born live love die

Shimmer was one of my favorite songs. When this song came out, I projected it onto my life and it is what I believed in. But then the divorce happened and I couldn’t listen to this song. It hurt to remember my aborted hopes and dreams after the divorce.

I found this song again today in my library. (The sound on this clip is a little messed up toward the end of the song; I’ll try to find a better link.)

They say that you’re supposed to ‘own’ your feelings. I think you also need to own your dreams, and I do.

Here’s the lyric:

sharing with us what he knows
shining eyes are big and blue
and all around him water flows
this world to him is new
this world to him is new
to touch a face
to kiss a smile
new eyes see no race
the essence of a child
the essence
he’s born to shimmer, he’s born to shine
he’s born to radiate
he’s born to live, he’s born to love
but we’ll teach him how to hate
true love it is a rock
smoothed over by a stream
no ticking of a clock
truly measures what that means
truly measures what that means
and this thing they call our time
heard a brilliant woman say
she said you know it’s crazy
how I want to try to capture mine
I think I love this woman’s way
I think I love this woman’s
way she shimmers, the way she shines
the way she radiates
the way she lives, the way she loves
the way she never hates
sometimes I think of all of this that surrounds me
I know it all as being mine
but she kisses me and wraps herself around me
she gives me love, she gives me time
and I feel fine
I feel fine
but time I cannot change
so here’s to looking back
you know I drink a whole bottle of my pride
and I toast to change
to keep these demons off my back
just get these demons off my back
’cause I want to shimmer, I want to shine
I want to radiate
I want to live, I want to love
I want to try to learn not to hate
try not to hate
we’re born to shimmer, we’re born to shine
we’re born to radiate
we’re born to live, we’re born to love
we’re born to never hate

Autism is scary in large part because we don’t understand it.  As a parent, it’s the kind of thing that we all fear.  This is a great article about new ideas in autism study.  It focuses on Amanda Baggs.

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn’t be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different  an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism  the disease model has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach  call it the difference model  is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. “If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago,” says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, “I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong.”

There’s some great links on that page, including YouTube stuff.  Check it out.

I would like to say a few words in praise of the neoconservatives.  This is the group of people who came from a progressive / liberal background and embraced conservative international goals of stability in the rest of the world.  They were looking at the world as a thing that could be managed, not by Stalinist five year plans, but by appeal to a higher political dream.

Let’s review the world as seen by the neocons:

• the world population is booming, projected to outstrip resources if not checked;
• the key to reining in world population is development, as industrial economies have fewer children;
• all of the world needs energy to develop industrial economies;
• unguided industrial development leads to pollution and environmental damage;
• the native populations of countries that serve to propagate democracy are declining;

Therefore, the key to management is to manage the world’s energy supply and bring developing countries under the umbrella of representative democracy in a few generations, much in the same way that Rome brought conquered lands into Roman citizenship in a couple of generations after conquest.

If this isn’t how they viewed the world, then they are just a bunch of narcissistic, arrogant bastards who should be forced to walk point in Ramadi.

Michael Scheuer is a retired CIA employee and has written a great book about Osama bin Laden, “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq“.  He was interviewed in Newsweek.

NEWSWEEK: Why did you write this new book?
Michael Scheuer: Because I think our country is in trouble. The enemy we are facing, Osama bin Laden and the movement he heads, is much more dangerous than anyone gives him credit for. Much smarter, much more talented, and now increasingly recruiting a new generation that’s better educated, not just in school terms but in operational and especially technological ways. We defeated the swashbucklers. The Errol Flynns of the jihad are gone; they’re about to go on trial in Guantánamo. Now we have the gray-suited fellows who are quiet, don’t draw attention to themselves, but are tremendously savvy.

Have we underestimated Osama bin Laden?
I think there is tremendous racism in our response to bin Laden. He wears a beard and a robe and lives in a cave. (I doubt that’s true, by the way. It’s the made-for-Hollywood version.) So we dismiss him. But it is just extraordinary to treat your enemy as an idiot, especially when you are losing two wars to him, and when our director of national intelligence is warning that Al Qaeda is rebuilt, refitted and stronger than ever.

We’ve been fighting bin Laden for longer than we fought World War II. Why haven’t we won?
Because our political elite do not want to level with the American people about the real reasons why bin Laden hates and opposes us. Our leaders say he and his followers hate us because of who we are, because we have early primaries in Iowa every four years and allow women in the workplace. That’s nonsense. I don’t think he would have those things in his country. But that’s not why he opposes us. I read bin Laden’s writings and I take him at his word. He and his followers hate us because of specific aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Bin Laden lays them out for anyone to read. Six elements: our unqualified support for Israel; our presence on the Arabian peninsula, which is land they deem holy; our military presence in other Islamic countries; our support of foreign states that oppress Muslims, especially Russia, China and India; our long-term policy of keeping oil prices artificially low to the benefit of Western consumers but the detriment of the Arab people; and our support for Arab tyrannies who will do that.

