Bruce

A lot has been written about Babbage's Difference Engine, and the method of divided differences it exploited to do its job, but having been exposed to the genius of it in ways I finally understand, I want to recognize it for the extraordinary clever idea it was.

The Difference Engine was not a computer, not in the formal sense. It was designed to implement a particular algorithm for generating values of a polynomial, but the method by which it actually *did* generate values required only serial iterated addition.

What the Difference Engine actually does is a very simple thing indeed: repeatedly add numbers to 31 decimal digit precision. Specifically, it increments each column by the number held in the next column over, with the last active column containing a constant. And it only adds -- negative values have to be entered in nine's complement format to allow the Engine to do subtraction. As a guard against transcription error, the output portion of the Engine transfers the value of the column at the end of the chain to positions of metal type bars, printing the value on a paper tape and simultaneously making an impression of the line of type in a tray of plaster, which at the end of a run is removed from the machine, allowed to cure, then filled with type metal to make an automatically typeset plate of type ready to set in a printing press.

The Difference Engine was literally the first direct-to-plate publishing device. Babbage knew the printing business too well to trust the average printer with the task of setting type for his tables.

But the genius is in the method, and in the tasks the method can be applied to. The method of divided differences is a means of reducing higher order polynomials to simple addition and subtraction, but in many ways it's the discrete equivalent of differentiation, and in fact, differentiation by the power rule (e.g. d/dx(x^2) = 2x, d/dx(x^3) = 3x^2, etc.). Polynomials of degree n have at most n degrees of differentiation, and the last nonzero derivative is always a constant. (This was one of the things that utterly fascinated me about differentiation of polynomials when I was first taught the trick back in 6th grade.)

And what the Difference Engine does, essentially, is reverse the process, integrating from that starting constant across up to 6 degrees of differential/integral relationships to the number that's finally printed on the page.

Why is this a blindingly brilliant idea?

Many non-polynomial functions can be closely approximated by polynomials.

So in one stroke, Babbage designed a machine that could generate extremely accurate tables of logarithms, trig functions, and other fundamental mathematical functions then only available in painstakingly hand-calculated (and notoriously error-ridden) traditionally printed books.

Why wasn't it built in the 1800's? Who knows. Babbage was an infamously trying person to work with, as was the engineer he worked with to work out fabrication details, and he suffered from the classic hacker's fault of being unable to resist launching new projects before completing existing ones, the latter most likely resulting in the British government giving up on the Difference Engine after spending £17,000 on a project initially bid at £1,700. There are plenty of theories.

But it's pretty clear that if even one Difference Engine had been built, and used to complete even one book of mathematical tables, it would have been a fundamental game-changer, and would have altered the Victorian-era concept of information technology in ways very difficult to imagine. (Although it's arguably been tried..) And that was a single-purpose system designed to do one very specialized job. Had a successful example of the Analytical Engine, a fully programmable computer in its own right, followed it, the computer revolution would have very likely begun in the late 1800's and early 1900's in England. Granted, perhaps it was inevitable that a man with Babbage's opinions about poetry would find a way to succeed at escaping success, but it's still tantalizing to imagine how different the world would have been otherwise ..

It's very naive. Unsupportably naive, in fact.

Which should be painfully obvious, given that we've collectively allowed our election process to become more of a show of democracy-like behavior than democracy in fact, but it's worth discussing at a little more length. And I've talked about it before, but it's something I keep coming back to because people seem to keep missing this message.

Many -- I'll be generous and diplomatic and not say "most", although it's quite likely -- people have very little understanding of their own country, or in some cases their own state, beyond the immediate circle of their neighborhood and beyond the immediate time frame of getting groceries home and dinner on the table that day. It's not their fault, because there are few if any institutions in this country left standing that would encourage them to have more distant horizons, but the immediate consequence of it is that things beyond those horizons become meaningless abstractions that have little meaning on the ground right there in their own lives.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem. But one aspect of this lack of direct understanding of the world is that when a partisan propaganda outlet comes along, especially one pretending to be a news outlet, that presents information in a manner designed to create a false understanding of the world, particularly one that gives people unused to the idea of themselves being smart and well-informed, it can create a large community of people who use that shared misunderstanding as a common bond, an echo chamber of mutual agreement based on skewed or even completely fabricated "knowledge" that gives them an empowered and informed feeling of self-fulfillment, which in turn makes them all too willing to accept the idea that anyone who disagrees with them (especially anyone who appears to have contrary knowledge!) is "misled and misinformed". (And with a dark subconscious undercurrent of existential threat to their feelings of security and empowerment, which only makes them fight for their "truth" even harder.)

Intelligent and critically-aware people generally don't fall for this trick. If anything, they learn early on to be suspicious of "knowledge" they haven't checked out, and they learn almost as early on not to be embarrassed by having invested too deeply in a misunderstanding of things, because we all do it, and sometimes we can make ourselves look rather silly by doing so. The thing is, such intelligent and critically-aware people are a comparative minority, and one of the ways in which they often fall short is in underestimating the ability of the people around them to be vulnerable to the kind of self-gratifying groupthink their fellow citizens are fully capable of, because it's very difficult for them to imagine the groupthinker perspective.

There are political entities in this country who are fully aware of the groupthinkers and how their minds work, and exactly how to slow-pitch ideas to them to steer them into voting the way they want, and applying pressure the way they want, and any number of other things. And these people have ad agencies working for them who have invested whole decades in the science of planting emotional reactions to brands in people's minds. These people created the Tea Party (an organization rather uniquely remarkable for being made up of people who are almost all committed nearly to the death to ideas and policies almost diametrically opposed to their own interests!), as only one example. They then turn around and hijack their effectively hacked followers into voting however they tell them to.

