SACW - 8 May 2015 | Nepal: Earthquake lessons; Charity, geopolitics / Maldives: Repression / Pakistan: The right to speak / Sri Lanka: reparations policy ? / India: RSS Takeover of History bodies / Post-ISAF Afghanistan / From hip-hop to jihad / Ukraine's European Talk / Viv Will Take Over the World

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 8 May 2015 - No. 2856 
[since 1996]

Contents:
1. Post war Sri Lanka: The Missing Justice and Raparations Policy - A CPA paper
2. Pakistan: Protest curbs on academic freedom, freedom of expression and public debate
3. Pakistan: The right to speak | S Akbar Zaidi
4. CHRI concerned over allegations of police violence & arbitrary action in Male, Maldives on 2015 May Day protests
5. Lessons From The Nepal Earthquake: Prepare and survive | Praful Bidwai
6. India: Historical research a battlefield for BJP and RSS - reports and commentary
7. India: Video of Prof Haragopal speaking on Saffronisation (Communalisation) of Education and History
8. India: Ban triple talaq and abolish Muslim Personal Law Board, says former minorities commission chair Prof Tahir Mahmood (Ajaz Ashraf)
9. India: Arrest of Adivasis and threats to rights' activists and lawyers in Chattisgarh - Statement by PUDR
10. India: PUCL Letter to President of India Requesting Him Not to Appoint a Governor as Chairperson of NHRC
11. India: Beginning once again -The CPI(M) has a new struggle ahead | Gopalkrishna Gandhi
12. Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - Bangladesh probes group suspected in blogger’s death for ties to al-Qaeda
 - India: Map of regulation on beef consumption across states
 - India: Why the RSS believes that sage Narada was the world's first reporter
 - 2002 Hit and run case: Salman Khan - In films and real life (Basharat Peer)
 - 9th may 2015 - 70th anniversary victory over fascism meeting (4:00 p.m. in Aiwane Ghalib Hall, New Delhi)
 - India: The Krishna circuit, envisaged by the RSS and now with big funding from the taxpayers money
 - A Matter Of Orientation - The Sangh parivar is not convinced that Smriti knows their education roadmap well (Prarthna Gahilote)
 - India - Karnataka: We’ll continue to speak of saffronisation and achieve it as well, says Governor
 - Announcement: Contemporary Challenges to Freedom of Religion in India - Lecture by Faizan Mustafa (14 May 2015, Bombay)
 - India: What is a prominent gandhian leader doing at the RSS linked Swadeshi Jagana Manch public meeting at Delhi's Jantar Mantar ?
 - India: The politics behind the banning of beef in Maharashtra - interview with Salil Misra (newsclick.in)
 - Pakistan Supreme court debates over how can be declared a secular state
 - USA: New York: “Eighth Annual Hindu Baccalaureate Service of UNR (Dikshant Utsav)” Hindutva @ work
 - India: Supreme Court's Tryst with Secularism and Hindutva (Namit Saxena)
 - India - UP: Violence in Shamli (selected news reports 2-4 may 2015 )
 - India: Cartoon by Sandeep Adhwaryu on... The Moga tragedy & Daily Patriarchy
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
13. TV discussion: Charity and geopolitics in Nepal quake relief
14. Post-ISAF Afghanistan: The Early Months | Sultan Barakat and Brooke Smith-Windsor
15. Pakistan:  Windfall weapons - Editorial, Daily Times
16. [Book announcement] Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India by Deepti Misri
17. Monumental Confusion: To Protect, Or Not To Protect, Jama Masjid Like Taj Mahal | Editorial The Times Of India
18. From hip-hop to jihad, how the Islamic State became a magnet for converts | Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet
19. A General Feeling of Disorder | Oliver Sacks
20. How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Aided the CIA’s Torture Program | Lisa Hajjar
21. “Ukraine’s European discourse does not correspond to reality”: Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko
22. Viv Will Replace Your Smartphone With Your Fridge and Then Take Over the World | John H. Richardson

========================================
1. POST WAR SRI LANKA: THE MISSING JUSTICE AND RAPARATIONS POLICY - A CPA paper
========================================
For any post war society grappling with the consequences of past violence and engaged in exploring modalities for transitional justice, reparations is an important tool. Reparations, if designed and implemented in an inclusive manner that factors in the grievances of the victims and affected communities, can be an effective tool in acknowledging and addressing the injustices of the past.
http://www.sacw.net/article11163.html

========================================
2. PAKISTAN: PROTEST CURBS ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM, FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND PUBLIC DEBATE
========================================
STATEMENT OF CONCERNED FACULTY MEMBERS AND STUDENTS OF LUMS REGARDING THE DECISION TO CANCEL THE TALK ON BALOCHISTAN IN KARACHI UNIVERSITY SCHEDULED TO BE HELD WEDNESDAY 6 MAY, 2015:
We, concerned students, alumni and faculty members of LUMS, deeply deplore the decision by the Karachi University administration to cancel the talk on Balochistan titled “Baloch Missing Persons and The Role of State and Society”, planned tomorrow Wednesday 6 May 2015 at Karachi University. This decision comes on (...) 
http://www.sacw.net/article11158.html

========================================
3. PAKISTAN: THE RIGHT TO SPEAK | S Akbar Zaidi
========================================
It is not uncommon for universities to disallow talks on so-called ‘sensitive’ issues as the Karachi University did with the Baloch Missing Persons and the Role of State and Society, yet as academics and intellectuals, it becomes our duty to stand up and protest such decisions and actions of the state or whoever wields some authority in its name.
http://www.sacw.net/article11164.html

=========================================
4. CHRI CONCERNED OVER ALLEGATIONS OF POLICE VIOLENCE & ARBITRARY ACTION IN MALE, MALDIVES ON 2015 MAY DAY PROTESTS
=========================================
New Delhi: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative expresses concern over the allegations of police violence, brutality and arbitrary action during and after the May Day protests held on 1st and 2nd May 2015.
http://www.sacw.net/article11162.html

=========================================
5. LESSONS FROM THE NEPAL EARTHQUAKE: PREPARE AND SURVIVE
by Praful Bidwai
=========================================
The disaster is a grim reminder of how vulnerable large parts of South Asia are to natural calamities like earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, flash floods and landslides. It also shows how unprepared the region’s societies are to cope with these, and how governments routinely fail to mitigate their effects on the plea that some of these events cannot be predicted.
http://sacw.net/article11165.html

=========================================
6. INDIA: HISTORICAL RESEARCH A BATTLEFIELD FOR BJP AND RSS - REPORTS AND COMMENTARY
=========================================
History is obviously of considerable importance to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Otherwise it would not, every time it is in power, turn the Indian Council for Historical Research into a battlefield.
http://www.sacw.net/article11159.html

=========================================
7. INDIA: VIDEO OF PROF HARAGOPAL SPEAKING ON SAFFRONISATION (COMMUNALISATION) OF EDUCATION AND HISTORY
=========================================
Prof. Hargaopal from CLC Hyderabad and Political Scientist, speaks on "Saffronisation of Education and History in India ', at the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR) public meeting on Acche Din? One Year After" on Saturday 2th May 2015 at Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh, Mumbai.
http://www.sacw.net/article11157.html

=========================================
8. INDIA:  BAN TRIPLE TALAQ AND ABOLISH MUSLIM PERSONAL LAW BOARD, SAYS FORMER MINORITIES COMMISSION CHAIRMAN PROF TAHIR MAHMOOD (Ajaz Ashraf)
=========================================
(via Dilip Simeon's Blog)
Former Dean of Delhi University's Law Faculty and former Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities Prof Tahir Mahmood is an internationally recognised expert on Muslim Law. He speaks on the system of divorce among Muslims and how maulvis and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board have thwarted reforms that could have benefited the community. Excerpts from an interview:
(...) 
http://www.sacw.net/article11155.html

=========================================
9. INDIA: ARREST OF ADIVASIS AND THREATS TO RIGHTS' ACTIVISTS AND LAWYERS IN CHATTISGARH - STATEMENT BY PUDR
=========================================
PUDR strongly condemns IG Bastar, SRP Kalluri's threat of taking severe action against certain NGOs in Chhattisgarh for allegedly aiding and abetting the Maoists under the guise of helping Adivasis. At a recent Press Conference he said that many such organisations were already under surveillance. The IG‘s list of suspicious activities included providing legal assistance to ‘Naxalites' – a thinly veiled reference to the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group (JagLAG), a small NGO active in Bastar since 2013, that provides legal aid to Adivasis many of whom are falsely implicated in cases of Naxal activities.
http://www.sacw.net/article11156.html

=========================================
10. INDIA: PUCL LETTER TO PRESIDENT OF INDIA REQUESTING HIM NOT TO APPOINT A GOVERNOR AS CHAIRPERSON OF NHRC
=========================================
how will ordinary citizens have confidence in the impartiality, fairness, objectivity and independence of a person who owes his current position as Governor of a state to the pleasure of the ruling Central Government?
http://www.sacw.net/article11154.html

=========================================
11. INDIA: BEGINNING ONCE AGAIN -THE CPI(M) HAS A NEW STRUGGLE AHEAD | Gopalkrishna Gandhi
=========================================
In times when political parties are led by supremos for seemingly endless durations, what a welcome contrast the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has provided us!...
http://www.sacw.net/article11152.html

=========================================
12. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
=========================================
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/

 - Bangladesh probes group suspected in blogger’s death for ties to al-Qaeda
 - India: Map of regulation on beef consumption across states
 - India: Why the RSS believes that sage Narada was the world's first reporter
 - 2002 Hit and run case: Salman Khan - In films and real life (Basharat Peer)
 - 9th may 2015 - 70th anniversary victory over fascism meeting (4:00 p.m. in Aiwane Ghalib Hall, New Delhi)
 - India: The Krishna circuit, envisaged by the RSS and now with big funding from the taxpayers money
 - A Matter Of Orientation - The Sangh parivar is not convinced that Smriti knows their education roadmap well (Prarthna Gahilote)
 - India - Karnataka: We’ll continue to speak of saffronisation and achieve it as well, says Governor
 - Announcement: Contemporary Challenges to Freedom of Religion in India - Lecture by Faizan Mustafa (14 May 2015, Bombay)
 - India: What is a prominent gandhian leader doing at the RSS linked Swadeshi Jagana Manch public meeting at Delhi's Jantar Mantar ?
 - India: The politics behind the banning of beef in Maharashtra - interview with Salil Misra (newsclick.in)
 - Pakistan Supreme court debates over how can be declared a secular state
 - USA: New York: “Eighth Annual Hindu Baccalaureate Service of UNR (Dikshant Utsav)” Hindutva @ work
 - India: Supreme Court's Tryst with Secularism and Hindutva (Namit Saxena)
 - India - UP: Violence in Shamli (selected news reports 2-4 may 2015 )
 - ndia: Cartoon by Sandeep Adhwaryu on... The Moga tragedy & Daily Patriarchy
 - India: Hindutva's student outfit ABVP threatens two Christian schools, forces one to close in Hazaribagh
 - Update on Citizens for Democracy police complaint against hate incitement by Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha
 - India: Judicial decisions on the Ayodhya dispute in the last decade jettisoned the rule of law and canons of justice
 - India: Woman journalist asked to move from front row, take distance from Jain priests on stage
 - Nepal 2015 Earthquake: RSS relief work facing some problems
 - India - Haryana: After RSS men attacked us, police forced us to forego legal action, say Sonepat Dalits (Dhirendra K Jha)

and More ...
available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
 
::: RESOURCEs & FULL TEXT :::
=========================================
13. TV DISCUSSION: CHARITY AND GEOPOLITICS IN NEPAL QUAKE RELIEF
=========================================
This episode of India's World on Charity and geopolitics, recorded last weekend , may still be of some interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBbpb289hNQ

