First blip -- environmental regulation even makes financial sense

Sounds weird, don't it? The White House Office of Management and Budget just came out with a report finding that clean-air regulations over the past 10 years have saved 5 to 7 times as much as they have cost, due to health and social benefits. Pretty amazing. And yes, this is the White House OMB, as in, the president appointed these people. [The Washington Post is the only paper I found that covered this, and luckily their story was liberated here.]

This is an illustration of one weakness of libertarianism -- coordinating these efforts centrally is much more likely to lead to big benefits like this that everyone will profit from.

Crazy guinea pigs, demented lab rats

This is a dope story about how lab animals may make bad research subjects. Basically, their confined existences may drive them bonkers, as in the case of lab mice who do backflips once every second for up to half an hour. Does their bizarro mental status cast aspersions on the data gleaned from research on them?


Money bits:

- If captivity alters animals to make them abnormal in their behavior, that raises the question: Are mad mice good human models? [Georgia Mason, behavioral biologist]

- If they develop abnormal behaviors, it might mean they are abnormal test subjects... My first concern was that the more these people examined complex brain function, the more it really started to matter whether these animals were normal or not. [Hanno Wurbel, animal behaviorist]

- If you grow up with evolutionary thinking or behavioral ecology—and this is now a more common thing—that's a scene where you think differently about housing conditions. You don't see animals as little machines that will always behave the same way if you put them in the same environment. You look at individuals differently, and you ask, 'What are we doing if we ignore the evolutionary history of a species and just keep them in a clean cage with nothing else?' [Barbara Konig, zoologist]

- What we're interested in is a model that has higher predictive power of whether a therapeutic regime works for humans," Hockly says. "Humans have a very complex environment. If the mice are sitting around twiddling their thumbs like they're in prison, you probably don't have a good model. [Emma Hockly, behavioral pharmacologist]

The truth comes out, and it is this: The truth came out long ago

Strange how 9/11 made false become true.

Want a prime example? An Australian journalist reporting from Britain last night reported that he had dug up a videotape of Secretary Powell from February of 2001 saying that Iraq had basically no WMD capabilities, thanks to the US-led sanctions. Of course, within hours of the terrorist attack on 9/11, the administration irrevocably set its sights on toppling Saddam, regardless whether or not Iraq was in any way connected to the disaster, as notes from Rumsfeld from that day clearly show; because Saddam 'had' weapons that we knew he didn't have, as Powell bragged back in February of 2001; and because his regime contributed to the 9/11 atrocity, a connection for which there was and still is an utter lack of proof, as even Bush recently agreed.

This newly-unearthed quote from Powell is getting significant play in the American press, as it was covered by the Washington Post and then picked up by other papers, like my hometown Chron, which is good, because it means it's liberated from the Post's damn pay archives. Even the uber-conservative NewsMax.com covered the revelation, although its story is kind of a cheerleading piece exhorting the administration to explain its case better.


Straight from the horse's bullshit-filled mouth

In this section I'm highlighting a few quotes from these sources to make a quick, nearly-primary-source summary of this material. [This is excluding the lies surrounding WMDs in the run-up to the war, which has been pretty well covered elsewhere.]

* Notes taken by Rumsfeld's aides on 9/11, describing how the US should counter-attack a panoply of targets in the Middle East, regardless of any actual connection to the hijackings [as reported a year ago by CBS News]: Rumsfeld said he wanted the 'best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. at same time. Not only UBL... Go massive... Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'

* Cheney on Meet the Press, September 14, 2003, claiming that Iraq was a central base for the 9/11 terrorists: 'If we’re successful in Iraq... we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.'

* Bush on September 17, 2003, saying that the US had no evidence that Iraq was connected with 9/11: 'We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.' [Everyone reported this, but the LA Times' story was particularly good, and it's liberated from their archive here.]

* Bush on May 30, 2003, after American troops found two trailers filled with specialized equipment, alleged to be involved with WMD manufacture: 'We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories... But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.'

