Cash money, ain’t got no use for you

18 12 2010

No no no no no no NO! No. No no no. NO!

In terms of public safety and national security, the sooner the world moves to a digital cashless economy, the better.

So says Professor Jonathan Lipow. To which I respond, well, you read my first line.

Consider the opening graf:

THE 500-euro note is sometimes called the “Bin Laden” — after all, Europeans may never see the 500 euro, but they know it is out there somewhere. Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s leader and the 500-euro bill are connected in another way: high-denomination bills make it a lot easier for terrorists to operate.

Got it? A joke about a name actually reveals a deeper reality!

Although, exactly how high-denomination currencies make it easier for terrorists isn’t really explained so much as it is “analogized”:

Organized crime has always been a cash industry. In 1969, the Treasury stopped issuing $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills specifically to impede crime syndicates — the only entities that were still using such large bills after the introduction of electronic money transfers.

It is up to the reader to suss out the reason for big bills: My guess is that it’s a lot easier to store a load of cash if that load is a pallet-full rather than a room-full.

In any case, while it is clear that terrorists and other assorted bad guys [and presumably a few bad broads] prefer cash to credit because, as Lipow helpfully points out, one can collect and dispense cash without showing any ID whatsoever(!!!!) it is not at all clear that bin Laden and his henchmen [what a great word, by the way, henchmen: it even sounds sinister] are actually using those 500-euro notes.

But no matter: the point about the mob was just to reinforce that bad guys and dolls use cash, and that the government can make it harder for those bad guys (and dolls) to use lots and lots of cash.

(Did such actions lead to a lessening of organized crime? Well, no, since Lipow himself notes that drug traffickers pile up the cash, only now in $100 denominations. But that’s another column, right?)

(And for another aside: We should be grateful that after distribution about $19 billion in cash in Iraq and Afghanistan,

the military has gradually realized that the anonymity of cash makes it easy for terrorists and insurgents to smuggle in money and make purchases without a trace.

So the Treasure figured out in 1969 that cash was king among the kingpins, but it took the military 40 years to figure this out? Or is that, too, another column?)

Anyway. Lipow then tells us the solution to all these terroristic and trafficking woes is to move from actual to virtual cash, not just cell-phone based but, preferably, “smart cards with biometric security features.” He offers the charming example of the Universal Electronic Payments System:

In South Africa, the technology company Net1 now distributes social welfare grants to almost four million people. It’s simple: with a battery-operated, point-of-sale device akin to a credit-card terminal, money is transferred from one person’s card to another; during the process, the cards download and record each other’s transaction records.

Every few days, employees from the payments system head out to the villages and make their own money transfers, downloading the transaction histories of the cards they come into contact with, which contain the histories of the cards they interacted with, and so on. That data is then downloaded into the company’s mainframe, as a way of monitoring the flow of funds across the cards.

Best of all, the system can function offline and off the power grid, providing a secure means of payment under all conditions and without any geographic limitations. And the incremental cost of executing a transaction via this system is essentially zero. It is a promising model for the global economy.

It’ll be cheap, easy, and fun!

No, what’s important about this system is not any benefit provided to consumers, but that the crooks, absent the ability to accumulate funds off the books, would find their transactions open to audits:

In a cashless economy, insurgents’ and terrorists’ electronic payments would generate audit trails that could be screened by data mining software; every payment and transfer would yield a treasure trove of information about their agents, their locations and their intentions. This would pose similar challenges for criminals.

Because in a cashless economy, there’s no way—no way—these criminals could dodge a (gasp!) audit, amirite? And since electronic systems are by definition impenetrable, there’s also no way that these same criminals could smash their way through or tunnel their way under these virtual walls to hide, steal, or otherwise mess with these currency bytes, right? Right?

I’m snarking on Lipow, perhaps undeservedly—after all, I’m hardly a fan of either Al Qaeda or organized crime—but he hijacks the wheels (and grease) of the economy in service to the omnipresent national security state without a consideration for all of the other licit purposes of real-world currency, or any inconveniences (or worse) to people of that same world without cold, hard, cash.

Following Lipow’s example, I won’t bother actually to spell out all those inconveniences (Matthew Yglesias provides some possibilities in the link, above), but let’s consider some of those “or worse” scenarios.

