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  • Wise Men Habitually Lie…(Narayan)

    Sabios Costumam Mentir …

    The baby Jesus had to contend with only three on Christmas and they were thoughtful enough to bring birthday presents, wrapped if you please, judging from the fuzzy cell phone snapshots of the day.  Two millennia later we have a putz with a package in his pants, and a plague of pundits visited upon us.

    “Perhaps the biggest lesson for airline security from the recent incident is that we must overcome our tendency to be reactive. We always seem to be at least one step behind the terrorists. They find one security gap — carrying explosives onto a plane in their shoes, for instance — and we close that one, and then wait for them to exploit another. Why not identify all the vulnerabilities and then address each one before terrorists strike again?”

    This amazing revelation comes in the penultimate paragraph of a could’a-should’a op-ed piece in the NYTimes (28 Dec 2009) by someone with the risible name (given the context) of Clark Kent Ervin.  Is this the same Mr. Ervin, I wonder, who, after an obligatory stop in a phone booth, reviewed the corpus of medical research since Adam and came up with a brilliant suggestion for discovering a unified cure for all cancers?  Since then, our worthy superhero has served as “the inspector general of the State Department from 2001 to 2003 and of the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2004”, and is now “the director of the Aspen Institute’s homeland security program”.  I find it uncommonly curious that Mr. Ervin has been overlooked by the czars of present and past administrations in their fight against crime, drugs, poverty, famine, drought, rapacious bankers, Ponzi schemers, and the like.  Given that the CIA and FBI are known to be populated entirely by dolts of the first water, I can see how Mr. Ervin’s ratiocinations are indispensible to national security.  I cannot imagine how such a perspicacious thinker was let go from Homeland Security.  Fortunately for us, his well paid sinecure at Aspen allows the country to benefit from his wisdom and his years in civil service. The sophist continues …

     “Since the authorities have to succeed 100 percent of the time, and terrorists only once, the odds are overwhelmingly against the authorities. But they’ll be more likely to defy fate if they go beyond reflexive defense and play offense for a change.”

    There it is, despite the inapt and ambiguous locution of “defy fate” – the All-American Testosterone Option.
    Since WWII America has learnt that she cannot win a war against “white” people.  Devotees of Reagan may demur, citing the defeat of the USSR, but I stand by my statement. The alternative is to go to war with “non-white” people presumably because we sense an easy victory, another notch in our gun.  Didn’t we kick a**  in Panama and the Grenada, but good?  What the “non-white” peoples have learnt is that they cannot win a war against “whites” but that guerilla tactics seem to stump them. Viet Nam was the last place where a combination proved effective, but that was then.  With Al Qaeda there will only be guerilla warfare, against which, “play offense” is a fool’s stratagem.  Nor can there be any victory against guerilla warfare; almost by definition, the best one can hope for is a stalemate. As surely as America does not understand or accept stalemate as a goal, guerilla leaders do.  Superman wants the resolution of a shootout on Main Street; Osama wants to shove a lump of Kryptonite down the sleeping superhero’s throat, and then to run away to his cave to gloat over the video.
    Al Qaeda is a guerilla organization instituted to murder “white” people.  Can you imagine someone in the Al Qaeda camp losing his job in disgrace over Abdulmutallab’s failure of last week? Certainly a few heads will roll at Homeland Security in the dénouement to come, for we have failed – a mini-defeat – and someone must pay the price.  And for what?  Shall I sue the furniture store if I stub my toe, the builder if I fall down the stairs?  Shit happens – learn to live with dignity! And how often in recent memory has America forgiven egregious sins against the public with the judgment, “Mistakes were made”?  I suspect Osama would win a few hearts and minds if he only targeted the usurers of Wall Street who sin with impunity.
    After the attack on the Pentagon Trade Center, we have avenged the death of 2819 by killing 6256 of our own and uncounted guerillas and innocents of the other with not even stalemate in sight.  Is no one alarmed by this imbalance?  Is this what our superhero wants more of?  How does one “identify all vulnerabilities”?  Surely not just by exhaustively searching for chinks in our armor.  To do so, one must have the mindset of a murderer – something better done in Maclean than at Aspen. Is that what we are prepared to do?
    In summary, Mr. Clark Kent Ervin, there is dignity in learning from our mistakes, thereby converting what you contemptuously characterize as reflexive defense into anticipatory defense.  And much shame attends upon killing your neighbor’s son in sacrifice to your offensive play.

    … Wise Men Habitually Lie

  • Looking forward (Joe)

    My New Year's resolution is to use only "Middle East," no matter how common "Mideast" may become in the media.  What's yours?

    Happy 2010!

  • Happy New Year and CotL # 100

    A very happy New Year to our readers from cold and foggy New Delhi. Hopefully, 2010 will be the start of a decade that the last one was not – peaceful.

    Along with whatever else you are doing to celebrate the end of the decade blow-out, please also check out the 100th edition of the Carnival of the Liberals over at And Dr. Biobrain's Response Is…

    New_year_2010

  • Plane Speaking (Sujatha)

    Even if it was a couple of days late, following much-maligned misspeaking by Janet Napolitano, President Obama's comments on the Undie-Bomber brouhaha were right on the money.

