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The end of the world: A brief history
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

<http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3490697> The Economist The end of the world A brief history Dec 16th 2004 Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? A VERICHIP is a tiny, implantable microchip with a unique identification number that connects a patient to his medical records. When America's Food and Drug Administration recently approved it for medical use in humans, the news provoked familiar worries in the press about privacy-threatening technologies. But on the notice boards of raptureready.com, the talk was about a drawback that the FDA and the media seemed to have overlooked. Was the VeriChip the "mark of the beast"? Raptureready.com runs an online service for the millions of born-again Christians in America who believe that an event called the Rapture is coming soon. During the Rapture, Christ will return and whisk believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. (Raptureready.com advises the soon-to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those left behind-husbands, wives and in-laws-about the horrors in store for them.) Furnished with apocalyptic tracts from the Bible, believers scour news dispatches for clues that the Rapture is approaching. Some think implantable chips are a sign. The Book of Revelation features a "mark" that the Antichrist makes everybody wear "in their right hand, or in their foreheads". Rapturists have more than a hobbyist's idle interest in identifying this mark. Anyone who accepts it spends eternity roasting in the sulphurs of hell. (And, incidentally, the European Union may be "the matrix out of which the Antichrist's kingdom could grow.") Christians have kept faith with the idea that the world is just about to end since the beginnings of their religion. Jesus Himself hinted more than once that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of His followers. In its original form, the Lord's Prayer, taught by Jesus to his disciples, may have implored God to "keep us from the ordeal". Men have been making the same appeal ever since. In 156AD, a fellow called Montanus, pronouncing himself to be the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, declared that the New Jerusalem was about to come crashing down from the heavens and land in Phrygia-which, conveniently, was where he lived. Before long, Asia Minor, Rome, Africa and Gaul were jammed with wandering ecstatics, bitterly repenting their sins and fasting and whipping themselves in hungry anticipation of the world's end. A bit more than a thousand years later, the authorities in Germany were stamping out an outbreak of apocalyptic mayhem among a self-abusing sect called the secret flagellants of Thuringia. The disciples of William Miller, a 19th-century evangelical American, clung ecstatically to the same belief as the Montanists and the Thuringians. A thick strand of Christian history connects them all, and countless other movements. Don't get left behind Apocalyptic belief renews itself in ingenious ways. Belief in the Rapture, which enlivens the familiar end-of-time narrative with a compellingly dramatic twist, appears to be a modern phenomenon: John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century British evangelical preacher, was perhaps the first to popularise the idea. (Darby's inspiration was a passage in St Paul's letter to the Thessalonians, which talks about the Christian dead and true believers being "caught up together" in the clouds.) It is not easy to say how many Americans believe in Darby's concept of Rapture. But a dozen novels that dramatise the event and its gripping aftermath-the "Left Behind" series-have sold more than 40m copies. New apocalyptic creeds have even sprung from those sticky moments when the world has failed to end on schedule. (Social scientists call this "disconfirmation".) When the resurrected Christ failed to show up for Miller's disciples on the night of October 22nd 1844, press scribblers mocked the "Great Disappointment" mercilessly. But even as they jeered, a farmer called Hiram Edson snuck away from the vigil to pray in a barn, where he duly received word of what had happened. There had been a great event after all-but in heaven, not on Earth. This happening was that Jesus had begun an "investigative judgment of the dead" in preparation for his return. Thus was born the Church of Seventh-day Adventists. They were not the only ones to rise above apparent setbacks to the prophesies by which they set such store: the Jehovah's Witnesses of the persistently apocalyptic Watchtower sect survived no fewer than nine disconfirmations every few years between 1874 and 1975. Which way to Armageddon? Why do end-of-time beliefs endure? Social scientists love to set about this question with earnest study of the people who subscribe to such ideas. As part of his investigation into the "apocalyptic genre" in modern America, Paul Boyer of the University of Wisconsin asks why so many of his fellow Americans are "susceptible" to televangelists and other "popularisers". >From time to time, sophisticated Americans indulge the thrillingly terrifying thought that nutty, apocalyptic, born-again Texans are guiding not just conservative social policies at home, but America's agenda in the Middle East as well, as they round up reluctant compatriots for the last battle at Armageddon. (It's a bit south of the Lake of Galilee in the plain of Jezreel.) Behind these attitudes sits the assumption that apocalyptic thought belongs-or had better belong-to the extremities of human experience. On closer inspection, though, that is by no means true. Properly, the apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. There is then a fall, followed by a long, rather enjoyable (for some) period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between good (the returned Christ) and evil (the Antichrist). Good wins and establishes the New Jerusalem and with it the 1,000-year reign of King Jesus on Earth. This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly. Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: "apocalypse" comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose. Norman Cohn, a British historian, places the origin of apocalyptic thought with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), a Persian prophet who probably lived between 1500 and 1200BC. The Vedic Indians, ancient Egyptians and some earlier civilisations had seen history as a cycle, which was for ever returning to its beginning. Zoroaster embellished this tepid plot. He added goodies (Ahura Mazda, the maker and guardian of the ordered world), baddies (the spirit of destruction, Angra Mainyu) and a happy ending (a glorious consummation of order over disorder, known as the "making wonderful", in which "all things would be made perfect, once and for all"). In due course Zoroaster's theatrical talents came to Christians via the Jews. This basic drama shapes all apocalyptic thought, from the tenets of tribal cargo cults to the beliefs of UFO sects. In 1973, Claude Vorilhon, a correspondent for a French racing-car magazine, claimed to have been whisked away in a flying saucer, in which he had spent six days with a green chap who spoke fluent French. The alien told Mr Vorilhon that the Frenchman's real name was Rael, that humans had misread the Bible and that, properly translated, the Hebrew word Elohim (singular: Eloha) did not mean God, as Jews had long supposed, but "those who came from the sky". The alien then revealed that his species had created everything on Earth in a space laboratory, and that the aliens wanted to return to give humans their advanced technology, which would transform the world utterly. First, however, Rael needed financial contributions to build the aliens an embassy in Jerusalem, because otherwise they would not feel welcome (a bit lame, this explanation). Although the Israeli government has not yet given its consent, the Raelians-those persuaded by Rael's account-continue to welcome donations in anticipation of a change of heart. The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced "egalitarian and communistic fantasies" to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, "The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still." Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, "The Great Year", Mr Campion draws parallels between the "scientific" historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem. Hegel saw history as an evolution of ideas that would culminate in the ideal liberal-democratic state. Since liberal democracy satisfies the basic need for recognition that animates political struggle, thought Hegel, its advent heralds a sort of end of history-another suspiciously apocalyptic claim. More recently, Francis Fukuyama has echoed Hegel's theme. Mr Fukuyama began his book, "The End of History", with a claim that the world had arrived at "the gates of the Promised Land of liberal democracy". Mr Fukuyama's pulpit oratory suited the spirit of the 1990s, with its transformative "new economy" and free-world triumphs. In the disorientating disconfirmation of September 11th and the coincident stockmarket collapse, however, his religion has lost favour. The apocalyptic narrative may have helped to start the motor of capitalism. A drama in which the end returns interminably to the beginning leaves little room for the sense of progress which, according to the 19th-century social theories of Max Weber, provides the religious licence for material self-improvement. Without the last days, in other words, the world might never have had 65-inch flat-screen televisions. For that matter, the whole American project has more than a touch of the apocalypse about it. The Pilgrim Fathers thought they had reached the New Israel. The "manifest destiny" of America to spread its providential liberty and self-government throughout the North American continent (not to mention the Middle East) smacks of the millennium and the New Jerusalem. Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption. Watch this spacesuit Noting an exponential acceleration in the pace of technological change, futurologists like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil think the world inhabits the "knee of the curve"-a sort of last-days set of circumstances in which, in the near future, the pace of technological change runs quickly away towards an infinite "singularity" as intelligent machines learn to build themselves. From this point, thinks Mr Moravec, transformative "mind fire" will spread in a flash across the cosmos. Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, relegates Mr Kurzweil and those like him to the "visionary fringe". But Mr Rees's own darkly apocalyptic book, "Our Final Hour", outdoes the most colourful of America's televangelists in earthquakes, plagues and other sorts of fire and brimstone. So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a beautiful bit of Revelation puts it: God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. Yes, perhaps. But, to be sure, not everyone agrees that salvation, when it comes, will appear clothed in a shiny silver spacesuit. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Is There Censorship?
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/books/review/19DONADIO.html?8bu=&pagewant…> The New York Times December 19, 2004 ESSAY Is There Censorship? By RACHEL DONADIO In accepting a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation at a black-tie gala in Manhattan last month, Judy Blume, the doyenne of young-adult fiction, delivered herself of the following admonition: ''Your favorite teacher -- the one who made literature come alive for you, the one who helped you find exactly the book you needed when you were curious, or hurting, the one who was there to listen to you when you felt alone -- could become the next target.'' A target, that is, of censorship. Blume's books, which address sexuality and religion with a frankness that has made many a grown-up squeamish, have been among the books most frequently banned from public school libraries over the years, and so the author certainly knows whereof she speaks. Yet there was something slightly alarmist in Blume's remarks. In somber, insistent tones, she spoke as if the authorities were lurking behind the doors of the Marriott Marquis ballroom ready to burst in at any moment and break up the party. Blume's speech perfectly captured the mood in certain literary circles these days, where air once thick with now banned cigarette smoke instead hangs heavy with talk of the C-word. But the kind of censorship Blume has faced concerns individual libraries choosing not to lend her books, or placing restrictions on who can borrow them. It isn't about government harassment, even though that's what Blume seemed to be implying. The definition of censorship has loosened so much that the word has become nearly devoid of meaning. Long gone are the days when the government banned racy books like D. H. Lawrence's ''Lady Chatterley's Lover,'' Henry Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer'' or James Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' When it comes to the written word, censorship debates are no longer about taste and decency -- although those issues are much in the news concerning the visual arts, television and radio. Instead, the debate over books tends to center on geopolitics, national security and foreign policy. Today, most defenders of the written word are focusing their energies on opposing certain sections of the USA Patriot Act, chief among them Section 215, which states that federal investigators can review library and bookstore records under certain circumstances in terrorism investigations. Larry Siems, the director of international programs at the PEN American Center, strikes an oft-heard chorus when he denounces ''the growing use of government surveillance and government intrusion into your creative space.'' This, in turn, feeds a concern ''that the government is able to see more deeply into our intellectual lives,'' Siems says. Where there is smoke, there may very well be fire, but there may also be mirrors. It's often hard to draw the line between perception and practice, between how certain government regulations are viewed and how they're actually being enforced. The very mention of the Patriot Act is enough to drive many publishers, writers, librarians, bookstore owners, readers and concerned citizens into a near-paranoid frenzy at the idea that the government is intruding into their personal business, although few can cite specific instances in which that is the case. Indeed, the marketing department of any given publishing house probably has far more power over free expression in America than any government office; if it decides a smart book won't sell, the publisher may not sign it. Attitudes are rampant, but facts are harder to find. And ultimately, grandstanding and self-righteousness obscure the fact that some cases do approach government censorship. Consider two recent lawsuits. This fall, a group of publishers and Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and leading women's rights advocate in Iran who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, filed two separate lawsuits against the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, which places serious restrictions on importing written work by authors in Iran, Sudan, Cuba and other countries under United States trade embargo. Under these regulations, buying the rights to unwritten books or making significant editorial changes to written works without a license is considered ''providing a service,'' and therefore akin to trading with the enemy, something punishable with jail time and fines of up to $1 million. Publishers argue that this regulation violates the First Amendment. OFAC devotes most of its resources to investigating terrorist financing and narcotics trafficking, and the regulations are largely intended for those aims. Some of the regulations at issue have been on the books for decades -- the Trading With the Enemy Act dates to 1917 -- and since the 80's amendments have been added to exempt ''informational materials'' from being subject to sanctions. But the current fuss dates back to this spring, when the Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a particularly stiff response to a query from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, which wanted to publish papers by scientists from countries under embargo. The Treasury office ruled that the institute could edit a manuscript from a country under embargo, and engage in peer review, but that making any ''substantive or artistic alterations or enhancements of the manuscript'' would be illegal without a license. Likewise, no publisher could market a book and no literary agent could sign an author from an embargoed country without a license. This sent the publishers through the roof. In September, Arcade, an independent publisher; the international writers' organization PEN; the Association of American University Presses; and a division of the Association of American Publishers filed suit against the foreign assets office. ''I think that censorship is the biggest danger that could confront this country, aside from physical attack,'' Richard Seaver, the editor in chief of Arcade Publishing, said in a recent interview in his comfortably cluttered Manhattan office. ''Censorship is never dead. It can always rear its ugly head. The danger is greater today than in the past 30 years.'' A month later, Ebadi -- the Iranian human rights lawyer (and Iran's first Nobelist), who under the rules can't sell her memoir to an American publisher -- filed her own suit, along with the Strothman Agency of Boston, which can't officially represent her. Ebadi raised the censorship question in an Op-Ed article in The Times last month (which she could publish because newspapers are exempt from some of the regulations). ''If even people like me -- those who advocate peace and dialogue -- are denied the right to publish their books in the United States with the assistance of Americans, then people will seriously question the view of the United States as a country that advocates democracy and freedom everywhere,'' she wrote. ''What is the difference between the censorship in Iran and this censorship in the United States? Is it not better to encourage a dialogue between Iranians and the American public?'' Salman Rushdie, the president of the board of trustees of the PEN American Center and an old hand at such debates, wrote in a declaration as part of the suit: ''Writers in Iran, Cuba and Sudan cannot publish freely in their own countries. It is a tragic and dangerous irony that Americans may not freely publish the works of those writers here, either.'' Publishers say several books have been suspended or canceled pending the ruling, including ''City of Columns: Historic Architecture of Havana'' by Alejo Carpentier (Smithsonian Institution Press), ''The Encyclopedia of Cuban Music'' (Temple University Press) and a paper by geologists at Shiraz University in Iran for an issue of the journal Mathematical Geology. ''Even if there isn't a single case where they actually prosecuted, there's a famous chilling effect,'' says Leon Friedman, a lawyer for PEN and Arcade who helped bring the lawsuit. ''Publishers just won't take a chance.'' Molly Millerwise, a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, declined to comment on the lawsuits. She says that over the years, no more than a dozen license applications have been submitted, most of them since last year, and none have been denied, although some are still pending. She says the department encourages publishers to approach them with queries. So why don't the publishers simply apply for a license? Just ask any self-respecting publisher. ''I'm not going to ask permission,'' Seaver says. ''That's the Iranian way of doing things.'' He says Arcade is going full speed ahead with ''Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature,'' which is due out in April. He acknowledges that the lawsuit might help draw attention to the book. ''I think libraries will be more attentive because they will have to be. Booksellers, too.'' You can't help getting the sense that there is a certain amount of public relations going on here. Ebadi could conceivably have sold the rights to her memoirs in Britain, and the British publisher could have subsequently sold the American rights. But that wasn't the point. ''American readers deserve to be hearing directly from someone like Ebadi,'' says Wendy Strothman, the literary agent and former publishing executive who is informally representing Ebadi. Strothman says Ebadi might well have been able to get a license ''because of her stature as a Nobel laureate,'' but the lawsuit was ''a matter of principle.'' It's also not entirely clear whether the Treasury Department would allow an American publisher to import such a work from Britain. ''There are so many weighing factors,'' Millerwise says. Ebadi hasn't yet written her memoir. In her statement to the court, which reads a little like a book proposal, Ebadi says her book would discuss ''how I became a lawyer, a judge and a law professor despite the obvious and often official obstacles women in Iran have had to face.'' There certainly does seem to be a market for Iranian women's memoirs. Both lawsuits cite the success of Azar Nafisi's best-selling ''Reading Lolita in Tehran,'' about a group of women who met weekly in secret to read forbidden works of Western literature, and of ''Persepolis,'' Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up during the Iranian revolution. Nafisi emigrated to Washington in 1997, and Satrapi now lives in France; neither could have published her book in Iran. For her part, Nafisi says she finds the Treasury Department regulations ''mind-boggling,'' and has written a letter to the court supporting Ebadi's suit. ''I understand sometimes there might be sanctions,'' Nafisi says. ''The point about this law is the people it will hurt are the people who have been suppressed in that country anyway.'' She continues: ''The principle of publishing should be understanding, should be more knowledge. On principle I think you have to publish even Ayatollah Khomeni!'' Although the Treasury rules have been on the books for ages, the lawsuits play into the literary world's general dislike of the Bush administration. When the regulations ''reached international ears, it was a very clear example to the international community of a kind of American cultural closed-mindedness,'' Larry Siems of PEN says. ''I spent a lot of time explaining to my international colleagues that this was not this administration's doing.'' Both lawsuits may very well be settled in the coming months. In November the Treasury Department asked for a one-month extension so it could file its response to the suits in January. ''The reason for the requested extension is that the parties anticipate that there may be developments with a possibly significant effect on the posture of the case, such that the briefing may need to be refocused or may even prove unnecessary,'' the Treasury Department's attorney wrote to the judge, according to a copy of the letter provided by the Strothman Agency's lawyer. The group of publishers received a similar letter, one of its lawyers said. Both sets of plaintiffs agreed to the extension. It remains to be seen whether the Treasury Department will adjust its regulations or rule only on those specific cases. Meanwhile, these lawsuits have provided many in the literary and publishing world with a cause -- one that's far more concrete than nebulous fears about the Bush administration or the Patriot Act. And it's certainly more satisfying to focus on censorship than on the future of publishing. It also seems to get the creative juices flowing. ''There's always a clash, an underlying tension, between politics, which is basically trying to keep the status quo, and literature, which is constantly questioning the status quo,'' Nafisi says. ''This tension between politics and culture is healthy. Each of us are playing our roles.'' You might say that all this conflict about infringements -- both real and perceived -- on free expression bodes well for free expression. Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Flaw with lava lamp entropy source
by Major Variola (ret) 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