There are other political entities in this country who are so invested in their increasingly extreme religious doctrine that they are both driving their own collective groupthink into increasingly destructive campaigns aimed at nothing less than tearing down the country's government and replacing it with one built around their own religion, and vulnerable to manipulation by the more professional politicians and ad agencies mentioned above (although in this case it's far from clear who's manipulating whom!) in support of partisan candidates who are simply set on the shortest path to power and have very little if any of the country's best interests at heart.

So even if we were in a universe where we had a perfectly transparent, fair, and utterly trustworthy election system, that alone wouldn't be enough.

And the solution to both is education, and not just in the schools. The need for people to have a more informed perspective and a greater critical awareness (and freedom from the fear of being embarrassed by having hitched their fortunes to the wrong horse in the heat of the moment) is far more urgent than will ever be satisfied by simply fixing the schools .. which is itself another complex subject for another time. The seeds for it need to be scattered far more widely, beginning with the understanding that the ones who most seem like our enemies are simply other victims of the same game .. and we are not chessmen to be laughed at while we fight amongst ourselves while the people most deserving of our attention hide on the sidelines and pull strings ..

Do you trust that the candidates elected to office in this country were legitimately elected?

Think about it. For purposes of argument, let's (naively!*) assume that everyone who voted in every election did so from a clear understanding of which candidate was better for the job and which ballot measure was better for their community/state/country, at least from a completely self-interested perspective (which in theory is supposed to drive viable decision-making by the collective voting population, and again this is more than a bit naive, but let's give it the benefit of a doubt).

How do we vote? In the past, we voted by making marks on pieces of paper that were then physically taken (under seal and subject to chain of custody requirements) to precinct, county, and in some cases, state election headquarters and physically counted and tallied at each location, and the tallies cross-checked and double-checked in various ways. A vote was a physically documented event that could be handled and counted, and recounted if need be, until it was clear to everyone involved, candidates' campaigns and the voting public included, that the election was a valid and fair count of all the votes cast.

And I deliberately mentioned the voting public in that equation. As strange as this may seem to some people these days, elections are no more to be taken for granted, or implicitly trusted, than the right we have to vote in the first place. As voters, as the ones making the literal hiring and firing decisions on the most influential government officials in our cities, states, and federal government, and the ones asked to give final approval to major financial decisions made by at least the local and state levels of that government, we are not only entitled to distrust the systems used to count our votes, it's actually our duty to distrust them and be suspicious of anything that doesn't pass the smell test in that process. We have the right to demand that our votes be counted in the most transparent manner possible, in front of us and accountable to us for every misstep or mishandling of our votes.

Fast forward to today. Most of our votes are now a finger tap or a scroll wheel selection on an electronic voting system, an ephemeral software event that (as documented in almost every electronic voting system I've seen data on, including the Hart Intercivic systems used in many parts of Texas, and the Premier (formerly Diebold) AccuVote system used in many other parts of the country) is at best only counted as an increment to a tally counter somewhere in the system, and not as a recorded and reproducible event of its own, never audited, never made a part of public record, just an uptick in a counter variable somewhere in the memory of the voting system. The vote tallies are handled in software and transmitted electronically (often over network connections) to election headquarters -- note that these are tallies, not individual votes! -- and aggregated, not counted, and reported simply as totals.

This is a several orders of magnitude weaker system. Virtually all of the intrinsic self-checks and redundancy built into the paper ballot system are missing in almost every implementation of electronic voting ever to see the light of day in voting booths in this country. One (the AccuVote TS) has in at least one version (hopefully not the current one) an elaborate double-bookkeeping scheme of vote totalling that can relatively easily be tampered with from the backend using Microsoft Access, and not only that, can be tampered with in ways that are not audited or traceable or otherwise detectable anywhere else, causing a whole precinct or even a whole county to report pretty much whatever vote totals the tamperer wishes, while showing to the tabulator operators exactly what they expect. This system was designed and programmed by a former convicted bank embezzler whose preferred modus operandi was double-bookkeeping.

Transparent? Just the description of the process above, working completely without tampering, is enough to say "no" to that. I'm enough of a programmer to know that unless the source code of the software used on these devices is opened up to public review and installed subject to at least the same software verification used on slot machines in Nevada. That would at least approach some degree of transparency. I'm also enough of a programmer to know that simply incrementing vote counters and not recording actual vote events (let alone with unique per-vote hashes and timestamps recorded with the votes) isn't enough redundancy for the known requirements of a vote counting system, because it makes recounts absolutely impossible. At a bare minimum, the system should record individual votes so that, if worst comes to worst and the election comes down to a full recount, the actual individual vote data can be printed out (if it wasn't, already, at the precincts, which would be even better) and hand recounted as a check against the machines and the software. That would be another step toward transparency.

Not like the incumbent government even tries. Citizens trying to watch the vote counting process in this country have been given the bum's rush from precinct and county election headquarters in almost every election from 2000 on, and threatened with terrorism charges if they dared to be too vocal about it. Terrorism, mind you, not just trespassing or other minor charges. Homeland Security and secret detention type charges. That should make anyone think at least a moment about what's happening. Our votes are counted in secret using proprietary software we're not allowed to evaluate, quite possibly tweaked here and there to flip a close precinct or county or two in a swing state that carries a lot of electoral votes, and we're not even allowed to watch, even through glass, and if we try, we're kicked out and threatened with secret detention if we protest too loudly.

Which leads to my point. Elections are everything. If we can't trust our votes to count the way we mean them to, we don't have a democracy, we have an authoritarian police state posing as a democracy, and putting on a show of democracy theater every few years just to keep us distracted. And we have no way of knowing we can trust our votes to be counted. And every time we demand that this be addressed, the people running the show conveniently "misunderstand" it as a call for more onerous measures to prevent (virtually nonexistent) individual voter fraud to make it look like something is being done, but do nothing about the possibility of official election fraud.

