A very interesting, if uneven, look at the internal workings of the Vatican and its relationship to the Vatican press corps. I say uneven because the segments on the press corps are light, almost comical in several instances, and then he switches to much more serious topics as the way the Vatican mishandled the sexual abuse scandals and John Paul II's close relationship with Cardinal Marciel and the Legion, not to mention the personality of Pope Benedict.
The book begins with some amusing stories from the enclave where they elected Cardinal Ratzinger as the Pope, following the death of John Paul II. Apparently there are numerous traditions that must be closely followed, but some of the modern trappings are just confused things. The bell-ringer who was supposed to ring the bell at the sight of the white smoke couldn't receive the news via radio because of the jamming devices installed by the Vatican to prevent Cardinals and others from using cell phones during the enclave. Moreover, the special stove they had installed in the Chapel with a special chemical to turn the smoke white couldn't be lit so you had a group of cardinals surrounding the stove trying to get it to light that resembled old men at a barbecue, as the Sistine Chapel filled with smoke -- don't tell the museum's curators of Michelangelo's painting.
Secrecy at the Vatican rises to the level of fetish. Everything is hidden and probably the most important tenet is that no one must say anything negative about his (never a her) superior or say anything that might bring the church into disrepute. John Paul II had child-like naive love for anything that smacked of evangelical revivalism for the Catholic Church, which made him susceptible to the machinations of Cardinal Marcial, founder of the Legions of Christ and serial pedophile. Marcial and the Legionnaires would shower Rome's cardinals with expensive gifts worth up to $1000 not to mention millions in support of the Pope's travels. He was brought down, if you could say that, only following numerous charges from Legionnaires who described how if they felt guilty from Marcial's inflicted masturbatory sessions, he would absolve them on the spot and often claimed he had a special dispensation from Rome for his sexual proclivities. That became too much for Rome, not the sexual misconduct, the misuse of dispensations. In any case, he was never punished, only put out to pasture. (They admitted to his fathering several children and heterosexual affairs - after-all he was human- but they never admitted to the homosexual activities.) Marcial and the Legion never apologized, claiming only that Marcial would be Christ-like in his surrendering to the higher authority of the Pope. It's enough to make you puke.
Thavis devotes a chapter to the campaign by some of the church's reactionaries to have Pius XII (considered by some to be "Hitler's Pope") declared a saint. You might as well declare a Hershey Bar (seems like Catholics will pray to anything) a saint, setting the bar so low. I mean really; Aquinas, maybe, but Pius XII or John Paul II (considered by some to be Marcial's enabler)? Give me a fucking break.
Here's what Thavis has to say about it:
One of the traditional signs of sainthood, still very much taken into account by Vatican experts, is the existence of a “popular cult” –evidence that people pray to the person in the years following his or her death. The six-year-old Nennolina, for example, who was soon to be beatified [by Pope Benedict XVI] was this kind of grassroots saint. Her friends, neighbors and relatives kept the fame of her sanctity alive by publishing her letters, reporting her holiness widely and praying to the little Roman girl.
If the fact that Pius XII was a pope gave his sainthood cause some inherent advantages, in other ways it made perceptions of his holiness less immediate and less personal. He was for most Catholics a remote figure at the far end of the hierarchy. History would ultimately be his judge, and it always struck me that whatever “popular cult” he did have seemed to be centered in and around the Vatican. (p. 229-231)
As with any large organization, politics, secrecy and money reign supreme. Sometimes they also appear quite short-sighted. Desperate for a new parking lot inside the Vatican, the engineers maneuvered the Cardinals to authorize them to begin digging without allowing any archaeologists to check the site first for possible artifacts and things of historical interest. They claimed to have done some test bores, but were horrified when the bulldozers tore open a huge burial site with many hundreds of Roman tombs and full of mosaics and museum quality pieces. Had they had any sense, it seems to me, not to mention foresight, they never would have let the archaeologists in first (full disclaimer, I studied a bit of archaeology in college) and when the tombs had been found, turned it into a major tourist attraction, charging money to watch and then visit. They could have built the parking lot elsewhere and had buses (for a fee, of course) carrying people back and forth. They would have made much more money and kept everyone (except perhaps the asphalt engineers) very happy. Instead, despite their attempt at secrecy, the result was a huge scandal.
