I've been reading about DNA, RNA, and proteins lately. I didn't realize how large and unwieldy proteins were, or how important it was for them to fold up into the right shapes. It's like origami, but instead of being folded by fingers, the final form is driven by a combination of molecular shapes, electrical charges, and whether each piece of the structure likes or avoids water. This picture is of a protein called PPAR, which is important in the study of diabetes.
This self-folding characteristic of protein molecules has got labrats thinking. Per Science Daily, Erik Dermaine, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, is "one of the world's most recognized experts on computational origami." (Talk about carving yourself out a niche!) In this field, thin foil-like sheets are imprinted with circuits so that the sheet will fold up in various ways when current is delivered, like an animated Transformer toy. This is a one-minute clip showing a sheet that will fold itself into either a boat or a plane, per instructions:
One of the practical uses of such a device may be things like "materials that can perform multiple tasks, such as an entire dining utensil set derived from one piece of foldable material," or, per the Christian Science Monitor, a "Swiss army knife of sorts able to form a tripod, wrench, antenna, or splint." Or artificial muscles.
MIT is a hotbed of this out-of-control folding business. Here are detailed instructions for how to fold the MIT logo out of paper in only a few hours.
The more traditional among us may prefer this dragon, which is way better than the cranes I used to play with:
So today the Supreme Court of the United States recognized what all of us have always known: that the right to keep and bear arms is one of the fundamental rights of citizens. Well done! It was never in danger, for we were always ready to defend it: but how wonderful to see a moment of wisdom on behalf of the powerful, who seem so short of it these days.
So how about a song mocking over-reaching government?
Sgian Dubh, by the way, means "black knife." This is the small knife meant to be worn concealed. Now Highlanders had a fine idea about bearing arms openly, but they also believed in a little something more. It's not so much distrust of our beloved Lady of Fate, but a gesture of respect for her merry nature and love of practical jokes. Or, as Corb Lund put it, 'A good sharp edge is a man's best hedge against the vague uncertainties of life.'
By coincidence, that marks the two next phases of the fight: Knife rights, and concealed carry outside the home.
[The Royal Shakespeare Company's] Morte d'Arthur is, in spirit, chainmail-rattlingly close to the original. If the adapter Mike Poulton has made a little free with the details of the text, well, in that, too, he is faithful to his source. Sir Thomas Malory (the 15th-century knight convicted of robbery and rape who fought for and against his king) repicked and remixed the old British stories and French romances spun around the legends of Arthur and fitted them to the pattern of his own time.
So he did, although the charges of "rape" were only charges. Specifically, they were charges brought by the woman's husband -- the same woman on each occasion -- to which she refused to testify. A far more likely explanation, given the high words that Malory has for women and womankind throughout his famous work: she was his Guinevere, or La Belle Isolde.
Seems like a fine play. It's a pity I won't be where I could see it, while it is playing.
A judge in Austin, Texas, has ruled that school districts can't force a teacher to award a student a higher grade than he earned. "The districts argued that their policies prohibiting teachers from awarding grades lower than a certain number - typically a 50 - helped keep students from getting discouraged and dropping out of school." Teachers countered with the quaint argument that "the minimum failing grading polices were dishonest and didn't prepare students for college or the workforce." Surprisingly, this argument won the day.
Apparently, in 2009, while I wasn't looking, those kooky conservatives in the Texas legislature passed SB 2033, a law that forbids school districts from requiring its teachers to enter a set minimum grade for their students’ schoolwork. In some schools, the required minimum grade was 50, in others 60 or 70. The law passed unanimously -- then was routinely ignored in practice. El Paso I.S.D. at least told teachers to use their professional judgment in whether to award a minimum grade regardless of whether any work had been done. Other districts ruled that the law applied only to grades of assignments and tests, and not report card grades, although the actual practice intended to be addressed by the law was report card grades. Fort Bend I.S.D. (southwest of Houston) actually prohibited scores of less than 50.
The battles lines are drawn over whether it is more important to ensure that accurate information is made public regarding a school's progress in teaching specific information, or to prevent students from becoming discouraged and dropping out. The strong feeling among educators was that all doubts should be resolved in favor of avoiding discouragement. The educators already were struggling with a "new" law dating from 1995, which “required decisions on promotion or course credit to be based on academic achievement or demonstrated proficiency.” What novelties will these bomb-throwing anarchists come up with next?
When teachers complained that they were still being required to inflate grades, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott issued instructions to school districts that they would be required to comply with the 2009 law. In response, 11 school districts, mostly from the Houston area, sued.
One school administrator explained, "The purpose of it was to keep the kid from throwing his hands up and saying 'I'm failing so I might as well not go to school.'" I guess not much thought was given to persuading the kid to draw another lesson: "I'm failing so I'd better work harder unless I want to repeat this class in summer school."
In other news, Texas Democrats, discouraged by years of virtual one-party rule in that state, proposed a law to award 50% of the votes in an election to the candidate who is trailing in the race. Okay, I may have made that last part up.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment's protection of the right to bear arms is effective not only against incursions by the federal government, but also against incursions by state and local government.
As late as the 19th century, the Court typically held that the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government's power. More recently, the trend has been to extend the limitations to state and local government via the 14th Amendment.
Update:
Justice Alito wrote:
Chicago and Oak Park (municipal respondents) maintain that a right set out in the Bill of Rights applies to the States only when it is an indispensable attribute of any “‘civilized’” legal system. If it is possible to imagine a civilized country that does not recognize the right, municipal respondents assert, that right is not protected by due process. And since there are civilized countries that ban or strictly regulate the private possession of handguns, they maintain that due process does not preclude such measures. . . .
[T]he constitutional Amendments adopted in the Civil War’s aftermath fundamentally altered the federal system. Four years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, this Court held in the Slaughter-House Cases, that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only those rights “which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws,” and that the fundamental rights predating the creation of the Federal Government were not protected by the Clause. Under this narrow reading, the Court held that the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects only very limited rights. Subsequently, the Court held that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government in [the] decisions on which the Seventh Circuit relied in this case [to rule against gun rights in the decision now on appeal]. [citations excluded]
After the Civil War and the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the Court began to sort through which rights were so fundamental that no civilized society was imaginable without them. It found that freedom of speech was fundamental, but the right to a grand jury indictment was not. The standard then shifted to "whether a particular Bill of Rights protection is fundamental to our Nation’s particular scheme of ordered liberty and system of justice." Justice Alito concludes: "Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present, and the Heller Court [striking down a federal gun ban] held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right." In Heller, the Court found that handguns were the quintessential tool for defense of home and family.
