Spinning Yarns

Since George Bush Jr. was elected President in 2000, his administration’s conversation with the Press, the Legislature, and the Electorate has been surreal and incomprehensible to me. Stripped down to its essentials, it seems to have gone something like this:

W:

Taxes are too high! We’re spending too much money. We have to cut taxes so that we will be more fiscally responsible.

L:

But if we cut taxes, we will have to cut back on government spending, and then we would have to go home to our constituents and tell them they can’t have the pork-barrel projects we’ve given them anymore. We’ll all be ruined, except for Teddy Kennedy who is incapable of losing his seat!

W:

That’s okay, because we can cut taxes and still pay for everything. Even though we already spend more than we take in, we will actually make the situation better if we collect less money, because mumble-mumble-mumble and we will write everybody a cheque for $300.

E:

Yay! Free money!

P:

That was your money, you idiots. Bread and circuses!

E:

No it wasn’t. It came from the Government. That’s like pennies from heaven!

(some terrorists hijack three airplanes and destroy them, killing lots of people)

W:

It was that bastard, Osama bin Laden! We’re going to get him! He can hide, but he can’t run! Or whatever! Anyway, we won’t stop till we find him and bring him to justice–although actually, we’ll probably torture him first. We heard he’s in Afghanistan.

E:

Excellent! Bring the evil man to justice, after torturing him first.

P:

Didn’t we agree to abide by the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly forbid torture?

W, E:

Shut up, you terrorist sympathizers!

(an ultimatum is sent to the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan, to whom we used to send arms and advisors when they were fighting for freedom against the Soviet Union)

W:

Give us Osama bin Laden, or we’ll send your women to college!

Taliban:

No way! For one thing, we don’t have him, and for another thing, we heard you’re going to torture him.

W:

Okay, that’s it. [Bombs Afghanistan. Exit Osama bin Laden for Pakistan or maybe Yemen]. Okay, great, now the world is safe for Democracy!

P:

Uh, where’s Osama bin Laden?

W:

Osama bin who? What are you talking about? This is about making the Middle East a safer and more democratic part of the world, it’s about setting the Afghan people free! Did I mention freedom? Yeah. What was your question again?

E:

Yeah! What are you talking about? Freedom is good!

W:

That’s right, this is about more than just getting the terrorist Osama bin What’s-his-nose and his buddy Al Qaeda. This is a war!

P, L:

Um, what are you talking about? A war against whom? We haven’t declared war on anybody last time I checked.

W:

We haven’t? Oh. Uh…well…it’s a…a war on…on…terror! Yeah! A War on Terror! We’re going to keep fighting until there is no more terror anywhere. In fact, you should pass a law allowing us to violate people’s Constitutional rights if we suspect them of being terrorists.

L:

[falls over itself in a rush to kiss up to the President] Okay, sure! Here you go. We called it the USA PATRIOT act, isn’t that clever? We didn’t read it before we voted, but it totally evicerated the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and we have appointed a committee to strangle the 4th Amendment quietly in a back room.

(the situation in Afghanistan gets worse, then finally the Taliban are unseated)

W:

The quarterback has been sacked! Afghanistan is safe for democratizationalism! Soon they will be just like the United States.

P:

Except that their roads have been bombed, their fields destroyed, their economy is completely for shit, and the only cash crop they have left is opium. The whole country is ruled by a hodgepodge of warring tribe leaders for whom the concept of “money” is still a little fuzzy at times, and you still haven’t found Osama bin Laden.

W:

All you people do is complain. If you wanna make an omelette, you gotta break a few heads. I mean, eggs. Hey, what about this guy Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He’s a terrorist sympathizer. We should get him next.

P

Iraq? What does that have to do with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda?

CIA:

Nothing. Why do you ask?

W:

[glares at the CIA director] What did you say?

CIA:

I mean, uh, well, we have no evidence that he has anything to do with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have had some ties, somehow. I heard he has a third cousin named Osama.

W:

That’s not the point anyway. Saddam Hussein is a ruthless bastard who bombs people that disagree with him, and they have no rights. Also, I heard he has some newk-ye-ler bombs.

United Nations weapons inspector:

No bombs in Iraq.

W:

Well, maybe it was chemical weapons. Or maybe even biological weapons. Weapons of mass distraction, er, I mean, destruction. He’s got ‘em, I know it. God told me. We’re goin’ in after ‘em. The UN inspectors are a bunch of patsies.

P:

Didn’t we sell Iraq a bunch of chemical weapons back when they were fighting Iran? Isn’t that what they used against the Kurds and when they attacked Kuwait back in 1991?

W:

[Ignores the press as usual] It’s morally necessary to attack Iraq. I can’t tell you why, but trust me, I’ve seen the reports, and they’re bad. Congress should trust me to do the right thing.

