical. Message-ID: <40A03F4C.5090609@barrera.org> May 9, 2004 NEURODIVERSITY FOREVER The Disability Movement Turns to Brains By AMY HARMON No sooner was Peter Alan Harper, 53, given the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder last year than some of his family members began rolling their eyes. To him, the diagnosis explained the sense of disorganization that caused him to lose track of projects and kept him from completing even minor personal chores like reading his mail. But to others, said Mr. Harper, a retired journalist in Manhattan, it seems like one more excuse for his inability to "take care of business." He didn't care. "The thing about A.D.D. is how much it affects your self-esteem,'' Mr. Harper said. "I had always thought of myself as someone who didn't finish things. Knowing why is such a relief.'' As the number of Americans with brain disorders grows, so has skepticism toward the grab bag of syndromes they are being tagged with, from A.D.D. to Asperger's to bipolar I, II or III. But in a new kind of disabilities movement, many of those who deviate from the shrinking subset of neurologically "normal" want tolerance, not just of their diagnoses, but of their behavioral quirks. They say brain differences, like body differences, should be embraced, and argue for an acceptance of "neurodiversity." And as psychiatrists and neurologists uncover an ever-wider variety of brain wiring, the norm, many agree, may increasingly be deviance. "We want respect for our way of being," said Camille Clark, an art history graduate student at the University of California at Davis who has Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism often marked by an intense interest in a single subject. "Some of us will talk too long about washing machines or square numbers, but you don't have to hate us for it." Last month, Ms. Clark helped start an Internet site called the Autistic Adults Picture project , where dozens of people list their professions and obsessions next to a photograph. The idea is to show normal-looking people, whose peculiarities stem from their brain wiring - and who deserve compassion rather than exasperation. Overcoming the human suspicion of oddity will be hard, the more so because the biological basis of many brain disorders can't be easily verified. Usually, all anyone has to go on is behavior. "It's a tough one," wrote one participant in an online discussion of Asperger's syndrome. "Was that woman," he asked, just "unwilling to think about others' feelings, not caring about whether she's boring me with the minute details of her breakfast wrap?" Or, he asked, was she "really truly incapable of adapting herself to social mores?" Science is beginning to clear up such questions, said Dr. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa Medical Center, by identifying distinct brain patterns and connecting them to behavior. But, he added, only society can decide whether to accommodate the differences. "What all of our efforts in neuroscience are demonstrating is that you have many peculiar ways of arranging a human brain and there are all sorts of varieties of creative, successful human beings," Dr. Damasio said. "For a while it is going to be a rather relentless process as there are more and more discoveries of people that have something that could be called a defect and yet have immense talents in one way or another." For example, when adults with A.D.D. look at the word "yellow" written in blue and are asked what the color is and then what the word is, they use an entirely different part of the brain than a normal adult. And when people with Asperger's look at faces, they use a part of the brain typically engaged when looking at objects. Dr. Damasio and others compare the shifting awareness about brain function to the broader conception of intelligence that has evolved over the last two decades, driven in part by the theory of Howard Gardner, a Harvard education professor, that children who don't excel in "traditional" intelligence - the manipulation of words and numbers - may shine in other areas such as spatial reasoning or human relations. Skeptics, like Mr. Harper's family, and some medical professionals argue that clinicians are too quick to hand out a diagnosis to anyone who walks through the door. In an effort to rein in the number of diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association imposed a new criterion in its latest edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual: an individual must now suffer from "impairment" to qualify as having one of its 220 psychological disorders. "We're not adequately differentiating normal from pathological if we just use the criteria that are in the syndrome definitions," said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, director of research for the American Psychiatric Association. The definition of "impairment,'' however, remains vague. And many clinicians chafe at the manual's rigid diagnostic criteria. "Say the diagnostic category for a depressive disorder is four out of eight symptoms, and you have two," said Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard University psychiatrist. "What are you, just miserable?" For patients, being given a name and a biological basis for their difficulties represents a shift from a "moral diagnosis" that centers on shame, to a medical one, said Dr. Ratey, who is the author of "Shadow Syndromes," which argues that virtually all people have brain differences they need to be aware of to help guide them through life. But the most humane approach, some experts argue, may lie in redefining the expanding set of syndromes as differences rather than diagnoses. "We're doing a service on the one hand by describing many more of these conditions and inviting people to understand themselves better," said Dr. Edward Hallowell, a leading authority on A.D.D. "But when we pathologize it we scare them and make them not want to have any part of it. I think of these as traits, not disorders." Knowing you are a mild depressive, for instance, could induce you to exercise often. A bipolar person could adapt their lives to fit their mood swings, or treat them with drugs if that works better. And a neurologically tolerant society would try to accommodate as well as understand behavior that remained aberrant. Others take a more pragmatic approach to the newly available information about how the brain works. In his recent book, "Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life" (Scribner), Steven Johnson undergoes a barrage of neurological tests to learn more about his own quirks. "For a long time when scientists talked about the brain it was, 'the human brain functions this way,' '' Mr. Johnson said. "But the great promise of this moment is that we can begin to understand what makes us different as well as what makes us all alike. Enough about the human race - I want to hear about me." Mr. Johnson, who found himself to be better at language than visual processing, said his wife used to get annoyed when he couldn't recall details about a house they were planning to renovate. Now, he says, they understand that she is better at visual tasks, and he tries harder to compensate. Many of those who advocate greater tolerance for brain quirks caution that it should not serve as an excuse for individuals to behave inappropriately. "It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card," Dr. Ratey said. "It's an awareness of what you need to do or accept about yourself and then decide, 'Do I want to fit in more or not?' '' The answer, increasingly, may be "not." Many A.D.D. adults say their condition contributes to their creativity, and some with Asperger's are now critiquing those they call "neurotypicals." On Internet sites like the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical (isnt.autistics.org), autistics satirize the cultural fascination with deviance. "Neurotypical individuals," states the Web site, "find it difficult to be alone" and "are often intolerant of seemingly minor differences in others." "Tragically," it adds, "as many as 9,625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top -- All dressed in uniforms so fine They drank and killed to pass the time Wearing the shame of all their crimes With measured steps, they walked in line From baisley at alumni.rice.edu Mon May 10 21:20:19 2004 From: baisley at alumni.rice.edu (Wayne Baisley) Date: Mon May 10 21:19:02 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Tragically, as many as 9, 625 out of every 10, 000 individuals may be neurotypical. References: <40A03F4C.5090609@barrera.org> Message-ID: <40A05483.6010601@alumni.rice.edu> There're also the right hemisphere conjugates of the ADD/ADHD problems, called Nonverbal Learning Disorders. NLD Syndrome (formerly known as Social-Emotional Learning Disorder) is much less known, and diagnosed perhaps less than 1/20th as often as the left hemisphere syndromes, even though they should occur about equally. From Nonverbal Learning Disorders Revisited in 1997 by Sue Thompson, MA, CET To recap my previous article entitled Nonverbal Learning Disorders: The term Nonverbal Learning Disorders (or NLD) refers to a neurological syndrome believed to result from damage to the white matter connections in the right hemisphere of the brain, which are important for intermodal integration. Three major categories of dysfunction present themselves: (1) motoric (lack of coordination, severe balance problems, and difficulties with fine graphomotor skills); (2) visual-spatial-organizational (lack of image, poor visual recall, faulty spatial perceptions, and difficulties with spatial relations); and (3) social (lack of ability to comprehend nonverbal communications, difficulties adjusting to transitions and novel situations, and deficits in social judgement and social interaction). Individuals with NLD generally have exceptional verbal skills, do well in school subjects requiring decoding (the word recognition aspect of reading) and encoding (spelling) written language, have excellent auditory attention and memory, and learn primarily through verbal mediation. This syndrome appears to be the exact opposite of dyslexia. NLD often resembles Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) because the student with NLD has poor attention to visual and tactile input. However, a closer observation of this child will reveal that the deficiencies he experiences in these areas are not actually attentional deficits (medication to improve attention does not usually improve this child's dysfunctional visual and tactile processing), but rather they are brought about by limited access to the areas of the brain which are linked to these modalities. From Neurobehavioral Characteristics Seen in the Classroom - Developing an Educational Plan for the Student with NLD The student with NLD: Has difficulty finding her way around - - and is often lost or tardy Has difficulty coping with changes in routine and transitions Has difficulty generalizing previously learned information Has difficulty following multi-step instructions Makes very literal translations Asks too many questions Is easily overwhelmed May experience heightened sensory experiences May develop secondary issues with stress and anxiety Imparts the "illusion of competency" More useful stuff at and Cheers, Wayne From khare at alumni.caltech.edu Mon May 10 23:07:10 2004 From: khare at alumni.caltech.edu (khare@alumni.caltech.edu) Date: Mon May 10 23:06:03 2004 Subject: [FoRK] NYTimes.com Article: A Question Still Unanswered: How Did the Blackout Happen? Message-ID: <20040511060710.554D63504F@web38t.prvt.nytimes.com> The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu. The failure modes of decentralized systems are quite intriguing -- especially when they're still being analyzed as though they formed a centralized system. The question is, will people recognize the same subtle errors when it appears as fraudulent failure of the international e-commerce networks? Rohit khare@alumni.caltech.edu /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ THE CLEARING - IN THEATERS JULY 2 - WATCH THE TRAILER NOW An official selection of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, THE CLEARING stars ROBERT REDFORD and HELEN MIRREN as Wayne and Eileen Hayes - a husband and wife living the American Dream. Together they've raised two children and struggled to build a successful business from the ground up. But there have been sacrifices along the way. When Wayne is kidnapped by an ordinary man, Arnold Mack (WILLEM DAFOE), and held for ransom in a remote forest, the couple's world is turned inside out. Watch the trailer at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/theclearing/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ A Question Still Unanswered: How Did the Blackout Happen? May 10, 2004 By MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON, May 5 - As the electric grid approaches its season of peak strain, engineers say they still cannot answer the central question of how a power failure in Ohio on Aug. 14, 2003, became the biggest blackout in North American history. Investigators, including officials from the United States and Canada, say that the eastern power grid - the vast complex of generators, substations and transmission lines through which the power failure spread last August - has become so large, complicated and heavily loaded in the last two decades that it is difficult to determine how a single problem can expand into an immense failure. A report issued by the Energy Department on April 5 put forward extensive recommendations for reducing the likelihood of isolated problems, like the failure of transmission lines in Ohio last August. But the report stopped short of speculating how a local problem cascaded into a catastrophe that spread from northeastern Ohio through Michigan, Ontario and New York and into parts of Connecticut and New Jersey. Investigators did identify how local failures could become larger difficulties in a way that had not been previously known: protective devices called relays could be tricked into shutting down power