You say bin Laden has laid all this out. But one doesn’t hear discussion of this in the current presidential campaign.
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just too inconvenient for our political class. It’s much easier to tell Americans that crazy people are after you and tomorrow morning your daughter is going to have to go to school in a burqa. And we have so few people, even now, with real expertise in the Arab world. In the year 9/11 happened, there were three Ph.D.s awarded that bore on Arab affairs. Three, in the whole country. One was in Islamic architecture. One was in Islamic poetry. The third was in Islamic history. And things haven’t gotten a lot better since. We are still not building the intellectual capital we need. In the cold war did we say, “We really don’t need to understand what Marx or Lenin or Stalin wrote because they are just gangsters, not smart men, just nihilists, and we can beat them because we are the good guys”? No. We built, with government money, institutions to study the Soviet Union. But almost nothing comparable is being done now. The effort is tiny. And more often than not you find that the outfits we do have are funded by Saudi money. Which means there are real constraints on what they can say. So I read in the National Review or the Weekly Standard about Osama bin Laden being a gangster or an idiot or both. But I have to tell you there is a touch of genius here. To pick the six elements of U.S. foreign policy that are most entwined with our domestic politics is a great piece of analysis. Because it makes frank debate so tough.

And if we don’t have that debate?
Look, we have a political class in this country that lives and dies by polls. They don’t go to the john without looking the polls. Well, polls tell us that in the Muslim world somewhere around 75 to 80 percent agree with Osama bin Laden that American foreign policy is meant to undermine or destroy Islam. Now, nowhere near that percentage is going to pick up an AK-47. But how many does it take to cause you a problem? Osama bin Laden is, in some sense, talking about a war of liberation. And it is true that for 50 years we have supported tyrannies that have oppressed Muslims, tyrannies with strong fascist elements. We hear a lot of talk about “Islamofascists.” Yes, there’s a lot of them out there. And they’re all on our side. They’re in Riyadh, Amman, Kuwait City, Cairo. Even Bernard Lewis, the patron saint of our neocons, has written that the governments that rule Muslims are basically [practicing] European fascism adapted to the sand … We can continue the current course of American foreign policy, but we need to realize that over time this may involve us in sending troops to fight on every continent as new generations of young Muslims sign up under the Al Qaeda banner. The candidates in the presidential campaign are talking about reviving jobs and wages and moving toward universal health care. None of that is going to be possible if this country is involved in some generation-long struggle with millions of Muslims. My own view is that it’s more sensible to confront the fact that our foreign policies toward the Arab world [add up to] the one indispensable ally Osama bin Laden has.

We need to stop using labels like facist and start getting to the nub of it, as a certain politician from Illinois used to say.

Did the caucus thing today. No, not the Russian one. The Democratic one. Met in an elementary school. 70 people. Up from 12 in 2004. At this rate, we should have the entire population of the world in 2052. I’ll be dead then, but who’s counting?

We split 4 : 1 for Barack Obama. During our caucusing period, one woman, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said, “Why not a woman? We got into this mess because of men.” I have condensed her speech. She was accompanied by her son, a Private First Class in the 101st Airborne, who stood about 6′6″, so nobody was going to diss her.

But a man stood up and said that if we were going to choose someone because of gender or race, he was going home. He identified himself as a Palestinian who had lived here for 20 years. That kind of put “Paid” on the whole gender and race talk.

A Republican, or Obama Republican, as he identified himself, said that he was for Obama because he was tired of the way things were run. He said that we needed to restore fiscal sanity to the system and that the only way he could see that happening is if there was someone who was inspiring to lead the country. He said that if the race was between Clinton and McCain, McCain would win, and that would be a mistake.

In the end, nobody switched votes and we selected four Obama delegates to the legislative district caucus. I nominated the Palestinian guy. I figured he should get his money’s worth of this democracy thing. Most of the people were ditching the joint as quickly as they could; this is the normal person’s reaction to democracy: “I want things to work around here, you folks take care of it.” I said that I could go to the next level and boom, I was in there.

Around King County, Barack Obama is running over 60% in the caucus voting. Let’s see what the rest of the state does.

Lottolab.org is a pretty fun site. R. Beau Lotto is a researcher at the University College London and has created some interesting illusions, among other things. The illusions can be found via a link on the front page.

See the website for the version that works.

Again, the feckless Bush-bots are engaged in bouts of head scratching, tail wagging, and probably also, ass sniffing.

Lingering anger in Europe over the U.S. invasion of Iraq explains why some allies are reluctant to heed U.S. calls for more combat troops in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday. It was his first public acknowledgment of such a link to the Iraq war.

As we used to say when I was a soldier: no shit, Sherlock.

I don’t know who will win the Presidential sweepstakes this November, but I hope that it is either a person who understands computing technology, or someone who has a batman who does.

But I’m not holding out hope.

I was having a beer with a good friend, someone whom I greatly respect with regard to computing insights. He was talking about the ARM11 core and the fact that it had a vectorized floating point unit. We had been talking about the awesome computing power available in the Cell microprocessor from IBM/Sony/Toshiba and he offered the ARM11 as counterpoint and then said that it had the same processing power as a Cray XMP.