So we need to cut the election process out of the government that's currently (and entirely possibly fraudulently) running it, and make it a self-contained entity of its own, with its own constitutionally mandated budget (which doesn't have to be all that large, but should be immune from budget cuts incumbents could otherwise use to blackmail it into collusion with them) and its own constitutionally mandated functionality to test and certify election systems, and if necessary, require paper-ballot re-votes in contested counties or states at the very least. It should be absolutely independent and accountable directly to the people, and tasked with enforcing transparency and accountability standards at the state and local level.

And this will never be allowed. Because there's far too much invested in keeping things the way they are and letting us go through the motions of "voting" when our votes are at the mercy of the people counting them. There was once a name for that: Tammany Hall..

* * *

(*And it is a naive assumption, given the sophistication of current advertising practice in bypassing rational thought and positioning products (and candidates) based on purely emotional reactions, as well as the large segment of the voting population conditioned to trust only FOX News as their source of information and opinions. But that's a story for another time, and one I've ranted about before.)

Over the past month or so, I've been watching Rick Santorum make long strides into extremist-theocratic territory, first with his extreme position on abortion, then with his increasingly bizarre pronouncements on contraception, public school education, and prenatal testing. There is little doubt anywhere that he is one of the most extreme right-wing authoritarian, dominion-theology, pro-theocratic candidates ever to hit the campaign trail, as any of these positions alone would more than prove. As a whole, they paint a picture of an angry, disturbed (and disturbing), privileged WASP male would-be patriarch who leaves no doubt as to what he would do with (and to) this country if he were ever in charge of it. (And I have few if any doubts that this will be his last such escalation, although death by stoning for blasphemy or having sex outside of his idea of a conventional male-female Christian marriage may be too extreme for even Santorum to admit to within earshot of any but his own hardcore extremist followers, but anything is possible given how much time is left before the GOP convention, so I wouldn't bet against it before it's all over.)

In any sane world, any one of these statements would end his political career. Any actual legislation passed on any of these positions would be so obviously offensive to the First Amendment that it would cry out to be ruled unconstitutional, and the tone of Santorum's speeches hints rather unsubtly at his distaste, to put it very diplomatically, for the very idea that the First Amendment represents. He has all but said out loud that he would end the era of secular government in the USA if he had power to do so, and strip away virtually every form of civil liberty in existence in this country if he had the power to do so. And he seems to have a strange blindness to the fact that the presidency is in fact not an absolute monarchy that would enable him to rule the country by fiat according to his personal whims, or at least he speaks to followers who seem to believe it would. Any candidate saying any of these things should, in the process, be exposing himself as someone who has no business coming anywhere near a position of power in this country.

So why doesn't it? Why is he still being followed in the news as a legitimate candidate? Why do people listen to him?

Because Rick Santorum is not alone in believing what he does, and because in fact many people in this country believe these things, and have believed them for decades at least. He is able to run for office because there are people who are willing to go bankrupt, almost, to give him every bit of money they can because he is the very essence of what they consider a true Christian, and because his extreme positions on almost everything he's said anything about are the very essence of what they want the most in this country -- the elimination of any semblance of power or rights for an entire gender, the undoing of every single advance we have made toward an egalitarian and secular society that lives up to the principles of our Constitution, and the enshrinement of the most hateful and intolerant values ever to exist in this country in its laws of the land .. and not only the creation of a sectarian, coercive, abusive, and intrusive state religion that invades every minute of our waking lives in our out of our homes, but the denial that that church was ever not the ultimate authority over us. They believe it, and they've been plotting for decades to make that belief reality.

The paradox of democracy is that it is vulnerable to defeat from within. Santorum and his followers -- and fellow-traveller candidates at almost every other level of government from Congress, to state legislatures, to city councils and school boards -- give lip service to democracy when it suits their agendas, but they are gaming the system for the purpose of gaining enough power to dismantle it so they no longer need to pretend to adhere to the principles the country was founded on. The USA as Santorum envisions it would give power and influence only to people like him, denying all rights to any who defy the theology he champions. It doesn't take a lot of analysis to envision the nightmare future this would become -- jail or stoning for being caught outside and not in church on Sunday, harsh penalties for women caught driving cars or working for pay, criminal penalties for being found in possession of birth control devices or books or media that even hint at anything un-biblical, and death penalties for a broad range of activities that the church strongly disapproves of. They believe it. They've been working to put it in place for most of their lives and very often as second or third generation followers. They never stop.

The thing that scares me about Santorum isn't that he pronounces these things -- it's that he doesn't see coming out openly in favor of them as a political liability. Because the thought strikes me that he may in fact not be going through a delusional breakdown on the campaign trail .. he may have advance knowledge of other things that aren't making the news cycle, and his boldness may in fact be a dire warning of much more sinister things that haven't become public yet. I can only hope that he's simply gone around the bend on his own, believing his own mythology, and become a loose cannon that the church just hasn't been able to corral yet.

But my question remains: why is his race to the extreme right not political suicide? What has happened to this country that someone like him is still taken seriously as a candidate? Why do we keep giving him news coverage and discussing his positions like they're merely the views of a very devout "Christian" who speaks for .. well, anyone with any sanity?

Because we've been far too gentle with these people in the name of civility and decorum, and we've been far too tolerant of their hyperbolic posturing and counting coup, is why.

Santorum and his ilk are bullies, triumphalist authoritarians who have only escaped ridicule by wrapping themselves in the flag and shouting words from the Bible to play us through our blind spot centered on the country's dominant religion. They will only ever abuse every kindness offered them, and they will only ever interpret tolerance, decorum, and civility as signs of weakness and invitations to go for the jugular. They need to be shown the limits of our patience and given the public humiliation they deserve, now, before they manifest their delusional belief in their divinely-ordained authority and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some thoughts from the ride in to work today, was figuring out how to explain my fascination with LED's and where to begin the story, and feeling like writing it down ..

