Eliminating the Impossible

The lead-up to the tragic knife attack in Tokyo will seem very familiar to Americans. So will the government's response, in some ways (though, I hasten to add, not in others).

Government officials scrambled to respond to Sunday's attack. In an emergency meeting, the ruling coalition considered limiting access to knives like the one used in the stabbing, which had a five-inch blade.

"Obviously, the suspect possessed the knife without a legitimate reason," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said. "I think we have to seriously consider what we can do to step up the restrictions."

Of course, someone might buy a knife for a legitimate reason before deciding to kill people with it. And in this case, the knife seems to have been something of an afterthought, since the murderer began his attack by driving a rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians. It's also fair to say that large knives (and axes, and hatchets, and meat cleavers) will continue to be widely available to any murderer who wants them, government rulings notwithstanding. Indeed, the chances are pretty good that the next person who's destined to go on a knife-wielding rampage already owns a large knife, and has for years.

But let's put all that aside, and reflect for a moment on what a knife actually is: generally speaking, it's a piece of sharpened metal attached to, or equipped with, a handle. How on earth are you going to "step up the restrictions" on a low-tech object that people have been making by hand since the Bronze Age?

It's likely that the goal here is simply to make rattled citizens feel better, by giving them the impression that the People in Charge are seeing to things. But many of us, far from being comforted by gestures like these, are more alarmed by them. How comforting is it to live under a government that not only finds it plausible to limit access to knives, but also believes that successful restrictions would somehow thwart bloodthirsty maniacs, instead of obliging them to stroll down to the hardware store and buy an axe or a chainsaw? More to the point, how comforting is it to live under a government that's cynical enough -- or experienced enough -- to think that people will actually be soothed by talk like this?

I understand that this sort of spectacular freelance violence, in particular, constitutes a challenge that has to be formally addressed by the authorities, and that the Japanese government deserves credit for not pointing out how much better the massacre would've turned out if everyone in the vicinity had been armed with a five-inch blade. Secretary Machimura's quote is interesting mainly as an example of what constitutes an official "solution" in a given society. I don't know much about Japan, but I know that like any other country it has its own pathologies. And I suspect that this eagerness to discuss restricting the availability of knives is based on a reluctance to discuss something a bit more fundamental. When solutions are being debated by the powers that be, it's often what doesn't seem possible that's really worthy of attention.

Which reminds me, in an odd way, of what Sherlock Holmes used to say: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

(Photo: "Canaanite sword with ebony and ivory inlaid hilt (top: KW 275, length: 45.4 cm), Canaanite dagger (middle: KW 296, preserved length: 33.5 cm), and a Mycenaean sword (bottom: KW 301, preserved length:45.5 cm)." Via the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.)

Foreign Threats

Wired reports on the possibility that McCain would continue Bush's domestic wiretapping operations, despite prior straight talk to the contrary. Here's McCain spokesman Doug Holtz-Eakin:

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. [...]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

Holtz-Eakin, by the way, was previously GWB's chief economic adviser. And his use of the term "foreign threats" is almost as ideologically telling as his reference to "the ACLU and the trial lawyers" and his laborious demonstration that he knows the precise date of 9/11. Perhaps there really is something to all this talk of a third Bush term.

Dave Neiwert recently posted an entire chapter of his essential book In God's Country. It deals with the Phineas Priesthood, a violent Christian Identity movement that typifies the 4GW concept of leaderless resistance, and whose motives and methods are not entirely unlike those of Al-Qaeda. (Indeed, the movement's leading theorist claims that "As the Kamikazee is to the Japanese/As the Shiite is to Islam/As the Zionist is to the Jew/So the Phineas Priest is to Christendom.")

What's striking about Neiwert's account of the Phineas Priesthood is the claim that its inter-cell communication is not about violence, but through violence:

The crimes themselves become a way of communicating, especially among the believers dedicated to taking action.

“The real twist to leaderless resistance is that there doesn't have to be a coherent network for the action cells,” observes researcher Paul deArmond of Bellingham’s Public Good Research. “The use of the term `phantom cell’ is very revealing, since one of the premises of leaderless resistance is the creation of a `virtual’ network of terrorists who communicate with each other by their actions and the reports of those actions through the media.

After a certain amount of this hieroglyphic carnage, phantom cells (and governments, for that matter) can enjoy the benefits of phantom violence. As Osama bin Laden has reportedly noted, it's convenient to be able to strike against the enemy with nothing more tangible or expensive than rumors. I don't think I have to spell out how easily a warrantless wiretapping system could be exploited to precisely this end; what may be less obvious is the remote possibility that phantom threats are something this system is intended to generate (cf. my idle speculation on torture).

