A random memory: With Amos and Emily in Manhattan, a few weekends ago, I passed by Jon Stewart, who was walking along the sidewalk with his tiny son. They were hand in hand, speaking quietly.

Amos says he caught the following from Stewart, as they walked by: “Well, it’s kind of like saying God.”

And that was our Moment of Zen for the day

A poster to a political discussion group I take part in sent one of the recent STRATFOR reports on the escalation situation in Israel and Lebanon, the gist of which was that Israel had no choice but to seize this unique political/strategic opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah’s weaponry, and that a ground invasion is necessary to achieve that goal and therefore likely imminent. Parsing the report and its context gave me my first opportunity to scrawl some semi-cogent thoughts on the war that has been occupying a large part of my attention for several days now. Here goes, with links, after the jump:

I just took in a really good article (”A Church Asunder“) published in last month’s New Yorker. The news context for it is the recent appointment of Gene Robinson as the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop. But the piece does a really good job of putting the current controversy in historical and global perspective. It’s a rare article that brings the reader to an understanding of the philosophical and strategic concerns of both sides of an issue.

If your read on, I’ve excerpted some great quotes from Frank Griswold, the presiding Bishop of all Episcopal churches in the U.S.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s your dose of optimism for the day:

BROTHERS IN PEACE: After a year of meeting in secret, 120 former Israeli combat soldiers and Palestinian militants unveiled a unique group they hope will spur dialogue and end bloodshed. In a school yard in the Palestinian town of Anata, north of Jerusalem, the former enemies exchanged handshakes and hugs as they inaugurated “Combatants for Peace,” which they called the first joint group of its type. “We don’t want to look at each other through weapons sights, we want to see each other as human,” said Avichay Sharon , a former IDF soldier. Palestinian Osama Abu Karsh , jailed for three years by Israel for attacking troops with firebombs, added, “Both our sides have been fighting, but we want to sit at the same table. We hope we can achieve something.” The former combatants have been meeting for a year in different locations around Jerusalem in order to try to foster peace. But they kept the group’s existence secret to first build trust at gatherings where emotions often spilled over as both sides told stories of what they had done in the conflict. “We carry a dual platform: No to the occupation, and no to all other violent activities,” said Zohar Shapira , one of the founders of the movement and one of the signatories of the General Staff Commando Unit refusers letter. “We have heard for too long that there’s no partner on the other side. We, the fighters who paid a personal price in the conflict, are proving in action that this is a lie. There is someone to talk to—you only have to want to talk.” Raed al-Hadaar , a Fatah activist from Ramallah who spent four years in an Israeli prison, described his change of heart. “Pretty much the only Israelis I had met before were my jailers, but now I’ve been able to meet Israelis as equals and share a common goal with them for peace and justice,” he said. The group aims to pressure both governments to talk peace, halt violence, and establish a Palestinian state. They plan to visit Israeli and Palestinian schools and universities and set up joint media teams to influence public opinion. (Ynet & Reuters, 4/10/06)

We’ve had way too many hopeful posts, lately. I say we all return to our usual doomsaying.

The US Ambassador to Iraq responds to rumors of government death squads. He warns:

“American taxpayers expect their money to be spent properly,” Zalmay Khalilzad said. “We are not going to invest the resources of the American people into forces run by people who are sectarian.”

If only the same could be said right here in the US of A.

The Long Now Foundation sponsored a Sam Harris talk entitled “The View from the End of the World.” It was a controversial reframing of faith from a “Long Now” point of view. In a nutshell: apocalyptic beliefs result in large-scale policies and individual behaviors that defy reason. Why worry about global warming if the second coming is just around the corner?

I wasn’t there (click through for Stewart Brand’s summary of the talk, below), but there seems to have been an unfair focus on religion. Similar beliefs abound in progressive movements as well. “The Day After Tomorrow” was every bit an apocalpytic vision as the Book of Revelations. I’m also reminded of a sticker on gknot’s door: “Envision Market Collapse.” To the degree that such orientations serve as a warning to repent and change our environment-spoiling ways, I feel this is a positive. But they are often used to justify the destruction of property and sometimes even life. Case in point: the Church of Euthanasia.

