Links: Massive Edition

Just because I haven't been writing in a while doesn't mean I haven't been reading. This entry is coming at you from AirTran flight 155, seat 17C. I'm going to write about all the most interesting stories I've seen over the past week and a half, but first I'll start off with the seven blunders of the world, according to Mahatma Gandhi:

-Wealth without work
-Pleasure without conscience
-Knowledge without character
-Commerce without morality
-Science without humanity
-Worship without sacrifice
-Politics without principle

Keeping those in mind, think of the ethics of our current government. This soul-crushing moment of the day brought to you by Halliburton. I guess all we can do is live our life according to the principles that, if universal, would make the world a better place.

So we're losing the war on terror, are we? Wait... there haven't been any attacks on US soil in almost six years, and anyone with half a brain (half the country?) know that it isn't because “we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.” So why are we losing? Reason tells us: it's because of crap like this. I would say that we should try Michael Chertoff for treason, but we can't even get our shit together to impeach someone, so I guess the chance of any repercussions for Chertoff is nil.

Speaking of terror... want to take a bomb onto an airplane? You probably won't have a problem (as I write this at 30,000 feet). The Albany Times-Union explains how the TSA only will detect one about 29% of the time. Good thing they catch dangerous, dangerous bottled watter 100% of the time, though. If we're hydrated, the terrorists win.

Mmm... more airport security.

Since we're already talking about the war we're waging on a tactic, there's nothing like profiting from the misery of others to make you feel like a good person. Just ask Holland's own Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater. Maybe he's just a symptom of a wider problem, but this News-Observer article paints a pretty despicable picture.

More news from our favorite overseas clusterfuck: the Miami Herald shows us what happens when nobody that's not either insane or desperate signs up for the army: we just keep abusing the suckers we've already found. Just because you're in grad school and you've already been on four tours of duty doesn't mean you don't want to go back, does it?

If anybody doubts that our health care system is broken, take a look at this San Francisco Chronicle article. I guess it's a logical result of allowing the people in charge of our health to put profit-making as their one and only priority.

And we thought Regent University Law school (of which Monica Goodling is a graduate) was a joke: Reason tells the story of how “Dr.” Laura Callahan, former CIO for the Labor Department, received her PhD and two masters degrees from Hamilton University, a diploma mill in Wyoming run out of an old Motel 6 which attempts to be mistaken for Hamilton College, a top liberal-arts school in New York. Hamilton U is run by the Faith in the Order of Nature Fellowship Church, but it's accredited – by a fake accrediting agency also set up by the church. Although, you can get a PhD in five hours...

An apt cartoon by Ed Krebs, even if it's seven years late.

All right, now on to the stuff that's less depressingly world-shaking: this is an interesting list of the 10 most bizarre disasters in history. Sad, very sad, but also pretty interesting. I don't know why, but I love stuff like this. The Tunguska event is something I had previously read about, and an incredibly fascinating occurrence in its own right. Trivia: how is the Tunguska event similar to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871?

If you're not having much sex, you should step it up a little. That's according to this article in the New York Times, which is an excerpt from a book that I first heard about a while ago, if “sexual conservatives” would start snogging a little more (and thereby decreasing the impact of reckless, promiscuous individuals), happiness would go up and STDs would decrease. (Is there any wonder the Religious Right hates the Times? If you can't think for yourself, this article could be dangerous.)

Think Starbucks is snooty and expensive? If you ask, they'll make you a better coffee for less money, according to Slate. It's due to price discrimination, one of the most elusive but potentially profitable economic ideals – the same thing that makes airline prices highly variable and seemingly random, and also the reason why hardcover books cost so much more than softcover.

