Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Use It in the Form of a Sentence


An example of the term used in the last entry is probably needed, now that I think about it:
Numbers stations are an example of a parapolitical instrument, partially because their use is so mysterious. For instance the German station, known as "Swedish Rhapsody," which broadcast in the voice of a young girl. It was thought the Cold War would bring an end to these broadcasts but new stations are arising in the post-9/11 age. And a new one, apparently transmitting from the Southwest US and known as "Yosemite Sam", that begins with a brief data burst followed by the phrase "Varmint, I'ma Gonna Blow Yah T'Smithereens!"The clip is apparently from the cartoon "BUNKER HILL BUNNY", 1949 (pic to the right). This is repeated ten seconds later on the next highest of four frequencies. "Transmissions always start at an offset of 7 seconds, such as at 10:00:07. The timing of the transmissions seems to be excellent." (If this sounds like fun listening, you may want to consider the Conet Project. Though it was released before the debut of "Yosemite Sam") The FCC isolated the origination point of the broadcast as being near Albuquerque, New Mexico, but so far have been unable to offer any other information. "Yosemite Sam" went off the air on December 23, 2004, but returned during February 2005, on its old frequencies plus additional new frequencies, including those of time signals stations WWV and WWVH. Its origin and purpose are still a total mystery.

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Parapolitics: First Candidate for Word of the Year

Wow, as a linguist, I love this term and its the first time I think I have ever heard it. This is within the context of a post here about the UAE:
The UAE is not only the center of financial dealings in the Persian Gulf, it is switching central for dope and arms dealing. The dope comes out of Afghanistan into the UAE where tax monies are collected and used to buy arms, which were sent back in for the Taliban. Some of this money is thought to have helped finance the 9-11 attacks. A money trail is set forth in the government's filings in the Moussaoui case

Turns out parapolitics might not be in the dictionary, but it does have a wikipedia article and a definition as 'covert politics', a classic which includes using activities such as espionage, drug and gun running, mercenaries, exile political activities, terrorism, organized crime, insider trading, international money laundering, assassinations, hacking, and voting system sabotage/manipulation used to control political institutions. The politics of secrecy, subterfuge and deceit; a perfect candidate for a neologism needed in today's political discourse.

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Secrets of Cinema

Secret Cinema is a Chinese bittorrent tracker website, which has a nebulous relationship with copyright law but also specializes in VHS|DVD rips of otherwise obscure movies, such as the Taking of Pelham One Two Three and today's latest addition, The Cowboys (1972) featuring the pivotal downer moment in the cinema of the Western, when longhair Bruce Dern shoots John Wayne in the back. It is in this sam outlaw spirit that I would like to highlight films which not many people get to see, wither because of market inavailability or just because they aren't aware of it.

Foreign films fall into this category far too easily for American audiences. Every year brilliant fims languish outside of their home countries becuase the biggest spending market refuses to read subtitles. Something like Densha Otoko, a thoughtful and buoyant romantic comedy as ever in the digital age will kiekly never be noticed in the US. Why and how is that so? It concerns a very shy animation maniac who overcomes his social awkwardness by getting advice from online chat forum members. The best part is how they integrate the people in the chatroom, who are personified by a chorus of about six and in the end, fill a train station. A key exchange is punctuated by one of the chat room participants opening the door to another as he is writing a reply. The respondents are like those in the Truman Show, with the considerable gift of more interactivity, as they give him notes on wines and conversation topics. At one point, the protagonist explains excitedly about the connection of The Matrix to Ghost in the Shell. This movie also takes a page from the ninth episode of the first season of GITS: Stand-Alone Complex series. That episode is one of the best virtualizations of a chatroom in animation, both in how chats proceed and are moderated to how participants enter and exit and form private audiences. Densha Otoko captures that the best in real-action that I've seen, even including the dramatic soliloquoy at the end. Another story complaint is why, if this is a true story, did they need the ambiguous ending? or is that a flashback?

It also shows me a very vivid picture of a specific real world locale, namely the Akihibara neighborhood of Toyko, an electronics mecca I had heard about via William Gibson but could never fully picture, unlike Ginza, which itself is pretty well photographed. Still, I have seen so many movies which have a scene in Times Square, and when I was there in fall of 2004, it seems very different then those prior snapshots had led me to believe, both in current advertising and general layout. I suppose Akihibara is really the same way too. Still even a horrible movie like Lie Down With Dogs can, by shooting on location, totally paint an accurate portrait. For a refreshing look at love in modern Japan, seek a copy of Train Man (Densha Otoko).

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On Narratives 1: 'I am the Greatest!'

It seems to be conventional wisdom that the greatest US president of the latter half of the last century was Reagan, who is now viewed with a sort of Rushmore-like perfection of a year, making W all the more wanting to conservatives in comparison to the Gipper.

The arguments are a mix of covert and overt suggestions: that Reagan ushered in a era of growth; the social conservative idea that he slowed the excesses of liberalism going back to the New Deal; and most potently, that he single-handedly won the Cold War, staring Gorbachev down and psyching him out with the SDI. This narrative of course supposes that Star Wars, with its multibillion-dollar brilliant pebbles, was the straw that broke the back of the Russian economy.

I have to imagine, Reagan would be more humble, based on his autobiography, about his role in the Cold War. The argument that without Reagan, America would have lost the Cold War is attractive to the myth, but explicitly denies that our way was better. Was it the problems of Communism that lead to the system's collapse and not just the foreign policy of a single administration?

