I still get a lot (for me) hits here, so a second note:

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Hello all (anyone? ),

This Blog is now hosted at its own domain platosbeard.org. If you are using an RSS/Atom reader to view this blog, please update your feed URLs either by visiting the new site and subscribing from the links there, or by using these URLs:

• http://platosbeard.org/feed/   — Site feed
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As before, you can subscribe to subsections of the blog based on tags/categories.

[via RawStory] 

Guardian | Indian state bans Baa Baa Black Sheep
Maseeh Rahman in Delhi
Wednesday June 14, 2006

Tens of thousands of children at Indian schools have been told they can no longer sing popular English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Baa Baa Black Sheep.

In an attempt to rid schools of what is perceived as malign western influence, the school education minister in the state of Madhya Pradesh, Narottam Mishra, has commissioned a new set of rhymes written by Indians to "infuse a sense of patriotism" among five-year-olds.

[...]

This is not the first time that the Hindu nationalist BJP has stirred a controversy by tinkering with the school curriculum. In neighbouring Gujarat state, school textbooks were rewritten to categorise religious minorities including Muslims, Christians and Parsis as "foreigners" and to extol aspects of Nazism and fascism. A social studies textbook in Gujarat said: "Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government within a short time, establishing a strong administrative set-up."

[via J on LBO]

You can watch the trailer and movie bits from "Why We Fight" at the following links:

• Why We Fight – A Film By Eugene Jarecki
• Clips from the movie

Thorough sentimentalist that I am, I have always believed that Mallory (and Irvine) made it to the top before Tenzing Norgay and Hillary. Mallory's body was recently discovered a few hundred feet from the summit, reigniting the old debate. The news bit below is gratifying not only because it gives further credibility to the idea (of Mallory summitting) but also brings up an issue (read the entire article to see what I mean) that is a pet peeve of mine: that when we "solve" problems with modern technology, we almost always lose something ie., there is a very rosy-glow notion of technological progress that is at best naive. The connection: Graham Hoyland, who tried Mallory's "simpler" clothing on the Everest, found them in many ways preferable to the modern polythene stuff.  

BBC NEWS | Replica clothes pass Everest test
By Janine Ainley

The results of a unique experiment on Mount Everest confirm that the clothing of the 1924 climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine would not have prevented them from reaching the summit, as many had believed.

The findings are a step closer to proving the men could have reached the top, 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary.

[...]

NPR : Rove Won't Be Charged in CIA Leak Case
by Linda Wertheimer and Don Gonyea

Morning Edition, June 13, 2006 · Prosecutors have apparently decided not to charge senior White House adviser Karl Rove with any crimes in the CIA leak investigation. Rove's lawyer says his client was advised of the decision Monday.

[via BoingBoing]
Pulp Covers for Classic Books

Slate's take on the covers that never were, for the classics.

BW: India: Why Apple Walked Away
[...] Apple Computer Inc. has shelved plans to build a sprawling technical support center in Bangalore, even as IBM (IBM ) and other tech powers are ramping up. Just three months back, Apple appeared to be on the same trajectory, and there was talk of the company hiring 3,000 workers by 2007 to handle support for Macintosh computers and other Apple gear. Many in India even speculated that Jobs might travel there this year to publicize Apple's commitment to the country.

It wasn't meant to be. In late May, Apple dismissed most of the 30 new hires at its subsidiary in Bangalore. (A handful working in sales and marketing will stay on.) Spokesman Steve Dowling would say only that Apple had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to provide support from other countries. Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."

The shutdown highlights concerns about the sustainability of India's fast-track economy. True, India grew 9.3% last quarter and is still home to the world's largest and fastest-growing offshore outsourcing sector, which last year generated some $17.3 billion in revenues and employed nearly 700,000 people, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Yet India's benchmark Sensitive index, or Sensex, has dropped by 20% in the past month as global investors have fled emerging-market stocks. And the outsourcing sector is now plagued by concerns about rising wages. Entry-level pay at tech and outsourcing companies climbed by as much as 13% annually from 2000 to 2004, while salaries for midlevel managers jumped 30% a year during the same period, to a median of $31,131, according to McKinsey and Nasscom, India's software industry association.

[...] 

So, here's what the public thinks about the origins of life and evolution:

Polling Report: Science and Nature

"Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process. Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process. OR, God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." Options rotated
						.
		Evolved, God Guided	Evolved, God Had No Part	Exactly As Bible Describes	Other (vol.)	Unsure
		%	%	%	%	%
	9/8-11/05	31	12	53	1	3

The report lists multiple surveys with many versions of this and related question, and in almost all cases, the majority (or plurality) have the anti-evolutionary view of things. Perhaps I should not be surprised by that?

This is good stuff. Go read the whole thing! 

Chris Floyd – Hubub in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi
[...]

Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from "eliminating Iraq's [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction" to "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

The name change of the Zarqawi gang from its cumbersome original – "The Monotheism and Holy War Group" – to the more media-sexy "Qaeda" brand was thus a PR godsend for the Bush Administration, which was then able to associate the widespread native uprising against the Coalition occupation with the cave-dwelling dastards of the bin Laden organization. This proved an invaluable tool for the Pentagon's massive "psy-op" campaign against the American people, which was successful in sufficiently obscuring reality and defusing rising public concerns about what many experts have termed "the full-blown FUBAR" in Iraq until after the 2004 elections.

[...]

 [via BoingBoing] 

War Room – Salon.com

[...] 

In fact, there's evidence that the war actually helped keep Zarqawi alive longer — and certainly presented him with more easily accessible targets — than would have been the case if the United States had not invaded Iraq. As NBC News reported back in 2004, U.S. military planners drew up plans to take out Zarqawi three times in 2002 and 2003, but the Bush administration killed the plans each time. Why? Because, military officials told NBC, the Bush administration feared that destroying Zarqawi's terrorist camp in Iraq "could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

Just for the laughs:

TorrentSpy suit accuses MPAA of hacking

[...]

TorrentSpy alleges that in July last year the MPAA paid the hacker $15,000 for the information. TorrentSpy also alleges that the MPAA told the hacker it didn't care how he got the information and that it would protect him from any liability in obtaining the information. The suit does not explain how TorrentSpy discovered the information breach.

[...] 

This is too freaking hilarious! [via BoingBoing] A YouTube video of a desi movie song that copies The Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand. Shammi Kapoor is just the icing on the cake on this one. Finally, a Beatles song I can listen to without barfing .

The New York Times tells us that Wal-Mart wants to sell organic food:

Wal-Mart Eyes Organic Foods – New York Times
[...] 

Wal-Mart has decided that offering more organic food will help modernize its image and broaden its appeal to urban and other upscale consumers. It has asked its large suppliers to help.

Wal-Mart's interest is expected to change organic food production in substantial ways.

Some organic food advocates applaud the development, saying Wal-Mart's efforts will help expand the amount of land that is farmed organically and the quantities of organic food available to the public.

But others say the initiative will ultimately hurt organic farmers, will lower standards for the production of organic food and will undercut the environmental benefits of organic farming.

[...]

The concerns raised (in the quoted section and elsewhere in the article) are important. Perhaps I am a bit paranoid, but additionally, what worries me is that this effort on Wal-Mart's part, perhaps unintentionally, has a divide and conquer effect by doing an end run around worker's issues (its current bete noir), since this could divert the attention or alter the priorities of liberals/progressives who would support (in general) both initiatives (worker's rights and organic food).

Below is an excerpt from the NYT about the history of Western meddling in Iran, with a sub-theme (reflected in the title) that is inessential to basic understanding of the politics and motivation of all parties.

The Persian Complex – New York Times
[...]

We tend to forget that Iran's insistence on its sovereign right to develop nuclear power is in effect a national pursuit for empowerment, a pursuit informed by at least two centuries of military aggression, domestic meddling, skullduggery and, not least, technological denial by the West. Every schoolchild in Iran knows about the C.I.A.-sponsored 1953 coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Even an Iranian with little interest in his or her past is conscious of how Iran throughout the 19th and 20th centuries served as a playground for the Great Game.

Iranians also know that, hard as it may be for latter-day Americans and Europeans to believe, from the 1870's to the 1920's Russia and Britain deprived Iran of even basic technology like the railroad, which was then a key to economic development. At various times, both powers jealously opposed a trans-Iranian railroad because they thought it would threaten their ever-expanding imperial frontiers. When it was finally built, the British, Russian (and American) occupying forces during the Second World War made full use of it (free of charge), calling Iran a "bridge of victory" over Nazi Germany. They did so, of course, after Winston Churchill forced the man who built the railroad, Reza Shah Pahlavi, to abdicate and unceremoniously kicked him out of the country.

Not long after, a similar Western denial of Iran's economic sovereignty resulted in a dramatic showdown that had fatal consequences for the country's fragile democracy and left lasting scars on its national consciousness. The oil nationalization movement of 1951 to 1953 under Mossadegh was opposed by Britain, and eventually by its partner in profit, the United States, with the same self-righteousness that today colors their views of the Iranian yearning for nuclear energy.

[...]

A few other worthwhile sources of information:

• Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation
• Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men

An op-ed piece in the NYT puts forth the [at least to me] novel notion that human language evolved from mother-infant vocalizations. Those, in the left, who confuse coincidence with congruence will distance themselves from such "sentimentalities", but I find it most interesting!

Our Mother Tongue – NYT
[...] 

Had it not been for the natural selection of enlarged brains, our species would have evolved in a completely different direction. There would be no theory of relativity, no knowledge of "entangled" particles or the human genome; we'd have no great art, music or novels. The excruciating pain and trauma of childbirth are the cost our species has paid for its fancy cognition. And mothers continue to pay the debt.

But that's hardly all prehistoric mothers gave us. They also may well have touched off the evolution of language from the sounds they made to reassure their helpless infants. Baby chimpanzees, after all, can cling to their mothers' hairy chests and contentedly ride along, nursing on demand. But human infants, born immature, lack that dexterity. Before the advent of devices like baby slings, the burden of carrying helpless infants presented a quandary for early mothers as they foraged for food and water.

To accomplish their tasks, ancestral moms would at times have needed to put their babies down, and these interruptions in physical contact would have been as distressing for infants then as they are now. It's very likely that mothers began to use special vocalizations to reassure and quiet their infants. These vocalizations were the origin of the more complicated lullabies and baby talk, sometimes called "motherese," that exist today in nearly all human cultures, but which are totally absent among chimpanzees.

Motherese helps infants learn the rhythms and rules of their native speech through simple vocabulary, extensive repetition, exaggerated vowels, high tones and slow tempo. The road from mothers' reassuring vocalizations to the first speech would have been a long one, but these interactions between prehistoric mothers and infants may very well have paved the way for the emergence of spoken words.

Many linguists think that the first human language was very simple and probably consisted mostly of nouns. But to what would the first words have referred? Kin, foods, predators, tools and weather have all been suggested.

I suspect that one of the first words invented was the equivalent of "Mama." Surely, maturing infants, then as now, would have sought a name for the being who provided their first experiences of warmth, love and reassuring melody.

Buried in an article in the NYT about Indian-American lobbying in the USA, is a bit of data that I have long suspected:

Indian-Americans Test Their Clout on Atom Pact – NYT

[...]

Although Indian-Americans have contributed heavily to both Democrats and Republicans, they have tended to favor Republicans, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Bush's campaign in 2004.

[...]

What a pathetic bunch of wannabes! Apologies for the rant, but I am sickened to the core, right now.

This is just too funny:

BBC NEWS | Manilow to drive out 'hooligans'

Officials in Rockdale say that local youths have been hanging around in car parks, revving their engines and generally annoying residents.

So the council has decided to strike back.

From July, Barry Manilow's greatest hits will be piped into one car park in a bid to drive the youths away.

Deputy mayor Bill Saravinovski said the decision was taken because the youths were intimidating local people.

"They are just hanging out and causing a nuisance to the general public," he told the AFP news agency.

[...]

"Daggy music is one way to make the hoons leave an area, because they can't stand the music," he told Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

Daggy is Australian slang for unfashionable or uncool.

[...]

In 1999, the Warrawong Westfield shopping mall in Wollongong played Bing Crosby hits over and over again to drive away loitering teenagers.

Robert Kennedy has an article in Rolling Stones on the controversy over the 2004 election and concludes that the election was indeed stolen. A lot of the data and analysis presented by him does indeed sound convincing, and raises the usual question on why the Democrats have not responded with more vehemence. [via TP] Farhad Manjoo tackles Kennedy’s argument in Salon: 

Was the 2004 election stolen? No.

[...]

interpretation and his deliberate omission of key bits of data. The
first salient omission comes in paragraph 5, when Kennedy writes, "In
what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four
Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls
only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP
efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast
ballots." To back up that assertion, Kennedy cites "Democracy at Risk,"
the report the Democrats released last June.

That report does indeed point out that many people — 26 percent –
who first registered in 2004 did not find their names on the voter
rolls at polling places. What Kennedy doesn’t say, though, is that the
same study found no significant difference in the share of Kerry voters
and Bush voters who came to the polls and didn’t find their names
listed. The Democrats’ report says that 4.2 percent of Kerry voters
were forced to cast a "provisional" ballot and that 4.1 percent of Bush
voters were made to do the same — a stat that lowers the heat on
Kennedy’s claim of "astounding" partisanship.

Such techniques are evident throughout Kennedy’s article. He
presents a barrage of seemingly important, apparently damning data to
show that Kerry won the race. It’s only when you dig into his claims
that you see what thin ice he’s on.

that 357,000 voters, "most of them Democratic," were either
prevented from voting or had their votes go uncounted, making Kerry
(who lost by 118,000) the likely true winner. Kennedy finds these
"missing votes" in the damnedest places. He counts 30,000 voter
registrations that were deleted from voter rolls, in keeping with state
law, as mostly Kerry voters, though it’s impossible to know if those
were even real people. He says that 174,000 mostly Kerry voters didn’t
vote because they were put off by long lines. But the source states it
was actually 129,543 voters, and that those votes would have split
evenly between Kerry and Bush. And that same source — the Democratic
Party’s report once again — notes conclusively: "Despite the problems
on Election Day, there is no evidence from our survey that John Kerry
won the state of Ohio." But Kennedy doesn’t tell you that.

Worse, Kennedy relies on a band of researchers whose research on
election fraud has long been called into question by experts.
Especially in his section on Ohio’s exit poll, Kennedy reports his
sources’ theories uncritically, even though many have been debunked, or
have at least been the subject of tremendous debate among experts.
Reading Kennedy’s article, you’d never guess that some of his star
sources’ claims have fared quite badly when put to people in the field.

 [...]

And so on for another couple of pages. I am sure we shall see a response from Kennedy shortly, and if so, I will update with a link on this blog.

I am a member of a few "left" mailing lists, which are typically dominated by Western Orthodox Leftists (typically Marxists) and even tentative mention of open source, by me (an admitted amateur in left theory), is dismissed as irrelevant to left goals, actions, etc. I never quite understood why not. Open source development seems to provide an interesting and successful example of communal effort and production, underpinned by certain ideals (from each according to his abilities and to each according to his need! ) that should warm the heart of leftists.

