by Brooks Riley
Charlie Keil: Groovologist
by Bill Benzon
Tracing things back to the beginning is always a bit arbitrary. There is always something that came before, and even before that. For example, just how is it that Charlie Keil, winner of the 22nd Annual Koizumi Fumio Prize for ethnomusicology, ended up playing tuba in front of the Vermont Statehouse in the Fall of 2012? I suppose it isn't much of a stretch to get from ethnomusicology to the tuba, as both have to do with music, but the Vermont Statehouse?
It's time we take a short tour through a long story. Just for sake of perspective, let's start the tour sometime in the late early 20th Century, with the band of John Philip Sousa, the March King. He was the highest paid member of that band, which had been touring America for years. His bass drummer during the 1920s was a man named August Helmecke. Helmecke was also the highest paid member of the band.
Why, you might ask, was the bass drummer the highest paid member of the band? Simple, really. He maintained the pulse. Without the pulse, the music had no life. Helmecke was the heart of the band.
And he was Charlie Keil's first percussion teacher. Helmecke gave group lessons on Saturday mornings at Darien High School in Connecticut in the late 1940s. Every Saturday morning he'd teach the kids to hold their arms high and then down stroke vigorously, getting the whole ar and trunk into the motion. And though it would be years before Charlie would know this, many of the jazz drummers he came to admire – Papa Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Chick Webb and others – would go hear Sousa's band just so they could bear witness to Helmecke's mighty drumming.
That's the start. Charlie went on to learn the snare drum, orchestral percussion, and the traps set. And while he's played professionally from time to time, he ended up studying anthropology in graduate school at the University of Chicago. That's when he did a master's thesis that he published in 1966 as Urban Blues.
UPROAR! The First 50 years of The London Group 1913-63. Ben Uri Gallery, London
by Sue Hubbard
From the start uproar raged both inside and outside the Group. There was press hostility to the ultra-modernists, rivalry between the Group and other exhibiting societies such as the New English Art Club, not to mention the warfare between Camden Townites and Wyndham Lewis's Vortecists, between the Surrealists and realists, as well as differing political attitudes exemplified by Mark Gertler's anti-war stance and Wyndham Lewis's bellicose right-wing posturing.
My Russian Professors
by Eric Byrd
Rhone-green
For years, amidst the cold and dirty cement, nothing had revealed itself to me, and I left so many hours, so many days go by in emptiness, without doing much about it. So when I finally felt the moist grass beneath my bare feet, a beam of pleasure climbed up my legs and landed at the back of my neck, tingling. The feeling almost subsided as I thought about the derision it would bring about were I to voice it, but it resisted in defiance when, with each slow step, I saw a bit more of the river: how could its color, in appearing among the tree leaves that separated it from me, be so beautiful? Hitherto, I understood that rivers were no more than paths for putrid waste, flanked by asphalt serpents over which gigantic metallic insects slouched creepingly, emitting their electric lights – red, yellow – and puffing ashes towards the sky; in the heart of such beasts lay anguished beings, encrusted, grabbing onto the wheel, honking, forcing themselves to ignore the imminence of cerebrovascular accidents. But not the Rhone: there I found myself, absurdly, in front of an idyllic valley where the waters ran quietly, and one could drink from them, and one could swim in them; small fallen branches were seen floating serenely, following their path towards the oneiric Mare Nostrum from the history books of my long gone childhood. And if under the sun its green glistened, by dawn the waters transubstantiated into pure methylene blue, and would then be confused in my memory with the swaying brushstrokes of a certain starry night, whose constellations shone magnificently, spreading as if by magic their light upon the river: divine images conceived by a sad soul, who had gone mad and died before anybody could be enraptured by his howls of utter beauty.
Moral hedging: why and how to apply it in practice
by Grace Boey
Last month, I wrote about moral uncertainty and moral hedging. The discussion was fairly abstract and ultimately rather inconclusive; it’s time to examine how real people might put some sort of moral hedging into practice now if they wanted to.