It reminds me of my candidate for greatest president of the latter 20th century, William Jefferson Clinton, and how he is so likely to be condemned by conservatives for being distracted by the troubles over his sex life they were excerbating. Such that, when a future threat to America was being targeted in Sudan and Afghanistan, they were doing all they could to mock this action as showboating with presidential power to distract the populace whilst tying his hands as to authority as commander-in-chief.

Both Reagan and Clinton had triumphs and mistakes, but no one will point out the elephant in the room, that Reagan's greatest mistakes were caused by his overreliance on delegation coupled with him now being non compos mentis in his 2nd term. If you compare his fluid rapport in his debates with Carter versus his more hesistant debates with Mondale, you can understand why concerns about his senility were palable enough for Reagan to need to defuse with "I will not make an issue of my opponent's relative youth and inexperience"(paraphrase). Joking aside, when Reagan was recovering from prostate surgery under various painkillers was when Col. Oliver North came to see him to authorize a classified policy which would ultimately lead to the Iran-Contra scandal.

Who today can think of all the scandals we heard of in Clinton's time, quaint in the light of smoking office towers which inaugerated our current era. We know see the effects of that time in its popularization and experiments with the Internet, something which is so interwoven into business considerations that one would be hard-pressed to imagine if this would be possible without Clinton's advocacy. So I say that if Reagan get this credit for ending the Cold War, Clinton should get the same credit for making possible the revolution in technology which we are only beginign to undestand today.

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marijuana is the moonshine of the 21st century


Via (Talk Left) : Underground Tennessee Pot Farm

This is amazing to look at in its greater Bond villain elaborateness and contemplate the applications of in a more rational society. I imagine, based on police campaigns against plantations of homegrown pot here in Holland (wietplantages), that smaller but no less elaborate setups exist here. I remember my first month here going to dinner with a guy who lived just northwest of the city center, typically boxy early post-war apartment, and I sat down in his living room as we were cooking and noticed a few pot plants together within a motley ensemble of other houseplants. Why such fear over a plant?

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In Defense of Anger

DATA
Anger is a negative emotion. I
wanted to concentrate on something
more positive.

TROI
Feelings aren't positive or
negative Data, they simply exist.
It's what we do with those
feelings that becomes good or bad.

For example, feeling angry about
an injustice could lead someone to
take a positive action to correct
it.

from "Descent", season 6, Star Trek:TNG


Anger, as Billy Crystal points out and Robert DeNiro mocks in Analyze This, is the result of a 'blocked wish'. This reminds us of children denied sweets who holler at the tops of their voices to change their weary parents' minds. As the denotation of 'angry' in fact encompasses a multitude of relatd emotions along a spectrum of physiological activation, from annoyance to contempt to hatred. When the wish that is blocked is your desire to love who you choose or live where you want, can we not see the need for anger? Also the anger caused in reaction to a hangnail is hardly the same order as that produced by cancer. Thus, we could say that since anger can denote a range of different, potentially co-ordinated states, such that the connotations of anger include everything implied by all of those states.
This is an important point to note when we consider the way in which justified outrage at the actions of others is often marginalized by media narratives as anger. We are socialized from very young that anger has very little place in polite society, when in fact, the whole concept of 'polite society' has a seething undercurrent of passive-aggressiveness. How much of a trope is it in American education to punish both parties of a schoolfight. Reason is usally called as a counter when people become angry, like 'can't we all just talk about this reasonably'. This implies that anger in itself is irrational and only leads to violence. Like all cliches we find a nugget of truth in the way in which sustained physiologial rage can produce chemicals like cortisol which can effect health. But rational anger, which has cognitively measured the intent of those triggering this injury, is far more intense than the more common physical frustration.
Yes, extremism is a risk of such a powerful emotion: fear, uncertainty and doubt help to faciliate anger by frustrating the other avenues people may have for affecting change. Political extremists tend to be angry because of this denial, thus pundits implicate that if one is angry you have put yourself at the political extreme. There is such a criminal tendency in liberal thinking towards the need to play fair and accept criticism if you want to offer criticism that people on the left end up being tolerant of people who equate their political philosophy with treason and use homophobia as a campaign tactic. You'd think they have all converted to Buddhism when they talk about how the opposition is too angry to be trusted.
I will raise my voice, if I think its something everyone should be listening to.

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Monday, February 27, 2006

Gables Modern and Old, Today on the Prinsengracht

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from the "culture of life" file:


"The House That Straw Built" @Slate
The White House has spent the past week telling us not to worry about selling our ports to the United Arab Emirates, because DHS will still have Customs agents on the scene. At last, their logic is clear: News that a port is in danger will never make it up the bureaucratic chain at DHS, so we're better off bringing in an Arab company whose transmissions we have a chance to intercept.
"Year of the Rat" a classic rant (1998) @ Suck.com
Can anyone seriously doubt that given the boomers' penchant for sucking up all the shrimp and steak in the buffet line of life they are setting up the rest of us not merely to fork over ever more generous portions of our wages to fund their Social
Security and Medicare (hey, why shouldn't face lifts and Viagra prescriptions be covered?) but to deny us any last crumb of joy that comes simply from being younger than them? We have, after all, spent a lifetime being castigated for following in the boomers' footsteps and being found wanting: They were idealistic, we were cynical; they did drugs to open the doors of perception, we did them just to get high; they dodged the draft out of high moral purpose, we simply forgot to register for selective service at the post office; their congressional impeachment hearing was about a president fucking the country over, ours is about blowjobs; and on and on.
'Unintended Legal Horrors' from Reason's Hit and Run about the SD abortion ban:
On a somewhat less consequential front, this bill would also seem to outlaw in vitro fertilzation in which not all embryos are implanted in a patient's womb. To get around this problem, the bill might be interpreted to require that all embryos produced by IVF be implanted even if they are genetically defective.

