Tuesday, January 25, 2005

The Beat Goes On.....

The headlines of two news bits in today's New York Times tell us what the rhetoric of the Bush Inauguration didn't:
"General Says the Current Plan Is to Maintain 120,000 Soldiers in Iraq Through 2006"

"Bush to Seek About $80 Bln for Military Operations"


Perhaps the only saving grace in this situation is that the military, especially the Army, is stretched almost to the breaking. There will undoubtedly be more talk about evil Iran, probably more commando raids (see "The Coming Wars" by Seymour Hersh in last week's New Yorker) but no major ground campaigns. The Bush regime will do its best to destabilize its opponents, but it lacks the military strength to launch another Iraq.

posted by Mark Orton at 8:30 AM 0 Comments Links to this post  

Sunday, January 23, 2005

A Snow Storm

We love our weather here in New England. It is constantly changing, unpredictable, and the topic of conversation in a way that it can not in places like CA where the weather remains the same for weeks on end. Over the last twenty four hours we had endured one of our classic winter Nor'Easters. This one may break all records for a single snow fall here in Cambridge. Local measurements confirm 31 inches (and the flurries are not quite done).

Here is our car looking out our front door:


You got it. That white lump is our car.

posted by Mark Orton at 2:32 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

Thursday, January 20, 2005

9/11 Has To Go

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

From the moment this attack occurred every element of the government and media machinery talked about this event as though the world might come to an end, as a Rubicon crossing that demanded enormous changes in our internal and external defenses.

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

9/11 itself was a challenge to our psychology, our sense of national self. We have two large oceans separating us from most of the nastiness in the world. Sure we have porous borders, but the one to our south is an important source of cheap labor, and we remain convinced that Mexicans and others from Central America who come here are too busy trying to make a living and join the American dream to do anything treacherous. 9/11 ended this happy delusion that nasty people could not get to us in our homeland.

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

9/11 itself was just a little pin prick in its effects on our national capabilities. Symbolically large, but practically hardly measurable, except for those in the government and media machinery who found something very useful in 9/11.

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

9/11 today is a banner for patriotic gore, larger defense, spy, and police budgets. It is an icon to which we are supposed to bow down while cheering for policies that have lead us into Iraq and, now, appear to be readying us for a confrontation with Iran or Syria. 9/11 has been converted by the government and media machinery into a permanent, semi-religious icon that justifies an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy nd potentiall repressive regimes at home.

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

9/11 has produced long lines at airports and enormous displays of military and police personnel and armaments at events like the political conventions and today's inaugural events. But, it is very clear that the government and media machinery has not delivered real improvements in our security, in the homeland nor abroad. I have said before, and repeat here, I will not be surprised on the day when some harbor, perhaps Boston Harbor, just four miles from where I am sitting, is visited by a nondescript merchant ship. It will dock and then explode with a small very dirty nuclear device. You can visit the book The Outlaw Sea : A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by William Langewiesche for more on how this might happen. Do you feel more secure today than on 9/10?

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

9/11, as a political icon, a banner, must be replaced by serious discussions of our security. Above all, we need to force the government and media machinery to talk about issues that really matter, issues that are flowing from changes in the world that will not go away, can not be bombed or bullied by messianic pugs in the White House and Pentagon (now also in Foggy Bottom, too).

The first step is for each of us to cease using 9/11 in its iconic banner waving mode. The second step is to begin to ask other questions about our security. I will skip by the obvious questions about our foreign policy and its relation to "terrorism". By "security", I mean the broadest meaning of security - a roof over your head, proper health care, good education, a living wage. You probably could add other elements that make you "secure".

To expand briefly on one element in my list, a living wage, we might ask why the real incomes of middle class Americans have not improved substantially since 1974 while the rich have done stupendously well. Is this a natural function of the "free market", a natural outcome of superior human performance by rich people? Or, is it just additional demonstration that the rich get richer because they control virtually all of the resources and they make up the rules (tax code, corporate governance rules, accounting rules, environmental regulations, labor laws, etc.) as they go?

It is time for us to look seriously at 9/11.

posted by Mark Orton at 5:42 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

Saturday, January 15, 2005

"Who Said Engineers Aren't Important?"

This sequence of photos showed up by email from my brother Ed. I asked where they came from. He replied "I dunno...." So, after you stop laughing, where did these events take place? UK, Canada, OZ (this seems like an event from OZ)?? Ignore the title,"Who Said Engineers Aren't Important?", this was the topic line in the forwarded email. I suspect parochialism on the part of a bunch of jealous chemistry PhDs.













posted by Mark Orton at 9:42 AM 3 Comments Links to this post  

Thursday, January 13, 2005

It's Official

Just in case you missed this little note inside the paper today:

U.S. Team Ends Iraq Arms Search
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: January 13, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - The top American weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has wrapped up his work there, a step that ends the search for illicit weapons, an intelligence official said Tuesday night.