I've been running a 1970s-era lava lamp for some time, and found that it can enter a stable attractor where you get a non-circulating blob o' wax at the bottom. While Walker et al.'s (?) LL video entropy source is cute/clever, the general lesson we can take from this is to be careful that physical sources do not fail. Cooling the lamp and restarting it seems to have put it back into a quasi-random physical trajectory. I suppose my visual observation counts as an online entropic monitor that any physical source apparently should have. This was driven by a 40 watt bulb and the ambient temperature dropped when it stabilized. Shaking did not restart it; only cooling and then reheating did. Now back to your regularly scheduled war crimes.

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New revollutionaary peenjs enlaargment tool! solicit
by Andy Cummings 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

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Israeli Airport Security Questioning Re: CRYPTO-GRAM, December 15, 2004
by R.A. Hettinga 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

At 11:41 PM -0600 12/14/04, Bruce Schneier wrote: > Security Notes from All Over: Israeli > Airport Security Questioning > > >http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/12/security_notes.html > >In both "Secrets and Lies" and "Beyond Fear," I discuss a key >difference between attackers and defenders: the ability to concentrate >resources. The defender must defend against all possible attacks, >while the attacker can concentrate his forces on one particular avenue >of attack. This precept is fundamental to a lot of security, and can >be seen very clearly in counterterrorism. A country is in the position >of the interior; it must defend itself against all possible terrorist >attacks: airplane terrorism, chemical bombs, threats at the ports, >threats through the mails, lone lunatics with automatic weapons, >assassinations, etc, etc, etc. The terrorist just needs to find one >weak spot in the defenses, and exploit that. This concentration versus >diffusion of resources is one reason why the defender's job is so much >harder than the attackers. > >This same principle guides security questioning at the Ben Gurion >Airport in Israel. In this example, the attacker is the security >screener and the defender is the terrorist. (It's important to >remember that "attacker" and "defender" are not moral labels, but >tactical ones. Sometimes the defenders are the good guys and the >attackers are the bad guys. In this case, the bad guy is trying to >defend his cover story against the good guy who is attacking it.) > >Security is impressively tight at the airport, and includes a >potentially lengthy interview by a trained security screener. The >screener asks each passenger questions, trying to determine if he's a >security risk. But instead of asking different questions -- where do >you live, what do you do for a living, where were you born -- the >screener asks questions that follow a storyline: "Where are you >going? Who do you know there? How did you meet him? What were you >doing there?" And so on. > >See the ability to concentrate resources? The defender -- the >terrorist trying to sneak aboard the airplane -- needs a cover story >sufficiently broad to be able to respond to any line of >questioning. So he might memorize the answers to several hundred >questions. The attacker -- the security screener -- could ask >questions scattershot, but instead concentrates his questioning along >one particular line. The theory is that eventually the defender will >reach the end of his memorized story, and that the attacker will then >notice the subtle changes in the defender as he starts to make up answers. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Frank Zappa, american composer
by Major Variola (ret) 18 Dec '04

18 Dec '04

At 08:56 PM 12/17/04 -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote: >the shiny pages of ''Hippie'' is to breathe deeply. My copy fell open at a >manifesto by Frank Zappa, in which he admitted that ''A freak is not a >freak if ALL are freaks,'' and went on to assert that ''Looking and acting >eccentric IS NOT ENOUGH.'' How true. I didn't bother wasting my attention enough to see if FZ was deemed a freak or not in this article. I will tell you that he was not into pharmaceuticals but was one of the finest american composers of the last century ---and Tipper Gore[1] will burn in hell for wasting his time. If you want to appreciate his brilliance, the _yellow shark_ album (which puts to music the US form required of immigrants) will inform you. [1] A publicly known mentally ill person who spawned drug-abusing future citizens and slept with liars.