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Cory Dcctorow Interview at bit-tech.net

On DRM:
DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret any more.

On IPTV program Democracy:Democracy is genius. It's a trivial platform for watching video on the internet. The experience of watching video on the net up until now has been really clunky - the browser's not a great tool for watching video on. The experience of publishing video on the internet has been even worse, because obviously you put a couple of gigabytes up and then you go broke! So by combining BitTorrent, RSS and VLC, they've really delivered everything you need in one package to publish and retrieve video and make it as easy as sitting down in front of the television.

On becoming a blogger:
Well I've always been someone who's interested in telling people about interesting things I've found. I used to edit a monthly column of ten things you should look at on the internet for Sci-Fi Channel magazine, 1990-95, so before the net really took off.

Mark, the Editor-In-Chief of Boing Boing, he had run the magazine as a print magazine. It went under when there was a big print die-off as the big magazine publishers went under and took all the mags with them, so he restarted it as a weblog - to try out Blogger for an article he was working on. It went very well, but it was only really a modest success...

Then when Dean Kayman invented the Segway, and announced it but didn't announce what it was, he said "The codename is 'Ginger', I've got investors but i wont tell you what it is." Mark went and looked up the patent drawing and published a picture of the Segway, essentially, and said that this is what it was. It ended up on CNN!

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Mickey Macintosh?



I've always thought, when hearing about movie studios in Los Angeles complaining about computer technology being too effective at copying data, such that it's hurting their bottom line, that this was ironi considering Apple and Google and other tech companies enabling this technology are also in California a bit north and generate revenue an order of magnitude than the entertainment industry. But I was shocked to see this on /.
"This week, Barron's is suggesting that with Steve Jobs on board as the number one shareholder of Disney, following Pixar's acquisition, that Disney is ripe for the plucking for an acquisition by Apple. But look at the numbers. Apple has a $60 billion market cap, and Disney's is over $50 billion. Apple's cash on hand is in the $10 billion range. Wouldn't a Disney acquisition eliminate the possibility of working with NBC's shows on iTunes, or working with Viacom/MTV? It would seem the conflicts and competition would outweigh a purchase of Disney - Pixar or not."
What does this portend? What are the ramifications of such a 21st century merger? Will the Disney store and the Apple Store meld? What about Disneyland? And where's the Apple touchscreen/tablet with handwriting recognition?

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Sonic Weapons


As someone who has read alot about psychoacoustics and the various intricate mechanisms which link sound to speech and thought, I alone seem to have a dread of the coming advances in sonic weapons. And least you think the idea of sound waves killing people, consider two recent examples: the use of a large-scale weapon known as the Scream in Israel, with reputedly horrific consequences for the hearing of those Palestinians caught in its wake; and the far cooler and more apparently newsworthy story where a sonic cannon defended a cruise ship from RPG-wielding Somali pirates. Admittedly from the latter story, there are non-lethal benefits of this technology, as well as precedents from Joshua's Trumpet to the modern LRAD system being deployed in Iraq (and disturbingly, Katrina and the 2004 Republican Convention). And the effective use by ships of sonar as an anti-frogman measure.
Another more insidious form is the sonic laser: a battery of ultrasonic (too high for humans to hear) emitters around a normal-but-highly-focused speaker, the effect of which is to produce a beam of sound which can be transmitted across significant distances, only to appear as if someone is whispering in your ear. Thus, you could hold a private conversation with someone in your line of sight a mile away. Thus we are in the mall in Minority Report, sonic lasers beaming viral adverts (hey, try a Snarfler!) causing who knows what kind of effect on all those delicate little bones in our heads normally, to say nothing of what happens when a catstrophic failure in a local supermarket causes a cereal advert to blast into little Timmy's ears at 120 dB. Or worse, some of these systems could be marketed with a dual ad/security feature, perfect for convienence stores, any would-be stickup ending in bleeding eardrums.
None of that is so impossibly Orwellian as the non-lethal pain inducement capability of sonic weapons, especially those being demonstrated as the Active Denial System. Most versions of that system seem to involve something like a wide-angle microwave oven, which penetrates only so far into the skin. Thus, a blinding heat or even a freezing cold can be generated by targeting the specific tactile receptors for that kind of feeling.
A directed handheld sonic weapon would have many of the same features, also capable of inducing targeted pain, making this a non-lethal weapon with significant capacity towards causing deaths, the causes which are not immediately detectable, what is charmingly called 'less-lethal' as in less lethal than a gun but quite a bit more lethal than a marshmellow. All of this is possible today and probably available at your Radio Shack. Under some of the specific uses of such a device, just think of the infrasonic effect of heavy sub-bass noise that you get from standing to close to a speaker at a rave, which at the right frequency will make your stomach turn. A powerful-enough ultrasonic weapon could liquify tissue. Distortion of vision can be produced by vibrating the eyeballs with an infrasonic pulse. And there is the potential for all sort of structural damage from sonic bullets, sonic mines, sonic grenades and sonic cannons. It would be nice if we got a weapon as compact and functional as the stunning rifle from Minority Report, but more likely non-lethal we are to end up with will use the Brown Note, the legendary infrasonic tone which has the power of causing people to shit all over themselves involuntarily, like the bowel disruptor in Transmetropolitan, or as in the 3rd season South Park episode, World Wide Recorder Concert.
The DoD has demonstrated phased arrays of infrasonic (below human hearing) emitters. The weapon, about the size of a truck, usually consists of a device that generates sound at about 7Hz. The output from the device is routed (by pipes) to an array of open emitters, which are usually one wavelength apart. At this frequency, armor and concrete walls and other common building materials vibrate, and therefore provide no defense. The frequency is chosen to be near the resonant frequency of internal organs, causing illness, deafness, and internal injuries.As a defense to such a weapon, mechanical "diode walls" to convert the oscillating air into a steady flow have been demonstrated. Although not common at this time, they could be mass-produced and would provide an effective countermeasure.

