Ancient Rumors about RAND Dismissed

There are two old rumors about RAND that I think anyone who cares already knows are not true, but just in case, and because sometimes publishing on a blog can have long term archival uses, lets go over them.

1. I always liked the rumor that there was a tunnel under RAND to make it possible to get things or people in and out without being seen.  Presumably this tunnel would have gone to the promenade somewhere, but not necessarily.  This would have been the old buildings which no longer exist of course.  I dont think this tunnel ever existed.  There was, or rather, is, an underground river that passes underneath RAND or the general area and empties into the ocean.  Or so I was told by Facilities.

2. There is a belief that Dr. Henry Kissinger worked at RAND.  I don't think so.  It would have made sense for him to have occasion to visit now and then for a seminar or a meeting.  He was, after all, a senior academic in the national security apparatus.  It is even possible that he was briefly a consultant, although I dont know that for sure.  However, I dont think he was ever an employee the way some people believe.

RAND Alumni Event and Dr. Donald B Rice

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The RAND Alumni event had only a few people I knew present, but I was happy to see and be able to talk to those who were there.  Among them was Michael O'Brien, Cara McCormick and Herb Shukiar.  But most of all, I was amazed to run into Dr. Rice who was president of RAND when I was there.  I thanked him for hiring me back in those days when I was a college drop out.

 

 

Dr. Donald B Rice 

 

The Pernicious Impact of Frivolous use of Ancient Computers (JOSS #1)

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JOSS was the RAND Corporation's internally developed timesharing system to permit one computer to be used by many people (researchers) in their work and in a way that was more convivial than punching cards or paper tapes with machine code.   JOSS stands for "Johnniac Open Shop System".  In researching this important early system, I came across this beautiful description of an unexpected and, in the eyes of a key developer, an undesirable effect of making JOSS more available to researchers at RAND.

The researcher wrote:

In the summary and conclusions section of RM-5270-PR

Rand 1700 Main Street Re-creation

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A real time simulation of the early RAND buildings at 1700 Main Street in Santa Barbara.  This is a screenshot from version 53.

 

It runs best in Google Chrome by the way, but it will run in any browser that has WebGL enabled. It may take a few seconds to load textures.

https://mwahrman.com/dist_053/rand_0_53.html

The MidCentury Building That is No Longer There

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I am trying to recreate 1700 Main Street with computer graphics.  This will be more difficult than I anticipated.  

The problem, or the opportunity if you will, is that 1700 Main Street was actually and sincerely a midcentury building and I am constantly puzzled by details and ideas that I do not remember. I was very young when I was there, you know. A child, really. The corridors are without lights and there is no moon in the sky. I am not sure I recognize this building. Is this what they call cognitive dissonance?

I dont recall them asking me before they tore this building down.

 

Slaves

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It turns out that all my friends are afraid that if we have a conversation about any of a number of issues in our society, issues involving the 2nd amendment or freedom of speech and so forth, that the Gestapo will come and take them away and kill them. How far down we have come from a free society. Or maybe it was always this way and I was permitted to have such discussions at the RAND Corporation but did not realize that outside that priviledged zone the slaves, I mean the citizens, were not permitted the privilege.

Gainful Employment, Society is At Fault

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Fragment of a larger essay.

I had the misfortune of working at RAND as a college drop out and being part of the early ARPA community, and that set expectations for the workplace which have not been met. Symbolics (an MIT AI Lab spinoff was part of this enlightened conspiracy, so was the MIT Media Lab in its earlier Architecture Machine form). I blame society because I was treated so well to begin with.

A Story About the Civilian Use of Force in International Conflict

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On the occasion of Donald Trump, the moron king, attacking Syria and blaming Obama for Syria using chemical weapons, I have an anecdote from my days at the RAND Corporation.

There is a story from RAND that would have happened years before my time if it happened at all.

For many years, RAND managed for the US Government a lot of the original strategic simulations, what are popularly called wargames but which are more properly described as simulations of international conflict. They may not be primarily about war. Basically you had teams (red team, blue team, etc) and you had referees who managed the game, but what made the games interesting (and classified) was that the teams were made up of real people from the Dept of Defense, the US Military, the NSC, possibly members of Congress and so forth.

The goal would be to evaluate some different scenarios where nations might come into conflict and evaluate different policies, approaches, and so forth in advance. Anyone who has ever been through any of these types of simulations, even on a more informal basis, will tell you how involving and compelling they can be.

So you had civilians and military personnel mixed together in tension filled situations and you might expect, if you watched stupid Hollywood movies that it would be the military personnel who would first call for war and that it would be the civilians who would beg for peace. Give peace a chance, they might say. But the story I was told was pretty much the reverse of that. That it was the military personnel who knew damn well what war involved who were for diplomatic solutions but it was the civilians, the politicians, who were freaked out and "pushed the button" so to speak. 

Take that for what you will.

Moron Trump pushing the button

Globalization and its Discontents Part 2/2

I can't imagine anything more futile and tedious than spending time agonizing over how to present what I have learned about some of the structural economic issues of this country. It goes without saying that i have no credibility in this area and that there is zero opportunity for my opinions to make the slightest difference.

On the other hand, I have read that a so-called democracy depends upon an informed electorate assuming, that is, that we do have a democracy, which I doubt. And some of the most important issues that we as a nation face are at the very least non-trivial and with a long and interesting history so it hasnt been entirely boring for me, but for you, thats not so clear.

If we are going to participate in the political process, then it is up to us to investigate what is going on, what the options are, correlate what we have been told with what actually happened in order to form judgments about future behavior and take what positive steps we can in a world out of our control. Furthermore, certain of the issues described below, although they are part of a very complicated economic system, do seem to have some straightforward partial solutions that would be helpful.

I will call these “naive solutions”. I mean, why not?