One of the most interesting sections described the attempt by the SSPX under the leadership of Marcel Lefebvre to influence Cardinal Ratzinger and the newly elected Pope. They were upset with the changes enacted by Pope John XXIII and wanted a return to the Latin mass and the more traditional (and medieval) form of worship. He belonged to identifiable strand of right-wing political and religious opinion in French society that originated among the defeated royalists after the 1789 French Revolution. He defied Pope John Paul II and consecrated four bishops, an action for which he (and they) were excommunicated. He was particularly incensed by the Vatican's reaching out to other religious denominations, not believing in rapprochement. Apparently he and his followers didn't buy all that nonsense about the Pope being God's representative, Clearly, Lefebvre believed he had better communication with God than the Pope. The whole thing smacked of Luther's rebellion against the established order in 1521, his excommunication, and we all know where that led. Seems to me that Lefebvre met most of the conditions of heresy.
Thavis, a Vatican correspondent, and chief of the Rome Bureau for the Catholic News Service, for more than thirty years, says he wrote the book to reveal the inner workings of the Vatican, a place rife with political in-fighting and scandal, hardly the locus of a church with a unified and universal mission. Whether the institution will ever become governable in the modern world remains to be seen. Ratzinger (Benedict) gave up but it should not have come as a surprise. The man had spent his entire life seeking refuge from controversy and the world in general. He had decided at a very young age he wanted to be a cardinal, and enrolled in seminary at age 12, with but a brief stint in the German Army, his life was one of books (sounds delightful) and as an academic -- he never had a job as a pastor dealing with the day to day quotidian lives of parishioners -- fled conflict. I suspect the pressures of being Pope were just too much, so off to the monastery.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Some people will pay NOT to be prayed for....
This study is quite interesting. It seeks to determine the value of the phrase, "thoughts and prayers" following a tragedy. It attempted to place a value on the phrase economically, i.e. using the market.
"The Christians who participated in this study valued prayer from a stranger, on average, at more than $4. A prayer from a priest was worth about $7. The nonreligious participants would pay less than $2 for a priest to not pray for them, and over $3.50 to avoid a Christian stranger’s prayer.
“This article raises an interesting point — some people, maybe, just don’t want your thoughts or prayers,” said University of Colorado at Denver psychologist Kevin Masters, who was not a member of the research team. In 2006, Masters and his colleagues analyzed the body of research on the effects of prayer on someone’s behalf. No study was able to show that prayer has discernible health benefits on a distant recipient."
Study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/10/1908268116
Article: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/16/some-people-would-pay-avoid-thoughts-prayers-after-disaster-study-finds/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
"The Christians who participated in this study valued prayer from a stranger, on average, at more than $4. A prayer from a priest was worth about $7. The nonreligious participants would pay less than $2 for a priest to not pray for them, and over $3.50 to avoid a Christian stranger’s prayer.
“This article raises an interesting point — some people, maybe, just don’t want your thoughts or prayers,” said University of Colorado at Denver psychologist Kevin Masters, who was not a member of the research team. In 2006, Masters and his colleagues analyzed the body of research on the effects of prayer on someone’s behalf. No study was able to show that prayer has discernible health benefits on a distant recipient."
Study: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/09/10/1908268116
Article: https://beta.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/09/16/some-people-would-pay-avoid-thoughts-prayers-after-disaster-study-finds/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Review: LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
Every new technology is disruptive and many of those in the past bear an uncanny resemblance in their effects to those of today. Each has been heralded as providing the means for everlasting peace. Moveable type democratized book production making reading almost a required skill yet contributed to religious upheaval. The telegraph and then the telephone made communication virtually instantaneous and while they brought people closer together provided the means for generals to control their troops from afar. Radio gave FDR the means to go around the newspapers who had pushed back against his third and fourth terms. His fireside chats reduced his message to just short bursts of ten-minute talks (tweets of the day, if you will) while Goebbels noted that the rise of Nazism would never have been possible without radio. Television forced politicians to change their habits and locked in the public to news as entertainment. It ended the Vietnam War by bringing battle scenes into living rooms. The Internet, still in its infancy really, is equally disruptive by changing the way we link to one another.