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Sunday, February 26, 2006

why HuffPo is so popular

Everyone might not believe a word when 'Hollywood liberals' open their mouths about the great social issues of the day, but it was pure genius to give them a 24/7 platform online to do so, more than any pre-meditated assemblage of figures designed to fill a platform of 'something for everyone.' Yes, there's a place for that, but people bookmark and comment on things they feel strongly about, creating a tension between the novelty and provocation of new content and a thematic consistency. Trying to maintain the same level of content on a variety of issues in the blogosphere requires either large amounts of sponsored dedication to those issues or large numbers of motivated users (i.e. Slashdot). HuffPo alone on the left seems to have both. And although we could consider the comments on HuffPo (or DailyKos) just as partisan, just as filled with hatred for Bush as the comments on LGF exhibit for Arabs, this does not have the same chilling effect on advertisers. Plus, we have Arianna, who a non-native dexterity with irony and metaphor and is always convienently 6 hours ahead of the rest of the country:
Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years. Turns out his line in the sand can be found in the deserts of the UAE.

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Saturday, February 25, 2006

voice mining

Speech technology is revealed to have a deeper role in the warrantless wiretaps (from NYT, emphasis mine):

Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address — another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.

An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.

As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.

In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. (NB: This is almost unheard of; 10% transcription of such degraded audio would be more normal) Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well.

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ol' skool

My boyfriend just got a degree in innovation management. Reminds me of this classic exchange:
(via iMDb)
Dean Pritchard
: Ladies and Gentleman, please welcome, the co-host of CNN's Crossfire, famed political consultant, the raging Cajun, Mr. James Carville
James Carville: Thank you, Thank you Dean Pritchard. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here sir.
Dean Pritchard: Topic number one. What is your position on the role of government in supporting innovation in the field of biotechnology?
James Carville: Well Dean, I'm? I'm glad that you asked that question...
Frank: Uhhh... Actually, I'd like to jump in and take that one Jimmy, If you don't mind.
James Carville: Have at it, Hoss.
Frank: Recent research has shown that empirical evidence for globalization of corporate innovation is very limited and as a corollary the market for technologies is shrinking. As a world leader, it's important for America to provide systematic research grants for our scientists. I believe strongly there will always be a need for us to have a well articulated innovation policy with emphasis on human resource development. Thank you.
Frank: [Frank grunts, makes a face and goes limp]
[audience applauds]
Frank: What happened? I blacked out
Dean Pritchard: That was interesting. ha ha. Thank you very much. And, uh, your rebuttal? Mr. Carville.
James Carville: Oh... It... We... have no response. That was perfect.
Frank: That's the way you do it! That's the way you debate!

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A Dream of Chaos, or Human Gumbo

From the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras in New Orleans via Salon(emphasis mine):

The floats all depicted harrowing, flame-engulfed scenes from hell, with themes like "The Headless State," "Carpetbaggers," "Homeland Insecurity," "The Pigs of Patronage," "The Corpse of Engineers," "Ministers of Misinformation," and a withering caricature of New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson (who wants to move the team to San Antonio), "Boogieman."

The most dramatic float, "The Inferno," showed Kathleen Blanco, Ray Nagin and Michael Brown as infernal cooks brewing a giant cauldron of human gumbo in the Superdome as members of Congress forced people into the boiling pot with pitchforks, and a leering George W. Bush presided over the whole scene as the horned Satan incarnate.

These startling images expressed the deep rage and sense of abandonment in this city, sentiment that is not about to disappear in the near future, regardless of how many bared breasts appear on Bourbon Street between now and next Tuesday.

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Banksy-like street art from around the way

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The authentic anti-elitism of the Boston native

There is a tale of a rather stereotypical student who rolled his brimming cart to the "No more than 10 items" line in a Cambridge supermarket. The cashier rang it all up, without a word of complaint, but then turned to him and asked, "Tell me, is it that you are from MIT and can't read, or from Harvard and can't count?"

(from a discussion of Larry Summer's firing at TPM)

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Friday, February 24, 2006

MENDOZA!!!

Captain: Senator Mendoza is one of the most respected citizens in this state, McBain. And yet, you ran his limo off a cliff, broke the necks of three of his bodyguards, and drove a bus through his front door!?
McBain: But Captain, I have proof dat he iz de head of an international drug cartel!
It was a spot-on throwaway gag on the cliche nature of action movies and their stars but McBain has proved to be a durable part of the Simpsonsverse. Which was why I was amused to hear that conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has promoted the title of this entry as a shibboleth/secret handshake to indicate your rightward philosophy to fellow travellers, however disruptive the practical application of this idea may be. At first I thought it was because the fictional Mexican-American legislator/kingpin is the conservative nightmare, but no, Goldberg writes this in a curious response to his compatriots who couldn't understand why Arab men hold hands. He guesses the only heterosexually appropriate context for most of his readers to engage in this type of behavior would be if your partner, a day away from retirement, is assassinated by a corrupt government official. Ultimately, this is a thoughtful response to the people who take the possibility of being mistakenly thought of as gay way too seriously.