So with my undergraduate degree in Economics in hand, I boldly set out to understand what is going on with certain economic policies of our country. Probably no one term describes these structural issues but the one most often used is “globalization” and that will have to do for now. And the goal of my little adventure in civics and participatory democracy is to learn more about what is going on in our economy which seems to have substantially changed in the last 30 years.

Lets ask some fundamental questions.

1. Just how many unemployed people are there in this country?

I grew up at the RAND Corporation, the very home and heart of quantitative research in this country. All economic measures are imperfect but they are often useful. We need some way to judge the effect(s) of policy, and if we are using modeling and simulation, some way to evaluate the results of proposed changes in policy.

I assumed that the “unemployment rate” that we hear so much about was an imperfect measure of the percentage of Americans who are either completely unemployed or mostly unemployed. Imperfect is not the right way to describe this measure, a better way might be “deliberately deceptive”. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “unemployment rate” only measures the percentage of people in this country who had become unemployed in the last 18 months and are still unemployed. If you have been unemployed for more than 18 months, then you are no longer counted. But of the people I know who are unemployed, by far the ones who are most affected are those who have been unemployed for longer than 18 months. How many of those are there? No one seems to know.

Furthermore, there is no measure, as far as I can tell, of the number of people who did find work, but at a rate far lower than the one they had previously. So, if they previously worked as a Marketing professional at $80K/year but are now working slinging burgers at Jack in the Box, this is not measured. There is also no accounting for the people who have given up trying to work, but would be working if they could.

But our government does not measure or attempt to measure this. And when they talk about the unemployment rate they are deliberately lying. Well, I dont find that acceptable. What are they trying to hide. Thats an easy question to answer. They dont want to know how miserable people are in this country due to their policies and they dont want you to know either.

2. But, how much of this unemployment and underemployment is the result of “globalization”?

It would be easy to find out if they wanted to know, all they would have to do is to ask the companies that lay people off, or who no longer outsource to American companies, how many people they laid off or what is the value of the contract now sent overseas.

This would not tell the whole story.  If $500 million dollars worth of salaries is extracted from a community and sent overseas to save $50 million for the corporation, that $500 million is no longer being spent in the local community. How many people does that effect and how to do you measure it?  And then of course that money is itself recycled through the community many times, perhaps to a lesser degree.  Given enough time and a research library, I would probably find that economists have measured or modeled this effect in the economy.  For our purposes it is enough to know that we do not know how much the mere outsourcing of work to save a few dollars for the corporation hurts the rest of us.

But just like the unemployment rate, we would expect that our government would want to know these numbers and would make an effort to estimate them. But they do not. All that is reported, if anything is reported, is that the corporation saved $50 million dollars that year by outsourcing. That must be nice for that corporation, and their shareholders, but how about the rest of us?

3. Surely you do not advocate "Protectionism"? What about "market forces"? 

Yes, there are market forces at work, but there are also many government forces, subsidies, taxes and so forth at work as well.  And believe it or not, "market forces" do not absolve anyone from ethics, planning or thinking.

Protectionism is a naughty word in Washington.  The code word du jour is "free trade". As previously referred to in a test case, should we allow a corporation to save $50 million if it costs our citizens $500 million in salaries?  Our Washington elite says yes. They say that so-called "free trade" will help everyone. Does it? Prove it.  

4. But doesnt Globalization help everyone?

In a word, no.

If 90% of the wealth of this country is owned by 1 percent of the population, then if profits are increased for some major corporations, those profits go to the 1 percent. But its worse than that. Not only does this not take into account the lost income to the now-unemployed workers, it does not take into account how much of that income would go to local taxes and to local businesses as people live their lives. In other words, Globalization deliberately increases the profits of the rich at the expense of the working classes and the local communities.

Furthermore, it is completely obvious to anyone who reviews the history of this process that the people who are most hurt by these policies are the people who are least able to afford it.  The worker with tiny savings can not just simply be unemployed and go get retrained as a lawyer.  First, he has a family to support. Second he has no money for school.  Third he is an older worker and our society is ageist as can be, and furthermore is ageist with specific government support to be so.  (1)

5. Why do you say the government specifically did this to hurt most Americans?  Isnt that paranoid? 

Of course.  Or maybe being called paranoid is just an ad hominem attack by people who do not want to discuss the issues.

It is the responsibility of our law makers, our bureaucracies, and our justice system to create and then implement a body of complex laws, rules, precedent and so forth.  When someone who is an elected representative tries to get support for a law, or a treaty, or a judgment and tells people it will make them more prosperous when he or she knows full well that it will not, then what do you call that?

The issues associated with so-called "globalization" have been well known in economic circles since the 19 th century. Technology has made things somewhat different, there is more work that can be sent offshore, but this is hardly the first time this phenomenon has been seen. Our politicians and leaders of industry knew to a great extent what the result would be and they did it anyway and lied about how it would be good for us the whole time.  When they knew full well that the people who would benefit would be the rich, and that the people who would be hurt would be the middle classes and the poor.  And they did nothing whatsoever to mitigate that very predictable result.  

Nor have they tried to even measure the result as we have shown.  

6. Arent you oversimplifying this situation?

Yes, the situation is far worse and far more blatantly abusive than I have described.  Lets go a little deeper.

Our government has worked to encourage business to send work to countries where slave labor, indentured labor, and vast numbers of impoverished workers look for anything to do to make a living.  They knew full well that this infinite sink of cheap labor would impoverish a tremendous number of Americans, but they did absolutely nothing to mitigate it.  What could they possibly do, you say?  One, there could be laws against sending work to countries and companies that use slave and indentured labor. Second, these laws would have to include criminal sentences and mandatory jail time for all executives of a company, to the very top, or they would do it anyway, as business in America always breaks the law to make a fast buck.  Third, we can make provision for the displaced American worker to be able to support their family and pay for their graduate school.  Fourth, we can pay for the previous item because the company that displaced them will pay for this retraining out of the profits made from globalization.  Anything else would merely say to the company, make as much money as you want but do not for a second be concerned or responsible for the immense suffering and economic results of the greed of the corporation.