=========================================
14. POST-ISAF AFGHANISTAN: THE EARLY MONTHS
by Sultan Barakat and Brooke Smith-Windsor
=========================================
Brookings Report | May 6, 2015
Following more than a dozen years of international military presence in Afghanistan, the country faces a key security transition after NATO combat forces transferred all security responsibilities to the Afghan National Security Forces at the close of 2014. The Afghan people also witnessed a political milestone last year—the first peaceful transfer of power from one elected president to another. Today, there are numerous challenges facing the resulting national unity government as the country undergoes near-simultaneous security, political, and economic transitions.

What will happen in this post-transition period? Will Afghanistan’s security hold? What can Afghanistan expect from NATO going forward? Can the economy develop despite a likely decline in foreign aid? What role might Pakistan and other neighbors play in shoring up Afghanistan’s economy and reinforcing its national security?

This policy dialogue addresses these and other questions. It presents a summary of the key findings of a workshop that the Brookings Doha Center and NATO Defense College hosted in Doha in February 2015. The workshop brought together senior officials from the Afghan government and NATO, independent experts, representatives of Afghan civil society, members of the media, and others to discuss and debate Afghanistan’s prospects in the post-ISAF era.
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2015/05/bdc-afghanistan-nato-report/bdc-nato-event-report.pdf

=========================================
15. PAKISTAN:  WINDFALL WEAPONS - EDITORIAL, DAILY TIMES
=========================================
(The Daily Times, May 08, 2015)

As the US armed forces depart Afghanistan and the war winds down, the Pentagon faces the issue of disposing of its considerable stock of weapons used in the 14-year war. Due to the prohibitive cost of transporting this weaponry back to the US, where it would most likely be scrapped, the US government has decided to transfer these weapons to countries in the region. Pakistan has been lobbying to receive the leftover US arms from Afghanistan and Iraq for some time, a request that the US had so far been hesitant to fulfil. Both before and after Osama bin Laden was caught and killed by a team of US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad in 2011, just half a mile away from Pakistan’s premier military training academy, the US government had been suspicious of Pakistan for harbouring the Taliban and al Qaeda. Militants from Afghanistan did indeed find safe havens in the bordering areas of Pakistan, but the US government suspected Pakistan of providing a ‘support network’ to the leaders of these terrorist organisations, as President Obama said after bin Laden’s death. Now that the Pakistan government and army have shown that they are firm in their resolve to eradicate terrorism from the country without discrimination or the blind alley binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban, the US seems to be starting to see Pakistan once again as an ally in the fight against terrorism. It is due to this new found confidence and trust that the US has agreed to transfer used combat aircraft, jets, armoured personnel carriers and other weapons and maintenance equipment from Afghanistan to Pakistan worth billions of dollars. This transfer of weapons comes on the heels of another nearly $ 1 billion arms deal between Pakistan and the US to aid the military operations against terrorists in North Waziristan and other areas. The latter arms deal was also delayed because India is always wary that Pakistan might use any newly acquired weapons against its neighbour, with whom it shares a long history of conflict and mistrust. Deputy Spokesperson for the US State Department, Marie Harf, stated in no uncertain terms that the weapons the US agreed to sell to Pakistan last month “are for internal counter-terrorism uses inside Pakistan so to be very clear about that, going after terrorists inside their own country”. Harf also expressed confidence that the weapons will not be used for military purposes other than those for which they would be provided.

Although it is fortuitous that the end to the war on terror has given Pakistan the opportunity to receive cheap weapons for its own protracted war against terrorist groups, such arms deals will undoubtedly deal a further blow to its already struggling economy. Questions still remain as to where the money for this military investment will come from or whether the military budget will cover this spending. Pakistan’s governments have always spent inordinate chunks of the federal budget on the military at the expense of all other institutions. As the government doles out billions of dollars on military equipment, essential sectors like those of health and education are still inadequate and underfunded. In the next financial year, Pakistan hopes to receive $ 9.5 billion from foreign lenders to prevent defaulting on the repayment of previous loans, as the tax system is inefficient and foreign investment hard to come by. Even if Pakistan’s economy does recover, it will be a long and arduous process to dig ourselves out of the enormous foreign debts we are accumulating. The military’s commitment to fighting the festering wound of terrorism and militancy is certainly a source of relief to the Pakistani people and other stakeholders but the government should exercise caution in spending money on the military that it does not have.*

=========================================
16.[ Book announcement] BEYOND PARTITION: GENDER, VIOLENCE, AND REPRESENTATION IN POSTCOLONIAL INDIA by Deepti Misri
=========================================
Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism and State violence have marred the Indian nation-state since its inception. These phenomena frequently intersect with prevailing forms of gendered violence, complicated by caste, religion, regional identity and class within communities.

Deepti Misri shows how Partition began a history of politicised animosity associated with the differing ideas of “India” held by communities and in regions on the one hand, and by the political-military Indian State on the other. She moves beyond that formative national event, however, in order to examine other forms of gendered violence in the postcolonial life of the nation, including custodial rape, public stripping, de-turbanning and enforced disappearances.

Assembling literary, historiographic, performative and visual representations of gendered violence against women and men, Misri establishes that cultural expressions do not just follow violence, they determine its very contours, and interrogates the gendered scripts underwriting the violence originating in the contested visions of what “India” means.

Deepti Misri is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Demy 8 vo    ISBN: 978-81-88965-93-9      Rs. 475.00    Pp. xii + 201

Women Unlimited
(an associate of Kali for Women)
7/10, FF, Sarvapriya Vihar
New Delhi - 110016
Tel: 011-26866596/ 26524129
Email: womenunltd at gmail.com
Website: www.womenunlimited.net

=========================================
17. MONUMENTAL CONFUSION: TO PROTECT, OR NOT TO PROTECT, JAMA MASJID LIKE TAJ MAHAL | EDITORIAL THE TIMES OF INDIA
=========================================
(The Times of India, May 2, 2015, Editorial)

It’s a longstanding mystery why the capital’s Jama Masjid remains an un-protected monument. Different benches of the Delhi high court headed by different chief justices have tried to solve this riddle for more than a decade. They searched high and low and finally got their hands on a letter in which then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured “Dear Syed Ahmed Bukhari Sahib” that the Centre would desist from protecting Jama Masjid – in other words, said protection would continue to be said Sahib’s preserve.

Before crying minority appeasement, remember that efforts to bless the Tirupati temple with a heritage tag also got buried. The tag of heritage is unwelcome, perhaps understandably so as long as the tide of offerings flows abundantly. But what’s to be gained, exactly, by becoming a protected monument anyway?

Rabindranath Tagore wrote romantically, “The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time.” But decades of GoI protection later, that tear has lost its solitude, the river resembles a drain. Romance is a struggle when you wade to it through piles of plastic, splashes of paan and the honking of traffic jams.

Still, there’s much Taj Mahal has to be thankful for. Many monuments under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India have actually disappeared! Culprits range from modern records to modern construction. And if unchecked pollution’s turning it yellow, not to worry, ASI has a secret weapon that it’s been testing out at the Mehrauli park: Whitewash. Global conservationists may turn up their noses, but that’s proper desi jugaad.

As for those disappearing monuments, new age ASI likes to work with RWAs so that neighbourhoods see monuments as part of their property. But they should be a bit careful about encouraging people’s sense of ownership, given that encroachments are already rampant. Uncleji finds his growing family crying for more space, just drags down the wall of a neighbourhood monument and parks his drawing room there.

The republic’s egalitarian spirit means that ancient tombs, Himalayan pine forests and the beautiful turquoise sea of the Andamans can get treated exactly the same – as spittoon, dustbin, public lavatory. The erudite like to sex this up with the broken windows theory, about a building with some broken windows, which are not repaired, then vandals break the rest too, and the next thing you know the whole neighbourhood has gone to hell.

Does this mean we can put the whole blame on the first person who broke the first window? Finding out who that was can be tough. But we do know who set off the romantic bomb that’s been exploding graffiti non-stop: Shah Jahan. Ever since his great ode to love in Agra, lovers feel pressed to set their sentiment in stone too. So next time you go ballistic at the etching – Pappu (heart with arrow) Manju – you know who to blame.
This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India. 

=========================================
18. FROM HIP-HOP TO JIHAD, HOW THE ISLAMIC STATE BECAME A MAGNET FOR CONVERTS
by Anthony Faiola and Souad Mekhennet
=========================================
(The Washington Post -  May 6 , 2015)
CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’|This is part of an occasional series about the rise of the Islamic State militant group, its implications for the Middle East, and efforts by the U.S. government and others to undermine it.

A photo from June 20, 2005, shows former rapper Denis Cuspert, known as Deso Dogg, posing in Berlin. Last month, a video released by Islamic State graphically depicts its ruthless deeds as Cuspert, a convert, delivers a rap-like chant about Islamic jihad. (Deutsche Presse-Agentur via Associated Press)

THE HAGUE — She was a redheaded rebel, the singer in the family, a trash-talking, tattooed 21-year-old wrapped up in a hip-hop dream of becoming Holland’s Eminem. Then Betsy found Allah.

After her sudden conversion to Islam last summer, Betsy — a name given by her family to protect her identity — began dressing in full Muslim robes. By January, the once-agnostic Dutch woman, raised in a home where the only sign of religion was a dusty Bible on a shelf, began defending homegrown terrorists. A feud with her father over her apparent radicalization prompted her to leave home — turning up days later, her parents and Dutch authorities now say, in Syria, where she would become the bride of an Islamic State fighter.