lines if they sensed short-circuits that did not actually exist. But the report only hinted at solutions. The report has drawn mixed reactions from electricity experts. While some said it was thorough and balanced, others said that it reflected a bias by its overseer, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to de-emphasize ways that deregulation of the electric market might have affected the system's reliability and vulnerability. Robert Blohm, an electricity consultant who first questioned some of the report's calculations, said in an e-mail message: "We've charged ahead with long distance markets in electricity without realizing/understanding the reliability effects which this blackout brought home." People involved in preparing the report acknowledged that it focused on the origins of the blackout and did not fully explain how it spread. One specialist, Gerry Cauley, the director of standards at the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry group founded after a widespread blackout in the Northeast in 1965, said it made sense to promptly address the events that started the blackout because they were easily preventable. The events in Ohio were "so egregious that they just should have never happened," he said. Alison Silverstein, senior energy policy adviser to the regulatory commission, who drafted much of the report, said in an interview: "Reliability is about taking care of the basics every single day. That's what all of those prior blackouts told us. That's what this blackout told us." Investigators concluded that power lines initially failed in the blackout because they came into contact with tree branches. The inquiry also found that an Ohio utility and a regional power control agency did not have the computer tools to spot failures as they occurred and make compensating adjustments. Focusing on the origins of last year's blackout was easier than looking in detail at how it spread, experts said. Mr. Cauley said that lines, substations and generating stations fell in such profusion that plotting just two or three seconds of events takes weeks of work. He says he hopes to finish a detailed analysis by the first anniversary of the blackout. The report discusses several hypotheses about the spread of the disturbance, including relays confusing huge power flows with short-circuits and reacting by shutting down lines. Installation of relays that can tell the difference is probably years away, experts said. A broader question is whether the power failure would have been less extensive if the system had been set up to tolerate more disruptions. "Maybe the Midwest would not have gone down," said Jack Casazza, a transmission expert and consultant. Conversely, he said, had the relays not tripped, it is also possible that the blackout might have spread further. "Maybe the whole darn East Coast would have gone down. I think it's important to know the difference." The report cautions that "simulation of these events is so complex that it may be impossible to ever completely prove" theories about the events. Such a thorough analysis was "not a job we could do in the time we had available," said David Meyer, senior adviser to the Office of Electric Transmission and Distribution in the Department of Energy. The report notes that some companies on the grid failed to submit complete data and that some utilities, asked to say when and why various components of the electric system shut down, did not fully respond. The report's focus on initial failures in the blackout contrasts with similar studies of earlier power failures. In 1978, discussing blackouts in 1965 and 1977, the regulatory commission said that it was "not possible to prevent an occasional localized power failure." The trick, the investigators said then, was to prevent them from spreading. Ms. Silverstein said that the 1977 blackout was less than a tenth the size of the 2003 blackout, and easier to diagnose. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/business/10blackout.html?ex=1085255630&ei=1&en=bd5fc6887eb56fa7 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company From gbolcer at endeavors.com Tue May 11 07:29:25 2004 From: gbolcer at endeavors.com (Gregory Alan Bolcer) Date: Tue May 11 07:30:02 2004 Subject: [FoRK] [Fwd: UCI ISR 2004 Research Forum: Registration is Open!] Message-ID: <40A0E345.6050306@endeavors.com> Mitch Kapor to talk about Chandler at UCI ICS ISR June 8th if you are in the area. Greg -------- Original Message -------- Subject: UCI ISR 2004 Research Forum: Registration is Open! Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 15:21:53 -0700 From: Institute for Software Research To: UCI_ISR_list_members: ; Institute for Software Research University of California, Irvine http://www.isr.uci.edu/ UCI ISR 2004 Research Forum: Industry Problems - ISR Solutions Keynote: "Chandler: An Open Source Personal Information Manager" Mitch Kapor, Founder and Chair, Open Source Applications Foundation and Founder of Lotus Development Corp. and Designer of Lotus 1-2-3 http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/Research-Forum-2004/ ADVANCE PROGRAM Tuesday, June 8 1:30 pm - 7:30 pm UCI McDonnell Douglas Auditorium Early Registration Cost: General Admission $75, Sponsors $50, UC - no cost. Early Registration Deadline: Wednesday, June 2. ** Register early - Seating is limited! http://www.isr.uci.edu/events/Research-Forum-2004/reg-form.html The ISR Research Forum brings together researchers, leaders in industry, and technical practitioners in a multi-disciplinary environment to: * discuss current research areas and technical trends in the fields of software development and interactive collaborative technologies; * showcase current ISR research; * formulate visions on strategic future research and technological directions; * encourage interaction among academia and industry through exchange of ideas and sharing of experiences. Goal. A major goal is to encourage collaborative research and technology transition. Themes. This year's Forum focuses on joint industry/academia concerns in open source development; bridging the gap between research and practice; use case scenarios; weblogs; and areas such as software architecture, software design, CSCW, interaction and collaboration. Keynote. We are pleased to feature a keynote presentation by Mitch Kapor, Founder and Chair of Open Source Applications Foundation, titled "Chandler: An Open Source Personal Information Manager". Highlights. Other program features include: * New this year is a "students only" session in the morning. A major goal is to build a community of regional software and informatics focused students. Students will be able to present posters to each other, gather feedback on research, foster relationships for future collaborative work, and network with peers. * A Panel discussion on: "Open Source Success and Challenges" focusing on industry successes and research challenges. A panel of experts will discuss their experiences, insights, and opinions with the development of open source software systems that have been deployed in industrial or enterprise settings. Chair: Walt Scacchi, UC Irvine/ISR Panelists include: Dr. Pankaj K. Garg, Founder, Zee Source Jason Robbins, Ph.D., UCI/ICS and formerly CollabNet, Inc. Additional industry panelists TBA * Presentations: "Blogging: Past, Present and Future" Prof. Bonnie Nardi, UC Irvine/ISR "The Golden Spike: Finding Common Ground between Software Architecture Research and Practice" Eric Dashofy, UC Irvine/ISR "Use Cases: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (and what you can do about it)" Prof. Hadar Ziv, UC Irvine/ICS "Understanding Multi-tasking Work Environments: Cooperation with a Financial Services Company" Prof. Gloria Mark, UC Irvine/ISR & Eric Smith, State Street * An evening reception highlighted by ISR research project posters and demonstrations. This reception is a huge hit each year. This year we anticipate having an even larger number of students than in the past, representing a broad regional community. For More Information: Debra A. Brodbeck, Technical Relations Director, brodbeck@uci.edu The UCI Institute for Software Research warmly thanks its sponsors: The Aerospace Corporation The Boeing Company IBM Research Division Intel Corp. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory To be removed from the UCI ISR email list: Send email to isr@uci.edu with the Subject line: UNSUBSCRIBE -- Gregory Alan Bolcer, CTO | work: +1.949.833.2800 gbolcer at endeavors.com | http://endeavors.com Endeavors Technology, Inc.| cell: +1.714.928.5476 From jm at jmason.org Tue May 11 10:29:24 2004 From: jm at jmason.org (Justin Mason) Date: Tue May 11 10:28:48 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Salon bits: 'The mighty windbags' (fwd) Message-ID: <20040511172925.B949932800F@radish.jmason.org> This is a *great* article. See also aaronsw's recent blogging. 'Matt Labash ... interviewed by Columbia Journalism Review partner Web site JournalismJobs.com. The interviewer asked, "Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and FOX News Channel become more popular in recent years?" In his answer, Labash conceded that conservatives reject in their own media the standards of fairness, accuracy, and unbiased coverage that they demand from the "liberal media." He unmasked the hypocrisy at the heart of these endeavors: "Because they feed the rage. We bring pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly but it's true somewhat ... While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective ... It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket."' http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/05/11/noise/print.html Copy below "for the archives"... --j. The mighty windbags Thirty years ago, conservatives embarked on a plan to subvert journalism and skew America to the right. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. - - - - - - - - - - - - By David Brock May 11, 2004 | Since defecting from the Republican Party in the latter half of the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I've discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers, and hundreds of readers of my book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." I'm rarely asked anymore why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed. After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place. Nowadays, when I talk about "Blinded by the Right," people want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds. While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It's the media, stupid. When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O'Reilly's temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I'm a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial. Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don't is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed. When I came to Washington fresh out of college in 1986, I got a job at the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper bankrolled by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of a religious cult called the Unification Church. Though Moon's paper was said to be read in the Reagan White House, nobody paid much attention to it. We were the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Considering that the paper was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil, this was a good thing. That was eighteen years ago. Today, the most important sectors of the political media -- most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites -- reflect more closely the political and journalistic values of the Washington Times than those of the New York Times. That is, they are powerful propaganda organs of the Republican Party. For our politics, this development in the media represents a structural change: a structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism, and, I believe, the greatest structural obstacle facing opponents of the right wing. I therefore think it is one of the most important political stories of the era. I have sought to tell this story in "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy." I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a "research fellow" at the Heritage Foundation (the Right's premier think tank), to a position as an "investigative writer" at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations. By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices across all media channels. The most influential political commentator in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans -- not only conservatives but independent swing voters -- with their primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The Spectator juggernaut -- which had a circulation of three hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s -- had been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than 6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial media. The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually every media venue in the country, have now been well documented, not least in "Blinded by the Right." In that book, I compared the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American. My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern. In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true. The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "... Gore lies because he can't help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "LIAR, LIAR," screamed Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore's "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review's Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusion' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present ... a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'" This impugning of Gore's character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined "Tendency to embellish fact snags Gore," while the Boston Globe weighed in with "Gore seen as 'misleading.'" On ABC's "This Week," former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore's "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal's Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC's Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn't it getting to be delusionary?" The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been -- and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in -- because of negative voter perceptions of Gore's honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore's program over George W. Bush's. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore's federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore's "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason. Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said: "The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole.... Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist...." True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he's just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore's issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it's a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN's "Crossfire." "I actually think he's coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS. As Gore's experience demonstrated, Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears -- their own leaders -- rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that "failed" diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth. With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media's wildings of 1993 -- which led to Clinton's impeachment four years later -- will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated. Ironically, though not coincidentally, this radical transformation of the media has been obscured by conservative charges of "liberal media bias" that are believed by the vast majority of the public, including about half of Democrats. I'm all too familiar with the claim. From my very first days at the Washington Times, I was schooled to invoke "liberal bias" to deflect attention from my own biases and journalistic lapses and as a rationale to justify my presence in the mainstream media conversation in the name of providing "balance" or "the other side." We sold a lot of books and magazines and commanded lavish attention for our propaganda outside the right wing by using this cover story. As I showed in "Blinded by the Right," the truth was that my work as a right-wing journalist and commentator -- in particular, my American Spectator exposés on Anita Hill and the Clintons -- did not deserve the attention they received. I was delivering a truckload of nonfacts, half-truths, and innuendos, not "balance" or "the other side." What I show in "The Republican Noise Machine" is that my experience was not the exception but the rule. The "liberal media" mantra aside, if one looks and listens closely to what the right wing says when it thinks others may not be paying attention, there should be no doubt that it has made potent political gains not despite the media but through it. Rush Limbaugh says his program has "redefined the media" and refers to the "Limbaugh echo chamber syndrome," by which messaging originating on his show drives the twenty-four-hour news cycle. "The radical Left," he says, "is furious that liberals no longer set the agenda in the national media." "'New media' outlets pound establishment," the Washington Times announced in an op-ed by right-wing publicist Craig Shirley. In a column explaining why the "outing" in the press of the identity of a covert CIA operative by senior Bush administration officials -- a possibly criminal act committed to harm a Bush critic -- did not spark a major political scandal, Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution explained in the Washington Times, "The media culture has changed. Conservatives and GOP partisans now have more than adequate means to offer an exculpatory counter-narrative." When CBS announced the cancellation of a biopic that was deemed unflattering toward the Reagans, Matt Drudge appeared on MSNBC, on a show hosted by a former Republican member of Congress, to announce the "beginning of a second media century .... It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there's never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three." Brian C. Anderson, writing on OpinionJournal.com, a right-wing Web site published by the Wall Street Journal, in late 2003, informed conservatives, "[w]e're not losing anymore" and attributed this fact to a media "revolution." "Everything has changed," he wrote. In a syndicated column titled "Culture War Signals," John Leo of U.S. News & World Report argued that "a corner has been turned" in the "culture wars" with the "rise of a large crop of commentators the left has not been able to match" and "conservative gains in new media" like the FOX News Channel. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has written that the conservative media have "cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." MSNBC's Matthews, interviewing Bernard Goldberg, the author of an attack book on the "liberal media" titled "Bias," got the author to agree with his view that the cable news industry -- whose total news audience is growing while that of the traditional broadcast news networks is declining -- is biased all right, though in favor of the right wing. According to Bill O'Reilly, "For decades, [liberals] controlled the agenda on TV news. That's over." In an interview with PBS, Tony Blankley, the former Newt Gingrich flack turned editorial page editor of the Washington Times and "McLaughlin Group" panelist, said: "Starting in 1994, with the Republican election of Congress, I think Limbaugh made the difference in electing the Republican majority. In the following three elections, he made the difference holding the majority. And in 2000, in the presidential race in Florida, he was the difference between Gore and Bush winning Florida, and thus the presidency." Commenting on the media while interviewing Ann Coulter about her book "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," right-wing radio host Sean Hannity crowed, "We've basically taken over!" Coulter, who has made millions off the charge of "liberal media bias" while maintaining a career as perhaps the most biased right-wing voice in the media, laughed in agreement. A young writer for Rupert Murdoch's neoconservative Weekly Standard named Matt Labash -- whom I hired into right-wing journalism at The American Spectator -- was probably laughing, too, when he was interviewed by Columbia Journalism Review partner Web site JournalismJobs.com. The interviewer asked, "Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and FOX News Channel become more popular in recent years?" In his answer, Labash conceded that conservatives reject in their own media the standards of fairness, accuracy, and unbiased coverage that they demand from the "liberal media." He unmasked the hypocrisy at the heart of these endeavors: "Because they feed the rage. We bring pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly but it's true somewhat ... While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective ... It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket." Matt Labash's "great little racket" is the subject of "The Republican Noise Machine." This is a book about the explicitly right-wing media and about how mainstream media, sometimes under the direction of executives who are conservative Republicans, has succumbed to an undue conservative influence and tilt. It is about the right-wing media's history, its reach, its appeal, its practices, its methods, and its financing. It is also about the beliefs of those who populate right-wing media and the beliefs that people derive from it. My conclusion is that right-wing media is a massive fraud, victimizing its own audience and corrupting the broader political dialogue with the tacit permission of established media authorities who should, and probably do, know better. I argue, moreover, that the creation of right-wing media, and of the strategies by which the right wing has penetrated, pressured, co-opted, and subdued the mainstream media into accommodating conservatism, was not an accident. Once upon a time, right-wing strategists, operatives, and financiers believed that they could never win political hegemony in the United States unless they won domination of the country's political discourse. Toward this end, a deliberate, well-financed, and expressly acknowledged communications and deregulatory plan was pursued by the right wing for more than thirty years -- in close coordination with Republican Party leaders -- to subvert and subsume journalism and reshape the national consciousness through the media, with the intention of skewing American politics sharply to the right. The plan has succeeded spectacularly. The implications of this right-wing media incursion extend well beyond particular political outcomes to the heart of our democracy. Democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The conscious effort by the right wing to misinform the American citizenry -- to collapse the distinction between journalism and propaganda -- is thus an assault on democracy itself. The problem is really not so much one of "bias," to use the Right's favored terminology, as it is where bias leads: In the biased right-wing media, among biased right-wing commentators, and in a mainstream media susceptible to right-wing scripting, it leads to verifiable journalistic malpractice, to the publication of misinformation, and to ethical malfeasance. At a deeper level, the existence and influence of the right-wing media as presently constituted is an affront to logic, rationality, and the maintenance of a shared knowledge base from which political consensus and correct public policy choices can be forged. While the right wing cleverly has achieved its greatest gains in mainstream media sectors that ostensibly present opinion -- columns, TV punditry, talk radio, and books -- this opinion is predicated on a raft of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies presented to readers and viewers as fact. To further confuse the picture, the right wing has funded an array of its own media institutions, including newspapers, magazines, Internet sites, and a cable news channel, that produce a large volume of "news" that is not only offensive and unfair but misleading and often false. Because technological advances and the race for ratings and sales have made the wall between right-wing media and the rest of the media permeable, the American media as a whole has become a powerful conveyor belt for conservative-generated "news," commentary, story lines, jargon, and spin. It is now possible to watch a lie move from a disreputable right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning's Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points -- manufactured by and for conservatives, often bought and paid for by conservative political interests, and disseminated through an unabashedly biased right-wing media apparatus that follows no rules or professional norms -- into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America. Equally troubling is that the cable and radio talkers who shape the national political conversation have the ability to censor news that does not serve the interests of the right wing. Every day, professional news organizations, primarily in the prestige print press, report facts, across a broad range of subjects, that are essential to an informed view of politics and policy. More often than not, these stories die on the page and never reach most Americans, owing to right-wing command of the new media "echo chamber." The right-wing drive for media power must also be understood as an overturning of the First Amendment, which posits that good information will drive out bad information given diversity in the marketplace of ideas. As I will show, the Right's premeditated undermining of the media as a public trust in favor of crass commercial values, its coordinated attacks on noncommercial media, and the Republican-led drive for greater consolidation of media ownership have all but wiped out liberal and left-wing views and voices in entire sectors of the American media. Perhaps most ominous, right-wing verbal brownshirts of late have used their mighty media platforms to chill the free speech of their political adversaries and to neuter aggressive journalistic fact-finding that threatens Republican power. My view is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided. If California voters recall their governor in the belief that the state budget deficit is four times higher than it actually is, if Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 before hearing any evidence, if 19 percent of the public thinks it is in the top 1 percent tax bracket, if Americans view criticism of the government's national security policies as tantamount to treason -- thank the right-wing media and those who abet it. Excerpted with permission from "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy" by David Brock. Published by Crown Books. From jbone at place.org Wed May 12 08:33:08 2004 From: jbone at place.org (Contempt for Meatheads) Date: Wed May 12 08:33:16 2004 Subject: [FoRK] The Best Lies Money Can Buy Message-ID: From k5 yesterday: http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2004/5/11/15442/1184 The Best Lies Money Can Buy (Op-Ed) By stpna5 Tue May 11th, 2004 at 05:25:23 PM EST Freedom George Bush has given al Qaeda and bin Laden exactly what they wanted. Not only has he killed nearly 800 of our troops he will also have soon blown through $300 billion of Americans' tax dollars to do so. I In 1990 Osama bin Laden attempted to convince Saudi Prince Sultan to let him bring in a force of mujahadeen to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which had just been invaded by Iraq. The Saudis said thanks, but no thanks to one of their wealthy countrymen and began allowing the Americans to set up secret bases in the Saudi kingdom instead. The Gulf War of 1991 followed. A dozen years later bin Laden saw the Americans fall into a trap by sending their military into Iraq a second time. A