The Ambrosini Critique

And don’t think that Brad De Long has a chance at being objective. Excuse me while I go bang my head against the wall in despair:

And don’t think Colin Powell is going to become White House Chief of Staff and save us:

Whiskey Bar:

Sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction … And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.

Colin Powell
Press Briefing in Cairo
February 24, 2001

If Iraq had disarmed itself, gotten rid of its weapons of mass destruction over the past 12 years, or over the last several months since (UN Resolution) 1441 was enacted, we would not be facing the crisis that we now have before us.

Colin Powell
Interview with Radio France International
February 28, 2003

[Semi-Daily Journal]

 

Can the University of California, Berkeley find an economics professor that (a) can see the forest for the trees (b) understands that September 11th changed everyone’s perspective on foreign policy (c) knows that you can take pieces of any statement, juxtapose against another piece of a statement that the person made, and make it look contradictory.  I’m not sure that Prof. De Long is capable of clicking a link that he, himself pointed to in his post.  The first press briefing quote was a response to a question about Arab press reaction to the US’s policy of enforcing UN sanctions.  The second quote was in response to a question about US’s policy to enforce UN resolution 1441.

Almost surely, Powel, in both quotes, is discussing the administration’s consistent policy of working with the UN!

Cool!

I just ordered my “le jeu de cartes du régime Bush” styled after the card deck the military handed out to troops in Iraq to list the most wanted Saddam lackies.

God, the French piss me off and that’s why I love ‘em.

Right. So the other day I fell asleep watching this movie. I missed the last 1/2 hour and I’m not really interested in going back and watching it.

There were too many reference to Russian history that I have no idea about. Also, the topic, which I should have guessed, was ‘Russianess’. I’m pretty indifferent to what it means to be Russian. I suppose it has importance and it could have an impact on geopolitics, but I’m just not into it. Oh, well.

Christopher Hitchens writes about Britishness in this month’s Atlantic. He tries his damnedest to make it interesting to the rest of us non-Britons, but in the end its not interesting to hear about “others’” identities when your knee deep in trying to figure out what you’re all about.

HOWEVER, there’s a small chance that the movie sparked an interest in Russian history…

Mr. Wheeler explained, last night in class, that an integral is just the limit of a Riemann sum. He said that we’ll learn clever ways to integrate (e.g. by parts, the substitution rule, completing the squares, etc), but that in each case we’re really just finding the limit of the corresponding Riemann sum. This is all good because it turns out that its pretty hard to find the limit of the Riemann sum and relatively easy to integrate using these other techniques (once you’ve drilled them into your head).

To illustrate graphically: lim n->∞ ∑[i=1,n] f(x_i)Δx = ∫f(x)dx

That thing on the left is, by definition, equal to the thing on the right of the equal sign. This is just messing with symbols. Like saying 1+1+1 is equal to 1*3 or like the little stick man on the doors of bathrooms. There is something to that symbol-play that sets our feeble little minds at ease, though. For some reason, the simplicity in this new set of symbols on the right of the equation make it easier to fiddle with integrals. To me, this is amazing. We haven’t introduced anything but a metaphor and it makes the job that much easier. Why does this magic happen?!

Is it that our brains can only process so many little symbolic units at a time? Anything that can compress the number of units can simplify the processing the brain has to do. With this understanding, the way to understand the integral metaphor is by counting the symbols… the metaphor reduces the number of characters in the Riemann sum (20) down to 7 for the integral on the right hand side. So introducing this new notation reduced the complexity that the mind has to deal with by a factor of almost 3.

The genius of inventing these metaphoric mind tools, the genius of Riemann, is that they make concepts like integrals easier for us mere mortals to grasp, not that they tell us something profound about the truth of integrals. If we were gods, omnipotent, we wouldn’t need these metaphors, the complexity of Riemann’s Sums would be transparent, and there would be no need for integral notation. This fact stands in strange contrast to our notions of the divine beauty of metaphors, the idea that they get us closer to the truth, don’t you think?

This contradiction begs another question: is it possible that metaphors get us further from the truth, rather than closer?

The thought that I have to keep distant, for now, is that if these metaphors are just tools, there is no truth in them besides the object of the metaphor, and they don’t help to uncover more deeply hidden truths, why do I need to learn them? I have to keep this question distant because I’m in the middle of taking a 10 week course where I’m learning those worthless metaphors!