  • You don’t have enough money to open a bank account, or enough of a steady infusion of funds to overcome any of the fees associated with low-money accounts. As a result, you are shut out of the economy.
  • You lose your e-cash-card (loss, theft, catastrophe) and have no way to access your account. No one can lend you money to tide you over, because the problem is not the lack of money, but lack of access to the money.
  • You are in an abusive relationship and need funds to get away. Abuser is able to track you through your purchases, or in some way interfere with your ability to access your funds.
  • The government doesn’t like you and slams down a gate between you and your money. (Think this can’t happen? Consider what happened to Muslim charities designated in some way as “terrorist”: their funds were frozen; search “muslim charities funds frozen” for examples. Or asset forfeiture when the cops think you’ve committed a crime; see here and here, among others).
  • The government doesn’t like you and pressures financial institutions to block your access to funds; see WikiLeaks.

The thread running through these possibilities? The loss of access, which can inhibit not just your purchases, but your purchase on the economy, your mobility, and your ability to engage in disfavored political activity.

Admittedly, the last three examples  could be used against me just as I used the only-partial-effectiveness of Treasury Dept. actions to halt crime against Lipow, to wit: these things are already happening in the cash-ready world. Unlike, Lipow, however, I don’t argue that this means we should get rid of all e-money and rely solely on cash.

The virtual economy is useful, which is one of the reason that so many of us have moved happily into it, i.e., we were neither suckered nor coerced into doing so. Common currency was developed, as Adam Smith pointed out, as a convenience to both buyer and seller (as well as a way for sovereigns to accrue and maintain creditable wealth), and while some might have grumbled at the loss of commodity-barter, it is likely that most others liked the fungibility and—wait for it—accessibility of currency.

In other words, currency gave its holder options.

This mix of actual and virtual money seems to me to offer money-holders a reasonable array of options. Don’t like holding cash? Go with the debit or credit card. Prefer shopping online? Ditto. Like being able to fish a buck or two out of your pocket to buy a slice of pizza or to toss into a busker’s guitar lid? Cash. Don’t want a store (or another household member)  to track your spending—or know it was you who bought something embarrassing? Ditto. Want the convenience of the card as well as the ability to buy and sell anonymously? Duh, both.

You can do variously nefarious things with cash, of course, as well as have variously nefarious things done to you, but so, too, with electronic monies. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it were more likely for you to be victimized electronically than, um, cash-ically—but I won’t push it.

So we make our choices—sometimes after much thought, sometimes with no thought at all—and do what we can.

I disdain the glib security-versus-liberty equations, not least because they are not necessarily opposites, and don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another; this particular “versus” implies a death-match which doesn’t necessarily exist.

“Necessarily” is the key term: Sometimes they are in relation to one another, and sometimes one does have to choose more risk in exchange for more freedom, and less freedom in exchange for less risk (although, even here, I question whether trading away one’s freedom will result in greater security—but I’ll leave that for another day).

Lipow, however, commits the opposite error: he doesn’t even consider that his quest for security could have any effect on liberty, large or small; in his eagerness to close off the options of criminals, he doesn’t much consider the effects on the options of the rest of us.

“Money’s destiny is to become digital,” he quotes an OECD report. But he and the report’s authors forget that money doesn’t have a destiny.

It has a use.

Which means we should, theoretically, have some say in how it is used.


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A message for John McCain

18 12 2010

Re:

“I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.”

Go fuck yourself.


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Categories : Politics, Rant

Every man, every man for himself

16 12 2010

I grew up with nuclear dreams.

Nightmares, actually: Watching as the bombs rained down, fleeing from bombs, living after the bombs fell, wondering how long before we were all gone.

I know that in real life that ‘bombs’ are unlikely—in most places, a single bomb would be enough—but these were nightmares, not journal articles. In real life, I studied nuclear history, nuclear weapons, nuclear tactics. I learned about throw-weights and multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) and ICBMs and SLBMs, tactical ‘backpack’ nukes, yields, and blast radii. I was drawn and horrified, thrilled and terrified at the technologies and policies that could end it all.

I was also convinced that any attempt to survive nuclear war was foolish, a waste of money, and, most damningly, likely to lower the threshold of MADness. Since deterrence was found in this balance of terror, any attempt to diminish that terror with songs of survivability was, itself, mad.

As regards all-out nuclear war, I think that assessment holds.

But what of smaller-scale nuclear war, of terrorist tactical nukes? The world won’t end if one or two or three bombs are exploded (see: the world after the Trinity test, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the numerous test explosions since 1945), so why not try to increase survivability?

Somewhat to my surprise, then, I am not opposed to federal guides on how to live after a nuclear explosion.

