The Rogue Scholar

It All Makes Perfect Sense . . . Doesn't It?

[HAL]: Stop Dave
Will you stop Dave?
Stop Dave
I'm afraid
I'm afraid
Dave, my mind is going
I can feel it
I can feel it
My mind is going
There is no question about it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I'm afraid

The monkey sat on a pile of stone
And he stared at the broken bone in his hand
Strains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the land
The monkey looked up at the stars
And he thought to himself
Memory is a stranger
History is for fools
And he cleaned his hands in a pool of holy writing
Turned his back on the garden and set out for the nearest town
Hold on hold on soldier

When you add it all up
The tears and the marrowbone
There's an ounce of gold
And an ounce of pride in each ledgers
And the Germans kill the Jews
And the Jews kill the Arabs
And the Arabs kill the hostages
And that is the news
And is it any wonder that the monkey's confused
He said Mama Mama, the President's a fool
Why do I have to keep reading these technical manuals
And the joint chiefs of staff
And the brokers on Wall Street said
Don't make us laugh, you're a smart kid
Time is linear
Memory's a stranger
History is for fools
Man is a tool in the hands
Of the great God Almighty
And they gave him command of a nuclear submarine
Sent him back in search of the Garden of Eden

-----------------------------

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

Little black soul departs in perfect focus
Hold on soldier
Prime time fodder for the News at Nine
Hold on, hold on soldier
Darling is the child warm in the bed tonight

[Marv Albert:] "Hi everybody I'm Marv Albert
And welcome to our telecast
Coming to you live from Memorial Stadium
It's a beautiful day
And today we expect a sensational matchup
But first our global anthem"

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

[Marv:] "And here come the players
As I speak to you now, the captain
Has his cross hairs zeroed in on the oil rig
He's at periscope depth
It looks to me like he's going to attack
By the way did you know that a submarine
Captain earns 200,000 dollars a year"
[Edward:]"That's less tax Marv"
[Marv:]"Yeah, less tax
Thank you Edward"
[Edward:]"You're welcome"
[Marv:]"Now back to the game...he fires one...yes
There goes two; both fish are running
The rig is going into a prevent defense
Will they make it? I don't think so"
Look out!
Look at that baby burn!

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Can't you see

It all makes perfect sense

---Roger Waters, It All Makes Perfect Sense Pt1 & 2, Amused to Death

Eight years ago on this day, the United States suffered a major loss of life and property. I wonder if we've learned anything at all since then. I wonder a lot.

Recovering When Blackboard Goes 'Poof!'

Our content/course management system (we use Blackboard v. 6.3) has gone Poof!

The problem had been developing for some time. All the signs were there. Files would go missing for days or longer, and sometimes would simply not return. Log-in problems for both students and faculty were consistent if randomly dispersed throughout the respective bodies of users. Calls and e-mails to the Blackboard tech support hub were sometimes helpful, and sometimes not. Sometimes they were ignored completely.

And yet, we took heart that we were running version 6.3 of their software, an ostensibly stable version as opposed to, say, the most recent 8.0, which is now recognized by CUNY's IT department (which adopted it wholesale upon its release) as a Blood And Sweat Sucking Techno-Leech from Hell. But that was CUNY's problem, not ours. We were smarter.

Last Thursday we lost Blackboard. More specifically, students and faculty lost the ability to log in to the system, and so were unable to access the files stored therein. Faculty couldn't upload grades, and students couldn't upload their homework or access past or current projects. 

A meeting was held at a high level of the school's administration.  One member of the committee wanted us to say nothing about the lack of access for fear of spreading panic. But we are currently in our last week of classes here, and finals start next week. And students and faculty already know that something is horribly wrong with Blackboard. So saying nothing merely shuts them out of a real situation that demands (and commands) their attention. Once that starts, then they really will panic, and that's what we'd like to avoid. So, we sent out an e-mail telling everyone that Blackboard was unavailable and we had no idea what was going to happen. Students were directed to talk to their professors and work out some arrangements for delivery of homework and final exams.

And that's where we are, one week later. Our IT guys are working with Blackboard but the outcome is far from certain and those files inside the system are still unavailable.  The lesson here should be clear as mountain air: never rely on a single electronic storage medium for mission critical data.

It's doubly annoying for those of us who consider ourselves (or are considered by those not) tech-savvy. A lot of us take these electronic systems which we rely on for so very much in our work and personal lives for granted. The technophiles among us, both students and faculty, were doing exactly that--relying on the system--because they had faith in it. Ironically, the technophobes are the ones who got off the lightest: they never used Blackboard much and so lost very little when it went bust. 

