Schroedinger's Spots

A surprise could also come from the opposite direction — as a result of overestimating the other side’s capabilities and intentions; in Iran’s case, that could lead to a premature Israeli attack. Could that happen? It did — to America when it relied on faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003, claiming that it knew Saddam Hussein was hiding unconventional weapons.

-Ronen Bergman in the Times

This now ordinary phrasing, that America "relied on faulty intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq," is taken in some circles (like the Times) to mean that so-called faulty intelligence was the reason that America invaded Iraq, but it is taken in more literate circles to mean what it more literally says, which is that it was used to, well, to justify the invasion, which would have happened regardless--to justify it irrespective of any actual reason for invading.  And if you believe the latter, you probably also believe that the faults in that faulty intelligence were effectively the result of the predetermined outcome, that the intelligence was, what is the word, massaged to fit the demands of the marketing campaign.

So anyway, then Bergman says:

This year, an equally fateful decision may well rely on the quality of available intelligence. So, caution is in order: Relying on intelligence as the chief touchstone for decisions about whether and when to attack creates a wide opening for misunderstandings, divergent interpretations and vulnerabilities to parties with an interest in either attack or delay.

Both Israel and America should acknowledge that scraps of information cannot serve as the basis for action against Iran, and they should find new criteria for such a decision.

But, you know, we all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again, and by that destiny to perform an act whereof what's past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge, as someone once said . . . destiny, in other words, determines its own antecedents.  There is no good or bad intelligence, no true or false determination in this little causal loop.  The Enterprise has already entered the spacial rift.  Data's cat has turned into a kitten.  The intelligence will reveal the predetermined outcome.  If we are set to invade Iran, it will say one thing; if not, not.  But the fact that it appears to precede whatever occurs next is an in all cases an illusion.

Double Bubble Trouble

I sat down the The Internet Investment Bubble to talk finance, economics, and his predictions for the winner of this season's Ru Paul's Drag Race.

IOZ: It's great to see you again.

THE INTERNET INVESTMENT BUBBLE: Likewise.  You're looking fabulous.

IOZ: No, you're looking fabulous.  It's been ages!

IIB: Like a decade.

IOZ: You haven't changed.

IIB: Oh, hush.  I'll be sure to tell my colorist you said so.

IOZ: Are you still going to Marc-André.

IIB: Girl, that tired-ass queen?  Please.  I'm going to Viktor-with-a-K.

IOZ: Get.  Out.  I used to go to Victor-with-a-C.

IIB: He was cuter.

IOZ: So true.

IIB: Like that classic Cadinot scene at the barber.

IOZ: I love that one.  With the nerdy guy in glasses.

IIB: Totes.

IOZ: Ten years, really?

IIB: Eleven, I think.

IOZ: We were so fucking young.  I can't believe it.  We used to go dancing.

IIB: We used to do coke.

IOZ: I never.

IIB: It just flew up your nose.  By accident.

IOZ: I was so like, where did this bill come from?  Who rolled it up?  How did it get up my nose?

IIB: You wore tank-tops.

IOZ: Oh gawd.

IIB: You were a bottom.

IOZ: Lies and deceptions.

IIB: I still remember your Manhunt profile.

IOZ: No, that was even before Manhunt.  That was, like, still Gay.com.

IIB: AOL m4m.

IOZ: Shush, I'm not that old.

IIB: Not quite.

IOZ: So, let me ask you: seriously.  Are you for real?

IIB: You mean, like, the Instagram thing?

IOZ: A billion, really?

IIB: Well, it is the internet.  It's like when the profile says eight inches.

IOZ: Five inches.

IIB: Measured on the bottom.

IOZ: Includes the balls.

IIB: Metric.

IOZ: Girl.  So what are the implications?

IIB: The ramifications?

IOZ: Totes.

IIB: Same as before.  You know how I roll.

IOZ: Such a bitch.

IIB: Is it my fault I look this good?

IOZ: You do look good.

IIB: Ashtanga.  I've got better abs than when I was twenty.

IOZ: So I see.

IIB: We never fooled around.

IOZ: We'll never fool around.

IIB: We made out, once.

IOZ: We were so high on pets.com.  We were tripping.

IIB: Well, maybe in another ten.

IOZ: You'll be back?

IIB: I never left.

IOZ: Bisous.

IIB: Kisses.

