Cage recaged?

It’s been a day when all my rituals got shuffled, if not dropped. I woke up late, the morning went untrotted, the students never got their assignment, and there was seemingly nothing to write about. In a funk, I turned to a TED Talk on music by the contemporary composer Mark Applebaum.

And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?

He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).

Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?

Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.

“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.

“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.

Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.

Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.

So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….

"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."

Aha!—that’s why I liked it!

In this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off looking like something Tim and Eric created.

Tim? Eric? Who are they?

Well that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way, was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.

The piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t spoil it. So how would it sound?

Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.

Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.



Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!

Well, that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure that Applebaum knows of Harry Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both Californians.

Partch was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own instruments—he described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

He did more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let Wikipedia describe it….

Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28] Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.

Confused? Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade through the paragraph myself.

So yes, Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what? Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the question of the Beethoven? Is it music?

His response?

It’s the wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”

Yes—to both Beethoven and Applebaum.

Back on the Fence!

OK—a fact, a story, and a change of mind (maybe)….

Fact—in 2012, the federal government made 1856 requests for warrants to the FISA judges. And guess how many of those requests were granted?

1856.

Caveat—I haven’t checked this number out; I’m trusting Gail Collins of The New York Times, those fire-eating liberals up there. But if correct, we could save money on the whole FISA thing and buy a rubber stamp, instead.

Story—in 2004, several bombs were detonated in the Madrid subway system. Spain asked the FBI to search its database of fingerprints after a print was found on a detonating device; the FBI complied, and sent back a response: they had a match. A 100% match.

The FBI’s own records would reveal that there were 20 possible matches, but the FBI focused on Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer who had served in the military (which was, ironically, why his prints were in the database) and who had converted to Islam.

Strange things began happening in the Mayfield home—doors were locked that hadn’t been, a computer screen was half unscrewed, and the computer itself had a hard drive half sticking out. The family became convinced that somebody had been entering the house.

Nor was it just Mayfield—remember those 19 other possible matches? Well, the same thing was going on with them. Oh, and by the way, Spain, which had never been convinced about the fingerprint anyway, now had a suspect a bit more credible than a guy raised in Kansas. It was an Algerian man named Ouhnane Daoud.

In April, Spain notified the FBI that they believed Mayfield’s print was a negative match. Amazingly, the FBI keeps right at it, and on May 6, 2004, the FBI arrested Mayfield. They then turned around and leaked the news to the media, which was how the family found out where poppa was.

Mayfield sat uncharged in prison for 20 days; it took Spain announcing the name of the suspect and international attention before Mayfield was released.

Ready for the punch line?

Mayfield had not left American soil for eleven years prior to the explosions in Spain.

The FBI conducted an internal review and found—hang very tight to your seat here—that they had not misused the PATRIOT Act. I can feel the relief of all you readers out there; relax—have a beer.

Mayfield—well, there’s always somebody to spoil the party, isn’t there—wasn’t satisfied. Explicably, he sued; just as explicably, he won, at least partially. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

On November 29, 2006, the U.S. government settled part of the lawsuit with Mayfield for a reported $2 million. The government issued a formal apology to Mayfield as part of the settlement. The settlement allowed Mayfield to pursue a legal challenge against the Patriot Act.[7] The FBI was also cleared of wrongdoing in an earlier internal investigation.

On September 26, 2007, two provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act were declared unconstitutional. Finding in Mayfield's favor, Judge Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, "now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment," which violates the Constitution of the United States.[8] The Federal government appealed that ruling, and Mayfield's attorney, Elden Rosenthal, argued in front of the Ninth Circuit court on February 5, 2009.[1] The ruling was overturned in December 2009.

It seems that Mayfield had committed two crimes: he had served in the military (which got his prints into the FBI database) and he had converted to Islam (which was a red flag for the FBI).

You could argue that it was an isolated case, but I’d return that 19 other people were also being investigated. But what’s completely troubling is the mindset of the FBI—they are determined, despite all evidence, to get this guy, to nail him for a crime he didn’t commit on foreign soil.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Thomas Friedman and his argument—the time to start a database is not after you have a suspect but before. Persuasive—I bought in briefly. But now I’m wondering—if you want my vote, there have got to be better safeguards against abuse than those now in place. 

Sorry, Tom!

Just Another Battle

“Courage,” somebody or other once said—I’m too lazy to look it up, though I am putting it in quotes—“is a muscle that grows stronger with exercise.”