Not all of the free software / open source movement’s principles and functioning is leftist of course. There is a strong libertarian streak running through open source development and certain larger issues (participation within a capitalist system) are poorly addressed. These differences are known within the community, however, and are the subject of ongoing debate. Richard Stallman, the father of what we call today Open Source, goes to great length to stress the political considerations of his movement, and defends his precepts successfully against the newer school (Cathedral/Bazaar types). It seemed strange to me, therefore, that all of this would be so easily dismissed by the entrenched left.

Today, I came across a couple of texts that do seem to take open source a bit more seriously.

One of them is Yochai Benkler’s (Yale Law School) book The Wealth of Networks (PDF), the Introduction of which I quote from below:

[A]dvanced economies have shifted from an economy based on production
of physical goods and services (e.g., automobiles and textiles, mining
and construction) to an economy centered on the production of
information goods and services (e.g., cinema and software, legal
representation and financial planning).

Second, advanced economies have shifted from a communications
environment relies on an expensive centralized communicator that
broadcasts to a wide audience (e.g., radio, television) to an
environment that relies on a multitude of cheap processors with high
computing capacity that are interconnected with one another (i.e., the
Internet).

These two shifts make it possible to lessen the market’s
influence over political values. The second shift allows decentralized,
non-market production. The first shift means that this new form of
production will play a central, rather than peripheral role, in
advanced economies.

The first part of this book explores in detail the economic
implications of these two parallel shifts. The central thesis is that a
new stage of the information economy is emerging. The industrial
information economy of the mid nineteenth and twentieth centuries is
now being displaced by the “networked information economy.” The
networked information economy is characterized by decentralized
individual action carried out through willed distributed, nonmarket
means that do not depend on market strategies.

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but it promises to be an interesting read. Another book in a similar vein (which Benkler refers to also) is Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source which funnily enough begins:

Several years ago when I began thinking about open source software, I had to convince just about everyone I talked to, outside of a narrow technology community, that this was a real phenomenon and something worth studying in a serious way. I no longer have to make that case.

 Clearly, Weber can speak more intelligently of the matter than I can . In the Preface, he goes on to say:

 I became interested in open source as an emerging technological community that seemed to solve what I see as very tricky but basically familiar governance problems, in a very unfamiliar and intriguing way. In the end I’ve decided, and I argue in this book, that the open source community has done something even more important. By experimenting with fundamental notions of what constitutes property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance. At the same time, it is remaking the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe (as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to create wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solutions to problems, then understanding how open source can change those processes is very important.

Now, why couldn’t I have put it that way, when arguing for the importance of examining open source! Below is a bit more from the Introduction, followed by a link:

This is a book about property and how it underpins the social organization of cooperation and production in a digital era. I mean “property” in a broad sense—not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers, and where those ideas come from and how they spread. It is a story of how social organization can change the meaning of property, and conversely, how shifting notions of property can alter the possibilities of social organization. I explain the creation of a particular kind of software—open source software—as an experiment in social organization around a distinctive notion of property. The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is. Open source is an experiment in building a political economy—that is, a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms. In this case it is a governance system that holds together a community of producers around this counterintuitive notion of property rights as distribution. It is also a political economy that taps into a broad range of human motivations and relies on a creative and evolving set of organizational structures to coordinate behavior.

There is an excerpt in PDF from the book available for download from Harvard University Press.

Maopost.com has some (as you may have guessed) vintage Chinese propaganda posters. Check it out. If you really like themther eis even a Dashboard Widget to display the poster of the day on your desktop.

Business Week reports that Democrats are protesting the use of a particular company for supplying voting machines for U.S elections. Before you get all excited that the Dems have grown a spine… no, they are not talking about Diebold and their CEOs promise to deliver Ohio to Bush, but about a Venezuelan company, no doubt under the control of that leftist rogue Hugo Chavez!

One Man, One Vote, One Conspiracy Theory
Critics of electronic balloting are raising questions about a voting machine supplier

After the controversial 2000 Presidential election, the U.S. embarked on a campaign to replace paper ballots and their infamous hanging chads with electronic voting. But the new systems, many based on touch screens similar to bank ATMs, have become the bane of computer experts and some political activists on the Left.

[...] 

Over at Business Week, wunderkind gets all radical and suggests we throw open the border. Funny thing with liberal ideas that sit around long enough… they get picked up by conservatives and neo-liberals . We have been calling for action against Saddam for a few decades. Bush thinks of the same thing, for the first time ever, and decimates the country. We have been talking about the environment for ages. Now the evangelicals adopting the platform but from the funny perspective of stewardship. And now we have Mandel:

BW: Bordering on Absurdity

Cars can move more easily from country to country than people, and that is crimping both human potential and economic growth

What's the best long-term immigration policy for the global economy? Right now we have an international system where goods and services move easily across national borders, but flows of people are strictly regulated. The 149 countries that belong to the World Trade Organization are committed, by treaty, to a "substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade." No such organization or commitment exists for global immigration reform.
I think that's wrong. It should not be the case that toys and cars can move from country to country more easily than people do. Instead, pulling down the barriers that impede immigration should be our long-term goal. Immigration policy should facilitate the movement of people, just as trade policy facilitates the movement of goods.

From an economic perspective, this is a no-brainer.

[...]

CNN reports that geeks are now joining fight clubs to liberate their inner macho child:

CNN.com – Computer techs turn to fisticuffs for fun

MENLO PARK, California (AP) — They may sport love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks, some Silicon Valley techies turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.

[...]

I wonder what would happen to these dudes if some real men showed up to the fight?

Below is a snippet of a Gallup poll on values, via PollingReport. Read the whole thing. There's plenty of bad news: if you are an animal rights proponent, like me, then there is the disappointing bit that 60+% approve of animal testing and even wearing fur. Then we have the righteous disapproval of homosexuality. And more. Read on.

Next, I'm going to read you a list of issues. Regardless of whether or not you think it should be legal, for each one, please tell me whether you personally believe that in general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong. How about …

	Morally Acceptable	Morally Wrong
	%	%
The death penalty
5/8-11/06	71	22
5/5-7/03	64	31
Buying and wearing clothing made of animal fur
5/8-11/06	62	32
5/5-7/03	60	36
Medical testing on animals
5/8-11/06	61	32
5/5-7/03	63	33
Gambling
5/8-11/06	60	34
5/5-7/03	63	34
Homosexual relations
5/8-11/06	44	51
Abortion
5/8-11/06	43	44
5/5-7/03	37	53
Suicide
5/8-11/06	15	78
5/5-7/03	14	81

So, if get this right: the public does not approve of suicide, but they approve of the death penalty. In other words, they want do kill you rather than let you kill yourself. So if you want to commit suicide, your best bet is to kill someone else, including (as the above indicates) the not yet human foetus inside a woman — then turn yourself in, and they will kill you. But make sure you don't kill a homo since the public doesn't care much for that sort of people.

CW: House panel approves Net neutrality bill
May 25, 2006 (IDG News Service) — A U.S. House of Representatives committee has approved a bill that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or impairing their customers' access to Web content offered by competitors.

[...]

You can now download a Beta of the Opera browser 9. If you have never used Opera, give it a whirl. Its wicked fast, provides easy keyboard navigation, did tab-like stuff before Mozilla, and now, again beating Mozilla to it, does the latest fad: widgets! Sweet!

Download Opera Web Browser

Next time you meet a reductionist, you can wave this bit of news at him! 

BBC | Spotty mice flout genetics laws

[...] 

The scientists, based at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, used mice which carry one normal version of Kit and one mutant version, giving them spotted tails.

They bred these mice together, producing offspring with a range of Kit gene combinations:

* two mutant genes (these are shown to die shortly after birth)
* one mutant and one normal gene (these should be "spotty" like their parents)
* two normal genes (these should not be spotty).

However, the researchers found that mice born with two normal versions of Kit also had a spotted appendage.

"We were very surprised to see this," said Professor Minoo Rassoulzadegan, a geneticist at the University of Nice and lead author on the paper.

After further investigation, the scientists suggested the transfer of RNA molecules as the cause.

[...]

[A question to English usage types: is "Apropos of" or "Apropos to" the right usage in this title? My initial urge was "of" but on further thought I felt "to" is more apropos!]

I have already posted on the Kaavya Viswanathan affair (plagiarization by the young Indian-American author), though I did not quite articulate what it is that bothered me about her. Below is an article from the Guardian that describes the difficulty that minorities have in getting published. A comment towards the qend of the quoted text describes my uneasiness: that minority writers are further disadvantaged by those (otherwise privileged) who play upon their minority status to open doors. 

Guardian | Monica Ali and Zadie Smith are in the minority, finds survey
Michelle Pauli

Wednesday May 10, 2006

The book trade is missing a trick by ignoring the potential of the black and ethnic minority (BME) market, says a new report by the Bookseller and the Arts Council.

The Books for All survey of publishers, booksellers, agents and librarians found that a "fear factor" was holding back the book trade from pursuing a growing market and a huge potential source of writing talent.

[...]
While 7.9% of the UK's population is of ethnic minority origin, only 50 (1%) of this year's top 5,000 bestsellers are by BME writers, despite the high profile of award-winners Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy and Monica Ali.

[...]

The report is critical of the lack of monitoring that takes place in the publishing process, with 58% of publishers unsure whether the number of submissions received from BME authors has risen, fallen or stayed the same during the past year, but acknowledges that accusations of tokenism can also be damaging.

"There is obviously a wealth of excellent Asian writers out there," said Poorna Shetty, editor of Asiana magazine, "but, inevitably, there are some books that get published because of the ethnic tag, rather than because they're actually great books."

[...]

AlterNet: It's Not Enough to Be a Vegetarian

There wasn't much wiggle room left for the casual carnivore when über-ethicist Peter Singer got finished with us in 1973. That's when his uncompromising assault on trans-species suffering, Animal Liberation, had millions of readers trading in their T-bones for tofu.

But now even the moral high ground of a vegetarian lifestyle isn't good enough. Singer's new book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter argues that, all things considered, only a vegan lifestyle will do. The reasons go far beyond Singer's past exposés of animal abuse and factory farming. Tracking the source of food served at three very different American tables, Singer and his co-author Jim Mason uncover more than they could swallow.

How we eat can influence the very health of the planet even more than switching to hybrid cars or solar heating. The hidden costs of even the most prudent food choices — costs in terms of social injustice, poverty, waste and pollution, as well as animal cruelty make us all collaborators in environmental destruction. Especially Americans, who consume one quarter of the world's fossil fuels, and whose food industry "seeks to keep Americans in the dark."

[...]

[via BoingBoing]

Москва невоплощенная/Unrealised Moscow
The Architecture of Moscow
from the 1930s to the early 1950s.
Unrealised projects

Ok, the title of my post is more alarmist than necessary, since even I do not think this is a huge warning sign. Now, how can they spin this to blame it on the people for voting out the rightwing BJP? 

BBC NEWS | Business | Indian stocks rebound after pause

Indian shares have rebounded after a drop of more than 10% prompted the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) to suspend trading for an hour.

The BSE's benchmark 30-share Sensex index closed 456.84 points, or 4.2%, lower at 10,481.77.

Earlier it had lost 1,111.71 points, its biggest intra-day drop, amid heavy selling by domestic and foreign funds.

Investors said they were worried that recent record gains had come too fast to be justified by the profit outlook.

[...] 

Army says all the horror of war as depicted in a documentary of Iraq war injured might be a bit demoralizing. Perhaps when compared to the much better version of reality presented in the ads with dudes climbing mountains and such? When asked if morale may improve among the troops if they were to be brought back home, rather than just ignoring the brutality of war, a spokesperson responded: That's just crazy talk! [I am kidding of course!]

Army Concerned About HBO War Film – NYT

[...] 

The documentary, titled "Baghdad ER," chronicles two months at the 86th Combat Support Hospital, where filmmakers were given broad access to follow doctors, nurses, medics and others as they treated soldiers wounded by roadside bombs and in combat. As one nurse, Specialist Saidet Lanier, says in the film: "This is hard-core, raw, uncut trauma. Day after day, every day."

The Army officials said that concerns about the documentary — which includes footage of an amputation and of wounded soldiers undergoing surgery and, in some cases, dying — were also raised by the wives of top Army officers who had seen the film.

"Given the subject matter, it's not something you're going to cheer at the end," said one senior Army official.

Richard L. Plepler, an executive vice president at HBO, said the screening would take place as planned on Monday, but he said he expected far fewer people to attend than the 300 or so that Army officials told him to expect after an initial screening at the Pentagon.

"We had discussed a larger degree of participation from senior members of the Army when we first visited the Pentagon in March," Mr. Plepler said. "One retired general who was there told us the film 'captured the soul of the United States Army.' Therefore, we're a little surprised by the change in plans."

[...] 

[via BoingBoing] 

Sexoteric Blog: Got a towel? has a couple of great posters via Flickr. Check it out!

Surprisingly, it's NYT that gives us a more balanced angle on the ongoing bruhaha over nationalisation of Bolivia's gas and petroleum production.

All Smoke, No Fire in Bolivia – NYT

[...] 

Latin America's newest populist leader, President Evo Morales, had just issued a decree nationalizing Bolivia's petroleum.

In reaction to the news, the European Union warned that the move could tighten global energy supplies and increase prices at the pump. Other international analysts have expressed concern about a resurgence of dangerous "energy nationalism." However alarming Bolivia's move might appear on the surface, though, there is surprisingly little in it to worry the United States and the West.

This is simply the way democracy sometimes works. Oil and gas nationalization has been the main political issue in Bolivia for the last several years. Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian farmer, won a landslide victory in December on a promise to nationalize the gas industry. Now he's delivering on that promise he made to the country's nine million citizens.

And when viewed from a Bolivian perspective, this is less of a nationalization than a return to constitutionality. Mr. Morales has a strong legal argument that the privatization that took place in the mid-1990's was unconstitutional. Under the Bolivian Constitution, the contracts that gave control to private companies were supposed to be approved by Congress, and they were not.

Add this to resentment on the street over Bolivia's Transparency International corruption ranking last year (placing its leaders among the world's most dishonest) and a long history of swindles where natural resources like gold, silver, timber and petroleum have been "privatized" into the global economy to the sole benefit of a few very wealthy Bolivians.

[...]
Bolivia was one of the first Latin American countries to adopt this approach back in the mid-1980's. State-owned companies were sold off. Government spending and regulation was scaled back. Foreign capital was courted. All on the promise of a new dawn of well-being.

Twenty years later the average Bolivian is worse off than before. Exports have declined. Bolivian incomes are stagnant, and half of the population lives on less than $2 a day. The rest of Latin America has experienced similar results from neoliberalism, leading to a general disillusionment that has given rise to leftist-populist governments.

[...]

Most of you probably have a desktop computer, perhaps also a laptop, one or more hand-held device (Palm computer, iPod, etc), and a mobile/cell phone (and there is also the home phone, but I will ignore that here). The standard problem: keeping the information sync'ed up between all of them, without needing data re-entry.

What data?

At the least, contact/addressbook information, and calendar/task entries. Stuff that falls under the PIM (Personal Information Manager/Management) cloud.

How is it accessed?