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Where Aquarius Went
by R.A. Hettinga 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/books/review/19HITCHEN.html?8bu=&oref=log…> The New York Times December 19, 2004 Where Aquarius Went By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS HIPPIE By Barry Miles. Illustrated. 384 pp. Sterling Publishing. $24.95. WHAT'S GOING ON? California and the Vietnam Era. Edited by Marcia A. Eymann and Charles Wollenberg. Illustrated. 209 pp. Oakland Museum of California/University of California Press. Paper, $49.95. BACK FROM THE LAND How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970's, and Why They Came Back. By Eleanor Agnew. Illustrated. 274 pp. Ivan R. Dee. $27.50. IN the summer of 1989 I was a speaker at a memorial for Abbie Hoffman. This was a rolling and unstructured all-day event, but at the closing moment the stage held the simultaneous presence of Bobby Seale, Norman Mailer, Amiri Baraka, William Kunstler, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg and one or two others whose names collectively spelled ''sixties.'' Camera lights popped and there were many independent filmmakers squinting through lenses. I later wanted a photograph of myself in this lineup, but was told after exhaustive inquiries that none of the organizers or participants could lay hands on even one. Thus I rediscovered the metaphysical truth that if you claim to recall the decade you were not really there. (Also, if you lay any claim to have been commemorating the high points of the 60's after a lapse of two further decades there is no proof that you were there, either.) Yet photographs (plus a certain pungent reek that some people, such as myself, never actually inhaled) are the best mnemonic prompting. To turn the shiny pages of ''Hippie'' is to breathe deeply. My copy fell open at a manifesto by Frank Zappa, in which he admitted that ''A freak is not a freak if ALL are freaks,'' and went on to assert that ''Looking and acting eccentric IS NOT ENOUGH.'' How true. And yet, what a long time it took to find that out. Here they all are: Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones -- this book includes a good deal of the British scene -- Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary. (The latter, the last time I saw him in the early 90's, was planning to have himself cryogenically frozen but was ''not to be reanimated during a Republican administration.'') Occasionally, there is a picture that jars. What exactly is Martin Luther King Jr. doing in a book with a title like this? He is standing on a road outside Selma under a billowing Stars and Stripes. He's wearing a suit and tie. He's not even trying to look or act eccentric, let alone freakish. The marketing of the 60's has come to necessitate the blending of quite discrepant images: the dogs of Selma and the bearded Puritans of the Cuban revolution, along with the moon-faced narcissists and dropouts of Haight-Ashbury and the groupie-draped avatars of rock. (Francis Ford Coppola later managed this subliminal association even better, synthesizing the music of The Doors with the near-psychedelic bloom of napalm in the verdant foliage.) This would be another way of saying that the days of love and peace had their sordid and nasty side, too. The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was idyllic for about five minutes before the following famous flier was distributed: ''Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gang bang since the night before last. The politics & ethics of ecstasy.'' The ''3,000 mikes'' there are micrograms of LSD (''Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'' in the Sergeant Pepper ecstatic version) and represent 12 times the ''normal'' dose. I still know people who undertook such voyages of the imagination, or had them inflicted upon themselves, and who never quite came back. It is conventional to say that ''the 60's'' of the herbivorous -- in both senses -- Woodstock ended with the homicidal events of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (where Hell's Angels beat and stabbed a man to death in front of the stage) and with the sadistic fiesta of Charles Manson on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills. Why is it conventional to say this? Largely because it is true. The Christlike beard of John Lennon mutates into the Judas-like visage of ''Charlie,'' whose disciples were robotic and spaced-out sadists. It was an open secret even at the time that some of the supposed ''communes'' were places of twisted, paranoid cultism -- the pseudo-Satanic ''Process'' group was one such warning -- and in retrospect the subsequent events of Jonestown seem easy to predict. Yet Frank Zappa and John Lennon were icons on the wall of Vaclav Havel, who had always considered himself a ''60's person'' and, two decades later, helped bring down an unsmiling authoritarianism without a shot being fired -- and to the accompaniment of a joyous effusion of rock music, jazz, improvised theater and blue jeans. To the extent that the decade had a moral seriousness that could be transmitted forward, this inhered in the partly spontaneous opposition to an unjust war in Indochina, and to the coincidence of this movement with the battle for civil rights. To this day, there are people who are convinced that they took part in these struggles just by being young and alive at the time, and who have the beads and the Dylan albums to prove it. A great merit of ''What's Going On?'' is that it recreates, more in words than pictures -- though there are some arresting photographs -- the especially tough way in which this was all fought out in the nation's most various and politicized state (if I may say that without offending New York readers). It was in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially, that the convergence of campus rebels, black militants and antiwar activists was most vividly on show. Many of the activists were short-haired and white-shirted Marxists of one stripe or another, who leafleted factories and served in the field with indentured farmworkers while trying to ''shut down'' the bases and induction centers that serviced the hideous war on the other side of the Pacific. Easy as it is to mock the atmosphere of Berkeley -- ''Berserkely'' -- in those days, there was a thread that connected the