Of all the methods suggested, I am most intrigued by Total Existence Failure, with its vaguely existentialist implementation of planetary suicide:

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 2*10⁴⁹ atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist.

Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (10¹⁰¹⁰⁰) to one.

Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Bush reaffirmed that Iran is not now in danger of a U.S. attack, despite the administration's belief that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons; Iran denies that charge. "There's more diplomacy, in my judgment, to be done," the president said.

Asked about his level of concern that Israel might attack Iran to prevent its Tehran from acquiring nuclear arms, Bush responded with an assurance to Israel of U.S. protection.

"If I was the leader of Israel and I'd listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well," he said. "We will support Israel if her security is threatened."

Translation: "If we feel like attacking, we'll go ahead and do so, but we're going to keep a plausible distance from it by allowing Israel to do the deed for us."

The Telegraph plays the story rather differently. The article repeats the same "we will support Israel" quote, but goes on with a very different interpretation:

His comments appeared to be a departure from the administration's line that there are no plans to attack at present and that Washington backs European diplomatic efforts. The remarks may have reflected Mr Bush's personal thinking on an issue causing deep concern in Washington.

Moments later, Mr Bush was asked another question on Iran and appeared to return to his script - this time emphasising the need for a diplomatic effort.

(Hat tip: John Robb for the Telegraph piece.)

All this reminds me of a high school report I once did on the MHTGR, or Modular High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor. The idea behind MHTGR is to build a small (500-megawatt) reactor with an intrinsically safe design: it's meltdown-proof because of the core design, and immune to Three Mile Island-style radioactive coolant leaks because it's cooled by helium (which doesn't become radioactive). And, being modular, the MHTGR can be mass-produced.

Of course, technology has moved along in the 15 years since I did that little report, and pebble-bed reactors are the latest in safe-by-design nuclear power tech. The pebble-bed looks like a similar concept to the MHTGR, and has been used successfully in Germany. New ones are now being built in China.

If James Lovelock is thinking positively of nuclear power, it seems we may be close to unbranding one of the enviro movement's sacred cows. With more research we should be able to come up with ways to solve the waste storage problem. But if Green opposition stymies nuclear research and development before it can get started, that's unlikely to happen.

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

Frankfurt usefully distinguishes between the simple liar and the bullshitter. Because the simple liar is aware of the truth and wants to skirt it, he has a respect for truth that the bullshit artist lacks. The bullshit artist, caught in his own web of unfounded rhetoric, simply disregards truth as a criterion of sound reasoning, instead relying on persuasive ability as the measure of an argument's strength. In this the bullshitter is trapped in a closed loop of which I've written recently.

The gem in this article comes when Edidin quotes Frankfurt on the origin of his title:

"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "

Now that's some straight shootin'. Rather than "disrupting" his chain of reasoning, the use of the barnyard colloquialism allows Frankfurt to slice directly to the heart of his chosen topic. No bullshit.

Another way of saying "breathing your own exhaust."

Now, it seems that the closed OODA loop -- the trap of having your orientation confirm and produce your observations and actions -- applies to more than just military organizations. I think it works at a psychological level, too, as might be seen in certain psychic states like depression or mania. I'd like to draw that out some more, but this will have to wait for another day.

Hvorledis oc i huad maade Malt skal giøris/oc siden bryggis/kand icke lætteligen skriffuis/eller ved Bogstaffuene læris: Mand skal selff være hoss/oc selff holde en Haand der hoss. Thi huer Landskab haffuer her vdi sin besynderlig art oc maade.

Translated, it runs:

How and in what manner Malt should be made, and then brewed, cannot easily be written or be learned by letters: one should be there and have a hand in it. For each land has in this its peculiar art and manner.

So true (and not just of brewing, either).

[T]he escorts weren't there to provide security; all of us had already been through two checkpoints and one metal detector. They weren't there to keep me away from, Heaven forbid, a Democrat or a protester; those folks were kept safely behind rings of fences and concrete barriers. Nor were the escorts there to admonish me for asking a rude question of the partying faithful, or to protect the paying customers from the prying media. ... [T]he minders weren't there to monitor me. They were there to let the guests, my sources on inaugural night, know that any complaint, any unguarded statement, any off-the-reservation political observation, might be noted.

I'm trying to remember where I've seen a precedent for this. Thinking... thinking...

Oh yes! It was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where government minders were notorious for dogging Western journalists' steps at every turn. There, too, the system was only partially designed to constrain the scribes; its real intent was to make sure the interviewees never forgot that someone was watching and recording everything they said, and that nothing outside the party line got aired.