* Two scientists from a NYTimes report on the trailers, published on June 7, 2003 [and liberated here]: 'Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion... I am very upset with the process.'
The second scientist:'I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter.' The initial report 'was a rushed job and looks political.'

* Powell, on February 24, 2001, talking to the press after telling the Egyptian foreign minister that the sanctions against Iraq were working well [the meeting transcript is still on a State webpage]:

'We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.'

Dean and Bush -- two sides of the same privileged coin

Weekly Standard editor David Brooks recently got a column at the NYTimes, and with William Safire now they got 2, count 'em, 2 conservatives in house. I've got to say that Brooks is way better than Safire. First of all, I like his viewpoints better. Second of all, I like his topics better -- he's quite successfully carved out this niche doing psychological/sociological background analyses of the political games going on. [I first came across his name with his Patio Man piece in the Standard, which explained how the title character would continue Republican domination of the country.]

The real point here is that Brooks just wrote a good column on how Dean and Bush both come from this same waspy, elite world that cranks out good leaders. Interesting. Best sociological piece on the prez candidates since that one I posted from the Voice last month.

[Oh, and I made a little progress in my ongoing quest to foil the efforts of certain publications to make people pay for their content. I just web-searched for this column, which is already off the Times' free site, and found it elsewhere, for free. I guess until millions of people flock to thinkness they won't care/know. Okay, it's not really that impressive a discovery. Big deal.]

Woof, God. Woof.

Interesting bit from an interview with biologist John Maynard Smith in the 14 June 2003 New Scientist. He mentions religion in animals, and I have been thinking a lot recently that animals probably are religious.

'NS: Perhaps your best-known work involves using game theory to shed light on the evolution of different behavioural strategies in animals, the 'Hawks and Doves' idea. How as this area developed?

JMS: If you look at the animal signalling literature now, it's entirely based on game theory. I've just finished a book on the evolution of animal signals where we talk about relgion quite a bit. You mustn't think it is confined to human beings: religion, meaning ritual behaviour functioning to create emotional commitments -- there is plenty of it. You find it in a group of hunting dogs about to go out for the day, in a group of birds about to migrate, and in some very odd circumstances in chimpanzees. Chimpanzees go in for a thing called a rain dance. Usually the adult males perform it: they jump up and down, they shout, they pull branches off trees, they go berserk. Nobody really knows what the function is.'


Then he talks about how one alpha male was seen doing a solo rain dance in a waterfall -- was he claiming a special relationship with higher forces, like a priest?

Don't ask me why I've been thinking about religious animals recently. Maybe Egyptian animals have Gods with animal bodies and human heads. I'll stop believing it when someone proves the theory wrong.

Clashing color

Disclaimer: I don't usually comb the fashion section of the NYTimes looking for quasi-celebrity wedding announcements. But today I found word that Jonathan Frankel, who apparently is some teevee personality, is marrying a '9/11 widow'. For a guy who makes his money saying cogent things on-air, he sure talk funny:

'Occasionally, Mr. Frankel said, the subject of 9/11 "felt like a white elephant sitting in the room with us."'

A white elephant is a supposedly valuable item that is actually more costly than valuable. An elephant in the room is something everyone is thinking of but no one will talk about. A white elephant in the room is a tangled metaphor that means approximately nothing.

Now what I'm wondering is if the Times reporter knew what she was doing or not. Did she just think it a colorful metaphor, clearly quote-worthy, or did she realize it was wrong and want to put it in as a newspaper reporter's subtle jab at a teevee reporter?

Puddin'

'The proof is in the puddin' -- one of my favorite phrases of all-time. I'm going to immediately start getting into some of the ideas I want to steer toward in this new incarnation of thinkness, so as to show everybody involved [you and me] what's going on here.

This article from the May 2003 Scientific American would be at the middle of the canon for thinkness, if such a thing existed. [Good idea, no?] It's a great story that, in small sense, is about synesthesia. The research is quite accessible and pretty fascinating. Even better, it goes beyond just the neurological questions to almost philosophically address questions about human beings use abstract thought. This is one of the biggest ideas that circulates in my mind, and I think about it all the time, so it's good to get it onto thinkness.