Instead the government and corporations pretend that outsourcing or offshoring does not have negative effects in this country.  But it does, and someone has to pay for it.  Why not have the corporation that benefited from such outsourcing pay for it?

7. Our government has failed to enforce treaties and trade agreements designed to create a level playing field.

The case study of the visual effects and motion picture industries is quite illuminating.  The commonwealth nations (UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have created subsidies for foreign filmmakers to bring their films to these countries.  A producer who brings $10 million worth of production work to Canada will receive a check for $4 million up front.  No producer can resist that. This has affected all the filmmaking arts and crafts, but it has wiped out the American visual effects business (with a few exceptions).  Almost all visual effects has moved offshore and while some Americans have been able to leave the country and find work, or temporary work, many have not been able to do so and have been required to leave the industry and / or are otherwise impoverished.

There are laws about such things. There are treaties. There are remedies.  But in general it requires our State Department to act and they will not act if the elected representatives do not ask them to.  And our representatives will not ask the State Department to act unless the citizens demand it.  But labor is not organized in visual effects so they do not ask, or demand, their elected representatives to help them (or to invoke any of the other remedies that exist to deal with this kind of problem).

Our government had a responsibility to act and it did not do so, and as a result many, many people were impoverished and had to leave the country.  And why?  Because the movie studio wanted the subsidies, it helped them, not the worker.  But who cares about the worker, the non-shareholder? I presume that the field of visual effects is not unique, and that if our government is so completely in the pocket of the large corporation and against the worker in this industry, that the government also acts against the interests of the worker in other industries as well.

Isnt this really the fault of the worker for not organizing? Well, maybe, that is certainly part of the problem here. Maybe our system should require labor to organized to defend their basic rights? After all, the people who are hurt are not just those who did not organize (the craft of Visual Effects) but the local economies as well. But isnt this really just blaming the victim? Its all her fault because she did not scream loud enough when being raped? Maybe.

8. But what could our government do to change the situation?

The following would in no way solve all the problems.  Peoples lives have been destroyed to increase the profits of the rich and we can not turn back the clock.

First, measure unemployment. Second, pay for retraining (calculated at about 250K per person). Third, stop abusive visa programs such as the H2B program. Fourth, compel the corporations to pay their share of the retraining. Fifth, see to it the costs of shipping and communications reflects real costs and does not violate our laws. Sixth, enforce the trade laws regarding subsidies. Seventh, criminalize the corporate violations of the law that result in American unemployment. Eighth, stop oppressing the middle and lower classes with taxes, but increase the taxes on the rich. Backdate this five years. Ninth, use our intelligence community to shut down the transfer of wealth to off shore tax shelters and the work of companies to do the same. Tenth, make it illegal for our corporations to outsource or off shore work to companies that use indentured labor, slave labor, or suppress workers rights. As always with our corporations, these requirements must have criminal penalties attached.  Eleventh, the subsidy issue in the motion picture industry proves that labor must be organized to fight for its rights in our government, so not only must the "right to work" bullshit be eliminated, but unions of one type or another must become mandatory.  Twelfth, force our government to create a strategic economic plan for the economic well being of all our citizens. We have strategic plans for defense and energy, we should have one for our economy. Thirteenth, reduce the influence of big corporations on the political system.  Do this one first.

9. What conclusions should we draw?

I concluded from my little research project into the economic policies of this country the following:

1. That the policies that go under the term of "free trade" were guaranteed to impoverish and/or economically damage the American worker.

2. That the US Government knew this and lied to the American people about the likely economic results of their policies in order to increase the profits of the rich.

3. That the US Government does not measure nor does it want to measure the amount of economic distress that exists in this country.

4. That the US Government does not enforce the laws and treaties that might mitigate the distress their policies have caused.

5. That the US Government has not taken any of the steps or implemented the policies that would assist the American worker in this economy.

6. That in order for us, the 99 percent, to change this situation we will have to change our government, and force them to make the changes.  These changes include measuring the distress, stopping certain visa programs, implementing laws against outsourcing and offshoring to companies and countries using slave or indentured labor, or who deny worker rights, implementing new training and education programs for all Americans that put them on a even footing with the children of the rich, making it illegal to outsource or offshore unless it can be shown that the net benefit to society as a whole (and not just the profits of the corporation) are positive, criminalizing corporate malfeasance, making it illegal to outsource or outshore work to governments and companies known to be involved in immoral and unethical activities, creating real and non-insulting benefits for our unemployed and impoverished, force the State Department to implement the laws regarding subsidies, change the tax structure of this country to put the burden on the rich, and discover and punish off-shore and illegal tax accounts by our rich and our corporations.

Some of these are easier to do than others, but all of them are doable and should be done at once. Ha. Maybe you think that is unrealistic, and you are probably right. Our government has made it very clear what they think about the working classes of this country.

They could not care less.

[To follow: a post on the need to criminalize corporate crime and more specific remedies for the economic inequality our government has so conscientiously brought into being].

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1. You are invited to spend a day reviewing the laws about ageism and ask yourself whether there is any chance for one second that these laws are intended, in any meaningful way, to prevent discrimination based on age.  My conclusion after spending a week on it, is that there is not the slightest chance in hell that these laws are expected to be taken seriously.  One more time our government pays lip service to some nice sounding social policy but does nothing to make it happen.  It would be a joke, if any of it was funny.