At any rate, Neiwert's post describes how a number of Phineas Priests ended up in jail, and wonder of wonders, it doesn't seem to have involved the wholesale extralegal acquisition of millions of American citizens' private phone conversations. To paraphrase something I said earlier about torture, if the United States were to repudiate warrantless wiretapping, and to punish the transient officeholders who authorized it, it would be a more impressive blow against terrorist ideology than BushCo has attempted, let alone accomplished.

In the meantime, watch out for photographers.

(Illustration: "Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven In Abortion-Clinic Attack," from The Onion, Nov. 25, 1998).

Food Deserts and Fortifications

A paper in The International Journal of Health Geographics discusses the use of GIS to track the evolution of urban "food deserts":

The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.

The problem of spatial inequalities isn't confined to southern Ontario, needless to say. Cervantes goes so far as to suggest that the current food shortage deserves some of the attention that's currently being given to lapel pins and bowling scores:

This is not a temporary problem. It's a long-term, secular (as the economists say) trend. The planet is running out of stuff -- water, land, topsoil, petroleum, atmosphere.

In America, at least, higher food prices may have some connection with the crackdown on immigrant workers, as well as hard-right hysteria over the AgJOBS Act. Still, this is the sort of situation that can trigger mass migration and civil unrest, making border security -- regional, national and local -- more important than ever.

The $20 million prototype for the virtual fence near Tucson may've been scrapped -- along with the law it was supposed to protect and represent -- but the outlook for solid walls and barriers is very promising indeed, especially when it comes to protecting microborders. Whether you're planning "a gated community or an insurgent holding pen," or some convenient amalgam of the two, blast walls are de rigeur in the modern City of Refuge (which will ideally protect us not only from being punished for unintentional killing, but also from being accused of it).

Unfortunately, simply building walls isn't enough to protect yourself from the tired, and the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You also have to make sure that no one gets around, under, or over them. In that regard, knowledge is power, especially when it confirms what you already believe.

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to find a small business with a Top Secret security clearance that can snoop on Spanish language conversations transmitted over foreign communications systems and "instantaneously" translate those conversations from Spanish into English....

The translation company would be expected to create online records of "complex foreign voice radio transmissions containing technical terminology, advanced grammar and syntax, and colloquial conversational forms"....

The problem is, when people know they're being overheard, they can use codes, or intentionally spread misinformation, or simply agree to meet up in person. That's why DARPA's Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) is so exciting:

These half-bug, half-chip creations — DARPA calls them "insect cyborgs" — would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.

Scientist Amit Lal and his team insert mechanical components into baby bugs during "the caterpillar and the pupae stages," which would then allow the adult bugs to be deployed to do the Pentagon's bidding.

The article ends with a joke that has considerably more than a grain of truth to it:

Presumably, enemy arsenals will soon be well-stocked with Raid.

It's easy to imagine pesticides being the first line of defense against these cyber insects, regardless of any collateral damage to "useful" species; one thing DARPA will probably want to do is create hybrids that are immune to common pesticides (particularly in Latin America, where a much wider range of chemicals is used).

At that point, I suppose evildoers would have to clear their confidential meeting places with flamethrowers, or perhaps jamming signals. There's also the possibility that natural predators -- for lack of a better term -- will eat some of these semi-mechanical bugs; they should probably be equipped to deliver an electric shock, or a squirt of some noxious liquid, that'll discourage hungry birds and bats.

Surely none of these problems is insurmountable, given what's at stake in a world that's low on resources (or finds it impractical to distribute them equitably, which amounts to the pretty much the same thing).

In completely unrelated news, Bruce Schneier asks a serious question, and provides a serious answer:

[G]iven a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

Frightening, isn't it? There oughta be a law.

(Illustration from The War Illustrated, April 3 1915.)

Stupid Smart Machines

In consumer technology, as in biology, mutations tend to be useless or maladaptive. The Taser isn't improved by being combined with an mp3 player, unless you believe that two capabilities are automatically better than one, no matter how incompatible they may be. I think it's fair to suggest that turning a dangerous weapon into yet another lifestyle accessory - one that distracts you from your surroundings, no less - makes users and innocent bystanders less safe.

Now, there's talk among Serious People of marketing a cellphone that doubles as a radiation detector:

"The likely targets of a potential terrorist attack would be big cities with concentrated populations, and a system like this would make it very difficult for someone to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb in such an area," said Longman, who also is Purdue alumnus. "The more people are walking around with cell phones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

Let's imagine for a moment that I'm an actual terrorist, rather than a member of that Islamopacifascist fifth column, the American Left. Let's suppose further that I have access to radioactive material, and that I don't want it to go undetected. What's to stop me from putting it in magnetic containers on the undercarriage of UPS trucks, or crosstown buses? Or taping it under subway or taxicab or bicycle seats? Or floating it down rivers and canals? Or mailing it?