According to HotAir.com, the entire American effort in 66 days has skimmed off 600,000 barrels of oil. The owners of a massive ship called the "A-Whale" claim that it can skim 500,000 barrels a day.
So where is the A-Whale now? In the Gulf? Not yet. It’s on its way there after being tied to a dock in Norfolk, Virginia, and won’t be allowed to join the cleanup effort until the Coast Guard and the EPA figure out whether it meets their standards.
It does appear that some progress is being made on the Clean Water Act problems -- you, know, the bureaucratic decision that we should annihilate the Gulf in the name of enforcing an absurdly inapplicable Clean Water Act regulation just because no one in authority can figure out how to waive it -- though I can't quite tell if all we've done is let the skimmers in, or if we've actually started letting them operate as designed, which is to discharge partially cleaned-up Gulf water even though it doesn't meet drinking-water standards. According to a June 24 piece in the Daily Caller, the Federal On-Scene Coordinator announced quietly on June 18 that the U.S. now admits it needs the foreign help that has been offered since days after the oil spill began:
The European Union maintains a multi-faceted inventory of [oil spill recovery vessels] OSRVs. The Netherlands alone lists eleven ships that exceed this 9,400-barrel capacity, including vessels like the Geopotes 14 (pictured) that reportedly can pick up and contain 47,000 barrels at a time. That’s ten times larger than any U.S. ship we’ve been using.
The Daily Caller piece applauds this move, because it will reduce the time spent going back and forth with the dirty water. It notes, however, that the EPA still will prevent the skimmers from discharging the fairly-cleaned-up water, because it fails to meet the EPA wastewater-discharge standards.
During a hearing before Congress this past Thursday, several Democratic members of House accused the Administration of turning its back on those on the gulf coast by refusing overseas cleanup help. During Friday’s session of the Senate, Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), George LeMieux (R-Fla.), and John Cornyn (R-Texas) joined together and introduced legislation that would temporarily waive the Jones Act to allow foreign marine vessels to assist with the oil cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico.
That's good to hear, and yay Texas, but it's still not clear to me that the EPA has backed off yet. Still trying to confirm.
Here's an anguished June 8 Facebook entry from a guy named Chris Johnson who identifies himself as a marine biologist clean water expert, somehow involved in the federal government, who has been frantically trying to work the back channels to solve this EPA-wastewater screwup. (He reports, by the way, that the standard in question is 5,000ppm, not 15ppm, or 99.5% purity, and I suspect he may be a better source than the run-of-the-mill journalists or even the Dutch guys who are their sources.) He confirms the misuse of EPA standards reported in the other articles and says, "I swear I am not making this up, as stupid as this sounds."
Turning to the question of what to make of this Mother of all FUBARs (a mistake?! or did he do it to us on purpose??!!), some input from various commenters at Patterico and HotAir:
I think it is incompetence but also a lack of motivation. If it had been someplace they love, they would have been motivated to overcome their incompetence.
I agree that it would have made little difference. It could be any one of the 57 states, even those speaking Austrian, and Obama would mull over what would Niebuhr have done ? The only thing that engages Obama seriously is a piece in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone that is perceived as straying from the party line. The first thing an infant learns is the difference between “self” and “non-self.” Obama is still working on that.
There is a difference between “stuck on stupid” and “forged out of pure stupid”…
Tinfoil hats really not needed…Soros has his money in PetroBras…and they NEED platforms…..oil still gushing, ban still being appealed….you do the math.
This is a full-blown crisis with all the value attendant to that….destruction of the oil industry, punishment of red-state voters, demon[i]nization of private business, kowtowing to environmental nutjobs, opportunities for grandstanding and photo-ops, speech opportunities, $20 billion dollar slush funds, total dependence of the voters of Lousiana on the federal government, ability to smear the Brits on an hourly basis. . . .How is this ship going to improve the situation in any meaningful way.
And a final comment in a more practical vein:
A couple of questions I have:
The Jones Act does not influence operations beyond 3 miles from shore, as I understand it. Why is that even an issue?
Vessels at sea, picking up “wild” oil, are not under EPA jurisdiction, as far as I know. This would fall under the admiralty law…the law of salvage. Under what authority could anyone stop them?
Why the [h**l] doesn’t somebody seek an injunction against the EPA? Seems there are sensible judges on the Federal bench who would grant that in a heart-beat…
Why doesn’t somebody just go do this, and defy an effort to stop them?
In closing, just to destroy any lingering confidence you might have in federal environmental bureaucrats -- people I used to think were the good guys but who lately seem as crazy as a rat in a coffee can -- here's an article about applying EPA oil spill regulations to dairy milk. EPA regulations say “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria.”
I've been hearing about the U.S. government's rebuffing offers of foreign help to clean up the Gulf, but mostly in the context of the Jones Act problems. And there were those stories about stopping boats from laying out booms because they didn't have enough fire extinguishers or lifejackets, or about stopping the building of sand berms because of the possible impact on fish.
Now Instapundit has linked to an article in the Financial Post that shows the stupidity has reached hitherto-unguessed levels. Our environmental laws treat a skimmer ship as if it were a factory discharging wastewater:
Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. "Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour," Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill. . . .the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge.
. . . .Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn't good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million -- if water isn't at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
It turns out that American skimmers have to suck up the dirty water and transport it back to port for later disposal, which severely limits their daily capacity.
Someone might almost think they want this to go badly.
Apparently, What They Need at the U.N. Is Softer Blankies
I've never been much of a negotiator -- probably that empathy thing you're supposed to have. Often I have almost no idea how other people come to their decisions. Here's some research on factors that may be creeping into the process under the radar.
Research psychologists at Harvard, MIT, and Yale recently reported that our judgments are surprisingly influenced by the texture of objects we're in contact with during or just before the decision-making process. For instance, interviewers judged job candidates as better qualified and more serious about the position sought when they were given the resumes on heavy clipboards. The heavier clipboards also were associated with interviewers' higher opinions of their own accuracy in judging candidates.
In the same vein, listeners to a story about a social interaction described it as harsher when they had been given rough puzzles pieces to assemble as opposed to smooth pieces. Similarly, they described one character's attitude in a story as more rigid or strict when they had been given a hard wooden block to hold, instead of a soft blanket. When participants in a mock bargaining session were seated in comfortable chairs, they turned out not only to be more flexible in their responses to successive offers, but also more likely to judge their opponents to be "more stable and less emotional."