2. See the Congressional Research Service Report "The Economic Effects of Trade: Overview and Policy Challenges" at https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44546.pdf

R Stockton Gaines in Memoriam

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One of my favorite people from the RAND Corporation and its no long existent Information Sciences Department has passed away.

R. Stockton Gaines was a PhD from Princeton, a longtime editor of the ACM for Operating Systems and a pioneer of secure computing.

There is a memorial service coming up this weekend.

This has been a very bad year for this sort of thing.

This post will be updated with more information later.

Snowden and Ellsberg Compared

The following essay may have to be read with a “sarcasm alert”.

I am sorry, I just could not resist.  Back when Ed Snowden was newsworthy and before he disappeared off the media radar, I was hearing him compared to Dr. Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers' fame.  Now Danny Ellsberg used to smoke dope on the beach with a good friend of mine who was at RAND at the same time, so I feel a certain, close, personal relationship.   And even though Danny has publicly congratulated Snowden, as all truly committed lefties are required to do, I just had to write this post comparing the two people and events because ... well you will see.

None of this particularly addresses the issue of whether the various materials should have been leaked.  That is a topic for another day.

So I am now going to compare the two men in the areas of education, experience, knowledge in the domain, and so forth.   Lets see where it goes.  

1. Education.

Dr. Ellsberg was scholarship to Harvard in Economics where he was summa cum laude, went to Cambridge University on a Woodrow Wilson scholarship and completed his PhD in Economics at Harvard. Ed Snowden dropped out of Arundel High School in Maryland.

2. Prior Experience.

In 1959, Dr. Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. Ed Snowden dropped out of high school to be a sysadmin for the CIA and later for the NSA through a contracting agency. The CIA identified Snowden as a security risk and terminated his involvement but failed to communicate that information to the NSA.

3. Depth of Knowledge in the Area

Dr. Ellsberg was a recognized member of the national security apparatus and co-author of the report in question. Ed Snowden simply vacuumed up everything he could get his hands on, including stealing security keys from other people, and dumped the material in the public domain. He has no credentials in any of the areas where he released material.

4. Role That They Played in Creating the Material

Dr. Ellsberg was one of the authors of the report that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Ed Snowden had no role whatsoever in the materials he copied without permission and released.

5. The Process By Which the Material Was Released

Ellsberg approach various members of congress to try and get them to both read and release in the Congressional Record the report (thus making it difficult to prosecute anyone). Whoever Ellsberg approached would not do it. Eventually he gave a copy to a NY Times reporter with the (supposed) intent that it not be published, more as background, I suppose. Well the NY Times decided to publish it. I dont know the truth of the matter, but I suspect hairs are / were being split on who could legally be prosecuted. Snowden fled the country before releasing anything and found someone who in my opinion is highly motivated to release material no matter how much it hurts this country, Greenwald. That Greenwald received the Pulitzer prize for this is a disgrace and lowers the credibility of the Pulitzer, IMHO. In any case, Snowden was no where near as clever or responsible as Ellsberg. He leaked everything and then fled to the most oppressive surveillance state on the planet. Many knowledgable people believe that he was working for Russian intelligence more or less all along. Dismiss that as paranoia if you will, that is what they believe, and the people who believe it have access to much more information than you or I do.

6. The Nature of the Material Released

Dr. Ellsberg released a report that was primarily about the history of the Vietnam war and the decision making that led to our involvement. Because the report had information from very secret sources it did compromise sources that were directly involved with this area and (supposedly) led to the death of many people (possibly a few hundred) of people who risked their lives to help us. Ed Snowden released information on a vast number of current operations and activities, activities for which he should not have had access, and released them indiscriminately. The full impact will not be known for years, but it is likely that the death toll will be huge. The impact on foreign policy and international relationships is far afield from what Snowden claimed he was interested in, which is to say domestic surveillance, will also be huge. In fact, very little of the Snowden material released pertains to domestic surveillance and no one could seriously take that as a motivation for his activities. In other words, Ellsberg's leaked information about the past in order to demonstrate that the POTUS was not completely honest with the American people. Snowden released information about the present, in a vast number of areas, completely unrelated to his announced motivation for the release.

7. Actions after the Release of the Material

Dr. Ellsberg stayed in the United States and said he would take responsibility for his actions. His trial was thrown out of court by the judge due to the famous misdeeds of the Nixon Administration and his Plumbers. Arguably this was one aspect of the Watergate scandal that led ultimately to Nixon's resignation. Snowden fled the country and, demonstrating his unique hypocrisy, took asylum in a country with the most oppressive internal surveillance in the world. He regularly states that he can not get a fair trial in the USA but I think his real concern is that he is likely to get a fair trial in the USA.

8. Other Service

Ellsberg had been ROTC to Harvard and spent two years in the USMC as an officer. Snowden has no service to his country other than as a consultant where he violated his oath.

So as you can see and, in summary, the two cases are very, very similar.

Actually, that was a lie.  The two cases are about as dissimilar as they could be.   So you can conclude at least that anyone who claims to you that they are similar is just an idiot.  From top to bottom, soup to nuts, materials released, credibility of the person who released them, impact on our country, and so forth and so on, they are completely and utterly different.   About the only thing you can say that they had in common is that they both involved the unauthorized release of highly classified material.

Of course, this discussion does not go into the more interesting question, about whether they were right to release the material they did.  My short answer to that question, which is of course of very little interest to the world, will be the subject of another post.

Remembering the Ancient Celebration of the 4th of July in Santa Monica

How should Americans celebrate the Fourth of July? Should it be in comfortable, respectable, middle-class suburbs with tepid, but safe, fireworks shows? Or should it be an exuberant recreation of that famous artillery barrage from long ago when the enemy cannon fire illuminated the battlefield with explosions at night and revealed to all sides that we stood defiant? Should it be boring, safe, sane, and white, with only people like us participating, or should it be filled with immigrants of every type who have come to this country to try to have a better life in this uncaring and corrupt world?

