The Ash Twins Blog

According to an article in today’s NYTimes,

Shortly after the attacks on 9/11, a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio, met several times with White House officials, including at least once with President Bush’s former top strategist, Karl Rove, to discuss ways that the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas…

Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Mr. Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II.

“They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda,” she said. “Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us.”

David Barstow’s case study on Pentagon Military Analyst General Barry R. McCaffrey features the following anecdote:

In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was “governance, not marketing,” and Veritas insisted that he never “solicited new or existing government contracts.”

General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.

As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.

General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.

In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.

That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into “Pol Pot’s Cambodia.”

The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as “very sober-minded.”

General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist…

Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.

CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)

On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.

Another great NYTimes book review, this time by Steve Jones on The Superorganism, a new tome on the social insects: wasps, bees, ants, and termites.

Hölldobler and Wilson’s central conceit is that a colony is a single animal raised to a higher level. Each insect is a cell, its castes are organs, its queens are its genitals, the wasps that stung me are an equivalent of an immune system. In the same way, the foragers are eyes and ears, and the colony’s rules of development determine its shape and size. The hive has no brain, but the iron laws of cooperation give the impression of planning. Teamwork pays; in a survey of one piece of Amazonian rain forest, social insects accounted for 80 percent of the total biomass, with ants alone weighing four times as much as all its mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and frogs put together. The world holds as much ant flesh as it does that of humans…

A few simple rules produce what appears to be intelligence, but is in fact entirely mindless. Individuals are automatons. An ant stumbles on a tasty item and brings a piece back to the nest, wandering as it does and leaving a trail of scent. A second ant tracks that pathway back to the source, making random swerves of its own. A third, a fourth, and so on do the same, until soon the busy creatures converge on the shortest possible route, marked by a highway of pheromones. This phenomenon has some useful applications for the social animals who study it. Computer scientists fill their machines with virtual ants and task them with finding their way through a maze, leaving a coded signal as they pass until the fastest route emerges. That same logic helps plan efficient phone networks and the best use of the gates at J.F.K. In the phone system each message leaves a digital “pheromone” as it passes through a node, and the fastest track soon emerges. Swarm intelligence does wondrous things

Swarm sex is even more remarkable… the sting-less male’s only job is to inseminate females, who sting and sting again in defense of their nest. The queen herself packs a punch, although most of the time she is too busy to do much damage. Among the leaf-cutter ants, “Earth’s ultimate superorganisms,” with their uniquely intricate societies, a single queen may produce as many as 200 million female (and sterile) offspring in her lifespan of 10 to 15 years, together with a few males, whose only job is to replenish the sperm supply…

The world of superorganisms varies from that of the relatively primitive “dawn ants” of Australia, which live in groups of a hundred or so separated only into sexual and asexual kinds, to the leaf-cutters, found only in the New World, who cultivate fungal gardens and have millions of workers, divided into a diversity of castes, in a single colony. The whole place buzzes with information, passed on with chemical cues, taps and strokes, dances and displays…

[A]nyone interested in what real biology — the study of life, rather than of chemistry — is up to nowadays could do no better than read this volume.

Garrison Keillor’s review of Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers striking excerpts in its discussion of thanatophobia, the fear of death:

The Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie, . . . a tragedy with a happy ending,” and yet [Barnes] misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in the Mozart Requiem, the sculptures of Donatello — “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Barnes is not comforted by the contemporary religion of therapy, the “secular modern heaven of self-­fulfilment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, . . . the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.”

So Barnes turns toward the strict regime of science and here is little comfort indeed. We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won’t care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely “a story the brain tells itself.” Individuality is an illusion. Scientists find no physical evidence of “self” — it is something we’ve talked ourselves into. We do not produce thoughts, thoughts produce us. “The ‘I’ of which we are so fond properly exists only in grammar.” Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope…

“There is no separation between ‘us’ and the universe.” We are simply matter, stuff. “Individualism — the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists — has led to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience.”

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http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.showContent&view=fulltext&format=HTML&id=2002-10827-010

Excerpt:

Parks and Floyd (1995)… found from their samples of Internet users that people feel personal relationships they form on the Internet are close, meaningful, and rewarding. More recently, in a 2-year longitudinal study of randomly selected Internet newsgroup participants, McKenna et al. (2002) found not only that 84% of the participants reported their Internet relationships as being as close, important, and real as their non-Internet relationships but also that these relationships remained remarkably stable over time. Indeed, compared with studies of romantic relationships begun in a traditional face-to-face setting (Attridge, Berscheid, & Simpson, 1995; Hill, Rubin, & Peplau, 1976; Kirkpatrick & Davis, 1994), considerably fewer of the romantic relationships that formed initially over the Internet dissolved, and the majority were reported as having become even closer and more intimate. Nonromantic relationships fared equally well.