She also became part of a growing crisis in Europe, where a surging number of young people from non-Muslim homes are flocking to the Middle East to heed the call of violent jihad. It is happening, terror experts say, as converts emerge as some of the most dangerous and fanatical adherents to radical Islam — a fact driven home this week by Elton Simpson, a 30-year-old American convert who joined one other man in opening fire on a Garland, Tex., contest for cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

“I don’t blame Islam,” said Betsy’s mother, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her daughter. “I blame the people who made her believe in a radical way of life.”

As the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts have grown, concern in the West has largely centered on Europe’s entrenched Muslim communities — communities that have spawned more than 4,000 mostly young and socially isolated Muslims who have left to join Islamist militants fighting in Syria and Iraq. Once there, the new arrivals can transform into what intelligence officials call the most dangerous kind of radical: one with a Western passport.

Yet the Islamic State’s allure is hardly confined to traditional Muslim homes. In fact, as many as 1 in 6 Europeans joining the self-styled caliphate are converts to Islam from non-Muslim faiths including Christianity, as well as nonreligious backgrounds. In some countries, such as France, the ratio of converts among those leaving is significantly higher: about 1 in 4, according to European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.

The swell of converts happens as the Islamic State appears to be actively wooing them, using savvy social media outreach and recruitment drives. A number of female converts who have joined the Islamic State, for instance, have turned to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to encourage others to join. Increasingly, converts are being deployed in Islamic State propaganda aimed at the West, including videos for recruitment as well as for stirring fear.

In one video, for instance, Swedish convert Michael Nikolai Skramo — who grew up near Gothenburg and who European security officials believe moved with his wife and two children to Raqqa, Syria, in September — is shown calling, in Arabic and Swedish, for more Western fighters to join the Islamic State. “The door to jihad is standing there waiting for you,” he says. “It is the fastest way to paradise.”
Islamic State propaganda targets Westerners(1:21)
The Islamic State appears to be using social media to recruit new members. This footage from propaganda videos shows English speakers appealing to others to join them. (Storyful)

In another Islamic State video released last year, several fighters — including “Jihadi John,” identified by The Washington Post as Mohammed Emwazi — were shown cutting the throats of captured Syrian pilots. At least one of the killers has been identified as Maxime Hauchard, a French convert to Islam from Normandy. And last month, a high-quality video released by the group graphically depicts its ruthless deeds as Denis Cuspert, a German hip-hop artist known as Deso Dogg who converted in 2010 and later joined the Islamic State, delivers a rap-like chant portraying the path to jihad as a chance for empowerment, spiritual fulfillment, vengeance and adventure.

Simpson — who, along with 34-year-old Nadir Soofi, was killed after opening fire on a security guard at the Texas event — was an Illinois-born homegrown radical who converted at a young age. His attorney described him as extremely devout, and U.S. officials think he and Soofi may have been inspired by the Islamic State.

Simpson was suspected previously by authorities of attempting to fly overseas to wage violent jihad, telling an FBI informant in May 2009, “It’s time to go to Somalia, brother,” later adding, “We gonna make it to the battlefield. . . . It’s time to roll,” according to court records.

Converts “are the most vulnerable because they do not yet fully understand Islam,” said Jamal Ahjjaj, an imam at As-Soennah Mosque in The Hague, where Betsy’s parents say she occasionally worshiped. “When we have religious classes for converts, sometimes there are people — the wrong people — waiting outside the mosque to greet them.”
Who are the converts?

In the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, cases of converted extremists have cropped up on both sides of the Atlantic and include the likes of Adam Gadahn, an American who rose through the ranks of al-Qaeda, and John Walker Lindh, another American who fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yet the number of converts streaming to aid the Islamic State, experts say, is far greater than in any other modern conflict in the Islamic world.

[Map: How the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq and Syria has surged]

For Europe, in particular, the broad appeal of the Islamic State is rapidly morphing the group’s message of violence into a dangerous social problem at home, increasing the risk of homegrown terror and the chance that lost youths become indoctrinated into a perilous, cultlike lifestyle.

The profiles of converts joining the Islamic State often mirror that of Betsy. The child of divorced parents, she dropped out of school by age 14, was busted for shoplifting by 16 and was struggling with a drug problem at one point.

Here in the Netherlands, more than a dozen of those who have left for the Islamic State came, like Betsy, from the single largest pool of converts: young women. For instance, at As-Soennah Mosque, the heated national debate in the Netherlands over ­Islamist extremism has fueled a mini-boom in converts. Last year had the highest number, 97, since the mosque opened in 1993. Most were ages 19 to 21, and more than 70 percent were women. Many of them, mosque officials said, were dealing with problems at home.

Latifa, a converted British Sunni Muslim, wears a fundamental and traditional style to cover her face in a presentation for western tourists during a part of the “Open Doors. Open Minds” program in Dubai. (Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press)

“You find that a lot of the converts going to the Islamic State are girls, girls with problems, girls who have been prostitutes, girls with psychological and behavioral issues, sometimes borderline personalities,” said Marion van San, a senior researcher on foreign fighters at an institute affiliated with Erasmus University in Rotterdam. “Then someone comes along and promises that Allah is going to give them a second chance.”

Converts, experts say, also make easier targets. At least some tend to be lost souls searching for answers. For a minority of them, the radical ideology of the Islamic State is providing a heady sense of belonging, structure and a clear set of rules.
‘This is the way, brother’

A 30-year-old former convert to Islam who asked that his name be withheld because he has received death threats for leaving the faith and is still on parole after serving a prison sentence in the Netherlands on terrorism charges cited his own spiritual and political journey as an example. His first contact with Islam came after his parents divorced when he was a teenager and he began socializing with devout Muslim friends in the immigrant neighborhood where his alcoholic father had relocated.

“I noticed they had all the answers,” he said. “They offered me what I was looking for.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said, he followed a more radical path. He began surfing the Internet for information on the Taliban and found its absolutist worldview to be intoxicating. He began skipping school to read the Koran, spending more time studying the lives of “martyrs,” whose deaths in violent jihad had, he believed, paved their way to paradise. He left his moderate mosque for a more conservative one and quickly met a Dutch
Moroccan extremist in the Netherlands who would further radicalize him.
Scores of hostages, including Westerners, have been killed by the Islamic State since 2014. Here are some of the major incidents where the Islamic State killed the hostages. View Graphic

Soon he was on a plane to Pakistan to train in a terrorist camp. After his arrest and deportation to the Netherlands, he connected again with a group of homegrown radicals whom he had known before, some of whom were advocating domestic terrorist attacks akin to the 2004 killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Not knowing that his home was under police surveillance, the convert agreed to store a cache of hand grenades in an apartment. When the hideout was stormed, he threw a grenade at police. “I wanted to die in bullets and go to paradise,” he said.

But he was apprehended alive. And during 8 1/2 years in prison, he began clearing his head of radical notions by, “of all things,” reading the works of Plato and by putting his faith in science and philosophy instead of religion. He emerged, he said, as if from a dream, shedding the hold that Islamist thought had over him.

Although he abandoned his adopted faith, his radicalization left a painful legacy in the form of his younger bother. The 30-year-old had helped to convert him years earlier, and, as the older brother sat in jail, the younger one maintained his associations with radicals, growing increasingly extreme. Three months ago, the 30-year-old said, his brother left the Netherlands for Syria to join the Islamic State.

[The Islamic State was dumped by al-Qaeda a year ago. Now look at it.]

“Dutch parents tend to be very liberal. They aren’t giving clear answers to what’s right and wrong, so some of us go looking for answers elsewhere,” the older brother said. “You don’t understand what it’s like when you meet someone who can set aside all your doubts and has convincing arguments and tells you, ‘This is the way, brother, and all you have to do is follow it.’ ”

Such transformations, like Betsy’s, can occur before parents understand what is happening.
‘Looking for something’

In the fall of 2013, a slightly awkward redhead with thick Poindexter glasses took the stage at “The Next MC” — a contest show like “American Idol” for aspiring hip-hop artists in the Netherlands. A YouTube video shows Betsy, with her long locks in cornrows and sporting a navy blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “b----,” rapping in Dutch to an insouciant crowd.

“You try to be tough, but you aren’t,” one of the judges tells her. “You are really a sweet girl.”

That was the Betsy her parents knew.

They divorced when she was still a child, so Betsy grew up between homes, initially living with her mother. After her mother suffered a serious illness, Betsy moved in with her father. By then, she was a teenager hanging with a tough crowd, experimenting with drugs and running afoul of the law. She got a tattoo on her middle finger — “C’est la vie” — to accentuate her point when flipping the bird.

Still, her father, Pete, 53, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, said, “She had a softness about her.” And he sensed a change for the better brewing in 2013. She had sought out the old Bible he kept on a shelf. “She was looking for something, I don’t know what, but some kind of peace,” he said.

The precise timing of her leap from aspiring rapper to Islamic State bride is somewhat unclear. But in 2013, she started a relationship with a young Dutch Turkish man who, according to people familiar with the situation, had left for Syria in 2014 to join the Islamic State. That same year, a close friend of Betsy’s who had converted to Islam, began introducing her to the faith, Betsy’s parents said.

Betsy, said her mother, contacted another Dutch convert in 2014 who had left for Syria that year with a former boyfriend, whom she married. Betsy also began to attend special events with a small Muslim prayer group that was not sanctioned by the local mosque and that her parents think included radical voices that wooed their daughter into extremism.

In a religious ceremony late last year, she married a Syrian man but left him only days later, claiming he was “too soft” a Muslim.

Yet the timing of her departure, Betsy’s family thinks, appeared spontaneous — a choice born of anger following the blowup at home after she defended the Islamist shooters who went on a rampage in Paris. After the family had heard nothing from her for days, Betsy finally sent a text to her father.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Where do you think,” she replied, “in Syria.”

“No!!!” he texted back.

“Don’t pretend that you care,” she answered.

Her parents later found evidence on a computer that she had cashed in her savings and booked travel to Turkey. An arranged contact met her in Istanbul and took her by bus to the Syrian border, which she eventually crossed. Dutch authorities declined to comment on her case beyond confirming that they think she is still in Syria. She has told her parents that she is now the bride of a Dutch Moroccan national fighting for the Islamic State and that she spends most of her time learning Arabic and studying the Koran.

[The Islamic State’s war against history]

Her parents now live for her texts, which come once a week at best, apparently during rare times when she has an Internet connection. She has relocated from place to place, her parents said, because of bombing campaigns. A photo that she recently sent them shows her in a flowing blue niqab, in a room with a Middle Eastern-style wood-
burning oven. But something about her face seemed different, Pete said.

“You can see there is no innocence left,” he said. “I look at that hard expression, and I cannot see my baby girl.”

Anthony Faiola is The Post's Berlin bureau chief. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since then reporting for the paper from six continents and serving as bureau chief in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York and London.
Souad Mekhennet, co-author of “The Eternal Nazi,” is a visiting fellow at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the Geneva Centre for Security policy.