Looks like we should be presenting our resumes on heavy, smooth, soft tablets. If nothing else, you guys might view your wives as less emotional and unstable if you'd take the precaution of settling into a comfy chair before listening to their complaints. No fair going to sleep, though.
I couldn't find a clip from the "Day of the Dolphins" where Fa and Bee explain that they like humans because they're smooth, like dolphins, not rough like sharks, so I went with this:
Nor is it just these Ivy League researchers who are into the new "tactile tactics" in social conflict. No one was surprised when researchers from the University of Minneapolis and the University of British Columbia concluded that shoppers were more comfortable on carpet than on hard vinyl tile. What was a little surprising is that the comfortable flooring had opposite effects on their purchase judgments, depending on how far away they were from the products on the shelves. Moderately distant objects were judged "more comforting" by the shoppers who were standing on soft carpet, by some kind of unconscious confusion of the tactile sensation of one object with the inherent worth of another. In contrast, nearby products appeared to suffer from comparison with the softness of carpet: a gift basket was judged "less comforting" when the carpet-treading shopper was very close to it.
I suppose the trick here is to present the gift basket to the object of your affections when she's moderately far away on a soft carpet, but don't put it into her hands until you're maneuvered her onto some challenging parquet. But if you want to bring out the big guns:
I don't know about you guys, but this video doesn't just make me want to vote. It makes me want to crawl over broken glass on my knees to get to the polls. "Rise, and rise again . . . ."
Not that the November elections give me much room to act as a Texas voter in a district that Ron Paul apparently owns for life, and not that I would ever miss even a petty local election for any reason. (For one thing, I'm an election judge -- I have to show up early and stay all day.) But I really want to see a Brobdingnagian turnout.
Plutarch.
I chose Nicias and Crassus as a follow up to Alcibades and Coriolanus because of the connection, as Nicias was general in Alcibades' disasterous expedition to Syracuse--and so the situation would be somewhat familiar.
Nicias was general on the expedition, but thought it a bad idea in the first place. Crassus, nortoriously got himself and his army destroyed in Parthia, on an expedition that many thought ill advised, but he went ahead with it anyway.
She sounds as if she may be expressing disappointment with the President. Obviously, he needs to fire and replace her in order to demonstrate that he is a strong leader, in command of the situation.
When you take an antibiotic, you expect it to kill your infection without hurting you. Lots of antibiotics take advantage of differences between your “eukaryotic” cells (cells with nuclei) and bacteria’s “prokaryotic” cells (no nuclei). A typical antibiotic will shut down protein synthesis in bacteria’s ribosomes, which are the fantastically complicated little factories in cells (about the size of a small virus) where proteins are built according to instructions delivered by RNA. Stop protein synthesis and the cell dies. Luckily for you, your ribosomes use a different construction process from bacteria’s, so the antibiotic doesn’t shut down your protein synthesis and kill your cells.
Castor Beans
Unless you ingest ricin, that is. Ricin is a protein found in the seeds of the castor bean plant (Ricinus communis). It messes up the protein synthesis in the ribosomes of eukaryotic cells, that is, nucleated cells, like yours and mine. In other words, ricin did to Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978 pretty much what tetracycline does to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. There is a difference, though. Unlike the natural toxins in common antibiotics, which lock on one-to-one with their target molecules to disrupt bacteria’s protein synthesis, ricin jumps from ribosome to ribosome, shutting down one after another. As a result, a single molecule of ricin can kill a whole cell. This makes ricin one of the most toxic natural substances known, a thousand times as toxic as cyanide. A mere 75 micrograms can be a deadly dose in an adult human; one castor bean contains something like 1,000 micrograms.
Biochemists report recent progress in developing a ricin antidote and a ricin vaccine, but don’t count on them yet. Likewise, we may figure out someday how to target cancer cells with ricin, but for now it’s just bad news for all of your cells.
There are worse toxins than ricin, but few so widely available. Castor bean seeds are used in the production not only of the laxative castor oil, but also brake fluid, varnish, soap, and ink. Ricin is soluble in water but not in oil, so castor oil is OK from the point of view of health, if not of taste. But stay away from the bean pulp left over after castor oil production, and don’t eat unprocessed castor beans, unless you’re trying to cure Gaia of her human disease.
More cheerful news about poisonings throughout history here.
A piece on stoicism, which contrasts it to the products being generated by our own age:
Ours is not a philosophical age, much less an age of Stoicism. As Frank McLynn explains in his new biography of Marcus Aurelius, the last of Rome's "five good emperors," commander of Rome's prolonged campaigns against the invasions of barbarian German tribes, and the last important Stoic philosopher of ancient days, our philosophers (academics) no longer profess to help the average person answer life's great metaphysical questions. Contemporary philosophers might contemplate such abstruse problems as whether mental properties can be said to emerge from the physical processes of the universe; what the necessary and sufficient conditions are for self-interest; where the mind stops and the rest of the world begins-not, perhaps, the pressing existential questions presented by the normal course of a human life.
Beyond the realm of professional philosophy, an ever-expanding tribe of self-appointed lay philosophers profess practical strategies for worldly success: how to win friends and influence, how not to sweat the small stuff, how to free ourselves from shyness, anxiety, phobias, poverty, extra pounds...
That part about university philosophers is mostly true as far as it goes, which is this far: Anglo-American philosophy departments. There is a lot of interest in broader questions in non-English speaking Europe, but there the problem is that they are mired in dead-ends.
That only means that the time is right for something new: a hailstone, or, if you like, a mustard seed.
Philosophy is more important than people understand, as the second article shows. It is on fertility:
Many conclude that if you value your happiness and spending money, the only way to win the modern parenting game is not to play. Low fertility looks like a sign that we've finally grasped the winning strategy. In almost all developed nations, the total fertility rate—the number of children the average woman can expect to have in her lifetime—is well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children.
What, though, is being measured in these happiness surveys? People are asked how happy they are. Well, how happy are you? What am I asking you to evaluate? That is a question of philosophy.
What is a good life? The first article will point you in the direction of Marcus Aurelius' answer. If you can adopt his model, the question, "Are you happy?" means something entirely different than the question modern Americans hear you asking. They think you are asking them, "How do you feel?"
That shift in mindset has tremendous consequences. You decide to make it, perhaps, because you read a biography of Marcus Aurelius. Or perhaps you read some arguments about Aristotle, and how he defined happiness. Or perhaps you only watched Oprah, and stick with "How do you feel?" Whichever you do, you find that this decision -- an apparently minor preference for one way of thinking over another -- changes your life and everything about it.
