Well, not one, not two, not three but FOUR, count ‘em FOUR posts in 2009! And now, a new theme. Yessiree, things are really livening up here in the world of New Cerulean.
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I finally got around to viewing President Obama’s remarks on the way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although I still find his presentation lacking the “Presidential Bearing” that would, on it’s own, inspire confidence in his audience, I must say that his words are well chosen and are delivered in a way that communicates more directly to the listener by virtue of his “enthusiastic city councilman” demeanor.
I agree with most of what he said. However, there is one glaring point on which I think the administration is either missing the point, or is trying to address that point by charismatic public wishing. Throughout his remarks, President Obama kept referring to “the Afghan people”, as if such a united body of people existed. His remarks elaborated on America’s role in equipping the Afghan people with their own defensive capabilities and with our helping the Afghan people rise from poverty as partners with America.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that the “people of Afghanistan” do not share a national identity as we do. Their group identity is defined by their tribe. Any concept of “nation” is merely that a dominant tribe exists which happens to be stronger than their own tribe at the moment, and is therefore in charge of the army and is able to collect taxes from the other tribes. All other aspects of life, from whom to marry to whom one does business with are controlled by tribal affiliation.
Since this tribal binding force is many times stronger than any abstract, putative notion of “the Afghan people”, any strategy which intends to result in stability in the region must either harness this force directly, or must somehow design a transformation of this force into a common national awareness and identity.
The President might have been attempting such a latter transformation by repeatedly referring to “the Afghan people”, as if wishing it were so would make it so. If the President were more dazzlingly charismatic and if the President were being watched, understood and admired by the people who make up this group he is attempting to define, then perhaps this attempt at charismatic nation-building would succeed. Unfortunately, I don’t think enough of these prerequisites are met, so President Obama’s many references to “the Afghan people” are more likely to have come across as willful ignorance to anyone in Afghanistan who was willing and able to hear the President’s remarks. Chanting “the people of Afghanistan” as a magical incantation is unlikely to conjure a nation, so there really needs to be a more concrete plan for dealing with the tribal structure of Afghan society.
Medieval Europe broke much of the influence of clans by banning marriage within four relations. This resulted in many inter-clan marriages and, ultimately, the decline of clan influence in favor of national or religious affiliation. It is unlikely that any attempt at a brute-force ban on consanguineous or intra-tribal marriage would be effective, so perhaps a similar blurring of tribal lines could be started in Afghanistan if a bounty were offered for each child born of an inter-tribal marriage. The purchasing power parity of the average Afghan is $800 per year. If each family who produces an inter-tribal child were rewarded, say, $800, I predict that Afghanistan would soon be awash in babies whose tribal affiliation isn’t so clear. Similarly, such inter-tribal married couples might have the benefit of being able to act as inter-tribal middlemen, brokering business deals and perhaps even marriages between tribes. Being inter-tribal could thus become a desirable thing on its own, encouraging more inter-tribal marriages for their own sake.
If we committed just one billion of the estimated $439 billion so far spent prosecuting the Afghanistan war on inter-tribal baby bounties, Afghanistan might soon have over a million inter-tribal citizens. In a country of 28 million, that would mean that 3.5% of the population could be inter-tribal within a few short years. The longer we maintain such a bounty, the less distinct the tribal boundries would become and the stronger a national identity could grow.
With tax season approaching, I sat wondering just exactly what it was that all these “dues” I’ve paid have been spent on. Sure, it’s informative to look at the big picture, but I think it’d be cool for the federal government to allocate income to expenses and provide each of us a receipt. Okay, it’d be impractical to match each dollar as it is received by the government to each expense as it is incurred, so they could simply track all government expense chronologically, then align tax returns against this expense list as each return is processed.
Some years you’d get a receipt that says “Thank you for your purchase of 137 cubic yards of concrete that were poured into the new park visitor’s center at Snolobuger National Overlook”, or maybe “Thank you for paying 15.6 days of the salary of Spelvin ‘Spud’ Stankiewiscz, adjutant sub-district protocol officer for the diplomatic attache to Moldova”, and other times you might get “Thank you for funding 1/1000000th of a project that we can’t tell you about, but which we assure you would let you rest easier at night knowing about it if we could”. A cottage industry could spring up to provide Soviet-style medallions that proud taxpayers could wear, showing exactly what role they’ve played in keeping our great nation running.