I think this speaks for itself. And it certainly reminds me of one of Nietzsche's most famous aphorisms (from Beyond Good and Evil):

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. There is no shortage of filament. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

(Via)

Observations feed into the organism's Orientation activity. Boyd showed how Orientation exhibits a shaping pressure on what is seen and on the interpretation of what is seen. Decisions and actions flow out of this two-way interplay of Observation and Orientation. He showed why the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system—and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.

The power of Boyd's intellectual achievement is that he showed why the inevitable result of such an inwardly focused OODA Loop is a build up of internal confusion and disorder (entropy). He showed why, when such loops are put under menacing pressure, the confusion and disorder naturally expands into panic and chaos, which in turn can generate overload, paralysis, and even collapse. Boyd's entire strategy of conflict centered on the idea of inducing his opponent's OODA loop to turn inside itself.

Now, of course it's tempting to observe the blogospheric tendency to become a closed loop that amplifies its own non-adaptive templates. But I don't want to dwell on that. Instead I want to open my own loop a bit by going beyond my usual group of blog references, and point to a post by Andrew Sullivan in which he considers the precarious security situation in Iraq and the difficulty of implementing a democratic government under such conditions:

I know Paul Wolfowitz has read Hobbes. Did he forget it? CPA adviser Larry Diamond hasn't: "You can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." As John Burns has written - again no sympathizer for Saddam or cynic - that simply isn't the case in Iraq. Our predicament is that you cannot have democracy without order and you cannot have a new order without democracy.

But American triumphalists from Wolfowitz to President Bush are stuck in an Orientation system that presupposes democracy as the condition of security. It's why Bush was able to say, in his inaugural speech, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." It's why David Brooks was able to claim that the ideals are more real than reality itself. It's a framework that is exactly backwards: disconnected from the reality of the situation, it is becoming a closed, self-sustaining feedback loop. And, if Boyd is right, when you prod such a loop, it degenerates into paranoia and chaos.

Against this background I watched with interest a Newshour segment on the possible benefits of high oil prices. The key here is that high prices will create a real economic incentive for conservation in all its forms: more energy-efficient vehicles, production methods, housing, city planning patterns, work habits. Currently cheap oil is the foundation of the US economy, and (by implication) of the entire Imperium Americana: without cheap fuel lubricating our economy, our military strength would be diminished. And, of course, imperial ambition goes hand-in-hand with the need for this cheap fuel. So we support corrupt regimes like that of Saudi Arabia, regimes which are hardly credible among their own people, and which themselves preside over a society that produces thousands of jihadis.

Perhaps extremely high oil prices would be the lever that finally causes us to trim back our imperial wings. We can only hope. But, as observed in Slate today, some neoconservatives are embracing the energy-efficient lifestyle for its geostrategic benefits: using less oil will make us less dependent on Persian Gulf producers, which could allow us more flexible policy in the Middle East. The neocons, however, don't seem interested in reducing the American empire, but in preserving it. For them,

the fact that energy efficiency and conservation might help the environment is an unintended side benefit. They want to weaken the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Syrians while also strengthening the Israelis. Whether these ends are achieved with M-16s or hybrid automobiles doesn't seem to matter to them.

From a Green perspective the marriage of convenience with neoconservatives might make sense. But from an anti-imperial standpoint, it amounts to more of the same. We may withdraw our military from the Gulf, yes, but without changing other aspects of our position we're going to be stuck with a widespread global insurgency.

Matt Yglesias points out that our hero's chief method -- plotting curves that connect a seemingly-random series of dots on a map -- really isn't an example of sophisticated math. All true: scientists in many disciplines use this type of problem-solving all the time. That said, what struck me in the show is that the hero solves crimes the way George Bush "promotes freedom": ensconced in his room, with minimal input of facts, he consults his first principles and arrives at a formula that precisely locates the danger and specifies a course of action. For Charlie, it's the equation that best fits the scatter of data; for Bush, it's his god.

"Numbers" also acts as an apologia for unbelievably intrusive policing tactics. With an initial (flawed) map of where the bad guy is likely to live, Charlie suggests the police collect DNA data from all males in the neighborhood. When they realize it will be too hard to get a warrant for such a widespread search, the cops decide to do it on the down-low, by gathering discarded cigarette butts, coffee cups, and chewing gum. This tactic requires even more intrusive surveillance than simple cheek swabs, because the subject must be tailed until he drops a suitable object with trace DNA on it. The show lets this sinister abuse of police and technological power go entirely unremarked.

As one of the founders of the concept of Fourth Generation war, I would like to take a stab at solving this riddle. The key to it, I think, is precisely “the triumphs of rationalism.” Rationalism, or more broadly modernity, believes in nothing. Belief is the opposite of rationalism. Fourth Generation war is triumphing over the products of rationalism because people who believe in something will always defeat people who believe in nothing at all.

