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The pseudonymous mad hedge fund trader on the new world order:

Cyber warfare is a huge new battlefront. Some 100 countries now have this capability, and they have stolen over $50 billion worth of intellectual property from the US in the past year. As much as I tried to pin [CIA Director Leon] Panetta down on who the culprits were, he wouldn’t name names, but indirectly hinted that the main hacker-in-chief was China. This comes on the heels of General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Chinese cleaned out the web connected mainframes at both the Pentagon and the State Department in 2007. The Bush administration kept the greatest security breach in US history secret to duck a hit in the opinion polls.

Margaret Atwood on why we should not assume any bird species will survive without our help:

One more statistic: according to Al Gore, 97% of charitable giving goes to human causes. Of the remaining 3%, half goes to pets. That leaves 1½% devoted to the rest of nature – including the crisis-ridden oceans, the eroding, drying, or flooding land and the shrinking biosphere on which our lives depend. How crazy are we?

I wonder if pet owners could contribute to such causes via their purchases of certain brands of pet products? If it’s working for Working Assets…

Watching The Girlfriend Experience on Netflix Instant Play: it’s like a movie, but not. It’s also like a reality TV show, but not quite that either. What is clear is that the dialogue is timely and the characters are, I guess, real-like.

Context transforms content. It’s not that people like reading at a computer, though many have more opportunities to do so in the modern workplace. It’s that writing and reading under new conditions transforms that writing. In the case of the web, which is driven as much by pleasure as by technology (as is everything), the new writing may be more pleasurable because it’s more efficient: Michael Kinsley for The Atlantic:

One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long.

I often forward news articles to friends and colleagues. Very seldom do I include the first sentence. More often than not I quote a paragraph halfway through or even the closer. Quite often I quote someone who is in turn being quoted by the author. Kinsley pinpoints the failures in the original prose that prompt me – and doubtless many others – to thus compensate with our edits. (That the above quote is the opening sentence testifies to the author’s clarity on the matter.)

update

my friend KF responds:

I disagree that length itself is the problem, and in the end Kinsely’s argument seems less about length and more about bad journalism. Not too many words but the wrong words. If I am fascinated by a topic I will read a very long article about it–as I just did read The Atlantic’s story about “The Science of Success” –online. And when I email a passage from the middle of a story to others it is because it is that particular passage felt powerful to me, and I think it might to the person I am emailing as well, but others might find different passages hit them over the head. What seems to one person like the most essential point, might not be to someone else…

All very good points. But i wonder just how many possible pull quotes an article has. And the web is like reading one pull quote after another.

Who selects those pull quotes is interesting. It’s only sort of me in that I select other, better readers – or “quote pullers” – to follow. When I do eventually read some longer stories I do so thanks to their very pointed introductions. It’s that kind of introduction that Kinsley brings up as essential for news and too late or too subtle in some stories.

Maybe his wording was not the best: it’s not that they’re too long but that they take too long to get to their premise?

America would be a stronger, more democratic and far wealthier nation if our journalists asked questions as directly as the team of Frank Dohmen and Klaus-Peter Kerbusk do in this interview for Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Is the crisis over for you?

Kleisterlee: No, it isn’t. But we are getting it under better and better control, as you can see from our costs.

SPIEGEL: No wonder, if you do what Philips does and cut thousands of jobs at short notice.

That’s just the beginning.

SPIEGEL: In the consumer electronics division, you’ve already closed almost all of your factories. Is Philips in danger of facing the same fate as German consumer electronics companies like Grundig or Telefunken, which went bust despite being household names?

And, whoa:

SPIEGEL: If you’ll pardon our saying so, you’re talking exclusively about computer companies. Your direct competitors are companies like Panasonic and Sony — who still do their own manufacturing. Isn’t your retreat more of a declaration of bankruptcy in the face of competition from Southeast Asia?

Just as important, perhaps, is the way the interviewee, Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee, is able to parry each question without – as far as I can tell – losing his cool or equivocation. A great read.

postscript

also, it’s quite possible that I’m asking journalists (and CEO’s) to be more German in their interactions.

A different take on last week’s terrorist attack in Afghanistan that killed a team of U.S. intelligence officers and an Al Qaeda double agent. The argument: it proves the terrorist group is not very well organized as they could have extracted more use from a live double agent.

Silver lining to a very dark and toxic cloud, I guess.

Lillia Shevtsova skewers European politicians (and, well, the U.S.) for giving Russia a pass on human rights violations.

