Justice Scalia filed a dissenting opinion which, to the extent that I understand it, I agree with. It's kind of confusing since you have to know exactly what Hamdi was asking, and I think the plurality opinion is right, as far as it goes—I think they are saying that the decision to make someone an enemy combatant must be subject to review—so I would have thought Scalia could concur with that while dissenting on the bigger point that THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES CAN'T DETAIN PEOPLE INDEFINITELY WITHOUT A CRIMINAL SENTENCE OR CONGRESSIONAL SUSPENSION OF THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS. But I guess Scalia has to dissent with the one step in the right direction that could be part of many more steps back.

... It follows from what I have said that Hamdi is entitled to a habeas decree requiring his release unless (1) criminal proceedings are promptly brought, or (2) Congress has suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

...

Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis—that, at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silences law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it. Because the Court has proceeded to meet the current emergency in a manner the Constitution does not envision, I respectfully dissent.

—Justice Scalia

Out of all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, however, no less than ninety-nine percent were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are also sixty-two percent of the words most used. Therefore authentically English roots, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, and from, are central to speaking English. Yet the vast majority of our vocabulary originated in foreign languages, including not merely the obvious "Latinate" items like adjacent and expedite, but common, mundane forms not processed by us as "continental" in the slightest.

For example, every single word in that last sentence longer than three letters originated outside of English itself ... In fact, it's pretty easy to "cook up" that kind of sentence. What would be harder is to come up with one made up only of words that come from Old English. In fact, that last sentence was one ...

English lost most of its original vocabulary through three main lexical "earthquakes."

Vikings invaded and settled in the northern half of Brittany starting in 787; they spoke Old Norse (ancestor of today's Scandinavian languages) and scattered about a thousand words into English. They were not merely "cultural" terms but staples like both, same, again, get, give, are, skirt, sky, and skin. If I tell you that on a foggy Thursday, a sly, dirty-necked, scowling outlaw skulked into the bank with a knife, ransacked it, and crawled out the window seeming happy, every word came from those Vikings except a, into, the, with, it, and out.

Then, in 1066, French speakers took over England for roughly the next two hundred years. Actually, these "French" people were Vikings again, having taken over northwestern France and switched to French over the generations; their ancestry was why these French were called the Normans—that is, Norsemen. They introduced no fewer than about seventy-five hundred words ... how "French" do words such as air, coast, debt, face, flower, joy, people, river, sign, blue ... or fry feel to us today?

The "Latinate" layer most perceptible to us as a word class apart came after the withdrawal of the French, with the increasing use of English as a language of learning—hence client, legal, scene, intellect, recipe, pulpit, exclude, necessary, tolerance, interest, et alia (including et alia, of course).

The Power of Babel, John McWhorter, pp 95-96.

A truly free, open society would be one in which the following propositions offered by John McMurtry would be widely debated. McMurtry teaches philosophy at the University of Guelph in Canada.
...

3. General Motors, Dupont, IT&T, Standard Oil and Ford Corporations all produced military supplies for the Nazi armed forces during World War II while the United States was at war with Germany.
...
6. The free market means that those without money to buy what they need do not have the right to live.
7. The major player in the international drug trade since the Second World War, using drug enforcement laws to maintain its monopoly, has been the United States government to finance internationally illegal foreign interventions.
...
19. Our major social problems are caused by the profit imperative overriding all other values.
20. The belief that God sanctions our social order or our state at war is a superstition.
...
25. Unions have historically led the struggle for improvements in health care, working conditions and social security for the population as a whole.
...
28. The President and his leading advisors are provable war criminals.
29. Christianity calls for the redistribution of wealth.
30. The mass media are essentially a joint-stock company of profit and advertising for major private corporations.

Originally published in Informal Logic, X,3 Fall 1988.

How to Be Good, Nick Hornby.

Bearable and insightful in ways that A Certain Chemistry very much was not. Alluded to some Big Issues, gently, and with as much depth as you could expect from 245 pages.

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson. Excellent. Set in the present and not overtly a genre novel.

Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett.
This one took a few months to get through. After the first few hundred pages, he helpfully provides a summary of everything he's just told you, which I will reproduce here:

There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.

The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memems, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.

If all that made sense to you and you don't need to hear arguments and explanation, you can skip to page 254. I didn't need to hear arguments, but I did need a lot of explanation. The rest of the book I'll need to read a second time before I could do a summary justice, but perhaps it boils down to this:

Old Model:
1. a hundred billion brain cells do their things according to chemistry
2. ???
3. Consciousness!!


New Model:
1. a hundred billion brain cells do their things according to chemistry
2. thousands or millions of higher-level "demons" process memes according
   to evolved and emergent rules
3. ??
4. a narrative fiction of Consciousness!!

I think Dennett thinks he eliminated step 3, but I'm still not sure I know how. I kinda understand what he means by 4, and it's convincing, but I can't feel it.

Along the way he does present strong counter-cases against the Cartesian Theater, the Central Meaner (the I or the soul), the Chinese Room, and other such problems. I followed every individual piece of each argument, but the whole of it still escapes me. But it does give me much more hope for immortality through robot bodies. Now I'm wondering, is static electricity more or less of a problem for people with robot bodies?

Visit this site every day through November 2, 2004. You should be crazy by August.

Last year I embarked on Plan C, " to move to Europe ... and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities." One motivation was the job; another was a desire to live in Scandinavia for a while to see what it's like. A month or two ago, on hiatus from Danish class, I realized that my learning and assimilitation had plateaued. I wasn't going to see much more progress in living here until I really mastered the language. And I had three conclusions based on my observations:

First, I wouldn't be seeing substantial return on psychic investment until I had lived here for two or three years more.