First, here’s a recap (readers already acquainted with moral hedging can skip the next two paragraphs). What should you do if, despite knowing all the relevant facts about animal physiology and consciousness, you are still uncertain as to whether killing animals for food is permissible, or whether it is murder? This is moral uncertainty, as opposed to factual uncertainty. The strategy of moral hedging aims to maximize the ‘expected moral value’ of our actions under moral uncertainty. This expected moral value is the probability of an action’s being right, multiplied by the moral value of its being right if it is indeed right. This means that we shouldn’t just choose to do what we think is most probably right – we should also take the value of consequences into account.
While the idea of moral hedging seems promising, I noted that it suffers from some weaknesses. For one, there is the ‘problem of inter-theoretic value comparisons’ (PIC) – how do we compare values across theories that value things differently? Also, the theory still lacks clear guidelines that the average person can realistically apply in practice.
In this second piece, I’ll give reasons for believing that we should press on with moral hedging. I’ll also recommend a realistic guideline for acting under moral uncertainty that I believe captures the idea of moral hedging: For any choice of action that you’re morally uncertain about, consider this question: if you eventually find out that this choice is, in fact, morally wrong, what attitude would you have towards your actions? If you foresee that you’d hold yourself culpable or blameworthy for the potential wrong, then you shouldn’t perform the action now. Although this may seem obvious on first glance, this suggestion may impact more of our actions than we realize.
Why press on with moral hedging?
As previously discussed, hedging isn’t the only way we might go about coping with moral uncertainty. Moreover, PIC might appear to be a big enough theoretical challenge for some to give up on the strategy of moral hedging. In spite of this, however, I believe hedging is still the correct thing to do under moral uncertainty, and that we should apply it where we can. Here I hope to persuade my readers of the same. (Readers who already support moral hedging may want to skip to the next section).
Monday, January 6, 2014
F. P. Ramsey’s Marvelous Theorem
by Jonathan Kujawa
There is a delightful episode of Radiolab entitled “Emergence''. In it they look at the remarkably complicated structures which can emerge from large groups of remarkably dumb individuals each doing their own thing. You see this in ant colonies, flocks of birds, human cities, capitalist marketplaces, and the human brain. Remarkably, we find the same phenomenon in the (seemingly) inert world of mathematics.
You have a problem. You're planning your annual post-New Year's party and as the consummate host you know that parties are deadly dull unless you have just the right mix of friends and strangers. A core group of witty friends or interesting strangers to keep things lively is just the thing. For the moment let's say you would be equally happy to have three people at your party who are all friends or all strangers. Unfortunately, your co-host believes parties are best when well mixed. At all costs they would like to avoid a group of three friends or three strangers.
You make a bold offer to your co-host: If you get to pick the number of guests, the co-host can decide who is invited.
Does your gambit work? Can you now successfully outmaneuver your co-host by making the invitation list sufficiently long as to ensure a group of three friends or three strangers no matter who ends up on the list? And, if so, how many? Or have you made a horrible mistake in this strange high strategy battle over the most minor of stakes?
Landings
by Tamuira Reid
“Planes have always been a theme in my life,” my father says and asks me how the essay is going. I tell him fine. It has some problems, but fine. Still trying to work out the structure. I hear him smile to fill the distance between us.
The last decade was bad for airplanes.
Hudson. Turkey. Buffalo. Tokyo.
And Air France. Twice.
MAN was killed instantly when a Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet lost control and crashed into his house. He was asleep at the time, a hand positioned under his pillow, unfinished Sunday crossword on the nightstand. WIFE AND DAUGHTER managed to escape seconds before the plane hit. They would have to start their lives over now, start from scratch.
SEASONED PILOT, male, lands Boeing (INSERT MODEL HERE) Jet safely into the Hudson River after a BIRD STRIKE on BOTH ENGINES. All CREW and PASSENGERS were evacuated from the plane safely. No major INJURIES were reported.
In 1950 a CESSNA two-seater nose-dived in to the Pacific Ocean, just outside of San Francisco. The plane held TWO MEN; one of them was MY GRANDFATHER.
Is it possible to miss someone I've never met?
_____
Would you call my father a liar if he told you the perfect story? If he told you that at exactly 1 p.m. he fell into a fence, blinded by a white light so strong and pure it knocked his feet from under him, a math book open in the gutter, seedless grapes hanging in clusters from a vine above his head?
At exactly 1 p.m. my grandfather's plane crashed into the ocean. The velocity with which he hit the water was enough to tear the clothes from his body. Shoes too.
