I was having coffee with Pieter Hintjens talking about a bunch of crazy ideas fueled by caffeine and lack of sleep when I decided I need to become a defense contractor and build weapons. If you know me you probably scoff at the idea that I actually have something to contribute in the field of defense but read on before you judge. Before I explain my idea for a weapon I need to discuss some characteristics of what we’ll call the enemies of freedom. Enemies of freedom would be countries like Iran, North Korea, and Taliban tribal chiefs in regions of Pakistan like East Whathefuckisstan that don’t like us westerners very much. Some would say we need to defend ourselves from these enemies of freedom. We customarily use the military for this sort of ‘defense’. In a way this makes sense because someone who is dead can’t really attack your freedom. An error in judgment made by the Bush administration was that if you use the military to get rid of the despots ruling a non-free country the population of that country will welcome Americans as liberators and naturally adopt freedom (and give us their oil). Of course experience has shown this isn’t quite true, you have to kill quite a large number of the non-freedom adopters before you manage to convince the survivors that being alive and free is better than being dead and not free. Some never do quite figure this out and so we have suicide bombers. Killing people is a really bad way of spreading freedom. The people being killed tend to get pissed off if you start killing them and so it becomes easier for their despotic leaders to point the finger of blame at the nasty westerners doing the killing which takes the focus off the despotic leaders and the killing and the torturing that they do to remain in power. This tends to perpetuate non-freedom. Anyway, the non-free people really don’t care about freedom. What they really want is enough to eat, a nice place to sleep and no worries that they will be arbitrarily hauled off in the middle of the night and tortured. They don’t know that in many countries people have enough to eat, have nice places to sleep and can pretty much say whatever they want to without fear of night torture and that these types of things follow from having a free society. This is because the leaders of non-free people try really hard to control the information interchange with the outside world.
This is where my weapon idea comes in. The philosophy behind my weapon is to inundate the non-free with information (and consumer goods) from the free world. My weapon consists of portable solar powered kiosks. Each kiosk contains internet enabled computers with browsers bookmarked to Amazon.com, Ebay, You Tube and a variety of popular porn sites. Each kiosk has a certain amount of store credit that can be used to purchase consumer goods and also dispense free espresso and other coffee drinks. Dozens of kiosks can be stacked inside a C-130 Hercules for rapid parachute deployment over a non-free country. The idea is that you seed a non-free area with hundreds of internet kiosks and the non-free people of the area will start using them, communicating with the outside world, buying stuff and browsing porn. The kiosks would also provide a place to sleep and the store credit could be used to buy food. If the despots leave the kiosks in place, the populous will naturally be assimilated into the consumer culture and people in these countries will soon be too dept ridden to stop working and go to war against the west. If the despots attempt to take the kiosks people will be outraged for being deprived of their porn and consumer goods and will overthrow them. In any of these cases the west comes out looking like the good guys. We’re not killing people, we are merely providing consumer goods, coffee, a nice place to sleep and some harmless diversions. Also, I’d have to think that one of my little kiosks would be cheaper than your basic smart bomb, currently a common tool used by the military to liberate people . The GBU-39 variant of the 250-pound class bomb equipped with an INS/GPS guidance system costs about $100,000 apiece. I think I could build one of these little kiosks for a lot less than that.
Last Tuesday night I went up to Manhattan to visit my friend Dmitri. Later when I was taking the train back to Princeton Junction they announced that Obama won the presidential election. The train erupted in applause and cheering. I don’t know that there were any McCain supporters on the train but if there were they were keeping a pretty low profile.
I grew up in a town that would be the cultural equivalent of Wonder Bread so one of the things I like about my job is that is that I get to know people from all over the world. I was talking to one of my Chinese friends today and mentioned something about her recent marriage ( something she said made me think she was recently married ). She corrected me saying that she had a college age daughter (which I already knew) and that I should infer from this that she had been married many years. I responded that the daughter could have been from a previous marriage. She replied she was old fashioned. Then she said ‘When you marry a dog you become a dog. When you marry a pig you become a pig’. I’m really not sure what sort of ancient Chinese wisdom she was trying to pass on but it does exemplify what I enjoy about interacting with people from other places. Every so often I’m surprised by some idiom or custom like celebrating Maslenitsa or learning how to really insult someone in Tamil.
I went to a party at a CSA farm last weekend. I knew about one person there so I was uncomfortable as hell. The premise of the party was fairly interesting, everybody brought food and helped dig sweet potatoes.
Here are some of the potatoes.
Here are some of the diggers eating.
Here’s part of the farm.
I basically get paid to think about stuff. Here’s an article from Ars Technica that cites a study that indicates that heavy mental effort leads to much bigger meals. So now I have an excuse.
Yep. No more long hair. Chopped it all off. No reason. Quit bugging me about it.
I got together for supper with my niece Kate, and her husband Archie. Kate and Archie are great adventurers who I am totally in awe of. Last year they canoed down the Mississippi river from the Twin Cities and then after they did that, turned around and walked a pilgrimage route from Spain to France. The cool thing is that they did these things with a minimum of money. They just went and did it. Anyway, I met them for supper on W. 52nd street in Manhattan for supper at the Bombay Palace. I thought since Kate is a vegetarian that an Indian restaurant would be the best bet. The food and service were great and the price was right too, appetizers, naan, two entrees and drinks for eighty five bucks. Not bad for New York.
I’m very interested in the concept of free will and the implications that stem from the degree to which free will exists. I’m of the opinion that free will is largely an illusion. We think that we make decisions with our conscious minds largely free of the influence of instinct or similarly programmed responses when in fact the opposite is true. This Scientific American article asks “If people come to believe that they don’t have free will, what will the consequences be for moral responsibility?”
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. Really. In a way I suppose that’s good because the Hotels DJ puts me up in are typically nicer than my current living situation. At least one of my situations. Its nice to have someone clean up after you and have all your cooking, laundry etc taken care of for you. Right now I’m sitting in Philly on standby trying to get out of town before the forecast thunderstorms start to back up flights. I’m turning around and flying back out early Monday morning and the last thing I want to do is to get stuck spending the night here because my flight got canceled. Spending Saturday flying back, and then turning around and flying out again is not a pleasant prospect.
Last Saturday I went up to Manhattan and saw Spamalot. I wasn’t really expecting much, I’m not really a theatre kind of guy, but I had the good fortune to get a couple of center second row seats so I decided what the hell and went. Sometimes it good to get away from the computer after all. I saw Cats along time ago and I was underwhelmed so I wasn’t really expecting much. But a show based on The Holy Grail, well, how bad could it be. It turns out that I had a great time, the show was fabulous. I laughed continuously through the whole show.