If we look at those who are fighting Fourth Generation war, America’s opponents in Iraq and elsewhere, one characteristic they share is that they believe very powerfully in something. The “something” varies; it may be a religion, a gang, a clan or tribe, a nation (outside the West, nationalism is still alive) or a culture. But it is something worth fighting for, worth killing for and worth dying for. The key element is not what they believe in, but belief itself. ...

The death of the Modern Age actually comes with World War I; in 1914, the West, which created modernity, put a gun to its head and blew its brains out. The ninety years since have merely been the thrashing of a corpse. The rise of Fourth Generation war, and its triumph over state armed forces in Iraq and elsewhere, mark the real beginning of the new century, a century that will be defined and dominated not by the West’s ghost, nor by the Brave New World that is that ghost’s final, Hellish spawn, but by people who believe.

I'm inclined to agree with Lind's assessment, at least in part. Al Qaeda is not an isolated terrorist network; it's a popular movement with broad, worldwide support. Belief, of course, is not sufficient to motivate a popular resistance; there must be concrete offenses (American support for tyrannical, un-Islamic governments, say) to provoke people to war. But belief provides an orientation against which certain decisions are made. It cushions the believer against uncertainty, and can provide moral comfort that soothes the anguish of bloodshed.

Now, some would say that belief in ideals is just as present in American culture. President Bush's inauguration speech offered plenty of ideals in which he says he believes. Today, addressing these, David Brooks becomes a kind of dialectical materialist in reverse as he opines:

If you want to understand America, I hope you were in Washington on Thursday. I hope you heard the high ideals of President Bush's inaugural address, and also saw the stretch Hummer limos heading to the balls in the evening. ... What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often - this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross materialism, the lofty and the vulgar cheek to cheek.

The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. ... But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real.

Brooks does not mention the other major feature of Washington on that day: a complete clampdown on the city, and a massive military presence. There were surface-to-air missiles on the Mall, secret command centers, helicopters flying overhead, and miles and miles of barbed wire. If our ideals of liberty and freedom are so real, why is our inauguration -- a day of national symbolism -- turned into an armed garrison? With no specific or credible threat, the display of militarism only served to underscore the contradiction between our lofty rhetoric of liberty and our base practice of imperial majesty. These contradictions were present in Bush's speech, as well: to invoke freedom in a city where everyone had to present special passes to get through the gates is the rankest hypocrisy. Even as his minions prevented protesters from crossing his path, Bush was intoning "there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty."

It's a long stretch to characterize ideals like this as "real". What is real is the cognitive dissonance that supporters of this rhetoric must experience. It's a kind of doublethink: the ability to believe two directly contradictory things, while experiencing no twinge of discomfort. Placed against those who fervently and thoroughly believe in their own internally consistent system, this belief amounts to no belief at all. That jarring difference between an ideal of liberty and a capital in lockdown is a sign that the corpse of rationalism is thrashing indeed. Up against contradictory and incoherent dogmas such as this, it's clear why a man of belief such as Osama bin Laden was able to put his finger on the jugular of American empire.

Under the President's determined, even steely, excesses of optimism lie dystopian abysses and half-a-century-plus of history in which policy-making projections about the future, another form of reality-based fiction, and the deepest sort of end-of-time gloom have met and melded. ... By 1950, our top civilian planners had plunged with utter seriousness into fictional scenarios that seemed to outstrip the wildest science fiction novels, not to speak of leading directly into the charnel house of history – and there the Pentagon followed with alacrity. In the wake of the "stalemate" of the Korean War, throughout the rest of the 1950s, actual war-fighting ceased to be a military matter. The CIA was the outfit that fought covertly in the global "shadows," while left to the armed forces in those years was fantasy.

The very power and destructiveness of our utmost weapons rendered it impossible to use them in a real war. So the Pentagon slipped into a perpetual war-gaming mode, in which all possibilities were considered, but none actually implemented. By the time of the Vietnam War, war games were so deeply entrenched in the planning mindset that the entire war effort became a kind of game, an effort to see if we could win a war without really trying. Along the way we missed vital pieces of information from the real world, such as the depth of Vietnamese committment to self-rule, and its total superfluity to our power struggle with the Soviet Union.

After Vietnam, realism and covert operations ruled for a time. The CIA took care of business in Central America and other locations, while the Pentagon worked up its strategy of using overwhelming force: the Powell Doctrine. But all that prudent, hard-nosed realism dissolved when Bush came to power. Last week's story by Dana Priest on the new report by the National Intelligence Council revealed that the Iraq war has created a "training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists". What's more, it created an Iraq-Al Qaeda link that previously existed only in the imagination of Bush administration officials:

Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government.