destabilized Iraq, which al Qaeda could not achieve while Saddam was still in power, is one less secular Islamic state in the region. The bonus to the further recruitment of young, whack-job zealots in the jihadist cause is that now it is easier to point to Iraq and say: the Christian Infidel Crusaders have attacked and now occupy an Arab country rich in oil. The US army now occupies a country which was not a military threat to the US. The whole-cloth invention of bogus threats used to justify another undeclared war there has played out as bin Laden for years has propagandized that it would. Putting the enormous reserves of Iraqi oil under the control of the Coalition Provisional Authority instead of Saddam Hussein has preceded oil and gas prices now cresting to an all time high. A number of Americans believe many totally fictitious things about Iraq involving weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda operating from there with Saddam (not true, they wished to eliminate him) and the rest of the world mostly approving our invasion. (They mostly didn't.) The allies of the US are actually moving away from the American position of unilateral justification for the Iraq attack, even as the EU expands, Chechnya continues to plague the Russians, and terror cells in Europe proliferate. The European Union has added a group of new member states and the currency of those nations is now unified. (Saddam had indicated before his removal that he wished in the future to be paid in Euros, not dollars for barrels of Iraqi oil.) As numerous career military experts pointed out before and since, the Pentagon's Infantry Lite scheme implemented in the 2003 attack was wrong-headed in the extreme. No body armor was provided for most troops, no armor plate for many vehicles, and the Pentagon brass and the Joint Chiefs have now spent a year slowly sending to slaughter brave warriors who were not trained nor equipped for their assignments. The contempt by the Bush juggernaut for the seasoned advice of many military experts is based on nitwit assessments such as this: "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon. The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years." --Paul Wolfowitz Undersecretary of Defense Wolfowitz is the ultimate chickenhawk. He was recently (while appearing before Congress) unable to answer correctly by an order of magnitude how many American troops were killed the past 12 months in Iraq. He seems blithely unaware of the folly of sending a stripped-down military force on such an ill-conceived fool's errand. Iraq is the wrong place to do the wrong job, with the wrong equipment at the wrong time. Wolfowitz would have you believe he merely received some faulty information. Someone has called it the worst intelligence failure since Cassandra and the Trojan Horse. II The question of civilian control of the military was most acutely resolved by Harry Truman early in the Cold War. Though there were Congressional hearings and calls for his impeachment, Truman fired the heroic Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He later wrote: I "didn't fire MacArthur because he was a dumb SOB, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail." --Harry S. Truman He was fired for not respecting the authority of the President. Some have called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired. I don't think he should be. He is certainly responsible for overseeing the Pentagon, but Bush, Cheney, the Joint Chiefs, Powell and Wolfowitz are equally culpable in this strategic meltdown in the desert. Bush has said of himself "I don't do nuance." Rumsfeld said last year "I don't do quagmires." Such is the mindset of these subdividers of sand dunes who are spending your money to send your family members off to die, and then having them face courts martial for following orders. Truman was himself a war veteran and a half-century before the $150 toilet seat became shorthand for the Department of Defense money pit, he made certain that the massive expenditures by the United States via the Marshall Plan --which rebuilt the destroyed and destitute industrial nations and their economies after World War II-- was nearly devoid of graft, patronage and waste. Such cannot be said of the Return to Iraq, 2003. One of the greatest threats facing the US is private corporate control of defense spending which has skyrocketed in the past two fiscal years concurrent with the large tax cuts specifically handed to the wealthiest tier of America's citizens. Before one of them was passed, billionaire Warren Buffett said on "ABC Nightline" it was so economically useless you might as well call it the "Warren Buffett tax relief act." The wet dreams of imperial conquests by the likes of Wolfowitz, Cheney and Richard Perle result in precisely what we see on the ground in Iraq right now. As Eisenhower said,"we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." With the involvement of private firms such as Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorp and numerous other defense contractor firms being paid for security, transportation and some, as it now turns out -- for interrogation of captured prisoners in Iraq, the situation resembles that of 19th century Pinkertons and the private armies of ruthless railroad barons in the Old West. Some of these firms have engaged in firefights with "insurgents" and calling in their own air support. They operate outside the chain of command to which all the active military members sent by the Pentagon must adhere. Unlike previous Iraq involvements the expenses of the Pentagon for everything from fuel to firepower are not being shared by the vaunted "coalition". The Gulf War of 1991 with Iraq under Bush the Elder cost around $61 billion dollars. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Japan paid around $57 billion of those costs. The current war in Iraq has cost Americans $100 billion in the first 12 months according to Bush the Second's administration, which says it will keep the current number of troops (130,000) on the ground through 2005. Including their request of Congress for an additional $25 billion to supplement the $87 billion outlay they estimated last year it comes out to +/-, $1 million per man on the ground for this zero-sum, neo-con destabilization exercise. $132 billion divided by 130,000 = $1,015,384.62 The costs may actually be much higher but severely lowballed for election year consumption. Some US allies who supported our Afghanistan effort beginning in late 2001 do not understand why Iraq once again took precedence over everything else for another President Bush. The 9/11 commission heard testimony from Richard Clarke that the number of policemen in New York City is larger than the force we sent to Aghanistan to hunt bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban. France and Russia, among others opposed a US invasion of Iraq. Some say they had lots of lucrative Iraqi oil contracts to protect. Other European allies have been alienated as well. Donald Rumsfeld dismissed them as "the chocolate making countries" of old Europe when some of them dared --as did the Islamic democracy of Turkey-- to represent the will of their constituents in opposing the launch of a new Iraq war. According to Bob Woodward $700 million was pulled out of Afghanistan at a crucial point in that war and diverted toward preparations for another Iraq invasion. At Saudi Arabia's Prince Sultan Air Base the American forces are now leaving. Many civilian oil workers from abroad are leaving the country too. Unlike 1991's Gulf War, Turkey refused permission this time for American troops to deploy from their country. This is blamed by some Bush apologists for the failure of his Iraq strategy. Spain has pulled its troops out of Iraq. General William Odum, a former NSA head who accurately predicted the outcome of this invasion and occupation points out that we have now alienated our allies in Europe over this misguided Gulf War sequel. The costly task of overthrowing a sovereign nation and then attempting to occupy ancient lands among an Islamic population has created a netherworld of conflicts between international law and the Geneva Accords, from Guantanamo to the recently installed mosque and minaret sniper positions of Iraq's holy cities. Fighters who were shooting at Marines only weeks ago are now being recruited in the Fallujah brigade. Our man in Fallujah, their newly installed leader, General Mohammed Latif says he wants the Americans to leave Fallujah and then to leave Iraq. This is the grand result a year after victory was declared by the President of the United States. The neo-conservative architects of this experiment in massive defense spending abroad said "major combat operations" were ended in May, 2003. They are lying scum who act as if the lives of our enlisted grunts are a dime a dozen. "Even when there is a necessity of military power, within the land,...a wise and prudent people will always have a watchful & jealous eye over it." -- Samuel Adams From jm at jmason.org Wed May 12 12:58:31 2004 From: jm at jmason.org (Justin Mason) Date: Wed May 12 12:59:05 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Vultures beginning to circle over Blair (fwd) Message-ID: <20040512195832.E524E3280CC@radish.jmason.org> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Interesting news from the UK's Channel 4 News. (yes, these daily emails really are written by Jon Snow, their (extremely sharp) presenter.) - --j. - ------- Forwarded Message Date: Wed, 12 May 2004 17:59:54 +0100 From: Snowmail - Channel 4 News To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: Vultures beginning to circle over Blair Good afternoon, Jon Snow here with my latest missive from the frontlines of newsgathering: Vultures beginning to circle over Blair: ======================================= Forgive the lateness of this posting. Events, dear reader, events. Tonight Ira q dominant again. The reactions in the US of the beheading of the American host age are furious. But they do not prevent Tony Blair coming under increasing pre ssure here. In the Commons today things got very heated. I must say that I have been contacted by several very senior New Labour loyal o f the loyal who tell me that they no longer feel they can support him on Iraq a nd that he may eventually have to go. It's not feeling good for him. Jonathan R ugman from DC, Elinor Goodman from Westminster tie the tears the war and the in trigue together tonight. More on Iraq at: http://www.channel4.com/news/2004/05/ week_2/12_iraq.html View from the front: ==================== Anne Clwyd, Blair's human rights envoy has been into Baghdad's Abu Ghraib priso n and met with General Miller, tough blunt new camp commandant. He's fresh fro m running Guantanamo, an unfortunate juxtaposition one would think. We shall b e talking to Ms Clwyd shortly for your delectation at 7. Propaganda battle: ================= We are exploring the ghastly impact of pictures on this conflict. Exploring too the influence and make up of the man proclaimed in the video as Al Qaeda s exe cutioner, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Israeli soldiers die in Gaza: ============================= Five more Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza as angry residents secrete the body p arts of the six they killed yesterday. Eleven Israeli soldiers in two days. Th at's not happened in years outside open war. But then open war however unbalanc ed, maybe what is going on these days. Olympic gets green flame: ======================== Olympics get the go-ahead, and will be ready in time say the official inspector s. We have the Australian perspective on Greek difficulties at seven. Our man I an Williams is down there. Cannes jamboree begins: ====================== And finally Nicholas Glass is on the Red Carpet in Cannes tonight as the film f estival opens. amazing people Brad Pitt et al. All live at seven. Gotta run, Anne Clwyd's on the line and the director's shouting at me to get in the studio. Best as ever, see you at seven, Jon Snow Business news: ============== In the City the Footsie's finished the day down 42 points, at 4413. In a downbe at session, the index has lost nearly all the territory it managed to claw back yesterday. Bargain-hunting for cheap top flight stocks has once again given wa y to sell-offs as high oil prices and fears of interest rate rises in the State s return to haunt the markets. In New York a short time ago, the Dow Jones was do wn 111 points at 9909. UK weather: =========== Remaining dry with clear spells for most overnight. Cloudier to the north-east again. Some mist and fog developing in those clear spells, some dense patches f orming across northern England, the Midlands and south-west England later as wi nds fall light. Lows of 6-9C. Tomorrow, high pressure keeping many parts dry wi th varying cloud and some sunny spells. Thicker cloud over northern Scotland br inging some rain here. Highs of 13C in the north to 18C to the west and south-w est. To unsubscribe : http://www.channel4.com/news/snowmail/snowmail_deactivate.html - ------- End of Forwarded Message -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Exmh CVS iD8DBQFAooHnQTcbUG5Y7woRAgKvAKCe6AeXC2jw6wwX5SRMnYI2hX850wCeOdGM gjYzHURcIVvtExagcRlEUZ0= =2Tg8 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- From bill at whump.com Wed May 12 14:40:27 2004 From: bill at whump.com (Bill Humphries) Date: Wed May 12 14:40:43 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Vultures beginning to circle over Blair (fwd) In-Reply-To: <20040512195832.E524E3280CC@radish.jmason.org> References: <20040512195832.E524E3280CC@radish.jmason.org> Message-ID: On May 12, 2004, at 12:58 PM, Justin Mason wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > > Interesting news from the UK's Channel 4 News. (yes, these daily > emails really are written by Jon Snow, their (extremely sharp) > presenter.) Thanks for the pointer to the Snowmail. I'll give it a try. -- whump From emerson at singinst.org Wed May 12 16:04:38 2004 From: emerson at singinst.org (Tyler Emerson) Date: Wed May 12 