Terror, Trafficing in Evil

I’ve already posted twice about the NYTimes article that said we should “traffic in evil” to win the war on terror, which the author defined in such a way as to be unwinnable. Well, looks like we’ve been following that advice in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, this has completely defanged all the terrorist organizations that hate our government and caused the Middle East to love us and fear us. Rush Limbaugh calls it a “thoughtful” approach. Those of us who have not falled off the wagon (he must be back on drugs), are somewhat appalled. However, this is exactly what the NYTimes seems to think is a good idea. this is exactly what has been suggested. And it’s what we’ve been doing, according to the Red Cross and other groups, for more than two years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? the justified war? Where prisoners have now been held in inhumane conditions for two years with no access to legal counsel and without being charged with any crime. Remember how we were bring freedom to Afghanistan, quoth Bush, “once ruled by the brutal Taliban regime.” Now ruled by the brutal american regime.

Human Rights Watch articulates the problems with the reasoning behing the nytimes article,

But imagine for a moment that you’re an interrogator, and that you have in front of you a person who has information about an imminent attack on the United States. What would you do to get that information?

That is the classic “ticking bomb” scenario that proponents of torture always bring forward … But what we’ve found is that it puts you on a slippery slope that leads to extensive torture. If you can use torture against somebody who today you believe knows where the ticking bomb is, why not use torture on the person who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows where the ticking bomb is going to be in two weeks?
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/05/07/iraq8562.htm

and this reasoning leads directly to the kind of abuse that has been photodocumented in Iraq. I mean, these prisoners might know something, even if they haven’t done anything wrong themselves, right?
The Times suggested that we torture suspects for information. Not people convicted of something. Not even people who are charged with something, necessarily. People who might know stuff. The abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan are what happens when that reasoning is followed. And if this is not enough to convince you, if you think maybe these soldiers are not systematically “softening up” inmates, maybe they’re “blowing off some stream” (says Rush) or it’s not worse than Frat Hazing (say many people who are apparently unaware that frat boys volunteer for hazing and anyway it’s illegal at many schools), or maybe it is actually systematic, but who cares these guys are all foreigners, or whatever. If you want to excuse it: the NYTimes thinks we should start this sort of thing at home. That’s not just foreigners, in that case. That’s your neighbor. That’s your kid. That’s you. You, even as an upright Republican voter, have a duty to protect yourself by standing up against this at home and abroad.

and

Obviously, I’m procrastinating on my paper. This abuse thing is very very bad. but I must write my paper. I wonder if I have any “upright republican” readers.

shoutouts

thank you to David for recording, webcasting and photodocumenting thursday cocnert.

thank you to tim for organizing thursday concert.
thank you to dan for promoting thursday concert.
thank you to tim, dan and charlie for playing in thursday concert.
thank you to aaron for providing beer, seating, hospitality, mixing board and monitor speakers for thursday concert.
thank you to people who came/listened on the web to thursday concert.
thank you to sophie for offering a ride from airpot on wednesday.
thank you to david for offering a ride to the airport on wednesday.
thank you to angela for taking xena for the summer.
thank you to cola for offering me temporary lodging (while CN was to be unavilable)
thank you to mitch and to jean’s friend sarah for offering me bicycles (I will take one of you up on the offer)
thank you to ellen for offering me summer lodging
oh my, I am quite lucky to have had so many people be nice and helpful. I must now go back to working on my paper.

woot

I have republished my photo library. Concert pictures start on Page 12 or Page 13, depending on how you count.