The ARM11 processing core will be used in cellphones. The Cray XMP was the state of the supercomputer art in 1982 and was used to design nuclear weapons. The measure of floating point performance is the FLOP, or floating point operations per second. The Cray XMP was rated at 400 megaflops for a two processor machine. The ARM11 has a rating of 4.2 peak gigaflops, an order of magnitude better than the Cray. The peak rating of the ARM11 core would be hard to hit, but it could certainly hit 400 sustained MFLOPS.

Our conversation about the Cell microprocessor was really more about the Sony PlayStation 3 and using some PS3s to make a supercomputer cluster. The Cell processor in the PS3 has a rating of around 100 sustained GFLOPS, so a cluster of four PS3s would deliver three orders of magnitude more processing power than a CRAY XMP. The PS3 sells for $400, with three Blu-Ray movies.

As a measure of the power of the PS3, researchers at Stanford University have ported their Folding@Home project to the PS3, and spare CPU cycles are being used to work on protein folding problems. This distributed network is now recognized as the most powerful computing network in the world.

Here is the issue: as my esteemed friend, who is ABD’d in nuclear physics, pointed out, it is a rather trivial task for people to go back to first principles and model nuclear reactions on the abundantly cheap computing hardware now available. Solving the differential equations about placement of explosives required to achieve fission is eminently achievable. Solving the mechanical engineering problem of refining fissionable materials is less easily done. But if the goal is not to achieve a big explosion but to just spray highly-toxic, long half-life fission byproducts in a major metropolitan center, that is not that hard to do.

Which brings us back to the Bush Administration. The people at the top don’t really understand or care about the technology required to be a threat. Before 9/11, the Administration was moving to listen in to all traffic flowing between to off-shore points. The focus of this Administration has been people, not technology. They started a war with Iraq that was based on personalities (”this is the guy who tried to kill my dad“) and were willing to sacrifice intelligence assets to cover up their lies.

We should recognize that the ability to design nuclear weapons will be in the public domain in the very near future. The spread of cheap computing assets will make that happen. The bulwark against the spread of real nuclear weapons has two parts: 1) interdiction of fissile material trade; 2) helping to build countries/economies/systems where the possession of nuclear weapons is not an asset. Our intelligence services are working on the first one. The flap of that tent was lifted during the Plame affair.

The second part is harder and is akin to that joke test question: define the universe and give two examples. The causes and effects of the things that drive countries toward nuclear proliferation are like a mesh where there is no clear beginning or end. But the sure lesson that has been learned is that if a country has nuclear weapons, they won’t get invaded by the US.

This is the wrong lesson to learn.

I saw this film at Sundance in 2003.  It was gut wrenching.  It has been posted to YouTube in two parts.

What do you do when you are rich and you think that because you are rich you are also smart?  You start to endow things with your largesse and sometimes, your large ass.  If you have a political bent that you are unwilling to test in the market of free ideas, you find other people who are good with words to do the talking for you.

This is the state of American Conservatism, where rich fat cats want to give every crackpot idea they have ever had validity via scholarship.  In this vein, Johah Goldberg at the National Review has written a book called “Liberal Fascism”.  In it, he tries to show that Liberals, not Conservatives, are the rightful heirs to the Fascist mantle.

The web is full of reviews chanting Goldberg’s praise.  Two things to note:

1. the book doesn’t really go into deal with Franco in Spain, a clear Fascist who became an ally of the US after WWII;
2. it was the American Left that rallied to support the anti-Fascist forces in Spain, not the American Right.

The only immortality is in the written word.  Thus, “Protocols of Zion” will live forever along with “Mein Kampf”.  Fifty years from now, scholars will be quoting this book and give it some shred of credibility.  Or maybe in 150 years.

And the lard asses that fund the National Review will be dead.

Hillary is tap-dancing around her vote to allow the military to be used in Iraq. That resolution, force-marched through Congress in October, 2002, just before the mid-term vote, is the law that Bush has used to do what ever he wants in the Middle East. The Bush Administration was trying to spread the meme last year that the resolution would also support invading Iran.

There is a good reason to have voted for intervention in 2002. If the intelligence was correct that Saddam was actively pursuing nuclear weapons, the President needs to have the authority to act without declaring war. That is the job of the President. But this presupposes a President and Administration that are not so mendacious that they would drive us into a war for no real reason.

The main problem with the resolution is that there are no limits in it. There are no time limits and there are no procedural limits. There should have been a time limit, say one year, with which to ascertain that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons. There should have been procedural limits forcing the President to return to Congress to either declare war, withdraw from Iraq, or get the consent of Congress for further actions.
Hillary has been saying that given the intelligence she was given, that was the correct vote. She is splitting hairs. What she can’t say is this:

Bush lied.

She can’t say that because it will bring back the lies of her husband. So, she is moon-walking her ass off, hoping that people will get the point that Bush lied without it reflecting on Bill.

Good luck with that. But the first time the word ‘lie’ passes her lips, the airwaves are going to be filled with clips of Bill doing just that in a rather bald-faced way.