All right, let's take a radical idea – say you're buying a CD. When you plunk down your card, are you thinking about the quality of the hunk of plastic you're buying, or are you thinking about the rockin' tunes that are burned onto it? In a great article, Wired tells how Prince gave the obvious answer to that question, which actually required defying most of the established music industry, by giving away his CD to every subscriber of the British Mail on Sunday newspaper, a move that has sparked sellouts of his concerts across England despite his relative stagnance on the pop culture scene. The rationale used by corporate media that consumers should pay for the physical copy rather than the property within is one of the reasons why instead of profiting from the cheap, easy distribution methods made possible by today's technology, they feel threatened by it. Let's see – if you can cut costs and reach more of your target audience, with less effort, that's going to put you out of business?

Thanks for sticking with me through the long post... on to the Chicago-Mac!

Salty!

I'm reading Michael Benanav's Men of Salt now, which is one of the best travel stories I've ever read. It's about a man who latches on with a camel caravan that goes into the middle of the Sahara to trade at the Taoudenni salt mines and discovers a way of life that has been largely unchanged for over a thousand years.

Although I'm not done reading yet, several passages about the culture of the azalai (traders) aroused my interest as contrasts with modern western culture. A passage about the rationale for living in the most forbidding place on earth, from page 73:

Why bother? The environment is so unrelentingly brutal, it's hardly the optimal place for anything to live. Why then are plants, animals, and people so driven to eek out an existence in such a place? What's the point? Certainly neither money nor glory. The answer, it seems, is survival simply for its own sake. The deepest urge of all. And by adopting strategies that adhere to the laws of the desert, they can.

This, I saw, was about as far as one could get from the American proclivity for outsized consumption. Unlike the Saharans, who know the need for balance with the natural world because they live in it, we live as though we're separate from it, immune to the repercussions of overusing it. Yet with looming environmental catastrophe on a planetary scale, our circumstances are not all that different from the Saharans.

If their ethic of mutual sustainability is a survival strategy, then ours is a suicide strategy. If survival is the most hardwired biological impulse of all, we've got a short in our system. Our craving to consume, which in healthy amounts is critical to sustaining life, has hit pathological proportions, like a grossly obese person who not only can't stop eating, but justifies every bite. In other words, our culture is ill.

Pretty self-explanatory stuff. Think about that next time you see someone ordering a large drink because it's only 25 cents more than the medium, or driving a car the size of a small bus because it looks cool. The author backs these assertions up with numerous examples of azalai sacrificing their own self-interests to ensure the survival of the Saharan way of life. A prominent example, from page 136, occurs when the author is trying to figure out how the azalai and miners can coexist with the relatively recent introduction of trucks to the Sahara, which changes the trading equation:

After I returned to Timbuktu, I spoke about this issue with Sidi Mohammed Ould Youbba, a historian who is an authority on the salt trade. He said that soon an agreement would have to be forged among the truckers, the azalai, and the miners to resolve the matter. Wondering whether the truckers would concede to tinker with a system that currently works to their advantage, I asked if he thought it was likely that the three groups could come to mutually acceptable terms. "Of course," he replied, without a drop of doubt. Such pacts are commonplace, he said, and no one wants to drive anyone else out of business - which was a shock to my American ears. The truckers, miners, and azalai recognize the importance of the system as whole, he continued, and, as long as their own survival isn't threatened, will make agreements and even sacrifices to promote the welfare of the others. This is due in part to the familial ties among all three groups, as well as to the ethic of mutual sustainability that permeates Saharan culture. Again, it seemed like a perspective plucked directly from the desert ecosystem, in which resources are shared such that no one gets fat but the whole is able to survive, which in turn supports the survival of its members.

Wow. It reads like some kind of international copy of Bowling Alone. Considering that very few Americans feel their survival directly threatened at any point, where have we gone astray (no one gets fat?!)?

Recovering from BearFest

Happy Fourth, everyone!

First, as a cautionary note as people everywhere celebrate the birth of our country by blowing up a small part of it: nationalism is dangerous. It sounds like Richard Dawkins' critique of religion, but nationalism is a tool used by those in power to coerce the ignorant and downtrodden into actions that aren't in their best interests. Any absolutist paradigm that leaves no room for exceptions or free thought eliminates logic from decision-making, which is rarely a good thing. Howard Zinn of The Progressive provides an article that explains this better than I can.

