Perception

Note: the following story is based on actual events, however the names have been changed.

Yesterday at work “Amanda” showed everyone her new necklace It looks like this:

I identified it at once: “It’s a Sierpinski Triangle!¹”

“Helen” identified it at once also: “It’s a christmas tree!”

Only “Homer” got it right: “It’s a Triforce [from the "Legend of Zelda" videogame]!”

As if there ever was any doubt, this proves that people see things differently. It also proves there’s a subtly difference between geek and nerd. A geek sees the world through the framework of geometry; a nerd, through the reference of videogames.

¹ A Sierpinski Triangle is an infinitely self-repeating two-dimensional geometrical object composed of patterns of this shape.

Inalienability of Human Rights

This morning I turned on the radio in order to encourage myself to wake up properly.

It was about 8am and a show called “The War Room with Quinn and Rose” came on, typical talk show fare. “Quinn” talked about several things to do with Barack Obama, his economics policy, the skin coloration of his cabinet, the concept of “moral stature” and other things.

Then he reached for a heated button: Guantanamo Bay. Obama has promised to almost immediately close it, citing moral alarum. Quinn ridiculed this plan, calling the inmates “monsters” and raising utilitarian objections saying that it would be impossible to try them (because they’ve been tortured) and impossible to extradite them as they are banned from their home countries.

This is irrelevant.

They must be put on trial or released. You cannot hold people for protracted periods of time, let alone forever, without trial! Just because they might be found not guilty is not a valid reason to avoid putting them on trial. In the very same show Quinn criticized “the liberals” for avoiding situations where the outcome of an action might be something other than what they desire.

Typical syndicated big-wig talk-show host hypocrisy.

Procedural difficulties cannot override human rights. A right is inalienable ipso facto, rights are not privileges that are granted by government or society, they are natural rights, incumbent upon the definition of human. We may argue about how they arise, some say god, some say evolution, some say the demiurge, others (nonsensically) appeal to consensus.

That is if course what is so very subtly denied in this case, these people are said to be “monsters”, “terrorists”, “enemy combatants”; the tacit implication is that they are not human because they have no decency. They may not have any decency, but humanity is not the same as human-ness.

It seems to me that this is something we don’t want to think about, “we” (society), don’t want to think that these people are the same as us, don’t want to realize the common right and responsibility of human-ness. We want to think “humans can’t be that evil”, all the while committing great evil by assuming guilt and flaunting our prejudice.

Solving the problem of Guantanamo Bay by keeping things as they now are, by suspending human rights is not the answer. “We” excuse our denial of their human-ness by calling them inhuman, but denying the human-ness of humans is inhuman. If humanness is that factor that “we” pretend differentiates “us” from “the terrorist” then are we not already lost?.

Stabbing at MCC

At this Sancho awoke, and feeling this mass almost on top of him fancied he had the nightmare and began to distribute fisticuffs all round, of which a certain share fell upon Maritornes, who, irritated by the pain and flinging modesty aside, paid back so many in return to Sancho that she woke him up in spite of himself.

- Cervantes

On tuesday,  the eleventh of November, two students were stabbed at MCC outside building 11. That was all that the unctuous channel 10 personalities could provide for much of its marathon flashing of “breaking news” graphics that evening. Rebeca Leclair narrated the unfolding tragedy with her usual, wildly inappropriate, ebullience.

“Someone was stabbed!”, “Someone was stabbed!”, they even interviewed the useless student corpus president, they were so desperate to dig up something to put on our screens. As time went on and the silliness of the everlasting “breaking news” banner became ever more painfully obvious, no new information seemed to be forthcoming.

Finally, at seven I tuned out.

I never bother with the News at 11 and that day was no exception. I put the matter out of my mind.

But I had a class today and that brought everything to the fore again. I was not, of course, hesitant to go to school but after an in-class discussion I learned several important new facts which quite unnerved me, frankly.

I was quite aware that the SUNY-ALERT system, which is supposed to ring everyone up if there is an emergency didn’t activate, neither I nor anyone else got the alert, the only official communication from the college to students was a boilerplate “your safety is our foremost concern, etc.” email from the PR department.

But what I didn’t realise was that noone thought to inform all the professors.

Each classroom as a telephone in it, as I found out when someone mistyped an number earlier that day and a previously unnoticed extension in the TV control-room went off, startlingly. Why did noone ring the professors? The doors can be locked.