It seems to me that anyone who took these steps could cost one or more cities a great deal of money, and citizens a huge amount of trouble and worry, while undermining whatever remained of public faith in our "protectors." This is a perfect example of how easily anti-terrorist technology can become a readymade weapon, or a force multiplier, making us more vulnerable to disruption and despair as well as to violence. Schemes like this one are the technocratic equivalent of an autoimmune disorder.

If these modern-day Tom Swifts have considered this argument, they're keeping quiet about it:

The system could be trained to ignore known radiation sources, such as hospitals, and radiation from certain common items, such as bananas, which contain a radioactive isotope of potassium.

"The radiological dirty bomb or a suitcase nuclear weapon is going to give off higher levels of radiation than those background sources," Fischbach said. "The system would be sensitive enough to detect these tiny levels of radiation, but it would be smart enough to discern which sources posed potential threats and which are harmless."

Which would be great, in theory, if human beings of average intelligence weren't more than smart enough to outwit it, and to turn it against us.

In other news, our infrastructure is crumbling. Which is why it's disheartening to learn that research into this miracle cellphone "has been funded by the Indiana Department of Transportation through the Joint Transportation Research Program and School of Civil Engineering at Purdue."

Vacuuming Up Data

Michael Tanji explains the problem with what he calls "attempting to gill-net bad guys" through mass surveillance:

It's bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What's worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys....

This is not a needle in a haystack problem; it’s a needle somewhere in an unidentified field in the western portion of Nebraska. The problem with vacuuming up data wholesale is that even with a lot of machine-based filtering, an intelligence analyst is left with a massive pile of rock in which may lay a speck of gold. Intelligence does not want, need, look at or even retain the VAST majority of what passes through the ‘Net, which is something privacy mavens conveniently leave out of their angrily worded press releases.

Although I agree with Tanji's basic point - how could you not? - I'm always troubled when people reject textbook authoritarian measures on the basis of their inefficiency, rather than their unconstitutionality.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument (and in spite of evidence to the contrary) that raw data on law-abiding citizens have no political or economic value, questions remain about what constitutes a red flag, and about the construction of what Bruce Schneier calls "an infrastructure of surveillance," and about what Dan Lockton calls "the creeping erosion of norms" regarding privacy rights. What intelligence wants ought to be less important, legally speaking, than what they're allowed to have and how they're allowed to get it.

With this in mind, it's interesting to consider this low-tech version of mass surveillance currently underway in Phoeniz, AZ:

"The protesters, several visibly armed with guns, have been verbally engaging anyone walking by that seems to look illegal or don't seem supportive of them," Strand said. "These are residents, students, business people, neighborhood and spiritual leaders."

In theory, this group's aim is to detect illegal immigrants, which they do by challenging people who "look illegal." In pursuit of their larger political goals, however, and as an expression of the basic animus that drives them, they also end up targeting people who "don't seem supportive" of their brave efforts to defend the Homeland:

Lynne Stevens smiled and pulled open her jacket, revealing her Smith & Wesson....She scoffed at the idea that her fellow protesters are causing harm to the neighborhood. "We just want to get the illegals out of here....It's a black-and-white issue," she said. "I'm here to run them off. You turn the light on them and they scatter like roaches."

I suspect that American citizens of all colors have scattered "like roaches" in order to avoid tangling with these overwrought, abusive, visibly armed loudmouths...not least because businesses around the protest site are reporting a 15-percent drop in customers. If I were heading to a business in this area, would I wear a t-shirt that might offend someone like Lynne Stevens? I suppose it'd depend on whether I felt like getting into a potentially dangerous shouting match with an armed fanatic.

The point being that this demonstrates one of the effects of "screening" on public behavior: it can cause people to feel more vulnerable, and to change their behavior accordingly. They may not take the route they'd planned, or shop where they'd intended to, or say what's on their minds, or what have you. They may do their best not to "look illegal," and to seem "supportive" (or at least neutral); this can then conveniently be portrayed as informed consent.

Ultimately, the threat isn't that ordinary citizens will get caught doing something we're not supposed to do; it's that we'll feel insecure doing things we have every right to do.

(Illustration via Susan E. Gallagher.)

Worldly Concerns

The way I hear it, Jesus was unjustly condemned to death, and was brutalized and jeered by a mob who mistook their bloodlust for righteousness, and was finally executed alongside a pair of criminals.

The meaning of this story, assuming I understand it, is that we know not what we do when we refuse to be merciful and hospitable: God is, as Kierkegaard said, "attired in unrecognizability"...and who is less recognizable, as God and as neighbor, than the poor, the sick, the insane, and the imprisoned? The message of his resurrection - the one that interests a bystander like myself, anyway - is the impotence of worldly power at the precise moment that it presents itself as all powerful.