The New York Times notes that the Obama administration, following steps taken by the Bush administration, is distributing information on how to survive a nuclear bomb. This information is based on models which, unexpectedly, showed that casualties could be greatly reduced simply by taking shelter immediately after the blast, thereby reducing exposure to radioactive fallout.

Physicist Brooke Buddemeier spoke at a recent conference:

If people in Los Angeles a mile or more from ground zero of an attack took no shelter, Mr. Buddemeier said, there would be 285,000 casualties from fallout in that region.

Taking shelter in a place with minimal protection, like a car, would cut that figure to 125,000 deaths or injuries, he said. A shallow basement would further reduce it to 45,000 casualties. And the core of a big office building or an underground garage would provide the best shelter of all.

“We’d have no significant exposures,” Mr. Buddemeier told the conference, and thus virtually no casualties from fallout.

This is not nothing.

Government at all levels in the US is unreliable: it may come through in prevention before and care after, but, then again, maybe not. And, as these guides note, even a fully enabled government may not be able to respond immediately after.

For better and for worse, the government is telling us, we’re on our own. For better and for worse, we have to take care of ourselves.


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I’m a rocket man

14 12 2010

I try to be good, get off the computer for a few hours, and what happens? I miss an entire conversation on science.

Well, goddammit.

(Actually, given that a large portion of the thread was given over to name-calling and trollist cavils, I guess I didn’t miss that much. Still.)

So, science. I am for it.

I am an epistemological nihilist, it’s true, so this support is caveated with the usual cracks and abyssals, but I’m also quite willing to hop right over those chasms to walk among the ruins that compose our human life—and one of our more spectacular ruins is science.

Yes, ‘our’. ‘Our’ because science truly is a human endeavor (even as its dogmatists assert that science can take us outside of ourselves), and as such, there to be claimed by all of us. And it is important to claim it, both against the dogmatists and against those who find nothing of worth in curiosity and rigor, or in experimentation, skepticism, and discovery.

I can only respond to those opposed to discovery with questions and fiction—as we do not inhabit the same world, argument is stillborn—but to the dogmatists and, it must be said, to those who favor curiosity and thus oppose science because they believe science poisons curiosity, I can offer history and reason and ruin.

To offer the whole of that argument is to offer a book; instead, here is the abstract:

We humans have sought to know, and in seeking, have sought to make sense of what we have found. How we make sense has varied—through recourse to myths, common sense, measurement, extrapolation, generalization, systematization, reflection, etc.—and what we make of the sense we make has varied as well. Sometimes we call it truth or religion or wickedness or allegory or interpretation; sometimes we call it science. Sometimes this science is the means, sometimes it is the end, sometimes it is both. In early modern times [in Europe], in the period now known as the Scientific Revolution, science was thought to reveal truths about God, as it also was by those scientists working under the Abbasids; that it also brought technological advance and political and economic gain helped to preserve it against those who argued that a thirst for knowledge was itself corrosive of the faith.

Yet even throughout much of the modern period science was understood as, if no longer an appendage of natural philosophy, as nonetheless a part of a constellation of knowledge which included the arts, literature, and humanities; its practitioners are all a part of the learned class.

This collegiality faded, and now science is understood primarily as comprising the natural sciences and its methods; to the extent some social sciences adopt those methods, they may or may not be admitted to the realm as sciences, albeit as its lesser, ‘softer’, version. That science has a history is barely acknowledged, and it is unclear if scientists (or their learned critics) would consider them as ‘intellectuals’ rather than (mere) technicians, experimentalists, and lab directors.

This separation (and, often, contempt) is lamentable all around. [Natural] science is more than its tools and methods, involves more [hermeneutic] interpretation than the experimentalists may admit of, and requires greater curiosity than its skeptics may allow. But if we want to know, if we humans truly seek a human science (and, again, I would argue there is no other), then we have to prevent science from sliding all the way into scientism. Some think it’s already so technics-shriveled, that it is already mere methodological fetishism; I disagree.

This saving gesture doesn’t require that artists now refer to themselves as scientists or that neurobiologists become novelists. No, this reclamation project (another ruin) would gather the curious back together, to see if we exiles from one another would have anything to say to one another, to see what we could see.

I don’t believe this every day—yesterday, for example, I had no patience for this.

But some days, some days I think we humans could do this. Some days, this is my something more.


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Too goddamned irritated to blog

13 12 2010

You call your ‘movement’ No Labels, give yourself the motto Not Left. Not Right. Forward., and yet on the top of your web page insist

We are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America.