But what would that have done? There is no procedure, according to my professor, no procedure whatsoever for dealing with this, she would not have known what to do! One of my classmates reported that another professor, upon overhearing the incident canceled class and turned everyone out into… building 11!

The emergency committee reportedly went to the scene of the emergency and stood about with their arms crossed, totally unclear about what to do.

Many people are furious, it is usual for college administrators to be wildly out of touch with reality but this is carrying the trope to the point of feeble parody. Something, anything, other than nothing should have been done.

This is not the only time that this has occurred, I am aware of people having being beaten up in stairwells, three this semester alone! MCC appears to suppress many more incidents than are heard of.

Until quite recently, when large “renovations” were installed there in a furtive effort to solve the problem, the nexus between buildings 1 and 3 has had a chronic plague of astoundingly coarse loiterers shouting, fighting, harassing students and accumulating carnal knowledge of various flavors. This of course is quite unsettling.

This particular distasteful rout has now dispersed to other places but the conceptual problem never went away. For instance the causeway between buildings eleven and three is still full of low-class people who are obviously not students mooning about and passers-by.

The ELC is full of people (who actually are students) downloading breasts, updating their Myspace and playing games, all the while talking on their mobiles, nonchalantly defying signs strictly forbidding all or some of this. I fail to see how installing oversized flowerpots in the ELC can to solve this problem.

The Public Saftey officers are about as effective as dime-a-dozen children’s plastic figurines. I have never seen them break up an altercation and more often then not they seem to be enjoying the scene.

So what to do?

I, for one, am going to consider leaving. This is not my college anymore.

History of Plausible Deniability

Plausibile Deniability is the doctrine and practice of The State keeping a buffer between itself and its actions, such that The State can, skirt illegalities and disclaim involvement in distasteful actions.

The archetypal example, is Government covert operations. Following the U.S. Senate Church Committee* inquiry into the actions of the CIA it was discovered that the Kennedy Administration and the CIA had batted about plans to murder several foreign dictators, including… Fidel Castro**. Although the President was clearly of a favorable disposition towards the actions he was not to be directly involved himself.

Because of this, he could maintain a plausible pretext of being unaware of the operation, perhaps even pretend to be shocked by it, should it come to light. An assassination effort could prove to be damaging and disgraceful for the President, so the CIA would take the full blame on his behalf should it become necessary.

The Church Committee termed this “plausible deniability” and the term stuck. This incident illustrates the actual implementation of the doctrine, the vague invocation of departments and command-chains so that specific persons can deny involvement.

It is not, of course, always the case that the denial won’t be immediately seen through by anyone with half a brain but the denial will always be plausible meaning that it could theoretically be true and therefore people will eventually forget about it. The sensational plans to embark upon an illegal foreign policy adventure a’la Rambo are now a mere footnote in history.

This sounds like a modern practice, and indeed its formulation as an actual specific political doctrine does appear to be fairly recent. However the practice itself dates from antiquity.

In 1170 the politically active Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett was shockingly murdered during vespers, in his own church by Royal agents. According to many sources King Henry II proclaimed “will no-one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”. No actual order to commit the act was ever issued. This was essential as such a thing would have provoked the wrath of The Catholic Church, a powerful force that could prove extremely damaging to The King. This was an early instance of plausible deniability.

In modern-times the term can sometimes be applied to things not related to The State, for instance cryptography. In this scenario an encrypted file is disguised as an unencrypted file, such as a simple picture (steganography) which is then itself encrypted separately. In this case one can, if under compulsion, provide the first decryption key but then plausibly deny that further keys exist.

In peer-to-peer communications, particularly illegal ones, a similar concept can be used. All computers in a P2P network might be configured to relay P2P traffic automatically across the network, thus everyone can claim that their computers simply relayed illegal information without their knowledge and the identity of the person who originally transmitted the illegal file (under some legal theories the only person actually liable) is unknowable.

One of the modern applications of State plausible deniablity is the practice of “extraordinary rendition”. In this practice the accused are moved by the US Government to countries where they are tortured. However, at no time does the US Government itself ever actually order, instigate or undertake torture***. As a result of this the US Federal Government has plausibly denied that it intends to permit torture–which is unpopular with its constituents–instead passing the buck on to vague command structures in other countries.

As in many cases, no-one is actually taken in by the fraudulent denial, however it is sufficiently plausible that even if a serious judicial proceeding on the matter should come to bear, it is quite unlikely that any specific person would suffer particular consequences as a result of the crime.