L:

Gosh, I guess he’s right. Clearly we should just trust him. Okay, Mr. President, we authorize you to attack Iraq, even though we don’t understand why, and we have no idea what relevance this has to 9/11, terrorism, or capturing Osama bin Laden.

(U.S. troops begin invading Vietnam Iraq)

W:

Things are going well in Iraq! We’ll be turning over sovereign control to the Iraqis any time now.

Iraqi provisional government:

No! Please don’t do that. They just blew up another five busloads of volunteers for the police force. We haven’t paid our troops in years. The insurgency has better weapons and organization than we do! Even our government officials cannot feed their children. Our daughters have had to become hookers in the suburbs of Baghdad.

W:

You’ll be fine. Just hold an election. Once you have free and fair elections, your troubles are completely over! We’ve even got a Constitution you can use.

E:

Um…we’re not sure we really believe your rhetoric about Iraq, Mr. President. Even though you won’t let the press take pictures anymore, it seems like an awful lot of our kids are coming home in body bags.

W:

Well, there’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

E:

Ha ha! We love our President’s homespun wit. [Poll numbers improve]

(The situation in Iraq grows steadily worse, despite elections. Prices for automobile fuel increase rapidly throughout the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina)

Democrats in Congress:

Hey, guys, do you think maybe it’s time we stopped doing everything the President wants, and started looking out for the interests of our constituents? I realize this would be a radical departure from our standard protocol, but things are getting a little crazy around here, no?

E:

Yeah! We’re tired of gas costing so much! We’re even buying smaller SUV’s now! And what’s up with all our kids dying in Iraq still? [Presidential approval ratings plummet]

W:

We’ve got to stay the course. I’m doing a good job. You don’t need to see his identification. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. We can go about our business. You will accept our nominees for Attorney General and the Supreme Court without question.

E [mesmerized]:

We’ve got to stay the course! You’re doing a…well…maybe not a good job, but we like you better than we did ten minutes before you said that. You always make us feel better, Uncle George! [Approval ratings rise again]

W:

Great! Now, about those stem cells. They’re evil.

P:

Stem cell research is awesome! It’s better than sliced bread! We can cure cancer, grow new organs, find life on other planets, solve the Halting Problem, and teleport instantaneously between any two points in the known universe without using any energy! It also allows cold fusion!

E:

We’re not sure what to believe.

W:

I told you, it’s evil. We’ve got to outlaw it now before anybody figures out how to make it safe and effective.

L:

Of course, Mr. President. Right away!

W:

Good. And while you’re at it, you should make those tax cuts permanent, authorize me to let the military hold people without trials and torture people, and extend the reach of the USA PATRIOT act even more invasively. I’m not going to shut up until you do it.

Maybe it’s just me, but despite a litany of mismanagement, incompetence, deceit, maladministration, bullying, and outright abuse of power, the current Administration seems to have an unlimited ability to get what it wants from Congress and the People simply by repeating its assertions loudly and often. Then again, P. Joseph Göbbels did more or less the same thing in the 1930s and 1940s, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it works. I guess it just goes to show you that Sen. Carl Parker of Texas was right: If you took the fools out of the legislature, it wouldn’t be a representative body anymore. I just wish that occasionally there could be a candidate I could actually vote for, rather than voting the candidate I hate the least.

Filed by Michael at 21:34 under Diatribe, Political
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Ten years ago, I was predicting that something like this would eventually become commonplace. And, as somebody who is always advocating that people should make more use of privacy-protecting technologies such as strong encryption, it’s an issue that is near and dear to my heart. If you’re too lazy to read the link, here’s an executive summary: People die leaving encrypted data behind, to which the keys are unknown. No surprise there, I guess.

On the one hand, I applaud William Talcott for taking the trouble to memorize his passwords rather than writing them down. It’s rare that people will do this, without at least keeping a copy somewhere safe against memory loss. On the other hand, I have often wrestled with the problem of how to keep data encrypted with a “dead-man switch,” so that if I die, it can be handed off to appropriate people, but as long as I’m alive, nobody but me can read it. Law enforcement officials often advocate key escrow as a solution to this problem, but that’s not good enough for me. I want a solution for which it is computationally infeasible to compromise my encryption keys as long as I’m alive. So far, no dice.

Of course, even defining what it means to be dead can be a somewhat tricky proposition, so I’m not really surprised that nobody has figured out how to use it as a limiting case for cryptography. In fact, one of the biggest problems I have with biometrics for identification is that many of them work whether the owner of the biometric is alive or is dead (whatever that means), or has direct possession of the item of interest (“We got his eye, boss! Start up the retinal scanner!”). So clearly we have a few things to work out, on that front.

