The Breaking Time

The Rundown: essential equipment for the future

Flier for Adam Harvey's Stealth Ware

• What to wear in total surveillance A look at Adam Harvey's range of anti-drone/surveillance camouflage, ranging from sensor-deflecting hoodies to camera-blinding automatic flashes. 

Fascinating stuff, and a harbinger of the increasing arms race between surveillance and countermeasures. People are remarkably adept at avoiding detection, and some of Harvey's earlier work demonstrated that simple make-up (or war paint, if you prefer) can make facial recognition software useless. This may end up a fairer fight than many of us expect.

• "It’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect when it comes to broadband. Do rich countries spend on it so their citizens can stream more movies, or does having broadband make you rich? But it seems likely that broadband is a great enabler, like mass transit, good ports, a system of functioning courts, and other hallmarks of developed economies." You don't say? Of course, America's relatively terrible position in this kind of modern infrastructure isn't a matter of technology or resources. It's culture and politics that hold us back.

• Bahraini Princess facing multiple torture charges Of course, modern infrastructure doesn't mean that your government's not mired in a dark age. Of all the governing structures ever devised by humankind, I swear aristocracy is the absolute stupidest. "Here, you popped out of a womb, have some power." That'll work out well.

Let's start mass producing that anti-surveillance tech and shipping it over to Bahrain. Sounds like they need it to survive their rulers.

Good point from that mess. The trappings of the future can always end up used by archaic ideologies...

•

 

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 31, 2013

Of course they are.

First they came for the libraries

By Damien Williams

Photo by Gregory Maxwell

News came yesterday that radical Islamists have burned the ancient library of Timbuktu.

When I was twelve years old, one of the most important resources for my family was our local library: RL Christian Public Library, on H Street in Washington, DC. Though the area has changed, quite a bit, as any DC Metro-area resident can tell you, it's certainly not the best part of town. Nineteen years ago it was even rougher around the edges.

As funding for city libraries was cut, the operating hours of R.L. Christian were some of the first things on the chopping block. My sisters and I, along with other children from our neighbourhood, wrote essays and went before the DC City Council and explained to them —clearly but forcefully — what this library represented to the neighbourhood.

RL Christian Public Library had free after-school programs for children whose parents worked late. Study resources for those who would need them. A place to be off the street, later in the evening, in a part of town then still coping with regular gang violence. We, the children most affected by this, not our parents, made this case. And they shortened the hours anyway. Eventually RL Christian Public Library closed its doors.

People who know about but don’t fully understand history may ask, "Why do conquerors and fanatics always go for the Libraries?" Our most famous example has always been the Library of Alexandria, but it is by no means the sole instance. And if you take a look at that list, you can see something of a distinction: sometimes invaders burn libraries and loot them, and sometimes they just burn them. Why is that?

It's because a library, more than any other thing humans have ever made, is the physical promise of a wider, more inclusive world.

Scientology hits schism time

Disorder in the House of Hubbard.

Fascinating piece from Alex Klein on the looming schism in Scientology, specifically over a real-estate scam involving the construction of its "Ideal Org" local headquarters:

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is the dissidents' repeated references to L. Ron Hubbard's intent or original teachings. While some who've split from Scientology have ditched the whole thing, others have set up their own splinter groups.

That's a natural reaction. If people are attracted to a set of ideals and then the institution that supposedly represents them becomes corrupt or goes in a different direction, it's psychologically easier to find that the original goals were betrayed by the current leadership rather than abandon the whole structure.

The process of schism has happened in every creed from Christianity to Marxism, but this is a fascinating up-close glimpse at how it plays out. Hubbard's still within living memory, and people are already sharply disagreeing over what his intent really was. It's easy to see "Scientologists" in a century encompassing all swaths of ideologies.

This also highlights that arguing over whether a given creed, especially a large and old one, is good or evil somewhat misses the point. On a long enough timeline, multiplying sects will use the same founding mythology to justify every position.

The Rundown: Ringing in the new year

Police and protesters fight in Athens as another demonstration turns violent. Couldn't find the photo credit for this image, unfortunately.

Welcome to 2013, readers. Here's a quick parcel of "may you live in interesting times" items to start off your new year.