Santa Monica, a notorious “beach city” as Raymond Chandler related in his various works of fiction [My friend Nick reminds me that it was called "Bay City" in the Chandler novels], and the City of Los Angeles participated for many years in what they planned to be a respectable Fourth of July show.  To their amazement, and with absolutely no intention or planning, the celebration took on a life of its own, and became a day at the beach for hundreds of thousands of people from all over the city, of all colors and financial means.  Although they could barely speak English, if they could speak English at all, they somehow found their way from East LA, South LA, the east and west ends of the valley, Pomona, Compton, and even Watts to celebrate America's birthday.   I suspect that this tradition built up over decades until when I witnessed it, in the late 1970s, it had become a phenomenal street festival.   The estimates for the number of people who attended each year are fairly mind-boggling, but lets just say that many hundreds of thousands would be an estimate on the low end.   Kids came with their friends, or parents brought their children, to spend the day at the beach and then, when darkness fell, to set off, ignite, explode, and hurl through the air vast numbers of legal but mostly illegal fireworks.

A picture of the Santa Monica Pier with lots of people.

Packed nearly shoulder to shoulder on the Promenade in the darkness, barefooted and in shorts, an observer would hear languages and laughter in all the world's languages as he or she tried to navigate the masses of apparently very happy people who threw exploding and illegal M80s and cherry bombs, Picolo Petes and roman candles at and around each other. One friend of mine from the RAND Corporation described it as similar to being in Vietnam in which one moved in darkness and smoke while the native populations jabbered in languages you did not understand while throwing or firing munitions in all directions in some sort of wild frenzy.  The smell, not of napalm, but of black snakes and expended roman candles filled the air. Sparklers were lit, waved around, and thrown at random into the air or through the crowd.  Broken glass and the expended munitions, used sparklers and any other type of portable, hand held, fireworks and some firearms littered the beach and yet barefoot participants of all ages seemed to navigate the broken glass and expended sparkler field without concern or apparent harm.

At 9 PM the main fireworks show was detonated from the Santa Monica pier and presented the usual community fireworks show as one might see in many places in this country, with the added value of having a nice Pacific Ocean to reflect off of when, that is, the evil Santa Monica fog did not obscure everything which it usually did about half the time.  When that was over, the crowd gradually dispersed, many of them having been there all day, and being out of ammunition, went to their homes in every part of the city, somehow.

This is the new-style Santa Monica Pier.  The pier in the 1970s was much more tacky and authentic.

The next day the City of Santa Monica would awaken to the unenviable task of trying to clean the beach of massive amounts of broken glass, unbroken glass, sparklers, expended cartridges and generic trash of all possible types.   Recall that when walking barefoot on the beach, a former sparkler resembles nothing so much as a nearly invisible spike of dirty metal ready to puncture the unwary foot.  It would take all the next day and often the day after that to clean the sand and beach of dangerous, sharp objects.

Every year would come reports of wounds, burns, broken bones and unhappy and damaged children of all ages, some of whom had been actively hurling fireworks at each other at the time, and some of whom were just hanging with the family and became collateral damage.   Of course, every year, there was a call for someone to arrange a Fourth of July celebration that did not have so many injuries involved.

Finally the Cities of Los Angeles and Santa Monica decided to put a stop to this very unhealthy but entertaining situation and made fireworks of any type illegal on the beach.  They encouraged people to attend fireworks shows in their own neighborhoods and told everyone that if they were found with fireworks on their person that they would go to jail.

Some of us, more conspiracy minded, wondered if they woke up to the realization that they had created the potential for a serious civil disturbance.  Lets say on a very hot Fourth of July some Latino got hassled by the incredibly racist and violent LAPD and did not fall to his knees in abject submission as all minority groups are supposed to do.  The LAPD would naturally beat the miscreant into bloody unconsciousness which is their standard procedure in such circumstances (see, for example, Rodney King).    And suddenly you might have a riot on your hands with the minority groups already in the wealthy parts of the city and armed with M80s and other minor explosives.

But probably those who mismanage LA are actually not smart enough to come up with a reason like that, and simply wanted to lower their costs and minimize the injuries to try and prevent the otherwise inevitable lawsuit.

I am glad that I was able to observe this celebration on several years running and regret that it no longer exists in spite of the undeniable fact that it was insanely dangerous and out of control.  It was, in retrospect, a lot of fun for everyone involved.

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Wikipedia Page on M80s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-80_(explosive)

Dr. Willis Ware 1920 - 2013

I was devastated yesterday to hear of the passing of one of the most interesting people I have ever met or worked with, Dr. Willis Ware formerly of the RAND Corporation.

Dr. Ware passed away at the far too young age of 93 years old.

Most people at RAND had no idea what he did, just that he was very senior.

I met Dr. Ware at the RAND Corporation when I was just 21 or so years old, and Willis was already some sort of Scientist Emeritus at RAND and while no one seemed to know exactly what he did he, suspiciously, had a three window office and a full-time secretary/assistant. With this information we knew he was powerful beyond measure. They said that he testified before Congress on the issues of privacy, and that of course was important but seemed to only add to the mystery.

Several clues revealed themselves as time went by.

Clue #1 He knew my interest in graphics and he wanted to show me a film he had with a user interface that he thought was interesting. It turned out to be none other than one of the famous films of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis work at MITRE when he was a graduate student at MIT. To this day I consider that user interface to be one of the top five or so I have ever seen.

Clue #2 We were chatting about nothing in particular and he told me the story of how he had worked to bring Dr. von Neumann to RAND after the war and when he was bored at the Institute at Princeton. von Neumann, whose computer architecture you are using while you read my blog, most likely, was going to come to RAND and UCLA and split his time between them. But unfortunately he died suddenly of brain cancer.