A good short-term solution might be to encrypt several copies of your key using a (2, 2) secret-splitting algorithm like Shamir’s or Blakley’s schemes, or even a simple XOR-based algorithm, give one of the shares to each of your heirs in order of succession, and store the other half of each into a safe-deposit box or other physically secure location, access to whose contents will depend upon the execution of your Last Will and Testament. It isn’t perfect, of course, because somebody could still conceivably break into the bank or have your box put under subpoena, but at least you’d be protected from the obvious kinds of abuse some proposed government methods are subject to. The definition of death would be left up to medical professionals and the legal system, which is the best we can probably hope for at the moment. This solution wouldn’t keep you totally safe from the government—but at present, it’s not clear they could legally force your successors to give up their key-shares unless your heirs are in Great Britain). So, at least it’s a start.

Unfortunately, that solution is a lot of work, and somewhat brittle. What happens if one of your heirs dies prematurely? Are their encryption shares to your legacy part of their estate? Can they be left with their own heirs? If so, does that supersede your own Will, in the even it should conflict? I’m sure attorneys will have a field day in court someday, over just such questions.

Filed by Michael at 15:54 under Philosophical, Social
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Unless you’ve been living in a cave in rural New England for the past forty years, you have probably encountered the so-called “high-occupancy vehicle” (HOV) lanes built through many of the more urban areas of the Interstate highway system in the United States. The point of these lanes is to reduce the amount of automobile traffic (and concomitant air pollution) on some of the busiest sections of roadway during peak commuting hours. So far, it sounds like a pretty reasonable idea. After all, creeping along in bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour is hardly the most enjoyable use of a person’s time, so presumably there should be some motivation for people to ride together and use the access-controlled HOV lanes to cut down on their commuting time.

The first HOV lanes I saw required that you have three or four people in your vehicle in order to use the special lane. Nowadays, that has been scaled back to only two. But even at the peak of rush hour, you often see only a trickle of cars in the HOV lane, and they are usually not moving much faster than the main stream of traffic in the unregulated lanes. Why is that? How has the HOV idea failed? I think there are two reasons why HOV lanes don’t seem to work well at present:

The dearth of cars suggests that the majority of drivers consider the inconvenience of sitting in traffic to be less onerous than the inconvenience of sharing a ride and coordinating a schedule with somebody else. Around Puget Sound, where many commuters have to take a ferry to get to work, the prospect of having to wait up to four hours to get a car onto the Seattle-Winslow boat is sufficient to sustain some pretty effective van pool efforts — but in the Boston area, it seems most people would rather suffer in traffic than share a ride. There’s a simple comparison of utility, if ever there was one.

The sluggish movement in the HOV lanes is easier to explain: There is a huge jam-up when the HOV lane merges back into regular traffic at rush hour, and the drivers in the mainstream are even less willing than usual to let anybody from the HOV lane in. After a while, the tailback in the HOV lane is long enough that it spans the length of the regulated area (they’re ordinarily not very long), and the whole thing becomes yet another lane of bumper-to-bumper idiocy. Pretty soon, even people who are willing to carpool realize it’s not worth their time to deal with the HOV lane, and go back to separate vehicles.

So the other day, it occurred to me that if we are really interested in promoting carpools, maybe the solution is not to reward people who share, but to punish people who don’t share. What I mean is, instead of making a high-occupancy vehicle lane for cars carrying two or more occupants, we should make a low-occupancy vehicle lane for cars carrying only one person. The remaining lanes would be for everybody else. Under this scheme, the back pressure on the LOV users would encourage them to start carpools rather than abandon them, and there would be plenty of space for higher-occupancy vehicles to manoeuver. What’s more, this is an incredibly low-cost thing to set up — in places where there are existing HOV lanes, you just reconfigure the signs a bit. Oh, sure, there would be some initial expenses associated with enforcing the LOV rules, but I think in the long run, the problem would simply sort itself out: Pulling somebody over from the HOV lane is tricky, so cops usually don’t bother. But pulling a single-occupant vehicle over onto the shoulder of the mainstream is something they do all the time, so it’s no more trouble than running a speeding ticket.*

Does giving all the single-occupant vehicles just one measly lane seem insane? Perhaps so, but it is only a constant factor of insanity above and beyond a system in which the vast majority of commuters in population-dense areas pollute, increase road building and maintenance expenses, and raise the probability of accidents simply because it’s not convenient to find a better solution. I’m not advocating that we forbid anybody from driving alone — I do not believe that is something our government should have the right to do. But maybe we could improve things by applying a little leverage to the creative power of all those idle commuters, who are currently wasting their brainpower sitting in traffic.

I’d love to see some more bike lanes, too, while we’re at it.

* Mind you, they don’t pull over many people for that, either, at least not in the Boston area. As far as I can tell, you would practically have to run over a police officer’s toes to get him to pull you over. It’s kind of lawless on the roads around here.

Filed by Michael at 15:49 under Diatribe, Social
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