There were a lot of people here last night. Every chair in the house was used. People were sitting on the coffee table. People were sitting on the floor. People were standing in the back. I didn’t count. But I was very nervous. I get very scared when I play, which is why I don’t do it very often and is why I should do it more often. I kept grabbing the wrong cord. And my hands were actually shaking, so it was hard to plug them in. When I play with my modular, I keep all the cords around my neck, so easy access. So eberytime I move, there’s the sound of cable ends clacking against each other. Something I didn’t think about. Normally, I just take a line out and don’t play in front of people, you know, so the cable sounds don’t exist. Weird playing in front of people. I have no idea how long I played or what I did. I started with a chaos patch. That’s when you take three oscillators and take the ouput of one of them and use it to control the frequency of the next one. So if the first one is a very low frequency and the next one is higher, it sounds like a siren as the first oscilator frequency modulates the second one. If you turn the first oscillator up into the audible range, you can’t hear the siren anymore, because the frequency modulation [fm] is too fast. So It makes a very complex wave form. In a chao patch, you take the output of the second oscillator and plug it into the FM jack of a third one. Then you take the output of the third one, and plug it into the FM of the first one,s o they’re all cascading down a line. This is chaotic. Then take the ouput of any one of them, chnage the base pitch of any of the other ones, and un predictable things happen. It’s complex. It tweaks in interesting ways. It’s a good foundation. I feel like if I play again, I need to start with a different base. Good thing I’m not playing again for a while. The downside of starting with a choas patch is that it uses all three of my main oscillators. I have a few more, including three below-audio-range LFOs (low frequency oscilalators – synths are full of TLAs) and two more audio range oscialltors. But those and two of the LFOs and in a tiny little adjunct synth, which I don’t know as well (and for which I have too few cables!). I want another oscillator. I know exactly which one I want. Alas, hardware is expensive, which is why I’ve been all laptop recently as it’s portable and software is free. I actually need a mixing board way more than I need a new oscillator and new filter and a new MIDI->CV (cv = control voltage) converter and more more more stuff. A new row of modules! After I win the lottery. But I’m happy I played and I think I will do it again, Cuz actually, my synth does have a pretty good performance aspect for experimental music. ooooh, Wiard makes a very nifty controller. It’s two joysticks, each of which gives you an X axis voltage and a Y axis voltage and a couple of buttons which can function as gates. somebody should sign me for a record deal and give me a huge advance which I can blow on modules and controllers. This is why analog synths were a great hobby during the dot com years and laptop music is a better plan for the immediate future.
Ok, yes, where was I? A ton of people showed up and then all quickly dispersed. Among the people who did not exit immediately, reviews were positive. Two professors came, including my advisor. If you missed it, there is a recording some place on the internet world wide web (as david calls it), but David has not told me where the recording exists. I want to listen. Will post when I know.

Webcast

Check tommorrow at 8:00 EDT: http://www.xkey.com/~celesteh/music/stream.html. That’s 5:00 PM on the west coast, btw. The stream will be archived for posterity, btw.

It’s just me jamming on my modular. People are more excited about seeing the synth than anything else, I think. I’ve never played it in front of anyone before. I use it for tape music. Because it takes up a long time to set up a patch and then it’s just one sound. Normally, I’ll spend half an hour setting up a patch and the record it for 10 minutes and repeat the process 8 times to make a 5-10 minute piece. It’s a nice way to work, building up layers, doing sections. By the time I have everything recorded, I usually know what the mix will be, so it takes me another 20 minutes or so to mix. then I have a new piece of tape music. Woot. In this case however, I need to set up faster, I guess, and come up with a patch that is interesting by itself. I’ve been practicing a bit. I dunno how much I can plan in advance. I know I’m going to build up a chaos patch and use that, cuz they’re interesting. After that? Hopefully people will dig it.

Wine, Women and Song

Yesterday was the last day of classes. Today was something called Spring Filng. Outdoor concert
with 21934325146723 undergrads swarming like ants. Stopped by for a minute. I’ve been drinking and whatnot since the afternoon. woot. So I’ve started my summer in the wine dept. Tommorrow night is song. And my still lurking Joan of Arc paper will have to do for women. I need to get that dern thing written. Or hell, maybe I’ll get groupies from my synth gig. heh.

More on terror

As I read the nytimes article one page at a time…. The author talks about winning or losing the war on terror. He does not define his terms, yet he seems to imply that one more terrorist attack on US soil would constitute a defeat. Presumably, the abscence of such an attack would constitue victory. But since an attack is always possible, victory is unattainable. It is an unreachable goal state, since it cannot be assessed until the end of time. This is a problem inherent in letting the pro-perpetual war folks define the terms of debate. They create a perpetual, unwinnable war, which is ultimately against ourselves. The writer “warns” against this pehnomenon, saying we want to hang on to some of our freedoms. But since he quotes the highly reliable Rice talking about terrorists absolutely planning on tampering in the november elections (oh, i just bet they will. i feel fear, and not from angry foreigners), his biases are clearly evident.