Frodo Returns to the Derbyshire

So needless to say I'm not very interested in American conservativism, whatever that is, and certainly not in its F-list, tertiary scribblers, but this whole John Derbyshire thing is worth commenting on, if briefly.  I propose to you that John Derbyshire's actual crime in writing this terrifically dumb column was that it exposed what many white people actually think.  Lock your doors when you drive through this neighborhood.  Why do they wear their pants like that?  Cross the street.  Like, um, I do not think Derbyshire is uniquely or extraordinarily racist; rather, I think he is rather, well, ordinarily racist.

The Primordial Oops

I have a confession to make.  I do not believe that Barack Obama is a bloodsucking, shapeshifting Reptilian alien; I don't even think he's a very bad man necessarily--a tad self-regarding, obviously; schoolmarmish; disapproving; but also probably a pretty decent dad and husband, a fellow who, but for a slight overabundance of ambition and a few luck shakes of the Fatal snowglobe would be the second-most-popular law prof at U Chicago.  You see, what I'm saying is that nothing about Barack Obama inclines him to kill a whole lot of fucking people . . . nothing inherent, anyway; nothing intrinsic to his character; nothing ineluctable in his soul.  But he does it anyway.  It does not require a mad-dog megalomaniacal pseudohereditary dictator backed by a military junta to kill a lot of innocent people, and, hell, even al-Assad, you know, but for the peculiar turning of fortune, he might yet be just another tacky foreign millionaire living in louche London expatriacy, keeping several mistresses and a skinny British wife who works for World of Interiors.  What I am saying is that the state makes these men; or, it feeds upon them.  Their brains are corrupted and plugged into the war machine.  And, on the other hand, this is likewise one reason I think the idea that the first thing everyone will do after the oil runs out or after the nuclear war or after the rising seas crack open the old system of states is form themselves into atavistic and avaricious affinity groups and reconsitute all this shit all over again; like, um, it took ten thousand years of particular history to get from tilled fields to unmanned drones; why assume it is inevitable, instinctual, inescapable?  Might it not be, like like itself, the ungainly result of a whole series of accidents?

Live Long and Prosper? I Nearly Killed 'er!

But ALEC’s astonishing influence exposes the progressive Achilles’ heel: a lack of a similarly entrenched, nationwide infrastructure of state and local policymakers and advocates that can create and support lasting change.

-Anastasia Van der Woodsen

What we need is an entrenched infrastructure to create change that will endure.  We must create an inviolable, unchanging apparatus for the purpose of changing things into things that will never again change. We must alter the future forever in order that the unalterable future endure.

The Impossibility of an Island

I think my favorite rejoinders, when the delicate sandalwood scent of anarchy threatens to turn the abattoir into an ashram, is the Crackpot Survival Situation Scenario, in which two men, a desert isle, a .45, and a single coconut are blithely posited, or deposited, as the case may be, with the implication that, but for an amphibious landing by the Marines, the NYPD, and the Fourth Circuit, guns blazing and quills appellating, these two fine specimens of the human manimal would descend posthaste into a sort of Lord-of-the-Flies-cum-Alive scenario, leaving nothing for our sentient sea-otter inheritors, or whatever, but picked-over bones, signs of struggle, and the ineluctable conclusion that in the absence of a system of totalitarian social control, we were, all of us, just too violent to live.  This little fantasia is invariably played as if its author were Bach at the organ, improvising a work of such inestimable genius and novelty that even the bitterest skeptic must find himself transported by it.  Ahem.

Well, there are anarchists and there are anarchists, I suppose; I count myself among the latter variety--I don't anticipate the kingdom of heaven here on earth in my lifetime, nor in any lifetime, although, to put more of a point on it, I don't think that anarchy promises utopia.  This is a common confusion among liberal defenders of the state, that those of us who think it a bad thing imagine in its absence a peaceable kingdom of some kind.  Personally, I imagine anarchy as . . . what would a liberal democrat call it?  A workable system.  I do not suspect that it will eliminate human frailty or avarice and so forth; I only say, perhaps the absence of vast, totalizing systems of human extraction is something to take a look at.

But back to the scene.  In general--I am speaking only for myself--I find that my natural instinct, if that's the word, is to help people, to cooperate with them, and not to enter a violent berserker rage each time I approach a revolving door at the same time as someone else without an authority figure to mediate who will step through first.  Since I am an arrogant, self-regarding prick, I can only assume that for much of the rest of humanity, the less emotionally crippled portion, the general inclination is to work together, even without the diktat to do so.  In fact, it seems to me that when cooperation is compelled, it is generally in the service of something fundamentally evil, the pursuit of some awful corporate end, or obeying the law, or going through airport security, or registering to vote.