It’s probably true, because why did I come out, unwittingly, to a roomful of strangers? Oh, and out Mr. Fernández too.

Granted, it was hardly a backwoods bar in rural Mississippi; it was room full of poets, or poetry lovers. So the chances of being asked to step outside and settle our differences with our dukes were slim. Instead, the crowd laughed and two women of our sort gave us amused smiles as they passed near to us.

Mr. Fernández was there at my bidding, reading a poem of my mother’s. One of his many talents, besides cooking and holding contrarian opinions (and things not to be discussed here), is reading poetry. So I had assigned him the poem, and prepped him to mention me and especially Iguanas. Sales are terrible—actually, non-existent….

In the course of his introduction, he mentioned Franny as his friend—this I found sweet. However, he also mentioned me as his friend—this I found odd. So I found myself, in my booming teacher’s voice, saying something like, “Sweetheart, I’m your husband!”

He looked up and over at me, grinned, and said, “yeah, we got married four years ago.” Then he went on to read—very well—the poem.

I tell you this story because of what didn’t happen—neither Raf nor I mentioned it after the incident, and nobody commented on it except the owner of the place; she thought it was great.

This is completely unlike what I went through the first time I came out. Then, I couldn’t even speak the words; I had to write a letter. That meant a wait of five days or so, during which my stomach was knotted into dreadlocks.

I also tell you the story because, for many of us, we’re not living in a roomful of poets, but the aforementioned backwoods bar in Mississippi instead. Or maybe Omaha, Nebraska, which is where Danielle Powell was attending the religious college of Grace University.

Well, all was well with Danielle: she was the first person in her family to attend college, she was close to graduation. Then, a “spiritual advisor” ratted the news to the school’s Judiciary Board: Danielle was having an affair with a woman.

They hauled her in, asked her if she was sorry, and told her that she could continue, if she submitted to a “restoration process,” lived off campus, and didn’t sleep overnight in the dorms. Oh, and they also suspended her and didn’t allow her to finish the semester.

All this is bad—what catapults the story into heinous is that Danielle was forced into coming out to her parents and family before she was ready to. And you can imagine—from the very fact that she was attending a religious school, and was the first person in her family to do so—that her family was probably quite conservative.

Danielle then decided—smart move—not to go back to Grace; she found another college to attend. But guess what? Grace told her she has to pay 6300 bucks to get her transcript transferred to the other school.

Why the $6300? Here’s what the Huffington Post said:

James (Executive Vice President of Grace University) said anyone who withdraws before the semester is 60 percent complete will usually owe a balance, because federal law obligates Grace to return Title IV funds -- federal grants, loans and work-study funds -- on behalf of the withdrawn student. "Suspension or expulsion constitutes withdrawal," James said in an email.

Right—so the school suspends her, and then pours a little salt into the wound, forcing her to pay $6300 for it all?

Oh, and by the way, notice to whom the school is repaying: the federal government. So Uncle Sam is giving money to schools with religious scruples (their term) or which practice hate and blatant discrimination (my term!) Yeah? That’s where the taxpayers’ money is going?

Well, I looked it up, Grace University, and immediately had Mathew 6:12 flashed into my eyes. And then came across this:

Grace University has a long-lasting reputation of developing servant leaders for the home, the church and the world through excellence in biblically-integrated education. Here students receive a life-changing experience in a personal and discipling environment, all for the glory of God. Review the links below to learn more about our history, educational goals, beliefs, and more.

Biblically-integrated? Discipling?

Danielle is fighting back, along with her wife—the couple married in Iowa. There’s an online petition asking Grace to forgive the debt. I’ll certainly sign that, and my start one on my own.

How about denying federal funds to any institution that practices discrimination in any form, including sexual orientation?

Wrong, Again

Hmmmm—so maybe I was wrong, signing that petition in my knee-jerk fashion this morning. You know, the online petition supporting Edward Snowden, the 29 year-old guy now somewhere—supposedly—in Hong Kong.

I’m thinking this way because of Thomas Friedman and his column this morning, “Blowing a Whistle,” in The New York Times. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

Friedman argues as well that, to date, there have been no known abuses of the data mining programs and goes on to quote David Simon:

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.

Simon makes a point: there’s a big difference between collecting data—in this case collecting phone numbers or emails—and actually analyzing the data—that is, listening to the calls or reading the emails. To listen / read, the government has to go before a judge and give good reasons. Yes, the public won’t know—no suspected terrorist should be reading in The New York Times that the feds are on to him. And yes, it’s a little difficult to ascertain that the government is really playing by the rules. But still, it’s a system.