In the topsy-turvy victimology of Bill Murchison, however, it's not the death penalty that threatens the innocent, but the innocent who threaten the death penalty:

[G]rowing numbers of Americans [are] working to put capital punishment itself to death. The technique is, object to everything about the death penalty -- fairness, pain, cost, international opinion, the prospect of executing the innocent. Death by a thousand cuts is the prescription for the death penalty.

Objecting to everything about the death penalty...that's a daring new tactic for abolitionists, alright.

Murchison's love for the death penalty - his faith in it, and therefore in the human judgment that crucified his God - is nothing new in his circles. I wouldn't bother bringing it up, if he didn't go on to insult his own faith to a degree that actually surprises me:

Considerable help [in "killing" the death penalty] would come from liberal Christians, including evangelicals of the Jim Wallis/Sojourners stamp, with their worldly concerns for "social justice."

The quotes around "social justice" are a fairly standard tactic, of course. What really impresses me is the use of "worldly" to describe a belief in mercy and redemption. It's an inversion I'd call Satanic, if I found it possible, let alone necessary, to believe in an entity more deceitful than the average hard-right Christian blabbermouth.

Murchison continues:

What about capital punishment? Does it suddenly, after all these centuries, make no sense? The principle, I mean, not every application, as in the burnings-alive of the Reformation era -- none of which we're likely to imitate as a society.

If nothing else, Murchison has demonstrated that it's possible to get from false premises to false conclusions. Putting aside his assumption that the death penalty made sense previously, what strikes me about this argument is that it's precisely the one Murchison set out to attack. He began by sneering at the idea that pain should be "a central consideration in the legal equation"; here, he objects fastidiously to burning people alive. The debate over methods of execution, and the amount of suffering they cause, seems to be a legitimate one after all.

Murchison claims that we execute murderers in order to affirm the "human worth" of their victims, who have a "unique place in the created order." He uses some astonishingly weird examples to make this point:

It would have made sense to spare the lives of Goering and Himmler rather than visit on them personally and publicly the consequences of their war crimes? What of Hitler himself, had he survived the war?

Murchison doesn't seem to realize that all three of these men committed suicide as a final act of defiance. Would justice have been done if we'd prevented them from making that decision, and then executed them? More to the point, is justice even conceivable here, in human terms? What could those three corpses possibly signify, next to six million?

The thing that Hitler and Goering and Himmler - and Timothy McVeigh, to use a more recent example - demonstrate, once again, is the impotence of the death penalty; like the saint, the criminal can always call the state's bluff, as it were, and die in a state of acceptance. Or fulfillment. Or holy martyrdom. Some of 'em may even have this in mind right from the start.

All of which confirms me in my belief that what makes fundamentalist Christianity so ugly and dangerous isn't its otherworldliness, but its smug, stupid, rationalist materialism. From its obsession with the body - that vapor, that husk - to its cheerful quasi-Skinnerian belief in the power of pain and pleasure to produce "good" behavior (or to be experienced as pain and pleasure, for that matter); to its belief in that supreme denial of human worth and uniqueness that masquerades as "closure," this ideology is as worldly - in the proper Biblical sense of the term - as it's possible to be.

A Dangerous Precedent

Punishing Christie Todd Whitman for her misleading statements about air quality after the collapse of the WTC could make other functionaries think twice before misleading the public.

You may be thinking that this would be an excellent reason to throw the book at her, even if her lies hadn't blighted so many people's lives.

If so, you fail to understand the intricacies of statecraft:

Holding Christine Todd Whitman liable will set a dangerous precedent, leaving public officials to worry that their words to reassure the public after disasters will open them up to personal liability, Justice Department attorney Alisa Klein told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

There's enough material here for a dozen posts, but I'll restrict myself to a couple of points. First, I'm not likely to be reassured by people I don't trust. But if I were, it'd probably be because I felt that there was some chance, however small, that they'd be held accountable if they lied to me. That was a rather forlorn hope even before 2000, God knows, but the solution is surely not to treat the anodyne gibberish of party hacks as a balm for which we should be grateful.

Second, if I'd lived in lower Manhattan on 9/11 (instead of the Bronx), I would've found it much more reassuring if Whitman had said, "It's not safe for you to go home." It would've agreed with the evidence directly before my eyes, for one thing, and it also would've given me the feeling that marginally competent people were in charge.

Last, I've never seen much evidence that this government worries at all about frightening people. They've tried to frighten us with anthrax-laden balsa-wood drones drifting across the Atlantic, and a radical homosexual attack on traditional marriage, and ticking time-bombs from which only torture can save us. Worse, they expect us to be more frightened of these threats than the horrific behavior they were invented to justify (e.g., pre-emptive war, institutionalized bigotry, and outright barbarism).