This is a funny diagram of who really drives capitalist economies.

Walk like a fox, not like a cow. I tried this after reading Anthropik's article, and I'm a convert. This is a valuable revelation for anyone with foot, knee, or back problems.

DeputyDog gives a list of the 10 best natural phenomena. The first one listed will be familiar to anyone who has ever enjoyed a Macatawa sunset. This made me curious about some of the causes of the phenomenon in question, so I looked in Wikipedia, which has a really good rundown.

Salon provides a humorous look at a depressing subject - why nothing ever gets done on health care reform, probably the biggest immediate issue facing most Americans.

Jeff Stahler gives light to a sad truth that Michael Moore missed.

God Bless America? In some parts, if you visit America you lose your godlike status!

Classically Liberal gives us an intelligent and interesting look at economic conditions in the EU versus those in the US. In the EU, incomes are lower, and prices and taxes are higher than in the US. However, comparing this quantitative analysis with a subjective look at life in European cities is a powerful argument against purely using economic measures to define "quality of life". There is an intangible benefit to intelligent or artistic city plans, unique shops and areas, pedestrian-friendly public transportation, and collective community, all of which are far more prevalent in European cities (at large) than American ones.

Finally, to celebrate the 231th anniversary of declaring our independence from England, let's declare our independence from one of our biggest foreign policy boondoggles ever!

The Ugly Side of Capitalism

Chicanery

Only one link for today: this article from Newsweek/MSNBC gives some insight into why the Democrats lose elections despite having far superior ideas (and, indirectly, why Fox News has soared to the top of the ratings). It's about how your brain makes political decisions and how to frame an argument.

Here are my thoughts: it's really, really sad that political decisions need to be marketed. This kind of crap is why I'm not that interested in going into politics, even though at first glance it would seem like it's right up my alley.

However, more importantly, the marketing of political arguments will directly lead to the downfall of the democratic process. To show how, first let me lay out a couple of axioms: first of all, people will never make completely rational decisions. This has been proven beyond a doubt in economics and many other arenas. Second, not everyone will have access to all available information - some people will have an information advantage.

Taking these two givens, we can se how the presentation of information is of paramount importance. People at large won't do the necessary research and dispassionate analysis to have a true opinion on the issues, so they think what they are told to think. If (using an example from the article) a couple Arabs buying AK-47s could incite people to vote for more gun laws, without considering the benefits and drawbacks, they can easily be manipulated to vote along with the political interests of those with the information advantage. Since this is a situation exacerbated by the one-way medium of television (as Al Gore points out in An Assault on Reason), a medium that is accessible only to the super-rich, we have a small coalition of people ruling the majority. Call that what you want, but it ain't democracy.

This is a problem that isn't going to go away anytime soon under our current system. Saying "we just need to educate the population and give them the power to make informed decisions" is NOT a solution, for the simple reason that it is impossible. The only solution is to impose vast restrictions on the ability of big businesses to have political influence and limit the role of money in the political process. Of course, that presents a Catch-22: how do you get this political machine of wealth and power that so easily can manipulate popular opinion to make rules that will limit its ability to do exactly that?

My head hurts.

One more thing I thought when I read that article: Imagine if Al Gore had given the response outlined in the lead-in to the article... think the last seven years might have been a little different?

Doctrinaires

The New York Times has a really interesting article today entitled "Science of the Soul" that tries to encapsulate the recent discoveries giving evidence for a physical background of morality. Evolutionary biologists have known for years that many seemingly difficult-to-explain human "moral" attributes could be explained by survival-influenced evolutionary behavior (to take a simple and obvious example, it behooves a parent to share their food with their offspring, even though they then get less, because it increases the chance of their genes' survival).