=========================================
19. A GENERAL FEELING OF DISORDER
by Oliver Sacks
=========================================
(The New York Review of Books,April 23, 2015 Issue)

1.

Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms—be they elephants or protozoa—than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist, said everything on this matter when, in the 1850s, he wrote, “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre.” Maintaining such constancy is called homeostasis. The basics of homeostasis are relatively simple but miraculously efficient at the cellular level, where ion pumps in cell membranes allow the chemical interior of cells to remain constant, whatever the vicissitudes of the external environment. More complex monitoring systems are demanded when it comes to ensuring homeostasis in multicellular organisms—animals, and human beings, in particular.

Homeostatic regulation is accomplished by the development of special nerve cells and nerve nets (plexuses) scattered throughout our bodies, as well as by direct chemical means (hormones, etc.). These scattered nerve cells and plexuses become organized into a system or confederation that is largely autonomous in its functioning; hence its name, the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS was only recognized and explored in the early part of the twentieth century, whereas many of the functions of the central nervous system (CNS), especially the brain, had already been mapped in detail in the nineteenth century. This is something of a paradox, for the autonomic nervous system evolved long before the central nervous system.

They were (and to a considerable extent still are) independent evolutions, extremely different in organization, as well as formation. Central nervous systems, along with muscles and sense organs, evolved to allow animals to get around in the world—forage, hunt, seek mates, avoid or fight enemies, etc. The central nervous system, with its sense organs (including those in the joints, the muscles, the movable parts of the body), tells one who one is and what one is doing. The autonomic nervous system, sleeplessly monitoring every organ and tissue in the body, tells one how one is. Curiously, the brain itself has no sense organs, which is why one can have gross disorders here, yet feel no malaise. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson, who developed Alzheimer’s disease in his sixties, would say, “I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.”

By the early twentieth century, two general divisions of the autonomic nervous system were recognized: a “sympathetic” part, which, by increasing the heart’s output, sharpening the senses, and tensing the muscles, readies an animal for action (in extreme situations, for instance, life-saving fight or flight); and the corresponding opposite—a “parasympathetic” part—which increases activity in the “housekeeping” parts of the body (gut, kidneys, liver, etc.), slowing the heart and promoting relaxation and sleep. These two portions of the ANS work, normally, in a happy reciprocity; thus the delicious postprandial somnolence that follows a heavy meal is not the time to run a race or get into a fight. When the two parts of the ANS are working harmoniously together, one feels “well,” or “normal.”

No one has written more eloquently about this than Antonio Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens and many subsequent books and papers. He speaks of a “core consciousness,” the basic feeling of how one is, which eventually becomes a dim, implicit feeling of consciousness.1 It is especially when things are going wrong, internally—when homeostasis is not being maintained; when the autonomic balance starts listing heavily to one side or the other—that this core consciousness, the feeling of how one is, takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, and now one will say, “I feel ill—something is amiss.” At such times one no longer looks well either.

As an example of this, migraine is a sort of prototype illness, often very unpleasant but transient, and self-limiting; benign in the sense that it does not cause death or serious injury and that it is not associated with any tissue damage or trauma or infection; and occurring only as an often-hereditary disturbance of the nervous system. Migraine provides, in miniature, the essential features of being ill—of trouble inside the body—without actual illness.

When I came to New York, nearly fifty years ago, the first patients I saw suffered from attacks of migraine—“common migraine,” so called because it attacks at least 10 percent of the population. (I myself have had attacks of them throughout my life.2) Seeing such patients, trying to understand or help them, constituted my apprenticeship in medicine—and led to my first book, Migraine.

Though there are many (one is tempted to say, innumerable) possible presentations of common migraine—I described nearly a hundred such in my book—its commonest harbinger may be just an indefinable but undeniable feeling of something amiss. This is exactly what Emil du Bois-Reymond emphasized when, in 1860, he described his own attacks of migraine: “I wake,” he writes, “with a general feeling of disorder….”

In his case (he had had migraines every three to four weeks, since his twentieth year), there would be “a slight pain in the region of the right temple which…reaches its greatest intensity at midday; towards evening it usually passes off…. At rest the pain is bearable, but it is increased by motion to a high degree of violence…. It responds to each beat of the temporal artery.” Moreover, du Bois-Reymond looked different during his migraines: “The countenance is pale and sunken, the right eye small and reddened.” During violent attacks he would experience nausea and “gastric disorder.” The “general feeling of disorder” that so often inaugurates migraines may continue, getting more and more severe in the course of an attack; the worst- affected patients may be reduced to lying in a leaden haze, feeling half-dead, or even that death would be preferable.3

I cite du Bois-Reymond’s self- description, as I do at the very beginning of Migraine, partly for its precision and beauty (as are common in nineteenth-century neurological descriptions, but rare now), but above all, because it is exemplary—all cases of migraine vary, but they are, so to speak, permutations of his.

The vascular and visceral symptoms of migraine are typical of unbridled parasympathetic activity, but they may be preceded by a physiologically opposite state. One may feel full of energy, even a sort of euphoria, for a few hours before a migraine—George Eliot would speak of herself as feeling “dangerously well” at such times. There may, similarly, especially if the suffering has been very intense, be a “rebound” after a migraine. This was very clear with one of my patients (Case #68 in Migraine), a young mathematician with very severe migraines. For him the resolution of a migraine, accompanied by a huge passage of pale urine, was always followed by a burst of original mathematical thinking. “Curing” his migraines, we found, “cured” his mathematical creativity, and he elected, given this strange economy of body and mind, to keep both.

While this is the general pattern of a migraine, there can occur rapidly changing fluctuations and contradictory symptoms—a feeling that patients often call “unsettled.” In this unsettled state (I wrote in Migraine), “one may feel hot or cold, or both…bloated and tight, or loose and queasy; a peculiar tension, or languor, or both…sundry strains and discomforts, which come and go.”

Indeed, everything comes and goes, and if one could take a scan or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or decreasing—as if the nervous system itself were in a state of indecision. Instability, fluctuation, and oscillation are of the essence in the unsettled state, this general feeling of disorder. We lose the normal feeling of “wellness,” which all of us, and perhaps all animals, have in health.

2. 

If new thoughts about illness and recovery—or old thoughts in new form—have been stimulated by thinking back to my first patients, they have been given an unexpected salience by a very different personal experience in recent weeks.

On Monday, February 16, I could say I felt well, in my usual state of health—at least such health and energy as a fairly active eighty-one-year-old can hope to enjoy—and this despite learning, a month earlier, that much of my liver was occupied by metastatic cancer. Various palliative treatments had been suggested—treatments that might reduce the load of metastases in my liver and permit a few extra months of life. The one I opted for, decided to try first, involved my surgeon, an interventional radiologist, threading a catheter up to the bifurcation of the hepatic artery, and then injecting a mass of tiny beads into the right hepatic artery, where they would be carried to the smallest arterioles, blocking these, cutting off the blood supply and oxygen needed by the metastases—in effect, starving and asphyxiating them to death. (My surgeon, who has a gift for vivid metaphor, compared this to killing rats in the basement; or, in a pleasanter image, mowing down the dandelions on the back lawn.) If such an embolization proved to be effective, and tolerated, it could be done on the other side of the liver (the dandelions on the front lawn) a month or so later.

The procedure, though relatively benign, would lead to the death of a huge mass of melanoma cells (almost 50 percent of my liver had been occupied by metastases). These, in dying, would give off a variety of unpleasant and pain-producing substances, and would then have to be removed, as all dead material must be removed from the body. This immense task of garbage disposal would be undertaken by cells of the immune system—macrophages—that are specialized to engulf alien or dead matter in the body. I might think of them, my surgeon suggested, as tiny spiders, millions or perhaps billions in number, scurrying inside me, engulfing the melanoma debris. This enormous cellular task would sap all my energy, and I would feel, in consequence, a tiredness beyond anything I had ever felt before, to say nothing of pain and other problems.

I am glad I was forewarned, for the following day (Tuesday, the seventeenth), soon after waking from the embolization—it was performed under general anesthesia—I was to be assailed by feelings of excruciating tiredness and paroxysms of sleep so abrupt they could poleaxe me in the middle of a sentence or a mouthful, or when visiting friends were talking or laughing loudly a yard away from me. Sometimes, too, delirium would seize me within seconds, even in the middle of handwriting. I felt extremely weak and inert—I would sometimes sit motionless until hoisted to my feet and walked by two helpers. While pain seemed tolerable at rest, an involuntary movement such as a sneeze or hiccup would produce an explosion, a sort of negative orgasm of pain, despite my being maintained, like all post-embolization patients, on a continuous intravenous infusion of narcotics. This massive infusion of narcotics halted all bowel activity for nearly a week, so that everything I ate—I had no appetite, but had to “take nourishment,” as the nursing staff put it—was retained inside me.

Another problem—not uncommon after the embolization of a large part of the liver—was a release of ADH, anti-diuretic hormone, which caused an enormous accumulation of fluid in my body. My feet became so swollen they were almost unrecognizable as feet, and I developed a thick tire of edema around my trunk. This “hyperhydration” led to lowered levels of sodium in my blood, which probably contributed to my deliria. With all this, and a variety of other symptoms—temperature regulation was unstable, I would be hot one minute, cold the next—I felt awful. I had “a general feeling of disorder” raised to an almost infinite degree. If I had to feel like this from now on, I kept thinking, I would sooner be dead.

I stayed in the hospital for six days after embolization, and then returned home. Although I still felt worse than I had ever felt in my life, I did in fact feel a little better, minimally better, with each passing day (and everyone told me, as they tend to tell sick people, that I was looking “great”). I still had sudden, overwhelming paroxysms of sleep, but I forced myself to work, correcting the galleys of my autobiography (even though I might fall asleep in mid-sentence, my head dropping heavily onto the galleys, my hand still clutching a pen). These post-embolization days would have been very difficult to endure without this task (which was also a joy).

On day ten, I turned a corner—I felt awful, as usual, in the morning, but a completely different person in the afternoon. This was delightful, and wholly unexpected: there was no intimation, beforehand, that such a transformation was about to happen. I regained some appetite, my bowels started working again, and on February 28 and March 1, I had a huge and delicious diuresis, losing fifteen pounds over the course of two days. I suddenly found myself full of physical and creative energy and a euphoria almost akin to hypomania. I strode up and down the corridor in my apartment building while exuberant thoughts rushed through my mind.

How much of this was a reestablishment of balance in the body; how much an autonomic rebound after a profound autonomic depression; how much other physiological factors; and how much the sheer joy of writing, I do not know. But my transformed state and feeling were, I suspect, very close to what Nietzsche experienced after a period of illness and expressed so lyrically in The Gay Science:

    Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected…. The rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again. 