OK, you say, but why not go after the data when you have a suspect, and a court order to do so? Are you seriously going to give me the have-to-have-a-haystack argument?

Looks like I will. Why? For reasons of time and space.

Look, let’s pretend there a terrorist with a dirty bomb that he intends to put in Times Square at 9AM on Monday. He knows that; you don’t. Do you collect his phone history while the clock is ticking, or do you have the material at hand and then race to analyze it?

OK—that’s time, what about space? Well, you may be dealing with foreign governments, some of whom may not be in any hurry at all to comply with or honor requests from the US government for data. Which, by the way, they may not even have.

“Nobody is listening to your calls,” said Obama, who went on to say that if we don’t trust the executive, judicial and congressional branches of the government…um, don’t we have a problem?

Two thoughts.

As I wrote a day or two ago, the analysis of data tends to come in to an investigation after a tip is received, a laptop is discovered, and interrogation reveals a plot or a suspect.

Now two cases.

First case took place in Orlando shortly before September 11, 2001, when José Meléndez Pérez, a US Custom and Border Protection agent, confronted a Saudi national, Mohammed al Qahtani, and smelled a rat. Al Qahtani didn’t have a place to stay, he didn’t have a return ticket, didn’t have a credit card, but guess what? He had $2800 in cash. Some of his answers were contradictory; he was hostile.

Remember, now we know—no credit card because he didn’t want the trail, hence the large amount of cash. And probably a member of his cell was picking him up and giving him shelter, and as for the return ticket? Meléndez Pérez didn’t know any of that. But Melendez Perez said no way: the story didn’t add up, and he denied Qahtani entry. And that’s why Flight 11 had four, not five hijackers.

Second story—Russia tells the FBI about a guy in Cambridge, MA, who may need a bit of looking into. They do, they drop the ball, and two years later, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, completely unscrutinized by our sophisticated systems, drops the bombs at the finish line to the Boston Marathon.

So my first thought? A system is as good as the people who use it, and I worry that the bells and whistles of technology will dazzle people and delude them into thinking that that’s enough.

And my second thought?

It’s so damn hard to believe a president who says, “trust me,” when his director of national intelligence tells a lie to a congressman. Wyden asked a simple question, and deserved an honest response.

So did we all.

Popes, Presidents and Lies

Right, so now we know. The pope—the new one, not the old one—has come out and said it, and the Vatican has not denied it; so that’s pretty high on the credibility scale. Now then, hold on to your seats, take a deep breath, and prepare for the unimaginable.

There is a gay lobby in the Vatican.

Also, of course, many many saints, said the pope. But yes, in addition to that gay lobby, there is a “stream of corruption.”

You remember the question of Ratzinger, the old pope, who retired last February and trotted off to Castel Gondolfo, to spend pleasant days and nights with his personal secretary, Padre Georg, a hunk who makes Clooney look like Archie Bunker. Here’s a sweet photo of them together:

Right, I’d be grinning too, if I had that guy that close to me. Well, the old pope is proposing to live the rest of his days in the Vatican; Padre Georg will be secretary during the day for the new pope, and then walk home where he will be secretary during the evenings for the old pope.

People in Italy found this situation unusual; as one reporter put it, the pope routinely enjoys robust health until the day he dies. For a man not known as a trailblazer, Ratzinger caused millions of jaws to drop the day he decided to retire.

The press then speculated—was there any reason that the pope decided to retire? Age and frail health are nothing new to the papacy—what had changed that had made it necessary for the pope to retire? Two things came up, two very old things: sex and money.

There was talk of a secret report written by three cardinals; the report, it was said, would be given to the new pope personally by the old pope. The Vatican press agent, of course, completely dismissed the idea of a “gay lobby,” essentially calling the idea absurd.

Well, chatting in Spanish to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious (CLAR), Francis dropped the news, and the press office, declaring the event private, had no comment.

I’m thinking a lot lately about secrecy and deception. The Vatican knew about a situation and lied; the head of our national security agency, James R. Clapper, looked a congressman straight in the eye and lied. And I am trying to remember—when was the last time I lied?

Well, I’m either a completely dishonest person—and thus incapable of seeing the terrible truth that I’m prevaricating at a prodigious rate—or I’m pretty honest. Barring social lies, I really can’t remember the last time I lied to anyone.