free speech movement to the freedom riders and to the exposure of depraved statecraft overseas, and this volume restores that connection with exemplary force. A rather telling chapter, toward the end of the book, recounts the long battle to build a Vietnam memorial in Orange County, Calif., this time to honor the many thousands of Vietnamese who fought against Ho Chi Minh and whose refugee families constitute one of the largest minorities in the state. It's brave of the editors to have included what many people think of as an irony of history -- an irony that is at their own expense. The friends I just mentioned, who took LSD and never quite returned from the trip, are in a different category from the friends who left town and seemingly disappeared altogether. Every now and then, one would hear people talk in mysterious tones about log cabins or geodesic domes on virgin land in Vermont or Montana, and the growing of organic vegetables. John Denver's song ''Country Roads'' made West Virginia a favored destination. Then there would be a brisk exit from the blighted city, with a car towing an assortment of furniture, tools, pets and sometimes children. The pull of nature and authenticity, so imbricated in the original material of the American Dream, had overcome the easy temptations of materialism. For me, there are only two really memorable scenes in ''Easy Rider.'' The first is when Jack Nicholson edges in from the side of the screen and we know at once that something has happened to American acting. The second is when Fonda and Hopper pull up at a remote rural commune where, among other things, bearded boys and full-skirted girls are broadcasting seeds into furrows from improvised sacks. (''You can tell just by looking,'' said a comrade of mine at the time, ''that nothing's gonna grow in those furrows except footprints.'') There was always a slight embarrassment to be experienced when these would-be Amish came sidling back to town, to resume work in brokerages and banks and universities. To this day, that especially vile reminder of the epoch -- the graying and greasy ponytail trailing off the balding pate -- is their living memorial. Eleanor Agnew's lovely memoir of this movement of primal innocence is at once honest and hilarious. She recaptures the period with unerring skill: a period when the Apollo mission had shown us our fragile, blue planetary home from outer space, thus promoting (first) ''The Whole Earth Catalog'' and (second) a mentality that despised the science and innovation necessary for the taking of that photograph in the first place. Countless educated young Americans went off the map, in pursuit of Walden or some other version of bucolic utopia. They learned to chop wood and sometimes to grow crops, and they got hypothermia and piles. Irving Howe, when attacked for being a sellout by some young master of certitude at Columbia University, turned on his tormentor and hissed: ''You know what you're going to be? You're going to end up as a dentist.'' This was meant, in the context, as an impressive put-down of bourgeois aspirations. Yet here is John Armstrong, from a family of dentists in Michigan, who is introduced to us by Agnew with the perfect pitch she brings to quotations. Armstrong ''started a premed program in college but 'quickly discovered that medicine wasn't my bag, which shouldn't be misconstrued to mean that I had the slightest clue as to what my bag might be.' '' With his new wife Darma -- a name that just might be coincidental -- he embarked on homesteading in the Upper Peninsula of his home state and found it very snowy indeed. It was probably just as well that neither he nor Darma needed the services of a dentist -- surely one of civilization's great boons -- during the time when they were frozen in. Agnew is at her driest and wittiest when she describes the reaction of her sodbusting ''sisters,'' in particular, to the hygienic arrangements and then to the knotty question of natural childbirth. More than one agreed to have a baby on a kitchen table before getting pregnant again and heading as fast as possible back to town for ''serious numbing drugs.'' If you look back to the founding document of the 60's left, which was the Port Huron statement (also promulgated in Michigan), you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity. It forgot what Marx had said, about the dynamism of capitalism and ''the idiocy of rural life.'' Earlier 18th- and 19th-century American communards had often been fleeing or preparing for a coming Apocalypse, and their emulators in the 1960's and 1970's followed this trope as well, believing everything they read about the impending crash, or the exhaustion of the world's resources. The crazy lean-to of the Unabomber began to take dim shape at that period, even if many of the new pioneers were more affected by the work of the pacific Tolstoy or of C. Wright Mills (who used to recommend, if memory serves, that people should build their own cars as well as their own houses). Is there a moral to point out here? Of course there is. Maybe more than one. The first is that, as Agnew deftly notes, more of her friends ought to have read about the Joad family before setting out. The second is that not all was wasted or futile. Everybody in society now has a better idea of our relationship with the natural order and our kinship with animals, and we are no longer so casual about what once seemed the endless bounty of our environment. In some ways, we have the ''love generation'' to thank for this. Meanwhile, though, the anti-globalization movement has started to reject modernity altogether, to set its sights on laboratories and on the idea of the division of labor, and to adopt symbols from Fallujah as the emblems of its resistance. Conservatism cannot and does not, despite itself, remain static. It mutates into something far more reactionary than anything from which the hippies were ever fleeing. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor at New School University. His collection of essays, ''Love, Poverty and War,'' has just been published. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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[Antisocial] Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theorist Offers $100,000 Prize (fwd)
by J.A. Terranson 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