He is also too willing to excuse government misdeeds, stating, “Even so, after 9/11 we were frightened, and Congress and the government weren’t always thinking straight.” Right. The patriot act, passed by congress without having been read by any of the lawmakers, was definitely an act of political expedience, if not fear. But from whence did this act come? Who wrote it? Who had it sitting ready until the time was right to broaden police powers? Somebody planned it. They wrote the legislation and then sat on it, waiting for an opprtunity. That is not fearfully not thinking striaght.
He writes also, “To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil.” Even if we accept this line of thinking as valid, it still raises numerous problems. First of all, we already do these things abroad and the result of them has not been truth justice, and the american way. The result has been Hussein, the Shaw, massacres galore in south america, human rights abuses upon human rights abuses. And who do we trust when it seems like pre-emptive war is justified? Hitler neutralized the terrible Polish menace. Now we’re in Iraq, lookingin vain for Weapons of Mass Destruction. They were going to be horrible, remember? All aimed right at us. But it turned out, to nobody’s surprise, that really, we wanted to increase the profits of Halliburton, get control of oil and expand the reach of the welathy elite. Hussein did not become a bad guy when he gassed the Kurds. He became a bad guy when he nationalized the oil companies. Our definition of threatening our national interest corresponds exactly with threatening corporate interests. Our government will be more than happy to defend us with pre-emptive strikes, if by “us,” you mean oil companies. The greater evil, in our military adventurism since WWII, has always been the potential loss of corporate profits and power.
And how about defeating evil? When is it defeated? When we take over the capital of evil? when us troops occupy the 9th layer of hell? when jesus rises again and judges the living and the dead? Or is evil some sort of war we can win by attrition? Let’s say that right now in the world, there are 1000 people in terrorist cells, currently plotting horrible things. something must be done to stop them, obviously. Let’s say we bomb the hell out of villages suspected to be hiding terrorists. We kill 700 of them. And 10000 bystanders. Then there are only 300 terrorists left. And all the insanely angry freinds and relatives of the bystanders. We had 1000 terrorists. Now we have 20000. Fighting terroism with “evil” is fighting a hydra. Everytime you use violence without due cause, you inflame anger. Violence is a blunt and ineffective tool for change or communication. Moreover, it becomes the only tool. the more a stae uses violemce, the more it has to use violence. We would fall into a perpetually bloody struggle, leaving a trail of dead behind us. This is not a definition of “winning” a war on terror, unless by winning, you mean being the most effective, bad-ass terrorists. And damn, we already won that. Our elder staesmen are wanted war criminals. Look at what we did in Guatemala in the 80’s! Man, look where our aid money is going. The more a country violated human rights, the more military aid they receive from us.
no, i do not have time to be worrying about this.

I lack emotional robusteness

I want to say it’s cuz I’m tired, but really I just cannot handle emotional stress. I mean, if someone rejects me or I think they’re going to reject me, it freaks me the hell out. Even people I don’t like that much. I mean… I think this is definitely a pattern. I dunno what to do about it. Fortunately, people do not act in a manner that makes feel/fear rejection very often. And I can see how such a reaction might have come into my life recently or at least been recently amplified, although it’s scary to think how many of my life descisions might have really centered around this tendency. or not. i dunno. Obviously, if I’m going to be a functioning member of society, I need to be able to deal. step 1: recognize the issue. step 2: ?

I swear, I get happier and more functional every day. But “all better” continues to ellude me. I have to much stuff to do before wednesday to worry about this. maybe i’ll just live in a cave till i’m done here. and then live in a cave forever! no, not really. i should go look at my Feeling Good book, as it contains many strategies for dealing with stupid every day things. Cuz a lot of depression is just not knowing how to react to everyday things.