Notes:

*Not, unfortunately, anything quite so amusing as a sacerdotal inquiry into the workings of the State Machine…

**There was also allegedly a plot to contaminate him with estrogen to cause embarrassing physiological changes but it seems nothing ever came of this either.

***One side-effect of this is intrapersonal plausible denial, agents involved in the practice of extraordinary rendition can pharisaically quiet their consciences by claiming that they are technically not committing any immoral act.

Film Review: Gladiator

This is not a typical film for me, like the last film reviewed here, it was the recommendation of a friend, the same friend actually, so I had a fairly good guess what sort of film it was going to be like. This film arose out of a vigorous discussion of Plato’s views of theatre, I punted the proposition that amusement parks were morally worthless by dint of focusing solely on, well amusement. Although I think Plato was a wingnut I can understand where he was coming with some of his views on theatre.

By the same line of thought, though scarcely immoral, amusement parks are vacuous and saccharine; amusement parks are ultimately boring because they are superficial and emotive. Somehow this resulted in me agreeing to see the film Gladiator. (This is how conversations between us usually go).

This is the story of Maximus, it is the story of a decent man who fell far and landed hard. The story of a man who sought his redemption, in rage and hate and animus, but who destroyed himself in the process.

The other major characters in the story are Commodus, “Caesar Jr”, Lucilla, his sister Juba, a Numidian, and Gracchus, a republican senator.

During the opening half hour Commodus murders his father, the Caesar, to ascend the throne by deception. His father had planned to devolve his powers to Maximus with the eventual aim of returning power to the senate, much to the horror of his ambitious and personally insecure son. To secure his position he tries to execute Maximus however the attempt is bungled and Maximus makes a physics-defying escape, running home to rescue his family.

Commodus is, unfortunately, much more effective with his family however, his forces destroy the estate and murder his child and wife. Maximus buries the bodies and collapses in grief and exhaustion.

With him collapses the first phase of the character’s development, “Optimistic-Maximus”. He gives way to “Numb-Maximus”. This man looses all will to survive or fight or do anything for any particular purpose, he even looses his name. He is addressed simply as “Spaniard” during this time.

However, once he recovers from his numb-ness the death of his beloved family will prove a major, if not the sole, factor in the character’s development and a key event in the story’s causal flow, more on that later.

He is picked up by slave traders and meets Juba, a Numidian Farmer also in the caravan. Shortly, Proximo is introduced in one of the film’s few comic scenes. The slave-trader bustles up to him full of good news about his latest shipment and Proximo greets him angrily, to say the least; his Giraffes are defective! they won’t mate! Perhaps the most incongruous line in the whole show is Proximo’s apoplectic “You sold me queer Giraffes!”

Using the supposedly homosexual giraffe for leverage, Proximo is able to extort a much lower price for the slaves and then drags them off for training as gladiators. So numb is Maximus that he even refuses to fight during the training, characterizing himself as a scribe, claiming septilingualism (which is met with the caustic declaration that tomorrow he can “scream in seven languages”). Proximo berates the captives, cursing their mothers and telling them that they shall fight, while offering his own utterly nihilistic world-view as justification for the atrocity.

Spainiard (for he has lost his name) seems to take this view at face value, after all, it is not so very different from his own. Many of his actions during this period are motivated by nihilistic whim. Later, Proximo addresses his “Spaniard” advising him to be more creative in his destruction, more showmanship-like. In the next fight he obliges with a colorful double-handed sword-display… the crowd goes wild! Like all other acts during this period “Numb-Maximus” is here motivated by apathy apathy and recklessness. “Why not?” after all, he is thinking, “Nothing matters any-more.” He is personally lost and disoriented

The political motivation for the resumption of the games in the city of Rome is made evident during conversation between Gracchus and his ally Gaius. The games dazzle the people into surrendering their freedom, playing into the autocratic agenda of the new emperor. One cannot help but feel that here, like elsewhere the creators are waxing polemical about the George W. Bush administration to the Sept. 11 disaster. This, however cannot be the case as the film was released in 2000 and the lines themselves must have been written much, much earlier. It is interesting to watch the film through the lens of the post-9/11 world and see the relevance of the political statements.

Proximo proves to be a more complex character than previously expected, he turns out to be a former gladiator himself, he shows his Spaniard the wooden sword that is the symbol of his freedom, something granted personally… by the emperor…

In a flash, of course, Maximus realizes that this is a way he can get close to the emperor and obtain his revenge. This is the beginning of the end of “Numb-Maximus” and the beginning of the beginning of “Vengeful-Maximus”.

