Day: May 21, 2002

A few days back I alluded to a mysterious “reader” who me to a Boston Globe article on Vatican legal scholar Rev. Gianfranco Ghirlanda. He remained mysterious as I couldn’t get the provided link to his site to work; but that now having been corrected, he is mysterious no more: check him out at The Daily Babble.

can’t stop linking to TTLB !

The Mickster has now linked to my humble page no less than three separate times in the past 36 hours. It appears to be some kind of strange addiction.

But Mr. Kaus’s pain is my gain, so welcome, Kausfans and Slate-junkies, to the humble page of a humble bear!

By the way: Do I need to point out less subtly the inherent amusement of the web site for Internet Addiction? Nah, didn’t think so.

Are the real spooks The Truth Laid Bear? Or is the ‘creative dream team’ just an idea whose time has come?

You be the judge.

Read the whole article down ’til the end to get to the real relevant part. And if you find WSJ registration odious, check out Mickey’s summary.

case you are shopping for a gift for the geek who has everything.

Celine Dion’s New Day Has Come: $12.98

Black felt tip marker: $1.35

Making opponents of openly reviewing security systems look like idiots: Priceless

Creative Dream Team Update

Okay, the nominations have been pouring in, so time for an update. My methodology is simple: I’m listing every suggestion I received, along with my own comments (where I have any) about the nominees.

original list, as you’ll recall, was:

Tom Clancy
John Barnes (see Mother of Storms).
Kim Stanley Robinson
Christopher Hitchens
Iain M. Banks
Ken MacLeod

New nominees are:

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
By far the most commonly submitted nominees, and foolish of me to have ommitted them in the first place.

Al Franken, P.J. O’Rourke, and George Carlin
Laurence Simon over at File13 sent these in, and advises: “Toss in a few wise-asses because they always see the faults in the system”. The man has wisdom.

The “Killer B’s”: Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin
Also extremely popular nominees (and also fine choices).

Instapundit adds the following suggestions:

Greg Egan: (“The best up-and-coming hard science fiction writer, and our
world is looking more like his all the time.” – Instapundit)

S.M. Stirling (“mostly doing alt-history these days, but a supple mind
and he’s done harder stuff.” – Instapundit)

Stephen Baxter (no commentary from Glenn here, but I’ll second the nomination — particularly since Baxter often seems to have great difficulty ever finishing a novel without destroying the Earth first.)

One reader suggests Stanislaw Lem, “particularly for his outstandingly prophetic Imaginary Magnitudes, which completely anticipated the ‘Net via Vestrand’s Extelopedia.”

And another proposes Dean Ing, indicating “He’s been in US think tanks re future weapons. Also he’s written several good novels and novelettes on terrorism and gotterdammerung in general.”, and Harry Stine (whose work I’m afraid I’m not familiar with, but who the reader indicates also writes under the name Lee Correy, and wrote “Shuttle Down which involved a Space Shuttle aborting to Easter Island. The book was good enough to be used as a NASA manual…”)

Thomas Harris, of Hannibal Lecter fame, is nominated by a reader for his earlier work, Black Sunday, “about a psycho blimp pilot who loads his craft with flechettes (anti-personnel darts) and flies it over the stadium in which the Super Bowl is being played.”

(By the way, if you check the Amazon entry for Black Sunday, you’ll see the following comment from a reader/reviewer, circa September 2000: “Finally, this book is sort of outdated. You can’t fault Harris for this, but it’s worth noting. Though it doesn’t really show up in the book (thankfully), the general plot (Middle Eastern terrorists trying to blow something up) sort of prays on the fears of the zenophobic middle American. It’s a simple formula which I’ve seen many times, and has been done many times.” And I’m afraid you’ll see it again, friend.)

Another nomination: Vince Flynn, whose Transfer of Power “tells how a campaign contributor turns a White House visit into the kidnapping of a president.”. Sounds like the kind of twisted thinking we’re looking for.

And more: British author Peter O’Donnell, Robert L. Forward, and Vernor Vinge make another reader’s list. (Yet again an omission on my part: no idea why I didn’t put Vinge on my original list… except maybe a subconcious wish that he’d publish a little more frequently!) And another reader seconds many of the previous nominations, and adds Charles Sheffield to the mix.

Last but not least, my favorite nomination was from a reader who suggested L. Ron Hubbard, who actually did write science fiction before founding his own religion, let’s remember. But I did feel obligated to reply to the reader that while we might well nominate him, it’s unlikely that he’ll show up for work, given that he’s dead.