You would think that in the Internet age you would store the information on a central server and access it using standard protocols supported by client applications. That, it turns out in my experience, is tougher than I would have thought.

The technology

If you live in a pure Microsoft world (Windows on your PC, laptop, handheld and mobile phone) you probably can stop reading, at this point, and add a comment exhorting me to come over to your side! Windows probably does a decent job of Sync'ing between your computer and your handheld or mobile phone. Throw in an exchange server and you probably get syncing across computers as well. Well, what about the rest of us?

The standard technologies (well, one of the standards: as the saying goes, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from!) for contact and calendar information are LDAP directories and iCalendar based calendar subscriptions and import/export.

Surprisingly both LDAP and iCalendar are supported by today's addressbook, email and calendar applications, including: Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, Apple Addressbook (and hence Mail), Microsoft Outlook (from what I know), the many GNU/Linux/GNOME/KDE applications (Kmail, Evolution, Kontact, etc).

Well, are we done, then?

Annoyances

Unfortunately there are many annoyances to deal with:

• There aren't many free or commercial LDAP directory services available on the net. In fact, the only one I have found, which I highly recommend, is ScheduleWorld (which provides not just LDAP directories, but also standards based calendar service). This general lack of LDAP services pretty much nixes sharing your addressbook.

• Mozilla Thunderbird (to my knowledge) does not support lookup across multiple LDAP addressbooks for address completion, making use of LDAP just another bit tougher.

• Access to remote information is not a viable option today on iPods and various mobile phones. They do not support LDAP or iCalendar access to your information. The good news is that many of them provide two way synchronization (where applicable) using applications and drivers on your computer.

• There are a large set of iCalendar based calendar services available (e.g: the aforementioned ScheduleWorld, Google Calendar) As always there is a catch… well two in this case:

• Most calendaring services use a publish/subscribe model and not a synchronization model. In other words, you can publish your Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird calendar to the server, or subscribe to your server calendar on one of these applications, but you typically cannot update either willy-nilly and have them synchronize with each other.

• Free/Busy information: in order to schedule events involving multiple individuals, their free/busy information needs to centrally stored, accessible to the others. In a web-only system, this is trivial. In our multi-tool scenario, free/busy information needs to be synchronized.

Is there hope?

There is hope for the future, but my investigation has found nothing with enough coverage to make it worthwhile. The exception, if any, is ScheduleWorld. As far as I know, these are your options:

• Use a fixed write (write the information using only one interface), publish to server, and subscribe from many, model: either store your data in an application that supports pushing it to a server or store it on the server. Subscribe from all relevant clients.

• Use a service like ScheduleWorld which gives you: web-based read/write access to both calendar and contacts, a Java based multi-platform client to accomplish the same, and open interfaces (LDAP, iCalendar) for your multiple client applications. Beware of Apple Addressbook weirdness: not only does it often not import LDIF entries (from LDAP directories), it also does not sync LDAP directory entries to the iPod).

• Wait for better SyncML support.

• Hack up your own or use open source scripts to import data into client applications from public services such as Google Calendar.

• Use a service like Plaxo (which has come under much scrutiny and criticism, all of which you can read easily through a Google search on Plaxo) which synchronizes (only your contact list though) across multiple platforms (Apple Addressbook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook) and provides a web interface.

• NYT: Soda Distributors to End Most School Sales
• BBC: Moussaoui is spared death penalty
• CW: Democrats introduce new Net neutrality bill

From AlterNet:

The Anti-Bush Anarchist

By Gabriel Thompson, In These Times
Posted on May 2, 2006, Printed on May 2, 2006

Standing 5' 9" tall, weighing 240 pounds and sporting a shaved head, Jeff "The Snowman" Monson looks like a cartoon ready to pop, a compressed giant of crazy shoulders, massive biceps and meaty forearms. When he sneers, people shudder. When he sweats, they turn away. When he's angry, your best bet is to run.

He's angry right now, even though his combat career in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — an often-bloody tournament that combines martial arts disciplines like Brazilian Jujitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing — is taking off. [...] So no, it's not his future career prospects that have him pissed. It's the state of the world.

"I'm not some sort of conspiracy theorist," Monson says of his political leanings. "I'm not talking about how the government is trying to hide UFOs. I just want to do away with hierarchy. I'm saying that our economic system, capitalism, is structured so that it only benefits a small percentage of very wealthy people. When I was traveling in Brazil, they had us staying at a really posh hotel. Outside the hotel there was a mom sleeping on the sidewalk with her two kids. That's when reality hits you. What did that woman ever do? Who did she ever hurt?"

Monson wears his politics on his sleeve, as well as the rest of his body. An anarcho-syndicalist star is tattooed on his chest, an anarchy sign on his back and another "A" on his leg. While he loves his sport, he also feels a responsibility to use whatever exposure he receives for a larger purpose. "I don't think I'm more important than anyone else, but since some people are paying attention, then I'm going to use this as a vehicle to express myself," he says. Some fans have labeled him anti-American, but he shrugs off such criticism.

[...]

Monson sees no contradiction between his radical beliefs and his full-time occupation. "What I do is completely different than war, because everyone wants to be there, and it's a competition. There's no victim. We're all entertainers," he explains. "If there is any contradiction, it's that we're part of the capitalist machine, and I'm really just a wage slave. You know, we don't make any money without fighting, and if I win I get more; if I lose I get less. But it's simply a sport. Sure, it's somewhat like a gladiator sport, but it's voluntary."

Monson grew up middle class in Minnesota. His mother still works as a nurse, and his late father worked at a penitentiary. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he wrestled, and then received his Masters in Psychology from the University of Minnesota. During his graduate work, Monson had his political awakening — a course entitled Community Psychology.

"Oh man, that class really opened my eyes," he says.
"Just looking at the way the world is run, the way that the people that might be disabled or have mental issues are left behind. How education and general welfare are not a priority, and how the elite run everything for their own benefit. Then I started reading a bunch of stuff — Animal Farm, the International Socialist Review, Chomsky — and I started thinking in a different way." Monson the Ultimate Fighter uses Plato's allegory of the cave to describe the experience.

After graduating from Minnesota, he moved to Washington State, where from 1997 to 2001 he counseled the mentally ill for Lewis County; his primary responsibility was to determine whether an individual needed to be institutionalized. "I started right when they were pushing through welfare reform, and so we had all of these huge cuts in money for mental health and welfare. It's the same basic idea with No Child Left Behind. The government tells you that you have to cut your programs, cut your money for books, cut the money for teachers, but then you are expected to somehow do better. It's a brilliant strategy, really, from their perspective."

Despite being a world-class competitor, Monson finds time to remain politically engaged. In 2003, he marched against the Iraq War in Seattle, and protested the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami (where the notoriously aggressive cops wisely left Monson alone). He is also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and despite the controversy that surrounds him, continues to engage people within the fighting community about politics.

So what lies ahead for "The Snowman"? At the moment his focus is on his next big fight. "But this is not my whole life," Monson says of fighting. "I've got children and a girlfriend, and I like to be with my family. I try to remain involved in political events. After my next fight, I'll be taking my son to Montreal. They're having an Anarchist Book Fair, and they invited me to come up and do a workshop." The topic: self-defense.

First Pat Tillman, then of all things an ultimate fight type dude. As the immigrant rallies show, perhaps civil/human rights is best advanced by those outside the so-called "left"!

Below is an excerpt from an AlterNet post on the issue of porn (and stripping, etc), its impact on women and feminist response to it:

Raunch Culture

By
Leanne Shear

[...]

Part of the reason why we took the class in the first place is because my girlfriends and I tend to consider ourselves pretty adventurous and free-spirited. A few months back we started regularly going to (female) strip clubs and getting the occasional lap dance, while the mostly male clientele licked their chops. However, suddenly two things made all of that a lot less alluring for me — and one of them wasn’t that every time I tried to swing around the pole, I got dizzy and my sweaty hands caused me to land in a heap on the floor.

First, taking the strip class put me square in the stripper’s shoes (heels), right there on the stage, under the flashing lights. Second, and more importantly, reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy gave insight into the mind of the stripper, and the overall rampant pornification of our culture at large.

Levy writes about the proliferation of “raunch culture,” which, regardless of my self-proclaimed staunch feminism (women can make any choices they want!), I have been unwittingly engendering by doing things like going to strip clubs. Levy says in raunch culture, it’s the norm that “all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual … and the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment.”

All during strip class, Daphne kept repeating the mantra ad nauseum: everything we were learning was for “[our] man.” To me, empowerment signifies control — and the man-centric philosophy strip class (not to mention the whole stripping industry) seemed to espouse flew in the face of female control, either in society or just swinging around the pole.

Empowerment in my view is also about equality — and if all things were equal, would women necessarily want to be stripping for the greasy dollar bills that men throw at them with the same hand that wears their wedding bands? If my experience is any indication, I don’t think so. Proponents of “female liberation” might argue that some women are really comfortable with their bodies and like what they do with that pole, but as Ariel Levy says so perceptively, “because I am paid to is not the same thing as taking control of my sexuality.” Liberation implies we have broken the chains that have bound us to our status as sexual inferiors, and as Daphne’s sultry intonations suggested, that’s definitely not the case.

Ms. Levy continues, “The vast majority of women who enter the [stripping] field do so because they are poor and have no more attractive alternative” — and they stay poor. It really unsettled me to discover that I, as a “feminist,” would exploit one woman’s lack of power in the name of my own empowerment. This sort of hypocritical “empowerment for sale” mentality strikes me as another layer of conspiracy in the race to keep women down, and indicative of the fundamentally economic nature of the inequality of the sexes.

If we were smart and really empowered, we women would use our economic power to take sex out of the equation. Similarly, Female Chauvinist Pigs quotes Erica Jong as saying “sex is not power — women in decision-making positions — that’s power. When the senate is 50 percent women, that’s power. Sexual freedom is a smokescreen for how far we haven’t come.”

In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to be judged for something other than my physical appearance, and for something other than just my sex. Strip class taught me though that at least for the moment and to the detriment of all women, even the rare few who actually hold truly powerful positions, achievement for us is tied to sex.

[...]

• BBC: Spanish US anthem raises hackles
• BBC: Liberal thinker JK Galbraith dies
• BBC: Court win for ex-Playmate Smith
• BBC: US immigrants stage boycott day
• US News: Sun’s McNealy steps down as CEO

While reading through Behr, Kim and Spafford's Visible Ops piece, I came across this amusing quote they attribute to Borenstein (of MIME fame):

"The most likely way the world will be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." – Nathaniel Borenstein

SFGate: Panel dumps Net neutrality
Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer

Internet carriers would have a free hand to charge the likes of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. extra for faster delivery of services to consumers under a bill approved by a House committee Wednesday.The vote, 42-12, brings a two-tier Internet one step closer to reality despite the wishes of a broad coalition of Web site operators and public interest groups that insist the fees will crush innovation.

The Web companies had hoped to amend Wednesday's legislation, thereby enshrining the status quo of "network neutrality," the catchphrase that has come to represent a system in which all Internet traffic is treated equally. But the effort failed when an amendment introduced by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., was defeated 34-22 in a largely party line vote earlier in the day.

[...]

IOL: Spain urged to grant rights to apes
Spain urged to grant rights to apes

April 27 2006 at 05:53AM

Madrid – Spain's governing Socialist Party is promoting a controversial parliamentary initiative to grant rights to great apes on the basis of their resemblance to humans, news reports said on Wednesday.

If the initiative is approved, it would make Spain one of the first countries to officially protect the rights of apes, said a spokesperson for the animal rights association Adda.

The socialists want to prohibit the "enslaving" of gorillas, chimpanzees, orang-utangs and bonobos.

Spain would thus adhere to the international Great Ape Project, granting the animals the rights to life and freedom and to not being tortured.

"We are not talking about granting human rights to great apes," but about "protecting (their) habitat, avoiding their ill-treatment and their use in various circus activities," environment minister Cristina Narbona explained.

[...]

From Schopenhauer (serious) to the Beatles (trivial), the West has demonstrated a fitful fascination for things Indian. The latest (not counting the return of Yoga) has been Indian English literature — by which I mean not the modestly illuminating works of someone like R.K. Narayan, bot more the cutesy stuff such as the exotic prose of Arundhati Roy. Much was made of the Indian-American Kaavya Viswanathan's precocious work of fiction in the past year. Things have taken a turn for the worse and the below news item might signal the beginning of the end of this fad.

Young Author Asserts Copying Was Unintentional – NYT

By DINITIA SMITH and MARIA NEWMAN

Kaavya Viswanathan, the young author who has admitted copying parts of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," said today she was troubled to see so many similarities between her book and two novels by Megan McCafferty.

"When I was writing, I genuinely believed each word was my own," the 19-year-old Harvard University sophomore said in an interview this morning on NBC's "Today" show.

She also said the similarities were unintentional, even though she admitted earlier this week that she had copied them, and she hopes Ms. McCafferty can forgive her.

"The last thing that I ever wanted to do was cause any distress to Megan McCafferty," she said. " I've been unable to contact her and all I want to do is tell her how profoundly sorry I am for this entire situation."

She has promised to revise her book and said she would acknowledge McCafferty in a foreword.

On Tuesday, the day after Ms. Viswanathan apologized to the author, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from called her apology "troubling and disingenuous."

Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act."

[...]

Publisher to Recall Harvard Student's Novel

By MOTOKO RICH and DINITIA SMITH

Published: April 28, 2006

Just a day after saying it would not withdraw "How Opal
Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from bookstores, Little,
Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer's books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves.

[...]

Author may have copied from 2nd book
'Opal Mehta' has been pulled from retailers' shelves

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A Harvard sophomore's novel, which was pulled from the market last week after the author acknowledged mimicking portions of another writer's work, appears to contain passages copied from a second author.

A reader alerted The New York Times to at least three portions of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," by Kaavya Viswanathan, that are similar to passages in the novel "Can You Keep a Secret?," by Sophie Kinsella.

Some interesting links:

• Probability theory and Viswanathan's plagiarism
• Examples from the Harvard Crimson

 Interesting bit on Alternet:

AlterNet: Asexuals Unite
Asexuals Unite

By Traci Hukill, AlterNet. Posted April 24, 2006.

A small but growing movement believes that asexuality is an orientation as valid as straight or gay.

[...]

On the one hand our (by which I mean all of society) liberal disposition accepts and encourages this sort of thing, while on the other hand, reductionist biology continues to gain ground. Is there hope of a selfish gene asexual? Anyway, just read the piece!

Here's something from the Nation's blog on a response from a Lesbian/Gay activist to the ongoing immigration reform controversy:

 

Marriage Myopia

Richard Kim

If you want to see the pathologies plaguing the gay marriage movement in action, you need look no farther than this article penned by Jasmyne Cannick. Titled "Gays First, Then Illegals," Cannick's editorial spews the kind of xenophobic rhetoric now rarely heard outside of right-wing radio and white nativist circles — unless, of course, it's coming from the mainstream gay press. Pitting gay rights against immigrants' rights, Cannick — former "People of Color Media Manager for GLAAD" — considers it a "slap in the face to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people" for Congress to debate immigration reform when same-sex marriage remains unrecognized. For your pleasure or fury, here are some of her greatest hits:

"Immigration reform needs to get in line behind the LGBT civil rights movement, which has not yet realized all of its goals. Which is not to say that I don't recognize the plight of illegal immigrants. I do. But I didn't break the law to come into this country. This country broke the law by not recognizing and bestowing upon me my full rights as a citizen."