As his performance enraptures the crowd and delights the emperor, Maximus does get his chance, eventually, Commodus walks out after one of the fights to meet this “Spaniard”, bringing with him his young nephew. Agonized, he finds himself unable kill his foe because of the presence of the boy. The crowd forces Commodus to spare Maximus, beginning the emperor’s decline in to open madness.

This is an important moment for both characters, Maximus proves he can pull himself together and act rationally and even, by the standards of his day, decently. This is, of course, a necessary lens, we must view him in the context of; the moral standards of his day as, for by ours, he is a murderer of the worst kind, I’ll talk more about that later.

Casting his numbness aside, Maximus even argues with Proximo about the moral goodness of the fight, his resolve is now fixed. Things begin to move much more quickly now as he plots with Lucilla and Gracchus to re-unite himself with his old army and overthrow the emperor by force. Commodus suspects the plans, though, and by dint of threat to her son, forces Lucilla to reveal everything. His guards invade Proximo’s compound and Juba and the other gladiators hold them off while Maximus escapes, only to be recaptured.

Completely delirious, Commodus announces he will duel Maximus in the arena, however he stilettoes him in the lung to ensure his advantage, in-spite of this, driven by his hatred and overwhelming thirst for revenge Maximus is victorious, when Commodus looses his sword, his guards refuse to aid him and Maximus beats him to the ground and stabs him with his on stiletto.

But with his wound the exertion is too much, Maximus hastily orders the gladiators freed, Gracchus re-instated and all power returned to the senate before collapsing surrounded by visions of the afterlife. He dies in Lucilla’s arms, assuring her that her son is safe.

---

Maximus is played by Russell Crowe, who has his work cut out for him. The character is larger than life, and spends a good part of the film in a state of deep depression, this in-fact almost threatened to completely de-rail the production as depression is not a valid personality. The producers clearly hoped that we would simply not notice how dullardly Maximus is during his “Numb” period. Crowe gives the role his best effort though, and while I don’t think he deserved it he did win an Academy Award for the rolê.

Crowe gets off to a poor start but soon makes up for lost ground in the middle to end of “Optimistic-Maximus”, particularly when he prays for his family, which is touching without being sappy, the convincing tenderness and regard for his wife and child give much more depth to the character and perversely impel him later to vengeful blood-lust.

As mentioned during the plot overview, Maximus can be divided into four parts, “Optimistic-Maximus”, “Numb-Maximus”, “Vengeful-Maximus” and one not mentioned in the narrative, “Peaceful-Maximus”. Each Maximus represents a different phase of the character’s development as a result of events in his world.

“Optimistic-Maximus” peters quickly, he is tired but hopeful of returning home and growing vegetable-marrows. “Optimistic-Maximus” dies with his family and is replaced by “Numb-Maximus” who cares about nothing and initially just wants to sulk, but is stirred to cold nihilistic homicide in the arena.

“Vengeful-Maximus” is the Main-Maximus. This version of the character is driven by his personal rancor towards Commodus and the “need” to kill him for personal and political reasons. The enmity between the two is handled differently by both, Maximus is honed into a single-minded and charismatic killer, Commodus diffused into an erratic lunatic.

When Maximus slew his foe he also killed “Vengeful-Maximus” very abruptly, hinting that this is not a natural personality but one acquired due to intense adversity and hardship. The true, Maximus, at peace with himself and others then appears, briefly, before he too perishes, this-time literally. Maximus dies, in physical person, once, (as semi-blatantly foreshadowed in numerous opaquely religious cut-scenes), but dies metaphorically four times.

Joaquin Phoenix fares much worse with his character, Commodus. Commodus is a boring, one dimensional person, driven solely by his personal insecurity (he even admits to “still” being afraid of the dark) and power-lust, then his growing paranoia and final insanity. Rather than hire an expensive celebrity actor the director should have used a card-board cut out instead, it would have been quite as effective at half the cost.

The only feature of the bland, insipid character is his first hidden, then increasingly open and finally overt lust towards his sister. While this might seem extremely shocking, incest being one of the few remaining sexual taboos in the western-world, it was, in-fact quite common in ancient Rome; the real-life Commodus is implicated in unlawful carnal knowledge of several sisters say most historians.

As you might imagine, a character solely composed of insecurity is quite uninteresting. Worse, Phoenix badly over-acts in several key scenes thus utterly destroying the ability of the viewer to view the character as anything other than an overgrown, histrionic, brat. Phoenix’s portrayal is unhinged, overbearing and wearisome.