The story really starts with the difference between metals and nonmetals, and why the former conduct electricity and the latter don't. If you look closely at the periodic table, it's fairly obvious that the metals all cluster in the right side of the table (at least in the "traditional" format) and the nonmetals dominate the center and left sides of the table. So what's the difference between the two?

Metals turn out to have a metallic appearance and conduct electricity for the same reason -- they have a "gas" of mobile electrons in their crystal structure that can move freely throughout the entire crystal and relatively easily between crystals, so if you put electrons into one end of a piece of metal and take them out of the other end, the mobile electrons inside can move in the metal to replace the ones taken out, and a current will flow. (The "metallic" appearance of a metal is a quantum mechanical effect that also depends on the fact that there are mobile electrons that can move around freely when light hits the surface of the metal, causing photons to mostly be reflected. Some metal elements absorb higher energy photons and only reflect lower energy ones, gold and copper being notable examples.)

Nonmetals, on the other hand, have all their electrons bound to atoms in their molecules, so there are no mobile electrons in them -- adding electrons in one place and taking them away in others simply causes local positive or negative static electric charges -- and the mechanism that allows metals to reflect light is not present in them, so they generally tend to be transparent.

But along that metal/nonmetal boundary are some interesting elements that aren't quite conductors or insulators, and have somewhat variable characteristics. Two of these, silicon and germanium, don't conduct very well, but do have some conductive characteristics. And to explain that, I have to take a detour into molecular orbital theory.

Electrons in isolated atoms have very discrete quantum energy states (known in chemistry as the s, p, d, and f orbitals) that follow very consistent rules of behavior. But when they combine into molecules, those energy states begin to merge into more complex structures (two of which are known in chemistry as sigma and pi orbitals) that have progressively finer divisions of energy state the larger the molecules become.

So what's a crystal? Essentially an extremely large molecule. Any crystal large enough for you to see, even through a microscope, contains so many atoms that they no longer have any kind of measurable difference between energy levels, except for one part of remaining structure -- the levels blend (usually) into two bands, which are known as "conduction" (mobile) and "valence" (attached) bands. It turns out that in metals, the conduction and valence bands touch or overlap, so it's very easy for electrons to get into and out of the conduction band and move around to follow whatever emf is acting on them, and in nonmetals, the bands are widely separated and electrons can't get into the conduction band at all.

And here's where it gets a bit more interesting. Semiconductors like silicon, germanium, and some crystalline compounds like gallium arsenide and gallium nitride have their conduction and valence bands very close together but not quite touching, forming what's called a "band gap", which electrons can jump due to quantum mechanical effects but gain or lose energy doing so. Pure semiconductor materials conduct energy very poorly because electrons are constantly having to jump the band gap to get into and out of the conduction band.

Note I said "pure".

It turns out that if you add impurities to otherwise pure semiconductor materials, some of them make those materials conduct a lot better. In silicon's case, we'll pick boron and phosphorus as examples. Boron tends to take electrons away from the otherwise balanced structure of the silicon, which creates gaps or "holes" in the valence band, whereas phosphorus tends to add electrons to the crystal, which spill over into the conduction band. Boron-doped silicon is thus a "P-type" semiconductor, whereas phosphorus-doped silicon is conversely an "N-type" semiconductor.

Both types conduct relatively well, in proportion to how heavily doped they are. N-type semiconductor has electrons in the conduction band that are always free to move around, whereas P-type has holes in the not-quite-full valence band that effectively act like positive charge carriers of their own, so the valence band electrons can flow slowly in the opposite direction.

So what happens if you put P-type and N-type next to each other? You form what's called a "junction". Junctions have some really interesting properties.

Imagine if you start adding electrons to the N-type side and taking electrons away from the P-type side. The electrons you're adding on the N side go right into the conduction band of the crystal, flowing along nicely through it. But the electrons you're taking away from the P side are leaving gaps behind -- you're creating holes on that side, and as electrons flow into the wire on that side, holes are streaming rapidly away from it. When the holes and electrons meet at the junction, they combine and cancel each other out. So current flows, from the steady stream of electrons and holes arriving from their own directions.

Now reverse the current, taking electrons away from the N side, and adding them to the P side. The electrons you take away on the N side flow out of the conduction band, and the ones you add to the P side fill up holes, effectively taking holes away from that side, and the electrons and holes at the junction are flowing away from each other .. which can't go on for long because the junction isn't making any new electrons or holes to maintain the flow, so you create a depletion zone at the junction and current flow stops.

That's a diode. It conducts electricity one way, and doesn't conduct it the other way. (There are more complex devices with two, three, and sometimes even four junctions, but those are left to study for another time.)

When the diode conducts, it's in a state known as "forward biased". Electrons and holes are meeting at the junction and cancelling each other out, which allows current to flow. So what's happening when they meet up at the junction?

Electrons moving through N-type material are in the conduction band, which is a higher energy band than the valence band. When they combine, they're dropping to a lower energy state to fill holes in the P-type material's valence band. And what happens when an electron loses energy? That energy has to go somewhere.

It turns out that in direct-bandgap semiconductors, that energy is released as light. This wasn't noticed for quite some time due to the fact that the most popular direct-bandgap material, silicon, happens to be opaque, and the bandgap is small enough that the emitted photons were extremely long-wavelength infrared and difficult to detect, and only the ones along the edge of the diode escaped. It also wasn't seen in germanium diodes because germanium is an indirect-bandgap material which allows electrons to lose energy via phonons, which are quantum vibrations of the crystal, rather than light.

But remember those other materials, the gallium compounds?

Gallium arsenide is mostly transparent, and it's a direct-bandgap material. This forces the electrons dropping across the band gap to emit light, and allows the light to (more or less, more on this below) escape the crystal to where it can be detected. A plain gallium-arsenide diode will emit medium wave infrared (almost all of the early generation LED's were infrared), but with modifications to increase the bandgap, can emit visible light of various colors, up to a yellowish green which is about the shortest wavelength that chemistry can produce.