[More in the original piece]

Jasmyne Cannick's blog has a response and some additional posts on the matter. She writes:

My reality in South Los Angeles may not be your reality.

I believe that America needs immigration reform but how we will get there still remains to be seen.

At the same time, I also believe that America needs to take care of its citizens who don’t yet have all of their rights, including the right to marry, access to affordable housing, access to a better education, access to healthcare, and access to jobs that pay livable wages.

And adds:

No one is right and no one is wrong. We all have the right to our own opinion on how things should be handled.

Opinion / Soap box below:

At the risk of being called inconsistent (in my prior act of defending pomo) I have to say that this seems entirely the wrong way to look at it. Reality is what it is ("r"eality with a lowercase 'r', as the postmodernists may say) and it is our common vision of it that unites us in action. If all we have instead is identity politics, we are ruling out populist struggle. If we do not try to define what is right (and only define what is right for me) we build neither solidarity nor a sustainable foundation.

I was re-reading Philip Kitcher’s comprehensive critique of SocioBiology over the weekend. Titled "Vaulting Ambition" its a serious and detailed work that  works through the arguments and the models. The book has the convincing mathematics inside; I will stop at posting the more simple and emotional appeal in the introduction:

 A Bicycle Is Not Enough

When I was growing up on the South Coast of England in the 1950s, I was haunted by a vision of judgement. [...] Those of us whose families were not rich enough to sidestep the state educational system knew that judgement awaited us at age eleven. An examination would separate the academic sheep from the academic goats. We did not want to find ourselves among the goats.

For those who failed the famous British eleven-plus — about fifty percent — judgement was virtually final. Institutions suited to their perceived abilities awaited them. These establishments tried, usually unsuccessfully, to combine sound discipline with the inculcation of mechanical skills. Once committed to them, few of my contemporaries would return to the company of the educational elect.

[...]

[Kitcher goes on to list the now famous statistical fabrications of Sir Cyril Burt in order to advance his perverse theories of intelligence, and derives a caution from such episodes in science on how we evaluate current attempts at quantifying or describing human capabilities. He then ends:]

In the early 1970s, on a visit to England, I went to see a distant cousin. One of her children had just failed the eleven-plus — the old system of final judgement lingered on in the bastion of Conservatism in which I spent much of my youth and in which my cousin lives. Like many children before her, the girl had been promised a new bicycle if she passed the eleven-plus. Like many parents before them, her mother and father had given her the bicycle anyway. The daughter was visibly depressed. She felt that she had failed her parents, and she was not looking forward to the beginning of the school year when she, together with the other "failures", would transfer to a new school. Still, the bicycle was there, a small consolation to her and a token of parents’ continued support. As she wobbled down the sidewalk (the bicycle was somewhat too big for her), pride in her new possession temporarily overcame her sense of inadequacy. As I watched her, I remembered many of the children I had known, and the ways in which the educational system had narrowed their horizons at an early age. Those whose asprations have been mangled and whose lives have been reduced through the application of misguided sicence direct us to lok closely at any theorizing that lead us to further mistakes. Their descendants deserve better. A bicycle is not enough.

Roundabout 2pm I pulled the Volvo around and we tooled on over to The Grove, but blimey, the Banana Republic was closed!! J. Crew? Same! No, not the GAP!!!! But yes, the Gap too had been filled shut.

All I want to know is, when did Christianity overtake Consumerism as the dominant religion of the nation?

On many left lists, in the West in particular, if you talk about the unsustainability of current human population and consumption, you are often labelled a "neo-Malthusean" and further, an enemy of the common folks and an advocate of population control of the worst kind. A popular modern version of this debate is the Simon-Ehrlich wager, between conservative economist Simon and eco-activistic (and in that sense leftist) biologist Ehrlich; the twist being that it is the conservative who argues against any dangers posed by human population. For the record, Ehrlich lost that wager handily.

Ehrlich offered a newer list of criteria that Simon found unnacceptable (see link above). What is interesting about the new list is that Ehrlich finally starts thinking outside the [human] consumption trap (and the rephrasing of the issue as one of the effects of human consumption).

Recently, biologist Eric Pianka, at the University of Texas, has been in hot water over his own doomsday predictions about disease and death among human populations. I do not know the background of this guy and his affiliations. However, the following note from his website is an excellent argument of why human arrogance and ignorance, in this context, are morally repugnant.

What nobody wants to hear, but everyone needs to know
Eric R. Pianka

I have two grandchildren and I want them to inherit a stable Earth. But I fear for them. Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over, using them as their resource. In addition to our extremely high population density, we are social and mobile, exactly the conditions that favor growth and spread of pathogenic (disease-causing) microbes. I believe it is only a matter of time until microbes once again assert control over our population, since we are unwilling to control it ourselves. This idea has been espoused by ecologists for at least four decades and is nothing new. People just don't want to hear it.

Population crashes caused by disease have happened many times in the past. In the 1330s bubonic plague killed one third of the people in Europe's crowded cities. Smallpox and measles decimated Native Americans when Europeans transported them to the new world. HIV is a relatively new disease wreaking havoc in Africa and Asia. Another population crash is inevitable, but the next one will probably be world-wide.

People think unrealistically because they have lost touch with the natural world. Many people today do not really know where and how our food is produced, and on what our life support systems are based. As we continue paving over natural habitats, many think that we can disrupt and despoil the environment indefinitely. We have already taken half of this planet's land surface. Per capita shares of all the things that really matter (air, food, soil, and water) are continuously falling. Our economic system is based on the principle of a chain letter: growth, growth, and more growth. Such runaway growth only expands a bubble that cannot be sustained in a finite world. We are running out of virtually everything from oil, food and land to clean air and water.

Some politicians, economists, and corporations want us to believe that technology will come to our rescue. But we have a false sense of security if we think that science can respond quickly enough to minimize threats from emerging diseases. Microbes have such short lifecycles that they can evolve exceedingly fast, much faster than we can respond to them. Many bacteria have evolved resistance to most antibiotics, and viruses are resistant to just about anything. Defense always lags behind offense. So far, modern humans have just been lucky. A reactive approach to problems isn't enough, we also need to be proactive and anticipate problems before they become too severe to keep them from getting out of control.Many people believe that Earth and all its resources exist solely for human benefit and consumption, this is anthropocentrism. We should allow the millions of other denizens of this Earth some space to live — they evolved here just as we did and have a right to this planet, too.

I do not bear any ill will toward humanity. However, I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. Simply stopping the destruction of rainforests would help mediate some current planetary ills, including the release of previously unknown pathogens. The ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" comes to mind — we are living in one of the most interesting times humans have ever experienced. For example, consider the manifold effects of global warming. We need to make a transition to a sustainable world. If we don't, nature is going to do it for us in ways of her own choosing. By definition, these ways will not be ours and they won't be much fun. Think about that.

While he may be temporarily (or even entirely) wrong on the predictions about disease, he is (IMHO) absolutely right on human crowding out of other species, human faith on technology, and in particular our attitude towards the world and how we "consume" it. It is fashionable today (within the left) to dismiss this sort of thing as "new age" sentimentality or "primitivism". The argument deserves more respect.

I bet the rest of the world knew this a while ago, but its news to me: 

Firefox (Mozilla Corporation/Mozilla Foundation) made $72M last year?! – The Jason Calacanis Weblog

UPDATE: I know a lot of folks are coming here from DIGG and other memetrackers. The $72M someone told me at BarCampLA and I have no idea if that is true or not. If you reblog this (or report it) please make sure you make that clear.

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I’m sure kick them back some affiliate fees. Brilliant.

Scooter continues to entertain:

Firedoglake – Bush Authorized Libby NIE Release to Press

The latest filing in the Libby case is a doozy, according to the NYSun this morning. If Libby was being truthful in his testimony about this, and if Cheney wasn’t misleading him in his assertion that President Bush authorized Libby to leak selected portions of the NIE to the press (specifically Judy Miller), then I think we’ve discovered a very good reason for Fitz to have met with the President’s attorney just prior to Libby’s indictment.

[...]

Sometimes the news media calls out official doublespeak: 

NYT: Fewer Marshes + More Man-made Ponds = Increased Wetlands

WASHINGTON, March 30 — In the bog of the federal regulatory code, a wetland is defined as a marshy area of saturated soils and plants whose roots spend part of their lives immersed in water. In the Interior Department's periodic national surveys, a wetland is defined, more or less, as wet.

Traditional tidal, coastal and upland marshes count, but so do golf course water hazards and other man-made ponds whose surface is less than 20 acres.

And so, even at a time of continued marsh depletion, pond inflation permitted Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns to announce proudly on Thursday the first net increase in wetlands since the Fish and Wildlife Service started measuring them in 1954. Wetlands acreage, measured largely by aerial surveys, totaled 107.7 million acres at the end of 2004, up by 191,800 acres from 1998.

The two cabinet secretaries hailed the apparent reversal in the long trend of wetland losses. "I'm pleased to complete my term as secretary of interior by announcing some good news, said Ms. Norton, who will step down from her job Friday.

Other times, they are happy to play along. Here is a BBC headline:

Norway protects Arctic oil areas

What a bit of good news, you think, given that the US interior is using clever interpretation to hide environmental degradation. At least, there is Norway! Protector of Arctic regions. Well, you may wish to reconsider, based on the rest of the article:

Norway has approved increased oil exploration in its Arctic waters but will limit drilling in some areas until 2010 to protect the environment.

(The thing that is irritating is the choice of headline) 

Guardian gives its 2c on feminist blogging: 

The third wave – at a computer near you

Comparative levels of computer literacy and interest mean that younger women do dominate. As Valenti says, "There's always been this sense among second-wave feminists that young women just aren't interested. That's never been true though: they just didn't know how to reach us."

There has also typically been a suspicion that if younger women are interested in feminism it's of a specific variety: what's sometimes called "girlie" feminism. The mainstream media tends to highlight young feminists whose outlook is "sexy". Those, for instance, who frame pole dancing as a feminist act.

Go online, though, and you are immediately struck by the huge variety of outlook and opinions. This is most evident at the twice-monthly Carnival of Feminists, set up by British blogger Natalie Bennett, who also runs Philobiblion, a women's history blog. Each carnival (usually on the first and third Wednesday of the month) is hosted by a different blogger, who invites people to contribute articles on current events or a general theme: "radical feminism", for instance, or "1970s feminism and what it means today". The host then chooses the best pieces, putting links to between 50 to 100 articles up on their site and providing a short commentary on each. This effectively creates a major new anthology of feminist thought every two weeks.

People are always saying the feminist movement is dead, but I've never believed that," says Rebecca Traister, a feature writer for Salon.com, and one of the founders of Salon's own women's blog, Broadsheet, which launched last year. "What I think is that it's taking a modern, technological form, and that, from now on, feminism will be about a multiplicity of voices, growing louder and louder online."

But is it all just sound and fury? The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there's a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism.

Nina Wakeford, a sociologist at the University of Surrey, is cautious about blogging's influence. "I think the way blogs can provoke debate is useful," she concedes, "but it isn't clear how much they feed into activism. In the past, there was a clear role for women's organisations as regards representations to government, but I'm not sure whether women can affect public policy through blogging. Just who are they representing?"

This last question is interesting. As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women. "Blogging is still somewhat limited, of course," says Georgia Gaden, a postgraduate researcher who has studied feminist blogs, "because although we take our access for granted, many women, globally, don't have that luxury."

That said, these blogs do redress the balance by highlighting global stories. And the Carnival of Feminists is trying to reach as many women as possible, with the most recent carnival held on the Indian blog, Indianwriting. "That was our fourth continent," says Bennett, "and I'm looking for an African blogger, so that we can reach our fifth."

 Perhaps we old armchair activists can show half the nerve of the students in LA:

United for Peace : april29.org

MARCH FOR PEACE,
JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY

End the war in Iraq -
Bring all our troops home now!

SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2006
NEW YORK CITY

An old one that has already been /.ed but worth repeating! Register reports: 

Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.
"Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???," Taylor wrote to CentOS. "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma."

[...]

Read more at the link above (click on quoted article title) and also see the entire email exchange and Register's followup article. If you haven't seen it already, click the link… its absolutely worth it!

Is it just my old age or is the IT industry paradoxically getting less worried about password security these days? Back in the day we used to jump through hoops to not reveal cleartext passwords. Today: my hosting provider prints the password out in cleartext in form responses and email. Various online sites (blogs and such) email you the password in cleartext (even if you didnt ask for it!). Even the MySQL command to change the password (mysqladmin password) accepts the new password only on the command line!!

What the hell?!

WaPo (believe it or not!) has a chat with Noam Chomsky online. In the quoted section below, Chomsky, as always, reclaims the use of terms and zeroes in on verbal hoodwinking that should be, but sadly isn't, obvious:

Chat With Chomsky

[...]
Washington, D.C.: Do you believe that Latin America can be successful in developing alternatives to Washington Consensus neoliberal policy and do you believe that Globalization is a real thing as often portrayed by writers like Thomas Friedman?

Noam Chomsky: The term "globalization," like most terms of public discourse, has two meanings: its literal meaning, and a technical sense used for doctrinal purposes. In its literal sense, "globalization" means international integration. Its strongest proponents since its origins have been the workers movements and the left (which is why unions are called "internationals"), and the strongest proponents today are those who meet annually in the World Social Forum and its many regional offshoots. In the technical sense defined by the powerful, they are described as "anti-globalization," which means that they favor globalization directed to the needs and concerns of people, not investors,financial institutions and other sectors of power, with the interests of people incidental. That's "globalization" in the technical doctrinal sense. Latin America is now exploring new and often promising paths in rejecting the doctrinal notions of "globalization," and also in the remarkable growth of popular movements and authentic participation in the political systems. How successful this will be is more a matter for action than for speculation.

 [Via MP]

Every day I learn of one more incredulous fact:

Giving Birth in Chains – New York Times
America regards itself as an eminently civilized country, but in many states female prisoners who give birth are required to be held in shackles during labor. Besides being grotesquely inhumane, this appalling practice is medically dangerous.

A report by Amnesty International U.S.A. finds that nearly half the state corrections departments — and the Federal Bureau of Prisons — have policies that expressly permit this practice. Prison officials justify the policy by saying that the women are a flight risk, even though many of them are nonviolent offenders who would present little risk, even if they were not doubled over with labor pains or strapped down on a delivery table.

[...]

Its women's month, isn't it?

In my earlier entry on Mac software, I forgot one that is absolutely brilliant and a big help for those who have multiple computers, such as a workplace Windows PC. Synergy is a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse sharing application) without the V. In other words, it lets you share your keyboard and mouse across multiple systems, even if they run different OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux, etc). Displays can be chained so that moving the mouse across the border of one takes you to the next computer. Even cut and paste works across systems and screensaver synchronization is possible (for some platforms).

Phil Zimmerman (of PGP fame) has the following notice from a week ago:

Secure Voice over IP: Zfone

I’ve just released Zfone, a new product that takes a new approach to make a secure telephone for the Internet.