Second, there are three types of expatriates in Denmark - "here for work," "here for a job," and "refugee." Out of all three groups, none seemed to have Danish friends unless they were dating or married to a Dane.

Third, my progress learning Danish was very slow because I didn't need or even want to use Danish. This is because I've never felt like I belong here or want to belong here. I've checked it out and it's not my bag. (Aside: the people here are very nice. One phrase I've seen a lot in travel gossip around the world is "the people are nice." In my experience, most people in most places are nice most of the time, as long as you are interacting individual to individual. Humans are nice. People in China are nice; people in the US are nice; people in Europe are nice.)

Since I have no plans to settle here permanently, all this argued against investing another year of my life just to make the year or two after that nicer. The job is still interesting, and we've got some fun projects for the rest of the year, so I'll keep working for Collaboraid. I still want to live in various strange places, and so I updated my essential criteria for selecting a home. There are three. I gotta have friends or family there already, speak the language fluently, and enjoy the weather. That left southern California, so I'm moving back to my birthplace, Los Angeles, from where I'll work remotely, travel back to Copenhagen for a month or so this fall, and not think about the future until I really have to.

Though I do want to get back to studying Chinese. 1 billion native speakers vs 5 million. Hmm.

An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003 categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date accounting posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders on the most-wanted list have now been taken into custody or killed, but that none were taken into custody until April 13, 2003, and that none were killed by airstrikes.

Yes, but "Senior military officials said ... intelligence agencies were engaged in a hard task." So I guess 0 for 50 is understandable, because in order to actually drop precision bombs on military officers, instead of just random buildings that very probably have innocent civilians, you would have to, you know, have an idea where those evildoers were, and in order to do that you'd have to have, like, spies and stuff. In Baghdad.

... commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved ...

The trend over the last decade or so has been that the US military is so intensively technologized that our military allies can't really cooperate closely because they just don't have the toys. But since it's turning out that we simply don't have a significant spying capability, maybe they have something to offer after all. Anyway, it's been years since 9/11 - how many Arabic speakers are the CIA, DIA, NSA, ETC, employing? If the number's not in the thousands, can we ask some more officials to resign for personal reasons?

"When you take a large country the size of Iraq, with all those sensors and communications, how do you get the right information to the right person who needs it in a timely manner?" General Cone said.

I guess my hope would have been that the US military would have had the answer to that question before dropping all those bombs. My taxes are paying for this. Your taxes, American readers, are paying for this.

The two got to only first base (kissing), which is about the only base that anyone can agree on anymore. ''I don't understand the base system at all,'' Jesse said, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. ''If making out is first base, what's second base?''

''We need to establish an international base system,'' Brian said. ''Because right now, frankly, no one knows what's up with the bases. And that's a problem.''

Jesse nodded in agreement. ''First base is obviously kissing,'' Brian said.

''Obviously,'' Jesse said.

''But here's the twist,'' Brian said. ''Historically, second base was breasts. But I don't think second base is breasts anymore. I think that's just a given part of first base. I mean, how can you make out without copping a feel?''

''True,'' Jesse said. ''And if third base is oral, what's second base?''

''How does this work for girls?'' asked Ashley, the 17-year-old junior. ''I mean, are the bases what's been done to you, or what you've done?''

''If it's what base you've gone to with a girl, you go by whoever had more done,'' Jesse told her.

''But we're girls,'' Ashley said. ''So we've got on bases with guys?''

''Right, but it doesn't matter,'' Jesse said. ''It's not what base you've had done to you, it's what bases you get to.''

Kate shook her head. ''I'm totally lost.''

''See how complicated this is?'' Brian said. ''Now if someone asks you, 'So, how far did you get with her?' you have to say, 'Well, how do your bases go?' ''

What is the world coming to, when the base system loses definition? Is it going to take an ISO standard to clear things up?

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. Mil Millington.
I've been reading the web site for a year or so, and I finally snapped up his two novels. It's very funny, but seems devoid of the warmth of the web site. The humor gets blacker and blacker and I didn't find it an especially pleasant read.

A Certain Chemistry. Mil Millington.
While frequently funny, the plot is basically everything going to hell, people being jerks, people hurting people. None of the characters, least of all the narrator, is at all sympathetic. It reminded me a lot of Murial's Wedding, alleged to be a comedy but in fact just a psychic mugging. I think it's safe to say I'll be steering clear of Millington's fiction in the future.

Red Thunder. John Varley.
I was very excited to find a new Varley novel, and then increasingly disappointed to discover that it's basically a juvenille; the plot, characters, and narrator's voice are one-dimensional and naive, and so while it's pleasant enough it leaves little trace and seems marooned in the wrong decade. Key evidence for that theory would be the unexpected and unwelcome Chinese-baiting.

``Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy...'' President George W. Bush, Wednesday June 2 2004.

Where to begin...

I have two comments.

1) I hope I'm not the only person who did a double-take upon hearing this. A good many countries were heavily embroiled in World War II long before Pearl Harbor was attacked. The United States entered World War II when it declared war on Japan December 8 1941--the day after the tragedy in Hawaii. I hope Bush meant to say, "like our involvement in the Second World War..." but somehow I doubt it.

2) On tonight's "The National" (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's evening television news program), anchor Peter Mansbridge referred to the "so-called war on terrorism." The mention occurs about 21 minutes into the broadcast (air date June 2 2004) in a piece reporting on the aforementioned speech given by Bush in Colorado Springs. (Streaming video is available at http://www.cbc.ca/national ) Historical revisionism begets skeptical and dare-I-say hardball news terminology...