Category Archives: real life

****The Terrorist’s Dilemma

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laptops, soldiers

(photo: wikimedia)

By Jacob N. Shapiro – an academic’s look at the organizational constraints on traditional terrorist organizations—from those in pre-Revolution Russia to the Irish Republican Army to Al Qa’ida to Fatah and Hamas—and how groups manage these difficulties. Princeton professor Shapiro gave a fascinating talk about his research last December and resolved to read his book.

In part, his message is that terrorist organizations face many of the familiar challenges as do other organized human endeavors. They have resource management issues, they have personnel issues, they have issues related to achieving their goal. But operating as covert and violent organizations imposes a number of additional, unique security constraints.

A key factor is the extent to which “management”—the terrorist leaders at the top—and “line” personnel—the people carrying out day-to-day operations are in sync. Often, they are not. A terrorist organization’s leaders typically have a political agenda, which requires compromise, negotiation, a focus on long-term goals and, therefore—in an effort not to alienate national leaders or the populace of the host country—the need to keep a lid on violence, at least to some degree. This is because, as Shapiro says, “the groups that eventually win political power, or even major concessions, do so not on the strength of their violence, but on the back of large-scale political mobilization and participation in normal politics.”

By contrast, people drawn to the front lines of the same terrorist movement, to whom operational decisions may be delegated, are likely to be more extreme and to seek confrontation and heightened violence, “action in its own right,” Shapiro says. Disagreement in the ranks is common, as personal histories and captured documents amply demonstrate. Even Osama bin Laden counseled restraint among the rank-and-file.

However, controlling the troops requires a fair amount of communication, and every communication between underground organization leaders and the field entails a security risk. Thus, control is always imperfect. Similarly, it is the leaders of terrorist organizations who generally are the fundraisers and the people responsible for husbanding the organization’s resources. Closely managing who spends funds for what purposes again leads to security exposure. These two tradeoffs—operational security vs. tactical control and operational security vs. financial efficiency—play out in one underground terrorist organization after another, across time and geography.

Much has been learned about these organizations (via captured documents—and in one case reported here, which would be unbelievable if it were written into a political thriller, Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison purchased a used laptop in Kabul as a quickie replacement and discovered his new machine had been that of Al Qa’ida #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri, turned in for resale without wiping the hard drive.)

Shapiro contends that understanding why terrorist organizations make the choices they do is an essential first step in designing counter-terror policies. For any number of reasons, ISIS may be different than these past organizations and not understanding those differences also will lead to tragedy.

What ISIS Really Wants

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world on fire

(photo: pixabay)

Graeme Wood’s penetrating article, “What ISIS Really Wants” in the March 2015 Atlantic tries to answer deceptively simple, yet strategically essential questions related to the intentions of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Although the organization’s motives and aims apparently have eluded many Westerners, Wood says its propaganda machine, much of which operates online, makes those answers knowable.

According to Wood, analysis of these resources reveals that ISIS “rejects peace as a matter of principle,” hungers for genocide, is prevented by its religious views from adopting certain practices (even if they are key to its survival), and “considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.” Understanding ISIS’s beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment—its “dystopian alternate reality”—can help the West predict its actions and develop more effective countermeasures, Wood says.

Osama bin Laden operated a geographically diffuse network of relatively autonomous cells that had political aims, such as getting Westerners out of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. These cells operated more-or-less independently, in countries and territory they didn’t control, and attempting to exercise central authority over these scattered cells would have created a high security risk for al-Qaeda leaders.

In total contrast, ISIS has been able to seize and hold territory, thanks to the vacuum of authority in Syria and Iraq, and can therefore effectively implement a top-down, highly controlled structure. In fact, ISIS must continue to hang onto this territory in order to maintain the caliphate. But the key distinction between ISIS and al-Qaeda is that ISIS’s aims are religious, not political, and underpin “the group’s commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse,” Wood says.

We have diluted the meaning of this word with the snowpocalypse, the zombie apocalypse, and so on, but to ISIS, what they foresee is the original meaning: that is, the complete and final destruction of the world. With total annihilation looming, why not court death? What difference does one life–or a dozen, or a hundred–make?