Clue #3 Somehow it came to my attention that Willis had received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton in 1939. Look up 1939 in history, recall that the new Intelligence agencies (really the proto-agencies, the ones we know were formed after WWII from these proto-agencies) recruited heavily from the Ivy League and imagine what someone with a PhD in EE might do in the upcoming conflict.

Clue #4 Although Willis did not seem to work on any run of the mill projects at RAND, he did travel every six months and spent a week somewhere in Maryland. Fort Meade, Maryland, as it turned out. In fact, I saw above his secretaries desk an agenda and it said he attended the "SAB" at Ft. Meade, Maryland. Now, what is at Ft. Meade? Well, the National Security Agency is. And what might the SAB be ? Well, it is something called the "Scientific Advisory Board" which meets every six months.

The Scientific Advisory Board of the NSA is the body responsible at a very high level for advising the NSA on technologies of interest and issues that they should be addressing. In short, Willis had some sort of very serious position advising the NSA. A senior spook, at least in part.

Clue #5 Willis and I were discussing WWII and Enigma one day and I told him that I was guessing that there were still secrets from WWII that had not been revealed. And he said to me that he knew for a fact that there were secrets and events from WWII that had not been released and that, in his opinion, they should be.

Clue #6 At random intervals, maybe once or twice a year, Willis would travel on a short trip to Washington, DC. No one knew what he did there, but it was suggested to me, by someone who knew Willis well, that he was used by various elements of the Intelligence Community when it was necessary to liason with another part. In other words, he was some sort of prestigious messenger when some sort of issue or discussion needed to take place. Now, I may have that wrong, or incomplete, and of course it is vague, but I think it still has valid information.

Clue #7 In 1967, DARPA commissioned a report on "Security Controls in Computer Systems".  The report was reissued in 1979.   Written by Dr. Ware, you may find this report on the Cryptome site at http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm

And so, who was Dr. Willis Ware ?

I think he was a pioneer of computing and information technology, and a recognized authority on the impact on policy, particularly the policy of privacy, at very high levels of government. I think he was in some sense a spook during WW II and that he maintained his relationship with the primary user of computers in intelligence, the NSA, and was on their advisory board. He maintained an office at RAND and did his own work because it was a useful platform that kept him in touch with Washington, yet outside the beltway madness that so many succumb to. RAND gave him a certain long term cachet, and RAND management of course loved him because their very raison d'etre is to influence policy in Washington, and clearly Willis did just that.

I also suspect that there is more public history here than I know and will no doubt discover over the next few weeks. Willis was probably involved in the Mathematics Division of the RAND Corporation back when RAND had two mathematics-related departments: abstract and applied.   Computer science, such as it became, came from the applied math department.   When I was with RAND, we had a small computer science department that was in some way derived from these much larger efforts of the past. Today, RAND has no computer science department although there are individual computer scientists and programmers lurking in the hallways. (1)

Finally, Willis is one of the reasons that I am so screwed up today. You see, back then, at RAND, I was treated as a real human being, with intelligence and something to contribute. Today I am treated like garbage by nearly everyone but especially in my own field and it was those expectations that got set at RAND that led inevitably to my downfall.

I will really miss you Willis, wherever you are.

[The NY Times has an obituary of Willis at 
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/technology/willis-ware-who-helped-build-blueprint-for-computer-design-dies-at-93.html?_r=0]

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1. Part of the reason that RAND had a computer science department(s), was because RAND believed it was of strategic importance to the US Government. As time went by, computer science spread to the more traditional venues of University and Industry and so RAND no longer needed to do that. There were other things that were more important and more in line with their specific missions in the context of Congressional limitations on the maximum size of the annual budgets of places like RAND.

Joni Mitchell and the Perception of Small Differences in Musical Performance

[being written 7/16/2013]

This will be part of the Los Angeles in the 60s, 70s, and 80s topic, when that gets organzied]

It seems to be a human capability to listen to music and perceive tiny differences in performance. We are able to do this even on music they have not heard recently and even on music of considerable length. Who has not had the experience of hearing a song they knew well on the radio and then suddenly realize that this version is slightly different, it turns out to be a different version of the song never released, or from a demo made by the band, or for the European release, perhaps a live performance somewhere.

This fabulous demonstration of signal processing and memory storage and acquisition must have a purpose, the sincere but naive Darwinist, exclaims. Perhaps. But it could also be the accidental result of some other capability or capabilities that evolved and was selected because it was useful for some other reason or reasons entirely. Perhaps it is part of how we recognize when we are home, audio being such an important sense. Perhaps it is part of the amazing "friend or foe" recognition circuitry that lets us know if someone is of the tribe or not of the tribe, or whether the ritual is being performed correctly. Whatever it is, it seems remarkable how well it works.

For whatever reason, if there is a reason, that we have this capability, I have a story about it from when I lived at the beach and worked at the RAND Corporation.

In the 1970s I lived at the ocean in a rent-controlled apartment complex called the Seacastle Apartments. The building is famous for being a well known hotel built in the 1920s (I think), then a run-down dive near the beach during the 1940s and 1950s, and finally received a million dollar grant from HUD (Housing and Urban Development) to fix it up and turn it into low-income housing in the 1960s. The owner took the $1,000,000 and went to Mexico and HUD ended up owning the building by default. This being Los Angeles, I am pretty sure they tore it down to put up something so the rich could enjoy the view and get rid of the worthless poor and middle class people who were there before.[Correction... it is still there, sortof.  It has been turned into something called blusantamonica.com, which are expensive townhouses for rich people.  They must have gutted the place to rebuild it].  I lived there in a cave, very inexpensively, and worked at RAND.