Kentucky fucking chicken, what’s the point of calling yourself No Label if what you really mean is Every Label (on the inside pocket)?

And it’s a stupid idea, anyway.

And then this, from a blog which insistence and crankiness I like and respect: Removing science from anthropology.

What anthropologists do is up to them; that said, I generally think we social scientists should hang on to the word ‘science’ with all our grubby little might. ‘Science’ in its most general terms as a search for knowledge has a long and honorable history and, as I always like to point out, one of the earliest known seekers was Aristotle—who considered political science the highest of all sciences. So there.

What chaps me about this piece is not that non-anthropologists have opinions about this move, but after the requisite words of respect about the so-called softer sciences, Orac also has to toss in the requisite bullshit references to ‘post-modernism’ and ‘political correctness’.

Yeah, I get it, he sees invidious parallels between claims about ‘other ways of knowing’ and his white whale, complementary and alternative medicine.

This is an intriguing claim. Truly.

But again with the KFC: Do you need to haul out straw-ass versions of an interpretive method which definition you draw from Sokal  in order to light the whole goddamned discussion on fire?

Kentucky Jesus Fried Christ.


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Yes, he really was that bad

11 12 2010

More lovely thoughts from the one who we can no longer kick around (unless we dig him up). . . .

Yes, the New York Times reports on more tapes released from the Nixon White House—with links to the audio so that you, too, can listen to the dulcet tones of the 37th president.

Here is Nixon the anthropologist:

In a conversation Feb. 13, 1973, with Charles W. Colson, a senior adviser who had just told Nixon that he had always had “a little prejudice,” Nixon said he was not prejudiced but continued: “I’ve just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits.”

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

A moment later, Nixon returned to Jews: “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

. . .

Nixon listed many of his top Jewish advisers — among them, Mr. Kissinger and William Safire, who went on to become a columnist at The New York Times — and argued that they shared a common trait, of needing to compensate for an inferiority complex.

“What it is, is it’s the insecurity,” he said. “It’s the latent insecurity. Most Jewish people are insecure. And that’s why they have to prove things.”

Nixon the expert on race relations, talking to his secretary, Rose Mary Woods:

“[Secretary of State] Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

Nixon the diplomat, commenting upon a 1973 visit by Golda Meir:

The tapes capture Meir offering warm and effusive thanks to Nixon for the way he had treated her and Israel.

But moments after she left, Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were brutally dismissive in response to requests that the United States press the Soviet Union to permit Jews to emigrate and escape persecution there.

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Nixon the statesman:

In his discussion with Ms. Woods, Nixon laid down clear rules about who would be permitted to attend the state dinner for Meir — he called it “the Jewish dinner” — after learning that the White House was being besieged with requests to attend.

“I don’t want any Jew at that dinner who didn’t support us in that campaign,” he said. “Is that clear? No Jew who did not support us.”

And, once more, Nixon the keen observer of domestic politics:

Nixon also strongly hinted that his reluctance to even consider amnesty for young Americans who went to Canada to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War was because, he told Mr. Colson, so many of them were Jewish.

“I didn’t notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don’t know how the hell they avoid it,” he said, adding: “If you look at the Canadian-Swedish contingent, they were very disproportionately Jewish. The deserters.”

They don’t make presidents like that anymore.

 


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Talkin’ ’bout my generation

9 12 2010

My blog-friend Mo at the Daily Snark has nabbed something which has been bothering, and eluding, me for a while:

I wonder if my focus is too broad. Or not broad enough. I’ve actually thought about abandoning this blog and maybe starting over. At one point I thought about starting a blog about dogs. I’ve even considered ditching blogging altogether. Which, truth be told, I don’t really want to do. . . . It’s been frustrating because I feel like I have to force myself into a niche but I don’t want this space to feel forced or contrived. I don’t want to make up a niche or a topic. I don’t want to be like some of the bloggers who are so entrenched in their niche that they can’t break free from it even though we know and they know they should have a long time ago. I like the freedom to write about anything and everything.

Yes: I want both focus and freedom.

When I started this blog, I had the idea of addressing philosophical and political matters in an accessible manner—intellectual journalism rather than academic scholarship, if you will. But I couldn’t keep my own self out of this blog, and the skew has turned much more personal than political.

I’m not terribly comfortable with that mix; however, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that I’m not terribly comfortable with that mix. I don’t think life is just one thing, and if I want, in my own uncertain way to ask about the meanings of life, well, things are going to be a bit of a mess.