You always remember the grapes. They looked like tiny Christmas bulbs.
After the funeral, you paced around the back yard, the one that would become a basketball court but wasn't yet. You stepped on weeds, pressed their bodies to the ground. Tossed pebbles into the grass to watch them sink.
What words did you choose when you told your little brother about the accident? Your mind was someplace else by then. Left the body to fend for itself.
_____
2012: Discovery Channel filmmakers purposefully crash a 727 Jet into the Mexican desert in the name of passenger safety research. It was concluded that following the guidelines on the seat-back safety cards might actually increase your chances of survival.
It was also noted that real people were replaced by crash test dummies.
The Coast Guard found my grandfather's wallet at the scene of the accident. Two pictures were still tucked neatly inside; one of his children standing in front of a lopsided Christmas tree and the other of his wife in a bikini.
My father fell into the cracks of his own life but clawed back out, “tooth and nail” his mother would say. “Tooth and nail, that Johnny.” I imagine him scaling trees with his bare hands.
You were fifteen and didn't want to lose your father but you did. That's the way it worked. He was there and then he wasn't. Just like that.
Monday Poem
Tiny Megalomaniacs
.
being good
you take responsibility for everything
and credit for nothing,
otherwise you’re sliding down
the slippery slope at an accelerating clip
until you’re taking credit for everything
and responsibility for zip
just a short slip down that slope
you’ve already sloughed goodness
many times like snake skin
for the sake of some small gain
some little leverage, some edge, some in
elbowing out some less able
contestant in Darwin’s world
to gain what turns out to be
a plot of worthless sand
by means of tiny sins
it’s tough, discernment’s not easy
in the muddle of desire
everything you think you require is righteous
so you turn to gods that fan that fire
you whisper prayers into corners first
then, picking up a head of steam,
you’re bellowing your righteousness from peaks
as your minions mutter lies up and down mean streets
and many bubbles burst
but more often than not you don’t get that far
you settle for a provincial fiefdom
running a big firm or corner bar,
equally worthy jobs
if your heart’s in the right place
and you understand the limits of all
and know you’re in this universe
under an umbrella of chance,
lucky to be small
and know you have just a tiny part
in the making of this
curious dance
.
by Jim Culleny
12/28/2013
Length, height, and breadth
by Alexander Bastidas Fry
Issues of interpretation are not uncommon in science. “People slowly accustomed themselves to the idea that that the physical states of space itself were the final reality” Einstein said. He was commenting on the fundamental principle of his theory of general relativity wherein the distribution of energy and matter determines the geometry of space time. Einstein spoke to the public with precise words. Here he is stating that the reality we experience is given by space-time itself. He is also suggesting a larger kind of scientific realism where there is an objective world independent of our capacity to know it. In this view reality is a purely physical manifestation of the natural laws of physics. Yet, the underlying dynamics of nature are not directly accessible to human perception, as Einstein said it, “imagination is everything.”
“Should overwhelming evidence gathered using a diversity of methods confirm the existence of a phenomenon in the world, it ought to be taken to be objectively real; for example, that the universe consists of three spatial dimensions: length, height, and breadth” states Sean Miller in his 2013 book Strung Together. The existence of extra dimensions is prescribed by the formalism of string theory (in M-theory there are ten dimensions of space and one of time). This claim contradicts current theories. String theory will attain the status of scientific knowledge only if predictions like this can be validated. String theory makes such sweeping claims about our universe that it is a so called theory of everything. Though regardless of whether or not string theory is strictly correct our imaginative understanding of what it means may continue to progress.
A Belated Reply to Plato
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
Plato is among the most famous critics of democracy. His criticism is relatively simple, but potentially devastating. It runs as follows. Politics aims at achieving justice, and so political policy must reflect the demands of justice. Only those who know what justice is and have the self-control to enact what justice requires are capable of doing politics properly. Alas, the average citizen is dumb and vicious. Hence Plato's conclusion is that democracy is a fundamentally corrupt form of politics; it is the rule of those who neither know nor care about justice. In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues for a philosophical monarchy, the rule of the wise and virtuous.