• Greeks feel unfolding social and humanitarian crisis "There is an anger against the national government which hasn't yet expressed itself, and it's building up like water behind a dam, waiting to break out. They're going to start smashing shop windows and grabbing things, and ultimately I wouldn't put it past the Greek society to storm parliament."

• Tea estate owner, wife killed by workers in India The article refers to what was going on as a "labor dispute," but dispute seems too mild a word for "an army of 700 workers gets together, armed with bows and poison arrows, and set the plantation owners on fire."

• Police arrest teenager for doodling Remember my fear that, because dealing with real problems was hard, Newtown's aftermath would see zero-tolerance return with a vengeance? Yeah, that's happening.

• Slavery's global comeback A brutal piece about how slavery's made a return around the globe (and in many places, never went away). A reminder that even as the future rolls in, many of the past's horrors are still very much with us.

• "Arrest us all" As the protests — some violent — in India have drawn attention to the horrific levels of rape in that country, this is not a new problem. In 2005, a mob of 200 women marched into the Nagpur district court and brutally killed a serial rapist that the police had let go scot-free for years.

Worth remembering that when a justice system fails widely enough in its duty to mete out vengeance, people will eventually start doing the job themselves. While I personally think the women in Nagpur were completely justified to kill their tormentor, vigilantism gets real nasty when it becomes increasingly endemic.

• Interfaith unions on the rise in UK Marriages between Muslims and Christians are becoming more frequent in the UK. Remember this the next time someone tells you that Muslims — apparently uniquely among all types of immigrants — are all fanatics who won't ever change in response to a secular society.

• China removing addicts' pleasure centers In the next stage in China's march towards dystopia, some doctors are "treating" drug addiction by burning out the pleasure centers of addicts and the mentally ill. As if that wasn't enough, China's also ramping up its internet censorship. Malevolent robot overseers are probably just a few months away.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

The Rundown: Old concepts on wikipedia

The Commissar Vanishes...

A few interesting concepts and tidbits that I've found more about on Wikipedia. This is one advantage to a crowd-sourced encyclopedia: after awhile, it gets into the nooks and crannies of human knowledge.

• Damnatio memoriae — The strangely enduring concept that a person can be erased from history. Pursued by almost every civilization in some form, from Romans striking faces off mosaics to Stalin's comrades disappearing one by one, becoming, in Orwell's words, "unpersons." Widely considered impossible in eras of much more widespread documentation.

But with more media becoming electronic however, this paradoxically might become easier. Ironically, a version of Orwell's works recently disappeared from Kindle. 

For the lower class, decentralized equivalent, see Going Ghost.

• King in the Mountain — Once upon a time, we had a leader who led us to victory against the odds, with more to come. Then a tragedy happened. But the leader was too great to die, we know that (somehow).

The leader must be sleeping, somewhere, waiting. Someday they will come back. The good times will come again, and everything since reduced to a bad dream, a footnote in a golden age.

• Terminus — In Latin: "boundary stone." Sooner or later everything ends. Every country has its border, every life its final day (unless they're sleeping under a mountain, naturally). The Romans were bright enough to turn this into a god. It's the basis of every tragedy (everyone reaches their limits) and every sense of relief (this will eventually end)

The original name of Atlanta was Terminus, and in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Terminus is a planet that serves as the final refuge of humanity's knowledge in the face of a dark age. For awhile, anyway.

Discussion Time: science vs. democracy

Because cat pictures help every discussion

Several recent items brought this particular discussion topic to mind. A column by Dr. Barry Starr asks if voters are qualified to decide issues like the labeling of GMOs, given that polls point to some massive scientific misunderstandings on the part of the public.

Part of the problem with the GMO debate is that the term encompasses everything from cattle pumped full of hormones (questionable/bad) to Vitamin A rice (good). But then that's the issue: popular will isn't known for fine distinctions.

Let's add to the mix the Portland mayor's grand fuck-off to anti-fluoridation activists, the North Carolina legislature's bill banning sea rise and the ongoing fights over vaccination.

On the other hand, science is a human process, and there are plenty of historic cases to give one pause in making policy based on today's science too quickly. As North Carolina battles over compensation for people whose lives were ruined by eugenics programs, it's worth remembering the damage done based on what seemed like sound science at the time, especially when good scientists' aversion to absolute certainty is removed and democratic rights are ignored.

For a more modern example, throw in Sam Harris' misreading of neuroscience to conclude that we should start brain scanning people accused of a crime. 

