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Oct. 13th, 2005 01:05 am
Oct. 13th, 2005
Got some groceries, some peanut butter
Oct. 13th, 2005 02:10 pm- Way, way too many evolution fish emblem things. Most of them are dumb Supercilious Atheist stuff, but I really liked the lutefisk and gefilte ones, and the skeleton fishy. Courtesy
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springheel_jack. - Only in the O.C.: "The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, Forensic Science Services Division (Santa Ana, California) recently received two separate tablet submissions, both suspected MDMA. The first submission consisted of four off-white tablets with an “LV” (Louis Vuitton) logo, average net mass 240 - 250 milligrams." Via the DEA's Microgram report.
- Camel WHAT. Thanks to wearescott.
- HOWTO make a head in a jar.
- Thanks for the spyware, Blizzard! (via Bruce Schneier).
- JESUS HAD A PUPPY
Harvard and the Unabomber: Review
Oct. 13th, 2005 05:57 pmI just finished reading Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist
, which I had begun and read about a third of when it came out and then set aside.
Ted Kaczynski was that odd math-major guy. He had an upbringing in which he couldn't come up to his parents' standards, was teased badly at school and left out, and was miserable a lot. He went to college, where he was a loner and withdrawn. Then he went to grad school and did really well, but wasn't very happy. Then he became a professor of math, and then he moved to nowheresville, and then he started killing people with bombs. Wait, where'd that come in? There are enough tightly-wrapped smart kids, lonely outsiders in college, and crazy mathematicians around who don't turn into terrorists.
Chase's thesis is that Ted was driven into a state of permanent homicidal rage by psychological experiments done at Harvard byCharles Henry Murray. Ted was coaxed into joining a lengthy psychological study as a subject, and it apparently was no fun. For example, participants (who were chosen for their intelligence and sensitivity) were asked to write out a thorough explanation and defense of their philosophy of life, and then called in to a meeting in which a trained and prepared speaker demolished their ideas and attacked them as viciously as possible while they sat in a chair with EEG and blood pressure monitors on them and cameras pointed at them. Other participants in this program are bitter to this day about these experiences.
Murray was clearly a class A weirdo who had a lot of trouble separating his work from his personal life, and who enjoyed power over others way too much. He was also an ex OSS spook with a background in interrogations. Chase makes a lot of the CIA connection, and certainly Murray's friends were dosing hapless victims with LSD and doing other grimy things at this time, and he was part of an academic alliance with intelligence agencies.
Chase was also an undergrad at Harvard around this time, and he spends about 100 pages attacking the school. The elitism, coldness, and anomie of the environment are described in detail. He also dissects the academic dogma of the time, which was despairing in the extreme: existential, tragic, and rigidly structuralist. The Universe was described essentially as a huge machine for grinding up the Soul.
After Harvard, Ted did go around telling people he wanted to move to a remote place and kill a lot of people. He was also full of rage against "The System", but who wasn't? But he didn't participate in any of the Berkeley radicalism even when he was a young professor there in the late sixties. In fact, he left for Nowheresville in 1969.
Chase overstates his case all over the place, as monomaniacs do. Harvard and Murray are demonized to an unbelievable degree, as if poor Ted was a tabula rasa until he stepped inside the gates of Hell and met the Tempter himself. It's pretty clear that Murray's "research" was deeply fucked-up, though. It can't have been good for a hypersensitive and socially withdrawn guy with critical parent issues to be screamed at and belittled over and over again with a bright light shining in his face. And it's significant that this was done in the context of a psychological institute with government ties, part of a big university.
What Ted did later on was make war on industrial society. He wasn't insane by any good definition; he was a terrorist. His stated aim was to bring down the entire structure of computer technology, big government control, the military, and big businesses. He also wanted to kill a Communist but I guess he couldn't find one. He wasn't an environmentalist or a hippie. He was, if anything, a revolutionary anarchist. Chase points out that a lot of his behavior and language seems drawn from a few books, one of which is Joseph Conrad's meditation on anarchist violence The Secret Agent, which is also one of my favorites. Oddly Ted didn't get the message about the pointless, tragic nature of this kind of violence. It reminds me of Tim McVeigh getting inspired by watching Robert DeNiro's heroic A/C repairman blow up government buildings in Brazil, only a bit worse. Ted was highly intelligent and sophisticated about literature.