Now, it seems, neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists are finding structures within the brain that can be directly linked to these behaviors - not only in humans, but also in other animals. Of course, religious conservatives are in an uproar. One of the central tenets of pretty much any Judeo-Christian religious doctrine is that man is special: he has a soul, and was created as the caretaker of the earth (a concept which has historically led to a lot of mistreatment of animals and "sub-human" humans).

The more science discovers, the less is left to be explained by religion. If I were a Catholic bishop, I would feel threatened by each new discovery, too. But inevitably what happens in these scenarios is that church doctrine doesn't change until it is absolutely forced to by prevailing wisdom. By then, it is apparent to everyone how asinine the church's position on the issue is - think the "sun revolving around the earth" situation. This phenomenon doesn't only take place in the catholic church - it is also present in protestant, Muslim, and Jewish thought patterns. The Catholic church is simply the easiest to follow because of its official, centralized doctrine. In the article, this 1996 quote from Pope John Paul II illustrated precisely what I am saying:

Although he noted that in the intervening years evolution had become “more than a hypothesis,” he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was “incompatible with the truth about man.”

Sooner or later, this kind of thinking inevitably catches up to the church, and they are left with egg on their faces. Simply stating a "truth about man" that flies in the face of all available evidence is an affront to curious, thinking people everywhere. When I hear of a quote like this, I feel much less bad about the decline of the church. They have no one to blame but themselves.

Thagomization

"Now this end is called the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmons." One of my favorite Far Side strips has actually spawned a new term - the spikes at the end of a stegosaur's tail are now referred to by paleontologists as the "thagomizer".

Democratic Underground unveils their Top 10 Conservative Idiots of the week. All I can say is that Trent Lott is a perfect fit for the people who voted for him.

The NFL Europe championship game took place this past weekend, with Hamburg beating Frankfurt. The halftime performer? Meat Loaf. I kid you not.

The Supreme Court took another step toward limiting free speech, ruling that a student who unfurled a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner at the running of the torch for the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002 could be suspended from school for advocating drug use, despite the fact that the incident didn't take place on the school grounds.

Glenn Greenwald notes that now all the people we're killing in Iraq are "Al-Qaida militants"... see, we did attack Iraq because of terrorists! Propaganda at its best. Or is that worst?

On a roll, Greenwald also gives a good exposition of the Bush administration's "good vs. evil" mentality and how it has led us much further along the path to war with Iran than was ever necessary.

The New York Times gives an interesting detail of how Rupert Murdoch came to be so evil.

Finally, the Boston Globe talks about why most citizens of this country want to impeach W, but most members of Congress don't... could this possibly be connected to Congressional approval ratings in the 20s? Nah. My personal view is that impeachment proceedings are political dead weight, but they need to be done. From the article:

Most Democratic politicians and strategists see impeachment as a loser. Right now, President Bush is one of the least popular presidents in American history, and Democratic leaders don't see any point in turning him into a political martyr.

I agree with those sentiments. However, more importantly, impeachment must be preserved as a threat to dishonest, incompetent, and outright criminal politicians everywhere. If a politician brazenly lies to the American public, time after time, and it results in a war that has killed thousands of our citizens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, for absolutely no gain whatsoever, doesn't get impeached - who does?

Congress doesn't want to get sidetracked with the impeachments and lose popularity. I ask - what popularity? It's becoming increasingly apparent that the majority is so slim that they'll never pass anything of consequence with Bush and his veto power sitting there. So they may as well spend their time impeaching him, and running the risk of martyrdom.

Still, I don't think turning Bush into a martyr is a big risk. First of all, impeachment proceedings would bring to light additional evidence of exactly how big a scumbag Bush is, further turning public sentiment against him. Second, it would put the GOP in the awkward position of facing the possibility of President Cheney, a leader even they don't want. If Bush gets impeached, and Cheney resigns rather than assume the title, it looks horrible for the GOP. If Cheney ascends to president, he can't be any worse, effectively, than Bush, and he's unpopular enough within his own party that he won't be able to move any legislation.

Rrgh. Mondays.