Further testifying to the importance and depth of these relationships formed over the Internet, the majority of the participants were not content with having these relationships exist solely in the virtual realm but instead were motivated to bring them into their real lives, with more than 50% meeting their close Internet friends and romantic partners in person…

McKenna and Bargh (1998) studied individuals with stigmatized aspects of identity to test whether models of social identity transformation based on offline group membership (e.g., Deaux, 1996) would hold for online group membership… [T]he more that Internet members participated in the group, the more they incorporated the previously taboo aspect of identity into their self-concept, as measured both by self-reports of their acceptance of this aspect as a direct result of group participation and by behaviors such as “coming out” about this aspect for the first time to non-Internet family and friends… In fact, more than 40% of the respondents in both studies eventually disclosed this previously secret aspect to family and friends for the first time, as a direct result of their Internet group activities…

Postmes et al. (1999) demonstrated that communication patterns within e-mail groups differed significantly in content and form, illustrating that different norms developed within each group and were maintained over time. As e-mail messages exchanged within groups became more prototypical in content, messages sent to members of out-groups differed significantly from the in-group prototype. In other words, norms were developed within the different groups that influenced the use of paralanguage in e-mails to other group members but did not influence behavior in messages to individuals who were not part of the group…

Research has found that in first-time encounters, an individual will be liked better by his or her interaction partner if the encounter takes place in an internet chat room than if the two partners meet face-to-face instead (Bargh, McKenna, & Fitzsimons, 2002; McKenna et al., 2002). This greater liking continued to hold, and indeed increased, after the interaction partners met a second time, face-to-face. Thus, meeting in person enhanced feelings of liking for Internet partners, whereas no such increase in liking occurred for those who met in person on both occasions. Providing an even stronger test of this effect was a condition in which participants met the same person over the Internet and face-to-face but did not know that it was the same person. They were told that they would be interacting with two different people, one of whom they would meet in an Internet chat room and the other they would talk with in person. In actuality, they talked with the same partner both times. Even though participants did not realize this, they reported liking that person significantly more after chatting with him or her on the Internet than after meeting face-to-face…

In a study comparing Internet and face-to-face interactions, Green and McKenna (2002) preselected individuals scoring at the high and low extremes of Leary’s (1983) Interaction Anxiousness Scale and randomly assigned them to interact in small groups. Anxious individuals in the face-to-face condition reported feeling a great deal of anxiety, shyness, and discomfort during the interaction. Their anxious counterparts who interacted in an Internet chat room, however, not only reported feeling significantly less shy, anxious, and uncomfortable, but had self-reports on these measures that were nearly identical to those of nonanxious individuals in the face-to-face condition. In other words, when a socially anxious individual takes part in a group discussion on the Internet, he or she will feel as comfortable, outgoing, and anxiety-free as nonanxious individuals typically feel in face-to-face discussions. Furthermore, anxious individuals were perceived as outgoing, likable, and confident by other group members on the Internet, in stark contrast to the negative ratings they received on these measures by face-to-face group members…

Socially anxious individuals have been found to respond more slowly and less consistently than nonanxious individuals in group settings (Cervin, 1956), to engage in opinion shifts more readily (Kogan & Wallach, 1967), and to be better satisfied with the group’s performance than nonanxious individuals (Zander & Wulff, 1966). Their anxiety may inhibit them from introducing relevant ideas and suggestions to the group and from taking an active role. When interacting in groups on the Internet, however, these individuals appear to function as do nonanxious individuals. Indeed, behaving and being perceived and treated as a confident and nonanxious individual by others in the virtual world may enable anxious individuals to become more confident and less anxious in the offline world as well. McKenna et al. (in press) found that after two years of active participation with others via the Internet, reported levels of social anxiety experienced in offline interactions significantly decreased for participants…

Recent relational models of the self (e.g., Baldwin, 1992; Chen & Andersen, 1999) posit that just as one incorporates important social group identities into one’s self-concept, so too will one incorporate one’s important relationships. An individual is thus likely to be motivated to bring important virtual relationships into his or her everyday life. Indeed, such real-world meetings between virtual friends are becoming increasingly common. In a study of nearly 600 newsgroup participants, McKenna et al. (in press) found that in 1997 slightly more than 50% of the respondents had taken the step of getting together with their closest Internet friend in person. Two years later, that number had increased to 73% of the participants. Meetings take place not only between dyadic friendship pairs, however. Large and small real-world gatherings of virtual group members also take place, where members travel across countries and continents to attend “MUD gatherings,” “knitting circles,” and countless other group “socials” to mingle in the flesh with their fellow group members…