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Explanatory Note

The headline title of this blog is Liberum Arbitrium, a fine example of that most potent of dead languages, Latin. It means, as the subtitle roughly says, free judgement or, more commonly, free will. Free thinking as a political philosophy is considered a liberal viewpoint, although nothing could be more traditionally American. Just an example of how the poisoning of words and labels in political discourse leads to a gross exaggeration of pinpoint disagreements in philosophy between people into issues they are ready to scream at each other across a table over, making common ground into scorched earth.

Now, the culpatory bit: the idea of applying the name to a weblog was inspired by a brief fictional Liberum Arbitrium, in Joe Dante's savage and campy zombie film/political satire Homecoming, which ran last fall on Showtime's Masters of Horror series. In one scene, 'Larry King*' is at a roundtable with 'Ann Coulter' and, oh, 'Ken Mehlman' and quotes from the 'online weblog Liberum Arbitrium' about the newly-risen corpses of the fallen soldiers from an unspecified but misbegotten miliary quaqmire, to which 'Ann' snorts, 'Treason!'

Another note: in the course of making this post, I found another Liberum Arbitrium so I guess someone else liked this quote as well. Hmm...still keeping it, and that is my free judgement.

*Not their actual names

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The Republicans of Gilead


I was thinking about Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, spurred by a reference in an article about the South Dakota abortion ban. In the novel, about life in a dystopic Fundamentalist America known as the Republic of Gilead, the entire narrative is framed by the epilogue. It is the excerpted speech of an academic at a conference in a distant future Greenland, discussing the main story's discovery in a buried footlocker in Canada.

I always had trouble with this pat, easy, happy ending to such a powerful piece of literature. Something always struck me as tone-wrong about it, maybe because it was a guilty pleasure to see history make Gilead suffer. Perhaps the ambiguity of justice in 1984's ending, (if we leave out of consideration Orwell's witty and prescient essays on language and the sinister applications of euphemism, included in 1984) where Winston has been totally broken by O'Brien and Room 101, was what Atwood was trying to avoid recreating.

I was glad to read most of these arguments in the Wikipedia article about A Handmaid's Tale, including an argument about a bit of androcentricity in the epilogue, as well as condemnation for its dehumanizing and detached nature. Still I love this novel because it paints a picture of a complex society without resorting to info dumps lke the encyclopedia/new bulletins accompanying the chapters in The Truth Machine or Dune.

A lot of science fiction also falls into the 'planet of hats' syndrome, where different societies so obviously meant to be analogous to some real cultural aspects, is different chiefly in one slight detail, but in an exclusive and all-encompassing way: planer Hthrae is just like planet Earth except everyone wears funny hats. Instead Atwood takes gender politics and dress codes and thus is able to transcend the just one issue, when that issue is how one half of the human race treats the other half.

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Thursday, February 23, 2006


The Phyrgian Cap

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from the 'hypocritical oaths' dept:

Gay Sailor challenges ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell'
Groton Democrats May Help Support His Efforts
By Bethe Dufresne, New London Day, 31 Jan 06

Groton -- A seaman apprentice at the Naval Submarine School launched a personal campaign for gay rights Monday, first by telling his commanding officer that he was gay, then by issuing a news release to the media.

“I am an American, I am a United States sailor, I am a brother, son and friend to many. I also happen to be gay,” wrote 19-year-old Seaman Apprentice John Graff, who said he wants to stay in the Navy as an openly gay man.

That is not an option for Graff, however, since he violated the Pentagon's “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy on homosexuality by declaring that he's gay. Facing discharge, he now plans to focus on trying to repeal the federal DADT policy enacted in 1994, and may have found an ally in the Groton Demo-cratic Town Committee.

Last Thursday, Graff went before the town committee seeking support. Vice Chairman Karen Buffkin said the committee invited Graff to submit a written resolution which, if approved, might be sent to U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-2nd District, a member of the Armed Services Committee.

While the DADT policy is a federal issue, Buffkin saw plenty of reason for local people to get involved.

“The sub base is part of our constituency,” she said, “and a lot of servicemen and women live in Groton.”

Democratic Town Chairman Elizabeth K. Moukawsher wasn't at Thursday's meeting, but had met Graff earlier during committee caucuses.

Graff wanted to join the committee, an elected position, but couldn't because he was in the military, Moukawsher said. She said repealing DADT is “a good issue for Democrats,” especially because they differ sharply from Republicans.

Christopher N. Zendan, public affairs officer for the submarine base, confirmed that Graff met Monday with his commanding officer, Capt. Kenneth Swan, on a personal matter. The meeting was a Request Mast, said Zendan, meaning it was not the result of any disciplinary action.

“Captain Swan was very respectful, and I appreciated that,” said Graff, who lives on the base.

Graff enlisted in the Navy in June 2005, and has been at the Naval Submarine School since August. He said he grew up in the Bronx and Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and prior to enlistment worked on Democratic political campaigns, including Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean's bid for the presidential nomination.

Given his background, Graff said he expected some would think he joined the Navy just so he could make a statement. But he claimed he had dreamed of a military career since childhood.

“Serving your country in the military is something great,” he said. “Every American should have the opportunity to do it.”

For awhile after enlisting, Graff said, the thrill of being in the Navy was enough. But listening to friends talk about their girlfriends, he said, made him resent not being allowed to be honest about his sexuality, especially when honesty was a major military virtue.

