Here’s an interesting obituary about a fellow who ran a book club for intellectuals in the former eastern bloc:

George C. Minden, who for 37 years ran a secret American program that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

George C. Minden, 85, Dies; Led a Cold War of Words By DOUGLAS MARTIN, New York Times, Published: April 23, 2006

The article quotes an academic paper of a few years ago as saying of his program that:

the initiative sprinkled reality into an "unnatural and ultimately irrational" system.

The recipients of the books in question, ranging from James Joyce to Nabokov to Solzhenitsyn, thought the publishers were altruistically donating them.

Actually, the CIA was buying them from the publishers, who were making a tidy profit.

It may be that every change from The Way Things Are Done requires a sprinkling of reality. Last night I went to see Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Regardless of your politics, I recommend you go see it, because if you want to continue believing that global warming is not an issue, when none (zero) out of 925 published scientific articles agree with you; if you want to continue believing that the current warming trend is just cyclical when current CO² and temperatures are higher than they’ve been in 600,000 years and climbing rapidly; if you want to believe that the recent spate of huge hurricanes is normal, despite many years of data collected by insurance companies (who have to pay for damages) and weather bureaus that say it isn’t; if you want to continue believing that it’s not us causing this, despite extensive correlations, including with specific government initiatives such as the original U.S. Clean Air Act; or if you want to continue believe that nothing can be done, even though we have already dealt successfully with at least one global environmental threat (the ozone hole), and we have all the tools we need to deal with this one if we can find the individual and political will, then you can continue to do so, but at least you will have had some reality sprinkled on you, and maybe it will stick better to your neighbor.

Al Gore’s family continued growing tobacco until his sister died of lung cancer. Then they finally quit growing the vile weed. My family stopped growing tobacco in 1941, but my grandfather continued smoking a pipe until it killed him. That’s how strong denial can be. Must every change in the way things are wait until many people have died?

In Internet security, it’s so easy to just continue doing what we’ve always done, even though there is no longer a real corporate perimeter to defend with firewalls, because sales staff, customers, and telcommuters are outside it, and travlling laptops, VPNs, and SSL-VPN reach through it. Plus it’s so easy to continue trying to go it alone, even though the perpetrators are no longer hobbyists or teenage script kiddies: they’re organized criminals in it for the money, using the Internet for maximum leverage, attacking with hordes of zombies on botnets. What sort of reality sprinkling will it take to get people to realize that collective action via observation, law, insurance, reputation systems, etc., is needed to deal with aggregate damage?

-jsq

Gunnar pointed me at the obituary, in a different but related context.