Eric often says "Facta, non verba," and that is true as far as it goes. Some of the words, however, are necessary conditions for the deeds. If you don't have the thoughts, you'll never pursue the acts. You may never feel pain or know much by way of sorrow, and you may feel content. You will never, however, be happy.
An interview with Peter S. Kaufman, the President of investment bank Gordian Group and head of the firm's Restructuring and Distressed M&A practice.
They could cut loose BP America and it could be BP America that files for bankruptcy. My presumption is that it's BP America that's responsible for the spill. They can wall off the non-BP America assets from the Gulf -- which is about 50 percent of the company's net value --and try to reorganize BP America. That's likely to take a very long time, and BP would not make good on its promise for the 20 billion [in the escrow fund].
Or they could file all of BP, and do so in London. Wonder how well-received our government and legitimate Gulf claimants would fare in a British insolvency court?
Nearly half of American Adults see the government today as a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Adults see the government today as a threat to rights. Thirty-seven percent (37%) hold the opposite view. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.
The government is both a danger to individual rights, and a useful tool for protecting those rights. Making sure the danger isn't realized, and the tool is properly employed, is the whole proper business of government.
I was looking at the Kagan email archives, which are an interesting project, when I was surprised to see the subject heading: "5th commandment." I hadn't gotten the impression that Dr. Kagan was terribly religious, so I clicked on it to see what the email said.
It's basically talking points on a bill allowing the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools. They are remarkably coy in the most disgusting fashion of D.C. politics. Note that this message was forwarded, not written, by Dr. Kagan.
Jose checked the Catholic Web page, and Thou shalt not kill IS the 5th Commandment, so John gets the VP's award for Faith-Based Person of the Week.
Here's a longer Q&A for the 10 Commandments question:
Q. will the President support the amendment passed by the House to let schools post the 10 Commandments?
A. If the House were serious, they would have remembered the Fifth Commandment -- Thou Shalt Not Kill -- and voted to make it harder for criminals to buy guns.
So, will the President support the amendment? No, but neither will he admit that he's not supporting the amendment. Rather, he will cite the Ten Commandments as a means of undermining the movement to honor them.
Now that reminds me of something...
Now, there are definitely valid questions for Americans -- and even Christian Americans -- about how much of the Old Testament Law they are really interested in bringing forward into modern life. The honest position here is, well, the honest position: "I don't believe the Ten Commandments are a proper guide for modern America." That's a perfectly defensible position.
What bothers me is this pose of being the superior readers of scripture -- and in the Kagan case, by people who admit they had to look it up to be sure which one they wanted to name. Even in the Obama case, the claim is that "folks haven't been reading their Bibles." I'd bet against that claim proving true; but again, the pose is one of arrogant intellectual superiority.
There is a tremendously interesting series being written on "unknown unknowns" starting here. As of this writing only the first three parts are published.
The argument being advanced is that there are things we don't just "not know" that we don't know, but things we cannot know that we don't know. It starts with a few amusing stories, but turns on the question of whether a known neurological disorder is actually just a very obvious example of a general problem with our brains.
An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.”
So, not only do they not know that they are paralyzed, they cannot know it. And they cannot reason to it: their reason, far from guiding them correctly, is inventing plausible rationalizations that let them avoid recognizing the problem.
So much for the disorder. But what about more general life?
DAVID DUNNING: I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.
ERROL MORRIS: Why not?
DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.
But in part two, the question arises: does the disease being used as a model for this investigation even exist? And how would we know?
It's an interesting question, but it is a known unknown; the true unknown unknowns are what they're after. And those are, of course, very difficult things to pin down. Even incompetence is not a very good candidate. It is true that the same standard I would use to decide how to weld two pieces of metal (say) is the standard I would use to evaluate whether I was a good welder. But I am still able to reason to my incompetence at welding from the fact that I find that I have no standard for judging how to weld two pieces of metal; or how to turn on an arc-welder; or how to be sure I wasn't about to burn off my foot. I can very quickly reason to knowledge that I am not competent to be operating the welder, and need further instruction.
Yet apparently this is often not true, and it is interesting to examine why.
It is also interesting to speculate about the general thesis, which is that brain states can disable reason (or retask it to mere rationalization). This touches on the matter that St. Augustine discusses in "On Free Choice of the Will," where he asserts that it is necessary to believe before you can begin to understand. The choice to believe something, or not, alters the brain state; and it is obvious enough that this may open some new roads, and close off others. What is interesting is the reinforcement of Augustine's argument: the idea that, having not made the choice to believe, the road is invisible to reason. Would it not be true that, having made the choice to believe, other roads are closed and hidden? Reason cannot grasp that they exist, because when pointed in that direction it will merely reply, "I do not need a pencil."
That is troubling as well as fascinating as a concept, because it is impossible to know which side of that canyon one is on. This, too, becomes a known unknown.
Iain M. Banks is the Scottish author of a series of science fiction novels about “The Culture,” a society made up spaceships driven by artificial intelligences. I’ve sampled the novels and concluded they aren’t for me, but I do appreciate some of the many names the author has given to the sentient ships:
Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill No More Mr. Nice Guy Just Read the Instructions Of Course I Still Love You Serious Callers Only Kiss the Blade Funny, It Worked Last Time Helpless in the Face of Your Beauty You Would If You Really Loved Me You’ll Thank Me Later Poke It with a Stick Hand Me the Gun and Ask Me Again Lapsed Pacifist Now Look What You’ve Made Me Do Don’t Try This at Home Now We Try It My Way You’ll Clean That up Before You Leave Now, Turning to Reason, & Its Just Sweetness Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall Stood Far Back When the Gravitas Was Handed out Gravitas, What Gravitas? Gravitas . . . Gravitas . . . No, Don’t Help Me, I’ll Get It in a Moment Gravitas Free Zone Low Gravitas Warning Signal Absolutely No You-Know-What
An interesting article on Baghdad nightlife. It wasn't that long ago that there wasn't any -- except on dust-ridden nights, when it involved planting bombs and setting up rocket launchers. Much has changed in a short time.
This piece on McChrystal is extremely good journalism -- you have to respect the reporter who managed to get this kind of access, build this kind of trust, and put this together. This isn't how we normally talk in front of reporters; but maybe we should. If the American people understood that this is just how people talk after months deployed, this kind of reporting would not have the potential to be disruptive. Everyone would shrug it off as normal combat steam-blowing. I heard way worse stuff from commissioned officers about Bush than that he was "disappointing" -- and when they'd talk about the next level of higher command, O My God, what you'd hear!