Citizens of modern democracies naturally tend to recoil at Plato's argument, and his positive proposal that philosophers should rule is often met with understandable ridicule. And yet Plato's crucial premise that the average citizen is too dumb and undisciplined for democracy is widely embraced, especially among those who find themselves on the losing side of a democratic vote. For one example, consider a common reaction among social and fiscal conservatives to Barack Obama's re-election in 2012; it was routinely claimed that the People had been “duped” and “mislead.” Furthermore, it seems that a second crucial Platonic premise – namely that a proper political order must place those who have knowledge and integrity in charge – is also widely endorsed. Consider here the popular criticisms of President Bush that fix upon his alleged lack of intelligence.
So we must ask: Could Plato be right?
We should begin by noting that many philosophers, including us, hold that democratic citizens ought to take seriously Plato's criticisms. There is nothing anti-democratic about earnestly confronting democracy's critics, and arguably there's something on the order of an imperative to engage with democracy's smartest detractors. As John Stuart Mill once argued, “He who knows only his own side of an argument knows little of that.”
Now, there are several responses to Plato, and we'd like to survey a few popular rejoinders before sketching our own. First, one may respond to Plato by denying that politics has anything at all to do with ideals so lofty as wisdom and justice. Politics, the response continues, is not about discerning truths, but producing stable government. And stability is not a matter of getting things right, but getting things done in ways that prevent revolution, and that's what a democracy accomplishes.
Argentina, or Notes on Knausgaard
by Madhu Kaza
I admit my interest in Knausgaard was also related to a longstanding preoccupation with Scandinavia and the North (from the age of seven I've owed a particular debt of allegiance to Denmark, proof in my mind that one doesn't exactly choose one's imaginary homeland). But even if the nets of affiliation pull in strange catch, they are not cast randomly: Knausgaard noted that My Struggle was originally titled Argentina, which he later explained was the country of his dreams. “I can't believe Argentina exists,” he said. “It's like literature.” He spoke of Borges and also of Witold Gombrowicz, who spent much of his life in exile in Argentina. It makes sense that a Norseman would find himself drawn to Borges (who was obsessed with Old Norse and the Icelandic Sagas), and through Borges imagine that the realm of literature itself was a land called Argentina.
Goethe: The Sufi of Weimar
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Over the years, the binding slackened from wear only under the section of children’s poems. When I was older I perused the rest of the book and found the poems complex but I was drawn to the miraculous harmonies formed of Urdu’s polygenetic beauty; its Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Turkish diction fitting as if synaptically, only in this poet-philosopher’s hands, to create a unique musical-intellectual whole.
I also found, to my astonishment, Iqbal’s poems addressing the greats belonging to a variety of cultures: Rumi, Shakespeare, Ghalib, Goethe, Hafiz, Ghazali, Blake, Emerson and other influential thinkers and poets. Iqbal’s century was changing the map fast, making his reflections on the learning of the East and West ever urgent. While rejecting the title “Sir” from the Raj, he continued to honor philosophers such as his own mentor (at Government College, Lahore) Dr. Thomas Arnold in his poems. Among great western thinkers, Goethe held a special place for Iqbal: Our soul discovers itself when we come into contact with a great mind. It was not until I had realized the infinitude of Goethe's imagination that I discovered the narrow breadth of my own.
Time and again, Goethe’s name stood out when I approached Iqbal’s poetry— there were many reasons for this, but the most memorable one was a typewritten response from the celebrated German scholar Annemarie Schimmel to my letter about my interest in Sufi poetry. She had read my poems closely and her brief letter was full of light and love. I heard the cosmic yes whispered in it, deep enough to give me a measure of patience, knee-deep as I was in raising my children while struggling to find time to read.
We the Puppeteers
by Quinn O'Neill
An alarm clock radio wakes me up each morning. For a while, it was set to a radio station that featured mostly pop music and mindless celebrity gossip, mainly because of its clear reception. It also frequently played an advertisement for an insurance company serving military members who have “honorably served” and their families. The ad cast military service in an unquestionably postive light and was played often enough that I could pretty well recite it. One morning, having heard it one time too many, I pushed the button on my alarm over to the buzzer option. “I'll decide for myself what I think of the military,” I naively thought.