Connie Nielson does quite better with her much more plausible character Lucilla. Lucilla’s main motivations are fear for her son (the next in line), evading her brother’s incestuous proclivities and concern for the people of Rome (she learns the games are financed by sale of emergency-grain reserves). There are hints of a past flirtation with Maximus but little comes of it in-spite of a jarringly out of character kiss between the two (the godfather of all holly-wood clichés).

She is a widow, and praised by her late father for her personal strength and intelligence. At first willing to stand aside and keep her distance from her brother she is brought to action by her fear for the well-being of the people and for her fear for the life and moral integrity of her son.

Juba is played with simplicity and sensitivity by Djimon Hounsou. This is somewhat harder than it sounds, there is a fine line between “simple” and “provincial”, Hounsou carefully avoids crossing the line and wandering into the realm of “village idiot”. Juba is warm and realistic, yet reserved and keeps his emotions in check. Nevertheless the simplicity of the character is problematic, it makes it difficult for us to identify with him or care for him as he has no clear motivation for anything. The character could fairly be described as “empty”, this though, might be too harsh..

Proximo is a gruff and rough character played by Oliver Reed who played nothing but rough and gruff characters. Reed died of a heart attack half-way through the film and had to be replaced by a CGI model from The Mill for some scenes.

And of course, Gracchus, played by one of my favorite actors, Sir Derek Jacobi, no stranger to swords and sandals (he played the titular rolê in the BBC’s celebrated I Claudius.) Jacobi plays his rolê with aptitude and verve, his studied tonality and refined elocution pair well with the understated and upper-class part.

The direction is tolerable, the overall appearance of the film is indistinct and visually noisy, while the music is atrocious. Hans Zimmer takes the fantasy setting as an excuse to be the bombast’s bombast. The score alternates between loud, obnoxious, repetitive and clichéd, and effete, vauge, unmemorable and clichéd. It is a score, very much for the moment and nothing else.

The plot is intricate without being esoteric; repeatedly, throwaway characters and scenes are referenced or revisited. A servant from the first act reappears in the third, small figurines of Maximus’s wife and child (delightfully) re-appear twice and the story’s conclusion is repeatedly foreshadowed, albeit very indirectly.

As expected it commits several egregious historical errors, Rome was not founded as a republic, but as a monarchy. Nor would an army-garrison be situated just out-side of Rome, except in special circumstances the army was not even allowed on the peninsula. (Forgotten the origin of the phrase “crossing of the Rubicon”, eh?)

Maximus is a complex and morally ambiguous character, he falls into a deep existential pit, is forced to grapple with his damnation to freedom, the cruelty and indifference of the world and the consequences of one’s, and other’s acts. He retreated into himself and then burst out in anger and started killing.

Maximus did not, I repeat not have the right to kill any of the gladiators, nor even Commodus. His love for his family and the cause of their death is irrelevant. Two wrongs do not ever, ever make a right. The ends do not justify the means. He should have mourned the dead and started over with a new life, difficult? yes, but from what we’ve seen of this character, quite doable.

This is the singular weakness and failing of the film, it’s a great story, undoubtedly, if quite fancifully implausible. While Maximus is indeed a highly compelling and vivid person, the glossing over of the moral issues with his quest is inexcusable. Films have been celebrating—er—studying moral ambiguity for some time now, but this is not like that. This is a case of the hero being unambiguously wrong.

The only reason we are able to tolerate the body-count and barbarous behavior is that Maximus is a product of his times. We, the viewer, are able, because of the verisimilitude and narrative persuasiveness of the film, to view him through the notions and perceptions of a contemporary Roman. He is, of course, the quintessential Roman hero, he possesses many admirable qualities: tenacity, sense of duty, sense of honor, warriormanship-in-defiance-of-physics, and impressive physical toughness and fitness, including the patented-hollywood-power-of-miraculous-ability-to-rapidly-regenerate-from-grave-and-even-unsurvivable-injuries, and more.

All of these qualities are viewed as desirable even today, and some rightly so. The problem lies in the what he used them for. He had great gifts and used them for revenge and hate. He allows himself to be nearly consumed by his despair but instead of overcoming this, he turned it into fearsome wrath.

When he finally accomplishes his goal, when he finally kills Commodus, what then? There is nothing left for him to do but to die, that one single motivation controlled his life, it subsumed him. Therefore, I would classify this film as a elegiac tragedy, not a costume adventure-drama as it most other critics have. Perhaps this plaintive, even threnodic coda is the film’s way of addressing the moral issues, but if so, I find it most unsatisfying perfunctory.