It's not a big deal. This stuff is constant at every level. On the few occasions you'd run into serious friction over it, people understood and would say, "You've gotta eat with those guys" -- meaning, they understood that you had to feel certain things just because of where you were and what you were doing. You get mad, you blow steam, then you suck it up and do the job. The job gets done, and when the deployment is over we forget every complaint and spend the next fifty years going to each other's parties and raising toasts to the memories.
If people thought it looked like something else, it doesn't. That party in Paris reminds me of some of the best times in my life, and why should we expect it to be different?
The problem isn't what was said or done; it's that so few Americans understand why it was said and done. This shouldn't be shocking, and shouldn't cause a political incident. This is how things are when you're talking to soldiers and Marines; the reporter just shows them honestly. It's a pity our politicians have so little stomach for them as they honestly are, because they're the best men we as a nation know how to produce.
Painting them as perfect, as we so often try to do in the press, sets them up for failure when some reporter gets inside the guard. Maybe it's time just to let people learn what it's like.
Friday we had pot roast (pork); Saturday I made pizza dough for homemade pizzas. Last night was chicken and potatoes. Today, with all the weekend cookery, there are too many leftovers in the refrigerator.
So I took the leftover pizza dough and made it into a pie crust, shredded the pork and chicken, and stuffed the pie with that and some onions and potatoes, and vegetables from the pot roast. It came out well.
There are several good ways of spicing such a pie, both savory and (odd to the modern taste) sweet. The sweet ones -- made with things like cranberries or currants, cinnamon and ginger -- are sometimes called "Great Pies," and were served at holiday feasts. The savory ones are more likely to be eaten today. The Scots have a version called the bridie that is very good.
A number of traditional recipies can be found here. If you like it, and you might be down in Louisiana in September, you might like to try the Meat Pie Festival. I haven't been myself, but it sounds like fun.
...restrictions on companies that received government bailouts during the financial crisis apply to businesses, but not unions: Under the DISCLOSE Act, General Motors can’t tell you who to vote for, but the United Auto Workers union can.
...
Government contractors with contracts of more than $7 million are not permitted to engage in express advocacy. Unions that receive their dues from the taxpayer-funded salaries of public sector employees face no such restriction.
The whole "campaign finance reform" bus was always an affront to the first amendment. The freedom of speech that the Founders most wanted to guard was political speech.
Apparently, that freedom of speech will be just another form of patronage for the party in power.
It's a remarkable claim to make, and he has to know that the President will deny it. It wasn't long ago that no one wanted to get crosswise with the President on questions like this, because he was the most popular politician in the world. If some Republican said X and he denied it, the Republicans feared the public would believe they were lying because of their essential good feelings for the President. Does this show that the numbers are so bad that they don't worry about that anymore? Or is it these numbers that Kyl is more concerned about?
This story appears to be evidence for a developing middle position between "the President's doing his best, but..." and "the Manchurian President is intentionally destroying America out of malice." According to the middle position, the President isn't trying to destroy America intentionally; but he is intentionally using his office to harm or punish parts of America, sometimes aggressively and sometimes through neglect of his duty. See here re: "McCain-voting Gulf states."
I have largely found this middle narrative unconvincing -- on the general principle that you shouldn't attribute malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation -- but Senator Kyl's claim appears to be support for the "middle-malice" position.
In 1952 the little-known brief novel “Testimonies” appeared in print. The author was Patrick O’Brian, who later would achieve considerable fame from more than twenty rollicking novels following the careers of a British Royal Navy captain during the Napoleonic Wars and his particular friend, a ship’s surgeon, naturalist, and sometime spy. “Testimonies,” a first novel written when O’Brian was in his 20s, is a wonderful book, though much different in tone from the beloved Aubrey/Maturin series, which was begun a full 17 years later. Here is its description of Joseph Pugh, an awkward, alienated, slightly ill ex-Oxford don’s discovery that he has fallen in love with his Welsh neighbor’s young farm wife, Bronwen Vaughan:
I was very simple I suppose. I had no idea that I was there at all until I was in love so deep that it was a pain in my heart. I had thought it was the pleasure of looking at her, the pleasure of joining that good and kind family circle (good in spite of the bad undercurrent that I suspected) and talking about country things to Emyr and the old man. Then one day it was upon me. I knew then what was the matter, and why nothing had seemed profitable but the evenings I spent there; she came in, just as I had seen her the first time, and my heart leaped up and I knew that Emyr was talking but I could not link his words together. . . . There may be things more absurd than a middle-aged man in the grip of a high-flung romantic passion: a boy can behave more foolishly, but at least in him it is natural.
“Testimonies” takes the form of a kind of inquest, though its nature becomes harder and harder to pin down as the novel gathers speed toward its conclusion. Here is Bronwen explaining how she saw Mr. Pugh:
Q. . . . I understand that he had many different ways, the other way of talking and behaving, but he was still a man like every other man, was he not?
A. No. He was not a man like any other man. He was the dearest man in the world for me. The difference in him was right inside, nothing to do with him belonging to other people. Without his gentry or his money or anything, if you put him by another man it was gold against brass. But to begin with it was just the ordinary difference that made me so slow and stupid. Unless he is wicked (which you can see at once) you do not expect a man like him to admire you.
New and used copies are available in hardcover and paperback at Amazon and alibris.
I'm feeling literary this weekend, so I'm going to quote an A.E. Housman poem here and recommend a book in the next post.
The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away, The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers. Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.
There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot, One season ruined of our little store. May will be fine next year as like as not: Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.
We for a certainty are not the first Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.
It is in truth iniquity on high To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave, And mar the merriment as you and I Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.
Iniquity it is; but pass the can. My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore; Our only portion is the estate of man: We want the moon, but we shall get no more.
If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours To-morrow it will hie on far behests; The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.
The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
. . .
This is the first poem I recall having anyone help me with in college, and I remember the professor pointing out to us the constant playing with "can" and "may." What strikes me now is the mournful tone about having to bear being all of 24 years old. I still like "Bear them we can, and if we can we must."
When I read a piece like this one, I almost think I'd be sorry if the New York Times went out of business. Richard Snow writes a lovely story about his father's WWII service. Obviously military service was not a big part of the family tradition, and Mr. Snow says of his very young self, "I knew he’d been in the war, but so had most of my friends’ fathers, and it made no particular impression on me: if I thought of his military service at all, it was as just one more civic thing that happened to grown-ups, like voting, or going to P.T.A. meetings, or spending a morning at the Department of Motor Vehicles." He also speaks of his civilian's perspective on the "subtle ways" that a war can "vex the spirit," particularly in the case of a man who obviously never set out to be a warrior. But the piece is entirely free from either condescension to the military or hackneyed notions about the evils of conflict. When Mr. Snow accompanies his father to meet an old comrade, who has brought a destroyer into New York Harbor, the little boy gets an extraordinary glimpse of a side of his father he'd never imagined, in the company of these "blue-clad demigods." He says, "My comfortable present swung like a door giving on the past." It's a short piece really worth your attention on this Father's Day.