Graff said the DADT policy mistakenly assumes that an openly gay man or woman could make peers uncomfortable due to the “special circumstances” of military service.

“When I first told my peers, individually, they all said the same exact thing, that ‘it doesn't matter; it doesn't change the way I feel about you,' ” Graff said. “I have a feeling it's the old guard, for the most part, who care about this, not the younger service people.”

Graff said he asked Swan to “show your dedication to our Constitution and our great nation by standing beside your shipmate and allowing me to serve my country as God created me; as an openly gay man.”

But he had no illusions that his request would be granted.

Zendan said it's not up to individual officers to decide whether to accept openly gay servicemen and women. Once a declaration is made, policy dictates that discharge proceedings must begin, Zendan said.

In February 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense reported that military discharges based on DADT made up a small fraction of “unprogrammed separations,” and were at their lowest level since 1996. The report cited 9,500 discharges from 1994 through fiscal 2003, but said numbers had consistently dropped.

In 2003, there were 770 discharges under the DADT policy, compared to 1,227 in 2001.

As a personal testimonial, I have known John since around the time of the Democratic Convention in Boston 2004. We saw a great deal of New England together and I was glad to travel with him because I found him to be intelligent and, beyond any doubt, honest. So it is not surprising to me that thedishonesty of this policy would be too much, It's a sad story that should no longer be true. The Dutch armed forces don't seem the worse for it, although it is Holland. I have met gay/bisexual members of all members of almost every branch of the service, from going to a gayclub with a Marine to a sensitive Army MP who served at Gitmo to a really hot guy from the Coast Guard. Why must we punish qualified, loyal, dutiful Americans for something which is no longer a crime, when we are supposedly engaged in a long-term struggle with international violent extremists?


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only in dreams

Cory Doctorow has a prop in his latest opus, Themepunks. I really want one now that I've been thinking about it and wonder whether it is really possible, especially given the state of the art in speech technology. Let's see if I can dig up the precise description of this wonderful yet empheral tool:

"This is a new artifact designed and executed by five previously out-of-work engineers in Athens, Georgia. They've mated a tiny Linux box with some speaker-independent continuous speech recognition software, a free software translation engine that can translate between any of twelve languages, and an extremely high-resolution LCD that blocks out words in the path of the laser-pointer.

"Turn this on, point it at a wall, and start talking. Everything said shows up on the wall, in the language of your choosing, regardless of what language the speaker was speaking."

All the while, Kettlewell's words were scrolling by in black block caps on that distant wall in crisp, laser-edged letters.

I get the feeling this is a bit like what the Japanese call gomi, or, in the story convention schwag, finally ending its projected life within the story in blister packs on a strip at Best Buy. Still I was surprised to find laser pointers on sale at the local Cumberland Farm in 2000. Just 40 years ago, a laser was a massive complex piece of scientific equipment and here it was a novelty item in between smileyface keychains and oversized gaudy incense. Cory puts his laser widget to good story use, including this one faux pas for dramatic effect:

Rat-Toothed Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her ear. "Translation: you're ass-fucked, the lot of you."

TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU

Andrea yelped as the words appeared on the wall and reflexively swung the pointer around, painting them on the ceiling, the opposite wall, and then, finally, in miniature, at her PowerBook's lid. She twisted the pointer off.

Still, I wonder whether this speaker-independent and continuous speech recognizer would be free, to say nothing of machine translation, which is one of the more proprietary areas. Well, I guess that's because recently I have put it upon myself professionally to find our how much good a free system can do. In particular, my professor and I were discussing altering an open-source speech synthesis engine (like a version of Festival, maybe FreeTTS) so that rhythm and durational elements can be altered, perhaps even in sync with the recognizer. Researchers in Japan have developed a method based on speech recognition technology to record new TTS voices with minimal data (30 sentences). Perhaps, not the talking laser billboard but your own voice, lovingly recorded and hashed into a simulacra by some artifact so that it may speak to you like you. Science fiction has spurred some innovations which no one would have considered before.

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amsterdom!

I went to A'dam yesterday to meet with bloggers from America at the Cafe Amercain (natuurlijk). After a bit of waiting on the Leidseplein, we had a leisurely coffee over applegebak, with much talk of politics, podcasting and Dutch culture from the outside and inside. Afterwards, we all had Italian around the corner and scouted locations for photos. John from Americablog and Tony from Busblog were both quite captivated by the twinkly-lit canals, and despite older photographic equipment it seems John took better shots, except for one Tony took that was really well composed of a Febo automat: a shapely blonde in a ski hat stands on tiptoe as she places a coin in the slot for a kroket while an older man checks her out behind her back and the counterman grimaces at Tony. So much great stuff here.

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Sunday, February 19, 2006

changing the world

The conservative position has canonically been one of restraint. As William F. Buckley said, "it is the conservative's job to stand athwart history and say 'Stop!'". Thus, one would think that following the death of the idea of state-controlled industry, that classical liberalism could define itself free of reactionary tendencies impeding progress. But one man's progress, amongst progressives, seems to be a step backwards to others.

I bring this up in reference to recent scavaging of World-Changing: This website is dedicated to an exploration of the methods and technologies used by leapfrog nations in the developing world, not only BRIC and Africa, but unexpected places like Native American reservations developing wind power. I grew very disheartened when I read the comments to an article about a solar-powered combination streetlight/wireless relay which has the potential to bring renewable nighttime lighting and network access to billions daily. But what do all the self-hating 1st World commenters have to say? Wind power will kill birds! The streetlights will cause light pollution! American roads weren't designed for hybrids!