Cancel that—I pleaded a headache recently to get out of an engagement. But I did feel guilty about it. Which, perhaps, is more than Clapper feels; here’s his justification for lying to Senator Wyden:

 "I have great respect for Senator Wyden," Clapper said in an interview with NBC on Sunday. "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- 'When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife' kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."

This is an insult. A senator asked you a question, Clapper, and there was nothing of a trick or ruse about it. It was a simple, direct question that made you uncomfortable, and so you decided that it couldn’t be answered by a simple yes or no. But what did you do? You said, “no, Sir.” And then weaseled around by saying, “not wittingly.”

What’s worse is the White House’s response to the controversy. Here’s CBS News on the subject:

President Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given" Congress, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday, adding that Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press." 

Well, Clapper certainly was straight and direct. “No, Sir,” is both; unfortunately, it wasn’t true.

That said, no one really gets off the hook. Obama says that all the activities of the National Security Agency have been vetted both by congress and by federal judges. If true—and it hurts to write those words—then everybody knew, and it took a 29 year-old kid, now branded as a traitor, to tell the people the truth. But if true, why was Senator Wyden asking the question in the first place?

And tell me, how does it jeopardize national security by telling the public in general terms how we’re going about doing national intelligence?

The Obama administration is saying, as did the Bush administration, “trust us.” Unfortunately, neither administration has proved worthy—on this issue—of trust.

On Questions and Intelligence

Well, it’s a story with many levels. But first, let me point out—we’re spending enormous amounts of money for something that gives us nothing.

There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.

The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.

And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?

Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?

I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.

And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?

Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.

And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.

Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.

Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.

Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?

It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.

It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:

 Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy

Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?

Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”

It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.

And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….

1984 Is Not Behind Us

There’s something screwy about it. The United States government has collected this enormous amount of information about whom we’ve called, how long we’ve talked; it also has connections to the largest servers in the country, and so it knows—minimally—who we’ve emailed. And if the government has access to servers, it seems logical to me that it can also monitor Internet use.

We cannot have, says Obama, 100% safety and 100% security: there has to be a trade-off. And he says that these programs have thwarted terrorist attacks in the past. What he doesn’t say is what attacks, and how the information helped identify the threat.

And according to at least one guy, Shane Harris, this kind of data mining is really only useful when you have a specific lead. And where do those leads come from? Here’s Harris on the subject:

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists' laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it's exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

So we have an enormous pile of data, and yet we’re still relying on tips, interrogations, or information found on terrorists’ laptops. Why collect all this information? Couldn’t the government get a court order when needed?

It’s also a little screwy that the government, with all this data on its hands, was unable to prevent a couple Boston kids from making bombs, killing several people, maiming scores more, and shutting down a major American city for a day. The Russians had told the FBI—watch out for this guy. That said, why wasn’t the government looking at all Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Internet usage, which presumably is where he was “radicalized” and / or where he learned to make the bombs?

I also understand that the last thing Obama wants is to have a terrorist attack on his watch. And God knows, I would have continued the program, too—what president wouldn’t? But the real question is whether a president, with the help of Congress and the Supreme Court, should be making these decisions.

And let’s be honest, if given the power, the government will use it. But is it legal, collecting all this data? Well, here’s what James Sensenbrenner wrote in the Guardian last Saturday:

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

The point should also be made—how do you get the genie back in the bottle? We have invested billions to obtain the technology to spy on our citizens. Is it likely that the government will walk away and leave it rusting there?

We went nutso after September 11. But actually, our freedoms had been eroding for years before. Am I the only person in the US who thinks that being asked to pee into a plastic cup in order to get a job stocking cereal in Wal-Mart is an unjustified invasion of privacy? And why is it that I am photographed countless times a day, sometimes without my knowledge? Since when did walking out onto the street mean implied consent?

“If you’re not doing anything wrong,” goes the line. Yeah? What if a major al-Qaeda figure dials my phone number by mistake? What if he emails the wrong person? Or what if my vengeful ex-wife, working away for our homeland security, decides to tap into the system, read my emails, and then start stalking my girlfriend?

Even if I trust this president not to misuse the information, will I trust the next one? Oh, and by the way, what if I write the sentence, “It is completely untrue and without basis that I want to kill Obama?” Will that ring alarms bells for Homeland Security? Am I to expect a knock on the door shortly?