Now, some folks might not like getting a receipt that thanks them for their purchase of 3.26 cluster-bomblet munitions. So the government can hold an eBay-style auction on who gets “credit” for what expense. People would go in hock to be credited as the person who provided President Obama with new carpeting in the Oval Office or some other glamorous assignment. A sort of vanity tax. I’d be all in favor of paying lower taxes in exchange for ending up with a receipt that says I paid for “1/2000th of a study to reduce odor from pig faeces” or somesuch. (Oh, I’m sure I’d buy the medallion for that).
Disabling AdPLA enzyme allows continued breakdown of stored fat
I like this approach so much better than all those targeting appetite. I have a feeling that even if a successful appetite suppressant were found, many obese people wouldn’t choose to use it simply because food, or more precisely, the sensation of caloric rush after eating, is an addiction. By keeping the body in fat-breakdown mode, we still get the rush, and the only guilt we may feel might be over consuming more than we need, (which hasn’t exactly been an overpowering guilt in our culture thus far).
I do wonder what it feels like to have stored fat continually being broken down, though. It seems like you might constantly have a higher level of glucose in your blood. This might leave you feeling continually energetic, but would also promote all the horrible things that come from high blood sugar – protein cross-linking, cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, etc. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Brain tweak lets sleep-deprived flies stay sharp
By altering fruit fly’s brains to express more of a particular dopamine receptor, flies are able to sustain freshly-slept performance on learning tasks even when sleep-deprived. This suggests that sleep may (someday) become optional for humans, too. The study’s author, PJ Shaw, says:
“I want to emphasize, though, that this type of treatment would just be for people who absolutely have to stay awake,” he adds. “It’s not about trying to cram too many hours in your day—everyone else should just suck it up and get a good night’s sleep.”
I find that equivalent to saying “You must die with one-third of your life unlived. Just suck it up.”
Militant jihadists are inspired by night dreams, suggests research
I suppose people have always been encouraged to ‘follow their dreams’. Often, this results in people launching new careers or moving to some other country. But this study suggests there is a dark side to encouraging otherwise directionless people to follow the impulses of their unconscious brains. How many turns of history have hinged on people reading significance into the semi-random sputterings of brains kept idle to prevent them from being eaten by nocturnal predators? Ah, humans…
Congress acts to stop adding oil to the national strategic petroleum reserve. This will increase the petroleum available on the world market by 70,000 barrels a day, or one tenth of one percent. An already symbolically small gesture, congress chooses to shut this spigot off as the strategic reserve is at 97% of capacity, and would have shut itself off within a year. This allows congress to take credit for something that would have happened soon, anyway, while not actually making even a small dent in the price of gasoline. But they’re seen to be DOING SOMETHING, and that’s what really matters.
In almost the same breath, the Senate voted 56-42 to reject the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and some offshore waters that are now closed to oil development. According to Walter Williams:
Oil and gas exploration in a tiny portion of the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would, according to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey’s estimate, increase our proven domestic oil reserves by approximately 50 percent.
So, when faced with an opportunity to actually do something that could tangibly affect domestic oil supply in a big way, Congress chooses the symbolic action of preserving our wildlife refuge, despite the fact that oil development would only take place on a small portion of this preserve, and despite the fact that this preserve will never even be seen by 99.99% of the population and can only affect their lives in a symbolic way.
Our government appears to have devolved into a series of theatrical actions – gestures that convey their feelings about an issue without having substantive impact. While it is easy to lay blame for this interpretive dance version of government at the feet of these legislators, I fear their behavior is only a mirror of our national soul. We elect these people, by and large, on how we “feel” about them. It’s a rare voter who does the homework to see beneath the posturing and derive the vote-worthiness of candidates based on actual impact of their actions. Doing that takes work. This is why we need to come up with some form of incentive for voters who invest the time and energy to understand the issues they’re voting on. As I’ve previously advocated, I believe a national lottery that is tied to how one scores on a multiple-choice quiz covering the candidates and issues on each ballot would go a long way toward shoring up our anemic government. It’d be more than a symbolic action.
Clay Shirky has posted an article that suggests we are now seeing a sort of phase-change in developed society from passive couch potatoes to active participants. He says that after WWII, people had to deal with something new – free time, a cognitive surplus. For the most part, he says, people spent their free time watching TV. Now, he says, the internet is catalyzing a transformation by allowing people to create and share with everyone. And this is a fundamental change in his view.