Twitter, live streaming, and blogging have become essential parts of the distribution of information, both real and fake. Virtually everyone has a smart-phone which even radically alters the battlefield. The Russians used the geo-location transmissions of Ukrainian soldiers cellphones to zero in their artillery on those troops during that brief war.
Cyber warfare includes more than just hacking a network. It's possible to cause damage by hacking information as well. Singer and Brooking cite the seesaw battle for Mosul in Iraq as just one example. ISIS used Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook to manipulate likes and the streams to promote their own POV. By manipulating images, followers, and hash-tags they were successful in winning converts and battles. The U.S. and Iraqi armies were totally unprepared for this propaganda warfare, but they learned fast, and the #freemosul tag soon appeared countering the ISIS streams with those more favorable to U.S. actions. Just as Amazon has disrupted commerce, so had social media disrupted warfare and politics.
Terrorists now show their work on-line. They use Twitter routinely. Russia tries to destabilize democracies by fomenting distrust of civil institutions with fake material. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battleground that plays out on our smart-phones. Singer and Brooking, using a combination of stories and research, lay out the problems facing us with new ways of conducting warfare. But it works both ways. Those Russian soldiers who shot down MH17 were identified through painstaking crowd sourcing work on-line by tracking soldier's emails, tire treads, registration numbers, all sorts of clues that were found on-line. Their work for the Dutch Investigation team was hacked by Russian hackers attempting to hide the Russian involvement.
Propaganda can now go viral. Fake stories are re-tweeted by confederates whose followers often unwittingly re-tweet the false information and soon millions have received precisely the message intended by the original poster who may be a governmental entity seeking to destabilize an adversary. The audience is huge as is the volume. Around 3.4 billion people have access to the Internet -- about half the world's population. Roughly 500 million tweets are sent each day and nearly seven hours of footage is uploaded on YouTube every second in 76 languages.
"No matter how outlandish these theories sound, they served their purpose successfully. 'The disinformation campaign [around the flight] shows how initially successful propaganda can be. . . . Obviously the ...lies were eventually debunked, but by then their narrative had been fixed in many people's minds.' That is the overarching goal of information hackers: 'The more doubt you can sow in people's minds about all information, the more you will weaken their propensity to recognize the truth.'"
Trump was one of the first to recognize the power of Twitter. Following his massive bankruptcy and declining interest in the Apprentice TV show, Trump began to tweet thousands of messages, bombarding the twitter-sphere with provocative, false, and often incendiary tweets. Soon his financial peccadilloes were forgotten, obliterated by his Twitter-storm. His infamy rose, but he didn't care as he valued the attention more than anything. It's a lesson he has never forgotten. As Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, said, "it matters less that what you say is true, only that it be believed."
The recent video of Nancy Pelosi appearing to be drunk and the Trump's attempt to doctor the CNN video showing that Acosta had inappropriately touched a white House intern are just a couple examples of internal use of social media to influence popular thought.
Lifewire.com, a technology website based in New York, defines an Internet troll as a modern version of the same mythical character. They hide behind their computer screens and go out of their way to cause trouble on the Internet. Like its mythical predecessor, an Internet troll is both angry and disruptive - often for no real reason. The effects can be completely out of proportion to their size.
The question remains what should governments do, if anything, to shut down trolls. In some cases they are freedom fighters trying to rally against a corrupt government. Would it be better to simply keep the Internet as open as possible? Satire, parody, misleading content, impostor content, fabricated content and manipulated content all need to be seen separately from each other and dealt with accordingly. How is that to be accomplished? Who will control it?