This is a classic conflict of two desirable goals running into each other: in this case people should have a say in what goes on in their communities and ideas are tested by observable evidence and experiment. 

So where's the dividing line? When science and democracy seemingly collide, who decides what wins? Plebiscite? Grand Science Council? What are systems are possible that respect science and popular will? Is that impossible?

Let's discuss below.

Coptic saints and old bargains

An Egyptian Coptic monk before a 2009 Easter Mass. Photo via Getty Images.

There's a bleak, interesting piece over at NSFWCorp (to which you should subscribe) by Gary Brecher on how a Coptic emigre came to cooperate with Protestant fundamentalists in turning a YouTube video into a weapon. It's a glimpse to the absolutely fucked-up mentality that a history of pogroms and capricious authority inflict.

But there's a part I have issues with (I also disagree that the region's swinging towards jihad, but that's another post), when Brecker talks about the Arab Conquest of Egypt, way back in the grand 'ol seventh century:

Egyptian Christians have been trying the other way, the turn-the-other-cheek way, from the beginning. When the Arab horsemen took on the few Greek garrisons in Egypt in the 7th Century, the Egyptian Christian civilians reacted the way peasants everywhere react to kings hacking at each other: They stayed out of it and figured it didn’t make much difference whether it was a Greek or Arab profile on the coins, since they weren’t likely to have any either way.

What the fellahin (peasants) found out too late is that this was one of those invasions that really does make a difference. That’s one of the hardest judgment calls anyone has to make: a peasant deciding whether to fight or let the guys who can afford swords use them on each other. Most times, the right answer is “stay the Hell out of it,” but there are times it’s worth helping your local vampire lord, because something worse is coming over the horizon. For Egyptian Copts, there were about 1370 years of bad times—and counting—in the dust cloud behind that Arab cavalry.

This is not exactly how things played out. The Copts actually had really good reasons for not helping out the Byzantine Empire and equally sensible reasons for not just turning the cheek but actively cooperating with the Arabian invaders. It actually worked: the Copts got a much better deal from the Caliphate than from the Byzantines.

For awhile, anyway. It's an interesting story, and a reminder of how much of the world is littered with the consequences of old bargains.

There is no They in Libya

A woman protesting the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, from this series of photos by Libya Alhurra TV.

Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed in the attacks, was respected by many in Libya, especially Benghazi, for his role in assisting the fall of the Qaddafi regime. As more evidence emerges, it seems the attack was planned well in advance, and that Libyans also died defending Stevens and the other Americans in the consulate.

Remember: no culture, anywhere on the planet, is represented by its worst extremists. There is no They.

Poems for Friday: Table Talk

Edouard Manet, At the Cafe

A tip of the hat to Ivanrich for highlighting this amazing poem by Billy Collins, appropriate for a time when many things are up for discussion, and we usually get where we are going. 

Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus,
one of us—a bearded man with a colorful tie—
asked if anyone had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

The differences between these two figures
were much more striking than the differences
between the Cornish hen and the trout amandine
I was wavering between, so I looked up and closed my menu.

If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows:
the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their approach.
Saint Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

I think I'll have the trout, I told the waiter,
for it was now my turn to order,
but all through the elegant dinner
I kept thinking of the arrows forever nearing
the pale, quivering flesh of St. Sebastian,
a fleet of them forever halving the tiny distances
to his body, tied to a post with rope,
even after the archers had packed it in and gone home.

And I thought of the bullet never reaching
the wife of William Burroughs, an apple trembling on her head,
the tossed acid never getting to the face of that girl,
and the Oldsmobile never knocking my dog into a ditch.

The theories of Zeno floated above the table
like thought balloons from the 5th century before Christ,
yet my fork continued to arrive at my mouth
delivering morsels of asparagus and crusted fish,

and after we ate and lifted our glasses,
we left the restaurant and said goodbye on the street
then walked our separate ways in the world where things do arrive,

where people usually get where they are going—
where trains pull into the station in a cloud of vapor,
where geese land with a splash on the surface of a pond,
and the one you love crosses the room and arrives in your arms—

and, yes, where sharp arrows can pierce a torso,
splattering blood on the groin and the feet of the saint,

that popular subject of European religious painting.
One hagiographer compared him to a hedgehog bristling with quills.