THIS MODERN WORLD

Hindsight is everything. Events played out the way they did and the world is what it is as a result. But you still can’t help but wonder, when you read something like this: what if…?

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 – More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

UPDATE: Never mind. I didn’t read closely enough. Weldon’s involvement with this story diminishes its credibility immensely.

Now, I’m sure you could write similar articles about history students who think George Washington wrote the constitution or math students who think a rhombus is a drink from Starbucks, but this is probably what we should come to expect from a political climate that insists on blurring the lines between science and religion :

While sleek crime-scene TV shows have turned students on to forensic science, an investigation of today’s high school laboratories shows that reality isn’t so flattering.

Most of the labs are of such poor quality that they don’t follow basic principles of effective science teaching, said a report released Monday by the private National Research Council, a prominent adviser to government leaders on matters of science and engineering.

The typical lab is an isolated add-on that lacks clear goals, does not engage students in discussion and fails to illustrate how science methods lead to knowledge, the report said.

Also contributing to the problem: teachers who aren’t prepared to run labs, state exams that don’t measure lab skills, wide disparities in the quality of equipment and a simple lack of consensus over what “laboratory” means in the school environment.

The study also found that the vast majority of science classes required students to bring their own Bibles from home. How are students supposed to test the salinity of Lot’s wife or the molecular transformation of water into wine without the proper materials?!

Joking aside, here’s a real example from a few days ago of sneaking a particular flavor of Christianity into public schools under the guise of Bible history :

The Texas Freedom Network, which includes clergy of several faiths, also said the course offered by the Greensboro, N.C.-based National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is full of errors and dubious research.

The producers of the Bible class dismissed the Texas Freedom Network as a “far left” organization trying to suppress study of a historical text.
. . .
Chancey’s review found that the course characterizes the Bible as inspired by God, that discussions of science are based on the biblical account of creation, that Jesus is referred to as fulfilling Old Testament prophecy, and that archaeological findings are erroneously used to support claims of the Bible’s historical accuracy.

He said the course also suggests the Bible, instead of the Constitution, be considered the nation’s founding document.

To be fair, that last part does make a lot of sense. There are ten commandments and ten amendments in the bill of rights. That can’t have anything to do with the fact that we use a decimal number system and that we’re naturally drawn to numbers divisible by ten. No way. You’d have to be a complete moron to not see the similarity between the third commandment, “Remember thou keep the Sabbath Day.”, and the third amendment, “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law”. This country was clearly founded by people who interpret the Bible the exact same way as James Dobson, Roy Moore, and Pat Robertson.

UPDATE : Since I’ve gotten a number of emails on this post, lemme clear up a couple of things. (1) The whole bit about children having to bring Bibles from home to their science classes was a joke. (2) The commandment I identified as the third is only considered the third in Catholic and orthodox Christian traditions, but it’s considered the fourth by Protestants and Jews. Meanwhile, it sorta looks like it’ the fifth of eleven commandments on the Judge Roy Moore version. If you’re bothered by the misquote, just pretend I said “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” instead.

Well, apparently John Roberts is pro-gay and Bill Frist is pro-choice. I wouldn’t get too excited about either one of these speculations, but anything that’ll piss off the self-righteous culture warriors on Crybaby Sunday is good news in my book. With the program’s stated theme of “God Save the United States and this Honorable Court”^[1], I wonder now how they’ll react to this revelation about Roberts knowing that it might mean trading Roe v. Wade for “Adam and Steve”. Considering that the host of the previous theocratic pep rally is the subject of a big “Fuck You” on the homepage of the Family Research Council^[2], I suggest that Judge Roberts shine his ass-kissin’ shoes and start studying Leviticus.

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^{1 : Just reading this trumpery makes me gag a little. I can’t imagine actually sitting through this bullshit.}

2 : You’ve gotta wonder how all that research has been going.

You know, if I were trying to satirize someone as clueless as Thomas Friedman, I might portray him hawking a book/metaphor called “The World is Flat.” But only if I were feeling lazy and/or uninspired, and needed to go for the obvious joke. So it’s really quite astonishing that the real Thomas Friedman is actually hawking said book/metaphor, and seems quite proud of same.

At any rate, Siddharth Varadarajan is unimpressed:

Ever since I experienced, at first hand, Nato’s bombing runs over Belgrade in the summer of 1999, I’ve had little time for Thomas Friedman or his ruminations.

In those days, Mr Friedman — a widely syndicated New York Times columnist and an advocate of corporate globalisation and American military intervention around the world — used to peddle the silly idea that countries with McDonalds would never go to war against each other. Well, before he could say ‘take-away’, the United States bombed Yugoslavia, while Pakistan and India fought a war over Kargil. All these countries had McDonalds (OK, the Indian ones don’t serve beef) but they still went to war. I don’t know whether the Panamanians ate Big Macs in 1989 but even if they did, I suspect George Bush (the elder) wouldn’t have thought twice about invading them.

In The World is Flat, Mr Friedman ditches McDonalds in favour of another lemon, the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention: “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other so long as they are both part of the same global supply chain”.