While I agree for the most part that having a participatory medium is surely attracting many brain-cycles away from TV, I don’t see it as quite the fundamental shift he does nor for the reasons he cites. There are other factors involved in this turning away from TV. In the days of broadcast network TV, it used to be a source of social cohesion. Having limited channels and limited shows meant that you had many experiences in common with people all over. It also meant that all that advertising power was more focused – more money per channel (might have) created more involved and engaging entertainment. Nowadays, the average sofa spud has hundreds of channels to watch, of which they have probably chosen their favorite half-dozen that they flick back and forth among. But it isn’t necessarily the same half-dozen channels as their neighbor. So, aside from special events and a few well-publicized series, people just don’t derive that much shared culture from TV anymore. The fracturing of entertainment bandwidth into so many channels also means there is less cash per channel to invest in creating interesting new content. So we have a lot of re-runs and inexpensive new content like talk shows, ‘reality’ shows, etc. On top of all that, video on demand makes it so that each person’s video reality is even less likely to overlap with anybody else’s. We’ve lost our video cultural identity, and we’ve diluted the effort that can be spent on each new piece of content. Given these facts, it’s no surprise that people are seeking other ways to entertain themselves and to bond socially, by creating and sharing common experiences with their friends. One of the huge advantages of the internet in fostering social cohesion is the ability of distant birds of every peculiar feather to flock together electronically, rather than chatting about last night’s TV around the water cooler.
Another factor that Mr. Shirky neglects to weigh is that many Americans, for example, are not and never have spent the majority of their free time watching TV. Americans have historically had one of the highest rates of membership in clubs, associations and societies of any culture. They also belong to churches and participate in many social undertakings there. Even in the age of broadcast networks, hobbies were an expected part of a normal, healthy life. People who didn’t have them were advised to take one up. The ‘wordless workshop’ fans of yesteryear would be the same sorts who read Make magazine nowadays. Tinkerers were everywhere and manly men, at least, were expected to have a fundamental grasp of how to make a stalled car go. The point being that it would be an inaccurate simplification to say that people simply spent their newfound free time watching TV.
So although I think Mr. Shirky has it right that the internet has added a fundamentally new and attractive way for people to gain social meaning and entertainment, it’s not clear to me that this trend is quite the tectonic shift he paints it as. Nor do I agree that people’s need to participate is the fundamental driver – I think it’s more driven by people’s need to share socially. It is, if anything, more a continuation of the fracturing of cognitive bandwidth ushered in by cable TV. Each website, each YouTube sensation, amounts to a cultural touchstone. Instead of promoting a cultural homogeneity that arose from broadcast TV, it is splintering culture into hundreds of millions of amorphous sub-tribes sharing subsets of identity and common experiences. The cultural isolation wrought by the advent of cable TV is being bridged by the selection capability of the internet.
The President Pelosi Scenario originally speculated on how the impeachment of Bush and Cheney would then devolve the presidency to Nancy Pelosi. But now, with Sen. McCain scratching and squinting about his possible running mates, a new avenue of a Pelosi presidency is taking shape. McCain would be 72 by the time he reaches office. According to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services (table 5, page 17), a white male in the US has a 15.2% chance of dying between the ages of 72 and 76, which would cover McCain’s first term. Now, supposing the wet dreams of the rabid internet Ron Paul advocates comes true, and McCain chooses Paul as his running mate. He’d be 74 by the time he takes office, making his probability of dying in the first term 18.3%. The combined odds of both candidates kicking the bucket before the end of term would be about 2.8%. Small odds, but not impossible. Around 1 in 35. Nothing to seriously consider, but enough to give staunch conservatives something else to mull over as they try to sleep. Sweet dreams…
Turns out human noses can be trained by shocking. I wonder what effect this observation will have on training olfactory-reliant professions like cooks, perfumers and sommeliers? Of course, one can easily imagine commercial interests influencing which product is the one that is discriminated by shock, giving a sort of Ludovico Treatment against the competition’s products. Perhaps doctors can be trained to smell cancers, the way some dogs are able to. If it works for smell, it ought to work for other perceptions as well. Imagine art students learning to discriminate colors by shock treatment. Or music students learning perfect pitch and different instrument temperaments. It seems those knuckle-whacking nuns were probably onto something.