16:04:42 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Singularity Institute's new bulletin Message-ID: <200405122304.i4CN4g723074@tick.javien.com> The Singularity Institute's first eBulletin will soon be released. We've made notable progress in recent months, and hope FoRK readers will consider subscribing to keep informed of our research and advocacy. http://www.singinst.org/news/subscribe.html Some topics covered: * AI Project Update * SIAI Staff and Website Update * Donors for March and April * Volunteer Contributions and Opportunities * "3 Laws Unsafe" Campaign * Research Fellow Challenge Grant Challenge Many thanks, --------- Tyler Emerson Executive Director Singularity Institute emerson@singinst.org http://www.singinst.org Suite 106 PMB #12 4290 Bells Ferry Road Kennesaw, GA 30144 T: (404) 550-3847 --------- From jbone at place.org Wed May 12 19:51:36 2004 From: jbone at place.org (Contempt for Meatheads) Date: Wed May 12 19:51:36 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Jabberwocky: now this is a cool BlueTooth app... Message-ID: <730C623A-A488-11D8-9CA6-000A95CFE9DE@place.org> All this people-network stuff is --- slowly --- starting to come together in just the way we all said it would. Years ago when nobody knew whether to call buddy lists "buddy lists" or "people browsers" I met w/ an analyst who --- very sagely --- suggested that the real oomph in buddy lists was going to be mapping and mining the n-degrees social networks, particularly with a mind to discovering and "outing" (selectively and optionally) "latent communities." The first sort of presages the current LinkedIn, Orkut etc. phenomenon. But the latter is particularly interesting when it's opportunistic and dynamic --- and that kind of thing is enabled by e.g. Bluetooth. What happens when it's not explicit "toothing" but rather mapping of implicit / dynamic Bluetooth connectivity and mapping it into social networks? Here's a start. Noticed on Boingsters: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/12/jabberwocky_intels_f.html Jabberwocky: Intel's "Familiar Stranger" Bluetooth application I wrote an article for TheFeature about Intel's "Jabberwocky," a bluetooth phone application that lets you track your "familiar strangers," (a term coined by late psychologist Stanley Milgram). Link posted by Mark Frauenfelder at 08:56:47 AM http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100626 From dl at silcom.com Thu May 13 08:03:56 2004 From: dl at silcom.com (Dave Long) Date: Thu May 13 07:44:49 2004 Subject: [FoRK] NYTimes.com Article: The Tug of the Newfangled Slot Machines In-Reply-To: Message from khare@alumni.caltech.edu of "Mon, 10 May 2004 22:22:03 EDT." <20040511022203.1A26135040@web38t.prvt.nytimes.com> Message-ID: <200405131503.IAA01773@maltesecat> > ''Big Balls of Cash'' was designed to hold roughly > 10 cents for every dollar played ... Worse than roulette, right? > but only the slot machine gives you the hope of > turning a few dollars into a seven- or eight-figure payoff. I'd say startups are a better bet. (working for, if not investing in) > Baerlocher's starchy mien melted away, revealing an amused > smile. ''You can see it on their faces every time,'' he > said. ''They feel they came soooo close. They're ready to > try it again, because next time they're going to get it.'' If one is perfecting a skill, it makes sense to keep plugging away; if one is rolling some dice, it's just another hit on the rat lever. Slots are doubly a loser's game: not only is the expectation value ruinous, but one can be ruined on the variance alone. > [one player] would fall into a > jealous rage when a favorite machine paid a jackpot to > another, less devoted player. Even if one plays games that pay out $1.10 for every dollar played, with enough variance there'll be a very good chance that the eventual payout goes to another (devoted or not) player. -Dave (cherry dribblers, otoh, resemble pyramid schemes, with the amazing returns on capital, and miserable returns of capital) From tomwhore at inetarena.com Thu May 13 11:48:53 2004 From: tomwhore at inetarena.com (Tomwhore) Date: Thu May 13 11:53:57 2004 Subject: [FoRK] RE: Incoming Msg Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/attachments/20040513/82434499/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Counter_strike.com Type: application/octet-stream Size: 21208 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/attachments/20040513/82434499/Counter_strike.obj From owen at permafrost.net Thu May 13 17:50:16 2004 From: owen at permafrost.net (Owen Byrne) Date: Thu May 13 17:49:48 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Buzzword Update Message-ID: <40A417C8.2070909@permafrost.net> I can't think of a useful comment. Says it all. http://observer.com/pages/newyorkdiary.asp Owen > *Global Buzzword Search-And-Delete: Rove at the Keyboard* > > *by Bruce Feirstein * > > Memo from: Karl Rove > > To: POTUS > cc: Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ridge, Mueller and Tenet > (bcc: Hannity, Novak, Sinclair Broadcasting) > > > To All Concerned Parties: In light of recent events, I feel the need > to clarify some of the language and "descriptive phraseology" we?ve > been using in regard to the war on terrorism and our ongoing efforts > in Iraq. > > These are not to be interpreted as "non-negotiable edicts" (whose > violation will result in your immediate reputation-tarnishing > dismissal), but rather as "helpful suggestions." > > Remember: The Patriot Act depends on you, acting patriotically. > > So please update your lexicon of White House?approved media buzzwords > immediately. > > 1) "/Shock and Awe/." Deleted. Archaic. Please resist the urge to > describe the goings-on in the soon-to-be-renamed Abu Ghraib prison > (see below) as "Shock and Flaw," "Shocking and Awful," etc., etc. > > 2) /Abu Ghraib prison/. Henceforth, this will be known as the "Khalil > Gibran/Dale Earnhardt Jr. vocational-training facility and > recreational center." As John Kerry himself has asked: "Who among us > does not like NASCAR?" > > 3) "/Mission Accomplished/." Unoperative. And please avoid the > alternate punctuation: "Mission accomplished?" > > 4) "/Bringing peace, freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people/." To > better reflect our current goals, please substitute "Protecting the > American homeland from vicious Al Qaeda terrorists." > > 5) /Ahmad Chalabi/ is no longer "the legitimate voice of the Iraqi > people." Please update your records to cite U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi > in this role, and avoid quoting his recent speech on French radio > blaming the whole mess over there on "the Israeli policy of domination > and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians." > > 6) "/High moral ground/." We?ve lost it. Lose it from your vocabulary. > > 7) "/Connecting the dots/."/ /Inoperative. > > /8) /"/Shaking trees/." Archaic. Arcane. Deleted. > > 9) "/Former generals in Saddam?s vicious Baath ruling party/." > Post-Falluja, please refer to these gentlemen as "Dedicated civil > servants and members of the previous administration, who now have > reformed and joined the coalition." (Note: Please avoid using this in > any paragraph with the words "bribes," "pay-offs," "failed policy," > "questionable loyalty," "grasping at straws." Similarly: > > 10) "/De-Baathification./" Oops! Let?s try "re-Baathification." > > 11) "/Body armor/" and/or "/Bolt-on Humvee armor kits/." As both > remain in short supply, these will now describe Secretary Rumsfeld?s > suits (i.e.: "Nice bolt-on armor, Don. Wearing that while you read > Dowd this morning?"). > > 12) "/Liberators/." This remains the preferred terminology to describe > our presence in Iraq, as opposed to "bungling, clueless superpower." > > 13) "/Coalition of the willing/." Even post-Madrid, this verbiage > remains in effect. (Given Spain?s proximity to France, we were always > slightly suspect of Spaniards anyway.) No matter how tempting?or > truthful?please avoid all modifiers, such as "Coalition of the > not-so-willing-anymore," "The gang of 17," or "Our partners in crime." > > 14) "/Uprising/," "/Armed resistance/," "/Insurgent forces/," > "/Organized anti-American factions/." We no longer recognize or > condone the use of these terms. In all cases, please substitute > "Vicious Al Qaeda terrorists." Likewise: > > 15) "/Syrian mercenaries/," "/Iranian guerrillas/," "/Radical > Shiites/," "/Fundamentalist clerics/," "/Disgruntled Iraqi > shopkeepers/." For simplicity?s sake, these groups will now also be > classified under the general category of "Vicious Al Qaeda terrorists." > > 16) "/Weapons of mass destruction/." Alas, we?d like to find a better > phrase here; we haven?t as yet, but we remain hopeful. In the > meantime, we?re still searching. > > 17) "/American war criminals./" Please substitute "Overzealous patriots." > > 18) "/Independent contractors/" remains our preferred appellation. > "Mercenaries," "hired guns," "Halliburton employees" or "crazed good > ol? boys operating outside any known moral or legal authority" are not > acceptable synonyms. > > 19) "/Prisoners of war/." Better to say "Guests of interest." > > 20) "/War/ /Crimes/," "/Atrocities/," "/Human-rights/ /violations/," > "/Torture/," "/Softening up prisoners for interrogation/." The > preferred description is "intelligence-gathering activities." But if > pressed, use "Having a frank and honest chat with our ?guests of > interest.?" > > 21) "/A world of hurt/." Avoid. Please substitute "An unfortunate and > unforeseeable blip on the road to success." > > 22) "/Slam-dunk/." Deleted. > > 23) "/Chain of command/." Obsolete. > > 24) "/Swatting flies/." Inoperative. > > 25) "/Imminent threat/." Banished. > > 26) "/Boots on the ground/." Expunged. (Alas, it seems that certain > "independent contractors" mistook this to mean "boots on the > prisoner?s head.") > > 27) "/Quagmire/." Forbidden, in any link to Vietnam. > > 28) "/Quagmire/." Acceptable, when used in reference to a) John Kerry > trying to explain precisely what he did with his medals, and b) how he > earned them. Remember the Karl Rove mantra: The best defense is to be > really offensive. > > 29) "/Don?t dipstick me/." We like this rejoinder. Especially in > response to press inquires as to "how things are going" in Iraq. > > 30) /Presidential daily briefing./ The P.D.B. will henceforth be known > as "/USA Today/." If you get a chance, stop by to say hello to ace > journalist Jack Kelley, who?s been brought in to edit it. > > 31) "/Unknown unknowns/." Now that we know what said "unknown > unknowns" are (i.e., white trash gone wild in Abu Ghraib prison), this > phrase will be dropped from our lexicon. > > 32) "/It?s possible/." As per use by Donald Rumsfeld: "Not a chance." > > 33) /Enemies list/. Let?s make it clear that we have no "enemies > list." On the other hand, we do have lots of people we?re "not too > fond of." (P.S.: Please tell me that no one left the missing file with > Paul Krugman?s tax returns in a Georgetown Starbucks.) > > 35) /Green security zone./ New definition: American states where > G.W.B. can still raise money. > > 36) /Exit strategy/. Inoperative. Obsolete. Archaic. Irrelevant. > > 37) "/America is not what?s wrong with the world/." Please avoid using > this Rumsfeld-coined locution, as it will only beg some smartass > columnist with /The New York Observer/ to reply: > > He?s right. It?s the people /running/ America who are what?s wrong > with the world. > > You may reach Bruce Feirstein via email at: bfeirstein@observer.com > . > From gojomo at usa.net Fri May 14 01:44:24 2004 From: gojomo at usa.net (Gordon Mohr (personal)) Date: Fri May 14 01:44:17 2004 Subject: [FoRK] [WiredNews] Novel anti-HIV saluvirus synthesized Message-ID: <40A486E8.3000909@usa.net> Via Slashdot. For the archives. A sign of things to come. Now, nature already has its own anti-HIV saluvirus [*], but the creation of yet another rather cheaply in a lab, using techniques suggested by a computerized model, is impressive and -- as the article notes -- a bit scary. - Gordon [*] http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2004/03/more-on-anti-hiv-saluvirus.html # # Designer Virus Stalks HIV # # By Kristen Philipkoski # # *Story location:* http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,63441,00.html # # /02:00 AM May. 13, 2004 PT/ # # BERKELEY, California -- It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just # $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. # And that scares them. # # That's because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley # National Laboratory assistant professors created a # virus altered to latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. # They've tested the theory in a computer model and in cells in a dish. # The results have been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the # researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year. # # Arkin said this week at the International Biotech Summit # at the # University of California at Berkeley that it was # almost too easy for him and his colleagues (Schaffer and then-grad # student Leor Weinberger # ) to build the # anti-HIV virus. # # "If I can do it, anyone can do it," Arkin said. "That's going to be a # problem." # # Well, maybe not anyone. After all, Arkin # and Schaffer # are not your run-of-the-mill # lab jockeys. # # Still, bad guys can be brilliant, too, which is even more reason for the # good guys to understand new biotechnologies as thoroughly as possible. # # "The genie is out of the bottle, so we might as well study these things # in earnest," Arkin said in an interview. # # Plus, the potential good could outweigh the bad. By using a computer # model of what happens to the immune system when it's infected with HIV, # Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that # would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it # would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would # have developed the disease after a decade of latency. They also predict # HIV would not become resistant to the