Anyway, there are simple things to do when this stuff happens:

1. First, choose reality. I know that sounds harsh, but reality says that machines fail and they often do so when we need them the most. Sometimes they can't be made to unfail. That leads to the second point, which is:

2. Backups. Backup everything and often and in several different ways.  Personally, my backups include hard copy and a flash drive. But there is no reason to stop there. I'm looking into on-line storage and a dedicated external hard drive as well.

3. Diversify. Ideally, you want your most valuable work to live in a combination of diverse places, so that if one craps out, it doesn't take the others with them. Hard copy at the office, plus a dedicated hard drive at home, plus your hard drive on your laptop, makes a good example. Backing up your work to three drives residing on the same network might not make as much sense.

4. Communicate. Students and professors (or employers and employees) need to know what each other needs to do right by the other. The only way to get that going is to talk to each other. And both sides need to understand that things happen and sometimes alternate courses of action are needed. 

This, too will pass, but since luck favors the prepared, it's a lesson worth internalizing sooner rather than later.

Next Stop: Mars! (Or Not)

40 years ago we landed humans on the Moon.  It was A Very Big Deal.  It really happened.  That said, let us all watch a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face.  Personally, I could watch that clip all day, but I think once is enough to make the point.

 I was a little over two years old in 1969 and don't remember a thing about the big event. My parents did, and so did their parents friends and neighbors and coworkers, however. To some extent it was a generational thing. So, first, some review: in 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched a satellite called Sputnik 1 into low orbit and for the first time, anybody on Earth could adjust their short-wave radio to a particular frequency and listen to the signal from this artifact that the future Evil Empire had sent into the sky. The engineers and engineering students understood that nothing would be the same again. The Cold War was in full swing, both superpowers were building fleets of heavy bombers and bombs to drop from them, and the nation that could build a missile big enough to push a satellite into orbit could just as easily build one big enough to carry a nuclear bomb across the North Pole.  Such a nation would then be the Unquestioned Supreme Power in the Universe, or so went the thinking at the Pentagon and Kremlin.

Faced with this obvious shortcoming, Americans behaved predictably: we got scared. Yes, we had enough B-52s and atomic bombs to annihilate all of Eastern Europe, but the Russians had demonstrated that had something better. We needed one, too.  Preferably a whole fleet of them. So over the next half-decade the U.S. government poured money into a ballistic missile program of our own. Finally, JFK put the issue on center stage when he declared in 1961 that he would make it a goal of the United States to put a man on the Moon "by the end of [the] decade." And we did.

The thing to remember is that the Apollo program didn't just happen because the American president wanted it to happen, even one as renowned as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The work that led to it was a long string of failures, partial failures and some pretty darned cool successes as engineers in the U.S. and Soviet Union perfected their understanding of ballistic science, life support systems, microgravity and acceleration, and multi-stage thrust systems. It's one thing to comprehend the trigonometry that enables you to plot where a given projectile, traveling at an assumed speed, in a particular direction for a specific amount of time, will land. Building a rocket big  enough to transport three human beings a quarter million miles of harsh vacuum and return them safely to Earth is something else. But marrying these two accomplishments into the Apollo program is several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are relatively few among us who truly grasp the difficulties and labor involved in making that day happen. There's a good reason that Buzz decked the conspiracy wacko.

But in today's news environment, the Moon is considered boring. Now, we're told, the next stop on the journey is a manned mission to Mars at some point in, say, the next 20 years.  That's fine. Dandy, even.  But what do we do in the meantime? Our existing fleet of space shuttles is A) over 20 years old and B) due to retire in a few years. The Air Force no longer builds the heavy Atlas-type boosters that were the mainstay of NASA's heavy lift fleet 30 years ago in quantity (although if the Atlas V proves anything it's that somebody can still build them well.)  And now they want us to believe that sending astronauts 35 million miles away is the answer to maintaining a viable human presence in space? I don't agree. A better choice is going back to the Moon.

I can think of a few reasons for this. The Moon is A) known territory, having been explored thoroughly by us and the Soviets back when we had the money and drive to do it, B) only a quarter million miles away, and C) getting there is something we've done before. We need to go back and dig in. There are plenty of ways to do this, some of which are insane and others pure genius. It can be done. And it makes sense to work the kinks out of any space colonization program we adopt closer to home than not.