The NYT: “The Story lost its magic amid the realization that speculators had simply been selling to other speculators, making the real estate market look like a Ponzi scheme.”

Random Specific is a Meena Kadri’s delightful blog on visual culture and design, now focused on Mumbai, India. I especially liked the post on Dabbawallas or lunch delivery services which reminded me of packets in TCP/IP.

via The Browser.

The NYT on last week’s suicide bombing by a double agent:

The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper ranks, and also seemed potent evidence of militants’ ability to strike back against their American pursuers.

I’ve read and heard bits and pieces of arguments that claim Avatar is an old, racist narrative: the white man who comes to rescue the dark natives.

Yes and no. Yes, that is what appears to be happening for much of the movie. But, no, that’s not the end of the story.

The only way to drive a stake through the heart of a narrative is to rehearse and then change it. That’s what happens in Avatar.

At the very end of the movie, the bad guy, a white man, confronts the hero, a white man, and says: How does it feel to betray your race?

Apparently, it feels fucking fantastic. Something like getting to start life over again as a skinnier, taller, more muscular, more finely featured you. Also, it means you can talk to every form of life. And you can fly.

All of which must look pretty attractive to the hero of the movie: a vet in a wheelchair who can’t afford to pay for the surgery that would bring his legs back and whose only mentioned family, his twin brother, was shot dead in a robbery before the movie begins.

It might also look attractive to anyone who has ever wanted to start over again. Or fly.

The promise of flight is a constant in history. Sometimes, flight can only be achieved at great cost. In this movie, a story for children as much as adults, the price for flight is environmentalism.

Specifically, a vague post-industrial environmentalism which, voiced by the famous Alien-killer Sigourney Weaver, is interesting if not compelling: there’s more wealth in a planet that is exploited holistically and incrementally than one that is stripped apart, all at once, according to a plan that can’t – or won’t – see beyond a single financial quarter.

I’ll take a few cliches and the badly written prayer scenes any day in exchange for that fairy tale.

postscript

At some point during my second viewing, my eyes drifted off the expensive visuals and I focused on an all-too-familiar musical score for a supposedly brave new world. It was then that the lyrics from another cheesy musical score came to my mind: “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

I find Avatar’s take at environmentalist science fiction, corny missteps and all, more satisfying than that 1980’s dystopia. In the dried out, anarchic world of Thunderdome, it’s too late to hope for a green planet. In the violent yet balanced world of Avatar, a very green and vibrant planet can still be saved.

Even if that world is a Pandora’s box, it’s filled with plenty of signs of hope. (Many of which are modeled after creatures in our own oceans.)

Ben of Ben and Alice:

Here’s my try: the damage of addiction, irrespective of the narcotic, is that it replaces real life. Potheads, including some friends of mine, generally believe that marijuana is not an addictive drug. But if you check out from the real world every day, you are missing out on real life.

Of course, there is no consensus on what real life consists of. If watching four hours of TV makes you a couch potato, doesn’t reading a novel do the same thing? Most people consider reading novels a worthwhile use of time, but of course it depends on the novel; I’d advise putting down the Danielle Steele and smoking a joint instead.

From a lively recap of the liberal revolution (youth movement) in Iran and what Western states can do to help it:

See for example how an attempt by the regime to smear an opposition figure by showing him in women’s clothes has backfired – the symbols used by the regime are swiftly being annexed by protesters themselves and used to hit back in fierce post-modern irony.

This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.

A small sampling of an incredible lecture by Tony Judt who is also the author of one of the most moving essays I’ve read in some time.

via MeFi.

I’ve worn all sorts of ridiculous outfits to stay warm at home. For example:

But wearing a blanket as clothing strikes me as more than just an indulgence. Are Snuggies another sign that too few Americans live in energy efficient homes?

I found this to be refreshingly counterintuitive:

Everyone knows I am a defender of theocratic government, although not in the current form. The difference lies in the fact that I intended for the people to choose the jurist and supervise his work… I now feel ashamed of the tyranny conducted under this banner. What we see now is the government of a military guardianship, not the guardian of Islamic scholars.

The late Grand Ayatullah Hossein Ali Montazeri.

Seinfeld famously explored the social meaning of speed dial. Who has explored the mores of the ringtone? (The “secret lovers” ad for T-Mobile notwithstanding.)

Games that spit out inane status updates will be the death of Facebook as a social messaging tool.