And of course, they've consistently tried to frighten us with the consequences of holding them responsible for their own actions:

"If you speak, you will be potentially held liable," [Klein] said. "Then the clear message for government officials is to say nothing."

I didn't think that any false dichotomy could be venal or insane enough to shock me at this point, but this one does the trick: Officials must be able to say whatever they think will "help" during a national disaster, without any fear of being held responsible, or they'll be forced to preside mutely over the carnage like a funerary statue.

All things considered, I think I'm willing to take the risk.

(Photo: Ruins of Dresden, 1945.)

Ever-Present Necessity

CKR makes some speculative connections between a book of stories about Estonian serfdom, and the persistence of ancient viruses in human DNA, and the exigencies of our "post-9/11 world":

People balance their spirit, their will, against the ever-present necessity imposed on them. We can feel a bit of this in apprehension as we approach the airport’s TSA checkpoint; the care we must take in behavior, speech, even thought as the monitor waves us through; the humiliation of stuff we must quickly gather up as the bins emerge from the x-ray machine. But then it is over. Just a few minutes of that world that Kallas’s characters lived in.

I'd barely had time to think about that, when I read this:

The CIA videotaped its interrogations of two top terror suspects in 2002 and destroyed the tapes three years later out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of U.S. questioners, the director of the agency told employees Thursday....

"The tapes posed a serious security risk," Hayden wrote. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathizers."

This claim recalls the Pentagon's earlier argument for suppressing evidence of prisoner abuse.

It is "probable that al-Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill...."

In other words, they'll point to our use of torture as evidence that we're torturers, instead of placing these acts in the context of necessity, or divine right, or manifest destiny, or whatever it is that supposedly makes our stolid bureaucratic cruelty so wise and wonderful. The funny thing is, this argument concedes that torturing people makes us less safe. Which is what the rest of us have been saying all along.

CKR makes an important connection between the apprehension many of us feel as we approach TSA checkpoints, and an earlier world - or a parallel world, or even a "real" world - of force that, in Simone Weil's words, "turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." At these times we feel how precarious our status is in regards to the law, since it has the power to create guilt as well as punish it. That'd be one effect of what Foucault called the inspecting gaze.

Overall, CKR's vision of a behavioral virus strikes me as Deleuzian, which is to say that it combines a handy biological metaphor with genealogy a la Foucault (cf. Discipline and Punish) and, ultimately, Nietzsche (cf. On the Genealogy of Morals).

Which I find interesting, to say the least. Whether CKR will be pleased with the comparison is another matter entirely....

(Illustration from De Naturae Simia by Robert Fludd, 1626. Via BibliOdyssey.)

Let's Roll!

Apparently, short-fused sourpusses like yours truly are increasingly using jammers to block other people's cell phone calls:

One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.

“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

It's funny until someone gets hurt. Given the role passenger cell phones played in the downing of United Flight 93, I'd say that people who try to carry jammers onto an airplane should be viewed with at least as much suspicion as blind Calypsonians and phylactery-wielding Jews. Especially when they've got these potentially deadly weapons disguised as cigarette packs. Or worse, cell phones.

If we're really serious about fighting terrorism, people who buy jammers (or the components required to make them) should be monitored much as we monitor people who buy Sudafed; if their surnames or political enthusiasms seem to warrant it, we should add them to the No-Fly List.

These days, you can't be too careful.

They're All Around!

We're in a war for our very survival against radical Islam. Which means it's time for all patriotic Americans to harass Mexicans at the local big-box hardware store:

For Truman Fields, the war against foreign invaders begins at home -- Home Depot.

Several times a month during Florida's latest building boom, the retired IBM executive climbed into his Dodge pickup and cruised home-improvement stores or construction sites in southwest Florida. Armed with a camera and a missionary's zeal, he'd look for groups of Hispanic men and start snapping pictures. Fields, 66, assumed anyone who ran off was here illegally....

"They're all around if people will just open their eyes."

The goal here is to prevent La Reconquista, which is at least as imminent as our national subjection to Sharia. (This dual threat is what makes the strategic thinking of America's own modern-day Clausewitz more compelling than ever.)

Some people call the anti-immigrant movement racist. It isn't, though. It's RACIST.

"Real Americans Committed to Integrity, Sovereignty and Truth."

"That's what 'racist' means to us."

And really, what other interpretation matters?

Truman Fields believes that people who run away from him are probably here illegally. If we could somehow make an armed drone "understand" this deep insight, it'd free confused, angry, and racist RACIST Americans from the drudgery of playing soldier in strip malls, and let them return to more personally fulfilling endeavors.