I haven't any comparable stories about a father from a decidedly non-military tradition who nevertheless stepped up. The closest my own father ever came to military service was in the last months of World War Two, when the concentrated efforts of his superiors in the nuclear physics establishment nearly lost their long battle to keep him stateside on their team. At 25, he hadn't completed his training or begun the long work he did at Los Alamos after the war, but they still guarded their research assets very closely. He got as far as being placed on some kind of transport en route to enlistment before they pulled strings and recovered him.
Deaf in one ear, wildly nearsighted, and nearly crippled in one hand, he'd have made an outstandingly poor soldier not so much for these reasons as for the fact that he was practically the archetype of the way-out-there Mad Scientist, only loosely tethered to the earth or his society. Here's a story that's not about him, but could be: A physicist at the University of Texas was reputed to wander around the halls in an apparent daze, often reading. One day someone stopped him in the hall and engaged him in a brief conversation, during which they jostled about a bit, avoiding passing traffic. When they were finished, he asked, "Which way was I going when you stopped me?" "That way," answered his surprised interlocutor. "Oh, good," he answered. "Then I've had lunch."
My father died 15 years ago. I'll never stop missing him.
Welcome to the 20th of June, Father's Day, which is a holiday of special importance here because it happens that certain birthdays and my wedding anniversary all fall on the same day. It's a major festival at Grim's Hall, about six months off of Christmas but with no religious aspects. It's a good day, the first day of summer, with the green of the forest at its heights.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945), "The Journey of Enid and Geraint " from: Idylls of the King.
The part of all that I share with all of you, however, is Father's Day. So, let's talk about that.
I read Colbert I. King's latest piece this evening. It's a pity that he didn't stop about halfway through the second sentence, because up until then he had a good point; there is no excuse for the poisonous piece that follows.
But let us ignore the poisons in his veins, and attend to the good point. Our President's other achievements and qualifications remain highly debatable a year and a half into his term, but one thing that is easy to admire is the family he has built. It's plain that he adores his daughters, and has a solid marriage to his wife. Whatever other disputes we may have with that man, in this matter I am pleased to speak well of him.
That's enough for today. Go and call your father, if you still may; or spend the day with him; or visit his grave, or his memory. It is no easy thing to be a father, and is indeed a great weight if it is undertaken with the seriousness it deserves. Not all bear it well, and none of us bear it as well as we might wish. The best gift to give a father is forgiveness, for those times he has not borne it so well; and respect, for those times he did.
Here's a third example to round out our series on so-called 'guerrilla' tactics in politics. This is an "ambush" interview only in the sense that it wasn't scheduled. It happened in a Congressional office building, following a meeting on the subject, by someone who was plainly identified as a reporter from a new media outlet with a known political agenda.
This kind of thing is perfectly OK with me. It's not an intrusion into the private lives of the individual; it's not a use of 'the rules' to undermine the system. And indeed, unlike the other two examples, we can see that our national dialogue is being advanced here.
So, here's the limit case for "what right looks like." You don't have to get on the Congressman's schedule. By all means any citizen should be able to ask their Congressman a question at town halls and through normal dialog, and new media reporters should also be free to talk to Congress in professional venues. This doesn't require jumping people on their way back from lunch, or traveling under the false flag of 'students working on a project,' when you're really acting as political operatives in the opposition. It's great to use your First Amendment rights to advance the discussion, not good to use them to shut down someone else's First Amendment rights.
The Congressman here is still a bit testy, but I think both he and the reporter are doing just fine. Politics is not a tea party, even when it's a Tea Party.
Andrew Sullivan cites this video, saying, "Finally, a way to respond to holy rollers, tea-partiers, Larouchies, Code Pink, Mormon missionaries, Farrakhanites, HRC fundraisers, at al" [sic].
I don't even know what political message was being advocated in the video, and I genuinely do not care. I do know that, far from being encouraged, this kind of disruption of civic free speech is an aggressive abuse to our democracy. Frankly, to put it in the words the President used just this week, I think this is the kind of thing that ought to put you in danger of having your ass kicked -- and kicked, not to charges or threats of charges of simple battery, but to the wholesome and wholehearted applause of the American people. The law should not oppose such kicking, and neither should we.
Any single gentleman who wished to escort this young man aside for remedial education would enjoy my approval -- so long as he took reasonable precautions to ensure that the harm done was passing, while the education was lasting.
In our recent discussion on faerie creatures, T99 suggested that she had a Platonist model of consciousness. I was reading from Plotinus' fourth ennead today, in which he talks about the unity of all souls under his theory. Plotinus was the founder of Neo-Platonism, in the third century A.D. Here, for ease of reference, is the 'television model' for consciousness.
There's an alternative model of consciousness -- which I may have invented, although it's highly likely that someone else has achieved it separately -- that thinks about consciousness as a kind of signal that is part of the universe. This is opposed to the standard view of consciousness arising from chemical activity in the brain (a highly problematic concept: these same chemicals exist everywhere, but produce the experience of consciousness as far as we know only when arranged as a brain, and possibly only as a human brain).
In this sense, the brain is not creating consciousness, but interpreting something already present. The brain can be thought of as like an old-fashioned television, the kind that pulls TV signals from the air. Two such sets, tuned to different channels, will give you a completely different experience -- one of a football game, the other of a soap opera. Yet they are pulling from the same signal.
If a set grows old, the picture it offers begins to alter in certain ways; but it is interpreting the same signal. If it is damaged, the picture may become quite distorted -- but the signal is unharmed. If you unplug it, or it dies of age, or you bash it with a baseball bat hard enough, it may cease being able to interpret the signal at all. The signal is still there. You just have lost your means of interpreting and understanding it. (And even when you had that means, you were only seeing a small part of what was really there -- the one channel.)
On this model, then, what culture is doing is helping to "tune" our minds in certain ways. That would explain (for example) why a child who hasn't read 1,000 year old books might make a claim about an event (say a fairy) that harmonizes with those books. No one told her that story; she has simply been tuned, by genetics and culture, to interpret consciousness in certain ways.
That is compatible with the Platonic model you are suggesting, I think.