Thursday, Dec. 16, 2004 Sept. 11 Conspiracy Theorist Offers $100,000 Prize NEW YORK (Reuters) - Jimmy Walter has spent more than $3 million promoting a conspiracy theory the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States were "an inside job" and he is offering more cash to anyone who proves him wrong. The millionaire activist is so convinced of a government cover-up he is offering a $100,000 reward to any engineering student who can prove the World Trade Center buildings crashed the way the government says. "Of course, we expect no winners," Walter, 57, heir to an $11 million fortune from his father's home building business, said in a telephone interview from California on Wednesday. He said a panel of expert engineers would judge submissions from the students. Next month, he also launches a nationwide contest seeking alternative theories from college and high school students about why New York's World Trade Center collapsed. The contest offers $10,000 to the best alternative theory, with 100 runner-up awards of $1,000. Winners will be chosen next June. The World Trade Center's twin towers were destroyed after hijackers slammed two commercial airliners into them. The attack in New York killed 2,749 people. Various official investigations give no credence to Walter's theory. A Sept. 11 commission spokesman did not return calls seeking comment. Walter insists there had to be explosives planted in the twin towers to cause them to fall as they did, and also rejects the official explanation for the damage done at the Pentagon. "We have all the proof," said Walter, citing videotapes and testimony from witnesses. "It wasn't 19 screw-ups from Saudi Arabia who couldn't pass flight school who defeated the United States with a set of box cutters," he said. He dismissed the official Sept. 11 commission report, saying, "I don't trust any of these 'facts."' Walter has spent millions of dollars to bolster support for his case, running full-page ads in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Newsweek, as well as alternative newspapers and 30-second TV spots. He points to a Zogby poll he commissioned last summer that showed 66 percent of New Yorkers wanted the 9/11 investigation reopened. Walter has spent about 30 percent of his net worth on his efforts. "I am a patriot fighting the real traitors who are destroying our democracy. I resent it when they call me delusional," he said.