So why were the early 1970's/1980's LED's so dim? One reason is that GaAs is a transparent crystal but it has an extremely high index of refraction, which typically means that most of the light generated inside the crystal is internally reflected and never gets out. 50-60 years later, we're getting better at packaging them in graded index plastics that help with that, and making the crystals out of aluminum gallium arsenide to greatly increase the amount of light that's generated at the junction (witness those eye-searingly-bright LED's in police light bars!), but the shortest wavelength those can generate is still only green.

That's why those 470-450nm blue LED's are still so popular. They're relatively new, and based on the other of those two compounds -- gallium nitride -- and either aluminum or indium, both of which have much wider bandgaps than GaAs and thus generate light of far shorter wavelengths. These are also sometimes used to make white LED's by coating the blue-emitting LED chip and reflector with a broadband yellow-emitting phosphor, which supplies the rest of the spectrum to make a bluish-white color, or, with a much heavier coating, a yellowish "warm white" color (IKEA uses these a lot).

But the bandgap makes another difference that's crucial to electronic designers like me -- the forward voltage drop of an LED is directly proportional to its bandgap and thus directly related to the color it emits. Green and yellow GaAs LED's have a higher voltage drop than red ones, and blue AlGaN or InGaN LED's have a considerably higher voltage drop than green .. and it's all related to the energy drop between the conduction and valence bands.

Fascinating, eh? ;)

Let there be no doubt that there is a culture war in this society.

The scope may be debatable, and the exact identities of the aggressors shady and shifting and difficult to trace at times, but a culture war exists. The only controversy lies in who started it -- the ones attacking the most earnestly claim they are the defenders and not the aggressors, however much their actions might speak otherwise -- and the only questions left to answer are how long it will last and who will prevail.

I wish I had been wrong years ago with my prediction that the anti-abortion elements of the "Christian" extremist movement would soon be joined by an equally strong anti-contraception faction, This now seems to be happening, and in fact, is happening more or less on the schedule I'd expect if anti-abortion and anti-gay campaigning were only opening moves in a larger game of attacking the most vulnerable targets first. And this, to me, proves that all of these are part of a larger effort that will only escalate as it gains more ground and more hearts and minds with its constant appeals to loaded concepts like "morality" and "decency".

And the culture warriors of the right wing deflect criticism and defuse fear of their agenda by claiming with each step that it's their only goal, when the truth is these are only incremental targets of opportunity and potentially everything in the entire society that is the least bit contrary to their doctrine will come under similar attack at some point or another as they gain ground. I was curious when the anti-gay campaigning began back in the 80's, and the anti-abortion agitation not long after that, but if contraception is under attack, that's enough for me to be sure that even that is only the beginning and it's a safe bet that many other aspects of "progressive" society, some of which we may even take for granted, are somewhere or other on the target list.

So how did we get here?

To some extent, we've allowed ourselves a huge cultural blind spot when it comes to the dominant/majority religion of that culture. We tend to accept its assertions of morality/ethics unchallenged, even to the extent of accepting such absurdities as assuming it cannot act unethically or immorally, and so when extremists wearing the clothes and speaking the language of that majority religion come along, they naturally exploit that uncritical acceptance as a means of manipulating us into accepting their intolerance as merely a stricter interpretation of ethics or morality, and making us unwitting accomplices and supporters of their agenda, and lending an air of plausibility to their excuses that it's only this one thing this one time.

And the war is definitely covert and under disguise, and there are plenty of legitimate-sounding reasons to believe it's far less than what it is. But don't believe for a moment that it will stop even here .. it's only begun ..

A conversation I had with a friend some days back still nags at me and haunts me with its implications.

We were talking about the various and sundry forms of (mostly white) western cultural (mis)appropriation of various and sundry native cultures, particularly native American, including the increasingly bizarre manifestations of "Mayan" 2012 mythology, and I came to a realization that I circle around to from time to time and which has the same impact on me every time I come back to it: the misappropriations and hijackings of those traditional concepts, and the mystical power they're often charged with, sometimes appropriately and sometimes not, in "new age" culture, all come back to what I see as a common feature of European ancestry in general: the real spiritual traditions we hunger the most for mostly don't exist.

My ancestors, before one of them moved to the east coast of what would eventually become the USA, lived in County Cheshire, England, for the most part. Those roots, for me at least, go back to at least the 11th century and probably much farther than that -- we were there before the Norman Conquest. The only spiritual experiences my ancestors were allowed to have, if they wanted to avoid potentially gruesome and severe punishments, were those of the Christian church, which had more or less successfully eradicated all traces of anything even remotely resembling the native folk culture and traditions as "witchcraft", so thoroughly that even the oral history of them was silenced. This is true of the native traditions of most people whose ancestry lay within the areas of Britain and western Europe that were under Christian control -- the assimilation by Christianity was so complete in the Middle Ages that literally only the history of (and largely written by) the Church survives from that time period.

There is a line from the movie Luther that stuck in my mind so deeply I may never forget it -- "the works of Luther shall be erased from the memory of man!" It stuck in my mind because I realized, hearing that, that it could very well have happened -- a church so completely in control of all flow of information that it could eliminate not only a man but any record whatsoever of his ideas, simply for disagreeing with the Church authority, could easily have succeeded not long before Luther's day, and almost certainly did, time and time and time again. We don't even know what we don't know, because so little of the culture of pre-Christian Europe survived that we literally only have the vaguest notions of what our own folk traditions may have been before they were stolen from us.

And stolen they were. We were robbed of that legacy before we were even born, by the cruelest and most vicious means imaginable. We live today as survivors of a literally unimaginable generations-long purge that crushed the heart of our ancestors' cultures so completely that we will probably never discover more than occasional tantalizing hints of what we were. And we were fed a travesty of the teachings of ancient Middle Eastern sages who were no more ours than they belonged to the councils who made a Bible of those teachings, a Bible that was composed and edited from the outset to be an instrument of state power and coerced obedience.