I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world. It also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another Zfone client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.

[...]

Seems interesting!

Below are a set of applicationsy that nobody with a Mac should live without. Well some of them may just be eye candy but then again, eye candy is what a Mac is all about . Non-freeware products are marked with the suffix [$].

	Adium Multi-protocol Chat client that supports all the major services (Google, Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, ICQ). Sports a great UI, supports Growl notification, lot of nice themes/templaets for chat window. Based on libGaim so suffers from the same lack of YMSG over HTTP support (which means Yahoo may not work if you are behind a corporate firewall). Alternatives: Fire, Proteus
	CyberDuck FTP and SFTP client/browser with support for Rendezvous/Bonjour. Provides bookmarking for frequently visited sites and synchronization with remote sites. Also supports resumption of transfers. Alternatives: Fugu, Fetch[$], Transmit[$], RBrowser, Interarchy[$]
	Desktop Manager Expose is nice but as any Unix-head will tell you a Windowing system is nothing without a Virtual Window Manager, and that’s where Desktop Manager comes in. Use your single physical screen as multiple virtual screens with neat transition effects, a desktop pager that can auto-hide, configurable shortcuts, and the ability to move windows across virtual screens and even make them sticky on all screens. The biggest drawback is the lack of a way to denote certain apps as always sticky At least an easier way should exist (such as a graphical button in the application titlebar) to make it sticky. Alternatives: Virtue
	Ecto Ecto is a multi-platform blogging client that supports a wide range of Blog servers and services (WordPress, Blogger, MovabeType, LiveJournal, etc). The UI is straightforward, the rich-text editor provides a good idea of the final look and feel, and there are some additional goodies such as inserting links from Amazon search. Ecto is not free, however. Alternatives: Qumana, Bleezer, Xjournal, MarsEdit[$]
	FireFox Unarguably the best web browser available! Tabbed browsing, fine-tuned privacy (cookies, forms, etc), zillions of extensions, and that’s about 1% of the available features. Forget that old notion that a Mac is best used with the inbuilt tools. Safari is no substitute for a real web browser. Alternatives: Camino, Mozilla, Opera, OmniWeb[$]
	Growl Growl is a notification system that provides other applications the means to notify the user of events. Various applications (including many listed here, such as Adium) support Growl notification. Notifications are customizable. Also See: GrowlTunes, HardwareGrowler, NetGrowler
	iEatBrainz CDDB etc are nice if you are playing, ripping or storing albums, but what about individual songs? For that you need the MusicBrainz service. And iEatBrainz is a client that lets you tag your iTunes collection (AAC or MP3) using acoustic matching from MusicBrainz.
	iTerm Terminal.App is for babies. iTerm adds the features that any Unixhead used to KDE/Gnome absolutely needs. For example: tabs for multiple remote terms. X style cut and paste. And a few other nice features.
	NeoOffice OpenOffice.org based office application suite that can read and write Microsoft Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel). Its a bit slow and sometimes has problems with advanced formats in MS files, but does the job for the 90th percentile. Alternatives: OpenOffice.org
	Quicksilver A launcher with an amazing number of features. Launch applications, visit bookmarks, setup custom shortcuts, open files, all with simple key shortcuts. Alternatives: Butler
	Taco HTML Edit A neat HTML editor that provides the basic set of features that makes it useful. Others like n|vu provide better WYSIWYG support but make it surprisingly more difficult to edit a page (such as by fixing table and cell widths, to use a random example). Taco provides a Live Preview that suffices to see what your HTML looks like. It also enables quick insertion of tags, performs syntax highlighting, etc. Alternatives: n|vu
	Thunderbird If Safari is inadequate compared to Firefox, Mail.app is a joke compared to Thunderbird. The list of features in T’Bird requires a separate web page altogether, but here are a few: multiple accounts with multiple identities, filtering, searching, labelling, Virtual Folders, LDAP addressbook, GPG (Enigmail), message aging, etc.
	Vienna RSS newsreader with inbuilt page viewer, tabs support, categories (including dynamic “smart folders” defined using filters — very useful for deleting those pesky “Open Threads” ). One feature that would be nice is OPML synchronization with a service like Bloglines. Alternatives: BlogBridge, Feed, Jager, Lektora, MiNews, NetNewsWire[$], NewsMac, PulpFiction, Strider[$], Bloglines, NewsGator, Shrook, Gritwire, and various other online news aggregators (Yahoo, Google, FeedLounge[$], etc).
Other Useful Tools
Eavesdrop: packet sniffer Saft add-on for Safari Screen Spanning Doctor: MacOS support for screen resolution limits it to the highest available on your iBook/PowerBook, though it can support higher resolutions, such as on an external monitor. Screen Spanning Doctor helps you not only extend your screen to an external monitor, but also helps support the higher resolution.
What’s Missing?
A nice Podcast client. At least for me, iTunes, iPodder, etc do not cut it. If you do not have Tiger and want something similar to Dashboard try Konfabulator or KeepAnEye Better LDAP support in the AddressBook. Currently subscribing to external directories is a crapshoot — it may work, it may not!

I sometimes think Economics has more interesting questions than Physics, but less interesting answers than the latter. Perhaps that is so because an ideological position seems almost a pre-requisite before any work in the field is started. Below are a set of links on the issue of globalisation and its effects. Broadly speaking, its somewhat of the same old debate abou free market vs protectionism, but the agents are reversed, and it seems, so are some of the ideologues.

The old story was that, despite its intuitive appeal (and caution gained from the experiences of colonialism), protectionism was bad for developing nations and adopting a free market system was a quicker (and perhaps only) way to achieve economic progress. The Asian Tigers were a clear demonstration of this, it was argued. Closed and protected economies like India, which languished for decades, blossomed into dynamic capitalist success stories within years of “liberalising” their economies. China was a bit of an outlier, but could be explained away.

Then we hear from Ha-Joon Chang about the development history of today’s “first world” nations and the credibility of the critique of protectionism:

Kicking Away the Ladder:
How the Economic and Intellectual Histories of Capitalism Have Been Re-Written to Justify Neo-Liberal Capitalism

Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge University, UK)

There is currently great pressure on developing countries to adopt a set of “good policies” and “good institutions” – such as liberalisation of trade and investment and strong patent law – to foster their economic development. When some developing countries show reluctance in adopting them, the proponents of this recipe often find it difficult to understand these countries’ stupidity in not accepting such a tried and tested recipe for development. After all, they argue, these are the policies and the institutions that the developed countries had used in the past in order to become rich. Their belief in their own recommendation is so absolute that in their view it has to be imposed on the developing countries through strong bilateral and multilateral external pressures, even when these countries don’t want them.

Naturally, there have been heated debates on whether these recommended policies and institutions are appropriate for developing countries. However, curiously, even many of those who are sceptical of the applicability of these policies and institutions to the developing countries take it for granted that these were the policies and the institutions that were used by the developed countries when they themselves were developing countries.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the historical fact is that the rich countries did not develop on the basis of the policies and the institutions that they now recommend to, and often force upon, the developing countries. Unfortunately, this fact is little known these days because the “official historians” of capitalism have been very successful in re-writing its history.

Almost all of today’s rich countries used tariff protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

[...]

Shortly after came the stories of the workings of the IMF and WB capped by a series of criticisms of erstwhile enthusiast Joseph Stiglitz.

Fast forward to today and we come to the role reversal, where countries like India and China are growing at near 10% rates while the US (and other parts of the West) is bogged down — of particular interest: jobs and outsourcing. And the result has been a strange morphing of positions among the intellectuals, theorists and assorted heavy-weights:

Guru of economics does an about-turn on free trade

At 89, after decades of speaking in favour of it, Paul Samuelson says it’s not such a good thing after all
Jay Bhattacharjee

A battle royale has just been initiated in the rarefied world of economic theory, although the rumblings have not yet reached these shores. The first salvo has been fired by no less a person than Paul Samuelson, and the targets he has chosen include some of his most prominent acolytes and disciples.

The MIT professor, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1970 and research mentor of countless economists, who later became major scholars in their own right, has re-assessed his entire stand on globalisation and the benefits that accrue from the process. In doing so, Samuelson has been scathing in his critique of some of his students, including Jagdish Bhagwati, once a member of his innermost circle.

[...]

The thrust of Samuelson’s analysis is that a country like China, basically a low-wage economy, will create a net negative impact on the American people, when it manages a substantial rise in productivity in an industry in which the United States was earlier a leader. Initially, American consumers may benefit from low-priced goods in their supermarket chains, but their gains may be more than neutralised by large losses sustained by American workers who lose their jobs.

[...]

Needless to say, this has not gone down well with Bhagwati (whom I like to think of as the intellectual version of Thomas Friedman ). Not just a liberal like Samuelson, but also conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts have switched to a protectionist (of sorts) position, and Bhagwati takes on Roberts in the WSJ:

Top Economists Square Off In Debate Over Outsourcing[...]

[Bhagwati:]

Look at the facts for 1999-2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, counting four IT-related sectors, the jobs expanded; slowly no doubt, but contract they did not. In 2002, the number of jobs in these sectors was over 17 million.

Contrast that with the estimate of gross numbers of outsourced jobs: They were around 100,000 per annum, and the upper estimates of job loss annually over the next 15 years has been put at 225,000, which is less than 1.5% of the stock of available jobs in 2002. I must add that the net estimates show that the U.S. has many more people employed in services that are exported than are “lost” in services that are imported.

And these jobs will surely expand because the main driver of growth in our economy is our prodigious technical change. Technical change nearly always substitutes for unskilled labor, but it creates new skilled jobs, both by creating new products and processes but also because the maintenance of technology also requires skilled labor.

[...]

[C]ountless … new jobs in unforeseen and unforeseeable occupations, requiring new skills, have emerged and will continue to emerge.

True, we will need to extend our adjustment assistance programs beyond manufacturing. We will also need imaginative programs to assist the older folks who cannot readily acquire new skills for the new jobs. We will finally need to delink medical benefits from employment: a change whose time has come, now that increased exposure to trade means that flexible responses to changing opportunities are possible.

But what we do know is that protection will only compound manifold the difficulties of adjustment for our skilled workers.

[...]

[O]ur social safety net is not as strong; and the family has been frayed, so neither the social nor the personal safety net is available to meet difficult problems of adjustment to import competition. So, when the fear of job losses is high, anxiety
is immense, as now.

[...]

Astonishingly, a liberal leadership of the Democratic Party that professes to better credentials on altruism in regard to developing countries is now committed to policies that are aimed at the developing countries which are using the trade opportunity to work themselves out of poverty, while a Republican president has taken the high road on both outsourcing and on foreign investment!

I think Bhagwati is right[er] (as are people like Krugman who have made similar points) about the last point he raises, and it is interesting to note that he is willing to talk about things like safety net or the difficulty of retraining.

The below is an excerpt from a FindLaw article by Julie Hilden on the cartoon controversy and issues of government censorship or expression. The quoted segment itself deals with the twisted use of logic and the English language, by the administration, which I have long found incredulous but seems to go almost unnoticed by large segments of the population. The obvious criticism raised below is therefore worth repeating:

Hilden: The Cartoon Controversy…

[...]

Government Speech: Weighing In on Cartoons — and Misinterpreting Them

Let’s start with the Washington Post cartoon, by Tom Toles. As noted above, it depicts a quadruple-amputee soldier, with a bandaged head. He is being attended by ‘Doctor’ Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld comments, ‘I’m listing your condition as battle-hardened.’ At the bottom of the cartoon, in smaller type, is Rumsfeld’s further comment, ‘I’m prescribing that you be stretched thin. We don’t define that as torture.’

The Joint Chiefs deemed the cartoon ‘a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds,’ and told the newspaper it had a responsibility not to ‘make light of [soldiers'] tremendous physical sacrifices.’

Column continues below %u2193

This kind of gross misinterpretation makes one wish there were a few more English majors graduating from West Point these days. The cartoon’s sympathies are firmly with the vulnerable soldier, and against Rumsfeld – plainly the callous one here. In light of reports of our troops being stretched thin because of the massive deployment in Iraq, and because soldiers’ tours of duty have extended well beyond their original discharge dates through a ’stop-loss’ policy, the cartoon suggests – hyperbolically — that Rumsfeld is willing to put even such terribly maimed soldiers back on the front lines of battle in Iraq.

The Joint Chiefs seems to have entirely missed the cartoons’ message – but it ought to be a familiar one. Indeed, it is the same as that of Wilfred Owen’s famous World War I poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est.’ Here are its final lines:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.

(The last phrase is Latin for ‘It is sweet and right to die for one’s country.’)

In sum, the cartoon simply did not express disrespect for the soldiers. Rather, it suggested, as Owen’s poem did, that they had been lied to, and hurt terribly because of the lie.

[...]

I haven’t posted an update for a while, but I plan to make this more regular (at least once a week, when there is news, which I guess is almost assured with this administration!). The below includes some dated material (unfortunately):

More coming up I am sure!

Hey, at least some parts of the Libertarian segment of the Right has a principled view/position:

Virtuous Violence Is Upon Us
by Paul Craig Roberts

[...]

If President Bush’s neoconservative administration were rational, the US would never have invaded Iraq. If Bush’s government were moral, it would be ashamed of the carnage and horror it has unleashed in Iraq.

The Bush administration has no doubts. It knows that it is right and virtuous. Bush and the neocons dismiss factual criticisms as evidence that the critics are “against us.”

People who know that they are right cannot avoid sinking deeper into mistakes. The Bush administration led the US into a war on the basis of claims that are now known to be untrue. Yet, President Bush and Vice President Cheney consistently refuse to admit that any mistake has been made. The chances are high, therefore, that the second Bush administration will be more disastrous than the first.

[...]

In a futile effort to assert hegemony in Iraq, the US has largely destroyed Fallujah, once a city of 300,000. Hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians have been killed by the indiscriminate use of high explosives.

To cover up the extensive civilian deaths, US authorities count all Iraqi dead as insurgents, delivering a high body count as claim of success for a bloody-minded operation.

[...]

On November 17, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called for investigation of American war crimes in Fallujah. This is a remarkable turn of events, showing how far US prestige, and the morale of our armed forces, have fallen.

However, for Bush administration partisans, war crimes are no longer something of which to be ashamed. Reflecting the neoconservative mindset that America’s monopoly on virtue justifies any and all US actions, Fox “News” talking heads and their Republican Party and retired military guests have arrogantly defended the marine who murdered the wounded Iraqi prisoner.

Iraqi insurgents are condemned for deaths that they inflict on civilians. But when American troops fire indiscriminately upon civilians and US missile and bombing attacks kill Iraqis in their homes, the deaths are dismissed as “collateral damage.” This double standard is a further indication that Americans have come to the belief that US ends justify any means.

A number of former top US military leaders and heads of the CIA and National Security Agency have condemned Bush’s invasion of Iraq as a “strategic blunder.” These are people who gave their lives to the service of our country and can in no way be said to be “against us.”

However, the Bush administration and its apologists regard critics as enemies. To accept criticism means to be held accountable, something the Bush administration is determined to avoid. Condoleezza Rice, who failed as National Security Adviser to prevent the Pentagon from using fabricated information to start a Middle East war, is being elevated to Secretary of State in Bush’s second term.