And, as I commented to Mo, perhaps we should reject the niche in favor of the anti-niche:

We’re in the same generation—post-boomer, Gen-X—what I used to call the Un-Generation because, unlike the boomers, there seemed to be so little to tie us all together.

So why not go with that? This is who we’ve (uncollectively collectively) have always been. We could call it the ‘dishabille’ style. . . .

We’re thrown together (in oh so many ways), so it makes its own kind of sense that our blogs—our thoughts, our writings—would reflect that.

Besides, ‘dishabille’ sounds so much more dashing than ‘slacker’.


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Lack Luster, Lack Luster how can I muster

7 12 2010

I am too much and not enough in my head.

Too much: I am pinned in my chair, un-able and un-willing to do what is minimally necessary to take care of my life, much less anything beyond that.

Too little: I have lost my concentration somewhere in a cascade of anxiety and passivity, un-able and un-willing to think myself past my self.

No, this isn’t a crisis—or if it is, it’s a low-grade one.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is to note that this is happening, and to write that I won’t be writing much about this. I have to get some things straight with myself, and straightening is, frankly, boring for anyone other than the person undergoing the untwisting.

I remember when I was in the depths/throes/clutches/appropriatelyalarmingsynonymhere of my depression—I wrote and wrote and wrote about it, and little else competed with it. Once I got past the worst of it, however—once I was no longer nailed to Hamlet’s post—I gradually lost interest in noting every last blip in my emotion.

I’m not criticizing my past self—such self-monitoring was, in its own way, necessary; nor do I consider the loss of interest lamentable, as I am no longer so oppressed by my moods. The point, really, is that a record of the grind really only matters while one is being ground: after that, well, it was enough to be able to walk away.

That I’m a little ground down now is worth noting, but every damned detail of what I do to haul myself out, not so much.

I like writing this blog, and will continue to do so, but that this has become a place where I sort some things out doesn’t mean this is the appropriate forum in which to sort everything out.

But once it’s sorted? Oh, hell, I’ll jabber away.


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On the occasion of emptying my mind and taking deep breaths and otherwise trying to make it through

6 12 2010

Or, my parents visiting:

It was fine.


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Quick, breathe in deep

1 12 2010

My parents are flying in tomorrow for a long weekend visit.

My mind is a blank.

I like my parents, I do. And I respect them. I also recognize that on many levels we have little more in common than our genes.

Now, we do have enough in common—chattiness, a penchant for peanuts and beer, a basic degree of courtesy—that we can get along. From a distance of a thousand miles. Or for weekend visits in which I fly to them and then spend half of my time with other people.

But they’re coming here. Because I invited them.

Did I really think they’d come? After their last visit, they said, That’s our last visit. Of course, they drove, and stayed at a hotel in Queens that was near exactly nothing, and I’d only been in NY a short while and didn’t really know my way around, so it made sense that the trip was more hassle than it was worth. But once I moved into own new place—i.e., a place they could stay—it seemed to me that I ought at least ask them to stay.

See, that basic courtesy shit.

And they reciprocated. I don’t know that they really want to hang out in New York City. They see museums as a chore, aren’t into adventures in food, are not aficionados of the avant garde, and don’t really cotton to the idea of ‘just hanging out’ or ‘soaking it in’. No, they’re here to see me.

Again, that basic courtesy shit.

I don’t know what to do with them, and they most definitely are ‘doers’ (see: don’t just hang out). Thursday is set—they’re taking me to the Rockettes and then seeing another show while I teach—but Friday Saturday Sunday? I have no idea.

I sent them a long list of possibilities, figuring it would be better if they’d pick what they’d like to do, and then I’d go with them. Tenement Museum (they do like historical stuff), boat tours, tunnel tours—they haven’t said a word. I am afraid, very afraid, that they’ll want me to figure it all out.

If my folks were up for anything, this wouldn’t be problem. They are not up for anything.

So I’m thinking that we could hit the Craft Fair at St John the Divine’s on Friday, then they could, I don’t know, do something while I teach that night. Saturday, if it’s nice, we can walk through Prospect Park and maybe hit the Slope. Maybe we can dial up a movie to watch Saturday night.

Sunday? Christ. There’s a Packer bar in the West Village—maybe they’ll go for that. I don’t know what time their flight leaves on Monday; I hope it’s not too late.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? I’m girding myself for a visit from two people who love me, a visit I should be anticipating with joy rather than dread.

And so I am trying not to dread. Breathe in, breathe out. Empty my mind, empty my self. No fear, no dread, just being.

Breathe in, breathe out. Let it be, let it all be.


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