It may very well thrive as a gaming platform — and, perhaps, it was always destined to become one. What is “poke” if not a game of tag?

the browser is one of the most useful sites I have found in the last year.

Italy, you never cease to dismay me: Operation White Christmas.

My mother-in-law remembers as a child her mother setting aside a few kernels of corn in early November and placing them in water so that they would germinate by Christmas and could thus be used as decorations for a nativity scene.

We are surprised by how quickly time passes. “Is it really Christmas again, already?” But if we relied on more natural processes, our sense of time would change. Perhaps, it would even slow down.

Arete on Wikipedia.

Corruption in Russia – norms in China + clueless European and US consumers = massive illegal logging.

An entertaining and spirited critique of President Obama by Drew Westen.

The NYT on the psychology of restaurant menus:

Tabla is just one of the many restaurants around the country that are feverishly revising their menus. Pounded by the recession, they are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.

via MeFi.

We literally do not know where we are in Afghanistan. via Yves Smith

The excellent every day is the same dream has been making the rounds online this week.

It’s a very modest experiment but one yields has rich results; yet more proof that the future of narrative is interactive.

With movies and television, the actors are the hook that brings the viewer along. With “games,” the hook is the possibility for change, which turns the viewer into an actor. If plays are a way to explore moral possibilities, they will be all the more transformative when experienced in the first person.

Imagine the bildungsroman as simulation.

via Waxy.org/links

Reading a mostly lame set of predictions for the future, I came across this: “Virtual reality – Glasses which show you a world that isn’t there.”

That’s exactly wrong. The drive to realize “Virtual Reality” is not to escape into a world that doesn’t exist but to hone in on the one that does; it’s a selective vision.

As Alice in Wonderland illustrates, virtual reality is a dive into the borders of reality, into the dense, unseen background that we push out of sight, out of of mind in order to focus on and execute our daily routines.

That’s why “augmented reality”, both the term and the experiences it describes, has caught on where “virtual reality” never did.

From a fascinating discussion of the moral dimension of our economic collapse, Steve Randy Waldman:

One group of people who did not violate traditional norms during the course of the credit bubble is the ordinary homebuyer who bought at the top of the market without forming an opinion on valuation, trusting market prices and professional advisors. Most homebuyers are not market timers: they purchase when the circumstances of their own lives make homeownership attractive, and take regional prices as given. Certainly the momentum of home prices affected Joe Sixpack’s (or G.I. Joe’s) buy vs. rent decision. Nevertheless, this group had the least culpability for the malfunctions of the credit market yet they are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs. McArdle thinks it would be desirable, from a social perspective, to reinforce norms under which borrowers have a moral obligation to pay. I would rather lenders ensure that loans where it would not be mutually advantageous for the borrower to pay are rare. To uphold McArdle’s norms on the backs of people who were drawn into a speculative bubble not of their making, whose “banking relationship” consists of a note that has been sold and resold multiple times, and whose risks are legally shared with other parties that have not hewn to any standard of good behavior, is simply unjust. Even if they could bear the cost. Even if they buy new furniture with the savings.

via The Browser.

Mark Lynas:

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

Avatar is as close to perfect as a movie gets – and certainly one that is oriented, by market forces, for a PG-13 release. Others will do a much better job assessing the movie’s many gifts to our culture (e.g., in terms of technique, it leaves the uncanny valley far, far behind) so I want to just note two things: its possible political impact and, quickly, its most jarring failure.

A few months ago I wondered if movie makers, having rendered so many visions of a mechanical / industrial future, would begin to: “realize a post-industrial reality, using CG to render green where there is currently steel.”

Avatar does. Incredibly.

Kids who grow up watching WALL-E and now Avatar are probably going to have an easier time imagining future scenarios that are not based on industrial-age values – i.e., the externalities that often don’t get considered when deciding whether or not to replace a complex ecosystem with a much simpler, and perhaps, doomed one.

(I’m not sure what role Star Wars played in global political culture during the 80s and 90s – the SDI missile defense plan, aside – given that its message of rebels versus empire had already played out in much of the world by the mid 1970s. Roger Ebert has called Avatar a welcome successor to that trilogy and I agree – a hundred times over.)

Earlier this year, I passed along this anecdote about the Iraqi insurgent who loved Titanic: “He recounted watching it seven times and crying every time at the ending, as Kate Winslet lets the dead Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing North Atlantic.” Given Avatar’s complex politics – its celebration of both localism and “miscegenation” – I can’t begin to imagine how this movie will play out across the world.
 