Westerners have a difficult time accepting a theological basis for the mass executions, beheadings, stonings, crucifixions, and immolations taking place in the Middle East. Yet, secular societies should not dismiss ISIS followers as merely a congregation of disaffected Muslims from around the world (and some few from the United States). It is a mistake, Wood believes, to see ISIS as anything other than a religious, end-of-days group, built on a coherent (if controversial) interpretation of Islam, whose members follow the exact letter of the law, as they understand it.

Meanwhile, the politically correct “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra does not fit the brutal laws of war as laid out in the Koran, and which were developed during a violent era. Wood quotes Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel as saying that Islamic fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

Wood says that the rest of the world must recognize ISIS’s “intellectual genealogy” if it is to react in ways “that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

This summary is based primarily on the introduction to this thought-provoking essay. Here is the link to the entirety.

Get Ready for Oscar! The Documentary Shorts

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Oscar, Academy Awards

(photo by Rachel Jackson, Creative Commons license)

Two theaters in our area are showing the Oscar-nominated short films this year, and last night I watched the five documentary short nominees, ranging from 20 to 40 minutes long and in total almost three hours’ worth of powerful—and pretty depressing—filmmaking. The nominees are:

  • Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 – A timelier topic is hard to imagine. It’s the story of a crisis hotline in Canandaigua, New York, which receives some 22,000 calls a month from struggling veterans (trailer). These hotline workers are invisible front-line heroes in the battle against suicide, one that a U.S. veteran, somewhere, loses every 80 minutes. An HBO film by award-winning Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry, it is my pick for the Oscar.[YES!! The Winner]
  • Joanna – a Polish documentary (trailer) by Aneta Kopacz, nominated for innumerable awards. The film tells the story of Joanna Sałyga, who used her diagnosis of terminal cancer to inspire a blog about her daily life, to leave her son something of her after she’s gone. The blog became popular, and perhaps people familiar with it gained more from the snippets of insight in the subtitles than I did. Bottom line: well-intended, but over-long, with a muddled story arc, because it was not chronological, so the viewer cannot tell whether and how her views develop.
  • Our Curse – another Polish film, this one by film student Tomasz Śliwiński and Maciej Slesicki, about how Śliwiński and his wife came to terms with the life-threatening medical condition of their infant son, who must wear a respirator at night to be sure he continues breathing. (He has a rare, lifelong genetic disease called Ondine’s Curse.) Bottom line: At least there’s a tiny story arc, with the parents progressing from anxiety, guilt, and fear to some measure of happiness with their baby, but again, chronological presentation would make more sense to viewers.
  • The Reaper (La Parka), by Nicaraguan filmmaker Gabriel Serra Arguello (not the current horror movie directed by Wen-Han Shih), is based on interviews with Efraín Jiménez García, who has worked in a Mexico City slaughterhouse for a quarter-century. The story, in the filmmaker’s words is about “the way (García) connects with death.” And he does connect with it, killing approximately 500 bulls a day, six days a week, for 25 years. Bottom line: A good argument for vegetarianism
  • White Earth – by J. Christian Jensen (see it here) documents the conditions for workers and their families drawn to North Dakota’s oil boom, as seen through the “unexpected eyes” and differing perspectives of three children and an immigrant mother: The American Dream, c. 2014. In a word: bleak. North Dakota oil fields at night make for some eerie scenery.

Sunday morning: the dramatic shorts!

Bill Scheide’s Extraordinary Gift

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Gutenberg Bible

The 1455 Gutenberg Bible (photo: Natasha D’Schommer, courtesy of Princeton University)

When Princeton, N.J., philanthropist Bill Scheide (SHY-dee) died last year at age 100, he left his alma mater (Princeton ’36) a gift that would make any lover of books and music brim with joy. His collection of approximately 2,500 rare printed books and manuscripts, when it is appraised, is expected to be worth nearly $300 million, making it the largest gift in the University’s history.

Scheide majored in history at Princeton and earned his master’s degree in music at Columbia University in 1940. His father and grandfather had been oil company executives, but the younger Scheide’s career took a different turn. He founded the Bach Aria Group, which made its Carnegie Hall debut in 1948, and, although Scheide retired from its leadership in 1980, the group continues to perform as one of the nation’s longest active chamber ensembles and the only one devoted solely to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. In the early 1950s, Scheide provided financial support to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the pivotal case of Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the desegregation of U.S. public schools. The University awarded Scheide an honorary doctorate of humanities in 1994, acknowledging his contributions as “advocate, scholar, student, benefactor, and friend.”