Every argument an appeal to horrific consequences which never arise. In 1976, an EPA official scratched plans for a prototype hybrid engine remarkably similar to the Synergy drive in the Prius. The same short-sighted ignorance exists on either side of the aisle today. I find the ligth pollution charge particularly grievous: we would rather have the rest of the world curse the darkness then build a green lighting source, or, lest they add to the carbon cycle, light a sooty candle. They seem to suggest that people in the developing world don't deserve to be able to walk home at night without being mugged. If you read the article, it references actual research which shows that streetlighting reduces crime - not to mention the added benefit that foreign development workers are more likely to stay in a country with a reliable lighting and power infrastructure. Democracy depends on solid ground.

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A timeline of uninformed government medical testing

1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with
cancer cells. He later goes on to establish the U.S. Army
Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is
named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he begins
a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and
civilian hospital patients.

1932 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. 200 black men diagnosed
with syphilis are never told of their illness, are denied
treatment, and instead are used as human guinea pigs in ORDER to
follow the progression and symptoms of the disease. They all
subsequently die FROM syphilis, their families never told that they
could have been treated.

1935 The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from
Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service
finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits
it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a
niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths
occurred within poverty-stricken black populations.

1940 Four hundred prisoners in Chicago are infected with Malaria
in ORDER to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to
combat the disease. Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite
this American study to defend their own actions during the
Holocaust.

1942 Chemical Warfare Services begins mustard gas experiments on
approximately 4,000 servicemen. The experiments continue until 1945
and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human
guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.

1943 In response to Japan's full-scale germ warfare program, the
U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.

1944 U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing.
Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas
and lewisite.

1945 Project Paperclip is initiated. The U.S. State Department,
Army intelligence, and the CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer
them immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top
secret government projects in the United States.

1945 "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the
health effects of fluoride, which was a key chemical component in
atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to
man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the
central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in
the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would
undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.

1946 Patients in VA hospitals are used as guinea pigs for medical
experiments. In ORDER to allay suspicions, the ORDER is given to
change the word "experiments" to "investigations" or "observations"
whenever reporting a medical study performed in one of the nation's
veteran's hospitals.

1947 Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission
issues a secret document (Document 07075001, January 8, 1947)
stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses
of radioactive substances to human subjects.

1947 The CIA begins its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use
by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and
military) are used with and without their knowledge.

1950 Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear
weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical
problems and mortality rates.

1950 In an experiment to determine how susceptible an American
city would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of
bacteria FROM ships over San Franciso. Monitoring devices are
situated throughout the city in ORDER to test the extent of
infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.

1951 Department of Defense begins open air tests using
disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and
there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been
exposed.

1953 U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas
over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy
River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is
to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.

1953 Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens
of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to
the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.

1953 CIA initiates Project MKULTRA. This is an eleven year
research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological
agents that would be used for mind control and behavior
modification. Six of the subprojects involved testing the agents on
unwitting human beings.

1955 The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human
populations with biological agents, releases a bacteria withdrawn
from the Army's biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Fl.

1955 Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its
potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000
Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.

1956 U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever
over Savannah, Ga and Avon Park, Fl. Following each test, Army
agents posing as public health officials test victims for effects.

1958 LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army's Chemical Warfare
Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.

1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence (ACSI)
authorizes field testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East. Testing
of the European population is code named Project THIRD CHANCE;
testing of the Asian population is code named Project DERBY HAT.

1965 Project CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH,
a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior
through the use of mind-altering drugs.

1965 Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia are
subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent
Orange used in Viet Nam. The men are later studied for development
of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had been a suspected
carcinogen all along.

1966 CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN, a program to test the
toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.

1966 U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger
throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million
civilians are exposed when army scientists DROP lightbulbs filled
with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.

1967 CIA and Department of Defense implement Project MKNAOMI,
successor to MKULTRA and designed to maintain, stockpile and test
biological and chemical weapons.

1968 CIA experiments with the possibility of poisoning drinking
water by injecting chemicals INTO the water supply of the FDA in
Washington, D.C.

1969 Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense requests
from congress $10 million to develop, within 5 to 10 years, a
synthetic biological agent to which no natural immunity exists.

1970 Funding for the synthetic biological agent is obtained under
H.R. 15090. The project, under the supervision of the CIA, is
carried out by the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the
army's top secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is
raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce
AIDS-like retroviruses.

1970 United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons"
(Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and
eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic
differences and variations in DNA.

1975 The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological
Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities
and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute
(NCI) . It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated
by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It
is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no
immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia
Virus).

1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm
that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological
agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San
Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis,
and St. Louis.

1978 Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the
CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for
research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men.

1981 First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New
York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that
AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine

1985 According to the journal Science (227:173-177), HTLV and
VISNA, a fatal sheep virus, are very similar, indicating a close
taxonomic and evolutionary relationship.

1986 According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (83:4007-4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share
all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly
identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA
may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no
natural immunity exists.

1986 A report to Congress reveals that the U.S. Government's
current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses,
naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through
genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent
treatment by all existing vaccines.

1987 Department of Defense admits that, despite a treaty banning
research and development of biological agents, it continues to
operate research facilities at 127 facilities and universities
around the nation.

1990 More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los
Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never
been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that
parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to
their children was experimental.