Epilogue

The hepatic artery embolization destroyed 80 percent of the tumors in my liver. Now, three weeks later, I am having the remainder of the metastases embolized. With this, I hope I may feel really well for three or four months, in a way that, perhaps, with so many metastases growing inside me and draining my energy for a year or more, would scarcely have been possible before.

    1 Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho, “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Vol. 14 (February 2013). 
    2 I also have attacks of “migraine aura,” with scintillating zigzag patterns and other visual phenomena. They, for me, have no obvious relation to my “common” migraines, but for many others the two are linked, this hybrid attack being called a “classical” migraine. 
    3 Aretaeus noted in the second century that patients in such a state “are weary of life and wish to die.” Such feelings, while they may originate, and be correlated with, autonomic imbalance, must connect with those “central” parts of the ANS in which feeling, mood, sentience, and (core) consciousness are mediated—the brainstem, hypothalamus, amygdala, and other subcortical structures. 

=========================================
20. HOW THE WORLD’S LARGEST PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION AIDED THE CIA’S TORTURE PROGRAM
by Lisa Hajjar
=========================================
(The Nation, May 7, 2015 )
The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for psychologists working in these facilities.

The participation of psychologists was essential for the CIA’s torture program to continue during the Bush years. The legal authority for CIA interrogations was based on then-classified Office of Legal Counsel memos. The first set of memos, authored by John Yoo, signed by OLC head Jay Bybee and dated August 1, 2002, were withdrawn in late 2003 by Jack Goldsmith (who replaced Bybee when he became a federal judge). In June 2004, one of the Yoo/Bybee “torture memos” was leaked to the press, and public outcry about the legal reasoning—especially among lawyers—created pressure on the Bush administration to release some additional legal memos and policy directives relevant to prisoner policies. In December 2004, acting OLC head Daniel Levin revised the narrow definition of torture in the Yoo/Bybee memos but reaffirmed their legal opinions. In the spring of 2005, the CIA requested new legal opinions to validate the techniques in use, and OLC head Stephen Bradbury authored three new memos in May. All of these OLC opinions were a “golden shield” against future prosecutions of officials responsible for the CIA program. According to Bradbury’s 2005 memos, the involvement of health professionals in monitoring and assessing the effects of “enhanced” techniques was necessary in order for them to be considered legal.

Why was the APA’s secret collusion so essential for continuance of the program? A key reason was because other physicians and psychiatrists were increasingly reluctant to participate in national security interrogations. In June 2005, doctors in the CIA’s Office of Medical Services refused a new role required by the Bradbury memos to engage in monitoring and research to determine whether the treatment and conditions to which a detainee was subjected were cruel, inhumane, and degrading. In 2006 the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association passed directives barring their members from participating in such interrogations on professional ethical grounds. The APA, in collaboration with the Bush administration, was willing to allow psychologists to fill the role balked at by other health professionals.

Details of this collusion—which APA officials have concealed and denied for a decade—are the subject of a new report, All the President’s Psychologists, authored by Drs. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, and Nathaniel Raymond. The information comes from 638 e-mails from the accounts of a RAND Corporation researcher and CIA contractor, Scott Gerwehr, who died in 2008. James Risen, a New York Times journalist and author, most recently, of Pay Any Price, obtained the e-mails through Freedom of Information Act litigation and shared them with the report’s authors.

The trajectory of collusion and deception begins in July 2003, when the APA leadership, along with the CIA and the RAND Corporation, sponsored an invitation-only conference on the science of deception where “enhanced” interrogation tactics and related research were discussed, including the use of pharmacological agents and sensory overload. Two of the invitees were retired Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, which contradicted the APA leadership’s repeated denials about any relationship with or knowledge about the duo’s activities. Mitchell and Jessen had been hired by the CIA in late 2001 to design and implement the program of black-site interrogations, and had been engaged in such interrogations since April 2002 following the capture of the first so-called “High Value Detainee,” Abu Zubaydah. One of the e-mails responding to an APA request for post-conference feedback states that the two would be unlikely to reply because they were busy “doing special things to special people in special places.”

In July 2004, while the Abu Ghraib/torture memo scandal was in full swing, the APA convened a secret meeting to discuss “Ethics and National Security,” and invited psychologists directly involved in CIA and military interrogations. The APA’s aim was “to take a forward looking, positive approach, in which we convey a sensitivity to and appreciation of the important work mental health professionals are doing in the national security arena, and in a supportive way offer our assistance in helping them navigate through thorny ethical dilemmas.” In the invitation, Dr. Stephen Behnke, the ethics office director (a position he still holds), promised that the APA would not reveal the names of attendees or the substance of discussions, and pledged that if information about prisoner abuse were to come up at the meeting, no assessment or investigation would ensue.

That secret 2004 meeting laid the groundwork for the establishment of the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) in 2005. The PENS task force, along with a number of unacknowledged “observers” from the White House and other government agencies, met over a weekend in June 2005, and one day later issued a report which the APA board approved by emergency vote. In July, Dr. Geoffrey Mumford, APA science policy director, sent an e-mail to Dr. Kirk Hubbard, a psychologist who formerly worked for the CIA and by then had taken a position consulting with Mitchell Jessen and Associates. Mumford wrote: “I thought you and many of those copied here would be interested to know that APA grabbed the bull by the horns and released this Task Force Report today.” The authors of All the President’s Psychologists argue that one PENS objective—achieved through this process—was to ensure that the specific language in the Bradbury memos was codified in APA ethics policy.

The APA had intended to keep the carefully selected members of the PENS task force and the substance of their discussions secret. However, when task force member Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo came to realize that she had been recruited to play a role in an elaborate charade in which the outcome of the process was predetermined, she decided to reveal the fact that six of the nine voting members at the PENS meeting were Defense Department employees with direct involvement in national security interrogations during that period. At the August 2006 APA annual meeting, Arrigo delivered an address that exposed the PENS task force collusions with government officials over the organization’s ethics policy.

In 2007, a resolution to impose a moratorium on psychologists’ involvement in interrogations at offshore facilities was voted on and roundly defeated by the APA council, whose members at the time apparently accepted the PENS argument that having psychologists involved in interrogations would ensure that they were conducted in a manner that was “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” However, in 2008 a referendum was passed by a sizable majority of the APA membership banning the presence of psychologists at facilities that operate in violation of international law and the US Constitution, except to treat US troops, and banned military psychologists from treating prisoners in these facilities. The APA adopted the referendum, but then argued that there was no way of knowing which facilities operate in violation of the law and therefore individual psychologists would have to decide for themselves, thus making the policy change meaningless.

Not until last December, following the publication of Risen’s Pay Any Price and the release of the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA torture, did the APA finally acknowledge—rather than deny and lie—that James Mitchell had been a member until 2006. This correction of the historical record was made in conjunction with the announcement that the board had finally ordered an independent investigation into complicity between the APA and the Bush administration’s “war on terror” interrogation programs. As All the President’s Psychologists documents, this complicity involved at least five senior staff members and four presidents, including the current president Dr. Barry Anton, who was a board liaison to the PENS task force.

To date, psychologists who are critical of the APA’s record on offshore national security interrogations—including report authors Soldz and Reisner—continue to be described as “dissidents” in the organization. This revealing report and the ongoing independent investigation of APA–Bush administration collusions may provide long overdue redress of this ignominious record of human experimentation and ethical malfeasance.

=========================================
21. “UKRAINE’S EUROPEAN DISCOURSE DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO REALITY”: Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko
=========================================
(eurasianet - 26/04/2015)

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine. He is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research, a member of the editorial board of Commons: Journal for Social Criticism and LeftEast web-magazine, and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology in the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.

Interview by Javier Morales. 

Javier Morales (JM): How do you think that the Ukrainian society is assessing the consequences of the Euromaidan revolution? Has there been any change in their attitudes in the past year?

Volodymyr Ishchenko (VI): Before the Maidan, polls showed that European integration and the Russian customs union had almost an equal support, but there was of course a geographical divide between different parts of Ukraine in their answers. After the Maidan, what happened is probably a typical effect of the victory of political mobilization: the number of supporters for European integration grew a lot. At this moment, supporters for the Russian customs union are evidently a minority, much less than in late 2013.

However, attitudes towards the Maidan are determined by a variety of factors. You can have one attitude towards the protests, another one towards Yanukovych’s removal from power, another one towards the current government and its policies… so it is quite complex. My own personal perception is that people are very much dissatisfied with the economic crisis and with government policies. So I am not so sure about the extent to which they support official propaganda, for example, about the “revolution of dignity”.

One of the most significant figures is the level of support for Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s party, the People’s Front.  It was the winner of the parliamentary elections, getting more votes than the Petro Poroshenko Bloc. But now, polls show that the People’s Front has a support of about 5-7%, not really more than the Right Sector, which has increased its support. In October the Right Sector got 2%, but now they have 5% – if elections were held today, they quite probably would get into the parliament. Of course, that might be connected to dissatisfaction about the economic situation.

JM: Can we speak of a democratization of politics and political culture as a result of the Euromaidan? Has Ukraine adopted a more “Europeanized” or “Westernized” national identity?

VI: There are different processes at the level of institutions, civil society or political culture that have influenced the attitudes of ordinary Ukrainians. What can be said for sure is that Ukraine has hardly become more democratic, and there are many developments which can make Ukraine more repressive than it was before the Maidan started. Of course, repressive measures [approved during those protests] such the January 16, 2014 laws systematically limited political freedoms.

However, before the Maidan Ukraine was a more democratic country. We can speak about various criteria: for example the strength of the opposition and the extent to which it was not affected by repression. Now, one of the main opposition parties, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), is under threat of being banned. It is going to be a long process, but under the new “decommunization laws” they will not be able to keep their name and symbols.

With regard to the problems with freedom of speech, the latest journalist that has been murdered, Oles Buzina, was quite a controversial figure, with views that some considered “anti-Ukrainian” – but that just does not justify that someone could kill him.

Another example is the case of Ruslan Kotsaba, another journalist that was arrested in February for making a video in which he called citizens to resist the army draft. He argued that this is a fratricidal and unjust war, therefore you should not go to the army and take part in it. He was accused of state treason, which is punished with 12 to 15 years of imprisonment; now, he is still under trial and in preliminary detention. Basically, he was repressed for expressing a critical opinion. Whatever you think about the war and the mobilization of Ukrainian men to the army, it does not justify arresting and charging a journalist with a crime that carries such an enormous punishment.