That’s it for now. Kee
p them coming — I don’t think we’ve drained this particular swamp yet. And by the way: if you see your nominations here without your name, it is because I did not publish anyone’s name where I was uncertain if they wished to be publicly attributed. If you would like to claim your public credit, as it were, drop me a line and say so and I’m glad to cite you appropriately.

In researching Heinlein and other science fiction authors’ work during WWII, I corresponded with James Gifford, author of A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion (a 2001 Hugo award nominee). In addition to providing me some further detail on Heinlein’s history and excellent pointers to other sources, he provided the following thoughts on defending against suicide attacks and the road that lies ahead:

A general exposition from my own viewpoint is that there is no way to stop a suicide attack. As the cutline for the graphic novel _Ronin_ put it, “If you intend to die, you can do anything.” All crimes are prevented by one of two things: the fear of death, and the possibility of being detected, caught and punished. If the first is missing, the second is of no consequence… and you have no possible prevention short of mindreading and on-the-spot execution.

The only possible way to prevent a majority of suicide attacks is the road we’re currently on – a severe and (IMHO) highly dangerous intrusion into civil liberties…

If there is a solution, it is to find a combination of technology and intelligence (both kinds) that will protect us while not overly impinging on our personal freedoms and our justly prized liberty. As the gent with the specs put it: those who would give up a little liberty to obtain a little security deserve neither. Our liberty and freedom have a price, and for the next decades, the price will have to be paid. One price or the other, that is, and since there is no way to eliminate the threat, paying in the coin of liberty in an attempt to do so is a foolish idea. It is, unfortunately, the road we have apparently chosen.

So, if you seek to put together a coalition of inventive brains to solve the problem, they need a focus beyond technological miracles. I can’t imagine any techno-magic of any kind whatsoever that would solve the problem without creating a bigger one. The solution, if there is one, is to eliminate the strife, the conflict, the disagreements that lead to suicide attacks.

Definitely. But the key is that our strategy must simultaneously include steps to protect us from those that wish us harm in the here-and-now, and also strive to create a future world where the threats we face today are reduced — if not outright elminated.

Despite my usual warnings about lumping people into large categories, I think there are only really two groups that are terribly helpful to think about when considering our adversaries in this struggle. There are people who detest us and will oppose us until death (Al Qaeda). And there are people who don’t like us much, who might be convinced to support those opposing us, or might otherwise be swayed to leave us the hell alone (much of the rest of the Muslim world).

The solution for the first group is, obviously, to destroy them. And it is important to note that this is not vengeance: it is prevention. When we kill an Al-Qaeda operative, there is no need to invoke the obscenity of September 11 and concepts of retribution, revenge, or even justice. We take that grave action — to end another human life — not for what Al-Queda has done to us in the past, but for what they have sworn to do to us in the future. It is not capital punishment; the proper analogy is not to a convicted prisoner walking death row, but to a rapist who is shot dead by his intended victim before he can commit his crime.

For the second group, the options are more varied and complex. I am a firm believer in the idea that while stable democracies may actually go to war with one another from time to time, they don’t have a habit of spawning suicide bombers. (Note: before someone points it out, England is a stable democracy — Northern Ireland is not). So, duh: the trick is how to transition the essentially medieval societies of theocratic Islamic or pseudo-Islamic states (my by-no-means-complete list begins with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and of course, the portion of Arabia currently ruled by the House of Saud) into stable democracies. Easier said than done.

But we shouldn’t get hung up on the idea that we must turn every state and people on the globe into our ally. That would be great, but it is not necessary. They can positively detest us. They can think we’re callow, insipid, jingoistic cowboys with brains programmed by Disney and bodies atrophied by the Internet. All that matters is that they don’t quite hate us enough to be willing to die to kill us.

And that, I think, has to be an achievable goal. Because let’s face it: it’s not like we’re trying to convince the world to like Nazis. We happen to have the advantage here of being one of the most legitimately decent societies to ever stride the face of the planet. Surely we can do a better job of convincing folks of that than we have to date (as a story, it has the advantage of being true.)

Finally, to return to one James’ points: I agree that technogadgetry is unlikely to provide any direct solution to the problem of preventing suicide attacks. But for now, I’d rest easier knowing that we at least had confidence that we’ve given our own defenses a thorough shake-down, and analyzed our own weaknesses unflinchingly. We’d at least, then, have accomplished the first step of preventing an enemy attack: knowing where it might come from.