And there, I think, lie the roots of that hunger people like me feel for something deeper. The traditions my ancestors and I grew up with are increasingly unsatisfactory food for our souls -- we're offered bread and given stones, to cite that same Bible -- and the True Believers in those traditions betray the origins of those traditions by pushing hate and demands for unthinking obedience ever more forcefully, and poisoning what little good was left in those gospels. For me, there is no turning back -- I knew decades ago that I have never been, am not now, and never will be a Christian, however much I may appreciate Jesus' insights and teachings or the strength of the gospel stories as mythology. It was never real to me, and I would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. To me, the cross will always be a symbol of what was taken for me, and what was done in the name of everything I was told to believe in, the rationalization for the extermination of native cultures in my ancestral home and the continued extermination and assimilation of more native cultures in the land where I live. I look at the cross and see only that betrayal of everything I could have been in that insane murderous quest for perfect orthodoxy.

And so I hunger for something that speaks to my soul, and the things that speak to my soul and inspire me are, at best, borrowed from people who will never accept me among them, no matter how well I may take their teachings to heart. I will always be haole, goy, bilagáana, gaijin, to the cultures who kept what my ancestors lost, most likely forever. Many people like me simply pretend to be part of other cultures that resonate in them, some believing that they somehow belong, others exploiting that hunger for personal gain, still others simply following the herd, but ultimately, so many simply hungering for something to take the place of what they will never truly find. As for me, the best I can do is become a religion of one, live my own tradition to the best of my ability, and hope I find some comfort in it, because that is all I really have to myself. That religion sometimes converges on other traditions that interest me mostly from the convergence, but I am ultimately alone in my own spirituality. And I wish I had company ..

.. of watching thislaw sail through both houses of Congress with these provisions attached to it makes me question my own sanity and challenges my notions of what the USA even stands for anymore. It's not the first such law to be considered, but the fact that this is even being considered seriously by anyone borders on what really should, by all rights, be unthinkable.

What bothers me the most about this recent step in a very dangerous direction is that Congress, and our supposedly progressive and Democratic President, appear to have accepted a convention of treating "terrorists" as subhuman to the point of being undeserving of even basic civil liberties, on the excuse that they are "enemy combatants" in a "war".

I seriously believe that a whole generation, or more, of now-adult citizens must have slept through every single day of government class, and simply blindly accept whatever anyone in authority tells them. I seriously believe that. Nothing else explains why the very idea of treating anyone in this country, even non-citizens, even terrorists, the way this country has treated these targets of its wrath.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were ratified by the people of 14 states, at least one of which refused to ratify the Constitution without the Bill of Rights. It's a pretty safe assumption that the Bill of Rights are integral to the very nature of what makes this country what it is.

In turn, the Bill of Rights are not grants of rights (or privileges or anything else of the kind) from the government to the people. Such "rights" are not inalienable rights, as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Inalienable rights are ours from birth as human beings, no matter where we live or travel. The Bill of Rights guarantees that those rights will not be infringed, and none of the Amendments in it contain any qualifications or exclusions limiting the exercise of those rights to citizens or those in the good graces of the powers that be.

So, this sentence:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Nor this one:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Nor this one:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

make any exceptions at all. Everyone in this country, suspected terrorists included, has the basic, fundamental, human right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty, given access to legal counsel (with attorney-client privilege), tried in court with the opportunity to present a legal defense and call defense witnesses and cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and given a fair sentencing if convicted. The United States does not have the right to pick people up off the street, hold them indefinitely in secret in undisclosed locations, or try them in absentia or in military tribunals without counsel, citizen or alien, law abiding or criminal, dissenter or not, terrorist or not. It simply does not, never did and does not now, nor ever will, law or no law. Any other position is so thoroughly un-American as to be abhorrent to the very spirit of the documents this country was founded on.

Did I overemphasize? I know of no other way to express how offensive the very notion of this idea is to me.

Am I unpatriotic in saying this? I believe I am the exact opposite -- there is no more patriotic position, in my mind, than to defend basic human rights and urge extreme caution against any measure that might turn against them. Even if this is an unpopular opinion, and I'm sure it is, and I'm sure I'll be called a traitor or worse for expressing it. But this monstrous police state where citizens live in fear of secret police with the power to make them disappear indefinitely, where speaking out in public or even exercising our right to assemble peaceably and petition the government for redress of grievances puts us in danger of police violence or threat of arrest simply for speaking out, is not the country I was born into, nor is it the country I grew up in, and the only words I have now for the horror into which I see it evolving are extreme and emphatic.

This country is yours. You inherited it at birth, you invested your life in it. It's being stolen from you, actually has been stolen from you in large part. The people who insist you give up freedom after freedom for the sake of a small increment of supposed safety against imaginary threats work for you. They're hoping and praying you've forgotten that. Remind them. Write to them, call them, fax them, whatever it takes. Get solid and committed answers on how each of them stand. If you live in a state with recall for elected officials, start recall petitions, and if you succeed in getting a recall on the ballot, vote people out.

It's time. It's past time.

"..but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when.."

..a governor in Texas can put on an "outdoorsy" looking jacket and pretend to open up to "regular folks" just to hitch his wagon to the "Christian persecution" meme that's so much the fashion in right-wing politics these days?

This video has been skewered enough ways in social media that I'd be beating a dead horse at this point, but I thought it deserved a little deconstruction. Gov. Hair was even good enough to provide a transcript in the caption of the video.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian..

No one should be, if it's an honest belief. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm not a Christian, which is a considerably riskier admission in the current climate even in a relatively liberal area of the country.