In 1959, the University’s Firestone Library established the Scheide Library to safeguard this collection of priceless works, making it available to scholars by appointment. Now it owns them.In its news release about the bequest, Princeton officials included these highlights of the collection:

  • Copies of the first six printed editions of the Bible, starting with the 1455 Gutenberg Bible
  • The original printing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
  • Beethoven’s only handwritten music “sketchbook” outside Europe
  • Shakespeare’s first, second, third, and fourth Folios
  • A handwritten speech by Abraham Lincoln on the issue of slavery and
  • Music manuscripts of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner.
Quran, illuminated book

An ornate Quran, c. 1700 (photo: Natasha D’Schommer, courtesy of Princeton University)

The availability of these works, amassed by three generations of the Scheide family, will be a treasure trove for historians, bibliophiles, musicologists, and literary scholars. Librarian Karin Trainer said, “There are discoveries to be made in every document and volume in the (Scheide) library.” And, historian Anthony Grafton said, “At its core, the Scheide Library is the richest collection anywhere of the first documents printed in 15th-century Europe.”

The University has been digitizing various works in the Scheide collection, including the Gutenberg Bible, Trainer said, and they are available through the University’s digital library website.

****The White Rock

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Inca Masonry

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By Hugh Thomson – When I was in the 7th grade I came into possession, I cannot recall how, of a pamphlet about the Incas. No more than 20 pages, it was probably not scientifically accurate, especially since understandings about this civilization have evolved considerably since it was published, primed with new discoveries and interpretations, but it seized hold of my imagination, and I’ve never recovered. The Incas built on the achievements of previous groups to extend their empire throughout the high Andes, establishing looser affiliations with trading partners in the jungles and on the coast, until their offhand destruction by the Pizarro brothers in the 1500’s.

No surprise, then, I was easy prey to the charms of The White Rock: An Exploration of the Inca Heartland, which tells of TV documentarian Hugh Thomson’s several bold trips through Inca country as a young man in his twenties and, after waiting out the passing plague of the ultra-violent Shining Path movement, his renewed adventures seeking as-yet unexplored and under-explored Inca cities, including Old Vilcabamba, the last jungle redoubt of the last Sapa Inca, Tupac Amaru. Thomson weaves into his narrative the history of the Incas and the state of native Peruvians today. The book contains several maps (which could have been keyed to his journeys), a glossary, and welcome photographs.

Inca stairs, Emmanuel Dyan

(photo: Emmanuel Dyan, Creative Commons license)

The possibility of new discoveries yet to be made is part of the continuing appeal of Andean exploration. The conquistadors were so intent on acquiring gold and silver that they ignored everything else, and Peru “is one of the few places left in the world where new ruins continue to be discovered,” says Thomson.

Because the Inca had no written language, and because their arts were destroyed by the fires of smelters or simple desecration, their remaining stone buildings, having stood half a millennium or more, are a stubborn, silent testament to their achievements.

This book is a tribute to the adventurers who are looking up, up to the mountains, following the ancient Inca roads. Well beyond the Machu Picchu overrun by tourists lies a world of still-unknown cities and outposts. Overlooked in the days of human betrayal, and sometimes hidden by encroaching nature, the old Inca roads and stone stairs beckon.

The Book Behind The Imitation Game

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Benedict Cumberbatch, Enigma, The Imitation GameIn wide release this Christmas will be the new film The Imitation Game (trailer), eagerly awaited by all serious fans of cryptography, World War II history-Bletchley Park division, spy stories, the invention of computers, and Benedict Cumberbatch. (My review of the movie.)Last week the author of the book on which the movie is based, Andrew Hodges, spoke here in Princeton. Hodges’s book—“one of the finest biographies of a scientific genius ever written,” said the Los Angeles Times reviewer—is Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film “The Imitation Game” published in 1983 by Princeton University Press, which is congratulating itself heartily over its three-decades’-ago decision.

As you may recall, Alan Turing was the young British scientist (incorrect to label him a mathematical genius, because part of his brilliance was in blending fields—logic, engineering, biology, and mathematics) who led the successful efforts to break the Nazi naval codes in World War II. The machine created to do this was an early computer, and a paper Turing wrote in 1936 laid the foundation for the theory of computer science, by imagining a field that previously did not exist.