A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like.

This technology could also prevent messy situations like the recent tasing of a mildly argumentative motorist; eliminating the human factor will make summary punishment easier to accept, or at least harder to argue with:

Police in Texas want to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot speeders, and now Miami cops are also looking at drones for SWAT Teams.

These systems are fallible, of course. That's why we need lots of them, everywhere. Traditionally, the border has been visualized as something like the aseptic seal that keeps a product uncontaminated. We'd be better off seeing it as something more like the immune system, with the official border as a skinlike barrier, concerned private citizens as pattern recognition receptors, and armed drones as monocytes.

Xenophobes, racialists and paranoiacs have an advantage when it comes to viewing human beings as pathogens that are "all around if people will just open their eyes." Thus, their visionary insights will be invaluable in helping to define and deploy this vital new security technology.

You may think this is insane. But to me, "insane" simply means "Improving National Security As Needed, Eternally."

Bitter Rivalry and Hate

In 1857, Manhattan was patrolled by competing police departments: the Municipals and the Metropolitans. According to a contemporary, their rivalry was relatively mild, at first:

Notwithstanding this duality of city guardians, there were no more murders, robberies and assaults, than usual. All this time war was progressing, although no overt act was committed, the arms used as yet being only the tongue of bitter rivalry and hate.

Soon enough, though, things escalated:

Friction soon developed between the rival police forces. On June 14, 1857, The New-York Times reported that members of the Metropolitan Police Force had arrested a man for disorderly conduct on East 9th Street, but that he had been immediately seized by a member of the Municipal Police Force. A group of the Metropolitans promptly “remonstrated” with the Municipal, and soon regained custody of the miscreant, in the process arresting the Municipal and another city officer who had attempted to come to his assistance.

Now that you've read that, read this:

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and a spinoff group of disaffected Minuteman members plan separate monthlong deployments along the border, beginning Friday and Saturday, respectively.

The Minuteman group said it will have members on patrol along the Mexican border in Arizona, California and Texas, and also plans to post members along the Canadian border in Washington state....

Meanwhile, the Patriots' Border Alliance, created after disagreements this spring led to the expulsion of several original Minuteman Civil Defense Corps members and officers, is to stage its inaugural 30-day border watch operation starting Saturday in the Palominas area, south of Sierra Vista and west of Naco.

Click here if you wish to trace the complex genealogy of these squabbling superpatriots. You should also note the alleged problems between citizen's groups and federal agents.

Volunteers who have converged on the Mexican border to watch for illegal immigrants are disrupting U.S. Border Patrol (search) operations by unwittingly tripping sensors that alert agents to possible intruders, an agency spokesman complained Monday.

This is why the border must be guarded by machines. You'll never hear Raytheon's Active Denial System 2 compare System 1 to male genitalia, or call it "a swine who lives in a cat box," even though System 2 is clearly superior when it comes to dealing with harsh border conditions:

System 2 was built for 125 degrees Fahrenheit with sun loading, and for rain. System 1 – you can’t let it rain a whole bunch. We’re not watertight. As soon as it starts raining, we pull it into the garage. System 2 has been tested for rain and tested for dust.

While I suspect that ADS sentries could be taken out with a few bullets, or even a well-aimed brick, the idea of an invisible line that can't be crossed appeals to the poetic side of our nature. Mayors who oppose the building of a border fence may want to consider deploying ADS to keep defense contractors (and their horde of undocumented laborers) from approaching the proposed worksite:

Mayors along the Texas-Mexico border have begun a quiet protest of the federal government's plans to build a fence along the border: They are refusing to give access to their land.

Mayors in Brownsville, Del Rio and El Paso have denied access to some parts of their city property, turning away federal employees assigned to begin surveys or conduct other preliminary work on the fence meant to keep out illegal immigrants.

"This is exercising our rights. This is our property. We are not going to make it easy for them," said Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada, who refused last month to sign documents granting government workers permission to enter city property.

Perhaps the Minutemen - and their bickering splinter groups - should undertake a new campaign to keep the borders' borders open.

(Image at top via Urbanography.)

Evolution of the Eye

Mayor Bloomberg's recent visit to London has given him a special insight into the rights and responsibilities of American citizens:

Residents of big cities like New York and London must accept that they are under constant watch by video cameras, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.

"We are under surveillance all the time" from cameras in shops and office buildings, "and in London they have multiple cameras on every bus and in every subway car," he added.

This isn't authoritarianism, but a gesture of blessing from the Invisible Hand:

"The people of London not only support it, but if Ken Livingstone didn't do it they would try to run him out of town on a rail. We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras."