But this is not really a statement of personal courage. This is a stock phrase intended to set the stage for what follows. It presupposes a factual falsehood -- that Christians are somehow the subject of universal ridicule in a society that somehow mercilessly taunts them and belittles them for their beliefs. (I ran into this firsthand in my brief misadventure with Maranatha back in my high school days, and it's a common trope in many conservative-leaning Sunday school classes.) The reality is that if you actually are serious enough about your beliefs to hold true to them, and if you're honest about them, the only people who will taunt or belittle you for believing what you do are small-minded petty people whose attention is not worth your time. But this myth still persists, and is actively reinforced at every opportunity, because it furthers certain agendas. (Truth be told, most of the people most likely to engage in that kind of behavior are the ones most likely to try to pass off this particular code phrase, especially if they're trying to build themselves up as "courageous" and "pious".)

..but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country..

"Something wrong in this country" .. well, that's one perspective, but in the context of what comes before it here, the meaning is pretty specific. The vague "something" in the sentence is more evasion than uncertainty .. the sort of person who's likely to resonate with the possibility of being shamed for admitting that they're a Christian is going to understand full well what that "something" is.

..when gays can serve openly in the military..

And here we get to the punchline .. sort of. It's disguised as sort of a throwaway qualifier here, but there's no mistaking the mention of it as a "something wrong in this country", qualifier or not. It's phrased as an either-or, and historically this is a common tactic in this style of speaking, but make no mistake, appeasing what comes after it will not be a successful strategy to make this in any way OK for the people he's speaking to here. And this is yet another nod, wink, and nudge to a very specific group of supporters, letting them know he's speaking in their code and he just has to tone it down a bit so he doesn't stir up the liberals.

..but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

And here we come to the first outright lie, in a factual sense. Everything that's come up to this has dripped with innuendo and carefully phrased key language to establish his credentials, but this is the first demonstrable untruth, as everything up to this point has been opinion, however offensive or intolerant.

Since when have kids not been allowed to openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school?

I'm going to ask that again, since it needs further emphasis.

Since when have kids not been allowed to openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school?

Are kids in school punished or corrected for referring to Christmas during the Christmas season, or wearing Christian-themed clothing, or other culturally normal means of "celebrating" Christmas? I've never heard of such a thing. I have heard of schools using non-sectarian themes and decorations in the school-sponsored decorations and other Christmas activities, but I haven't heard of kids being forced to follow strictly non-sectarian language or themes in their own personal expressions .. with a possible exception that I'll get to in a moment.

Are kids in school punished or corrected, or disciplined, for praying in school? I've never heard of that either, and I can't imagine how it would be enforced. Prayer is something you can do without any outward visible sign you're doing it, except for maybe what looks from the outside like quiet introspection, and there simply would be no way to single out students who appear to be engaging in quiet introspection who are praying, as opposed to meditating or simply taking a quiet moment here and there to breathe and relax and get into a positive mental state. But the "prayer" he's talking about here is not that, and likewise, the answer comes in a moment, so bear with me.

On one level, this is yet another nod and wink to the fundamentalist audience he's speaking to, another coded shout-out to people who use this kind of statement as a secret handshake of sorts to confirm loyalties. But on another level, it has some darker meanings.

"Praying in school" is a very good example of how things can be said to mean one thing to the uninitiated but something very different to the faithful. The only kind of "prayer" in school that's been specifically outlawed is teacher-led sectarian prayer in the classroom, which was a common practice up until the early 1960's (and later in some areas, and I clearly remember a few instances of it in my elementary school in the early 1970's), and which was ruled unconstitutional by SCOTUS in Engel v Vitale in 1962 and Abingdon School District v Schempp in 1963. The justification for this was that obligatory teacher-led prayer in schools was an inappropriate activity that created the appearance of establishment of religion. And that is one of the two kinds of "prayer in school" that the people he's talking to are referring to.

The other kind of "prayer in school" that's subject to a certain amount of restriction is aggressively public prayer, of the kind that's intended to assert a dominant (and to some extent invasive!) "Christian presence" in the school in direct defiance of teachers and school administrators. It's not personal or private at all, it's public, and territorial, and adversarial, and usually disruptive, and designed to provoke disciplinary action -- and often turns around immediately after that and claims the disciplinary action targeted the "prayer" when in fact it was in an effort to manage disruptive behavior. The only exception I would expect in terms of "celebrating Christmas", above, falls into the same mold -- adversarial and territorial and often disruptive public challenges to the school, only thinly disguised as "celebration". And darker things still, such as covert bullying and harassment of gay or minority students who "don't know their place", also excused as "prayer" or "expression of religious beliefs".

And even if the "when gays can serve openly in the military" was a qualifier, above, this turns into a dark ultimatum of sorts -- "if you don't let us indoctrinate your students in school and let our enforcers roam the halls intimidating them into compliance, we won't let your gay sons/daughters serve openly in the military and we'll go back to intimidating them into submission or outright driving them into suicide or desertion" -- which is itself a dubiously sincere promise, given the people it comes from. And given that it's probably not, there's very little positive about this sentence at all.

As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

I'll say this again: there is no war on religion in this country. No one is lining up Christians at gunpoint and taking them prisoner, or shooting them in the streets, or any of the other things that constitute "war". There is, now, a culture war, but the offensive force in that war is the audience Perry is speaking to here, not the Obama administration or any supposed shadowy leftist organization in this country. (I'm from the socialist fringe of the left wing. Trust me, we're not that organized.) The culture war exists only because the right wing insists on fighting one, and the only resistance they meet is defensive, however much they may protest otherwise.