3.5 of 5 stars

How to be a Wisenheimer and “Solve” the “-gry” Puzzle

English has thee common words ending in gry, “hungry” and “angry” are two of them. What is the other one?

This is a language puzzler that has been around since at least 1975, possibly much longer. It is a vexing puzzle because it sounds like there should be such a word, but there isn’t.

Before you drive yourself crazy over this one. I would like to make it abundantly clear that there is no third common English word ending in -gry. There are several words ending in -gry but for the most part they are esoteric, obsolete or bizarre. the O.E.D. lists “unhungry”, the compound word “aggry bead” and the archaic “gry“, meaning a tenth of one twelveth of an inch. No-one would think that these are common words in any way.

Even Wikipedia, that great fount of all divine wisdom, replete with a ridiculously long article on “Government Cheese” has only a very short article on aggry-beads and no article at all on grys.

Archaic alternate spellings such as “anhungry” a predecessor to modern “hungry” do not count. Nor do phrases such as “profit-hungry” “man-hungry”.

My solution to the problem was to track down an uncommon word for a common thing. The best I could do was “fenegry”. This word has certian advantages, it is not a compound word, it is not obsolete and it is for a common, or at least knowable thing. For “fenegry” is nothing more than another word for “feungreek”.

Fenugreek is a clover-like flowering herb that is used as a seasoning, you might find it in your grocery store. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary notes its use for skin irritations and wide-spread use for various maladies in “complimentary” therapies, particularly to increase lactation in pregnant woman. This latter use has some degree of scientific validation behind it.

So now you can be a wisenheimer* and show off in front of all your friends.

* A smart-aleck word for “smart-aleck”

How the Secretary of Energy Could Become the President

I’m sure that most of my U.S. Readers are familiar with the fact that should the President die or become incapacitated, Dick Cheney, as Vice President assumes the office. This has happened multiple times throughout history starting with “His Accidency” John Tyler.

I expect you know that in the event of the death or incapacitation of the Vice President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives (currently Nancy Pelosi) assumes his office and thus, should the President then die, he assumes the office in the usual manner.

Now, what should happen, you may ask, if, in some great misfortune both the President, Vice President, and Speaker of the House died or were incapacitated?

The President pro tempore of the Senate (Currently Robert C. Byrd) would attain the office. This has never happened. However, the President pro tempore was originally secondin line, before the Speaker of the House (Congress later altered the order). Thus, in the 1868 impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, who himself had become president when Lincoln died, and therefore had no Vice-President, the radical Benjamin Wade, President pro tempore at the time, very nearly did become President. It is thought by some historians that the then radicalness of Wade’s views was a contributing factor in the Senate decision to acquit Jackson.

If all of these persons should die the rest of the succession order comes into play and the heads of cabinet level departments, in the order in which the departments were created becomes acting president. The actual office of President does not devolve to a cabinet head, even if they serve for years.

Here is the current order, which is somewhat different from the usual order. I’ll explain in a moment.

Secretary of State	Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of the Treasury	Henry Paulson
Secretary of Defense	Robert Gates
Attorney General	Michael Mukasey
Secretary of the Interior	Dirk Kempthorne
Secretary of Agriculture	Ed Schafer
Secretary of Commerce	Carlos Gutierrez (ineligible)
Secretary of Labor	Elaine Chao (ineligible)
Secretary of Health and Human Services	Mike Leavitt
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development	Steve Preston
Secretary of Transportation	Mary Peters
Secretary of Energy	Samuel Bodman
Secretary of Education	Margaret Spellings
Secretary of Veterans	Affairs James Peake
Secretary of Homeland Security	Michael Chertoff

The current secretaries of commerce and labor are ineligible as they are not natural-born U.S. citizens. Although Article Two of The U.S. Constitution does not directly address naturalized citizens obtaining the office by succession the fact remains that it does prohibit naturalized citizens from obtaining the office by direct election, thus, to avert an undesirable constitutional crisis at what would almost certainly be a time of great upheaval and catastrophe the Congress passed a statute making this clear. Also, acting officers, such as recess appointees are not eligible.

It is interesting to note that although the departments of State, the Treasury, Defense and the Interior, as well as the Attorney General have at least some constitutional warrant, the rest do not yet their Secretariat can obtain the powers of the Presidency nonetheless.