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Re: Gait advances in emerging biometrics
by Major Variola (ret) 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

At 12:48 PM 12/17/04 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: >(Also, politics isn't about people on the Net. It's about people marching in >the >streets). And RPGs. Lots and lots of RPGs. And MANPADS.

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Re: pgp "global directory" bugged instructions
by Jon Callas 17 Dec '04

17 Dec '04

Thanks for the bug report. We appreciate your help in fine-tuning the language in the verification emails of the beta test of the PGP Global Directory. We noticed this one, ourselves, and put out an improvement to it on Tuesday. Please check it over and see what you think of the improved version. If you would like to send bug reports to us directly, please feel free to send them to beta(a)pgp.com. Cypherpunks and Cryptography are both inefficient ways to get them to us, as Cryptography waits for Perry to approve the post, and Cypherpunks waits for Bob Hettinga to forward it. However, the Global Directory does not consolidate information from any other keyservers. It is a replacement for the old keyserver, keyserver.pgp.com, and will take over that venerable old server's job once beta test is concluded. We are, however, migrating a number of keys from the old keyserver to that one. Think of the new keyserver as a mix between traditional keyservers, mailing list servers like mailman, and a robot CA. Its intent is to improve upon the older keyservers by giving some modicum of assurance that keys in it belong to someone, as well as allowing someones to recover from forgetting their passphrase. Jon On 16 Dec 2004, at 7:13 AM, R.A. Hettinga wrote: > > --- begin forwarded text > > > Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 05:50:22 -0500 > From: Adam Back <adam(a)cypherspace.org> > To: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)minder.net> > Cc: Cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> > Subject: pgp "global directory" bugged instructions > User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net > > So PGP are now running a pgp key server which attempts to consilidate > the inforamtion from the existing key servers, but screen it by > ability to receive email at the address. > > So they send you an email with a link in it and you go there and it > displays your key userid, keyid, fingerprint and email address. > > Then it says: > > | Please verify that the email address on this key, adam(a)hashcash.org, > | is your email address, and is properly configured to send and > | receive PGP secured email. > | > | If the information is correct, click 'Accept'. By clicking 'Accept', > | your key will be published to the directory, where other PGP users > | will be able to retrieve it in order to encrypt messages to you and > | verify signed messages from you. > | > | If this information is incorrect, click 'Cancel'. By clicking > | 'Cancel', this key will not be published. You may then submit > | another key with the correct information. > > So here's the problem: it does not mention anything about checking > that this is your fingerprint. If it's not your fingerprint but it is > your email address you could end up DoSing yourself, or at least > perpetuating a imposter key into the new supposedly email validated > keyserver db. > > (For example on some key servers there are keys with my name and email > that are nothing to do with me -- they are pure forgeries). > > Suggest they add something to say in red letters check the fingerprint > AND keyid matches your key. > > Adam > > --- end forwarded text > > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' > -- Jon Callas CTO, CSO PGP Corporation Tel: +1 (650) 319-9016 3460 West Bayshore Fax: +1 (650) 319-9001 Palo Alto, CA 94303 PGP: ed15 5bdf cd41 adfc 00f3 USA 28b6 52bf 5a46 bc98 e63d -- Jon Callas CTO, CSO PGP Corporation Tel: +1 (650) 319-9016 3460 West Bayshore Fax: +1 (650) 319-9001 Palo Alto, CA 94303 PGP: ed15 5bdf cd41 adfc 00f3 USA 28b6 52bf 5a46 bc98 e63d ________________________________________________________________ This message could have been secured by PGP Universal. To secure future messages from this sender, please click this link: https://keys.pgp.com/b/b.e?r=cypherpunks%40minder.net&n=NsqztWUvWFO%2Be83dn…

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