This is just anecdotal evidence from these two cases and would require more systematic research on the evolution of political culture. However, it does not feel like Ukraine has become more tolerant. For example, what do you call “Europeanization”? Maidan supporters tend to promote a progressive understanding of Europe. But Europe is about progressive values, tolerance, equal rights for everyone, and so on. It seems that they indeed believed in these ideas, but it does not mean that this was the reality of the Maidan. The far right did have strong positions there, despite the fact that they were a minority – numerically a minority, but also the most active in the movement.

At the same time, that European discourse does not correspond to the reality of the country, where there is a huge “patriotic” mobilization as a result of the war; it is not about tolerance. It seems ridiculous now to be so much focused on the typical liberal agenda of minority rights while totally forgetting about a number of Ukrainians actually excluded from the political discourse, and also from political participation, because they do not support what has happened in the past year. Hate speech is quite overwhelming. Words that are obviously derogative and pejorative for opponents of the Maidan are everywhere, repeated by top officials and the media.

I know about the idea that a “civic nation” is now finally emerging in Ukraine. The media and some intellectuals claim that, finally, it is not really important who is Ukrainian, who is Russian, who is a Pole, a Jew, a Crimean Tatar… or which language people speak, Ukrainian or Russian. We are allegedly one nation. But this idea of a new nation is based on support for the Maidan: your language or ethnic group does not matter as long as you agree with what happened in the past year and you blame Russia first of all.

Of course, this excludes those who have another opinion. I would not say that repression is really systematic unless you are involved in the separatist movement, which is openly criminalized – actually, you cannot publicly claim that you want your region to separate from Ukraine, even if you are not involved in violent activities. So the focus of this repression is on the separatists, especially those who might use or be willing to use violence. However, even people that are not for separation from Ukraine but are critical of the Maidan are under informal pressure.

JM: What are the prospects for left-wing social and political actors in Ukraine? Do you think there is a future for them, or are they going to remain marginal in the political landscape?

VI: At the moment they are much weaker than before the Maidan. Even before then, they were very weak.

The CPU —to the extent that you can call it a “leftist” party at all, which I have some doubts about— is a bourgeois and even conservative party with regard to cultural values such as feminism, gender equality or minority rights. They have published many conservative statements. But for the first time they did not get into parliament in the last election; before that, in any Verkhovna Rada we had Communist MPs. Now, in this parliament there is no leftist party at all, in any possible understanding of the word.

Some of the most important CPU cells were in the Donbass, where they had the strongest support. Their offices were attacked by the far right; a number of party officials were also arrested. More recently, the decommunization laws have been another blow to them.

The “New Left”, which is not connected to the CPU or other parties evolved from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is divided. Some of them took quite a strong position in support of the Maidan and others did the same in the anti-Maidan movement. They became the left wings of the two competing nationalist camps: nationalist/liberal pro-Maidan people and the anti-Maidan Russian nationalists. In this process, they were compromising class politics with other issues. Their support is quite marginal, and they are not able to get any closer to a hegemonic position in any movement.

JM: What influence do left-wing forces have in Eastern Ukraine, as a result of participating in the “anti-Maidan”?

VI: In fact, their situation is not any better than in the rest of the country. In some ways, it is even worse.

The CPU was not allowed to participate in the November elections in the areas controlled by the separatists, who define themselves as an “antifascist movement”; but the so-called “Kiev junta” did allow them to compete in the rest of the country. This says something about the perverted rhetoric in use; although it does not diminish the problem of repression against Communists in Ukraine as a whole. Those areas are actually under an effective military regime, so it is more difficult for CPU members to organize and mobilize themselves.

JM: Do you think that the new “anti-totalitarian” legislation will contribute to improve the political and social situation in the country?

VI: It is first and foremost having an impact on the CPU. Anti-Communist rhetoric is becoming totally legitimized. Now, even for groups that are not “pro-Soviet”, it is more dangerous to carry on their activities. They are marginal and do not represent any challenge to the state; but they are an objective of far-right groups. Obviously, the far right is going to use these new laws to create legal problems for the left.

There is also the question of whether an objective historical research on the Soviet Union is going to be possible in the future. These laws seem to be much more extreme than the decommunization laws in other Eastern European countries: in all of them there is a clause protecting freedom of historical research. In Ukraine, even in the context of historical research, you are not allowed to reject the “criminal totalitarian nature of the Communist regime”. The meaning of this is so broad that it could include everything. It may become an opportunity for the nationalists to prosecute historians who show a principled position towards the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the Second World War. Would recognizing any achievements within the Soviet Union mean that you reject the “criminal totalitarian nature” of that system, or not?

This is an extreme position in which the state makes a decision about what should be treated as historical debates. Rather than being closer to European laws, it is more similar to the USSR, where “anti-Soviet activities” were banned and you could get into serious trouble with the state for having an independent historical perspective. In some ways, these “anti-totalitarian” laws are taking Ukraine closer to a totalitarian regime than to a democratic society.

JM: How do you see the future of the Donbass after the Minsk-II agreement? Is peace still an option, or is some degree of violence going to continue there?

VI: Peace is always an option. Another question is the fact that the Minsk agreement did not solve any problem. It was written in such an ambiguous language that it has proved very easy for the Ukrainian government, the separatists and Russia to interpret it in different ways.

What is going on now is actually the intensification of fighting – not at the same scale as in February, and of course not as last summer, but they are still fighting in some areas. Some experts say that we can expect a full military campaign and quite a “hot” summer in the Donbass. But the fact is that this conflict does not have any military solution. At some point, some concessions from the Kiev government will be necessary.

The strategy of all actors at the moment seems to be about waiting for an internal collapse or government change on the other side, either in Ukraine or in Russia, and for a decisive military victory. I am not sure if anyone is seriously expecting this to happen. But it is quite possible that, for example, the West —the EU and the US— are waiting for a change of the Russian government, which does not necessarily mean a people’s revolution, but maybe some internal coup d’état by those sectors of the elite that are most endangered by the economic sanctions.  At some point, they might think that it is better for them to get rid of Putin and improve relations with the West.

But, at the same time, Russia also seems to be waiting for a government change in Ukraine. They might support political forces that could potentially challenge the current government. The best scenario for Moscow would be having someone like [former Georgian prime minister] Ivanishvili, who tried to normalize relations with Russia.


=========================================
22. VIV WILL REPLACE YOUR SMARTPHONE WITH YOUR FRIDGE AND THEN TAKE OVER THE WORLD
by John H. Richardson
=========================================
Esquire, May 2015

The guys who made SIRI are on the verge of releasing Viv, a word that conjures life itself. Viv is a way of optimizing the Internet that could, among other things, undermine Google and make you far more intelligent and capable. As with all innovations that claim to be advances, however, there, um, might be problems.

An anonymous green V marks the door of an ordinary office in downtown San Jose, California—inside, just a pool table, whiteboards scrawled with formulas, a dozen programmers working at computers with Nerf guns at their sides. The three founders gather in a glass-walled conference room. "What you're going to see here is a very early prototype," says Dag Kittlaus, the business guy. "This is only a few weeks old."

On the screen at the end of the room, a green V appears. Green bars radiate, and then it connects. This is Viv, their bid for world domination. It's a completely new concept for talking to machines and making them do our bidding—not just asking them for simple information but also making them think and react. Right now, a founder named Adam Cheyer is controlling Viv from his computer. "I'm gonna start with a few simple queries," Cheyer says, "then ramp it up a little bit." He speaks a question out loud: "What's the status of JetBlue 133?" A second later, Viv returns with an answer: "Late again, what else is new?"

To achieve this simple result, Viv went to an airline database called FlightStats.com and got the estimated arrival time and rec-ords that show JetBlue 133 is on time just 62 percent of the time.

Onscreen, for the demo, Viv's reasoning is displayed in a series of boxes—and this is where things get really extraordinary, because you can see Viv begin to reason and solve problems on its own. For each problem it's presented, Viv writes the program to find the solution. Presented with a question about flight status, Viv decided to dig out the historical record on its own. The snark comes courtesy of Chris Brigham, Viv Labs founder number three.

Now let's make it more interesting. "What's the best available seat on Virgin 351 next Wednesday?"

"We believe this will be as big as the Internet itself," says Cheyer. "It's a revolution."

Viv searches an airline-services distributor called Travelport, the back end for Expedia and Orbitz, and finds twenty-eight available seats. Then it goes to SeatGuru.com for information on individual seats per plane, and this is when Viv really starts to show off. Every time you use Viv, you teach it your personal preferences. These go into a private database linked with your profile, currently called "My Stuff," which will be (they promise) under your complete control. So Cheyer is talking to his personal version of Viv, and it knows that he likes aisle seats and extra legroom. The solution is seat 9D, an economy-class exit-row seat with extra legroom.

Even at this most basic level, as Kittlaus points out, the implications of Viv are world-changing: Priceline pays Google about $2 billion a year to get displayed at the top of cheap-flight searches. The entire Internet sales model is based on finding something, if you can find it, then going to the Web site or the app and looking some more and entering your dates and credit card. But Viv knows what Cheyer's looking for. It knows if he likes hotels with swimming pools and the best deals on his favorite entertainment options, even the airport he usually flies from. And although some of this interactivity is already available on Google's Siri clone, Google Now, Viv also knows how to enter all Cheyer's personal data and credit-card numbers and execute the transaction—one-stop shopping without the stop.

"It's that weaving together of services that creates this new paradigm that we think is going to take over," Kittlaus says. "It completely changes the way advertising works online. This will be the filter to you."
Ariel Zambelich

And how much is Viv going to charge Priceline?

"I don't know yet," Cheyer says. "But it'll certainly be far less than buying words on Google. That's why advertising completely changes."

But won't Priceline pay Viv to get higher in Viv's rankings?

"We'll learn from the way that Google has done it," Cheyer says. "We'll have, um, organic results."

And Google? Why haven't they sent out a hitman after you?

"Well, they've sent people after us," Cheyer says. "They've showed a lot of interest in what we're doing—positive interest."

And Orbitz and Travelocity? If Viv goes direct to the data, who needs them? "Well," Kittlaus says, "they'll get involved, too."

Won't this be another death blow to the media, which has never been able to sell ads online? People really aren't going to want their phones singing jingles at them.

"I think the business models will change," Kittlaus says.

And this may be the understatement of the Internet age.

***

BRIGHAM CAME UP WITH the beautiful idea, which makes its own perfect sense. Cheyer was always the visionary. When they met at SRI International twelve years ago, Cheyer was already a chief scientist distilling the work of four hundred researchers from the Defense Department's legendary CALO project, trying to teach computers to talk—really talk, not just answer a bunch of preprogrammed questions. Kittlaus came along a few years later, a former cell-phone executive looking for the next big idea at a time when the traditional phone companies were saying the iPhone would be a disaster—only phone companies can make phones. An adventurer given to jumping out of planes and grueling five-hour sessions of martial arts, he saw the possibilities instantly—cell phones were getting smarter every day, mobile computing was the future, and nobody wanted to thumb-type on a tiny little keyboard. Why not teach a phone to talk?