virus. # # The treatment is made of a gutted HIV virus. The harmful parts of the # virus are removed, and in their place the researchers have inserted a # DNA cargo that inhibits HIV's ability to kill immune cells. It latches # onto the natural HIV and spreads along with it, even from person to person. # # If this process sounds familiar, it's because it is essentially gene # therapy, albeit a transmissible gene therapy. But the term "gene # therapy" has fallen out of favor because of a handful of fatalities # in clinical # trials and, after nearly three decades of research, no gene therapy # method has been proven to work consistently. # # So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology # ." Despite appearances, it's not an # arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements # into machines to do their bidding. # # "An artificial virus is one such product, since it is designed and # constructed using molecular biology tools for a specific therapeutic # application," Schaffer said. "As another example, Jay Keasling # in our department engineers # bacteria to produce small-molecule pharmaceutical drugs." # # Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory # , MIT # and # other institutions have established departments and courses dedicated to # this manipulation of human molecules. # # "All the capabilities are found in nature, just not in the right order # to do what we want to do," Arkin said. "It's like changing the computer # language. (Cells) perform amazing engineering feats under the control of # complex cellular networks. We didn't design it, evolution did." # # Computer modeling is key to figuring out what bacteria or viruses might # do in a given situation. The computer model Arkin and Schaffer used # showed that their therapy won't likely eliminate all HIV cells in a # patient. But if the treatment inhibits HIV too much, the good virus # won't be able to propogate. # # "Maximal inhibition actually causes the therapy to extinguish itself," # Schaffer said in an e-mail. # # Without the computer model to guide them, the researchers may not have # detected such subtleties. However, other labs like Virxsys # (researchers there published work that gave # Arkin et al. a foundation for their own work) are further along in # developing a similar therapy (although the Berkeley researchers' method # is unique in its piggyback effect) without the benefit of a computer # model. Scientists there are already testing their treatment for safety # in humans, and hope to test for efficacy by the end of this year, said # Boro Dropulic, the company's founder and chief scientific officer. # # Arkin and Schaffer's computer model will also help them foresee # potential problems, which are plentiful when trying to treat a deadly # disease with a manufactured virus. This is a virus that can be spread by # having sex, just like HIV (although if it works, that could be a good # thing). It's also possible that HIV and the therapeutic virus could # mutate around each other and recombine to make an altogether new virus. # # "I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said. # # == # From sdw at lig.net Sat May 15 17:18:14 2004 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen D. Williams) Date: Sat May 15 17:17:44 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Grand Designs, How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire Message-ID: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> Is this interpretation of motivation credible? Probably or definitely true? This seems to add to the notion of the transfer of ideals relating to capitalism, market-drive, and small-"l" libertarianism to the liberals / Democrats. Perhaps a tame, beneficial multinational corporation is less attractive to neo-cons than an empire-building front. sdw http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html */ Grand Designs How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire By Corey Robin Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01/* In 2000 I spent the tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global imperial power. The end of communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire. "The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?" But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people." Since 9/11, I've had many opportunities to recall these conversations. Sept. 11, we have been told, has restored to America's woozy civic culture a sense of depth and seriousness, of things "larger than ourselves." It has forced Americans to look beyond their borders, to understand at last the dangers that confront a world power. It has given the United States a coherent national purpose and a focus for imperial rule. A country that for a time seemed unwilling to face up to its international responsibilities is now prepared once again to bear any burden, pay any price, for freedom. This changed attitude, the argument goes, is good for the world. It is also good, spiritually, for the United States. It reminds us that freedom is a fighting faith rather than a cushy perch. To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors -- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets. Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream." What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy, which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.' " But after that day in September, the domestic scene was transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus. Internationally, 9/11 forced the United States to reengage with the world, to assume the burden of empire without embarrassment or confusion. The mission of the United States was now clear to conservatives: to defend civilization and freedom against barbarism and terror. As Condoleezza Rice told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role. I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen." An America thought to be lulled by the charms of the market was now willing to sustain casualties on behalf of a U.S.-led global order. The end of the Cold War unleashed a wave of triumphalism, but it also provoked among American elites an anxious uncertainty about U.S. foreign policy. How should the United States now define its world role? When should it intervene in foreign conflicts? How big a military should it field? The United States seemed to be suffering from a surfeit of power, which made it difficult to formulate principles for its use. As Cheney acknowledged in February 1992, when he was serving as the first President Bush's secretary of defense, "We've gained so much strategic depth that the threats to our security, now relatively distant, are harder to define." When Clinton assumed office, he and his advisers concluded that the primary concerns of U.S. foreign policy were no longer military but economic. The great imperative was to organize a global economy where people could trade across borders. Clinton's vision reflected a conviction, common in the 1990s, that globalization had undermined the efficacy of military power and traditional empires. "Soft power" -- the cultural capital that made the United States so admired around the world -- was as important to national preeminence as military power. For some conservatives, Clinton's promotion of free trade and free markets was anathema. Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine -- all the comforts of bourgeois life -- they disdained Clinton for his pursuit of these very virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its sense of depth and political meaning. "In that age of peace and prosperity," Brooks would write, "the top sitcom was 'Seinfeld,' a show about nothing." Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtu, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. But there was another reason for the neocons' dissatisfaction. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and haphazard rather than proactive and forceful. Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past, this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement -- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have generated. As Rice told the New Yorker's Lemann, "Theoretically . . . when you have a great power like the United States it would not be long before you had other great powers rising to challenge it. And I think what you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to move to productive and cooperative relations with the United States, rather than to try to balance the United States." Thus, imperial America will no longer have to "wait on events while dangers gather," as Bush put it in his 2002 State of the Union address. It will now "shape the environment." The goal is one Cheney outlined in the early 1990s: that no other power ever arise to challenge American preeminence. For the Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to have its market without being deadened by it. Though it is still too soon to make any definitive assessment, mounting evidence suggests that the American empire is encountering obstacles at home and abroad. Violence against the United States might not prove to be a problem, at least not in the short term; after all, other empires have weathered it for a time. But the administration's vision is compelling only so long as it is successful. Because the neoconservatives' premise is that the United States can govern events -- and determine the outcome of history -- their vision cannot sustain the suggestion that events lie beyond their control. Ironically, insofar as the Bush administration avoids conflicts in which it might fail, say between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it forgoes the very logic of imperialism that it seeks to avow. As former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger has observed about the Middle East, Bush realizes "that simply to insert himself into this mess without any possibility of achieving any success is, in and of itself, dangerous because it would demonstrate that, in fact, we don't have any ability right now to control or affect events." This Catch-22 is no mere problem of logic or consistency; it betrays the essential fragility of the imperial position. On the domestic front, there is little evidence that the political and cultural renewal imagined by many commentators is taking place. Even the slightest imposition is rejected in Congress even in this time of war. In March 2002, for example, 62 senators, including 19 Democrats, rejected higher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, which would have reduced dependence upon Persian Gulf oil. Missouri Sen. Christopher Bond (R) declared, "I don't want to tell a mom in my home state that she should not get an SUV because Congress decided that would be a bad choice." The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?" The Bush administration initially looked for things for people to do -- not because there was much to be done, but because it feared that the ardor of ordinary Americans would grow cold. The best the administration came up with were Web sites and toll-free numbers that enterprising citizens could contact if they wanted to help the war effort. But the numbers were for groups such as Freedom Corps, enabling volunteers to become rural health workers, or Citizen Corps, which bolstered household emergency preparedness and expanded Neighborhood Watch groups. Now, with the war in Iraq going awry, the administration talks less about active involvement from ordinary Americans, happy to settle for their tacit support instead. We thus face a dangerous situation. On the one hand we have neoconservative elites whose vision of American power is recklessly utopian. On the other hand we have a domestic population that shows little interest in any far-flung empire. The political order projected by Bush and his supporters in the media and academia is just that: a projection, which can only last so long as the United States is able to put down, with minimum casualties, challenges to its power. We may well be entering one of those Machiavellian moments discussed by historian J. G. A. Pocock a quarter-century ago, when a republic opts for the frisson of empire, and is forced to confront the fragility and finitude of all political forms, including its own. /Author's e-mail:/ CRobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu /Corey Robin is an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York. This is a shorter version of an essay published in the Boston Review and in the forthcoming anthology "Cold War Triumphalism" (The New Press)./ sdw -- swilliams@hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@lig.net http://sdw.st Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/attachments/20040515/883ac447/attachment.htm From deafbox at hotmail.com Sat May 15 17:50:46 2004 From: deafbox at hotmail.com (Russell Turpin) Date: Sat May 15 17:50:28 2004 Subject: [FoRK] "Bush administration squelches Greenpeace?" Message-ID: The Bush administration is using an obscure 19th century statute against "sailor mongering," to prosecute Greenpeace, as an organization. This prosecution is politically important because it raises free speech issues. Don't know what "sailor mongering" is? Click the link. http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/05/13/9178663 _________________________________________________________________ Stop worrying about overloading your inbox - get MSN Hotmail Extra Storage! http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=hotmail/es2&ST=1/go/onm00200362ave/direct/01/ From tompoe at amihost.com Sat May 15 22:54:49 2004 From: tompoe at amihost.com (tom poe) Date: Sat May 15 22:48:21 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Grand Designs, How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire In-Reply-To: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> References: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> Message-ID: <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> This statement is much too much to swallow. Neocons don't have the capacity to contemplate more than money