The guy who leaked the information is 29, and though making a pot of money, wasn’t particularly high up in the hierarchy. He’s intelligent and speaks well; I believe him when he says that his intention was to force the issue onto the national stage.

Guess what.

He has.

Warning: This site may give you ED

Well, who would have thought?

Young guys are giving up porn.

I know this because I’m watching TED talks, recently, and ran into one entitled The Great Porn Experiment. Rest assured, dear Readers, this elderly and respectable blogger has never EVER consumed a speck of smut, excepting those times when I pass Mr. Fernández at the computer.

It seems, however, that I am an exception, if the speaker, Gary Wilson is right. In fact, anyone studying the effect of porn on the brain has a little problem—there are virtually no guys out there who don’t watch it. So that’s a problem, where’s the control group.

It’s basic brain anatomy—a guy seeing a picture of a lusty babe, if that’s his persuasion, get a little jolt of dopamine. Now if the lusty babe is being her sultry self in dad’s Playboy magazine (found in the sock drawer or under the bed)—that little shot of dopamine goes away, after a bit. But what happens when that busty babe is on a computer screen?

Well, several things. In the first place, you can click faster than you can turn pages, and more important, if you put all the smut that’s on the Internet in a magazine under dad’s bed, well, he’d need either a ladder or more likely a helicopter to go to sleep every night.

So Wilson outlines the problem: a slight jolt of dopamine is a reward, it gives us a good feeling, and it makes us want to explore the world, one part of which is sex. But if you sit for hours at a time, as some guys do, and do nothing but consume one erotic image after another, what’s happening in your brain? You’re getting a positive feedback cycle of dopamine—the brain is craving more and more stimulation, trying to get back to the feeling of that first hit of dopamine. It can’t, of course—that’s the trap of addiction.

You enter something called arousal addiction, but other things are happening as well. You’re isolating yourself, you’re losing interest in other things, you start to feel depressed and anxious, and critically, you start losing interest in actual sex.

Two bad things happen—when you are with a real partner, you can’t get it up. And guess what? You’re 22.

So young guys have been getting erectile dysfunction, as well as getting medicated for depression, anxiety, and a host of other conditions. And unlike the erectile dysfunction in elderly guys, it’s not a plumbing problem, it’s an electrical problem—the brain is sending a weaker signal to the brain.

Then something really weird happens—you’re a straight guy, so why are you watching gay porn? ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with me,’ you think, ‘am I gay?’

Relax, you’ve burned through your sexual preference, as it were, and now you’re searching farther and farther afield for stimulation.

So what are guys doing? They’re giving up porn, and waiting out the two to six months that it will take to rewire the brain. And as one guy said, that gives him time to study French, play the piano, exercise, etc. A porn addiction takes a LOT of time.

I live in Puerto Rico, which has a serious problem socially with arousal addiction. Car stereos are blaring, people are shouting, the landscape is littered with signs that seem to rush at you, screaming to be noticed. And everyone everywhere is beset with six things they have to do or want to do or are in fact just doing. I report this as absolute fact—I visit Manhattan and feel relaxed. Ah, a quieter, gentler time!

“Let me tell you about a place that is so dark the sky at night is ablaze with stars,” I would tell my students.

“Let me tell you about a place that is so silent, you turn off the refrigerator at night—it’s too loud,” I’d say.

“Let me tell you about sleeping alone in the forest, and hearing the rustle of something moving through the underbrush outside, and not knowing what it is,” I’d begin.

They looked at me blankly. Of all of the pleasures of the world, the one imaginable one for them was a moment free of…

…stimulation.          

Tropical Winds

Well, the opportunities down here in the tropics are blossoming like cherry trees.

While our northern friends may be worrying themselves about Syria, the IRS / PRISM / HSA affairs, climate change and the Iraq / Afghanistan debacles, we have other things on our mind.

First off—did the mucama / bedchamber maid kill Georgina Ortiz Ortiz? Well, she’s being tried in the murder of 17 August 2010, but nasty tongues are saying otherwise. The couple had stopped having marital intimacy, they communicated through others on the Internet, and Georgina had declared that she wanted to divorce herself from her husband. Worse, according to those savage tongues, Georgina was having an affair with her 48 year-old personal trainer.

People are interested in all this because, well, it’s interesting. Oh, and Georgina’s husband Carlos Irizarry Yunqué, whom the aforementioned evil tongues suspect of actually committing the crime, is a retired Supreme Court judge, now on the faculty of one of the best law schools on the island.