Which is all the more reason to make note of one glaring shortcoming: the scenes of ritual prayer. Considering the sophisticated craftsmanship that went into imaging and populating the hybrid world of Avatar (familiar-alien, present-future, live-cg) the scenes in which the fictional Navi people are shown in prayer are corny and cliched. I don’t have the heart to research who is to blame for that oversight but they were clearly mismatched for the project – and if it was the director’s doing, he should have delegated. Taken out of context, they’re almost offensive.

postscript
Avatar’s environmental agenda is only one part of a broader satire. The plot pivots on a loaded bribe: a military official, acting on behalf of a corporation and its shareholders, offers a wounded veteran access to otherwise unaffordable health care. In exchange, the vet is asked to commit an act of betrayal.

It’s no Prime Minister’s Questions but, edited, the following performance is pretty entertaining. Senator Al Franken arguing on behalf of the reality-based community:

I know Franken as a comedian (I’m old enough to remember “Doggone it, people like me.”) so I’m primed to experience what he says as entertainment. That prejudice or, in marketing terms, consideration, is a significant advantage in our highly competitive media marketplace.

Priming has bolstered the careers of Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan. It’s also key to understanding the role that talk radio and now Glenn Beck plays for the right wing. It’s nice to see that psychological “shortcut” working for a Democrat.

Hybrids are difficult. Perhaps, even impossible.

Take, for instance, President Barack Obama. He is a white man and a black man. But to his detractors on the far right, he is all Black – indeed, the grossest caricature of an African-American, an exotic African from the distant past.

Because President Obama is quite literally neither black nor white, a mere photograph of his face is already a challenge to long-standing racial hierarchies. More disturbing still for the many Americans coddled by the previous administration’s mania for black and white absolutes, President Obama’s politics are also, well, complicated.

As the comedian Jon Stewart observed in describing the president’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: “Obama forcing us to live in area between absolutes. Brain hurts! Complicated!”

The fear of the in-between, of that which is neither one nor the other, is both ancient and universal because it is essential to the way our brains make sense of the world.

On Friday, the Pew Hispanic Center released a report that confirms just how entrenched the fear of a hybrid identity is, even among the hybrid:

“The melting pot is dead. Long live the salad bowl,” when it comes to how young Latinos and others perceive their place in America.

When asked how they first described themselves, 52 percent said their preference was for their family’s country of origin — Dominican, Mexican, Cuban, etc. — over American, which 24 percent favored. Even fewer, 20 percent, responded Hispanic or Latino.

More than three in four say they are “some other race” or identify Hispanic or Latino, even though, according to the Census Bureau, that is an ethnic designation. Sixteen percent of young Latinos identify themselves as white, compared with 30 percent of adult Latinos.

We experience cognitive dissonance – say, the paradox of being both one thing and another – as painful. We seek refuge from ambiguity in categories that are perceived to be whole (e.g., “Dominican, Mexican, Cuban”), and even in categories that are as ill-defined as “some other race.”

That last possibility strikes me as the most pregnant: it’s a placeholder. It implies: “we don’t know yet, we’ll figure it out later.”

The Riddle of the Sphinx reminds us that our identity is fluid: what creature walks on four legs, then two legs and finally three legs? As we mature, who we are and, more importantly, how we perceive ourselves changes.

If there is any one trait that applies to hybrids at any point in their process of emerging, it’s just that: they are defined by their becoming. They are always what they will be.

postscript
It’s a wonderful coincidence that the only character in Blade Runner who knows the protagonist’s true identity is played by Edward James Olmos. And that his tell is an origami unicorn.

From an excellent interview:

SPIEGEL: The US has not yet instituted any kind of reform policy. What we see is the government and the Federal Reserve pouring money into the economy. If one looks beyond that money, one sees that the economy is in fact still shrinking.

Volcker: What should I say? That’s right. We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.

SPIEGEL: To get the recovery to the point where it is right now has cost a lot of money. National debt will probably reach $12 trillion in 2019. Just serving the debt costs $17 billion a year — at least according to this year’s forecast. That’s difficult to sustain.

Volcker: You’ve got to deal with the deficit and you’ve got to deal with it in a timely way. Right now, with the unemployment rate still very high, excess capacity is still evident, and the economy is dependent on government money as we said. We are not going to successfully attack the deficit right now but we have got to prepare for attacking it.