At the gym later that day, I found myself on a treadmill before a TV screen playing music videos interspersed with military recruitment advertisements. After my workout, on my way to the locker room, I passed a military recruitment stand with an array of brochures for the taking. I stopped for a few minutes and perused its offerings. As I saw it, the stand was wanting for alternative views, but it was clear that only one viewpoint was to be served to the gym goers, and it wasn't for me to decide.
In 1928, Edward Bernays, a pioneer of propaganda and public relations published his seminal book titled Propaganda.1 In this important, but little known book, he defines propaganda as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.” (p.52) Though the term has acquired a negative connotation, owing to its association with German use in WWI, the practice continues today, euphemized as “public relations”.
This exerpt from the 1928 book could equally apply to our current state of affairs:
“We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. […] Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons – a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million – who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” (p.37)
Whether we like it or not, we are being manipulated by an unseen, unelected minority. Society may have grown and evolved over the years, but the changes have served only to intensify the power that these invisible leaders have over us. Control over the media is concentrated today to an extreme degree. As of 2011, just 6 corporations controlled 90% of our media. In 1983, this power was shared among 50 companies.
Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,
which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
~ Arthur C. Clarke
Nevertheless, this has not dissuaded the cultural production of AI, so two recent treatments of AI in film and television provide a good opportunity to reflect on how “thinking machines” may become a part of our quotidian lives. As is almost always the case, the way art holds up a mirror to society allows us to ask if we are prepared for this coming reality, or at least one not too different from it. I'll first consider Spike Jonze's latest film, “Her,” followed by an episode of the Channel 4 series “Black Mirror” (sorry, spoilers below).
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Habits and Heresies: Authenticity, Food Rules, and the People Who Break Them
by Dwight Furrow
Chicken Tikka Masala
Dishes are a representation of the food tradition from which they emerge. But what counts as an authentic representation of a tradition and who decides?
All of us come to the table with a history of eating experiences that have left behind a sediment of preferences, a map of what goes with what, an impressionistic bible of what particular ingredients should taste like and how particular dishes satisfy. Food is the constant companion present when love emerges, deals are made, and sorrow weighs. Thus, food memories meld with emotional cues and are appended to the minor and major ceremonies that constitute the routines of life. Flavors acquire an emotional resonance and symbolic power that enables them to express the style of a culture and provide some of the prohibitions and taboos that signify social boundaries and status. There is a right and wrong way to eat and woe to those who get it wrong—you cannot be one of us.
Just as linguistic meaning is encoded in physical inscription (writing) and phonemes (speaking), food meanings are encoded in the flavors and textures with which people identify, a semi-consciously held template that says Italian, French, or low country. This template cannot be fully articulated in a set of rules; one knows the taste of home even if one can't say what home tastes like. Although the original association of flavors with identities is arbitrary, conventional, and driven by accidents of geography, once established they are no longer arbitrary but consciously perpetuated via resemblance. Cooks working within food traditions create dishes that replicate that template because their patron's map and bible generate those expectations.
Thus, the relationship between flavor and meaning is not merely an association but a synthesis. Moral taste and mouth taste become one.
When a server puts a plate of food in front of you, the dish confronts your map and bible. The dish may or may not represent your tradition, may or may not represent your map and bible, but it represents some tradition or other, and expresses someone's style, and thus poses a question about where and how it fits. The dish refers to other dishes as an imitation, interpretation, challenge, or affront. Is it an authentic extension of the tradition or a violation worthy of scorn?
Synthetic Biology: Engineering Life To Examine It
by Jalees Rehman
Two scientific papers that were published in the journal Nature in the year 2000 marked the beginning of engineering biological circuits in cells. The paper “Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli” by Timothy Gardner, Charles Cantor and James Collins created a genetic toggle switch by simultaneously introducing an artificial DNA plasmid into a bacterial cell. This DNA plasmid contained two promoters (DNA sequences which regulate the expression of genes) and two repressors (genes that encode for proteins which suppress the expression of genes) as well as a gene encoding for green fluorescent protein that served as a read-out for the system. The repressors used were sensitive to either selected chemicals or temperature. In one of the experiments, the system was turned ON by adding the chemical IPTG (a modified sugar) and nearly all the cells became green fluorescent within five to six hours. Upon raising the temperature to activate the temperature-sensitive repressor, the cells began losing their green fluorescence within an hour and returned to the OFF state. Many labs had used chemical or temperature switches to turn gene expression on in the past, but this paper was the first to assemble multiple genes together and construct a switch which allowed switching cells back and forth between stable ON and OFF states.