Now, Plotinus is not talking about a unified consciousness, but a unified soul -- indeed, consciousness poses a problem for him. How can two souls actually be one thing, if one is consciously experiencing pain and the other is not? He has an explanation for this which is similar to, but different from, the television analogy (which was obviously unavailable to him).
Now to begin with, the unity of soul, mine and another's, is not enough to make the two totals of soul and body identical. An identical thing in different recipients will have different experiences; the identity Man, in me as I move and you at rest, moves in me and is stationary in you: there is nothing stranger, nothing impossible, in any other form of identity between you and me; nor would it entail the transference of my emotion to any outside point: when in any one body a hand is in pain, the distress is felt not in the other but in the hand as represented in the centralizing unity.
In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient bodies made one, would the souls feel as one.
We must keep in mind, moreover, that many things that happen even in one same body escape the notice of the entire being, especially when the bulk is large: thus in huge sea-beasts, it is said, the animal as a whole will be quite unaffected by some membral accident too slight to traverse the organism.
Thus unity in the subject of any experience does not imply that the resultant sensation will be necessarily felt with any force upon the entire being and at every point of it: some transmission of the experience may be expected, and is indeed undeniable, but a full impression on the sense there need not be.
The concept of 'tuning' was not available to him, but he is in some sense reaching for a similar concept, especially when he speaks of how one body may not be conscious of all its sensations at the same time. Apparently the view of the soul he suggests was influential with Freeman Dyson, and Schrödinger.
Another place of harmony with Plotinus is the idea we often discuss that aesthetics underlies ethics, which in turn underlies politics. As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "Plotinus' chronologically first treatise, ‘On Beauty’ (I 6), can be seen as parallel to his treatise on virtue (I 2). In it, he tries to fit the experience of beauty into the drama of ascent to the first principle of all. In this respect, Plotinus' aesthetics is inseparable from his metaphysics, psychology, and ethics."
Of course, in thinking of beauty as being directed at something like a Platonic form (in fact, toward God), he is suggesting that the underlying root of beauty is the same for everyone. We appear to differ on particulars because, he says, we get hung up on sensible beauty; we ignore the inner beauty that we can see when we ignore mere physical beauty.
For a special day at school, a Rhode Island 8-year-old decorated a hat with patriotic themes, including camouflage, an American flag, and tiny plastic toy soldiers.The school banned the hat.“Why? The toy soldiers were carrying tiny guns.”
Hey, I'm just surprised they didn't object to the flag.
The Rhode Island principal explained that "the hat would be fine if the boy replaced the Army men holding weapons with ones that didn't have any."(Post-modern soldiers, holding copies of U.N. sanctions, are available at enlightened toy stores.)The school felt that the toy soldiers were the equivalent of wearing images of marijuana leaves on t-shirts.
The director of the Rhode Island National Guard gamely stepped in and tried to talk some sense to the school:"The American soldier is armed. That's why they're called the armed forces," he said. "If you're going to portray it any other way, you miss the point."I imagine him speaking very slowly and calmly.
Here’s another approach to guns, inspired by news reports of a Presidential Internet “kill-switch” to be triggered by an “emergency measure or action" announced by the Department of Homeland Security. Glen Reynolds responded:“If they shut down the Internet, I’m getting out my gun.And I think everyone should take it as a signal to do the same — because one way or the other, it means the country’s under attack.”
My solution to the boy’s hat?Use a razor blade to cut the plastic weapons loose, and replace them with tiny nerf bats.But as Bruno Bettelheim noted, the reason boys play with tin soldiers is that it’s not much fun to play with tin pacifists.
Why stop there, though? The arguments for her being Vice President are better arguments for her being President. Or we could simply move everyone one spot over: Joe Biden to President, Hillary Clinton to Vice President, and Obama could resign to pursue other opportunities. A stint as Secretary of State might give him some actual experience that would improve his odds if he wanted to run for a second term as President when he was really qualified for the office; or, he could follow his heart and move on to become Secretary General of the United Nations.
I'm not sure I see the benefit to the nation of swapping the two lower jobs without addressing the core of the problem. If we can get some agreement on that, though, I'll be happy to support the move.
"Global Organized Crime Becoming New Superpower: U.N."
It's good to see some honest reporting about the U.N. for a change! And the first phrase of the article is also insightful. It quotes the "U.N. crime chief," who says:
I'm reading Parzival, as I mentioned. One of the striking things about it is the German High Medieval sense of the aesthetic. It's not the understated, somber German sense you might know today! For example, here is how King Gramoflanz prepares for a ritual combat with Sir Gawan (or, as you better know him, "Gawain").
Now the king was armed. Twelve damsels took a hand, mounted on pretty palfreys. They were not to be negligent -- that lustrous company -- but each was to carry by a shaft the costly phellel-silk beneath which the king wished to arrive. Two little ladies, none too feeble -- indeed they bore the brightest sheen there -- rode with the king's stout arms about them.
Now, this is an entry that would do David Lee Roth proud. The king arrives on horseback, with twelve mounted damsels bearing a giant silk tarp above him, and two more in his lap.
Somehow, no artist has thought to render this image, which seems to me a striking omission! I can't think of anything else quite like it in Medieval literature -- but Wolfram is an interesting writer all the way around. He is also remarkable for how he insists that love and marriage be unified, as other Medieval writers did not always do. He does it consistently.
Eric has occasionally remarked that we should be of peacable mind about about the state of the union, until we started to see state efforts to organize against the Federal power. We are not quite there yet; but clashes between Federal and state officials are beginning to become common.
"These barges work. You've seen them work. You've seen them suck oil out of the water," said Jindal.
"The Coast Guard came and shut them down," Jindal said. "You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, 'Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'"
...
In Alabama today, Gov. Bob Riley said that he's had problems with the Coast Guard, too.... The governor said the problem is there's still no single person giving a "yes" or "no." While the Gulf Coast governors have developed plans with the Coast Guard's command center in the Gulf, things begin to shift when other agencies start weighing in, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"It's like this huge committee down there," Riley said, "and every decision that we try to implement, any one person on that committee has absolute veto power."
[The Arizona governor] said in a statement that "this is no way to treat the people of Arizona."
"To learn of this lawsuit through an Ecuadorean interview with the secretary of state is just outrageous," she said. "If our own government intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs the citizens of another nation."
All three complaints are essentially the same. The Federal government is asserting veto power over state actions; it is reading that power in the broadest possible way, even in emergency situations. It's unresponsive to the needs of the people of the state; but every piddling regulation ("How many fire extinguishers do you have on that oil-sucking barge?") is put ahead of doing something about the emergency at hand. They are more interested in the questions of precedence and propriety than they are in the disasters that are lapping at our shores, or storming across our borders.