SPIEGEL: Should Americans prepare themselves for a tax increase?

Volcker: Not at the moment, but I think we would have to think about it. The present tax system historically has transferred about 18 to 19 percent of the GNP to the government. And we are going to come out of all this with an expenditure relationship to GNP very substantially above that. We either have to cut expenditures and that means reducing entitlements and certainly defense expenditures by an amount that may not be possible. If you can do it, fine. If we can’t do it, then we have to think about taxes.

SPIEGEL: What kind of taxes do you have in mind?

Volcker: Maybe we should talk about energy taxes, which could be a big revenue producer.

Also, this:

Volcker: I must say, I admire Germany in this situation even with its high costs. In some ways, I think the labor cost is higher in Germany than it is in the United States but you can somehow maintain that export edge. You are dedicated to exporting, we are dedicated to financial engineering and it hasn’t worked out too well. I wish we had fewer financial engineers and more mechanical engineers. Tell me the secret of how the Germans keep this going.

via Yves Smith, once more.

Also: Paul Volcker on Wikipedia.

Matthew Yglesias responds to (or dispenses with) Matt Taibbi’s latest essay on President Obama:

Matt Taibbi has the latest in the endless series of articles and blog posts by everyone under the sun claiming everything in the world would be great if only Barack Obama were more left-wing. Taibbi is a much better writer than most people, so his contribution to this literature has a great deal more panache. That said, not only does his piece have the various factual problems noted by Tim Fernholz but it suffers from the same basic conceptual flaw as the vast majority of this literature—it ignores congress.

Writer Charlie Stross asks his readers to design a society that could survive a thousand year journey across space. Many of the responses are intriguing, especially those that are pregnant with possibilities. For example:

Chop it up into 5 or 10 distinct physically societies and do everything you can to make sure they don’t have the means to access one another. Have a computer controlled system allowing extremely unwieldy travel between adjacent areas once every ten years, e.g. a tunnel you have to crawl through which is open for 30 minutes.

How long before one or more of those societies makes it their primary objective to circumvent these artificial borders? And does that focus make the passage of time bearable?

I mention this exchange here because it’s an exercise in political science fiction, the intellectual backbone of my life for the last 20 years.

For what is Stross’ question about a society that can withstand a thousand year journey through space but a novel rephrasing of the question that has defined us all for millennia?

A spaceship in solar orbit, photographed from its satellite.

How should we live?

Ask Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, St. Augustine, etc., etc., etc.

Just passing that on. via Jon Gruber.

Lindsey Adelman makes beautiful lighting. She also teaches visitors how to reproduce her own works in a detailed PDF document supplemented by links to online retailers of the necessary parts.

Warhol is praised (and prized) for making unique art in the age of mechanical reproduction, artists like Adelman are to be credited for adapting to the age of digital reproduction.

Update: friend CP points me to Enzo Mari’s 1974 Autoprogettazioni (diy projects) as a precursor. Mari produced plans for do-it-yourself furniture.

An interesting proposition, among many:

In the Internet age, a student’s work is just as easily available to a professor on either coast. Why then would a professor be grading his or her own students? It is an invitation to dishonesty. A student who has learned nothing will not receive an F because the professor doesn’t want to admit that his teaching hasn’t been compelling and/or effective. Having the professor be simultaneously teacher, coach, and executioner sets up a bad dynamic in which students are afraid to admit weakness and ask for help.

It would cost nothing extra to have teachers at University of Kansas grade University of Massachusetts students and vice versa. The teacher at U. Kansas supplies the U. Mass teacher with the course syllabus and standards and the U. Mass teacher applies the standards without the bias of “these are the students who just sat through some lectures by the world’s greatest genius, i.e., me.”

via The Browser.

To have been in that room:

The former US Federal Reserve chairman told an audience that included some of the world’s most senior financiers that their industry’s “single most important” contribution in the last 25 years has been automatic telling machines, which he said had at least proved “useful”.

Echoing FSA chairman Lord Turner’s comments that banks are “socially useless”, Mr Volcker told delegates who had been discussing how to rebuild the financial system to “wake up”. He said credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations had taken the economy “right to the brink of disaster” and added that the economy had grown at “greater rates of speed” during the 1960s without such products.

via Yves Smith who adds: “OTC derivatives, which has mushroomed from 1992 onward, has been at best a wealth transfer device from the real economy to the financial economy, and has probably exacted a net cost on society as a whole.”