And about that "religious heritage" .. this is another example of the "Christian nation" meme, a popular one in the dominion-theology movement. The actual "religious heritage" of the USA, if there is one, is a Deist- and Masonic- flavored spirit of religious pluralism that is now and has always been sectarian, and the US Constitution was only ratified on the condition that it include the Bill of Rights, and specifically the First Amendment. Read that again: the states made the Bill of Rights, and specifically the amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and religion, a condition of their even accepting the Constitution as a governing document. So there's very little defensible about the implied claim, above, that Christian sectarian religious practice is somehow a "religious heritage" in any kind of established sense. And there's even less justification for claiming that this particular kind of sectarian practice, heterodox as it is in a genuine Christian context.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

Freedom to practice one's own faith without fear of punishment, among many other freedoms, made America strong. Faith by itself may have been a key part of that strength, but it was no one faith of some mythical privileged sect, it was hundreds of millions of individual faiths, with their commonalities and their differences, and with their shared experience and their shared spirit. Imposing one faith on a country never made it strong, and when it was truly successful, only weakened the countries in which it was imposed. This country was founded by people who had just declared independence from a monarchy that was intent on doing just that, and it was populated by people seeking to escape that imposition.

Overall, an equivocal, disingenuous, and in some ways disturbingly intolerant, nod and wink to the faithful of one of the most uncompromisingly extremist religious movements in American history, and a clear statement that either Perry is trying to use the language of the movement to con them out of money (and lots of it, as the leadership of the dominionist movement tend to be on the wealthy side), or he is a bona fide true believer and will actually carry out the promises he makes or implies in this ad.

And that's just 31 seconds of dominionist-flavored propaganda. There's a lot worse out there, both in terms of sheer density of twisted semantics and of volume ..

If you remember this post, and this one, you know some of the history of my ongoing battle with a particularly aggressive spammer that has proven very difficult to filter for or track with any degree of reliability. (If you haven't, go read those two posts first, because they cover most of the basics of what I've been able to dig up so far.)

It turns out I mostly successfully TOS'ed the first one. I hadn't realized that until I went back in and started analyzing the last few days' worth of these messages in my spam folder. I only got one from 184.164.128.0/19 (which was the original IP block), and the bulk of them were from 66.85.128.0/18 and 176.65.208.0/23, the latter of which actually seems to be part of 176.0.0.0/8.

The interesting new development is that 176.0.0.0/8 is actually owned by a different hosting provider:


OrgName: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgId: RIPE
Address: P.O. Box 10096
City: Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country: NL
RegDate:
Updated: 2011-09-24
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/RIPE

OrgAbuseHandle: RNO29-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: RIPE NCC Operations
OrgAbusePhone: +31 20 535 4444
OrgAbuseEmail: hostmaster@ripe.net
OrgAbuseRef: http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/RNO29-ARIN

The conclusion I have to take from this is that this behavior is itself probably a signature of a software package or script set, or something similar, that someone is either selling or distributing to advertising spammers, because both of these sources do the following things:

• Rapid rotation of domain naming, on both A and PTR records, with short TTL's (about a week, after which the images and links go to dead named addresses because the names no longer resolve), which makes filtering by domain almost impossible


• Rapid rotation between a fairly large number of IP addresses in the hosting provider's ARIN IP block, which makes filtering by X-Originating-Ip: header fields difficult


• Payload content entirely in remote images, which a) masks the payload content from the filter analysis and b) hits an HTTP server from your IP every time one is opened, confirming your email address with each image hit


• Large blocks of hidden Bayesian filter poison in the message content, which disrupts filter tuning and, with the large number of these messages going out, requires almost daily filter retraining to keep Bayesian filters from becoming totally useless within a week or so


• Finally, the opt-out link is also an image, which keeps the opt-out message out of the filter analysis (because it would otherwise be a crib), and hits the HTTP server confirming your email when it's loaded, even if you don't actually opt-out.

That combination is bad enough if it's just one smart spammer who has a little more ability to code than your average bear. It's potentially exponentially worse if they've built a software package that can be sold to other people and set up on other hosting providers anywhere else. The only viable defenses I can come up with for it are making a daily practice of tuning my spam filter when these start cropping up in my inbox, using rules to flag them so I don't inadvertently open one and mark myself as a "live one", and occasionally notify their providers at the abuse@ address when they reach the point where they're flooding my email account enough that it's difficult to keep up with it all.

And the thing that really offends me about this isn't necessarily that I'm getting the spam. Spam is a fact of life, because the infrastructure that delivers email is built on protocols designed back in the days when it wasn't totally naive if not dangerous to trust everyone on the net not to abuse everything they get their hands on, protocols that are now so deeply embedded in the infrastructure that replacing them is appallingly impractical.

The thing that offends me about it is more of a social-contract objection -- it would be bad enough if someone broke into your house every day and followed you around with a megaphone shouting random annoying things at you, but if they were friends with the local locksmiths and police to the point where you couldn't keep them out even by changing your locks and/or calling 911, then it would somewhat approach how I feel about these guys -- they nearly killed email as a communication channel, back in the days when there were trusting open SMTP relays everywhere, and it was only when the last open relays were sniffed out and shut down that email became practically useful again.

It's bad enough that there are people in the world who will gleefully invade your personal life with sales pitches for their useless crap, and do it in ways designed to shove it in front of your eyes without your consent, and it's only a slight consolation that until now there have been technological solutions to thwarting them. But still, it's not the fact that I'm getting spam that bothers me, necessarily .. it's the sociopathically greedy attitude that's behind it, and the knowledge that there are people out there who will burn the whole thing to the ground and make it completely useless for the people who were intended to use it, as long as they can make a buck or two before they choke it to death. And counting on compassion and trust and any sense of ethics to keep such people out of our lives is naive at best.

Ultimately, I think the only solution is a law defining "spam" in some sort of coherent logical way, and specifying penalties for sending it. My guess is that it would have to have some sort of do-not-UCE registry as a global opt-out, and some means for commercial email senders to integrate a registry check into their outgoing email server transactions. Otherwise, this will continue to be an arms race of sorts, and every game-changer like this will continue to threaten the very usefulness of email itself until yet another whack-a-mole tech solution is found to deal with it ..