The "Like" phenomenon is an important part of the campaign. The more "likes" a piece of news or comment gets on a news or social site, the more likely it is to be believed. People are more likely to believe a headline if they have seen a similar one before. “It didn't even matter if the story was preceded by a warning that it might be fake,” the authors write. “What counted most was familiarity. The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically.” That's what irritates me about the media's obsession with Trump's Tweets. By repeating them incessantly and parsing them repeatedly, they are validated. That, to some extent, was the genius of the Russian interference in the last election. You don't need sophisticated hackers to implement it either, just a bunch of people promoting a certain meme or thought until it becomes a tsunami overwhelming any other rational discussion; it becomes "the truth." Slick videos, click bait, and viral mimes become the new weapons in undermining democracy effectively grounding billion dollar fighter jets which then become obsolete as the war has already been lost.
As an aside, I remember listening to a commentator who suggested that the Phil Donahue show started the descent into irrationality. He was the first to invite callers on the show live to express their opinion. Soon all the shows were doing it. Callers became the experts and soon everyone was his own expert bypassing the value of people who had actually studied an issue. A bit simplistic perhaps, but there may be a grain of truth there.
Fascinating book.
Twitter, live streaming, and blogging have become essential parts of the distribution of information, both real and fake. Virtually everyone has a smart-phone which even radically alters the battlefield. The Russians used the geo-location transmissions of Ukrainian soldiers cellphones to zero in their artillery on those troops during that brief war.
Cyber warfare includes more than just hacking a network. It's possible to cause damage by hacking information as well. Singer and Brooking cite the seesaw battle for Mosul in Iraq as just one example. ISIS used Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook to manipulate likes and the streams to promote their own POV. By manipulating images, followers, and hash-tags they were successful in winning converts and battles. The U.S. and Iraqi armies were totally unprepared for this propaganda warfare, but they learned fast, and the #freemosul tag soon appeared countering the ISIS streams with those more favorable to U.S. actions. Just as Amazon has disrupted commerce, so had social media disrupted warfare and politics.
Terrorists now show their work on-line. They use Twitter routinely. Russia tries to destabilize democracies by fomenting distrust of civil institutions with fake material. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battleground that plays out on our smart-phones. Singer and Brooking, using a combination of stories and research, lay out the problems facing us with new ways of conducting warfare. But it works both ways. Those Russian soldiers who shot down MH17 were identified through painstaking crowd sourcing work on-line by tracking soldier's emails, tire treads, registration numbers, all sorts of clues that were found on-line. Their work for the Dutch Investigation team was hacked by Russian hackers attempting to hide the Russian involvement.
Propaganda can now go viral. Fake stories are re-tweeted by confederates whose followers often unwittingly re-tweet the false information and soon millions have received precisely the message intended by the original poster who may be a governmental entity seeking to destabilize an adversary. The audience is huge as is the volume. Around 3.4 billion people have access to the Internet -- about half the world's population. Roughly 500 million tweets are sent each day and nearly seven hours of footage is uploaded on YouTube every second in 76 languages.
"No matter how outlandish these theories sound, they served their purpose successfully. 'The disinformation campaign [around the flight] shows how initially successful propaganda can be. . . . Obviously the ...lies were eventually debunked, but by then their narrative had been fixed in many people's minds.' That is the overarching goal of information hackers: 'The more doubt you can sow in people's minds about all information, the more you will weaken their propensity to recognize the truth.'"
Trump was one of the first to recognize the power of Twitter. Following his massive bankruptcy and declining interest in the Apprentice TV show, Trump began to tweet thousands of messages, bombarding the twitter-sphere with provocative, false, and often incendiary tweets. Soon his financial peccadilloes were forgotten, obliterated by his Twitter-storm. His infamy rose, but he didn't care as he valued the attention more than anything. It's a lesson he has never forgotten. As Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, said, "it matters less that what you say is true, only that it be believed."
The recent video of Nancy Pelosi appearing to be drunk and the Trump's attempt to doctor the CNN video showing that Acosta had inappropriately touched a white House intern are just a couple examples of internal use of social media to influence popular thought.
Lifewire.com, a technology website based in New York, defines an Internet troll as a modern version of the same mythical character. They hide behind their computer screens and go out of their way to cause trouble on the Internet. Like its mythical predecessor, an Internet troll is both angry and disruptive - often for no real reason. The effects can be completely out of proportion to their size.