Brigham, at the time just an undergrad student randomly assigned to Cheyer's staff, looked like a surfer, but he had a Matrix-like ability to see the green numbers scroll, offhandedly solving in a single day a problem that had stumped one of Cheyer's senior scientists for months. Soon he took responsibility for the computer architecture that made their ideas possible. But he also had a rule-breaking streak—maybe it was all those weekends he spent picking rocks out of his family's horse pasture, or the time his father shot him in the ass with a BB gun to illustrate the dangers of carrying a weapon in such a careless fashion. He admits, with some embarrassment, now thirty-one and the father of a young daughter, that he got kicked out of summer school for hacking the high school computer system to send topless shots to all the printers. After the SRI team and its brilliant idea were bought by Steve Jobs and he made it famous—Siri, the first talking phone, a commercial and pop-culture phenomenon that now appears in five hundred million different devices—Brigham sparked international news for teaching Siri to answer a notorious question: "Where do I dump a body?" (Swamps, reservoirs, metal foundries, dumps, mines.)

He couldn't resist the Terminator jokes, either. When the Siri team was coming up with an ad campaign, joking about a series of taglines that went from "Periodically Human" to "Practically Human" to "Positively Human," he said the last one should be "Kill All Humans."

In the fall of 2012, after they all quit Apple, the three men gathered at Kittlaus's house in Chicago to brainstorm, throwing out their wildest ideas. What about nanotechnology? Could they develop an operating system to run at the atomic level? Or maybe just a silly wireless thing that plugged into your ear and told you everything you needed to know in a meeting like this, including the names and loved ones of everyone you met?

Then Brigham took them back to Cheyer's original vision. There was a compromise in the ontology, he said. Siri talked only to a few limited functions, like the map, the datebook, and Google. All the imitators, from the outright copies like Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana to a host of more-focused applications with names like Amazon Echo, Samsung S Voice, Evi, and Maluuba, followed the same principle. The problem was you had to code everything. You had to tell the computer what to think. Linking a single function to Siri took months of expensive computer science. You had to anticipate all the possibilities and account for nearly infinite outcomes. If you tried to open that up to the world, other people would just come along and write new rules and everything would get snarled in the inevitable conflicts of competing agendas—just like life. Even the famous supercomputers that beat Kasparov and won Jeopardy! follow those principles. That was the "pain point," the place where everything stops: There were too many rules.

So what if they just wrote rules on how to solve rules?

The idea was audacious. They would be creating a DNA, not a biology, forcing the program to think for itself.

Again, Kittlaus saw the many possibilities. Google was teaching cars to drive. Artificial intelligence breakthroughs were exploding. The "Internet of Things" was the new buzzword, machines all connecting by WiFi to the magic of the Cloud. And everybody was after the final interface that would unite them, spending billions of dollars in the hope of harnessing the winning innovation to their specific platform. Soon, Google would hire AI legend Ray Kurzweil and buy him a $500 million lab, and Facebook would spend another fortune on a team headed by NYU's Yann LeCun. But Viv was different. They were the little guy without big ties, and the idea of an open system was a hapkido move, leveraging their small size into something mighty. Their rebel DNA could work with all the platforms. And what medium could be easier than voice, their area of greatest expertise? One platform to rule them all!

They're joking, sort of.
Ariel Zambelich

They started out on pen and paper, breaking it down into the smallest possible pieces. You want the computer to do something, but you don't want to tell it how. It has to figure out that part for itself. So you start by teaching the program a concept, because a person can't act without a conception of where he's trying to go. Then you teach it an action. And you nudge it so that it finds its way from one to the other—which might just be the essential code of life itself, from DNA to the mysterious algorithms that unveiled the universe, from concept to the mysterious process that leads to action. If they could solve that, the program's brain could gobble up new concepts and actions until it contained . . . well, everything.

But was it possible? They weren't sure. Cheyer and Brigham spent the next six weeks trying to figure it out.

Brigham's bachelor party in Denver that fall included some of the smartest minds in artificial intelligence and computer engineering. After the party, Brigham ended up at a bar with Mark Gabel, a young hotshot at the University of Texas with the perfect mix of expertise: artificial intelligence, natural language, and program analysis. "He was completely shit-faced," Gabel remembers.

"Wait, wait, don't tell him about that," Cheyer says.

Gabel laughs. "He actually tried to recruit Danny—the guy you just met—at the same time, but he was so messed up and incoherent Danny just said, 'This is a complete joke. I'm not going to sacrifice my career for this.' He's kicking himself now."

They stayed in the bar for hours, talking about atomic functional units and program synthesis. Gabel couldn't figure out where Brigham was going with it. Research in program synthesis was stagnant, stuck at tiny little functions. How could they do entire tasks?
Then he got it. A working-class kid who split his time between math and classical piano, Gabel had come to understand that complex systems were always the same—you had to start by making the problem more abstract. He could see the beauty of the rule behind the rules, not a model but a metamodel. They had to define the problem in such a way that it could be solved without solving the problem.

But he still wasn't sure it was possible.

They started meeting at Brigham's apartment. Gabel would fly out and they'd set up a whiteboard and draw equations, starting with seemingly simple problems. How could they make the jump from concept to action? On the most basic level, if they said, "Find parking lots near the White House," how would the computer figure out which white house you were talking about? It might find restaurants named the White House. But they couldn't tell the computer how to make the distinction without writing a bunch of codes.

Then the answer came to them—the glimmer of an answer, an elegant subplan that was like another little piece of DNA: Find the solution, it said, and stop there. "Intent representation," they called it. By latching the program to a goal, they gave it a kind of freedom.

At the start of January, they were ready to start coding. Seed money came from the richest man in China and Gary Morgenthaler, the first investor in Siri. "I looked at the work they were doing," Morgenthaler remembers, "and said, This is as good or better than anything I've seen in twenty years." They hired just two employees, Joshua Levy, a kindhearted, homeschooled midwesterner who started college at thirteen, and Marcello Bastéa-Forte, a rumpled Stanford grad who was already the top front-end engineer at Siri in his early twenties. In a small cubicle in a space in San Jose with open ceilings, the smell of sawdust in the air, they wrote the basic code in a six-week push of furious coding.

Would it work? They still weren't sure.

For the first demo, they gathered around the table and asked for a simple weather report—and the program seemed to crunch along forever, trying to come up with a way to come up with an answer.

Then it asked for more information because it was confused. The program had intent! It wanted to do something.

Now the struggle against writing new rules became constant. They'd find some gremlin creeping in, like local movie listings in the middle of a flower search, and it was so tempting to just ban movie listings from the middle of the flower search. But then someone else would say "Find theater listing" and you'd have to add another rule. Every time, like parents trying to raise imaginative children, they had to define correct in a way that made the program improvise.

The solution was something they call the "planning objective function"—but at this point we get into trade secrets, says Cheyer. Or maybe religion. The point is, they did it. They created a program that could write its own code and find its own solutions. They named their invention Viv, after the Latin for "life." If it worked out in the marketplace and the feisty little improviser beat out the coded fortresses of the giant players, Cheyer's dream would finally be realized—he would make machines come to life.

For the next year and a half, they worked in secret.

***

ON THE SCREEN, CHEYER MOVES TO STEP TWO. This is how the world will connect to Viv. After a simple fifteen-minute video tutorial, you open this training module—it looks like lozenges of text with some words highlighted—and teach it your specialized vocabulary. That knowledge goes to Viv's brain, which gets smarter with every new lesson. Say you own a company called Wine.com and someone just asked Viv to find a good merlot—no, an awesome merlot. Awesome is the kind of imprecise word an enthusiastic human might use. Does your database make it clear that awesome is a rating?

"Find an awesome merlot," Cheyer says.

Instantly, Viv figures "awesome" must fit into the "rating" concept. Apparently, someone already taught it the meaning of awesome.

Cheyer's a little disappointed. "If it were wrong," he says, "you would literally drag and drop to teach it No, that's wrong."

And if you try to mess with it, Viv resists. Cheyer demonstrates by trying to teach it that a merlot is actually a kind of car.

"I'm not sure what you mean," Viv responds. "Please give a few more examples." In time, the hive mind will overwhelm mischief and human error. And all this requires no more skill than using a basic Web-site template, which hands the mysterious tools of artificial intelligence to ordinary people and lets them build on the contributions of all who came before.
Ariel Zambelich

Eventually, the Viv team hopes, its V will be everywhere. Press the V on your refrigerator and the fridge will say, Hello, how can I help, John? And you'll say, What is there to eat? And the fridge will see that it's lunchtime and ask if you want the usual cheese sandwich or something more interesting. You have ingredients that match a recipe for baked ziti on Edible Gourmet. Should I download it?

How long will it take?

You don't even have to say "How long will it take to cook?" because your fridge understands you. It knows you don't like to waste time in front of a stove. Seventeen point four minutes, short enough even for a lazy ass like you.

Take the snark down 10 percent, you say, cursing Chris Brigham.

And how much will the recipe cost?

Ten cents, the fridge says.

After a little back and forth about nutritional content and your excess belly flab and the free recipes available on the Web, you say fuck it and the fridge sends the recipe to your iPhone—ka-ching for Edible Gourmet, ka-ching for the guys behind that talking V, and ka-ching for you, too, since your food is that much less likely to rot in your fridge. And there will be a V on your car, too, on your bathroom mirror, your washing machine, the pump at your gas station, the ATM at your bank. Ask the Coke machine if your son is free for softball on Saturday and the Coke machine will say, Looks like he's finished with his homework but the forecast is rain. Want me to book an appointment at the batting cage?
Ka-ching for Joe's Indoor Baseball.

It's the world of seamless convenience, all your desires satisfied with a minimum of fuss.

***

THE LARGER IMPLICATIONS TAKE A WHILE to sink in. Why do you need a fancy phone if you can talk to your refrigerator? How much are you going to spend on an expensive computer when your alarm clock can do your shopping? Just what we need—another hurricane of creative destruction. And Viv will make it easier to talk to machines at a time when machines are getting fiendishly smarter, which could be the biggest problem of all—not because they might become aware and send Terminators after us, although people like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are starting to worry about that, but because they might take our jobs. As the technology writer Martin Ford details in an alarming new book called Rise of the Robots, there's already a robot pharmacist at the University of California that makes up ten thousand doses of medicine a day, reading the doses off bar codes so that there's never an error. Robot test scorers are more accurate than teachers, even at reading essays. Electronic-discovery services are eating the jobs of lawyers and paralegals. A newswriting program called Narrative Science puts out millions of simple sports and business stories. Online classes are taking on traditional universities, learning to solve their low completion rates with robot tutors. Fast-food robots are learning how to cook a burger, wrap it, and hand it to you—a threat to the jobs of 3.7 million fast-food workers. Robots are even learning to administer cancer treatments, diagnose diseases, and care for the elderly. According to a February report from Business Insider, the market for this mixture of intelligent algorithms and robots is now growing seven times faster than traditional manufacturing robotics, much of it driven by smartphones and tablets that can control them "at more accessible price points." And Viv will make all of this so much easier, turbocharging new services like Uber and Google's self-driving cars, which will be owned by Google or some other company and go back to a central warehouse for robot servicing, which is bad news for the millions of Americans working at car washes, service stations, taxi companies, and delivery companies.

