Posts Tagged ‘National Mall’
Wednesday Night
* “Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free.” Via MeFi.
* io9 has your alternate-universe Lincoln Memorial.
* Daniel Ellsberg on what it’s like to receive top-secret security clearance.
“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
“You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those other people are fools.
“Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to learn.
“In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
“You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
* More on Romnarok from Ezra Klein.
* And Mayor Bloomberg says the NYPD is his “own private army.” I think one of us probably ought to go back to 8th grade civics class. But which one?
Postponing the Ceremony
King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.
Cornell West: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.
Wednesday Links
* Since yesterday there have apparently been small earthquakes in Los Angeles and Iran, and a large one in Peru. I’m ready to call it: S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has an earthquake machine.
* Did Fracking Cause the Virginia Earthquake?
* National Level Exercise 11: a high-magnitude quake hits the New Madrid Fault, which lies on the border region of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi and on which fifteen nuclear power plants sit. More scary news: Virginia Nuclear Plant Had Quake Sensors Removed Due to Budget Cuts.
* Future Shocks: Modern Science, Ancient Catastrophes and the Endless Quest to Predict Earthquakes. Via longform.org.
* The Wire: The Complete Series is on sale today only at Amazon for $72.
* Lots of buzz today around truly outrageous exploitation of international student labor (and an eventual work action) at Hershey’s; good posts can be found at How the University Works and New APPS.
* I linked this on Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth repeating: this short Portal fan film is pretty stellar.
* Hegemony watch: “The Chinese want to make Superman an honorary citizen.”
* Laughably Freudian symbolism watch: “Washington Monument may be cracked, could be closed indefinitely.”
* A big part of the problem is precisely that climate efforts so far have been almost entirely driven by liberal elites. It’s been an extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking, and as we saw with painful clarity during the climate bill fiasco, an elite-driven strategy isn’t going to cut it. Why Isn’t the Climate Left Stronger?
* As things now stand we are producing a generation of graduates whose lives are being wrecked by debts they will never be rid of (or, if they go into the Income-Based Repayment program, will be rid of in 25 years, which to be fair is only five years longer than the term of service for ordinary soldiers in the Roman Legions when that empire was at its height). The Road to Serfdom.
* And just for laughs wry, knowing half-smiles: How Hard Is It To Get a Cartoon Into The New Yorker?
National Mall as Metaphor
The National Mall serves as a tragic metaphor for our nation, whose own infrastructure has been left to crumble. The irony is that the way that the National Mall has been allowed to crumble literally in front of the government is like how our nation has slowly crumbled while the government grows in size and power.