The same issue of Nature contained a second land-mark paper which also described the engineering of gene circuits. The researchers Michael Elowitz and Stanislas Leibler describe the generation of an engineered gene oscillator in their article “A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators“. By introducing three repressor genes which constituted a negative feedback loop and a green fluorescent protein as a marker of the oscillation, the researchers created a molecular clock in bacteria with an oscillation period of roughly 150 minutes. The genes and proteins encoded by the genes were not part of any natural biological clock and none of them would have oscillated if they had been introduced into the bacteria on their own. The beauty of the design lay in the combination of three serially repressing genes and the periodicity of this engineered clock reflected the half-life of the protein encoded by each gene as well as the time it took for the protein to act on the subsequent member of the gene loop.
Monday, December 30, 2014
Korczak
by Lisa Lieberman
In the memoir he was writing at the time he died, my friend Avresh described returning to the Czechoslovakian town of Sevlush, his birthplace, in the winter of 1946. He'd left some fifteen years earlier to attend a Jewish gymnasium in a larger city, stayed on to study engineering at the university and never looked back. This was his mother's wish for him: that he enter the great, free, secular world, liberate himself from the narrowness of his tradition. Escape.
When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Avresh joined the Communist resistance. Captured and tortured by the Gestapo but inexplicably released, he made his way to the Soviet Union, expecting to be welcomed with open arms, a comrade in the fight against Nazism. Instead he was arrested at the border and charged with espionage—the fate of most Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. 
by the time he was discharged, he'd earned four medals for his service on the Eastern front. His favorite featured a picture of Stalin.
So it was as a decorated officer in a Russian army uniform that he returned to his town after the war. All the Jews were gone, rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. A Slovak family was living in his childhood home and not a trace of Avresh's own family remained. Looking for answers, he went to the neighborhood synagogue and peered in the door. The sanctuary, the balcony, the corridors and stairways were cluttered with belongings: furniture, pots and pans, bedding, books, knickknacks and photographs. A policeman stood watch over the household goods of the departed Jews of Sevlush. Town officials had collected the Jews' possessions and stored them in the synagogue to prevent looting. No Jews had returned to claim their things. Was there something he wanted from the collection, the policeman asked, some memento?
Avresh said he took nothing when he left Sevlush, but this is not strictly true. He carried no objects away from the synagogue, no material belongings, pointedly refusing the money the officials offered as “rent” on his family's house. What he took, along with the burden of guilt he carried—”I share the usual remorse of most Holocaust survivors lamenting why they are alive and why they did not try harder to save their perished family,” he wrote in his memoir—what he took, I would say, was a sense of spiritual belonging, the token that remained of his Jewish inheritance.
Pakistan’s War – Part I
by Ahmed Humayun
(This is the first post in a series on Pakistan's struggle against militancy).
We need not accept all their grandiose declarations at face value. When it comes to global terrorism, in particular, there is a chasm between their rhetoric and their capacity. The only terrorist plot on American soil they can claim is of the failed Times Square Bomber in 2010. The evidence of Taliban involvement in Middle Eastern battlefields is ambiguous at best. And their operations are constrained by an overall pool of fighters that is small: estimates vary because data is hard to collect and the definition of an active fighter is murky but at any given time there may only be between ten and twenty thousand rebel fighters.
But the insurgents have substantially expanded their campaign within Pakistan itself. They have strategic clarity where Islamabad does not and their aspirations have been whetted by the confusion of the state. In recent years the rebels have complemented their fight against Pakistani armed forces in the tribal areas with a systematic campaign of terrorism in towns and cities across the country. To this end the insurgents have leveraged and expanded a vast ‘infrastructure of extremism', which originates in decades of state sponsorship of non-state militant groups.* The network includes combat trainers, militant recruiters, funders, suicide jacket makers, indoctrinators and foot soldiers who have access to training camps, safe houses, telephone getaway exchanges, madrassahs (some, not all) and highly sophisticated media communications facilities across the length and breadth of Pakistan. The insurgents are not cave dwellers: they are adept organization builders who have institutionalized the production of terrorism as one weapon in their broader war against the state.