I saw a review of this movie on Ebert and Roeper a couple weeks ago that perked my interest. The movie is a single take, continuous 90 minute scene.

There’s a good chance this won’t be a good movie in the sense that Braveheart, Empire Strikes Back and Casablanca are good. It may be more like watching acrobatics. The drama (or comedy) in the show isn’t why you watch. You watch for the ‘gimmick’ that isn’t really a gimmick as much as an newly discovered tool to entertain.

Each discipline seems to have at least two major areas of concern. Content (which is usually broken down further in more granular sub-groups) and the ‘Tools of the trade’. Economics has micro/macro as its content and things like econometrics as its tools. These two areas feed off each other. Discovery in the content area eventually hits a wall that requires new tools. The tools then are invented. Clever use of the tools discovers new content and so on.

This pattern occurs all the time in science… Looking at smaller and smaller things required better and better microscopes and the better microscopes allowed for unexpected discoveries.

Today was my first day of class at DeAnza. I’m taking the Math 1b class which is basically intro to integral calculus. It’s been a while since I’ve been in school (at least in a ‘real’ class… I took Italian a couple years ago), so a lot of thoughts came flooding into my mind:

- teachers ‘care’ about what they’re teaching, even though they’ve taught it over and over again

- it’s annoying when students go through the motions but don’t really care

- math is fun, even beautiful

- criticism needs to be tempered to the environment (I know this is a stretch, but maybe I’ll come back to this point)

- I might be an academic!

- How exactly does out mind work? Why do we need the ‘ladder of the mind’? Are ‘model’ and metaphor just tools to help get up that ladder or are they ‘real’? It’s annoying that they’re not real!

‘People loved us’ – Back in Humboldt after the Iraq War…

A Marine’s story back from Iraq… He’s from my home, Humboldt County, California.

Bogus? The conspiracies outlined in this article do not prove that the war is bogus, they simply point to the fact that the US sees a need for an International Stabilization Regime. The US’s interests are at risk in a world of uncertainty. The middle east and North Korea represent two highly volatile areas of the world and who knows what will emerge their to reek havoc for us and allies. Oh, by the way, these areas are among the worst in human rights and the outright oppression of people. Is it wrong to want to police those areas, to bring order?

The UN doesn’t have that charter, no nation in the world, but one, has the the power or will.

Oil? Two words: North Korea. How can Oil be the motivation of all this when North Korea is on the top of the agenda?

Meacher uses the example of Pearl Harbor as precedence. To him it proves that the US has a pattern of similar conspiracies. Ok, fine. Let’s assume that US engages in such conspiracy as a matter of course:

“The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war.”

What again was morally wrong about the US entering the war, freeing Europe, defeating Japan and generally restoring/creating order to the world?

Bowling for Columbine – Coming out

Trust. Fear. This movie wasn’t about guns. It was about a culture of fear. (And the unexplained bashing of Charlton Heston… What was that all about?)

What is the difference between Canada and the US? Canada has 7m guns and 10m households; they have guns too. Their murder rate is much, much lower than ours (hundreds of gun related deaths vs 10k in the US… A Canadian has 1/8th the chance of an American of getting killed by a gun). Why do we kill each other with guns and why don’t they?

Mr. Moore argues that the difference is fear. We have a history of fear. The Pilgrims came because they were afraid of persecution. The European settlers killed off the indians because they were afraid. To show further fear of other ethnicities, we’ve grown to be fearful of black people. This fear is shown again and again in our news programs.

According to Marilyn Manson, the fear is driven by corporations to drive demand for consumption. To be safe, you have to by this.

The problem doesn’t appear to be the guns but it is corporations and a culture of fear. How do we fix the problem?

This is where the movie fails. Instead of answering the question, the last act of the movie is spent disparaging the noticeable feeble and old Charlton Heston. Why does Moore spend his time beating up on this man? Earlier in the movie he had determined that the problem wasn’t guns. He even has a conversation with one of the Columbine victim’s father who can’t understand why Canada has as many guns but fewer deaths by them.

I’m going to punt on the issue of how to fix the problem just as Moore did… It’s easier to disparage old people and pin it on racism.