The Nobel speech

I'm trying not to be a total reactionary, but I'm losing.
We're hearing from every corner about the President's "realism," and I get where that's coming from.
Still, I could have done without the man invoking Gandhi and Dr. King in his speech.
To do so implies there's some parallel universe where principles of non-violence may be given their due, but not in the "real" world occupied by Mr. Obama and the rest of us.

That's just sloppy self-service.
Gandhi and King both brought down the most powerful political and economic interests of their respective cultures without once taking up the sword. That's sort of the point to the whole thing: those with insufficient firepower to kill their way to a decent position in the world still have perfectly functional tools to achieve social goals.

It's not a fuzzy choice. You either believe people's minds are changed through violence or you don't. I don't see any middle ground there, yet I'm asked to believe it's a wiser man than I who can successfully embrace war to reach peaceful goals. Those who do believe in war always invoke Hitler and WWII as examples of necessary force against absolute evil. That's a pat argument, and difficult to dispute because it's true that absolute evil requires special treatment when it slips out of its customary place as a rhetorical device.

I don't think we face any unstoppable, absolute evil in the world at this time. I think it's highly unusual that we ever do. Absolute evil is about as common as absolute good. Still, it's undeniably convenient to compare anyone at cross purposes with one's agenda to Hitler, and if you buy that kind of argument, then war is inevitably going to be your answer. That's what Mr. Obama has chosen to do with our foreign policy, and I appreciate the delicacy of his position. Perhaps he has no alternatives available to him.
I have no idea what he has to do to remain alive and in power, but I do understand he's an intelligent and thoughtful man trapped in the worst job on the planet.

In the end, I don't believe he believes what he said in Oslo.

Also, before you get the impression I'm fond of Islamic fundamentalism, let me hasten to say that's not the case. I don't cast my lot with any religious fundamentalists, or with authoritarians of any stripe. Thirty years ago I thought we needed to address our problems with the Arab world in a more realistic manner, and saw this same "Islamic" agenda as the most insidious ideology we'd have to contend with going into the future.

Unfortunately, we haven't found a way to make any sensible response to that challenge, and for so long as it's convenient to have a resident devil, I'm pretty sure we won't.
From the '50s onward, our espionage community has been pretty active in creating and protecting the very people we're told are the greatest threats to our survival. Without "godless Communism" to kick around, "Islamic fundamentalism" is pretty handy, and, like the nonsense economic theory that preceded it as our bete noir, it's chances of succeeding are severely limited by the self-destructive tendencies inherent in the philosophy.

Breath-taking stupidity

As a casual follower of Bob Dobbs's First Church of the Sub-genius, I knew twenty years ago that the future would be hypoxic, but I never seriously considered the possibility I'd be living in that future. Maybe I better get back to gargling with hydrogen peroxide every morning, and possibly taking a swig now and again like Ivan Stang and his hardy band.

It's difficult to access original research online due to pass-worded front doors to a lot of the material, but it's not that hard to find intelligent discussion of the role CO2 is playing in the air we breathe. It's a fact that oxygen levels are falling as carbon dioxide levels rise around the globe, but the lack of hard data about the composition of the atmosphere prior to the current era makes it difficult to prove just how much of an effect that decline is having on people, or how much total loss we've experienced since the Industrial Revolution began. If you follow the link, you'll see that a reasonable deduction can be inferred from the data we have, and it's not a happy deduction.

Human physiology doesn't work well when O2 levels fall below 20% of the available air, and we've already gone slightly below that level. As CO2 levels rise, we'll see an increasingly diminishing amount of oxygen, due to the fact that plants and the ocean already appear to be saturated, and they are the CO2 sinks nature has always used to maintain balance in the air.
Unless something is done, and done soon, we may suffocate ourselves.

The cognitive effects of hypoxia can be overcome by will and training up to a point, but there is no way to overcome the somatic effects. These include possible abnormalities in organ development when young animals are reared with a chronic oxygen deficiency. More immediate are the lethargy, fatigue, cardiac and pulmonary edema, difficulty in breathing, nausea and poor judgment associated with the sort of hypoxia seen in those who make rapid changes in altitude. You can experience all these things on a temporary basis if you make a trip to the Himalayas, or any other place where you go over 12K feet above sea level. I've observed an otherwise healthy person become totally dysfunctional at 9K feet. It varies according to the individual.

What's most disturbing about the long-term effects of sub-acute oxygen deprivation is that we really don't know whether we'll be able to recognize meta-trends before it's too late. We see just how difficult it is to discuss remediation of environmental inputs vis-a-vis overall climate when we consider the fact that 50 years of concerted study by thousands of scientists means nothing to the average man. If that average man also suffers from obesity and hypoxia, the chances of him coming to logical conclusions and acting out of survival interest can be dismissed as too small to deserve consideration.

The narrative

I see I'm not the only one struck by the possible foreshadowing in the White House gate crasher story.

NSA and Windows OS

Now that the cat's out of the bag about the collaboration between Microsoft and the National Security Agency in writing code for both Windows Vista and Windows 7, a couple of thoughts occur.

First, I think we can rest assured that when the PR people tell us it's in our own best interests to have computers that work well with government online services, we should run like hell in the opposite direction. I've been listening to true geeks and wireheads talk about this sort of thing for years, never dreaming their paranoiac fantasies weren't fantasies at all.

Second, I suspect we may owe an apology to those who raised such a fuss about the Cash for Clunkers dealer website gateway. If you recall, the front page required dealers to sign off on a waiver giving the federal government control over their computers before they could do business. Because the language was never public, and was taken down very quickly, I assumed it was a practical joke and dismissed the doom-sayers out of hand.
Maybe not.
It's entirely possible someone over-thought the legal issues involved, and made public a pre-existing capability that we were never intended to know about.
What better way to track financial matters than to have a permanent back door built into every computer using a Microsoft operating system?
We don't know that's what has been done, but if they didn't do it I can't imagine why not.
Any technology that's availble for use will be used.
Law of the jungle.

The neverending war

Yada yada.

No way out.

Taipei

I bought my tickets to Thailand months ago, partly to save money and partly as a way of insuring I couldn't back out.
Today I checked my itinerary for the latest word, and discovered my two hour layover in Taipei had been expanded to a 24-hour full stop.
Old habits of thought are hard to change. My first reaction was outrage, and I fired off a terse email to the booking agents.
They told me to contact China Airlines, because it was they who had cancelled the flight.
All in a huff, I told a couple of friends about the situation, and they had responses that surprised me. Both looked a bit wistful and remarked on the great gift of an extra country I'd been given.
The first emphasized the adventure, and the second asked me a question that changed the tide.
"Are you in a hurry?," he asked.

No. I guess not. I need to work on that.

Global warming

I know you think there may be a cosmic answer to the questions about why our climate is warming, and I don't deny the fact that the Earth varies in distance and inclination from the Sun. That's all very well-established in the literature.

It's also a fact that we've known about the potential effects of CO2 sequestration in the environment for nearly 150 years.

Who says both things can't be true at once?

Does that make you feel more secure?