I'd recommend this book if you're interested in terrorism, psychology, or this case in particular. A chunk of salt is recommended, since Chase is pretty clearly rehashing his own problems with Harvard and the America of 1962; there's far too much generalization about generations and Big Ideas of the Time. I'd also not pay more than a few bucks for it, since it was expanded from a magazine article by dumping in a lot of filler, including an unnecessary forty page history of Western thought.
, which I had begun and read about a third of when it came out and then set aside. Ted Kaczynski was that odd math-major guy. He had an upbringing in which he couldn't come up to his parents' standards, was teased badly at school and left out, and was miserable a lot. He went to college, where he was a loner and withdrawn. Then he went to grad school and did really well, but wasn't very happy. Then he became a professor of math, and then he moved to nowheresville, and then he started killing people with bombs. Wait, where'd that come in? There are enough tightly-wrapped smart kids, lonely outsiders in college, and crazy mathematicians around who don't turn into terrorists.
Chase's thesis is that Ted was driven into a state of permanent homicidal rage by psychological experiments done at Harvard by
Murray was clearly a class A weirdo who had a lot of trouble separating his work from his personal life, and who enjoyed power over others way too much. He was also an ex OSS spook with a background in interrogations. Chase makes a lot of the CIA connection, and certainly Murray's friends were dosing hapless victims with LSD and doing other grimy things at this time, and he was part of an academic alliance with intelligence agencies.
Chase was also an undergrad at Harvard around this time, and he spends about 100 pages attacking the school. The elitism, coldness, and anomie of the environment are described in detail. He also dissects the academic dogma of the time, which was despairing in the extreme: existential, tragic, and rigidly structuralist. The Universe was described essentially as a huge machine for grinding up the Soul.
After Harvard, Ted did go around telling people he wanted to move to a remote place and kill a lot of people. He was also full of rage against "The System", but who wasn't? But he didn't participate in any of the Berkeley radicalism even when he was a young professor there in the late sixties. In fact, he left for Nowheresville in 1969.
Chase overstates his case all over the place, as monomaniacs do. Harvard and Murray are demonized to an unbelievable degree, as if poor Ted was a tabula rasa until he stepped inside the gates of Hell and met the Tempter himself. It's pretty clear that Murray's "research" was deeply fucked-up, though. It can't have been good for a hypersensitive and socially withdrawn guy with critical parent issues to be screamed at and belittled over and over again with a bright light shining in his face. And it's significant that this was done in the context of a psychological institute with government ties, part of a big university.
What Ted did later on was make war on industrial society. He wasn't insane by any good definition; he was a terrorist. His stated aim was to bring down the entire structure of computer technology, big government control, the military, and big businesses. He also wanted to kill a Communist but I guess he couldn't find one. He wasn't an environmentalist or a hippie. He was, if anything, a revolutionary anarchist. Chase points out that a lot of his behavior and language seems drawn from a few books, one of which is Joseph Conrad's meditation on anarchist violence The Secret Agent
, which is also one of my favorites. Oddly Ted didn't get the message about the pointless, tragic nature of this kind of violence. It reminds me of Tim McVeigh getting inspired by watching Robert DeNiro's heroic A/C repairman blow up government buildings in Brazil, only a bit worse. Ted was highly intelligent and sophisticated about literature. I'd recommend this book if you're interested in terrorism, psychology, or this case in particular. A chunk of salt is recommended, since Chase is pretty clearly rehashing his own problems with Harvard and the America of 1962; there's far too much generalization about generations and Big Ideas of the Time. I'd also not pay more than a few bucks for it, since it was expanded from a magazine article by dumping in a lot of filler, including an unnecessary forty page history of Western thought.
Let the blogging begin!
Oct. 13th, 2005 11:18 pmIt's "Murray Week" here at the substitute Building. Next up is Charles. You remember, the Bell Curve guy? He's back with an editorial in the WSJ. He doesn't say much more than "I was too right" with a lot of excess verbiage.