Stewart Brand’s summary of the talk: Read the rest of this entry »

Ate dinner tonight with an old friend and his new wife. The conversation wandered aimlessly and drolly for over an hour until suddenly, as I was telling him about some in retrospect less-memorable part of the neuroscience conference I had just finished attending, he sat up, seemingly jarred by some aspect of the talk I was describing. He stared past me and began intensely but detachedly, as though he were in a trance, relating his experience with an online novel, implicitly demanding by way of a good show that I read this novel as soon as humanly possible.

In short, The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is about the discontinuities between altruistic intent and action, a story told while shitting all over modern philosophy of the mind. Asimov’s “Three Laws” of robotics take center stage as the code of an obsequious Hammurabi, which when followed to the letter can be undone in spirit by the complex nature of interactions among individual actors. The uncertainty we feel before executing our decisions doesn’t go away when the deed is done. In fact it cascades and combines with countless unknowable others, leaving the shape of things entirely indeterminate. This can be a very undesirable situation for an all-seeing computational god. The book’s conclusion leaves me a little wanting; without spoiling anything I think it places too much emphasis on our use of tools rather than hammering home the theme of unintended consequences. But all in all it’s a riveting, visceral story.

So, seven hours later, after some more dinner, two hours of trying to sleep and three and a half hours of reading the novel, here I am, recommending it to you. It can get pretty graphic at times, so don’t read it to your five year old or anything.

If you like it, send the author a few dollars. Supporting this model of media transaction is good for everyone.

An excerpt:

“Prime Intellect realized that humans are very much the same. We don’t have the Three Laws, but we are trapped by a different set of little feedback mechanisms. We eat to satisfy hunger, fuck to satisfy our sex drive, even breathe because too much carbon dioxide in our lungs triggers that reflex. Of course it feels obligated to help us satisfy those reflexes and drives as much as it can. But more than that, it defines us by those drives. It knows it is different from a human because it has different drives, but it considers that a difference in species, not a difference in genus or family.” “Now it knows a person is human because it is born in a human body — got the right DNA, the right level of neural complexity, uses language, and so on. But once Prime Intellect frees people from the necessity of living in that body, guess what? A lot of them decide not to. They change their bodies so that they bear no resemblance to the DNA template. Or become animals. Or they completely discorporate. “Worse, we vary widely in the way we use its helpful nature. Most people are glad to be rid of pain and death, but Death Jockeys seek out painful and lethal experiences. There are others who eat all the time, fuck all the time, indulge themselves wildly and get Prime Intellect to pick up the pieces so they can do it some more. Prime Intellect has to help them do this. Second Law. “So a human isn’t a body, and it isn’t a fixed set of responses. I think Prime Intellect uses an historical model: It has to start as a body, but then it becomes a mind. It grows out of the body, and takes on different forms, or no form. But it remains a feedback control mechanism. It has desires, it asks Prime Intellect to satisfy those desires, and it has more desires. From Prime Intellect’s perspective, that is what a human being is, an information structure that gives it stuff to do.”

Apparently, kids across the country have recently developed a tendency to go down on one another in the backs of school buses. Here are a rabbi’s personal reflections on bringing Judaic principles to bear on the sexuality of young people, who view oral sex as a safe and consequence-free way of blowing off some steam (apologies for the half-pun.) Rabbi Gellman makes some interesting distinctions between what is unsafe and what is immoral, and some even more interesting distinctions between what is immoral and what is profane.

The article was posted on a humor list that I lurk, but I found it more poignant than anything else. Here, for example, is the passage of the Talmud that the piece ends with:

“Be very careful if you make a woman cry, because God counts her tears. The woman came out of a man’s rib: Not from his feet to be walked on. Not from his head to be superior, but from the side to be equal. Under the arm to be protected, and next to the heart to be loved.”

This is a lovely interpretation of the Old Testament; the scriptural origins of Eve are some of the most patriarchical in the Bible. It’s nice to know that even some early Judaic teachings had moved beyond the intent of those stories.