and markets. Otherwise, they find themselves in conflict with their beliefs. Just a thought. Tom "It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets." On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 17:18, Stephen D. Williams wrote: > Is this interpretation of motivation credible? Probably or definitely true? > > This seems to add to the notion of the transfer of ideals relating to > capitalism, market-drive, and small-"l" libertarianism to the liberals / > Democrats. Perhaps a tame, beneficial multinational corporation is less > attractive to neo-cons than an empire-building front. > > sdw > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html > */ > Grand Designs > How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire > > By Corey Robin > > Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01/* - - - snip - - - It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call > of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and > markets. - - - snip - - - From louie at ximian.com Sat May 15 22:56:59 2004 From: louie at ximian.com (Luis Villa) Date: Sat May 15 22:59:04 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Grand Designs, How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire In-Reply-To: <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> References: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> Message-ID: <1084687019.32168.18.camel@linux.site> On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 22:54 -0700, tom poe wrote: > This statement is much too much to swallow. Neocons don't have the > capacity to contemplate more than money and markets. Otherwise, they > find themselves in conflict with their beliefs. Just a thought. Hrm. While I'm not a big neocon fan, I think you're probably confusing neocon and traditional big-business conservatives. Neocons self-define not by love of business or markets, but by belief in aggressive unilateral military pursuit of all values they see as american, which include money and markets but also democracy, free speech, etc. How one defines democracy, free speech, etc., is of course a matter of some debate- but neocons would say they don't really care how you define them as long as you are willing to go to war to defend whatever your conception of them is. Good background: http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html Luis > "It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call > of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and > markets." > > On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 17:18, Stephen D. Williams wrote: > > Is this interpretation of motivation credible? Probably or definitely true? > > > > This seems to add to the notion of the transfer of ideals relating to > > capitalism, market-drive, and small-"l" libertarianism to the liberals / > > Democrats. Perhaps a tame, beneficial multinational corporation is less > > attractive to neo-cons than an empire-building front. > > > > sdw > > > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html > > */ > > Grand Designs > > How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire > > > > By Corey Robin > > > > Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01/* > - - - snip - - - > It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call > > of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and > > markets. > - - - snip - - - > > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From signa at birch.net Sun May 16 00:39:12 2004 From: signa at birch.net (Steve Nordquist) Date: Sun May 16 00:42:11 2004 Subject: [FoRK] US-Syndicated markets In-Reply-To: <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> References: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> Message-ID: I think this is the neocon notion; that once a product is created or almost customerized, one actually cross-posts it to all government channels until it reaches success or a suitable failure mode. This explains the popularity of the Bush plushie phone face with Jing antenna hanger among treasury agents. So it must be so. Just like the SilenX 14dB fans seem way louder without a regulator that would displace the floppy-bay SD-card reader. I'm looking for a third bay. [Tuba riff.] From tompoe at amihost.com Sun May 16 00:53:00 2004 From: tompoe at amihost.com (tom poe) Date: Sun May 16 00:46:28 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Grand Designs, How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire In-Reply-To: <1084687019.32168.18.camel@linux.site> References: <40A6B346.8000000@lig.net> <1084686897.28625.6.camel@aether.raven.cxm> <1084687019.32168.18.camel@linux.site> Message-ID: <1084693988.29163.19.camel@aether.raven.cxm> Hi, Luis: Good point. Not sure about quoting CSMonitor, though. I tend to attribute much of what many refer to as neoconservatism to a philosophical foundation based on economic theory originating with the Chicago School crowd: http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/chicago.htm The Chicago School "The "Chicago School" is perhaps one of the better known American "schools" of economics. In its strictest sense, the "Chicago School" refers to the approach of the members of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago over the past century. In a looser sense, the term "Chicago School" is associated with a particular brand of economics which adheres strictly to Neoclassical price theory in its economic analysis, "free market" libertarianism in much of its policy work and a methodology which is relatively averse to too much mathematical formalism and willing to forego careful general equilibrium reasoning in favor of more results-oriented partial equilibrium analysis. In recent years, the "Chicago School" has been associated with "economic imperialism", i.e. the application of economic reasoning to areas traditionally considered the prerogative of other fields such as political science, legal theory, history and sociology." A good example of this obsolete, yet persistent philosophy is found in their (neoconservatives) approach to intellectual property, copyright, and the Arts-related issues. Unable to accept the concept of Public Domain, these folks are determined to wipe it from the face of the earth, and, as you say, militarily destroy those who would oppose their "burning the books". Tom On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 22:56, Luis Villa wrote: > On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 22:54 -0700, tom poe wrote: > > This statement is much too much to swallow. Neocons don't have the > > capacity to contemplate more than money and markets. Otherwise, they > > find themselves in conflict with their beliefs. Just a thought. > > Hrm. While I'm not a big neocon fan, I think you're probably confusing > neocon and traditional big-business conservatives. Neocons self-define > not by love of business or markets, but by belief in aggressive > unilateral military pursuit of all values they see as american, which > include money and markets but also democracy, free speech, etc. How one > defines democracy, free speech, etc., is of course a matter of some > debate- but neocons would say they don't really care how you define them > as long as you are willing to go to war to defend whatever your > conception of them is. > > Good background: > http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html > > Luis > > > "It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call > > of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and > > markets." > > > > On Sat, 2004-05-15 at 17:18, Stephen D. Williams wrote: > > > Is this interpretation of motivation credible? Probably or definitely true? > > > > > > This seems to add to the notion of the transfer of ideals relating to > > > capitalism, market-drive, and small-"l" libertarianism to the liberals / > > > Democrats. Perhaps a tame, beneficial multinational corporation is less > > > attractive to neo-cons than an empire-building front. > > > > > > sdw > > > > > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html > > > */ > > > Grand Designs > > > How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire > > > > > > By Corey Robin > > > > > > Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01/* > > - - - snip - - - > > It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call > > > of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and > > > markets. > > - - - snip - - - > > > > _______________________________________________ > > FoRK mailing list > > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > > > > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork From sdw at lig.net Sun May 16 15:47:54 2004 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen D. Williams) Date: Sun May 16 15:47:38 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering. 14 used & new from $13.99 Available for in-store pickup now from: $19.80 Price may vary based on availability Enter your ZIP Code Have one to sell? Don't have one? We'll set one up for you. Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future Message-ID: <40A7EF9A.4070208@lig.net> From an article last year: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/archive/030512/20030512040259_brief.php To a book this year: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400053064/102-7790499-1429724?v=glance The interesting question is whether it is good or bad to have public school be soft. I think that most of us have seen the soft vs. hard divide. I don't necessarily agree that it is the fault of the school system. I'm not even sure that it is a problem to begin with. There was a study long ago comparing US schools to Japanese and other public school systems. The analysis was that Japanese (and other) school systems brought more students to a more complete and advanced level of education, but in the process stunted, eliminated, or otherwise inhibited those that had the ability and interest to excel and be very creative. By contrast, American schools (and universities overall) were less performant on average, but produced the outstanding stars. I think that it is odd that the author and others associate so closely the Left with the soft phase or group and the Right with the hard. Anyone who has raised enough teenagers is likely to understand that outside influences and lazy or otherwise inappropriate choices happen even with strong education of the merits of 'hard' success. Everyone has to decide whether to be soft, and live with a likelihood of less money and opportunities, or hard, and live with competition but higher likelihood of "success". I have heard the generalization that some young men tend to be Republican/Right/intolerant and as they age and gain experience tend to become more tolerant and liberal. I have observed this in at least some aspects. Everyone should understand these tradeoffs and choices and understand when they are making them. I get the impression that career counseling in US High School is generally minimal and useless. One of my children who was fairly career minded but completely undecided as to field had received almost no indication of important factors like number employed in fields, median and top salary, burnout rate, etc. It very well may be that by allowing more self-selection of the time and place of the hard vs. soft decisions, the US benefits overall. I can think of a couple dynamics that would enforce this: people develop at different rates, sometimes drastically. Anyone who is a late bloomer would be at a severe disadvantage in a highly competitive one-shot educational system. Conversely, early bloomers would risk boredom and would be stifled from natural growth. sdw * http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=1400053064 Hard America, Soft America* Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future *Written by* Michael Barone Current Affairs | Crown Forum | Hardcover | May 2004 | *$32.00* | 1-4000-5306-4 *ABOUT THIS BOOK* A peculiar feature of our country today, says Michael Barone, is that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds. Indeed, American students lag behind their peers in other nations, but America remains on the leading edge economically, scienti?cally, technologically, and militarily. The reason for this paradox, explains Barone in this brilliant essay, is that "from ages six to eighteen Americans live mostly in what I call Soft America--the parts of our country where there is little competition and accountability. But from ages eighteen to thirty Americans live mostly in Hard America--the parts of American life subject to competition and accountability." While Soft America coddles, Hard America plays for keeps. Educators, for example, protect children from the rigors of testing, ban dodgeball, and promote just about any student who shows up. But most adults quickly ?gure out that how they do depends on what they produce. Barone sweeps readers along, showing how we came to the current divide--for things weren't always this way. In fact, no part of our society is all Hard or all Soft, and the boundary between Hard America and Soft America often moves back and forth. Barone also shows where America is headed--or should be headed. We don't want to subject kindergartners to the rigors of the Marine Corps or leave old people uncared for. But Soft America lives off the productivity, creativity, and competence of Hard America, and we have the luxury of keeping part of our society Soft only if we keep most of it Hard. Hard America, Soft America reveals: . How the American situation is unique: In Europe, schooling is competitive and demanding, but adult life is Soft, with generous welfare bene?ts, short work hours, long vacations, and state pensions . How the American military has reclaimed the Hard goals and programs it abandoned in the Vietnam era . How Hardness drives America's economy--an economy that businesses and economists nearly destroyed in the 1970s by spurning competition . How America's schools have failed because they are bastions of Softness--but how they are ?nally showing signs of Hardening . The benefits of Softness: How government programs like Social Security were necessary in what was a harsh and unforgiving America . Hard America, Soft America is a stunningly original and provocative work of social commentary from one of this country's most respected political analysts. *AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY* MICHAEL BARONE is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report and a contributor to Fox News Channel. He is the principal coauthor of the biannual Almanac of American Politics and the author of two acclaimed works of political history, *Our Country *and *The New Americans*. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he lives in Washington, D.C. */From Publishers Weekly/* In his latest book, Barone, a writer for /U.S. News and World Report/ and a well-known political commentator, describes America as comprising two diametrically opposed characteristics: hard and soft. "Hard America" is characterized by competition and accountability, while "Soft America" attempts to protect its citizens through government regulation and other social safety nets. While Barone's book is not without its political overtones-he identifies Hard America with the political right and Soft America with the left-his book should not be seen as the latest installment in the conservative-liberal cultural wars. Rather, Barone provides a deeper look at the way in which ordinary people live and work and the meaning behind the decisions they make. His concrete historical examples highlight the advantages and disadvantages of Hard and Soft America, creating a compelling picture of two very different ways of looking at the world, without degenerating into mudslinging or name-calling,. Although Barone, a conservative, clearly favors Hard America, he appreciates the necessary difficulty that comes with balancing the two Americas. He concedes that a society without some softness would be a cruel one, but warns that "we have the luxury of keeping parts of our society Soft only if we keep enough of it Hard." Despite his conservatism, Barone (/The New Americans/) writes with moderation and insight. Even those who do not agree with his normative conclusions can enjoy his thought-provoking and perceptive analysis. Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. */From /**/Booklist /* Barone, senior writer with /U.S. News and World Report/, claims there are two Americas: one hard-edged and extremely competitive, the other soft and overprotective. Essentially, American youths age 6 to 18 are dominated by a "soft" culture, most notably in public schools, which emphasizes self-esteem and protects them from the harsh realities of adult life. Come adulthood, Americans are confronted with a "hard" culture that is characterized by cutthroat marketplace realities. Generally, the dichotomy exists between school and work and between the public and private sectors, but the boundaries between the cultures are not fixed. Barone traces the trend in American culture that has produced the dichotomy--the increased leisure and ease of a wealthier economy, government regulation, and social trends toward providing greater safety nets. Barone is never overtly critical of soft America, recognizing the need for protecting some people in society, but he clearly argues for a deeper awareness of the dichotomy, its implications for the future, and the need to maintain a balance between hard and soft America. /Vanessa Bush/ /Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/001591.html Look at the cool map halfway down: http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1132959/posts / sdw -- swilliams@hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@lig.net http://sdw.st Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/attachments/20040516/77ba4f55/attachment.htm From sdw at lig.net Sun May 16 15:49:32 2004 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen D. Williams) Date: Sun May 16 15:49:30 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future In-Reply-To: <40A7EF9A.4070208@lig.net> References: <40A7EF9A.4070208@lig.net> Message-ID: <40A7EFFC.1010708@lig.net> Corrected title.... How did that happen?? sdw Stephen D. Williams wrote: > >From an article last year: > http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/archive/030512/20030512040259_brief.php > To a book this year: > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400053064/102-7790499-1429724?v=glance > > The interesting question is whether it is good or bad to have public > school be soft. I think that most of us have seen the soft vs. hard > divide. I don't necessarily agree that it is the fault of the school > system. I'm not even sure that it is a problem to begin with. There > was a study long ago comparing US schools to Japanese and other public > school systems. The analysis was that Japanese (and other) school > systems brought more students to a more complete and advanced level of > education, but in the process stunted, eliminated, or otherwise > inhibited those that had the ability and interest to excel and be very > creative. By contrast, American schools (and universities overall) > were less performant on average, but produced the outstanding stars. > > I think that it is odd that the author and others associate so closely > the Left with the soft phase or group and the Right with the hard. > Anyone who has raised enough teenagers is likely to understand that > outside influences and lazy or otherwise inappropriate choices happen > even with strong education of the merits of 'hard' success. Everyone > has to decide whether to be soft, and live with a likelihood of less > money and opportunities, or hard, and live with competition but higher > likelihood of "success". I have heard the generalization that some > young men tend to be Republican/Right/intolerant and as they age and > gain experience tend to become more tolerant and liberal. I have > observed this in at least some aspects. > > Everyone should understand these tradeoffs and choices and understand > when they are making them. I get the impression that career > counseling in US High School is generally minimal and useless. One of > my children who was fairly career minded but completely undecided as > to field had received almost no indication of important factors like > number employed in fields, median and top salary, burnout rate, etc. > It very well may be that by allowing more self-selection of the time > and place of the hard vs. soft decisions, the US benefits overall. I > can think of a couple dynamics that would enforce this: people develop > at different rates, sometimes drastically. Anyone who is a late > bloomer would be at a severe disadvantage in a highly competitive > one-shot educational system. Conversely, early bloomers would risk > boredom and would be stifled from natural growth. > > sdw > * > http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=1400053064 > Hard America, Soft America* > Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future > *Written by* Michael Barone > > > Current Affairs | Crown Forum | Hardcover | May 2004 | *$32.00* | > 1-4000-5306-4 > > > *ABOUT THIS BOOK* > > A peculiar feature of our country today, says Michael Barone, is that > we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably > competent thirty-year-olds. Indeed, American students lag behind their > peers in other nations, but America remains on the leading edge > economically, scienti?cally, technologically, and militarily. > > The reason for this paradox, explains Barone in this brilliant essay, > is that "from ages six to eighteen Americans live mostly in what I > call Soft America--the parts of our country where there is little > competition and accountability. But from ages eighteen to thirty > Americans live mostly in Hard America--the parts of American life > subject to competition and accountability." While Soft America > coddles, Hard America plays for keeps. > > Educators, for example, protect children from the rigors of testing, > ban dodgeball, and promote just about any student who shows up. But > most adults quickly ?gure out that how they do depends on what they > produce. > > Barone sweeps readers along, showing how we came to the current > divide--for things weren't always this way. In fact, no part of our > society is all Hard or all Soft, and the boundary between Hard America > and Soft America often moves back and forth. Barone also shows where > America is headed--or should be headed. We don't want to subject > kindergartners to the rigors of the Marine Corps or leave old people > uncared for. But Soft America lives off the productivity, creativity, > and competence of Hard America, and we have the luxury of keeping part > of our society Soft only if we keep most of it Hard. > > Hard America, Soft America reveals: > . How the American situation is unique: In Europe, schooling is > competitive and demanding, but adult life is Soft, with generous > welfare bene?ts, short work hours, long vacations, and state pensions > . How the American military has reclaimed the Hard goals and programs > it abandoned in the Vietnam era > . How Hardness drives America's economy--an economy that businesses > and economists nearly destroyed in the 1970s by spurning competition > . How America's schools have failed because they are bastions of > Softness--but how they are ?nally showing signs of Hardening > . The benefits of Softness: How government programs like Social > Security were necessary in what was a harsh and unforgiving America > . Hard America, Soft America is a stunningly original and provocative > work of social commentary from one of this country's most respected > political analysts. > > *AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY* > > MICHAEL BARONE is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report and a > contributor to Fox News Channel. He is the principal coauthor of the > biannual Almanac of American Politics and the author of two acclaimed > works of political history, *Our Country *and *The New Americans*. A > graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he lives in > Washington, D.C. > */From Publishers Weekly/* > In his latest book, Barone, a writer for /U.S. News and World Report/ > and a well-known political commentator, describes America as > comprising two diametrically opposed characteristics: hard and soft. > "Hard America" is characterized by competition and accountability, > while "Soft America" attempts to protect its citizens through > government regulation and other social safety nets. While Barone's > book is not without its political overtones-he identifies Hard America > with the political right and Soft America with the left-his book > should not be seen as the latest installment in the > conservative-liberal cultural wars. Rather, Barone provides a deeper > look at the way in which ordinary people live and work and the meaning > behind the decisions they make. His concrete historical examples > highlight the advantages and disadvantages of Hard and Soft America, > creating a compelling picture of two very different ways of looking at > the world, without degenerating into mudslinging or name-calling,. > Although Barone, a conservative, clearly favors Hard America, he > appreciates the necessary difficulty that comes with balancing the two > Americas. He concedes that a society without some softness would be a > cruel one, but warns that "we have the luxury of keeping parts of our > society Soft only if we keep enough of it Hard." Despite his > conservatism, Barone (/The New Americans/) writes with moderation and > insight. Even those who do not agree with his normative conclusions > can enjoy his thought-provoking and perceptive analysis. > Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier > Inc. All rights reserved. > */From /**/Booklist > /* > Barone, senior writer with /U.S. News and World Report/, claims there > are two Americas: one hard-edged and extremely competitive, the other > soft and overprotective. Essentially, American youths age 6 to 18 are > dominated by a "soft" culture, most notably in public schools, which > emphasizes self-esteem and protects them from the harsh realities of > adult life. Come adulthood, Americans are confronted with a "hard" > culture that is characterized by cutthroat marketplace realities. > Generally, the dichotomy exists between school and work and between > the public and private sectors, but the boundaries between the > cultures are not fixed. Barone traces the trend in American culture > that has produced the dichotomy--the increased leisure and ease of a > wealthier economy, government regulation, and social trends toward > providing greater safety nets. Barone is never overtly critical of > soft America, recognizing the need for protecting some people in > society, but he clearly argues for a deeper awareness of the > dichotomy, its implications for the future, and the need to maintain a > balance between hard and soft America. /Vanessa Bush/ > /Copyright ? American Library Association. All rights reserved > > http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/001591.html > Look at the cool map halfway down: > http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1132959/posts > / > sdw > >-- >swilliams@hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@lig.net http://sdw.st >Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw > > -- swilliams@hpti.com http://www.hpti.com Per: sdw@lig.net http://sdw.st Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/attachments/20040516/4441f7e6/attachment.html From joe at barrera.org Sun May 16 18:17:25 2004 From: joe at barrera.org (Joseph S. Barrera III) Date: Sun May 16 18:17:23 2004 Subject: [FoRK] Has anyone generated an XML representation of the Windows Registry? Message-ID: <40A812A5.2020308@barrera.org> If so, I'd be interested in comparing notes on how to handle multi-strings, how to represent non-printing characters in string values, etc. I'm sure this wheel has been invented many times... - Joe -- How bright are the fires of thought In a chain of command How bright is the medical torch When it is put in our hand