Our "dangerous world" also threatens us with devastating accidents and illnesses. But the notion that we could adapt and improve the UK's healthcare system remains controversial at best, despite widespread public support.

Also, drivers remain more dangerous than terrorists, but I don't see New Yorkers begging Bloomberg to ban cars, or force them to drive at five miles per hour within city limits.

But then, danger is being redefined - and personified - as "terrorism," and the public's predictable panic and confusion is conveniently being hailed as informed consent to surveillance.

I don't like arguing against the inadequacy of surveillance cameras, for the same reason I don't like arguing that torture doesn't work; doing so implies that authoritarian measures would be OK if only they were more effective. That said, there does seem to be some evidence that London's security cameras don't work:

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any....

A report by the criminal justice charity Nacro in 2002 concluded that the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent.

Well, what of it? Creationists routinely attempt to question the evolution of the eye by asking "what good is five percent of an eye?" Like a few cells with a rudimentary ability to distinguish between light and dark, London's surveillance system may turn out to be a step on the path towards 20/20 vision.

"We can read fingerprints from about five meters...all 10 prints," said Bruce Walker, vice president of homeland security for Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N). "We can also do an iris scan at the same distance."

And as we all know, seeing is believing.

Flat Evil

In one of his typically economical summations of the Evildoers' weltanschauung, President Bush explained that "they're flat evil. That's all they can think about, is evil."

A brain that thinks about nothing but evil will look as abnormal to an fMRI technician as it does to God, which may offer Civilization a powerful weapon against the theory, as well as the practice, of evildoing:

SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory....

Marketed in North America as SSRM Tek, the technology will soon be tested for airport screening by a U.S. company under contract to the Department of Homeland Security.

"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks."

I assume "clean" means a properly horrified or angry subconscious response, as opposed to, say, resentful nostalgia for the dear dead days of national unity. Or pride at having been "proved fucking right" about the ragheads.

Once we've used this system (and this one) to purge the body politic of active and larval terrorists, I'm hoping we can redesign it to screen public servants for authoritarian tendencies. It could flash subliminal images of torture at Abu Ghraib, and inflatable detention camps on the Texas border, and the active denial system, and perhaps even SSRM Tek itself, and then measure the subject's enjoyment. Anyone who showed signs of excitement - more drooling than usual, for instance - would be barred from holding public office.

There may be a few false positives now and again, but that's a small price to pay to keep American democracy safe.

(Photo at top via Mr. Bali Hai.)

A Hundred Flowers Bloom

On Thom Hartmann’s show today, media critic Norman Solomon excitedly explained that if we all work to deconstruct political lies, “the American people” will realize that they’re being misled, and disasters like the Iraq War will be less likely to happen.

Great idea, eh? It’s a pity no one thought of that in the run-up to the war.

What Solomon overlooks is that political lies are successful not to the extent that they’re plausible, but to the extent that they’re preferable to reality. That’s why people who try to puncture political fantasies so often end up on the sidelines licking their wounds, while rampant and ululant liars continue to be treated with quasi-religious reverence. It’s not a lie if it’s what you want to hear.

Solomon’s assumption – which is very common on the left – is that it’s a simple lack of information that causes Americans to support, or at least tolerate, criminal policies. That’s true in the sense that it’s a simple lack of information that prevents compulsive gamblers from believing they’ll beat the odds, but false in its rationalist assumption that given a choice between fantasy and truth, people will (or are able to) choose the truth. What truth more often produces, as we all know, is an overwhelming immune response whose chief symptom is rage.

Which is why the terrorists are less of a threat, to many Americans, than you or me or Norman Solomon. Terrorists confirm what these people already know - about the world, and foreigners, and alien creeds - and give them a solid identity as Opponents of Evil. Media critics and their ilk want to blur these distinctions and confuse the issue, leaving their victims bereft and naked in a strange land. Which is why we’re often at our weakest when we’re most powerful, in terms of having some semblance of the truth on our side.

For authoritarian politicians, of course, things are simple: Terrorists broaden their power, while citizens seek to restrict it. Who would they rather see defeated once and for all?

Meanwhile, Atrios wants us to tell the White House we’re displeased by the Scooter Libby decision, which to my mind is like asking us to put a cherry on top of BushCo's ice cream sundae. Our unhappiness is an expected and welcome result of the decision, and was undoubtedly one of the things that made it worth doing. I’m sure there’s something comforting for these folks about the sound of moderate-left outrage, with its sober invocation of The Federalist Papers and little-known facts from the history of Boss Tweed’s New York; it’s like having crickets outside your window all night.