The basic idea is that synesthesia is, in some sense, quite similar to the general human attribute of abstract thought. Synesthetes gleen certain properties from their perceptions that are then compared to properties arising from other perceptions. The connection between information from different sense is closely connected with abstraction and even metaphor. [Why, the article asks, do we appreciate that Juliet is like the sun? Because it compares perception from some different sources and sees similarities between them.]

The entire article is good, and at the end it starts to get into the really juicy stuff:

'Could it be that the angular gyrus--which is disproportionately larger in humans compared with that in apes and monkeys--evolved originally for cross-modal associations but then became co-opted for other, more abstract functions such as metaphors? Consider two drawings, originally designed by psychologist Wolfgang K?hler. One looks like an inkblot and the other, a jagged piece of shattered glass. When we ask, "Which of these is a 'bouba,' and which is a 'kiki'?" 98 percent of people pick the inkblot as a bouba and the other one as a kiki. Perhaps that is because the gentle curves of the amoebalike figure metaphorically mimic the gentle undulations of the sound "bouba" as represented in the hearing centers in the brain as well as the gradual inflection of the lips as they produce the curved "boo-baa" sound. In contrast, the waveform of the sound "kiki" and the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate mimic the sudden changes in the jagged visual shape. The only thing these two kiki features have in common is the abstract property of jaggedness that is extracted somewhere in the vicinity of the TPO, probably in the angular gyrus. (We recently found that people with damage to the angular gyrus lose the bouba-kiki effect--they cannot match the shape with the correct sound.) In a sense, perhaps we are all closet synesthetes.

So the angular gyrus performs a very elementary type of abstraction--extracting the common denominator from a set of strikingly dissimilar entities. We do not know how exactly it does this job. But once the ability to engage in cross-modal abstraction emerged, it might have paved the way for the more complex types of abstraction. The opportunistic takeover of one function for a different one is common in evolution. For example, bones in the ear used for hearing in mammals evolved from the back of the jawbone in reptiles. Beyond metaphor and abstract thinking, cross-modal abstraction might even have provided seeds for language.'

New thinkness

You may have wondered why there has been no more thinkness lately. You wonder, Golly, what's been missing from my life recently? Am I right? [Nod attentively.] Or maybe you gave up on such an unproductive, inconsistent site entirely. [Shake vociferously.]

I had a weird couple of weeks, several personal issues involved, that made me not post. The more relevant thing for the blog is that I'm changing its focus. I'm steering away from fine-point political stuff that I've been too involved with and turning more toward the broad emphasis on ideas that thinkness was originally supposed to pursue [thus the name]. I had clung to politics as a sort of throwback to old professional and personal disposition, and because it was easy to find new stuff every day. Now I am less interested in the silly daily political news. I'll still keep some politics stuff, but it'll be confined more toward good sociopolitical ideas that bubble up; amusing stuff; or pure vitriol that I have to unload. The daily sniping and positioning of the political game and press has overloaded me, and I really want to get back to more interesting things.

A few people asked about the blog. Thanks for looking. Now more interesting and regular.

Republicans and fiscal responsibility

Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the Manchester Union Leader that the national Republican Party has little desire to try to shrink government, per its old, Reagan-era ideals. Its stated goal of fiscal responsibility involves only growing the government at a slower rate than the Democrats would do.

So that gives you a little idea what they have in mind when they keep cutting taxes without any hope of spending cuts.

Deep regret - pot calling the fridge black

Okay, I've totally gotten out of posting to my 'chronic' columns of late. I think it's somewhat related to the fact that I don't feel like manually entering them all into my blog page. But perhaps at some point I'll catch up, so I might as well keep on posting to the chronic. And this one's just ridiculous.