1994 With a technique called "gene tracking," Dr. Garth Nicolson
at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX discovers that many
returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain
of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production
of biological weapons. Incorporated INTO its molecular structure is
40 percent of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been
man-made.

1994 Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that
for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds
of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for
intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included
mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals,
hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War .

1995 U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war
criminals and scientists who had performed human medical
experiments salaries and immunity FROM prosecution in exchange for
data on biological warfare research.

1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological
agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston,
TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas
Department of Corrections.

1996 Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were
exposed to chemical agents.

1997 Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an
investigation INTO bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.

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And another thing...

Those against evolution tend to straw-man biologists as all Darwinists or Darwinian, as if everything remains as gospel from the Origin of Species.

Cheap rhetorical bullshit as any biologist will tell you, most of whom may grudgingly acknowledge themselves as Neo-Darwinist if at all. Neo-Darwinism is the synthesis of Mendelian genetic inheritance with natural selection. Even this has been superseded by more recent developments: the Red Queen theory, symbiogenesis, and lateral nuclear transfer among them. So we have animals in an arms race with the germs they carry, germs Never has the thought of throwing our hands up in the air and saying the invisible man in the sky did it. No, the truth is far stranger than that placating bit of desperate hand-waving.

And there we have it. We are so unwilling to give ourselves over to the essential undesigned and unplanned nature of the universe. It is true that no one can prove conclusively that there isn't a god, since the only person who could know the cause of every action that ever happened or ever will happen by definition could only be an omniscient being. The atheism in modern evolutionary biology is what terrifies people into supporting intelligent design. If, as Dawkins said, Darwin made it possible for one to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, then what use is religion besides societal narcotic?

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Saturday, February 18, 2006

The Liberty Cap

A floppy hat of ancient design, somewhat resembling a benippled nightcap, or the psilocybian mushrooms which bear its name. Often made from red felt. Worn by Marianne, the figure of Liberty in La Liberte Guidant le Peuple, the famous painting by Delacroix which depicts the French revolutionary struggle. Often shown sitting atop a flagpole or pike, which is then called a 'liberty pole'.

In Roman times, when a slave was freed, the ritual included the presentation of a pileus libertatis ("liberty cap") to the newly-freed slave, who benefited because the ex-slave's close-cropped hair, unfashionable and stigmatising, a mark of servitude or criminality, was covered while it grew.

It's sometimes known as the 'Phrygian Cap', after Phrygia, a kingdom which dominated western and central Asia Minor around 800 BC. The Persian god Mithras, who is commonly depicted wearing one, was very popular with Roman legionaries. Many Roman slaves came from Phrygia.

It was worn extensively by Scythians, including the Athenian police force, the Scythotoxotes or Scythian Archers, mercenaries who were a sort of Hell's Angels of the day - scary barbarians on souped-up mounts with custom paint jobs. After the Romans conquered Greece the Scythian police were kept on and perhaps this is one route taken by the Cap on its way into classical Europe.

Saturninus, when he took the Roman Capitol in 263, stuck a Liberty Cap on the end of his spear, and hoisted it up so that it could better be seen, symbolising the emancipation he promised to all slaves who joined his forces. Others (including Marius and the murderers of Julius Caesar) were said to have followed his example in exhibiting spear-hoisted Liberty Caps to symbolise liberation for the masses at tricky points in their careers.

The Cap appears in several iconographies dating from the 16th Century, such as the 'Iconologia' of Cesare Ripa (1593), which emphasised the connections with the manumission (slave-freeing) ceremony.

As Europe lurched into the Enlightenment, the Liberty Cap, as it was to become known, was widely adopted as a symbol of freedom from political tyranny by the various groups, some of them masonic, who were plotting revolutions (and later carried them out.) One early example, in Brittany in 1675, was the "Revolt of Red Caps" - a series of riots protesting unfair tax laws.

As some of these conspirators rose to political power, notably in France, the Cap (known as the bonnet rouge, or bonnet de la liberte) became prominent in many expressions of the newly conceived hope for liberty, as for example in Augustin Dupre's depiction of Liberty as a young woman in the Libertas Americana Medal of 1783, which shows a pole supporting a Liberty Cap (a 'liberty pole') behind her head.

It was part of the uniform of the Sans-Culottes. Louis XVI was forced to wear the Cap and drink the health of the people when the Tuileries were taken. After the revolution, the Cap was everywhere, from milestones to official documents. Donning a Liberty Cap became de rigueur for all members of the Assemblies.

There were close links between the French Revolution and the American struggle for Independence. In 1765 the Cap was used by the Sons of Liberty and many Patriot soldiers in the American Revolution wore Liberty Caps bearing the phrase "Liberty or Death". After the revolution, many coins, for example the 1793 Liberty Cap Half Cent (inspired by Dupre's medal, above), and other paraphernalia of state, such as the seals of the US Army and Senate, showed Caps, often on poles.

In the 1820's, the Liberty Cap meme spread to the South Americas, where fresh revolutions were hatching. It now appears, for example, on the flags or other insignia of the Argentine army and navy, Haiti, El Salvador, Paraguay and the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina.

Back in the US, the original design for a statue of 'Lady Freedom', produced in 1855 by the sculptor Thomas Crawford, was for an "Armed Liberty" wearing a Liberty Cap.

Ironically, the associations with freed slaves proved too much for Jefferson Davis (then the War Secretary and later the president of the Confederacy), who objected to the design. When the statue was erected atop the Capitol dome in 1863 the Liberty Cap had been swapped for a helmet with an Iroquois eagle headdress.

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