terror

In other news, the new york times magazine has an article on the war on terror, which i don’t have time to read, but which I’ve heard rumors that it says we should use torture in interrogations and carry out assasinations. Well, of course, we already do these things. where do people think Hussein got all that torture stuff? the CIA has the greatest torture technology in the world. A lot of the tools for it are manufactured right here at home. Torture = american jobs. And you can get training on how to do that plus learn how to set up death squads at Fort Benning, at the renamed School of the Americas. I’m going to assume that the writer is conviently ignoring US-sponsored terror and torture in client states (we do car bombs, yes we do) and thinks we should start torturing people domestically.
Oh that’s a great idea. For instance, torture in Iraq’s prisons have really raised our stature in the Arab world. The question, tho, I guess for people who utterly lack a moral compass, has to do with the ends of the means and not the means themselves. What countries openly assisnate and use torture? What countries have terror? Well, there’s a lot of terror in Europe. Want to know why there are no garbage cans in the London Underground? How about the see-though garbage recepticles around Notre Dame in Paris? Yes, other countries, like, I dunno, Spain and all over Europe deal with terror all the time. I’m picking them vs South American countries, because they’re all democracies. Also, as the US is the source of South American, terror, it would make an odd comparison. Anyway, all of these countries have to deal with terror periodically, but somehow they maintain democracy. Of course, they’ve had experiments to responding to terrorist events, like say, the Reichstag fire, by adopting a more totalitarian model. That didn’t work out so well.
Contrast this with Israel, a contry with a ton of terror and assymetric warfare. They torture. They assasinate. Doesn’t seem to help much. Seems to make things a lot worse.
Lookit, the head of the department of education recently called the NEA a terrorist organization. If we say, “you can torture peple, but only suspected terrorists,” then who is a terrorist? People blocking the entrances to federal buildings? (I’ve done it. It used to be called peaceful protest.) Teachers? This strategy is a pandora’s box. Police forces will always use every tool available to them to solve crimes. To do otherwise would be to underacheive. Do we want them to have this tool? What if you, yes you, were mistaken for a terrorist? what if you did something that sort of brushed against a definition of terrorism? I know a guy who thought it would be cool to scribble stupid grafitti in an airplace bathroom. For a good time call, or something lame. Well, if he’s done something that looked illegible, like those stylized scripts you see used in artistic grafitti, law enforcement could assume that he was communicating with other members of a terrorist cell aboard the plane. No joke. No exageration. It was a lame thing to do, but do we want to torture lame college students?
The part of the article I did read contains some errors. First of all, Al Queda was never monolithic. Politicans have asserted otherwise, but they also said Iraq had WMD. There are many groups who are upset about US foreign policy (and rightly so, as we export huge amounts of inequality and terror) and willing to respond to that with assymetric warfare. Trying to say they all follow one guy with a video camera is rediculous. The power of these groups lies in their independance. The writer goes on to talk about dirty bombs. The Journal of the Atomic Scientists, a publication which included Einstein as an associate of some kind, recently ran an article on dirty bombs. First of all, the material needed to make a dirty bomb, spent fuel rods, are extremely heavy and toxic. They are very hard to move. anyone involved in such a project would certainly quickly die of radiation poisoning. Ok, so even if you say they’re suicide bombers, it would take fo team of people to grab the rods and they would all die shortly thereafter. then, the spent fuel rods are attached to a conventional explosive device. Like dynamite or something. The idea is that they spread radioactive material everywhere. Well, the folks quoted in the article that I read, a trade journal for atomic scientists, say the risk of anyone being harmed by that is low. So fuel rods, who and unexploded are very radioactive and toxic, but once they’re dispersed, the little pieces are a lot less dangerous. You clear the area and then send in a cleanup team. I mean, it’s not harmless. People caught in the actual explosion would be maimed or killed. but not by the radiation, by the bomb. the real, huge danger from a dirty bomb is panic. Panic that is way out of proportion to the threat. the way to prevent massive damage from a dirty bomb is to inform people about the real (much lower than they think) risks and make sure that people stay calm. That’s how you fight the effectiveness of dirty bombs. Their danger and power is in the symbol, not in the actuality. Nobody would go to the deadly hassle of messing around with spent fuel rods if they knew it wouldn’t cause panic. but how have our leaders responded? By whipping up fear to a fever pitch. They’re smart people. They have undoubtedly been briefed on the real risks of dirty bombs and know that the real problem is panic. the fact that they have chosen to increase the risks associated with dirty bomb attacks rather than decrease them suggests that protecting us from terror is not their primary agenda. Not that this is surprising, given that they’ve been diverting anti-terror funds to our Iraq adventurism and totally ignored terror reports from before 9-11. As it’s clear that fighting terror is near the bottom of the Bush agenda, we need to ask ourselves why they or their lackeys would be lobbying for torture and assaination. It’s not to make us safer…

Got flight

May 12
Wed
BDL-OAK
Southwest Airlines Flight 278
Depart Hartford (BDL) at 4:55 PM
Arrive in Oakland (OAK) at 10:25 PM

Need: ride from oakland. Also need use of large suitcase or duffel bag for the summer.
classes are OVER! woot. Now I just need to write longer 20 page paper about Joan of Arc’s gender, clean up and document some supercollider code, and document doing stuff with digital performer. at the risk of getting a reputation for being a total slacker, tho, there is no serious deadline on the last one before fall. I should talk to Ron about it. I want to do really good docs and not rush them, and I can do them from my own little laptop, mostly.
Oh yes, and southwest is doing a one way fare sale, which actually also makes them the cheapest way to buy coastal round-trip tickets if your dates are more than seven days and less than two weeks off. and by far the cheapest one-way fare. if you are a wes musician, i can try to get you west coast gigs. i may be hosting a living room concert series in my own berkeley home. fyi

My summer plans

Drink, have sex, smoke pot and write tons of music. Not in that order. So I’m prolly not going to find a groovy job. oh well. I still get my stipend during the summer months. I can live large… errr… small on my wages. ideally, somebody else will pay for the beer. or: homebrew! home soon. dunno when, but soooooon.