So the administration hawks, blinded by an ideology that blurred the differences and very real friction between separate groups of Muslims hostile to the US, based their rationale for war in part on ties that never existed. Their eagerness to embrace allegations of a tie between Osama and Saddam was also fueled by their realization that it was the best way to use the weight of September 11th to justify the war against Iraq. It's a sad and tragic case of committment to a fiction.

John Robb, who blogs with no little expertise about fourth-generation warfare and global guerrilla tactics, argues that the US nation-building policy in Iraq follows an upside-down version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow, of course, contended that we must meet basic, physical needs (food, security) before abstract ones (belonging, love, self-actualization). The words of Brecht prefigured this structure in a literary register: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" ("food first, then morality"). In Robb's view, the insurgents in Iraq are targeting the basics: simple infrastructure, security, food and water supplies. The US, on the other hand, focuses most of its effort on the abstract: elections, soverignty. This puts us in a weak position, because the goal we are trying to reach (a democratic Iraq) cannot be achieved without some basic assurances of stability and security.

Robb identifies another area of upside-down thinking in the administration's typical approach to fighting networks of terrorists. Essentially, it amounts to the old sci-fi movie standard of "kill the leader and they all disperse". Going after bin Laden or Zarqawi or "terrorist HQ" in Fallujah is almost beside the point, because their organizations are decentralized networks. They have lots of built-in redundancy, fluid hierarchies, built-in fault tolerance due to rerouting around disrupted communication channels: all the characteristics that make the Internet immune to centralized attacks also work for globalized terror networks. But the Pentagon, because it is a strongly hierarchical state-based organization, has trouble coping with the way that diffuse non-state organizations behave.

These upside-down policies are born of another fiction, an ideological outlook that conceives of the democratic process as a prerequisite to a safe society. If that were true, then authoritarian or dictatorial regimes would not have a chance at any kind of stability. But we see that -- at least in the short run -- they do manage to stand. As a man who believes that all authority vests in God -- the ultimate top-down arbiter -- George W. Bush is the perfect leader to engineer this kind of mistaken thinking. You can't just install elections on top of an insecure and shifting society and hope they will work. A free society starts with meeting basic needs and assuring basic safety. In other words, the essence of freedom starts at the bottom and trickles upward. But to a certain kind of religious worldview, it's exactly the opposite: essences come from the top and filter down.

I heard another striking example of fiction driving reality on NPR this week. Eric Westervelt had a report on the "Iraqi express", a supply convoy that runs from Kuwait to a base north a Baghdad. In the report, Staff Sgt. Jeff Drushel mocks his adversary, flippantly saying: "IEDs, mortars, RPGs, small arms -- hajji can't shoot, and hajji can't surf." This is life imitating art -- a pithy paraphrase from Apocalpyse Now brought in to capture a war whose dark origins lie in a day everyone described as being "just like an action movie".

Those action movies cited by 9/11 onlookers comforted us with a vision of American strength and glorious (though justified) violence: what else are Die Hard and Rambo if not a celebration of honorable cataclysm? And just as the action movie template follows one explosion with another with the slenderest logical thread binding them, the Iraq war grew as a response to 9/11 on the slimmest of pretenses and the most transparent of fictions. Our country's tenacious grip on fiction in the face of reality is surpassingly strange, but is also increasingly the motor of our history.

As the capital prepared to celebrate President Bush's inauguration, the city appeared on Tuesday more like a place under siege. Hour by hour the city of grand buildings and marble statues seemed to disappear behind curtains of steel security fences and concrete barriers.

The article's (web) title has a delicious double entendre if you read it with squinted eyes: "Capital Weaves a Steel Cocoon for a Big Party".

Turning the nation's capital into an armed garrison is bad enough, sending all the wrong signals about what our society is becoming. The crowning insult to these lavish celebrations, though, is this: their leitmotiv will be "a tribute to those who have served". Reportedly, President Bush doesn't want a top-heavy presence from the military; he said "It's my party. I want junior people, and I don't want them overwhelmed by the brass."

This is life during wartime, but not as we used to envision it. We're not being asked to pay higher taxes, or limit our consumption of goods, or even to think much about it. The war rages on, young men and women continue to get killed, and the President celebrates by holding a lavish ball wrapped behind barbed wire. This inauguration shows the brutal contradiction in American life more than most recent events. The rich and connected -- the controllers of the capital that wraps the GOP in its cocoon of steel -- get a huge party, at taxpayer expense, while the poor and isolated die. And -- for one day only -- those out on the front lines get trotted out in front of the cameras to illustrate the leader's compassion for them.

Shameful.