I'd say we're starting to see the friction. Heat follows.
If you’re a 30-something dude and this doesn’t describe you, congrats! You’re likely one of the other generalized types I mentioned—somewhere on the spectrum between single d*****g and taken demi-god.
Why should one wish to be congratulated for being on that spectrum? I would think any man would like the idea of being seen as a demi-god.
Apparently the standards for admission are fairly low, too. It's achievable!
If this isn’t a story made for a screenplay to rival “Lawrence of Arabia,” I don’t know what is.
Douglas Mackiernan (1913-1950) was the first CIA officer to be killed in the line of duty, though he was not honored until 2000, and then in a secret ceremony.In 2002 a journalist began to break the story, which was largely acknowledged by the CIA in 2008.
Just the story of the effort to pierce the veil of secrecy and honor Mackiernan's service would make for a bestselling potboiler, but the story of the service itself makes the cover-up thriller look pedestrian.The brilliant MIT-dropout misfit born to a Scottish whaler/explorer in Mexico City, the dawn of the Cold War, the Westerner engulfed by the East, the nuclear secrets, the abandonment of the U.S. embassy/spy station in remote northwest China upon the surrender of Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949, the wife's last-minute escape overseas to bear twins, the husband's desperate 1,000-mile trek by camel and foot across the Taklamakan Desert and the Himalayas fleeing the ascendant Chinese Communists, the tragic death at the Tibetan border crossing resulting from bureaucratic sloth and duplicity, the U.S.’s later abrupt betrayal of Tibetan freedom fighters upon re-establishment of diplomatic ties to China in the 1970s – and believe me, I’ve barely touched on the high points of suspense and irony.
Thomas Laird’s 2002 book about Mackiernan, “Into Tibet,” is about to join a pile on my reading table that’s getting way out of hand.Despite the CIA’s belated confirmation of many parts of the story in 2008, there remains controversy about Laird’s accuracy and partisan bent.I can’t begin to judge that side of things yet, but what a yarn!This guy is T.E. Lawrence, James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Jack Ryan rolled into one.It’s a Le Carre novel as re-imagined by Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling. Ridley Scott? Russell Crowe?
I stumbled across Mackiernan because I was surprised by reports in the morning paper that newly released information indicated the CIA was caught flat-footed by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.Wasn’t that common knowledge – the January 1950 Acheson flub and so on?I’m no Korea buff.Quickly reading the Wikipedia summary of the Korean War that's linked above, I saw Mackiernan mentioned as the source of advance intelligence of the North Korean invasion, which he was trying to get across the Tibetan border when he was killed.In reading other accounts of Mackiernan’s exploits I can’t be sure that’s right; if so, it’s such a minor part of the saga that it doesn’t rate a mention in other summaries.Either way, I’m motivated to read the Laird book now.
Former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht writes about the Iranian protests: how they came about, why they didn't succeed, and how the US failed to follow through where it should have. It cites the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper's work as the foundation.
It's an amazing case: the Clinton administration's policy toward Iran seemed hopelessly optimistic at the time they adopted it, but the Bush administration largely saw it through in spite of the challenges of the war on terror. The internal revolution that the policy hoped we would see -- if only we avoided giving the Iranian government a conflict they could use to convince the young that we were their enemies -- actually arrived!
Unfortunately, we did nothing; for now there was a third administration in place, one that viewed stability and engagement of the mullahs as its goals. The moment, so long hoped for both here and among the Iranian youth, arrived and passed.
See what Mr. Gerecht has to say; but also remember this piece, not from a case officer (or "operations officer," as I believe they call the position now) but from a long time agent of the CIA within the Revolutionary Guards.
The Net is abuzz, including at Cassandra’s place, with the sad spectacle of a blogger threatening a series of critics with libel actions. I’m not familiar with the blogger and haven’t the patience to figure out what she’s on about, but I do have some helpful advice on how to avoid lawsuits of this kind. Truth is a defense, of course, but beyond that, let euphemism be your friend.
I haven’t any entertaining euphemisms on this specific subject, beyond the possible “leak in the think tank,” but I did find an entertaining column the other day about euphemisms for drunkenness. If you’ve never tried “The Word Detective,” now would be a good time to start. I ran across this recent column about the origin of the expression “snootful.” The Detective points us toward last year’s book by Paul Dickson, “Drunk: The Definitive Drinker’s Dictionary” (Melville House, 2009), which lists and explains thousands of synonyms for that blunt accusation, including “not quite himself,” “overwrought,” “outgoing,” or “ruddy-faced.”
The Detective admired “full of loud mouth soup,” but the example most helpful for our purposes today has been employed by British journalists to protect themselves against strict libel laws. The tradition may have begun in 1967, when a press agent for Labour Cabinet Minister George Brown explained one of his notorious public displays by saying he was “tired and emotional.” The phrase proved useful for decades afterward.
The British seem to have a special flair for this kind of thing. One of their expressions, new to this writer, is “pissed as a newt.” A Foreign Office official, informed of Brown’s press agent’s explanation, suggested that Brown had been “tired and emotional as a newt.”
Alas, PC evasions can ever be only temporary. Once the meaning becomes well understood, even the euphemism can land the writer in trouble. An expert writing in 2001 suggested that the phrase “tired and emotional” might expose the writer to liability even if it was meant literally. It must remain the job of restless wordsmiths to expand the boundaries of gentle evasions in every generation.
“His aides from the Senate, the presidential campaign, and the White House routinely described him with the same words: ‘psychologically healthy,’ ” writes Jonathan Alter in “The Promise,” a chronicle of Obama’s first year in office.
That should have been a warning. If any collection of people who deal with you regularly "routinely describe" you using the word "psychologically," there's a problem.
And it's a bigger problem, if they're at such pains to prove your 'psychological health' that they set up an organized response among your aides.
So, here's a commercial for the poor man's Mustang.*
This is one of those silly counterfactual things, with modern technology introduced into historic settings. Guns of the South is a classic example, with the AK-47 being introduced to the Confederate army during the Civil War. (I haven't read more than the jacket of the book, but I remember the concept.)
The thing is, I'd take the bet being proposed in the commercial. A few unarmored Dodges versus an infantry unit armed with .75 caliber muskets? Yeah, you'd break the line in a few places, but your drivers would be dead, and the line would re-form.
Besides, I'm sure General Washington would prefer the Mustang.
* Yes, I realize that the Challenger is actually more expensive than the baseline Mustang. I still don't see why anyone would buy the Dodge instead.
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