[...]

Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating “virtuous violence.” They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them. These partisans do not doubt for a second that Bush has the right to dictate to Muslims and everyone else (especially the French). Many also express their conviction that all of Bush’s critics should be rounded up and sent to the Middle East in time for the first nuke.

These attitudes represent a sharp break from American values and foreign policy.

[...]

Read in entirety at the link (click on the title in the quoted section above).

These days you won't get much attention (at least in debates on the Internets) unless you sound all intellectual and academic. Legion are the stories of legitimate viewpoints dismissed by failing to meet buzzword compliance. So, inspired by the most excellent tips referred to in an earlier entry on this bog, below is a guide on how to win your next debate on the Internets, even if you are totally in the wrong:

References

People

DO: Mention a bunch of obscure philosophers and experts but make sure they are from an unrelated field. Some philosophers are particularly employable both in terms of their reputation and their mutterings. Wittgenstein is a perennial favourite, though he is becoming rather commonplace these days. Try to refer to such people by their positions, e.g: What I propose is convergent with the post-empiricist Gödelian thesis. Make sure the people you mention are well respected in some serious community, not some wackjob with a following.

DONT: Contrary to what Bush might say, Jesus is not a philosopher.

Places and Time

DO: Nothing like a good historical reference: Weimar Germany (watch out for Godwin's Law if you head down this path), Vichy France, the post-reconstruction years… people eat that kind of stuff up (I mean, can you believe that there is a large World War section at the bookstore and an actual profitable History channel?!).

DONT: Don't fall back on the Holocaust. For one thing its a bit in poor taste. For another you may get sued by the Weisenthal Center or the ADL!

Ideas

DO: Rise above the crowd. Interject yourself as a disinterested party summarising the positions and presenting the large picture. References to Hegelian synthesis are useful here, but throw it in somewhere in the middle of your text. Classify any argument into one of these dualisms: liberal/conservative (left/right), science/religion (scepticism/faith), reductionism/holism, selfishness/altruism, nature/nurture, individualism/collectivism. Then tag your opponent with the position you wish to argue against and tear down that position using the methods described here. Refer to classic ideas, conundrums and paradoxes: the mind/body problem, consciousness, Cartesian idealism, radical scepticism/empiricism, untenable solipsism, etc.

DONT: Don't ever propose a directly opposing idea to an idea that is presented. That exposes you to the danger of real debate. Refuse to answer questions directly and counter with references to other ideas and their inadequacies.

Words and Phrases

DO:

Use these wherever remotely applicable:

• Phrases like: Antebellum south
• Paeleo-anything
• Latin, Latin, Latin: inter alia, ceteris paribus, modus ponens, stuff like that
• Throw a neo- in front of your opponents position to discredit him: neo-Darwinian, neo-conservative, neo-liberal, etc.
• Just big fancy words: antidiluvean, avancular, hagiographic, etc.
• Scientific or technical terminology: counterfactual, contrapositive, underdetermined, asymptotic, and so on.

DONT: Palaeontology is a real word! Avoid the overused Latinisms like anything that starts with Reductio.

Other Concerns and Techniques

Preemption

DO: Preempt counter arguments by: (a) admitting to certain limitations in your position, (b) creating strawmen critiques and dismissing them, (c) employing the technique of BushCo by questioning the ulterior motive of the person (anyone who supports our troops will find little reason to suggest withdrawal). Your opponent might employ the very Guilt By Association technique described earlier, against you. Preempt it: e.g., It would be a grave disservice to confuse this explication with vulgar Lamarckianism.

DONT: As per the cautions above, make sure your argument is obfuscated enough that you do not expose yourself to trivial refutation. Do not, by error, end up constructing a real critique of your position while attempting (b).

Prolong Debate

DO: Prolong the debate as long as possible. Achieve that by constantly expanding the scope of the issues while leaving your own argument vague enough to defy immediate and conclusive refutation. Keep posting responses. Include snippets of poems and song lyrics (preferably not Springsteen, Beatles or Brittney Spears), parts of speeches by personalities, Unix man pages, whatever… keep the thing going!

DONT: Stop posting! In the eyes of the audience on the Internets the last guy to speak is the winner. If you are stuck, return to an earlier point of strength and start expounding on that.

Many of this blog’s readers have complained that the content tends to be boring. In particular a large segment has expressed disappointment over lack of exciting news (infotainment). What better way to address that than this entry with some comments by Die Hard hero Bruce Willis:

CHUD.com – Cinematic Happenings Under Development:

[...]

I’m a Republican only as far as I want a smaller government, I want less government intrusion, I want them to stop pissing on my money and your money, the tax dollars that we give 50 per cent of or 40 per cent of every year, and I want them to be fiscally responsible, and I want these goddamn lobbyists out of Washington. Do that and I’ll say I’m a Republican. But other than that, I want the government to take care of people who need help, like the kids in foster care, the half a million kids who are in orphanages right now, they call them foster homes but they’re orphanages. I want them to take care of the elderly and give them free medicine, give them whatever they need. There’s tons, billions and billions of dollars that are just being wasted. Okay? I hate government. I’m apolitical. Write that down. I’m not a Republican.

[...]

Violence — look, we live in a violent world, man. This country was founded on violence. Who’s kidding who? We came here and said to the Native American Indians, ‘OK, we got some bad news, we got some pretty bad news, and we got some really bad news. The bad news is we’re here. The pretty bad news is we’re not leaving. The really bad news is we’re going to take all your land, every tiny little bit of land that you guys have and put you on this little postage stamp of desert where you can’t grow a thing, unless of course we find oil on that land. Then we’re gonna move you to another little postage-stamp place in Arizona, and we’re going to fuck you over and give you blankets filled with smallpox,’ and if that’s not violence, then what is, my man. What is?

[...]

I don’t like the world. I don’t think it’s being run correctly and I think it could be done a lot better and because I’m old enough to have grown up at a time – look, I remember when Jack Kennedy got shot. I remember when the news was just ‘Here’s what happened and we’re going to show you what it is.’ Now the news is manipulated and managed and it’s all meant to scare you. They don’t show you anything good. They don’t show you anything good coming out of Iraq, all they say this many dead since President Bush took office. But a lot of great things are happening over there, I went over and saw things for myself and there’s a lot of jacked up things.

[...]

Look at what happened to James Frey in the last two weeks. That’s a great book, a great book and so is the follow up book. And just because his publisher chose to say these are memoirs, it took it out of being a work of fiction – a great work of fiction, very well written – to this guy being sucker punched on Oprah by one of the most powerful women in television just to grind her own axe about it. Hey Oprah, you had President Clinton on your show, and if this prick didn’t lie about a couple things, I’m going to set myself on fire right now.

[...]

Malian “bluesman” Ali Farka Touré died last night. The story goes that he fell in love with [African-]American blues music and adapted his own native music to that style. The picture to the left is the cover of his collaborative album with Ry Cooder. If you have not heard Touré before, find a site (perhaps last.fm or Amazon) which will let you listen to snippets of “Ai Du”. Its a great song.

Not just because I was a denizen at old Ma Bell, or because I harbour an irrational hatred for Verizon, but primarily for the "I told you so" pleasure of it, a report of news that AT&T (SBC that is) is buying Bell South:

AT&T near $65 bln deal to buy BellSouth
Plan to aqquire No.3 regional phone company could be announced Monday.
March 5, 2006: 7:50 AM EST

LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. telecoms group AT&T is planning to acquire No.3 U.S. regional telephone company BellSouth, U.S. newspapers reported on Sunday, adding a deal worth $65 billion could be announced as early as Monday.

[...]

Update: AT&T confirms.

NYT Op-Ed piece about Khruschev:

How a Speech Won the Cold War – New York Times
By WILLIAM TAUBMAN

FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress that changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose God-like status had helped to legitimize Communism in the Soviet Bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary.

[...]

Reading this kind of thing reminds me of how surprised I was to learn the differing versions of history between the USA and other parts of the world. I guess I was still young and naive then! While we learn of perestroika and glasnost and how Gorbachev brought about the momentous changes that led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the end of the so-called “cold war”, Americans (at least a large segment), behind their own velvet curtain, subscribed (or currently subscribe) to the idea that Ronald Reagan “won” the cold war, sealing it with his speech: “Mr. Gorbachev bring down this wall” (referring to the Berlin Wall). Perhaps the title of the piece quoted above is cleverly chosen to bring out this difference in our versions of history!

In an NYT Op-Ed piece, Matthew Pearl talks about the recent Larry Summers eviction at Harvard and ties it to larger historical developments. He starts out normally enough:

How the Liberal Arts Got That Way – New York Times
By MATTHEW PEARL

BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor, but oddly also laid the seeds of his presidential breakdown.

Except there is already a hint of the paradox that is about to be manufactured. And that hint is in the insertion of the word ‘oddly’. Which permits Pearl to (after outlining the emancipating liberalism of Harvard’s history) go on to:

In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer. The president could no longer concentrate on pleasing the finite body of individuals who approved and could censure him. From Eliot’s term onward, each president had to be acutely aware of negotiating between competing and in many cases incompatible demands from the various factions — the administrative governing boards, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors and those holding the federal purse strings.

What are the changes Pearl is alluding to (that freed Eliot)? He lists a whole lot in the passages leading up to this one. Student resistance is one. Advances in the sciences is another. Yet another is a law shaking up the Board of Overseers. Let us assume it is all of the above changes that “freed” Eliot, as president, to “usher in large-scale reforms”. Now these same changes, Pearl seems to claim, led to Summers being answerable to all and hence not in possession of the freedom for large-scale reform that Eliot enjoyed. This, I guess, is the paradox.

Except it rests on the question of what the changes were and whether they provided freedom for Eliot to perform arbitrary large-scale reform, or more reasonably, gave him the backing to carry out meaningful reforms? In other words, the “tide of liberalism” empowered Eliot to carry out the very changes that the liberalism rightfully demanded. The case of Summers is quite the opposite, for he was not attempting to create a “renaissance of the liberal arts” but to shout them down into a submissive role (to himself and to his pet notions). His actions were to push back against the “tide of liberalism” and towards more traditional notions, and it is no paradox that he was done in by his regressive actions, which were repulsed by the progressive changes that empowered Eliot.

The laments of the various reductionists in Biology (EP, Sociobiology, Cognitivei science, etc) by appeal to the injustice of suppression of radical new ideas by the establishment is a parody of real anti-establishment ideas that faced persecution. Not only are these ideas anything but radical (one does not need to look as high as Harvard presidents to find negative speculation on the abilities of women), they are no different (in their reasoning) from the twisted usage of the Bush crowd of notions such as whistle-blowing (which they use to defend their man Libby’s leaking of a CIA operative) or supporting the troops.

Pearl reveals his own axe shortly thereafter, in the article:

The Harvard experience had long ago been liberated from politics in its most concrete attachment — that tie to the Massachusetts Legislature — but it has been politicized in a different way, subjected to the realm of public politics and opinion.

Aha! Public politics and opinion we learn is what did old Larry in. Not surprisingly, Pearl seems to employ the same twist of logic I outlined above, for the truth is that Larry’s politics and opinion is what did him in.

Currently playing on my iTunes: Staralfur by Sigur Rós. Its a nice, haunting song (Epitonic will even let you legally download it), though the more uppity types might find it (as always) pandering or trite. One way to identify the uppity types is by their unfaltering admiration of Springsteen — I think the thing for this crowd is the Woody Allen trick of mixing the trivial (baseball) with the allegedly profound. Anyway this is not one my pet rants, though it sort of turned out this way. Just wanted to point you to the song.

And also a very interesting movie (which falls into the same classification as the song) called The Girl in the Cafe which I picked up quite by change because of the dratted free coupons that Blockbuster wastes my time with (because of my erstwhile DVD subscription). The movie in short: idealistic, simple, young girl meets nice, old, shy bureacrat resulting in trip to G8 summit and question of poverty, hunger, etc. Includes statutory Bono (One!) blurb at end, and all in all leaves one feeling empty and disgusted about oneself and the world (factoid from the movie: a child dies every 3 seconds due to entirely avoidable causes), except of course one is one of those sophisticated, uppity types described above! The movie ends with Staralfur in the background.

A grim reminder of what it still is, in this world, to be a [real] leftist.

BBC NEWS | Mexico ‘dirty war’ crimes alleged

The Mexican government and military committed “crimes against humanity” in the so-called “dirty war” against left-wing rebels, a leaked report says.

The report was prepared for current President Vicente Fox but has not been released. A US NGO has printed material saying Mexicans had a right to know.

The army kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of rebel suspects, says the report, which covers 1964 to 1982.

Mexico’s special prosecutor says the report is biased and has been revised.

‘Death flights’

The draft report’s authors write: “The authoritarian attitude with which the Mexican state wished to control social dissent created a spiral of violence which… led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide.”

They say they base their findings partly on declassified military, police and interior ministry documents and list for the first time the names of officers allegedly involved in the abuses.

The report says that units detained or summarily executed men and boys in villages suspected of links to rebel leader Lucio Cabanas.

Detainees were forced to drink gasoline and tortured with beatings and electric shocks, it says.

Bodies of dozens of leftists were dumped in the Pacific Ocean during helicopter “death flights” from military bases in Acapulco and elsewhere.

[...]

Matrix Pong

[Thanks to Adam]

I don’t usually forward this stuff, but this one is just way too funny to miss.

An amusing bit from the Guardian about the Dubai ports controversy. Doesn’t really state anything we don’t know but check it out anyway: its funny.

Guardian Unlimited | Calm down, it’s only a commercial deal

Bush has peddled hysteria as a way of governance, so it’s hysterical to see him trying to play down the Dubai Ports controversy, says William Greider

[...]

A conservative blaming hysteria is hysterical, when you think about it, and a bit late. Hysteria launched Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It created that monstrosity called Homeland Security and pumped up defence spending by more than 40%.

Hysteria has been used to realign US foreign policy for permanent imperial war-making, whenever and wherever we find something frightening afoot in the world.

Hysteria will justify the “long war”, now fondly embraced by Field Marshal Rumsfeld. It has also slaughtered a number of Democrats who were not sufficiently hysterical. It saved George Bush’s butt in 2004.

Bush was the principal author, along with his straight-shooting vice-president, and now he is hoisted by his own fear-mongering propaganda.

The basic hysteria was invented from risks of terrorism, enlarged ridiculously by the president’s open-ended claim that we are endangered everywhere and anywhere (he decides where). Anyone who resists that proposition is a coward or, worse, a subversive.

[...]

So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?

Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus. So do a lot of the politicians merrily throwing spears at him.

He taught them how to play this game, invented the tactics and reorganised political competition as a demagogic dance of hysterical absurdities, endless opportunities to waste public money. Very few dare to challenge the mindset. Thousands have died for it.

[...]

It would be nice to imagine this ridiculous episode will prompt reconsideration, cool down exploitative jingoism and provoke a more rational discussion of the multiplying absurdities. I doubt it. At least it will be satisfying to see Bush toasted irrationally, since he lit the match.