The question remains what should governments do, if anything, to shut down trolls. In some cases they are freedom fighters trying to rally against a corrupt government. Would it be better to simply keep the Internet as open as possible? Satire, parody, misleading content, impostor content, fabricated content and manipulated content all need to be seen separately from each other and dealt with accordingly. How is that to be accomplished? Who will control it?
The "Like" phenomenon is an important part of the campaign. The more "likes" a piece of news or comment gets on a news or social site, the more likely it is to be believed. People are more likely to believe a headline if they have seen a similar one before. “It didn't even matter if the story was preceded by a warning that it might be fake,” the authors write. “What counted most was familiarity. The more often you hear a claim, the less likely you are to assess it critically.” That's what irritates me about the media's obsession with Trump's Tweets. By repeating them incessantly and parsing them repeatedly, they are validated. That, to some extent, was the genius of the Russian interference in the last election. You don't need sophisticated hackers to implement it either, just a bunch of people promoting a certain meme or thought until it becomes a tsunami overwhelming any other rational discussion; it becomes "the truth." Slick videos, click bait, and viral mimes become the new weapons in undermining democracy effectively grounding billion dollar fighter jets which then become obsolete as the war has already been lost.
As an aside, I remember listening to a commentator who suggested that the Phil Donahue show started the descent into irrationality. He was the first to invite callers on the show live to express their opinion. Soon all the shows were doing it. Callers became the experts and soon everyone was his own expert bypassing the value of people who had actually studied an issue. A bit simplistic perhaps, but there may be a grain of truth there.
Fascinating book.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Review: Cult of the Dead Cow by Joseph Menn
Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting originally of bored but talented teenagers who enjoyed reverse engineering phone systems and early computer software, they evolved into "hactivists" (hackers with a mission), many of whom went on the become influential and and important members of the establishment.
Menn follows the individual careers of cDc members who initially focused on security flaws in Windows. They were completely apolitical but then morphed into " human rights activists and internet freedom advocates, eventually becoming security advisers for powerful institutions.
The hackers all started out delighting in discovering security holes in early Windows software but were dismayed by the reaction of the software giant when these holes were pointed out to them. The reaction was a large ho-hum. suggesting that and if you wanted to have a secure system, "go buy Windows NT. That's an irony since no one "buys" software, you buy a license which immunizes the software developer from accountability and permits them to see access to a product that's defective.
Their dismay is illustrated by this anecdote. The cDc had created a program that revealed the flaws in Windows but it was also a tool that could be used for less than savory purposes. They released it free to everyone as open source so others could revise and manipulate it. The establishment wasn't sure what to make of it. The FBI, while trying to discourage its release decided it didn't violate any existing laws. The anti-virus business was not pleased as it also showed how weak their software was, but many security professionals decided it was a necessary evil if for no other reason than to force Microsoft to fix their security holes. “Microsoft is evil because they sell crap.” One of the cDc members took a copy of the program on a CD to a Microsoft higher-up. He said thanks and was about to insert it into his CD-ROM drive when she, horror-stricken, asked if his computer was networked. It was. She then asked if it was sand-boxed (programs loaded were quarantined until proven safe.) No, was the response, to which she, shocked, pointed out to him that he was just about to load a program from someone he didn't know, a self-identified hacker, into a computer that was not sand-boxed and connected to his entire network and therefore completely vulnerable. That was their state of mind.
Eventually, major businesses realized how important these hackers were and many moved on to become security professionals. As their prominence grew so did the counterculture environment of the early movement begin to fade and they became more political especially after the Chinese student movement was squashed. They began to create software intended for use by dissidents and other cultural reformers, anyone anti-authoritarian.
Under Obama, through Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the hacktivism championed by Brown and the cDc to help with dissident subversion of foreign governments would become American foreign policy, part of a program informally known as “internet in a box.” While generally laudatory, Menn doesn't like all of them. Julian Assange and Jake Applebaum of Wikileaks and the TOR project are not portrayed sympathetically, "draping themselves in morality while serving other causes.” Assange was known for his sexual straying and his current behavior certainly distracts from the more positive aspects of Wikileaks.