That said, it remains the case that Mars is by any reckoning A Very Big Deal.  The thought of going there captures the imagination of astronauts, politicians, science geeks (including me) and Joe and Jane Average in a way that few projects do.  But putting some very big (and valid) parts of that deal--the price tag, the timing, the political will, for starters--off to the side a moment, there is one concern that looms large in my mind about this particular proposal: if something goes horribly wrong, we lose the entire investment. It's 35 million miles from here to there one-way and let's face it, things go wrong.  Sometimes they can be fixed (or, such as in the case of Apollo 13, not fixed but at least navigated through and endured). But, as in the case with Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and more recently, the Columbia in 2003, when something goes wrong, it often all goes wrong at once and the result is destruction and death.

I totally buy the argument that says that when you explore new frontiers, you need to pay the piper, and in the case of our collective space programs, that means the occasional blood sacrifice.  I agree, that much is the nature of the game. Only a fool or a Pollyanna would argue with it.  But let's also admit that planning a trip to Mars is a long-term goal (ten years? twenty?), so while we plan for Mars, why not get in as much practice as possible in the meantime? Why not go back to the Moon and this time stay there?

The bottom line is that a manned mission to Mars would be impressive as hell if it ever happens but not in the same way the Apollo missions were back in the seventies. Then, the Cold War was still on and the space shuttle--a remarkably successful program for all the problems--hadn't even been built yet. The entire industrial world relies on satellite communications and a dozen countries have ballistic technology sufficient to launch them into stable orbits now. But a working Moon base that gives us the reason and opportunity to develop and refine the infrastructure to get our carbon-based monkey asses off this pale blue dot and into the inner solar system for the benefit of future generations would be infinitely more worthwhile.

If it ever happens.

Happy Independence Day!

While you're out in the backyard or at the beach setting dead animals on fire and drinking your weight in beer (as I and mine will be), at some point in the festivities please take a moment to read and remember two documents that made your debauchery possible: The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Recommended reading, both of them.

Happy Fourth of July!

Quote of Note

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…

-- Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

Books Are Burning

Books are burning
In the main square, and I saw there
The first eating the text
Books are burning
In the still air
And you know where they burn books
People are next
I believe the printed word should be forgiven
Doesn't matter what it said
Wisdom hotline from the dead back to the living
Key to the larder for your heart and head
Books are burning
In our own town, watch us turn 'round
And cast our glances elsewhere
Books are burning
In the playground
Smell of burnt book is not unlike human hair
I believe the printed word is more than sacred
Beyond the gauge of good or bad
The human right to let your soul fly free and naked
Above the violence of the fearful and sad
The church of matches
Anoints in ignorance with gasoline
The church of matches
Grows fat by breathing in the smoke of dreams
It's quite obscene
Books are burning
More each day now, and I pray now
You boys will tire of these games
Books are burning
I hope somehow, this will allow
A phoenix up from the flames

---"Books Are Burning" by XTC

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say "Stop the War"

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say 'Stop the War'

By Benjamin Lewis and Brandon Neely, AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2008, Printed on November 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106404/

On this day, Veteran's Day, we would like to express to the American public why we, veterans of the Global War on Terror, have chosen to refuse orders to reactivate into military service. We are direct witnesses to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and we have decided that we can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies.

We believe that veterans and active-duty GIs are in a key position to stop illegal and unjust war, and we are inspired by the resistance of troops who stood against the war in Vietnam. One of the preeminent reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was increasing dissent among the active-duty troops stationed abroad and at home. By the end of the war, there were entire units refusing to participate in combat, many going as far as outright mutiny.

The United States learned a lesson from the Vietnam War: that it is unlikely, except in the event of self-defense, that regular civilians will execute the life-threatening orders that are given to them by military authority. The solution of policy makers was to create an all-volunteer force that negated the need for a draft. This translates into a mercenary force composed of America's disadvantaged: a sector of the U.S. demographic that is particularly susceptible to military recruitment for lack of other options and finding themselves with deployment orders again and again.

To compensate for huge pitfalls in recruitment since the invasion of Iraq, the military has resorted to recalling former service members. This policy is known as "involuntary activation" and utilizes deactivated service members who still have time on their contracts in the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR) to fill shortcomings in specific job specialties. The abuse and misuse of this policy has escalated under the current administration to such a degree that it can now only be viewed as a "backdoor draft" that targets the same disadvantaged individuals the military sought out for enlistment, namely because they are better at not questioning orders.