Rigour is often confused with toughness and it is only a short leap from there to machismo. We are urged to accept various theories not on the basis of rigourous proof or reasoned argument, but through what is the equivalent of “deal with it”. The left, forever afraid of being seen wussy, is often first to turn on its own with calls for accepting the “reality”, with the palliative that the “is” does not hinder the “ought”. Hence we have the scientistic attacks on postmodern philosophy, the examples from previous entries on neo-darwinism, the claims of dearly departed Larry Summers of Harvard about the innate disabilities of women, and so on down the road that leads to Joe Leiberman’s [what should not be] dismaying abandonment of his party.

In that category lies the repeated need to see human beings as a predatory and carnivorous species. Glorious male hunters showed us the way, and such anomalies as feminism or vegetarianism are sentimental niceties… never mind the inconclusive, or better, nuanced reality presented by actual data. These tough images need sustenance and that comes in the form of macho rhetoric and selective analysis and presentation of the data: when is the last time you saw a lion cub die in a nature show, except of course the rare segment where they are killed by the even more macho alpha male lion, despite the fact that a whole lot of them die within the first six months of life? On the other hand, there is no dearth of footage of fawns getting slaughtered by the predator of the moment? One must not get sentimental about baby Bambi!

Once in a while, a bit of different analysis or data makes it into the mainstream, challenging the macho stories, and I confess it amuses me greatly to be able to forward or quote them:

BBC NEWS | Predators ‘drove human evolution’:
Predators ‘drove human evolution’
By Paul Rincon

The popular view of our ancient ancestors as hunters who conquered all in their way is wrong, researchers have told a major US science conference.

Instead, they argue, early humans were on the menu for predatory beasts.

This may have driven humans to evolve increased levels of co-operation, according to their theory.

Despite humankind’s considerable capacity for war and violence, we are highly sociable animals, according to anthropologists.

James Rilling, at Emory University in Atlanta, US, has been using brain imaging techniques to investigate the biological mechanisms behind co-operation.

He has imaged the brains of people playing a game under experimental conditions that involved choosing between co-operation and non-co-operation.

From the parts of the brain that were activated during the game, he found that mutual co-operation is rewarding; people reacted negatively when partners did not co-operate.

Dr Rilling also discovered that his subjects seemed to have enhanced memory for those people that did not reciprocate in the experiment.

[...]

My previous entry was about the thoughts of a particular philosophical/biological group (neo-darwinism, darwinian fundamentalism, evo psychology, etc) on religion. Below is an essay on David Wilson, a biologist with a different approach and attitude. Edward Wilson too has suggested that religion (what others have called the religion meme) evolves due to its fitness advantages, but David Wilson’s take is a bit different. I am particularly interested in this article because of the mention of religion and morality, which “leads forward” to my upcoming rant on the Left (in America) and their views and attitudes (In short, they are, to an extent, the opposite of Wilson’s father — who is described by him as a man who was scornful of religion but deeply moral — since they are scornful of morality and unwittingly religious in terms of their faith).

Guardian: ‘I wanted to show how niceness evolves’
David Sloan Wilson says plankton can tell us a lot about God and human morality.
By Andrew Brown
Thursday July 24, 2003
The Guardian

[...]

One might say Wilson’s entire scientific career has been an argument with the Selfish Gene. The central story of scientific development in that book goes something like this: once upon a time, biologists believed organisms could evolve to do things for the good of their groups. Then came the revolution, the new, tough-mindedness that showed this could not be true and that everything must be analysed in terms of the ruthless selfishness of its components. As Margaret Thatcher might have said, in the new biology there was no such thing as a species only individual organisms and their families.

[...]

It may seem a simple twisting of words to say behaviour that’s good for the group will be selected by evolution if it’s also good for the individual. But the point is that this behaviour benefits individuals because they are group members. Behaviour can only be analysed and predicted by treating group selection as something that happens. “The idea that selfish gene theory by itself constitutes an argument against group selection is a common misunderstanding and the concept of selfish genes loses much of its force when revealed as merely newspeak for ‘any gene that evolves, including by group selection’. Genes that evolve by group selection are as compatible with selfish gene theory as genes that evolve at any other level of selection.”

[...]

The important thing about religion, he thinks, is that it encourages collective action. The emotions that religions build on, and the conduct they encourage, tend to bind groups and build cooperation. The worship of a common god, he believes, is really the worship of a common good, to whom everyone in the tribe or religion must defer.

[...]

In the same way, says Wilson, “spirituality, this intense searching for God, reliably leads to community. The monastic and ascetic tradition actually ends up being involved in communitarian activities. This is true across all religions. When you look at it closely, these people sitting in caves in the Tibetan mountains and the fabled ascetics of early Christianity, the people sitting on poles in the desert and so on, are plugged into a wider lay network.

[...]

His view of religion is in almost every respect the opposite of the Dawkins view that religion is a matter of false and perhaps malevolent beliefs. That they are false is almost the least important thing about them compared to the effect they have on our behaviour. If they promote advantageous behaviour, or group cohesion, religious beliefs will survive. The one thing religions take seriously is not their theories of creation. Or even of the after-life – many religions don’t involve any coherent belief in heaven. It is their rules about how believers must treat one another, and outsiders. If these are got right, the religion will flourish, even if its doctrines are absurd.

[...]

There is a certain vulnerability, of over-reaching, in acts of triumphalism that robs the agent of his well-deserved preening (we saw some of that in the fall of Bush (at least in popularity) in short order after proclamations of a ‘mandate’). There was a time when Selfish Gene theorists and other reductionists were somewhat of establishment outsiders and also not favourable with the public. EP and Sociobiology proponents fought hard to reach their current Amazon.com sales rank (Edward Wilson had to endure water being poured on him by indignant students, for instance), and with their most outspoken critic now safely in his grave, it is only natural and deserving that they enjoy the limelight to knock off a few mighty tomes of overarching wisdom.

But as the Eastwood character said in ‘Unforgiven’, it does seem to be not about deserving, at least over at the NYT Book Review, where old Dennett, all around AI and Neo-Darwinism groupie, gets a spanking in a review of his own take on Religion (following Edward Wilson’s attempt at it a few years ago). Read on (and click through) for an entertaining review that almost redeems TNR.

But before I let you proceed to the review, i have to say that I am quite tickled by the reviewer’s identification of scientism and materialism as the force behind some of these lines of thought. I am tickled because I have sitting in the drafts (for this blog) a festering rant about the American Left that ties into some of this stuff. It is particularly funny, to me, that Wieseltier (the reviewer) says:

Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

Funny because I was thinking of some parts of the left and their own omniscient white man with a long beard… . But that is another blog post…

The God Genome

‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,’ by Daniel C. Dennett
Review by LEON WIESELTIER
Published: February 19, 2006

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett’s book. “Breaking the Spell” is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person’s qualities may be known by a person’s brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett’s usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett’s book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky.

In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. “By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,” he declares, “and yet I persist.” Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts! He wonders whether religious people “will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.” If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as “protectionism.” But people who share Dennett’s view of the world he calls “brights.” Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that “brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest”? Dennett’s own “sacred values” are “democracy, justice, life, love and truth.” This rigs things nicely. If you refuse his “impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology,” then your sacred values must be tyranny, injustice, death, hatred and falsehood. Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful.

[...]

What’s up with the dudes with big white beards, anyway?

More tidings from the frontiers of the Bush revolution:

And so on it goes…

Recently, I posted about Max being dropped by dKos and a bit earlier about Kos opinion on peace marches. At that time, I had no problem with Kos in general but found some aspects of his approach (and his rhetoric) disturbing. More on his attitude has emerged (follow the Bitch|Lab blog link quoted below to read direct Kos comments on the dearth of minorities/women in the blogosphere, and from there on about affirmative action, etc) that casts further doubt on Kos’ credibility as a true progressive.

The quoted text below is of particular interest to me because it is rare to hear this (what I consider) older form of leftist/progressive ideal, here in the West. In fact new leftists (like Kos himself, though he probably does not consider himself a leftist) probably dismiss this as some sort of romanticizing, on various pragmatic grounds.

I have always thought that the job of the left is much harder: (I am not good at metaphors, so bear with me) We have the task of dragging the conservatives away from the last good idea we brought about to the next good one. Our techniques are part of who we are, just as theirs betray their outlook (Don’t worry, no Nietzsche quote shall follow).

Without more verbiage then, a comment from Bitch|Lab that says it most beautifully:

Bitch | Lab » Blog Archive » Flicked off

For him (dKos), it’s about winning elections. And the content of his blog is zeroed in on yakking about the races, promoting candidates, promoting campaign issues, battling the enemy.

And he wants to imagine that the only legitimate way to build this “Progressive” community is via this narrowly defined political practice. Thus those blogs that focus primarily on doing the same are considered legimitately part of the ‘political community’.

But, can a social movement for real progressive change rest only on this narrow conception of politics? How does such a narrow concpetion of politics foster community and solidarity? I don’t think it does — not for the long haul at any rate.

A progressive politics needs story tellers. It needs shared symbols which express, in crystallized for, those stories. Those story tellers speak from the voices of those who feel the burning edge of the need for social change.

Those story tellers seem to me to almost always emanate from the impassioned heart of those who feel most oppressed or who can, somehow, identify with them and give voice to that pain — and that desire.

Those stories are what the whole “values” debate is really all about. Those stories are what Mr. Framing (I’ve forgotten his name) is really talking about. But things he talks about don’t inspire the people who struggle. He only wants to get people to pull levers in voting booths. He only wants to bring USers to a point where more people thinkt he Democrats are more appealing than the Republicans.

Real social change — which is what I thought a progressive supports — is something that needs to be sustained by larger mythic stories of what’s wrong with contemporary life and what we can do to change. Those mythic stories we tell ourselves tell us why we struggle. They tell us why we’re doing this. They tell us why we keep fighting, even when we lose, even when we think nothing’s ever going to change. Those stories nourish us and reinvigorate us. They keep us fighting when the going gets tough. They connect us to a past through a present and onward toward an imagined future.

Ahem.

Sorry. There’s this weird thing that takes over me sometimes and I sound like a durn fool.

No you don’t. You sound just about right, and just about exactly what I learnt was worthwhile about being a progressive (and acting as one) from my father (the most gentle human being I ever knew).

By the way, B|L, the Mr.Framing guy you are looking for is, I think, George Lakoff (PDF).

As always, Fish (now at Florida International University) doesn’t fail to give an interestingly different analysis. But perhaps I find it interesting only because of my liberalism (my feeble attempt at a joke — read Fish to see why its possibly funny). This is Fish on the cartoon controversy, in an Op-Ed piece in the NYT. I urge you to follow the link and read the entire piece.

NYT: Our Faith in Letting It All Hang Out
By STANLEY FISH
Published: February 12, 2006

IF you want to understand what is and isn’t at stake in the Danish cartoon furor, just listen to the man who started it all, Flemming Rose, the culture editor of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Mr. Rose told Time magazine that he asked 40 Danish cartoonists to “depict Muhammad as they see him,” after he noticed that journalists, historians and even museum directors were wary of presenting the Muslim religion in an unfavorable light, or in any light at all.

“To me,” he said, this “spoke to the problem of self-censorship and freedom of speech.” The publication of the cartoons, he insisted, “was not directed at Muslims” at all. Rather, the intention was “to put the issue of self-censorship on the agenda and have a debate about it.”

I believe him. And not only do I believe that he has nothing against Muhammad or the doctrines of Islam, I believe that he has no interest (positive or negative) in them at all, except as the possible occasions of controversy.

This is what it means today to put self-censorship “on the agenda”: the particular object of that censorship — be it opinions about a religion, a movie, the furniture in a friend’s house, your wife’s new dress, whatever — is a matter of indifference. What is important is not the content of what is expressed but that it be expressed. What is important is that you let it all hang out.

Mr. Rose may think of himself, as most journalists do, as being neutral with respect to religion — he is not speaking as a Jew or a Christian or an atheist — but in fact he is an adherent of the religion of letting it all hang out, the religion we call liberalism.

The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously.

[...]

This is, increasingly, what happens to strongly held faiths in the liberal state. Such beliefs are equally and indifferently authorized as ideas people are perfectly free to believe, but they are equally and indifferently disallowed as ideas that might serve as a basis for action or public policy.

Strongly held faiths are exhibits in liberalism’s museum; we appreciate them, and we congratulate ourselves for affording them a space, but should one of them ask of us more than we are prepared to give — ask for deference rather than mere respect — it will be met with the barrage of platitudinous arguments that for the last week have filled the pages of every newspaper in the country.

One of those arguments goes this way: It is hypocritical for Muslims to protest cartoons caricaturing Muhammad when cartoons vilifying the symbols of Christianity and Judaism are found everywhere in the media of many Arab countries. After all, what’s the difference? The difference is that those who draw and publish such cartoons in Arab countries believe in their content; they believe that Jews and Christians follow false religions and are proper objects of hatred and obloquy.

But I would bet that the editors who have run the cartoons do not believe that Muslims are evil infidels who must either be converted or vanquished. They do not publish the offending cartoons in an effort to further some religious or political vision; they do it gratuitously, almost accidentally. Concerned only to stand up for an abstract principle — free speech — they seize on whatever content happens to come their way and use it as an example of what the principle should be protecting. The fact that for others the content may be life itself is beside their point.

This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.

[...]

Perhaps Fish is already aware of the possibility that he, more than anyone else, might personify the flippant nonchalance/posturing of the liberal he describes so well!

I have decided to create an entire new category: Bush Tracker, sort of a “Where are they today?” section on the ever-growing set of BushCo acts of obscenity and where they stand currently. In fact there are so many (stealing elections to Katrina to illegal wiretapping) that at some point I may have to create subcategories.

Here’s the update for today:

Let us see if I am able to keep up with the rate at which these guys can act!

Here is part 2 of the Guardian 3 part series on Israel and apartheid. You can click on the title of the article to view the original piece.

Guardian Unlimited | Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology

To be filed under “And you thought we were enemies” or perhaps “Homophobia makes strange bedfellows”:

[Via RawStory]

US legislators press Rice on UN vote against gays
Tue Feb 7, 2006 9:36 PM ET
By Irwin ArieffUNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The Bush administration’s support for Iran’s proposal to bar two gay rights groups from a voice at the United Nations sparked a demand from U.S. legislators on Tuesday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repudiate the action.

Of course there is nothing new in this sort of behaviour. The US has selectively enrolled in the Axis of Evil previously, for equally honourable causes, such as war crimes immunity, weapons ban (avoiding them, that is), executing jueveniles and mentally disabled…

First you have to publish a blog, but now that’s pretty overdone. You syndicate it through FeedBurner, get yourself on Technorati, throw in Haloscan comments, provide email feeds through FeedBlitz, do tracebacks, pingbacks, and most importantly, join a like-minded blogging posse by setting up a prominent blogroll. The perils of blogroll politics have been explored elsewhere, and here I want to just note down (perhaps mostly for my own later reference, since I am no blogging expert) some ways to maintain your blogroll.