A senior EPA official, John Pemberton, left to work for a company that owns coal-burning power plants, just as the EPA announced that it was relaxing rules on coal-burning power plants. This is unsavory, and happens all the time. I'm not exactly sure if/how you could go about stopping the revolving door, because this EPA guy knows the regs really well and can get paid well by this company to advise it on the rules. But doncha think, Mr FormerEPA, that it's just a little beyond the pale to leave the EPA and help a company take advantage of newly-wimpified rules?

That's not the really bad part. The quoted criticism of Pemberton comes from John Wilke, a former EPAer who now works for the Natural Resources Defense Council. No surprise there. But a lawyer who lobbies on behalf of EPA-regulated industries tries to impugn Wilke, the enviro-guy, saying he has as much vested interest as the guys on the industry side: "I do think this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Many of the same critics speaking against these EPA officials themselves once left the agency for environmental organizations."

Yah, but there's no conflict there: He went from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Natural Resources Defense Council. As opposed to Pemberton, who went from the Environmental Protection Agency to an environment-destroying, coal-burning power company that just got its industry-loving buddies at the EPA to relax its rules. See the conflict, pinhead? Sheesh.

US hegemon as UK empire

I just came across this interesting story by Niall Ferguson, a rising academic superstar, musing about the US as an imperial or hegemonic power. It starts with a comparison of the very similar quotes uttered by the British general occupying Mesopotamia in 1917 and the American president, victorious over the Baath regime in 2003.

It calls to mind a NYTimes Week in Review article from a few weeks ago making a similar comparison -- 'Britain Tried First. Iraq Was No Picnic then.' [Of course, it's not available any more because the NYTimes is too important to leave their stuff online for free. I hope I will soon blackball such news organizations.] My mother particularly liked the photo that went with this article, saying it showed that these British guys and their Arab dummies had no idea what they were getting themselves in for.

And the NYTimes, in turn, may have taken not just that story idea but that exact photo from a Smithsonian article that was written on that very subject before the war: Iraq's Unruly Century.


By the way, I have to say that Ferguson's criticisms of the book sound right on point to me. I can't really say for sure -- as I haven't read the book, and you can trust a critic's synopsis only so far -- but it is critically important to consider factors like the differences between direct and indirect rule and the vastly different ways that governments now spend money as compared to how they did in the past. Doesn't Ferguson's explanation of how British banks held sway over Argentina sound like how [mostly] American MNC's [multinational corporations] hold sway over such huge portions of the world, e.g., Africa? It is almost impossible, I think, to underestimate the close relationship of American business and government, and corporations may be equally as important to our empire as our government or military. And the 'Washington Consensus', built around the World Bank, IMF, and WTO, also figures prominently into America's sway over the world.

God bless that woman

Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that.

-- Britney

Tell it, dad

An Israeli guy who won a peace prize in Germany reminds me of my father. I'm wondering if I should pass along this story to him and try to get him to realize maybe Israel isn't only the land of milk and honey.

But mostly, this story is an excuse to post something from al-Jazeera, which is now publishing full-time in English.

Biggest Fibbest
or...
The Fibbonacci Series

Heh. This is hilarious. The Washington Monthly and Beliefnet have teamed up to take a poll of which of the past four US presidents [Reagan to BushII] was the worst liar. Interesting idea, in that it sort of canonizes the lies of these leaders; is this a consensus collection of big lies?

BushII came out way ahead of all the others, btw, with Clinton in last place [i.e., telling the least offensive lies]. The Monthly is a liberal publication, so I wouldn't say it's necessarily non-partisan. Although I think Reagan was a worse liar than Bush -- perhaps currency is the readership's other bias.

Old tricks

I'm back from Burningman. Miss me?

As I was driving back, I was wondering if the world had changed much while I was incommunicado. Then I read Daniel Benjamin's straight-dope Slate story that shows that Rice and Rumsfeld recent concocted a bullshit story about how 'werewolf' units in Germany effectively fought against the American occupation and recovery efforts after WWII. Werewolf units, indeed.

Little has changed, I see. Perhaps I'll move away farther for longer and see what happens.