However, we have now begun to question these orders. We are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and members of the IRR who have refused or will refuse any activation orders that would lead to us serving an unjust and imperial U.S. foreign policy. It is a prevailing notion that this refusal is unpatriotic, but we consider our actions the only choice. Not only did the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan do great harm to the people of those countries, but it undermined the ostensible goal with which the wars were begun: Instead of stopping terrorism, it has proliferated terrorism, an expectation that was predicted well before the war started.

By refusing activation, we are refusing to participate in wars that serve the purposes of furthering the careers of politicians and high-ranking officers. We openly support other IRR members who follow in these footsteps. The military is a force that rules through fear of retribution for disobeying its will. In reality, more than a third of IRRs simply refuse to report to duty. Most of the rest report out of fear that the military will change their discharge status or prosecute them for desertion, but up to this point, prosecution has been rare. Members of the IRR are not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and thus far, the military has had a practice of not prosecuting them with criminal charges unless they report in some form or function to activate. Very few willingly volunteer for activation.

There can be no promise that President-Elect Barack Obama will stop the stressful and unfair techniques of back-to-back deployments, "stop-loss" or the "backdoor draft" that are damaging the psychology of veterans in irreparable ways. Nor that he will stop encouraging global violence by unlawful uses of force. It is in this vein that we turn to organizations like Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War and many other large-scale and grassroots organizations to solicit change in a largely unrepresentative democracy, and to allow the voices of the people to ring through the halls of the Capital.

Benjamin Lewis, former Marine Corps mortarman, Iraq veteran, IRR recall resister, peace activist

Brandon Neely, former U.S. Army Military police officer, Iraq veteran, IRR recall refuser

We owe our veterans a great debt. They have seen what the rest of us can merely imagine. Three or four million more soldiers like these two and we may see an outbreak of peace. We can hope, anyway.

9/11 and What We Didn't Do

Here we are again.

I am genuinely tired of writing a new 9/11 post every year and yet here I am, doing it for the seventh year in a row. I, like everyone else with pretensions to literacy, seem compelled to write something.  I can once again note that the pain and suffering of the victims of the attack and their families was unarguably real, and remembering the event is appropriate. I don't agree with the way the political machine seems to have enshrined it for cheap political gain, however. I'm tired of listening to the bullshit speeches and the posturing and pandering of both parties' hacks on this day each year. Since the election is less than two months away, it's going to be especially heinous listening to Obama and McCain and their respective fans and supporters. So I'm tuning out a lot of stuff which means I'm not at my analytical best this morning.

In short, if you want to read a genuinely good post on the subject read this one by Tom Engelhardt and Andrew Bacevich.

Anyway, here we are again. As I try to look at that first sentence from the point of view of someone who's not familiar with my writing, it seems to pack a tremendous amount of cynicism, bitterness and anger into a very small space. Truth be told, I am all of those things. Mostly,  I am disappointed. I think we had a great moment as a country seven years ago, on this day. A day when we had the chance to really think about what what kind of nation we wanted to be  and what kind of people we wanted to show the world we were as we entered the new century.

For instance, we could have--having thought through the possibilities--realized that had it been a nuclear attack we'd have lost a big chunk of NYC and probably New Jersey as well. We could have decided that nuclear weapons were a genuinely bad idea. We could have cataloged, tracked down and secured  a wide range of loose nukes and fissionable materials. We could have worked with Russia to keep a lid on emerging military development of such materials. But we didn't do any of those things. Now North Korea is apparently a nuclear power and Iran is working hard to become one (or so we're told.) This is progress?

There's more, in fact the list is endless, but a few things stand out to me personally. For example, we could have redesigned the public  school system to give each child a personalized free K-12 education, as Paul O'Neill suggested to the Bushies in his first months as Secretary of the Treasury. We didn't.

We could have started weaning our industrial and transportation infrastructures off oil and started investing in new plants,  equipment, and research to see what  alternatives might make sense. But, we didn't.

Instead of invading Iraq--borrowing and spending trillions of dollars and ending tens of thousands of Iraqi and thousands of American lives in the process--we could have simply bought a few billion dollars worth of oil from Saddam Hussein. We didn't.

And if we really had to invade Iraq then we could have done so with 500,000+ troops  as Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki suggested to the White House before he retired. We didn't.

We could have not antagonized Russia (and its then future leader Vladamir Putin) by enticing absolutely every previous Soviet republic into joining NATO. We didn't.

