November 19, 2004
Recent photos
Guy taking a picture of someone taking a picture of a tourist posing with the statue of John Harvard in the Harvard Yard.
Business school party at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.
Petals leading to a flower shop in Harvard Square.
Too many drinks at the party.
Six eLearning authors in one photo.
Common business model of the future.
November 07, 2004
CRAZY RULERS OF THE WORLD
(DARPA at work)
Sunday 7 November at 8pm on NBC
Three years in the making, Jon Ronson’s Crazy Rulers of the World explores the apparent madness at the heart of US military intelligence.
With first-hand access to the leading players in the story, Jon Ronson examines the extraordinary - and plain bizarre - national secrets at the core of George W Bush's war on terror. (I am not making this up.)
The three-part series begins with The Men Who Stare at Goats, which charts the history of a secret US Army unit founded in 1979 - the First Earth Battalion.
The program uncovers the startling truth about this unit's involvement with paranormal activities that defy all known accepted military practice, including mind reading, out of body experiences and ‘thought-death’ experiments carried out on goats at Fort Bragg.
"People are basically nutty," says a CIA psychologist at the start of this extraordinary series, and by the end you may well believe he's right. It's presented by Jon Ronson, who has spent three years piecing together the history of bizarre paranormal programmes conducted by the US military and others. Take Maj Gen Albert Stubblebine III, once chief of army intelligence, now retired. He cheerfully admits to Ronson that he spent a good deal of time in the 1980s attempting to walk through his office wall, because he thought it would be a useful skill for a general to have, and, after all, the wall and he were both made of atoms that were mostly air. He kept banging his nose, but he kept trying. It's just one jaw-dropping delusion among many."
In programme two, Jon Ronson reveals how the New Age movement of the 1980s has influenced interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and in post-war Iraq.
November 03, 2004
And Uta's birthday (yesterday)
Austin joined us at the tail end of the day for supper at Green's.
Uta and I had feasted at Don Giovanni in Napa for lunch.
Then we took a sunset catamaran cruise on the Bay.
Peaceful. Scenic. And great weather, too.
We sailed directly under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Clouds, pelicans, and dolphins provided the entertainment.
We returned to port an hour and a half after we'd departed.