Mr. Duelfer issued a comprehensive report last fall that acknowledged that Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990's, years before the American invasion of 2003. But Mr. Duelfer returned to Iraq for further investigations after that report was issued. In an article in its Wednesday issue, The Washington Post reported that he had ended that work in late December.

The intelligence official said that Mr. Duelfer was still likely to issue several small additional statements on his findings, but that none would contradict the central conclusions that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion.



And to remind you of what this is all about here is an Associated Press compilation of the Bush regime's "Before the War" language and the "After the War" (hmm, is it really post-war?) retreat:



Bush Administration Comments on WMDs


The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; 8:50 PM

Statements by the Bush administration, before and after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on Saddam Hussein's weapons programs:

BEFORE THE WAR

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." - Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002.

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Sept. 8, 2002.

"After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more." - President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002.

"Saddam Hussein is a man who told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, but he's got them." - Bush, Nov. 3, 2002.

"The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world." - Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5, 2003.

---

AFTER THE WAR

"Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. ... We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder." - Bush, July 12, 2004.

"We got it wrong. We have seen nothing to suggest that he had actual stockpiles." - Powell, Oct. 1, 2004.

"We were all unhappy that the intelligence was not as good as we had thought that it was. But the essential judgment was absolutely right. Saddam Hussein was a threat." - Rice, Oct. 3, 2004.

"It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction. Why the intelligence proved wrong I'm not in a position to say, but the world is a lot better off with Saddam Hussein in jail." - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Oct. 4, 2004.

"He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies." - Bush, Oct. 7, 2004.

"Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people." - White House press secretary Scott McClellan, on Wednesday.


Even now I can't understand how Kerry could not make a campaign against these guys??

posted by Mark Orton at 9:09 AM 0 Comments Links to this post  

Monday, January 03, 2005

Aztecs at the Guggenheim Reveals Blinders about Contemporary Civilization

The November 1, 2004 issue of The New Yorker contained Peter Schjeldahl's review of The Aztec Empire at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. I was struck by a certain blindness in its point of view on the exhibition and what we know about the Aztecs. Last week I had the opportunity to see the show. It is enormous and overwhelming; startling and dazzling, especially the range of topics and approaches.


INLAID STONE: This mask (c. 450 AD) of stone, turquoise, obsidian, and shell was used in rituals at
Teotihuacan, a city that flourished 1,000 years before the Aztecs.
photo: MICHEL ZABÉ/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM (borrowed without permission)


But, back to Peter Schjeldahl, and, as it turns out, to many other reviewers, the human sacrifice that is so important to Aztec religious practice is a zone of human behavior that is both exotic and somehow verboten. Schjeldahl's essay in the New Yorker begins,
"The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs made war almost tenderly, wielding wooden swords that were edged with bits of obsidian or flint and, in face-to-face combat, endeavoring not to kill their enemies but, commonly by striking at their legs, to disable and capture them. Later, the captives - thousands of them for the rededication of the Great temple at Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1478 - were led to high platforms, where priests tore out and displayed their still-beating hearts."


and from later in his essay:

"I couldn't shake the thought that most of the show's contents were made with and for eyes that routinely beheld terrible acts, including rites of "autosacrifice" which the Aztecs performed at all their religious ceremonies."

Lets dispense with the first and simplest observation coming now after having seen the exhibition. One would hardly know from the essay that there is anything other than ritualized human sacrifice to the Aztecs. But, the show demonstrates a culture far broader and more powerful. For instance, they had developed a 365 day calendar well before Europeans had figured this out. Though, in honor of all the deities they also maintained a religious calendar of 260 days in parallel. Nor, would you be prepared for the naturalistic sculpture that existed along side the religious formalisms.


Locust - image borrowed from Guggenheim without permission


The written language is only hinted at in the exhibition itself, but for the past fifty years linguists have been constructing a detailed understanding of the language. This is a whole other story of academic blinders, but that for another time.....

Far more disturbing to me about this focus on human sacrifice is the moral blindness that is at the center of this approach to the Aztecs. We have passed through a century in which mass warfare was created and institutionalized. Our new century begins with more mass warefare. In the last twenty years or so we have seen the rise of "precision munitions" and "smart bombs" right alongside the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Africa with nothing more than machetes.

We think nothing of a social, political, and legal infrastructure in which it is considered perfectly normal for 17 and 18 yr olds to join the military machine to be sent off to do the bidding of whatever regime happens to be in power, and for whatever purposes they deem useful. So, it is perfectly accepted as a norm that we "sacrifice" our youth on the altar of "democracy", "national security", "world peace", "religious purity", etc.

Clearly there is something a bit amiss for us to be so horrified by the Aztecs rituals.

posted by Mark Orton at 8:48 PM 0 Comments Links to this post  

Another Cheerful Note

You may have missed the coming anniversary of the landing of two rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, on Mars and the amazing performance of these two research vehicles. Designed for a ninety day life, a year later both are still rumbling (metaphorically speaking to be sure) about the surface of Mars collecting a larger and larger set of data.




borrowed without permission from http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/

posted by Mark Orton at 8:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post