This prediction is typical of the ahistorical approach Mr Friedman adopts in order to argue that corporate globalisation is the panacea for the world’s problems. Open up your economy, be less corrupt, create institutions of good governance, let companies hire and fire workers more easily — this is essentially what those who are not benefiting from globalisation must do.

* * *

Stripped of the gush, what flatness boils down to is the ability of businesses to use new communications technologies in order to push the frontiers of cost-cutting by speeding up the work process and sourcing labour and inputs from every corner of the globe. Among the ‘flatteners’ are Windows, the Internet, workflow and open-source software, outsourcing, off-shoring (i.e. foreign direct investment), supply-chaining, insourcing, in-forming (i.e. Google and other search engines) and digital, wireless communication. Flatness, Mr Friedman contends, is making the world less hierarchical, more prosperous and equal (eg. by allowing Indians to work in call centres or process American tax forms), more transparent and democratic (thanks to blogging), and less prone to war.

Flatman gets so carried away with his discovery that he loses the big picture early in the book. On page 39, he visits a U.S. military base in Babil, Iraq and marvels at the live feed being relayed on a flat-screen TV from a Predator drone flying overhead. The drone is being manipulated by an expert sitting in Las Vegas and its feed monitored by a low-level officer who is accessing information earlier available only to his commanders. The Great Discoverer is overawed that Bubba’s been given a laptop. “The military playing field is being levelled’, Friedman writes, without a hint of irony. Remember, he’s in Iraq, a country that’s just been flattened by the U.S. military.

At the Arkansas nerve centre of Wal-Mart — a company he admits has labour practices that are a little unethical — Flatman finds more flatness. . Workers who are not able to move pallets piled high with boxed products fast enough are told to speed up by a “soothing” computerized voice delivered instantly through wireless headphones they must wear at all times. “You can choose whether you want your computer voice to be a man or woman, and you can choose English or Spanish”, a Wal-Mart executive says proudly. Flatman is duly impressed. This is what makes the Wal-Mart supply-chain efficient. This is what makes the world a flatter place to live.

Speaking of Flatman, don’t miss his column today, in which he argues that what America really needs is…better cell service. I kid you not.

As I have mentioned before, I have a Sirius satellite radio, which has come in handy now that I no longer live in a major media market. For awhile, I’ve been using it to listen to Air America while I work, but this summer I’ve found myself migrating back to the various NPR shows (I mostly listen to the radio during the day, and at a certain point, I realized that if I had to sit through one more “Oy Oy Oy” show — well, let’s just say that you can have too much of a good thing and leave it at that). The point being, I’ve only recently discovered that Air America has given Sirius satellite subscribers the shaft and hopped over to XM. And yes, I’m getting comped, but a lot of people invested in Sirius equipment and subscriptions specifically because of Air America, and on their behalf, I’d like to send out a big “fuck you” in the general direction of the business genuises behind that little decision. (…I’m aware that you can stream audio online, but I mostly find the glitches too annoying to bother.)(And streaming doesn’t really help people who installed satellite radio in their cars, does it?)

Anyway: these days, when my tedium cup overfloweth with the calm, measured rationality of NPR, I find myself doing what I did more often before AAR came along — wandering around the batshit crazy wingnut side of the metaphorical dial. Yesterday, for instance, I had the distinct pleasure of listening to G. Gordon Liddy’s son Tom, who is filling in for the “G-Man” this week (and yes, he really calls his father the “G-Man”). And one of the topics of the day was how hard it is for women to stay home and raise children if that’s what they choose to do — not only because of the unbearable scorn of the dominant anti-family liberal media, but because of all that darned government taxation, which takes away so much of your money, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

Excessive taxation is a staple of right wing talk radio, but one which forces hosts to tread carefully, given that what they are actually talking about is excessive upper income taxation — the solution to which generally requires an ever increasing burden to be borne by the host’s own oblivious audience. And since the host and the callers are, by definition, actually carrying on two distinct conversations at cross purposes with one another, confusion often ensues. Yesterday, for example, a woman made it on to the Liddy show and after telling Tom what a fan she was of his father, she pointed out that a lot of people she knows need two incomes because, well, they just don’t make very much money.

(This is often the problem with the elaborate theories of the right: they are usually in direct contradiction to the actual life experience of anyone who’s ever tried to get by on the minimum wage. So the host’s unspoken question becomes: who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?)

Tom tried to gently steer the conversation back to the evils of taxation, but the woman charged on, unaware of the damage she was doing. “At that income level, they really don’t have too many taxes,” she said blithely, threatening to undercut Tom Liddy’s entire fictional construct. You could almost hear the klaxon bells ringing as he allowed that, well, yes, poverty is a problem, and the only thing you can do is, er, try to get better jobs, and church groups can sure help. And on to the next caller!

You have to love it when the audience wanders off script.

(Speaking of talk radio, I also heard the insufferable Laura Ingraham mocking Al Gore for his new television project, which apparently invites viewer interactivity. “They want the audience to do all the work for them,” cackled the talk radio host, apparently oblivious to the irony of her own words. But then, they always are, aren’t they?)