Menn is also not afraid to criticism the industry proposing that cybersecurity problems today are at least partly the result of terrible business and engineering decisions made decades ago. These decisions caused problems that still exist. Whether the movement of the hacktivists into the world of corporate and individual greed will be able to remedy some of those structural problems without becoming part of the problem themselves remains to be seen.
To some extent it's the old story: countercultural anti-authoritarian types find success and join the corporate elites. How many Vietnam's most vocal protesters went on to become a prominent part of the culture they had so despised? Beto O'Rourke, one of the early cDc members is now running for President and another is security chief for Facebook! How well did that go...
Great read.
Cult of the Dead Cow is the facetious name of an early group of hackers (white hat) that began as a computer bulletin board (BBS). Consisting originally of bored but talented teenagers who enjoyed reverse engineering phone systems and early computer software, they evolved into "hactivists" (hackers with a mission), many of whom went on the become influential and and important members of the establishment.
Menn follows the individual careers of cDc members who initially focused on security flaws in Windows. They were completely apolitical but then morphed into " human rights activists and internet freedom advocates, eventually becoming security advisers for powerful institutions.
The hackers all started out delighting in discovering security holes in early Windows software but were dismayed by the reaction of the software giant when these holes were pointed out to them. The reaction was a large ho-hum. suggesting that and if you wanted to have a secure system, "go buy Windows NT. That's an irony since no one "buys" software, you buy a license which immunizes the software developer from accountability and permits them to see access to a product that's defective.
Their dismay is illustrated by this anecdote. The cDc had created a program that revealed the flaws in Windows but it was also a tool that could be used for less than savory purposes. They released it free to everyone as open source so others could revise and manipulate it. The establishment wasn't sure what to make of it. The FBI, while trying to discourage its release decided it didn't violate any existing laws. The anti-virus business was not pleased as it also showed how weak their software was, but many security professionals decided it was a necessary evil if for no other reason than to force Microsoft to fix their security holes. “Microsoft is evil because they sell crap.” One of the cDc members took a copy of the program on a CD to a Microsoft higher-up. He said thanks and was about to insert it into his CD-ROM drive when she, horror-stricken, asked if his computer was networked. It was. She then asked if it was sand-boxed (programs loaded were quarantined until proven safe.) No, was the response, to which she, shocked, pointed out to him that he was just about to load a program from someone he didn't know, a self-identified hacker, into a computer that was not sand-boxed and connected to his entire network and therefore completely vulnerable. That was their state of mind.
Eventually, major businesses realized how important these hackers were and many moved on to become security professionals. As their prominence grew so did the counterculture environment of the early movement begin to fade and they became more political especially after the Chinese student movement was squashed. They began to create software intended for use by dissidents and other cultural reformers, anyone anti-authoritarian.
Under Obama, through Hillary Clinton’s State Department, the hacktivism championed by Brown and the cDc to help with dissident subversion of foreign governments would become American foreign policy, part of a program informally known as “internet in a box.” While generally laudatory, Menn doesn't like all of them. Julian Assange and Jake Applebaum of Wikileaks and the TOR project are not portrayed sympathetically, "draping themselves in morality while serving other causes.” Assange was known for his sexual straying and his current behavior certainly distracts from the more positive aspects of Wikileaks.
Menn is also not afraid to criticism the industry proposing that cybersecurity problems today are at least partly the result of terrible business and engineering decisions made decades ago. These decisions caused problems that still exist. Whether the movement of the hacktivists into the world of corporate and individual greed will be able to remedy some of those structural problems without becoming part of the problem themselves remains to be seen.
To some extent it's the old story: countercultural anti-authoritarian types find success and join the corporate elites. How many Vietnam's most vocal protesters went on to become a prominent part of the culture they had so despised? Beto O'Rourke, one of the early cDc members is now running for President and another is security chief for Facebook! How well did that go...
Great read.
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Time for a new deity?
Isn't it funny how many people fall back on the "thoughts and prayers" mantra after a tragedy. You'd think they would have learned by now that it's a meaningless gesture. Unless they are praying for more senseless violence, the prayers are definitely not working. Or, perhaps their God isn't listening, could care less, is evil, or isn't there. Perhaps it's time to switch gods. I understand Zeus and Apollo are soliciting new worshippers and they have a better track record.
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