Although conservatives spend a lot of time attacking collectivism, their success is based primarily on group cohesion, looking out for one another, and team effort; it wouldn’t surprise me if they occasionally held hands and sang “Kumbaya” at their secret retreats. While their official commitment may be to “individualism,” the fact remains that they’ve taken larger self-sacrificing risks, and displayed more solidarity, to accomplish their schemes than most of their opponents have managed.

You can’t really blame them for believing that they can do as they please. Who’s going to tell them any different?

The Punishment Fits the Crime

This is possibly the best example I've ever seen of conservatarian noblesse oblige:

Lawyers for former Interior Deputy Secretary Steven Griles are arguing that the convicted felon should not serve any prison time but instead be sentenced to perform community service for a program funded by The Walt Disney Company and recreational industry lobbyists....The industry consortium has already approved a slot for Griles in which he would fundraise, secure corporate partners and handle “communication…with government entities and the media.”

By the same logic, an official who illegally turned a public forest over to developers could perform community service by driving one of the firm's bulldozers.

I could almost bring myself to admire the sheer nerve it'd take to make this argument, if I didn't suspect that the people making it have no idea that there's anything outrageous about it. In Hell, some say, gluttons are forcefed; here on earth, teenagers caught sneaking cigarettes are sometimes made to smoke a whole pack of them. Maybe if Griles spends enough time toadying to industry, he'll weary of it. You never know 'til you try!

In unrelated news, the Farm Bill currently under debate in Congresss includes a section that would forbid state and local governments from restricting the planting of genetically modified crops.

It is unclear who inserted Section 123 into the federal legislation, but staffers working on the bill say they do not expect it to survive intact.

Shocking, isn't it? Whoever did this terrible thing should be forced to repay the community by distributing Monsanto-approved educational materials to public schools.

Kill 'Em All!

One of the things that makes the death penalty an ethical disaster is the likelihood that it'll be inflicted on people who are not actually killers, but may as well be executed anyway because "they won't be missed."

Louisiana, for instance, wants to execute pedophiles:

The Louisiana Supreme Court last week upheld the death sentence for a pedophile, and the governor of Texas is soon to sign into law legislation to that effect.

The cynic in me welcomes the law, simply because of the merriment that'll ensue the next time a beloved priest or honorable politician is caught raping children.

But then, the cynic in me is a blithering fuckhead with the moral acumen of a spirochete.

It's safe to say that any pedophiles executed under this law will not have Friends in High Places. When a good (i.e., white, Republican, Christian) man like Randal Ankeney molests children, Maggie Gallagher and Peggy Noonan will present us with the edifying spectacle of a titanic battle between Good and Evil, and remind us that no one is beyond redemption. (Besides...were the children truly innocent? And isn't feminism ultimately to blame either way?)

When someone more disposible does it, they'll inform us that failing to punish certain crimes with death isn't morality, but self-coddling vanity that'll come to worse than nothing.

What's really appalling is that allowing the death penalty may actually make these cases harder to uncover and prosecute:

"We are very concerned that this may reduce reporting of sexual assault, since most child abuse is made by someone close to the child," said Karen Rugaard, a spokeswoman for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.

Indeed. Given what we already know about familial denial in cases of sexual abuse, it's not hard to imagine parents dealing with the problem privately, instead of consigning Grandpa to Ol' Sparky. As for politicians and priests, the organizations to which they belong will have an even greater incentive to keep misbehavior secret.

I find white supremacists almost as nauseating as pedophiles, but I don't think it's a good idea to execute them, either. Speaking of which, a neo-Nazi named Kevin Strom has been charged with posession of child pornography, and with "enticing" a nine-year-old girl.

Strom was surprised by his wife Elisha...while apparently masturbating nude in front of a computer while looking at photos of young girls. Although he ran away from his wife, "she was able to observe that he was sexually aroused."

He also committed the largely aesthetic crime of writing a love sonnet to the little girl, and setting it to the tune of "Here We Come a-Wassailing."

In my experience, the standard "liberal" response to a case like Strom's involves gloating over the idea of him sharing a jail cell with that classic racist stereotype, the large, amorous black man...as though rape were a legitimate way of settling scores, compared to the "barbarity" of the death penalty.

That's an emotional cesspool I prefer not to plumb at the moment. But I will suggest that the power deeply disturbed predators like Strom seek isn't likely to be made less attractive by the threat of death. As I've argued elsewhere, that threat's likely to lure them like bug zappers lure mosquitoes (much as they're already lured by this country's sick obsession with "childhood innocence," which assuages adult guilt at the cost of making children ideal victims).

UPDATE: In a conversation at Eschaton, Gomez made the additional point that it's unwise to have the same penalty for molesting a child, and molesting and killing a child. Some criminals may decide to take the "in for a penny, in for a pound" outlook.

Maybe so. On the other hand, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. What's important here is taking a tough stand. And what could possibly be tougher than killing people?