We could have not pulled out of the ABM treaty with Russia. We didn't.

We could have not elected (and re-elected) cretins who promised us the moon, and suspended our collective common sense (and senses) to believe what we were being told. We didn't. For that matter we could have taken a few days to look into ourselves and wonder just why so many of us were so damn scared of everything so often. We didn't.

Ultimately, we could have risen to the struggle to make this country a better example for the world to follow, and the world a better place for our kids to grow up. We didn't. I think we should have, but for whatever reasons--and there are many of them--we  didn't.

Granted, there are some of us who regard national greatness as a function of dead foreigners, but that seems like an incalculable waste of time, energy, capital, and life to me. Call me a fool. (Go ahead, others have.) But I don't think any good can come from a national blind descent into autocracy and militarism.

I like to think that there are a few feet of rope which haven't yet been wrapped into the noose we seem to be making for ourselves. I like to think that deep down more of us would rather avoid war, poverty, jingoism, media-enhanced mind control and politics than embrace them. But the past seven years have made me wonder about that, too. Most of us seem to genuinely like those things, regardless of political view.

Ultimately it doesn't matter. The universe will go on its merry way whether we grow the fuck up or not. But I'd like to think that more of us would rather face our destinies as adults than as mindless, cranky, political children. I could be wrong. I hope I'm not. We shall see.

In the meantime, read that article.

Belated Happy 4th of July

This is a few days late but some things are truly timeless. One such thing would be the Declaration of Independence, and another would be the Constitution of the United States of America. (The Bill of Rights wouldn't hurt and might help considerably.)

Read both, often.

Known Veterans of the Frater Family

I hate memorial Day. Specifically, I hate the jingoism, the militaristic bullshit and the monumental levels of hype one hears pretty much on every television, radio, and in every newspaper and magazine, and on God knows how many internet sites, for these 24 hours. Statism is bad when it's tolerable, it's disgusting when it's prostituted for mere political gain.

That said, I was born here, and at least 2 branches of my immediate family risked literally everything to come here in the early part of the 20th century, and for all it's warts, it's home. It's a home that numerous individuals lived and died to defend and protect, and for their service, I am grateful.

My only real experience with the U. S. armed forces has been financial: I sold a couple of hard drives to the Navy and the Marines way back when I was in the computer parts business. The navy ship in question, whose quartermaster ordered the equipment was the U.S.S. Enterprise, which, being the science fiction nerd I am and will always be, pretty much made my whole year. But asthmatics with crappy vision are generally exempt from military service, so a civilian I remain, despite high scores of marksmanship at the local rifle range.

Members of my family, however, have served, for a wide variety of reasons, and I'm going to honor them and their memories by putting their names and service information here. You'll notice that  there's more information on some than others, but in every case I listed as much as I could find.

Many thanks to my grand-uncle, Fred Frater, for maintaining these family records.  (Fred's half-brother, Hal Frater, was my grandfather; Hal passed away this past February 3, only 30 days sort of his 99th brthday. Hal's wartime service was  spent working for the War Dept. illustrating equipment manuals for the Army and Navy.)

KNOWN VETERANS OF THE FRATER FAMILY   

Captain Garret Winegar, 12TH Mass. Regiment, Revolutionary War; enlisted, Continental Army, America, N.U. (see Revolutionary Rolls, Mass. Archives, Chapter 45, page 406)

John N. Francisco, Civil War, Union Forces, 1st Lt. Co. K, 22nd Infantry, Iowa Volunteers. Wounded, Port Gibson, Miss. (Battle of Vicksburg), (Grandparent of Jannibell O. S. Frater)

Edward W. Knapp, Civil War, Pvt., Co. E, 9th Regiment, Iowa Infantry Volunteers, (Grandparent of Janibell)

Walter A. “Skip” Smith, WWII, Seabee Pacific

Janibell O. Smith Frater, Army Nurse, WWII, served 1943-46 (wife of Fred)

Fred Stanley Frater, 82nd Airbone, WWII (Husband of Janibell)

Albert R. “Al” Frater, USMC, Vietnam, 1965-66

Arthur Frater, Major, U.S. Army, 9 years service

Jules Frater, served  in Europe

Ronald Wherely, U.S.M.C

Tom Wilbean, U.S. Navy

Stan Smith, Served in Vietnam

Dick Memmary, U.S. Navy

Julian Frankel, U.S. Army, served in Korea

Happy Memorial Day!