The veneer of "science" over political polemic is pretty thin here. In the original ruckus neither the Bell Curve boys nor their outraged opponents did anything I'd call science. The "scientific debate" was about the political significance of race in the United States, and more particularly about the policy of affirmative action. The book and much of its associated research was paid for by political organizations, and the opposition to the book and its ideas was rooted in political ideas as well. There was no such thing as a disinterested third party evaluation of The Bell Curve's claims.
Once you step out of the little historical box of late 20th century U.S. race politics, the whole thing looks like a Laputan debate out of Gulliver's Travels. People were assigning the word "science" to discussions of concepts like race and intelligence that couldn't even be defined properly. IQ was treated as a fact like the speed of life, race was assumed to be innate and obvious and eternal, and asses were made of many.
It should be clear to anyone capable of critical thought that we don't understand the brain well at all. Concepts like IQ or g are almost medieval compared to our understanding of body processes like vision or digestion. Personally I think it will be a decade or more before we have a clear idea of the brain's real structure and function instead of just a list of what goes wrong when you whack certain parts of it. So forget about defining "intelligence" for now.
And the idea of defining race brings to mind a Spanish official trying to figure out if someone is a mestizo or an octaroon, or the South African government's detailed tests for negritude (hair kinkiness, skin albedo, etc.). Trying to describe "races" without making people laugh openly requires a tremendous amount of obfuscation.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make all along. The social sciences just aren't. I just can't swallow this shit, and I never have. I look at "political scientists" like Murray or any number of other racist, Marxist, fascist, religious, or other -ist social theoreticians and I can detect little more than layers of unnecessary verbiage over prejudice. Some of these people I agree with, some I don't, and some I can't even penetrate, but it sure as hell isn't science. That's a method, not a form of magic invoked by excesses of vocabulary.
Dogma from me: The social sciences are a failed attempt to legitimize sociopolitical warfare with jargon.
substitute Building. Next up is Charles. You remember, the Bell Curve guy? He's back with an editorial in the WSJ. He doesn't say much more than "I was too right" with a lot of excess verbiage. The veneer of "science" over political polemic is pretty thin here. In the original ruckus neither the Bell Curve boys nor their outraged opponents did anything I'd call science. The "scientific debate" was about the political significance of race in the United States, and more particularly about the policy of affirmative action. The book and much of its associated research was paid for by political organizations, and the opposition to the book and its ideas was rooted in political ideas as well. There was no such thing as a disinterested third party evaluation of The Bell Curve's claims.
Once you step out of the little historical box of late 20th century U.S. race politics, the whole thing looks like a Laputan debate out of Gulliver's Travels. People were assigning the word "science" to discussions of concepts like race and intelligence that couldn't even be defined properly. IQ was treated as a fact like the speed of life, race was assumed to be innate and obvious and eternal, and asses were made of many.
It should be clear to anyone capable of critical thought that we don't understand the brain well at all. Concepts like IQ or g are almost medieval compared to our understanding of body processes like vision or digestion. Personally I think it will be a decade or more before we have a clear idea of the brain's real structure and function instead of just a list of what goes wrong when you whack certain parts of it. So forget about defining "intelligence" for now.
And the idea of defining race brings to mind a Spanish official trying to figure out if someone is a mestizo or an octaroon, or the South African government's detailed tests for negritude (hair kinkiness, skin albedo, etc.). Trying to describe "races" without making people laugh openly requires a tremendous amount of obfuscation.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make all along. The social sciences just aren't. I just can't swallow this shit, and I never have. I look at "political scientists" like Murray or any number of other racist, Marxist, fascist, religious, or other -ist social theoreticians and I can detect little more than layers of unnecessary verbiage over prejudice. Some of these people I agree with, some I don't, and some I can't even penetrate, but it sure as hell isn't science. That's a method, not a form of magic invoked by excesses of vocabulary.
Dogma from me: The social sciences are a failed attempt to legitimize sociopolitical warfare with jargon.
GO GO GADGET 401(K)!!!
Oct. 13th, 2005 11:44 pm Your Personal Rate of Return from 01/01/2005 to 10/13/2005 is -5.6%
Your Personal Rate of Return is calculated with a time-weighted formula, widely used by financial analysts to calculate investment earnings. It reflects the result of your investment selections as well as any activity in the plan account(s) shown. There are other Personal Rate of Return formulas used that may yield different results. Remember that past performance is no guarantee of future results.