Futurists like Jeremy Rifkin have been warning about the "end of work" for years, but most people have filed that fear under "Luddite" and assume that capitalism will continue replacing lost jobs. Now some of our smartest economists are starting to ring alarms. Back in 2012, Paul Krugman said there was "no question" that smart machines were rapidly replacing workers in many industries, a trend that had the potential to "turn our society into something unrecognizable." Last year, Larry Summers warned about the "devastating consequences of robots, 3-D printing, [and] artificial intelligence" on both white- and blue-collar jobs. In February, Robert Reich said we were "barreling toward" an economy in which robots do much of the work and most of the profits go to the robots' owners, while humans are reduced to odd jobs like "Uber drivers, Instacart shoppers, and Airbnb hosts." A new study from Jeffrey Sachs and three other prominent economists puts the question so starkly it seems a plot point from dystopian science fiction: "Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business?"

Sachs's answer? An unqualified yes. His study "firmly predicts" a long-run decline in labor's share of the national income so severe it could crash the economy. "Absent appropriate fiscal policy that redistributes from winners to losers," he concludes, "smart machines can mean long-term misery for all."

Even the libertarians of Silicon Valley are starting to worry. "As much as it pains me to say so," says Jaron Lanier, the polymath behind virtual reality, "we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and heath care." Martin Ford cites a recent jobs summit he attended with about fifty tech-company CEOs. "Here in Silicon Valley, there's a remarkable consensus about this. Every single person agreed we're on the leading edge of a disruption, and we're going to have to move to a guaranteed basic income. There was overwhelming support for that."

It seems unfair to lay all this on the gentle geniuses of Viv, who are just trying to give life to their beautiful idea.

"We tell our investors they can take comfort that they're part of the beginning of the end," Brigham jokes.

"I don't think that's what we tell our investors," Cheyer says.

"Maybe business kind of gets destroyed in the process," he concedes. "But they can also get business they never would've gotten—like Match.com could say, 'Hey, it's Friday night and you've both indicated that you like theater. Do you want me to check out the shows on Friday night? Do you want me to get reservations for that restaurant near the theater? Do you want me to have an Uber pick up your date? Do you want flowers sent to the table?' It's new business for everyone."

And Viv solves the discovery problem, making it easier to find the little store or small magazine. It can integrate your loyalties, registering your preference for mom-and-pop stores or couch-surfing in Thailand. My Stuff will actually ask you questions to make this easy. "I've noticed you ate Mexican food three times this week. Can I infer that you like Mexican foods?" And unlike data-mining snoops like Facebook and Google, which can tell if you're gay or pregnant even before you admit it to yourself, you can also tell Viv what to forget. "This kind of turns the Google privacy model on its head," Kittlaus says.

And services will be working together in all kinds of new ways. Yummly and Edible Gourmet have recipes, but once they're plugged into Viv they might find somebody asking about the right wine to go with those recipes—and then linking to mapping services and local shops. If old-fashioned things like journalistic ethics were not of concern, Esquire could even harness its product reviews to recommend the best razors or shoes and take a cut on the purchases.

The opportunities are endless, they say. Somebody's got to teach Viv to monitor your refrigerator and order fresh milk. Somebody will build a program that sends out locations and lineups for all the local Little League games. Somebody could build a birds-and-bees tutorial to sidestep the fight over sex education. Law firms can develop their own specialized law-bots. A top cardiologist just suggested a medical noodge to nag you about taking your medicine and tell the doctor if you forget, which could actually save lives.

And who knows, maybe Viv will even help America's beleaguered musicians. "You can imagine just saying, 'Viv, take my latest track and put it on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest,' " Kittlaus says.

That's the real excitement of Viv, they insist—the idea of unleashing the creative and the entrepreneurial energy of millions of people.

But all this wild potential may also be Viv's biggest threat. Established sources like OpenTable will probably dominate restaurant bookings, they concede, and companies like Yelp will have a huge content advantage over new arrivals. Amazon will grow ever mightier. "If you provide a unified interface with no way for people or vendors to differentiate themselves," Gabel says, "economics just tells you at that point it's just a race to the bottom. So we have to preserve branding and personalization. We don't really want this to become like Soviet Russia: 'Buy me the official state car. Get me the official state hotel room.' "

But the fact is they don't know the answers to many of these questions. They've been working with their heads down, pushing to beat the competition, and they'll just have to worry about all that later.

Anyway, it's not really in their hands. "The world is going to decide what this thing is going to do," Kittlaus says. "That's the novel part of it. We've been building things to inspire people, to show what's possible, but the real question is What's going to happen when we open this up? What are people going to create with it? We don't know."

***

VIV INVITES THE IMAGINATION, there's no doubt about that. You could sit in your hotel room and ask Siri gloomy questions: "Are you going to put everybody out of a job?"

"I can't answer that," Siri says.

"Are you going to put me out of a job?"

"I can't answer that," Siri says.

Or you could start a dating service, using that seductively radiating lime-green V to link up restaurants and florists and lingerie stores! You could have a robot music teacher with infinite patience. And how about a satellite-controlled Roomba to cut your damn lawn? Like those big modern combines! And Viv could write the software and run the mowers!

Not exactly, Kittlaus says. You'd still have to connect to the satellite and map out the trees and rocks and write the program to control the machine and build the machine (and handle the liability issues). "Viv's not going to be able to do all the work for you." But Viv would make it a lot easier to put the service out there without a ton of advertising. "Say I want a cheap lawn-mowing service, and because you've got this automated thing, all they do is come once a week and toss this thing in your yard and it just goes about its business. It's going to be pretty cheap."

And once it was in the yard, Viv would be happy to run it.

I'm gone a week—have the lawn cut when I get back?

"Exactly. And the beauty of it is it plugs your lawn mower into a wider ecosystem—like with the refrigerator, you can say 'Order me some more milk.' "

So the Roomba lawn mower could have sensors that told you if you needed more lime, connect you to a supplier, and have the lime delivered?

"Absolutely."

And John's RoombaMower Co. gets a cut?

"Exactly."

And if its program for satellite guidance is great, RoombaMower Co. can sell the software to every aspiring robo-lawn-mower company in the universe?

"Absolutely," Kittlaus says.

RoombaMower will conquer the world!

"That's actually a really good idea," Kittlaus says. "I think you should quit your job and do it."

And that's the real excitement of Viv, they insist—the idea of unleashing the creative and entrepreneurial energy of millions of people. They all feel it will be the biggest thing they ever do in their lives. "As a founder," Cheyer says, "I'm allowed to be effusive. We believe this thing will be as big and important as the Internet itself and as mobile itself. It's a revolution."
Ariel Zambelich

They think they're about six months from a beta test and a year from a public launch, hopefully with a two-year head start on their giant competitors. Morgenthaler's optimistic: "They have a new vision and a time-to-market advantage, and the architecture is wholly new. It will take people a considerable amount of time to figure out."

Kittlaus has been so busy he hasn't even had time to patent a potentially huge new business idea of his own—the lightbulb idea.

The lightbulb idea?

"It's obvious," he says. Because they're everywhere and already have their own power source, lightbulbs will be the most convenient way to talk to machines. Add a microphone and some sweet little algorithm and bingo—it's a billion-dollar product.

Steal it fast.

***
IN THE MAIN ROOM, at four long tables, the coders work away, racing toward the public launch. One is working on the user interface, which has to be flexible enough to appear on all kinds of screens. Others are trying to give Viv a better short-term memory, so if you say "three," it will remember whether you're talking about how many children you have or how many there are in your party. This is called "dialogue management," currently a subject of much excitement and research at AI labs across the country. But, of course, the Viv guys don't want to hard-write too many rules. Once again, the program has to learn to analyze the context, taught by the input of thousands or millions of private developers pursuing the fulfillment of their own desires.

Another group of coders is teaching Viv how to supervise the approval process for new members, which Gabel happily describes as a "very nontraditional thing." The smart machine will actually be testing human contributions to the smart machine.

At his workstation, Cheyer is going through bugs, tweaking to make sure things are centered on the screen and there's no unintentional scrolling. Then he switches to playing the role of the flower-shop owner, teaching Viv to handle customers. No, there's no need to suppress funeral corsages. Yes, ask me whether it's a birthday or a wedding.

At his station, Brigham isn't happy with the way that the groups of flower products interact. He wants Theadora's Polka Dot Basket to show up in the centerpiece group more elegantly, with cleaner links to alternatives or a purchase decision. It's another design thing, final touches.

Across the room, Marco Iacono is working on the graphic design, tweaking the appearance for different devices. "This is the iPhone 5—which, you can see, yeah, fits perfectly."
Midmorning, they all gather for a stand-up meeting, passing a Frisbee around to designate the speaker. "Yesterday I spent a lot of time talking about the developer experience," one says. "I completed the P1's on the automated testing stuff," says another. "I did some cleanup and bulletproofing for Wine-Stein capsule," says a third.

Kittlaus makes a business announcement: "I'm working on getting $12.5 million wired into our accounts by tomorrow."

The scientists tease him. "What are you gonna do tomorrow?"

"Yeah, how many more millions next week?"

They're all a bit on fire with the potential of it all. "This is the dream project," says Richard Schatzberger, who joined the graphic-design team several months ago. "The technology that these guys here have built is something so radically new and different—it's something new."

"Behind the scenes," as Levy puts it, with the low-key pride shared by everyone at Viv Labs, "there are some pretty nontrivial algorithms."

"It feels awesome," Iacono says. "It's a wild, wild place to be."

For example, lately he's been experimenting with other ways of interacting with Viv.
Other ways? Besides typing or talking?

"Um, maybe."

Then he blurts it out: "Touching. We're kind of exploring the edges of possibilities."

Published in the May 2015 issue.


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web: 
www.sacw.net/

     #####
    #### _\_  ________
    ##=-[.].]| \      \
    #(    _\ |  |------|
     #   __| |  ||||||||
      \  _/  |  ||||||||
   .--'--'-. |  | ____ |
  / __      `|__|[o__o]|
_(____nm_______ /____\____ 

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
=====================================