A Google Earth view of the Seacastle Apartments now turned into Townhouses for Rich People

There were apartments in the front that faced the Pacific ocean. Not fancy, and very tiny for the most part, their view was unbelievable. Very, very difficult to get one of those apartments, and when you had one you did not want to give it up. This is in Santa Monica 1/2 block south of the Santa Monica Pier and on the Promenade, the real Promenade, not the shopping center, the walk path in front of the beach.

There were many colorful stories about this building some of which might even have been true. Of course the HUD story above is one of them, but there are also stories of the period when "ladies of the night" worked the building in the 1950s, of famous surfers who had lived there, and famous musicians and writers who could not afford even the low rent, and so forth. One story was that Joni Mitchell still had an apartment there, on the 2nd floor, in the front, or perhaps a boyfriend did, or perhaps she kept a poor boyfriend there who was also a musician, a starving one. The stories differed. I never believed any of them. It was all just local color to me, worth repeating, but very little chance of being true. Or maybe it was true once, long ago, but no longer.

I don't remember why I was able to be in front of the Seacastle to watch a sunset, as I usually worked at RAND from noon to 2AM or so. So this was probably on a weekend as I had started to take one day a week off, as I noticed that seemed to help my work in the long run. Whatever the reason, I was sitting on the wall between the promenade and the beach and watching a spectacular sunset, which probably meant that the Santa Monica mountains were burning down. A fire was always good for enhancing sunsets, adding all that debris from the burned houses of Malibu millionaires would always contribute to our sunset quality. They should burn Malibu houses down regularly as it would improve our quality of life.

It is the nature of apartment buildings of this type that you can hear everything, and I could hear that someone in the front was playing music. It was a Joni Mitchell album and I could hear it in the background and I did not pay any attention. It was not very loud, you could barely hear it above the sound of the ocean. I knew her albums well and I had seen her perform live on several occassions and I was very familiar with her music.

Joni Mitchell live on the Johnny Cash Show 1969

I was watching the sunset and not paying any attention when I realized that something was wrong. The music was different somehow, not much, but different. It was definitely Joni Mitchell, and it was one of her songs, but this was a performance I had never heard before. I am not sure if it was the phrasing, or the pacing, or something about the guitar accompaniment, or what it was. Her voice was very soft in the background and the sound of the ocean intermittantly overwhelmed her singing.   Whatever this was, I thought, it was very well done, her voice sounded wonderful, completely alive, as well as I had ever heard it.

I don't recall what songs she played, but it was early Joni Mitchell and to my memory it sounded similar to this one from the premiere of the Johnny Cash Show in 1969.

The music stopped in mid-stanza. She played guitar and seemed to be talking to someone. I couldn't really hear. The music started again in mid verse, then stopped, then switched to another song and she played for a few more minutes, pretty much just playing around, and then she stopped.

Joni Mitchell was upstairs, behind me, on the 2nd floor somewhere, watching the sunset with someone and the window was open and she was just practicing or more likely just goofing off.   The reason she sounded so good, of course, was that it wasn't a recording.

I listened for a few minutes and then it stopped and I never heard her again.

So you see, sometimes the crazy stories you hear are true.

I Was a Limo Driver for Bruno Bozzetto

Once upon a time, back when I was a fan of animation, animation meant 2D animation for the most part.  Certainly not 3D animation. And in those days, perhaps 1977,  I used to attend various international animation film festivals, or at least, would see collections of animation from those festivals.  And although I was not working in animation (1), I was a member of ASIFA. I remember having posters about animation festivals from Zagreb and Sofia on my wall at RAND. People must have thought I used to go there to visit Soviet Intelligence and pass secrets or something.

As a member of ASIFA, I heard that Bruno Bozetto of Milan, Italy was coming to this country to speak at UC Santa Barbara and needed a ride from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara and back again.  As an alumnus of UCSB, and a fan of Mr. Bozzetto, I volunteered to be his escort both ways in my old, red, un-air-conditioned, Chevy Impala.

Mr. Bozzetto having his picture taken with his limo driver.  Just kidding!

This was a very long time ago. It must have been sometime between 1977 and 1978.  I am pretty sure his film Allegro non Troppo (1976) was out by then.  

I remember driving him both ways, I have an image of him in my head. I remember a few things from his talk. That he had a small animation studio in Milan, Italy, and that they mostly made a living doing commercials. I remember him describing a system whereby the Italian government would sponsor short animated films, but that one of the requirements was that they had to be about 11 minutes long no matter how well the idea fit into that length. These films showed as short subjects at movie theatres in front of the main feature, I think. Just like we used to do in this country in the early days of film.  I think he went on to say that this is how his film Allegro non Troppo got made.

A portion of Allegro non Troppo on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSEJC-cVPuA

An alien spacecraft litters an alien planet with a soda pop bottle and starts off a whole cascade of evolutionary doom.

Marching to their inevitable destruction!

I dropped him off at the end of a very long day somewhere in Los Angeles, said goodbye, and went home. I always wondered how he was but had no way to get in touch with him, and besides, I doubted that he remembered me.

Then one day, somehow, I saw his name on a post that Tom Sito, now a professor at USC, had done. So I gathered up my courage, and sent him a friend request

Bruno Bozzetto 3:59am Feb 14 Hi Michael! I remember your driving and my friend Roberto, the music composer, trying to tell you a joke in english:) Nice to hear you again!

Yea!

Mr. Bozzetto's Studio on the Internet
http://www.bozzetto.com/index.html

Allegro non Troppo at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074121/

Article about Mr. Bozzetto in an Italian magazine (in English)

http://www.ecodibergamo.it/dossiers/Personaggi/18/43/

Bruno Bozzetto at IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0102547/

Allegro_Non_Troppo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_Non_Troppo

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1. Of course essentially no one was working in 3D animation back then.

A Story About the CIA in the Belgian Congo

The following stories are probably true or at least partially true.

