Synthesist

I was pointed at this piece which lamented the downside of hookup culture and effectively pleaded for the return of more rules and restrictions to clear up the confusion and increase the fun. Forget for now that it's from a conservative student newspaper. If you look carefully it cites a study done by the Independent Women's Forum and the Institute for American Values and then proceeds to go into op ed mode. Look around at the people associated with the two organizations and you'll see a fair amount of conservative and traditionally minded people and opinions being expressed thereto. Heck, the IAV explicitly is pushing for traditional marriage, their key phrase being "renewal of marriage and family life". Of course they'd have an interest in funding studies which look at the downside of promiscuous behavior that apparently threatens marriage.

In this modern age of propaganda it's a far more clever thing to do to fund research then proceed to cite it if the findings are favorable. That way it doesn't look like you're citing yourself when handwaving, but instead appealing to authority. Most people don't bother examining for the linkages for potential conflict of interest, be they in the media and/or the blogosphere. Admittedly, I haven't examined the study for its scientific validity, but how many ordinary people out there would even bother? A study came out says someone in the media, so it must be right, right?

By the by, I had some trouble finding any link to the study on either of the latter two sites. The IAV site search is busted, and apparently not current.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hardly against marriage, but stunts like this aren't going to convince anyone possessed of critical reasoning to tie the knot.

I believe the RIAA is applying social network analysis (SNA) in its current battle against P2P systems. This piece in Time dated 4 August 2003 is telling:

[The RIAA] has declined to say whom it is targeting or how many more subpoenas it plans to issue... "We're focused on the supply side," RIAA president Cary Sherman says. "If you can get at the 10% of people who are offering 90% of the files, that makes a significant dent."

However, that comment has revealed their game plan. The P2P network that is Kazaa presumably reflects the underlying scale-free nature of the Internet as a whole. Now consider this PhysicsWeb article from 20 July 2000:

Barabasi and co-workers studied the effect that removing random nodes from a scale-free network had on the ability of the remaining nodes to communicate with each other, and the degree to which the network became fragmented. They found that the network's performance remained constant, even after they had removed as many of 5% of the nodes, and that it was resistant to fragmentation. But when the team simulated an intelligent attack by targeting the highly connected nodes, it was a different story: the network became fragmented very quickly, and with 5% of the nodes missing, its ability to communicate was halved.

By breaking the Kazaa P2P network into isolated islands, they greatly reduce the utility of the network. College campuses with student networks are potentially superhubs, and have thus been targeted as well, though via college administrations. I therefore conclude that the RIAA strategy is solidly grounded in recent discoveries about scale-free networks.

Let's see the scoreboard for the axis of evil. Iraq is still contested as to who will end up in charge and who they'll favor. Iran recently tested its Shahab-3 IRBM and is currently denying having processed enriched uranium. There's now reports of a hidden, underground nuclear processing facility in North Korea. Meanwhile, the war on terrorism spans East Africa.

Regardless of one's political views, it's clear that those who expected the liberation of Iraq to be a quick fix were mistaken.

I am concerned about overextension of US forces. They claim to be able to handle the current situation, but there's little slack left in the system with regard to ground troops. From a Washington Post article:

The Army has 33 active-duty combat brigades. There are now 16 in Iraq, two in Afghanistan, two in South Korea and most of the rest are either committed to other missions or reconstituting, leaving just three brigades to send to Iraq as replacement forces.

The Iraqi Republican Guard pulled a fade. From April 28, 2003: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-661648,00.html

Fahd al-Mairi said: "I was prepared to be a martyr. But I was shocked how easily Baghdad fell. The treason of the Republican Guard led to the collapse. I saw no Iraqi soldiers, except for the officers who told us where to go. All the fighting in Baghdad was by volunteers. If I had known that the Republican Guard would betray us, I would never have gone..."

There's a pattern here, and it's a raw deal. Two years ago, foreign Taliban, mainly Arab and Pakistani volunteers, were sacrificed to provide retreat for local Taliban. From a November 14, 2001 Stratfor piece: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25328

In most cases, the Taliban's retreat was premeditated and orderly. The fighting that occurred was a rear-guard action, often carried out by foreign troops. Pakistani volunteers were left behind in Mazar-e-Sharif, and Arab troops reportedly fought a vicious rear-guard action in Kabul.

In both cases foreign jihadi were used to absorb American firepower while the locals melted into the background. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is attempting a comeback. Shock and awe meant it was foolish to take on American firepower head on. Both the Taliban and the Republican Guard adapted to the threat, and decided not to be there when the bombs came down. Watch for attempts by elements of the Republican Guard to infiltrate the new power structure and coopt it.

This paper is apparently a draft of a 1998 report to the EU titled "An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control". Given the general sense of insecurity in these times, expect such technologies to be deployed more broadly and frequently.

The real threat to civil liberties and human rights in the future, is as likely to arise from an incremental erosion of civil liberties, than it is from some conscious plan. The rate of such erosion is speeding up and is rapidly being fuelled by the pace of innovation in the technology of political control. An arsenal of new weapons and technologies of political control has already been developed or lies waiting on the horizon for a suitable opportunity to find useful work.

Complex adaptive systems have this tendency to stymie simple solutions. From Independent News:

Biotech companies have added genes from a naturally occurring poison, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is widely used as a pesticide by organic farmers...

Drawbacks have already emerged, with pests becoming resistant to the toxin. Environmentalists say that resistance develops all the faster because the insects are constantly exposed to it in the plants, rather than being subject to occasional spraying.

But the new research – by scientists at Imperial College London and the Universidad Simon Rodrigues in Caracas, Venezuela – adds an alarming new twist, suggesting that pests can actually use the poison as a food and that the crops, rather than automatically controlling them, can actually help them to thrive.

A naive natural pesticide splicing will kill off pests, but survivors can gain resistance and some may even digest pesticide as a nutrient. Moral: sometimes simple solutions make things worse.