Should some unprecedented disaster, such as a nuclear strike, occur which incapacitates every person eligible for the succession it is not clear what would happen, although this topic has been broached in fiction from time to time. In the event of the death of a Secretary the Deputy Secretaries would not be eligible as they only can assume the office of acting Secretary. Were Congress able to reconvene somehow (which does not sound likely) it could conceivably elect a new Speaker of the House or President pro tempore who would the immediately assume the powers and duties of the Office.

However, even were it possible, this would be a dangerously slow and time-consuming event during which time it would be unclear who was controlling the executive branch. Obviously the death of every person in the list would take place only during an incredible cataclysm. If the House or Senate did not have a quorum special elections would have to be held, potentially delaying the process for months. Should the House or Senate become deadlocked, or unable to reach a quorum it is almost certain the Federal Government would collapse. This is not a situation that bears thinking about as we all know what happens when powerful central governments suddenly disappear.

To avert this, the Government does not allow all possible successors to be present in the same place at the same time. One person, the Designated Survivor, is hidden in a distant, secret location and heavily guarded, for instance during the last State of the Union, the Secretary of the Interior was the Designated Survivor.

I am told that the Secretary of Health and Human Services acquired the powers and duties of the office in the television program Jericho due to his being the designated survivor when a nuclear attack happened to take place.

A concerted war or assassination attempt could still theoretically kill everyone in the event of good espionage, the possibility of this  happening has lead some to believe that laws or constitutional amendments on the matter should be passed in anticipation of a crisis.

Correction in an earlier published version of this article we incorrectly stated that Gerald Ford acquired the presidency through his post as the Speaker of the House, this was not correct. Gerald Ford was House minority leader and was nominated for the position of Vice President by Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned. Slacker Online regrets the error.

Kicking up the leaves

‘Cause you had a bad day
You’re taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don’t know
You tell me don’t lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day

Daniel Powter (link)

This has been an atrociously bad day. First this, then this, and now this. May-be tomorrow will be better.

Book Review: The Firecracker Boys

The Firecracker Boys by Dan O’Neil 1995, St. Martins Press

This book is the story of Project Chariot, a part of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Operation Plowshare. Project Chariot was an insane plan to chain several thermonuclear warheads, bury them in a pristine wilderness area of Alaska then detonate, creating an artificial harbour.

Of course, with the benefit of 20/20 hind-sight the lunacy of this plan is evident, the Sedan test carried out in Nevada released far more nuclear rubbish than anyone had anticipated. If the plan had been put into effect large tracts of Alaska would have been rendered permanently uninhabitable and the devastation to the environment would have been beyond belief.

The geopolitical implications were also not to be sniffed at, even the demented A.E.C. did not pretend that no radioactive dust would be hurled into the air, Alaska is located right between Soviet Russia and Canada, two sovereign nations who might not like having a massive lot of the stuff dropped into their back-yard. A.E.C. officials dismissed this concern by saying that they would wait until the wind was blowing the other way.

This was typical of the flippancy and dishonesty that emanated from the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, the unit of the A.E.C. which cooked up the plan.

LLRL, now going by the name LLNL, with the N standing simply for “national” was a quasi-autonomous unit within the A.E.C. bureaucracy. It was co-founded and headed by Edward Teller; who is popularly (and wrongly) credited with the development of the Hydrogen Bomb*. Teller was a hot-head and it is from his, and his scientists, attitude that the books title is derived, boys fulsomely playing with fire-crackers.

LLRL and Edward Teller lied repeatedly through their teeth about vital matters such as the release of radiation into the environment, what was going to happen to the Inupiat People** who lived in the area, the degree of engineering control that could be exercised over the blast, the economic viability of the harbor, and in-fact the idea that the harbor itself was the reason that the A.E.C. wanted to conduct the shot***

Eventually the plan fell to pieces as the lies were exposed and the catastrophic effect of the operation became more clearly understood by the public. In-spite of a wave of incredibly ignorant media-boosterism the project was put in permanent abeyance, it has never been canceled.

The A.E.C. itself no longer exists, it was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Comission and LLRL became part of what is now the Department of Energy.

All this is fascinating stuff and yet the book is so tediously dull I got about half-way through and abandoned the effort. It should be virtually impossible to write a dull book about this, it has something for everyone! Libertarians should be able to love the tale of government gone mad, liberals the disregard for the environment, conservatives the nostalgia. Students of history, journalism, Alaskan culture etc, etc. This should be a great book. Its falling so horribly flat is a huge disappointment as it is, to my knowledge, the only retail book on the matter ever published.