The police suspect the maid, who is in fact on trial this week. And it’s true—well, it’s supposed to be true—that she had told the security guard, as she passed him, “I’m gonna kill that bitch,” using the word perra. Unfortunately, Georgina has a little dog, and yes, it’s female. So who knows what she meant?

Oh, and the security guard certainly has a shifting memory. The murder took place at three in the afternoon, and the security guard testified yesterday that the judge was absent and came back at around 5PM. The problem? On the day of the murder, the security guard said the judge came home at 3PM.

Then there’s more confusion—a neighbor who was first on the scene (well, second, after the killer) states that the scene was altered: one of the knives had been moved, the hilt cleaned, and the knife placed in the right hand. The neighbor testified that the judge was muy mal and kept asking why his wife had wanted to kill herself.

OK—and the mucama? Well, she’s a Dominican by the name of Aida de los Santos; early reports mention that she’s undocumented, later reports don’t. But it’s significant that she’s Dominican because, yes, there is some prejudice against Dominicans. And her story turns a bit bizarre—a story in First Hour / Primera Hora reveals that while in custody in the Witness and Victims shelter, she either tried to hang herself, or someone slipped a rope around her neck and pulled it tight. De los Santos’ family says it was a murder attempt, the shelter says it was suicide. De los Santos, at any rate, woke up in a hospital bed the next day after guards at the shelter used their cellular phone to call the ambulance; the phones at the shelter weren’t working that night.

There is some evidence against de los Santos. Her granddaughter testified that de los Santos had given her three bracelets, worth $1,400, with the initials “G” and “C,” presumably standing for Georgina and Carlos. The granddaughter was to go find someone to remove the monograms, and then sell the bracelets, to finance a trip back to a new life in the Dominican Republic. There are rumors as well about a bloodstained fingerprint on the hilt of the knife—if it is de los Santos’ print, it would be hard evidence against her.

Then there is the age of the ex-judge: he was 88 at the time of the murder. Could a man of that age kill a woman strong enough to have a personal trainer? If he were in a rage, and if he surprised the victim, could he do it?

Stay tuned, readers. More later, as we say down here.

Then there’s the interesting news that the AMA, of Mass Transit Authority, has been a bit relaxed about checking the driver’s licenses of the bus drivers, 12 of whom have been found to be without valid licenses. So that means that 12 buses are idled, which is major anguish, since it can take up to an hour to catch a bus, which may well pass you by, if the bus is full or the driver thinks it’s full (there’s always room at the back) or if, for some reason, he is simply disinclined to stop.

“So why don’t they hire temporary drivers?” I said to my friend Tony.

“They’re broke,” he said, “They’re five or fifty million (can’t remember which) in the red.”

So I had to tell Tony the reason—half of the time, riders ride for free! Eight years ago, when the Urban Train started, all of the buses got refitted with new meters that would read the little cards that the train reads. And the train, in private hands, has been duly maintaining the readers. The Mass Transit Authority, on the other hand, a government agency….

“Well, now you can tell them,” I said, after he commented that the new head of the AMA can’t figure out why the train’s ridership is up and the AMA’s ridership is consistently sinking, essentially at the rate the meters break down.

“Or we could wait until the last meter breaks and ridership is at 0 and all the buses are totally crowded and the director is completely nuts,” he said.

We agreed, his was the better idea.

Oh, and did I mention that according to The New Day, our local paper, if we get downgraded by Moody’s and the like 100,000 jobs will be lost, investors will lose 4.6 billion dollars, our sales tax will hit 18.5%, and the economy will shrink by 5%?

Oh, and we have until June 25 to do something about it.

The governor is proposing, in this dire situation, lowering the sales tax. What’s the scoop, you ask? Well, the governor proposes taxing business to business; here’s how it works. At the moment, the government doesn’t charge a tax on Sony when it sells televisions to Wal-Mart; under the governor’s plan, it would. Now those good people at Wal-Mart could suck it up and absorb the bite, or they could turn around and sock it to the customer.

Well, in this situation, you’d expect urgent meeting, crisis management, guys in suits looking worried-but-calm going into and out of marble-walled capitol offices, right?

What—are you crazy?

The governor and most of the legislature are busy this weekend.

What are they doing?

You really wanna know?

Not sure…YES, tell me!

Attending the Puerto Rico Day Parade in New York City!