In Princeton in 1936-38, he worked on speech-scrambling technology. His interest in these diverse topics led him to an interest in ciphers and artificial intelligence, and these interests led not just to the Turing Test (“the imitation game”), but to Bletchley Park and the team of scientists there. Turing’s pivotal role in the Allied accomplishment, like most information about the unraveling of the Germans’ Enigma machine, was not revealed until the 1970s. Hodges said some of his theories about the connection between mathematics and biology were so advanced they are only now receiving attention in science.

Turing’s homosexuality caused few problems in the tolerant environment of King’s College, Oxford, but after the war, that changed. He held vast amounts of wartime secrets in his head, and it was a period of intense anti-Soviet paranoia. The authorities worried about his vulnerability. He died at age 42 of cyanide poisoning, and Hodges believes the coroner’s conclusion that his death was suicide, although the pressure that may have been brought to bear on him is unknown. He left just enough mystery about his death that his mother could console herself it was one of his science experiments gone wrong and conspiracy speculators could ever since consider it part of the enigma.

***Blood, Bones & Butter

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Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood Bones & Butter

(photo: author)

By Gabrielle Hamilton – An engaging memoir that chronicles the author’s intense relationship with food, from her upbringing with a French mother and artist/set designer father, her falsifying her age to work in New Jersey kitchens starting at age 14, her drug-riddled stints as a bar waitress and catering kitchen dynamo, to the opening of her own restaurant in the East Village. That restaurant became the mini-phenomenon known as Prune, helped bring home-style cooking into vogue. In 2011, Hamilton received the James Beard award as New York City’s best chef.

The book describes Hamilton’s difficult relations with her mother and husband, but it’s never clear what the source of these difficulties is, why the relationships deteriorated as they did, or, rather, why she let them drift. Her essential alone-ness appears to be the strongest strain in her character.

I enjoyed this book’s lack of typical foodie descriptions, though it is over-the-top in its own way, determined not to, ahem, sugar-coat kitchen proceedings. She’s a compelling writer, with an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and winner of the James Beard book award for writing and literature in 2012. Power on the page gets you past some of the unsavory spots, and it was well received. Legendary chef Anthony Bourdain calls the book “simply the best memoir by a chef ever.”

Related articles

“Where the West Begins”

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Fort Worth, Chisholm Trail

(photo: author)

Just back from a week in Fort Worth, Texas. Enough fun to make any Easterner sit high in the saddle and holler “Yee-haw!” When friends heard where I was spending Thanksgiving, the universal response was either “Where?” or “Why?” Now I’m here to tell you. It’s a vacation you might enjoy, too. Fort Worth has its own running “w” brand, but it could just as easily be the 5-C’s: cowboys, chow, culture, characters, and community.

Just to remind you, in 1849, Fort Worth was established as an actual fort, one of a string of outposts at the very edge of the Wild West, meant to protect settlers after the Mexican-American War. Soon “civilization,” such as it was, moved westward, and the fort was abandoned (now the site is occupied by the Beaux Arts Tarrant County Courthouse). A town grew up around the place on the Trinity River that was so well suited to watering and grazing livestock for a few days before the long trek north to market along the Chisholm Trail, and while the cows rested up, the cowboys made the best use of the neighborhood called “Hell’s Half Acre.”

Cowboys

Unique to Fort Worth is the stockyards area, much of which has been preserved as a tourist attraction, where once literally millions of beeves, sheep, and pigs were housed, awaiting their trips that end at our dinner tables. At first, cowboys drove the longhorn cattle north to slaughter, to feed Easterners’ desire for beef after the Civil War. Then the railroads came and made transportation faster. Then the big meat processors—Swift and Armour—decided to build factories right there and save the animals the trip.

cowboy boots

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Several museums and walking tours describe the cowboy way of life, including a fine exhibit of beautifully maintained wagons. Shops of cowboy and cowgal gear, too, including drool-worthy boots.

In keeping with the cowboy theme, we attended an initial National Cutting Horse Association World Championship Futurity round at the Will Rogers Coliseum. Despite having no idea how such an event is scored, we spent a morning spellbound, seeing these talented horses and their riders separate a cow from the herd and keep it from doing what it most wants to do—rejoin its companions. Lightning reflexes, flawless technique, intensive training, and inbred determination.