True, there are moments in the book that are quite good, such as the story of the “cassette tape fad” among the Inupiat; the unintentionally humorous remarks in the press such as its proclivity to refer to what were, in effect, secretaries as “leading atomic physicists” and hysterical predictions of everlasting propserity should serve as a cautionary tale to all.

I sadly cannot recommend this book as the prose is quite dense and over-verbose and the author seems to feel the need to bother us with endless paeans to the wild and so-forth that have little bearing on the subject matter.

Notes

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* Teller was a brilliant atomic physicist, yes; however he wrongly gets most of the credit for the H-Bomb, the first practical H-Bomb design was created by Stanisław Ulam; it did not work, but with some alterations by Teller it did. Ulam deserves most of the credit, if credit it is.

** Take the example of the Bikinians became welfare addicts in perpetuity after their island, immortalized in fashion, was wracked by a series of tests.

*** The experimental nature of the shot, who’s main goal was actually to acquire data was initially concealed.

Letter to a Web Host

I sent the following email to A Small Orange, my hosting company; I’ll let you know what the reply is.

Cpanel has utterly ceased working properly; every other operation I try fails, often silently. So far I have been able to consistently reproduce the following errors:

* Cpanel created the nonsense subdomain srv.vistua.net.vistua.net* which I did not instruct it to do, it previously created the nonsense subdomain vistua.vistua.com which I did not instruct it to do.
* Cpanel refuses to delete this subdomain in spite of claiming to have succeeded when I ask it to, it did successfully delete vistua.vistua.com.
* Cpanel refuses to change MX records in spite of claiming success when instructed to undertake the operation.
> Cpanel says “”Sorry, you do not have access to the domain srv.vistua.net Sorry, you do not have access to the domain srv.vistua.net”".
* Cpanel refuses to delete email accounts under [deleted for security] in spite of the fact that this subdomain does not even exist any-longer.
* Cpanel’s “home” button does not always work.

Did I mention that all of these things are problems with Cpanel?

I am using [deleted for security] and yesterday I asked to have a change made to [idem] on account of this (Heaven forbid that Cpanel would be able to do that…) And while two separate service representatives claim to have implemented the change, Cpanel still indicates delivery failure for emails to [idem]. Cpanel is wrong, delivery occurs correctly. Evidently the software, like the children’s book character, has jumped the tracks and is plowing through the butter-cups.

Have you considered scrapping Cpanel? It’s clumsy and ornery in any event; and now seem to have left off working entirely. Artificial intelligence is all very well and good, but the effort to deploy it before it has actually been invented seems to have resulted in a prevalence artificial stupidity instead.

“But!”,`they may say, “Cpanel masks the complexities of the UNIX system from timorous Windows-bondsmen who should otherwise surely be intimidated!”

I would reply that whether or not UNIX is actually more complex than MS Windows is open to dispute; I should also like to point out that “complex” is a “synonym” for powerful; no sane person would dispute the notion that UNIX is the most powerful and stable of the main-stream operating systems. Naturally; a powerful system, if as in this case its power is derived from its nuance; will have a multifarious and “complex” interface. This is ontologically natural and attempts to mask that interface behind warm-and-fuzzy facades such as Cpanel are as as emasculating as as a clip-on tie.

UNIX is like chess, a day to learn, a lifetime to master, particularly sendmail configuration. But most people need only what they can learn in a day. Those who need to use a system for complex things should expect a complex interface and cringing behind friendly bureaucracies such as Cpanel is intellectual cowardice; any such lotophagi should not bother to venture outside the epic pastorale of Windows in the first place, heavy drama is just not their forte.

Let UNIX be UNIX and Windows… Windows.

If you don’t want to dispose fully of Cpanel for the benefit of neophytes, customers should at least be able to turn it off and access UNIX configuration files directly. If I were able to do that all of these problems would not be happening and the help-desk would not have to be bothered by me twice in as many days.

Any remarks that “such things are available as paid upgrades or as part of other hosting packages” will simply be headed off by the observation that imposing artificial service limitations upon your customers is in very poor taste, antisocial, and possibly, depending on many factors including who taught your Philosophy 101 class, immoral. You should not strive to emulate the IRS in any way.

In conclusion I wish to express my extreme frustration with being forced to route my operations through a piece of software with a half-witted mind of its own. And further request that human intervention be put into place on your end of the matter to correct the above delineated errors and any other you should happen to discover along the way.

** Vistua.net is parked