When I worked at the RAND Corporation we were managed with a system called "matrix management", which meant that you had two orthogonal types of managers. One type was formal and respectable, these are the people who approved your pay raises and did your formal reviews. The other type was creative and project oriented, these were the people for whom you did actual work on projects and they did not have to be so respectable. I have read that this system has problems sometimes, but it worked very well for me when I was at RAND.

One of my project leaders was a person we will call Gary. That may or may not be his real name, for reasons that will be clear shortly. Gary was very colorful and ultimately he did not come to a good end as RAND has politics and Gary was not very adept at such things, practically asking for trouble it seemed to me.

Be that as it may be, I enjoyed working with Gary and it bothered me when he would do something self destructive. Gary did not manage his time all that well and liked to tell stories. Those of you who know me know that I also like to tell stories, but hopefully I am not as self-destructive as Gary.

Gary was all-but-dissertation in computational linguistics and before he got (or almost got) his PhD he had been, so he tells me, covert in the CIA. So we have two stories from that period, one of modest interest to help explain how such things work, and the other which is very amusing, I think, and therefore less likely to be completely accurate.

The first story is how he got recruited. Gary attended one of those famous catholic universities in upstate NY, apparently there are a few of them. This would have been the late 50s or the early 60s and Gary was a serious anti-communist and completely ready to dedicate his life to the noble cause of killing commies. The way covert at the CIA works is that, to be effective, it has to be that you have never publicly worked for the CIA, or, for example, have been seen coming to CIA headquarters at Langley and so forth. There are many other employees of the CIA who are analysts for whom these kinds of restrictions do not apply: they can drive to CIA headquarters, park in the parking lot and go to work like normal people.

But covert is different. So Gary was recruited by one of his professors at college and went to an interview, I believe, where there was no formal CIA sign on the door. And they told him, if he was interested in this, what he should do is apply for postgraduate work at Georgetown University near Washington, DC in one of several topics, such as "Russian Studies". If he applied, they said, he would be accepted, and he would receive a fellowship so he could afford to attend. And they, the CIA, would be in touch.

I believe that this might describe one of the processes by which young people out of college are recruited, so lets accept this for the purposes of this post. Now we get to the more amusing story, which is much more colorful and therefore probably less true.

We segueway a few years later and Gary is covert in the Belgian Congo as a low-level runner for the CIA.

Here is a topic sentence from Wikipedia on the topic of the "Congo Crisis":

The Congo Crisis (1960–1966) was a period of turmoil in the First Republic of the Congo that began with national independence from Belgium and ended with the seizing of power by Joseph Mobutu. At various points, it had the characteristics of anti-colonial struggle, a secessionist war with the province of Katanga, a United Nations peacekeeping operation, and a Cold War proxy battle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis

Gary told the following story.

One day he was on his motorcycle carrying something from one part of the city to another for his employer, the CIA.  But he had not been careful, and he ran out of gas in a very bad part of town. The native people had set up sentries at various places in the city, and one of them, in full native war dress and with a spear, saw him and came running over. Gary then realized that he had fucked up again, he had also forgotten to bring his revolver, so he was defenseless. My guess is that Gary also had a massive hangover and had not gotten much sleep the night before but that is speculation on my part. He realized that he was probably dead or that his fate was in the hands of this african sentry.

The native warrior motioned to Gary to get off the bike. Gary did so. The native put his spear down, got on the bike, flipped the switch to the reserve tank that apparently everyone who rides a motorcycle knows about other than my friend Gary, started the motorcycle, got off the bike, picked up his spear, and motioned for Gary to go about his business.

Proving once and for all time that no good deed goes unpunished.

What I love about this story is two things. First, the implied cultural racism. It was the stupid white man who did not know about the reserve tank, it was the native warrior in full paint and with a spear who did, and got the motorcycle going again. Second, what we have here is basically a local who helps a stranded tourist, who shows a human kindness to a visitor he doesn't know when he gets into trouble in a bad time and a bad part of town.

Knowing my friend Gary, I believe that there are elements of the above story that are true, but that it has been slightly elaborated and/or restructured for entertainment value.

Gary had other qualities that qualified him for a career in the CIA, he was a dedicated alcoholic for periods of his life and died in his late 50s of cancer of the esophagus. Those of us who knew him miss him terribly.

TRW Commercials, Robert Abel & Associates and the Origins of Computer Animation

[Updated 3/6/2013   I am now quite sure that other companies also did TRW commercials, I remember explicitly one that Digital Productions worked on.  It did seem as though RA&A did get a lot of them, however]

The origin of computer animation lies in part in the very high end advertising production that was done by such companies as Robert Abel & Associates, R/Greenberg, Digital Productions, MAGI and so forth. Among these, highly prized were the very expensive and generally quite abstract  TRW commercials.

TRW was a major defense contractor, originally created to be the project lead on the secret space program of the United States after Sputnik. Their commercials were more about raising awareness of their name among the public and associating the name with cool technology than it was about selling product.  We would recognize their goals today using terms like "brand identification and management".

A typical TRW commercial might have a computer screen with CAD program, the wireframe design of a butterfly which then comes to life and flies off the screen with a voice over that says "A company called TRW". They were always hits at the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre back when that event, the so-called film show, was important.

These commercials seemed to be done at Robert Abel & Associates exclusively as far as I could tell.  If there were other high-end TRW spots done by other companies, I probably was just not aware of them.  I thought it was amusing, sort of, that my peers at RA&A did not have a clue what TRW did whereas I, coming from the RAND Corporation, had a pretty good idea what their business was: spy satellites and related technologies.

So I wrote a fake TRW commercial in my head and now, many years later, I present it to you here.

The logo for TRW itself was slit-scanned, but I have not found an image or copy of it yet, so for now the basic artwork will have to suffice.