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame

National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame (photo: author)

Must mention the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, about the women who’ve participated in rodeo events, trick riding, barrel-racing, sharp-shooting (Annie Oakley!), as well as the Romance of the West (Dale Evans!!). (The horse-head detail is from a column in this museum.) Beautifully put together exhibits in an Art Deco building in the Cultural District.

Chow

With all this stockyards-walking, museum-going, and cow-watching, a gal’s gotta eat. What can you get, besides Tex-Mex? Steak. Big and delicious. Hickory Bar-B-Que in Bonham, Texas (why Bonham? Answer next week). Chicken-fried steak, a personal favorite, at Cowtown Diner, where the wry humor of our server-manager-barman provided unexpected entertainment. Saint-Emilion—Le restaurant Français de Fort Worth. Great wines, excellent food! Not a bad meal on the whole trip.

It’s always great to leave a place feeling there’s more to see and do, and that’s how we left Fort Worth! Culture, Characters, and Community next week!

Elena Kagan

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Elena Kagan

Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan with President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden (photo: wikimedia.org)

Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan, a graduate of Princeton University’s Class of ʼ81, spoke informally yesterday with University President Christopher L. Eisgruber. Unlike the other Ivy schools, Princeton doesn’t have a school of law (or medicine), and Kagan obtained her legal training at Harvard Law, where she was later the school’s first female dean. Nevertheless, she told the crowd filling Richardson Auditorium that “whatever I learned about writing, I learned here.”

Eisgruber, also a lawyer (University of Chicago), asked Kagan about rumors she goes hunting with Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. It dates back, she says, to her pre-confirmation interviews with Senators in 2010. Since they couldn’t ask her directly what she believes about specific cases and laws, they resorted to indirect stratagems to feel her out. A western Senator asked, “Do you hunt?” She explained she was from New York City. “Do you know anyone who does hunt?” Not that, either. But she promised that, if confirmed, she’d have “Nino” take her. In 82 interviews, “It was the only promise I made,” she said.

In her judicial decision-making, she said she often returns to the intent of the framers, but that can lead to untenable results in the modern world. She also looks at judicial history over time, “thinking hard” about the precedents for a case. The part of the work she enjoys most is when there is an opportunity for influencing opinion, and the Justices are arrayed around their conference table, trying to sway one another by making strong arguments.

As to the 5-4 split decisions for which the current Court is known, she said 60% of the Court’s decisions are unanimous. Most of the disagreements have to do with how people read some of the law’s and Constitution’s most abstract provisions, and they come about, not because the Court has blind spots in certain areas—gender politics being suggested as one possibility by an audience questioner—but because there are strong arguments on both sides of a question that represent a real clash of values.

Eisgruber asked how she likes being an Associate Justice, and she said “Great gig!”

Why I Don’t Eat Octopus

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octopus

(photo: wikimedia/commons)

Several compelling articles about the octopus have emerged lately from the laboratories of marine biology (like this one in Wired 10/2013, by author Katherine Harmon Courage who’s written a whole book on the topic). They’ve dangled fascinating information in front of my nose. Like: researchers cannot set anything down—coffee cup, clipboard, whatever—near their octopus tanks unless they want to find them in the tank. Like: the octopus does not have a central brain, as vertebrates do; its intelligence—supposedly on a par with that of dogs—is distributed throughout its body and works quite differently than ours. Like: the eight arms of an octopus can mimic the texture and color of whatever surface the animal is resting on, and they can do so separately—two gravelly-looking arms and six sandy-looking ones, for example. Amazing.

Last week I snatched up Octopus, by Richard Schweid, one of a series of natural history books published by Reaktion Books, Ltd., now atop my 2015 to-read pile. The book is rich with photos and illustrations from world art, and its first line is a grabber: “When you watch an octopus, an octopus watches you back.”

A question to Mr. Know-It-All in this month’s Wired is, “I’m an omnivore, but are there animals that are just too intelligent to eat?” Christopher Niemann’s response concludes “all animals are likely too intelligent to eat.” But he concedes readers will probably continue to eat them anyway. He says, “I do—proof that intelligence may be massively overrated.” Or empathy. But I don’t eat octopus not because they are too intelligent, but because they’re too interesting.

For more Octopus-amazement, see my review of The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.