If you are running your own server and use some popular blogging tool like b2evolution or WordPress, you can use their built-in blogroll (or linkblog) capabilities to maintain your set of links to sites your recommend. Popular blog hosts like Blogger and WordPress provide such capabilities too. If you find these things limiting (Blogger, last time I checked required text editing to create a blogroll, and a non-hierarchical non-tagged one at that), there are a few other esoteric techniques: host a blogroll/link-collection elesewhere, and use supplied (by the hosting site) JavaScript or XML-RPC to post your link updates to your site.

• Blogroll servers

Services like Blogrolling.com can be used to maintain your blogroll which using HTML/JavaScript can be imported into a section of your blog.

• Social Bookmarking

A blogroll is not much different from the old bookmarks idea, and social bookmarking (made popular by del.icio.us) sites may be one interesting way to maintain your links. Many of these sites provide JavaScript and/or XML-RPC mechanisms to bring your roll into your blog. I particularly like Jots and Blogmarks both of which can post your entries at their site to your blog using XML-RPC or other means. Both services are Blogger/WordPress/Typepad/etc aware. Most interestingly, both provide (similar to del.icio.us, which also supports such export) tagging of links. As is standard these days, they also provide bookmarklets which you can add to your browser to quick link/add pages. As far as I can tell, one problem many of these sites face is that they do not provide a way to do multiple tag (logical AND) searches (for that feature, try Scuttle). Another thing to note is that most of these servers post to your blog (as blog entries) and not to the blogroll within your blog. This may be unsatisfactory.

I use Jots to maintain my links and have it post update as blog entries to the blog category: Bookmarks. Additionally, I provide a link in my Blogroll called Bookmarks pointing to my Jots page. This works fine for me since I am conflating blogrolling with bookmarking. YMMV.

• Online RSS Aggregators

Yet another option is to use an online aggregator like Bloglines, which you are probably already using to read RSS feeds, and let it export [part of] your feeds list as a blogroll using one of the techniques above.

This is a very cursory sketch of my investigation into the available services, and I hope to flesh it out from my notes when I have additional time.

Also see: Roxomatic provides a great comparison of social bookmarking sites.

Guardian (UK) is running a three part series on the criticism of Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, comparing the situation in Palestine/Israel with South Africa. The first part is linked to below. It is fairly meticulous and provides data, anecdotes and quotes to illuminate the issue.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out multiple times, it is worthwhile to note that criticism of Israel within the country itself is well and alive (as it should be in any nation that claims to be a democracy) in contrast to the blind faith or apologism/defense of all Israeli action within the US, by the administrations and by many Jewish organizations, and even otherwise liberal Jews (multimedia). [Also see: Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah].

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Worlds apart
[...]

Some Jewish South Africans and Israelis who lived with apartheid – including politicians, Holocaust survivors and men once condemned as terrorists – describe aspects of modern Israel as disturbingly reminiscent of the old South Africa. Some see the parallels in a matrix of discriminatory practices and controls, and what they describe as naked greed for land seized by the fledgling Israeli state from fleeing Arabs and later from the Palestinians for the ever expanding West Bank settlements. “Apartheid was an extension of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land,” said the Jewish South African cabinet minister and former ANC guerrilla, Ronnie Kasrils, on a visit to Jerusalem. “That is exactly what has happened in Israel and the occupied territories; the use of force and the law to take the land. That is what apartheid and Israel have in common.”

Others see the common ground in the scale of the suffering if not its causes. “If we take the magnitude of the injustice done to the Palestinians by the state of Israel, there is a basis for comparison with apartheid,” said the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel. “If we take the magnitude of suffering, we are in the same league. Of course apartheid was a very different philosophy from what we do, most of which stems from security considerations. But from the point of view of outcome, we are in the same league.”

[...]

How deliciously pleasing is this:

CNN.com – Message in a bottle: Don’t litter – Feb 6, 2006
Message in a bottle: Don’t litter

Monday, February 6, 2006; Posted: 7:14 a.m. EST (12:14 GMT)

NAPEAGUE, New York (AP) — A boat captain who sent a message out to sea in a bottle says he received a reply from Britain — accusing him of littering.

From MaxSpeak:

SOLIDARITY WHENEVER
Your humble correspondent has been delinked by Daily Kos. An inquiry was met with a note insulting our honor. This after our support for a few of his more dubious blog adventures.

Yet another example of what I was pointing to in my post on the Kos take on peace marches. There are genuine reasons to split with Democrats, liberals, etc — Leiberman is a good example. But this sort of stuff seems to be muscle-flexing more than reasonable differences.

In this instance, the loss is Kos’ (despite his higher draw of eyeballs). Max’s content is way more interesting anyway! But as Max says, you can put that down as sour grapes too, since I was at the Sept.24 march that Kos writes so condescendingly about.

[From a friend: Chip]

This one is too funny to not post as a self-parody:

Wired News: No Opinions? No Problem
Commentary by Lore Sjöberg
02:00 AM Feb, 01, 2006 EST

Events are taking place. Disturbing events. World-shaking events. Fortunes are at stake. Countries are at stake. The survival of the most adorable life forms on the planet are at stake. Blogs and news sites across the web host message boards yearning for your commentary.

You owe it to everyone to let them know what you think, and by extension what they should think. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people fail to register.

You may be impaired by — among other things — the lack of an actual opinion on the subject at hand. That’s OK, opinions are filthy, malodorous things that tend to fall apart under close examination. What you need is something that appears to be an opinion without actually requiring defense, justification or rational thought.

While you’re wasting time considering context and relevant factors, lesser minds are beating you to the Submit button. This simple guide to posting on message boards requires no more contemplation than is necessary to microwave popcorn.

[more at link above]

Last year the rural population in India handed a stinging defeat to the right fundamentalist BJP which had been trumpeting India’s recent economic boom as one of its successes. Now, the new government is moving to address the neglected segment that brought them to power. Whether any of this effort will filter through the corrupt political system is something that I remain pessimistic about. It is refreshing however to hear political leaders talk about transparency!

BBC NEWS | South Asia | India launches anti-poverty deal
India launches anti-poverty deal
The Indian government has launched one of the country’s most ambitious efforts to tackle rural poverty.

Under the National Rural Guarantee Scheme one member from each of India’s 60 million rural households is guaranteed 100 days of work each year.

They will receive a minimum wage of 60 rupees ($1.35) or an unemployment allowance if there is no work.

[...]

An Op-Ed piece at NYT gives us this:

Seducing the Medical Profession

Published: February 2, 2006

New evidence keeps emerging that the medical profession has sold its soul in exchange for what can only be described as bribes from the manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. It is long past time for leading medical institutions and professional societies to adopt stronger ground rules to control the noxious influence of industry money on what doctors prescribe for their patients.

The rest of the piece has examples of excesses and a simple and appropriate conclusion. I point this piece out because of the swift-boating of lawyers in the last few years. Lawyer jokes have always been around, perhaps thanks to that old loon Socrates, but the spectre of “rising malpractice costs” has been weilded quite effectively, especially by the conservatives (since trial lawyers are the paymasters of the Democrats), to further tar lawyers and present insurance costs as a malpractice problem.

The AMA has been a willing participant, labelling this the “malpractice crisis“. The noble myth that doctors are looking out for their patients, always, lends weight to such claims and reasoning. It is worthwhile hence to note the behaviour of doctors and where their loyalties lie, as illustrated by the NYT article above.

The malpractice crisis myth has been exposed many times over, including a piece by Business Week which not only found the empirical data (on malpractice costs and settlements) unconvincing but also identified the real cause of rising insurance costs as the insurance industry’s investment adventures (and subsequent losses) during the tech boom years.

Below are excerpts from relevant articles:

Washington Post: What Crisis?

GAO: Malpractice Premium Spikes Don’t Force Out Docs

By Sandra G. Boodman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 16, 2003;

The stories are legion: pregnant women unable to find doctors to deliver their babies because disgruntled obstetricians have closed their practices or retired in droves; white-coated physicians hitting the picket lines and threatening to shut down emergency rooms; desperate patients forced to travel long distances to find a specialist willing to perform lifesaving surgery.

The culprit, according to the American Medical Association (AMA) and President Bush: multimillion-dollar jury awards in malpractice cases that have resulted in insurance premium increases so huge that they are forcing doctors out of business and jeopardizing patients’ access to health care.

But a new study by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, has reached a very different conclusion about the effect of rising malpractice premiums on consumers. Investigators who studied nine states found instances of localized but not widespread problems of access to health care mostly in “scattered, often rural, areas” that have long-standing problems attracting doctors.

And many of those highly publicized accounts of doctors who have retired or moved are, according to the GAO, either “not substantiated,” temporary or involved only a few physicians.

In Pennsylvania and West Virginia, for example, two of 19 states designated by the AMA as being in a “full-blown liability crisis,” the number of doctors per capita has actually increased in the past six years, according to the GAO.

See also:

• BW: A second opinion on the malpractice plague
• WM: Malpractice makes perfect
• Ralph Nader on the Malpractice Crisis

• Jane J. Mansbridge — Beyond Self-Interest
  A collection of papers from a wide range of fields that together present a critique of extremely reductionist reasoning based on self-interest alone. Includes the witty and insightful “Rational Fools” paper by economist Amartya Sen.
  Tags: Altruism, Books, Economics, Selfishness

On Sept 28, blogger extraordinaire Kos, wrote the following about the fairly large anti-war rally in DC (Sept 24, 2005):

Peace protests and the new media environment

by kos

Wed Sep 28, 2005 at 10:47:17 AM PDT

I’ve been critical of peace protests in the past [...]. This time, however, I wasn’t feeling animosity for last week’s protests. I was feeling something akin to apathy.

[...]

The lack of focus is maddening, obviously. But my biggest problem with anti-war protests is that they’re obsolete. What do they accomplish?

[...]
And we don’t need marches to let the country know that people are turning on the war.

[...]

People marching on the street? Boring. Unless you 1) have violence, or 2) crazy people making crazy speeches. It’s a lose-lose situation, and at best a single news cycle story.

[...]

The Right, except for the crazy anti-abortion protesting crowd, focuses its efforts solely on influencing media coverage. And it’s paid incredible dividends in the past few decades. We need to follow suit, rather than continue the same activism tactics of a century ago.

[...]

Ultimately I was agnostic over the march this past weekend because I can appreciate that people want to gather to fight for the cause, I appreciate that they want to feel like they’re doing something.

My question, then, becomes whether the money and effort people expended getting to DC to march might’ve been better spent in other forms of activism — letters to the editor, contributions to anti-war candidates, politicians, and organizations, calls and letters to their elected officials [...]

Today (Jan 30, 2006) he writes:

So now what?

by kos

Mon Jan 30, 2006 at 03:53:52 PM PDT

We lost the cloture vote, but that was — despite some of your best wishes — a pre-ordained conclusion. But that doesn’t mean we lost on the bigger picture.

What you guys accomplished the last week was amazing — the outpouring of emails, letters, faxes, and phone calls was unprecedented for the netroots and particularly surprising given how weak our issue groups organized against Alito. We should’ve played a supporting role to strong efforts by NARAL, People for the American Way, and others. Instead, we ended up being pretty much the entire effort.

But say what you will about blogs and the netroots, we are not effective organizers for this type of large-scale effort, with an opposition wielding tens of millions of dollars. That we got this much accomplished in the fact of that is simply incredible.

So we are now on the map. The Alito vote may have fizzled, but you better believe the Dem establishment knows we exist.

Hmm… is it necessary to add a comment here, or perhaps just highlight the inadequacy of such thinking with a quote from the very same Kos post, misappropriated for my purpose:

In addition (this isn’t an “either/or” situation),

On another note: elsewhere on his site Kos confesses to his Republican campaigning past while other parts of the site ridicules “hippies” (while dispensing advice on what to do and not to do at the boring irrelevant DC march). The irony highlighted by these two excerpts can serve as a good starting point on why the left doesn’t hang together in the USA.

Washington Post is reporting that the Dems stay true to cowardly form:

Senate Ends Alito Filibuster Attempt
72-25 Vote Virtually Assures Nominee’s Confirmation

By Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006; 5:57 PM

By a 72-25 vote, the Senate cut off a symbolic filibuster attempt today on the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., all but assuring that the federal appeals court judge will be confirmed Tuesday morning by the Senate.

Now, rather than the usual lament about the Democrats (that I started out with, with my reference to cowardliness), I am interested in some level-headed analysis of why this happens. While I subscribe generally to the duopoly party system story and the idea that the Democrats are a kinder, gentler Republican party, there is more to it than that. In this case, perhaps the simple explanation is that the Democrats have too many vulnerable seats (South, Dakotas, etc). While I can understand the public in these regions being pro-Bush, pro-Iraq-war etc., and wishing to punish their representatives for not toeing that line, do they really follow and care about a SCOTUS nomination, even if it involves pet issues such as abortion? If this is the case, wouldn’t Harry Reid (from Nevada) face similar pressures?
Recent polls seem to have shown that a majority of Americans are not opposed to Alito. What percentage of the people polled cared about the issue, I wonder? Also, another reason put forth by Kerry (need a link here) is the fear of the Democrats being successfully labelled as ‘obstructionists’. More data needed here.

Finally, we must also examine (for the sake of completeness) the possibility that Alito is (or will be) a centrist (or right-centrist) on the bench. By ‘centrist’ I do not mean a sort of objective centrist, but at the centre of the current rightward leaning climate.

In a well-reasoned piece titled:

Can humans escape Goedel?:A review of “Shadows of the Mind” by Roger Penrose

Daryl McCollough provides a non-paradoxical version of the Liar’s Paradox to illustrate inconsistency in human thinking. In doing so, he addresses a particular aspect of the interpretations of belief and truth with regard to debate on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (the first, for the picky). That issue is a better understanding of human fallibility (and its relationship to the phrase “there are some sentences we know to be true”). Perhaps Wittgenstein can be interpreted to also explore this in his [in]famous commentary on Gödel’s Theorem but more on that later.
McCollough writes:

6. How Could Inconsistency Creep Into Human Reasoning?

6.1 As I discussed in the last section, Penrose’s arguments, if taken to their logical conclusion, show us not that the human mind is noncomputable, but that either the human mind is beyond all mathematics, or else we cannot be sure that it is consistent. If we reject the “mysterian” position that mind is beyond science, we are left with the conclusion that we can’t know that we are consistent. This seems very counter-intuitive. If we are very careful, and only reason in justified steps, why can’t we be certain that we are being consistent?

6.2 Let me illustrate with a thought experiment. Suppose that an experimental subject is given two buttons, marked “yes” and “no”, and is asked by the experimenter to push the appropriate button in response to a series of yes-no questions. What happens if the experimenter, on a lark, asks the question “Will you push the ‘no’ button?”. It is clear that whatever answer the subject gives will be wrong. So, if the subject is committed to answering truthfully, then he can never hit the “no” button, even though “no” would be the correct answer. There is an intrinsic incompleteness in the subject’s answers, in the sense that there are questions that he cannot truthfully answer.

6.3 Now, there is no real paradox in this thought experiment. The subject knows that the answer to the experimenter’s question is “no”, but he cannot convey this knowledge. Thus there is a split between the public and private knowledge of the subject. But now, let’s extend the thought experiment.

6.4 Someday, as science marches on, we will understand the brain well enough that we can dispense with the “yes” and “no” buttons (which are susceptible to lying on the part of the subject). Instead of these buttons, w