    Napolitano, interview on CNN, Dec 28:

    "What we’re focused on was making sure that the air environment remains
    safe, people are confident when they travel, and one think I’d to point
    out is … is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role
    here … the passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action
    within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring all
    128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures
    in light of what had occurred on the Northwest Airlines flight." (italics mine)

    Obama, on Dec 29:

    “A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally
    unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said. He said he had ordered government
    agencies to give him a preliminary report on Thursday about what
    happened and added that he would “insist on accountability at every
    level,” although he did not elaborate." (italics mine)

    There were any number of points during the whole lead-up to the bombing attempt where red flags should have gone up and stayed up, but that didn't happen. How in the world does the CIA get tip-offs from the fathers of would-be extremists and not pass on the information to other branches? How do people whose visas were revoked by Britain continue to waltz around with unrevoked US visas, considering the so-called intelligence sharing that exists between those two nations? Does all this information reside in disparate databases, with no 'Database to rule them all' to make the connection at Langley VA?

    Whatever the case, the best way to describe it is to indeed say that it was a systemic failure. Reviews will be made, hopefully heads will roll and a careful reassessment and calibration of threats to safety and how to deal with those threats is getting along post-haste.

    The once great hopes that 'puffer machines' could easily detect explosives have been misplaced. They are now in the process of retiring those devices which kept breaking down more often than not, unsuitable for the rigors of a modern airport environment. One supposes that it would be of paramount interest to Al-Qaeda trainers and handlers, who might think the time was ripe for setting off an influx of undie-bombed acolytes on the aircraft bound for the US.

    Bodyscan We need replacements for those machines, whether it be hand-held replacements like these (no doubt all sold out and shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan). The intrusive backscattering types of body scanners have generated much controversy, but combinations of simpler and less intrusive methods could also work reliably.

    "The American Civil Liberties Union has opposed the imaging machines, arguing that the body images they produce are too revealing.  And some members of Congress have supported legislation that would limit their use, allowing passengers to opt out and submit to a pat-down search instead.

    In an effort to increase privacy, the TSA screeners who read the images are placed in a separate room so they are not able to see the passenger who is being shown on the imaging screen.

    Travelers at DFW Airport were divided.

    "It's not like you're taking a picture and posting it on the Internet or selling it in a magazine," said Paul LeBon. "It's just a scan that lasts for 10 seconds.

    "I am going to take issue with people being able to look at my children's bodies and my body," said Tamara Haddox, another traveler.

    The TSA currently has 150 additional body imaging devices machines on order. But that's not nearly enough to cover all of the nation's airports."

    Either that, or we are all forced to fly naked, shoeless and luggageless, just to thwart the shoe-bombers, undie-bombers, toupee-bombers, belt-bombers, tampon-bombers …..

  • Gentler and more Humorous (Sujatha)

    atheism than the Ditchens:

    This is despite the much-discussed op-ed he wrote last year for the Daily Mail, which had some theists arguing that he had found God. But as he states it, he found the place(s?) in the brain where gods come from, not God.

  • climate musings and link dump (prasad)

    SuperFreakonomics and Geoengineering:
    The Benefits of Procrastination: The Economics of Geo-engineering:

    Although procrastination is often a sign of immaturity, in the context of climate change it may not be. In the typical debate over geo-engineering, proponents argue that it is “the” solution to global warming, while the critics worry about all the things that could go wrong. Yet this “geo-engineering: yes or no?” debate overlooks the important possibility that the most economically efficient outcome involves the postponement of carbon-abatement strategies, along with the simultaneous research and development of varied geo-engineering techniques to be deployed if they should become necessary. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this strategy could leave our descendants many trillions of dollars richer than the alternative of implementing immediate and large cuts in emissions.

    As an aside, there’s a bit of a discussion of SuperFreakonomics, so I wonder: has Steven Levitt become the new Malcolm Gladwell? Gladwell doesn’t have one of these, but there’s the same desire to be a ”rogue thinker”, the suggestion that the reader is being presented with new and startling insights, the middlebrow sales pitch that wins large audiences before pissing off the reviewers. Maybe Levitt-2009 is Gladwell-2004? I do think Gladwell might deserve a modest recovery though – too many people have bashed him, too much. He isn’t that terrible.

    Copenhagen:
    Here’s the best thing I’ve read about the Copenhagen Conference:

    In this environment, it is in the interests of participants to stop trying to discern what is symbolic from what is real. Copenhagen’s signifiers — its words and images — have a conveniently shifting relationship to the external world.
    The final result is a conference that is desperately fake from beginning to end. It opened with a fictional girl who loses her polar bear to an angry earth. It will end on December 18, when President Obama and President Hu Jintao will, to the sound of thunderous applause, call for bold action while they, in reality, implement business-as-usual energy policies.
    There is no better symbol of the phoniness, the manic self-referentiality, and the desperation of global warming politics today than the one created and projected by United Nations diplomats upon the screen: a scared little girl with a video camera.

    Well worth reading through. I didn’t know this:

    Europe gamed the Kyoto protocol in 1997 by rigging the framework to start from a high 1990 baseline, instead of the much lower 1997 baseline. Europe was thus able to count big emissions declines dating back to the early 1990’s and create a perception of European leadership.
    Europe’s claims are nothing short of fraudulent. Its emissions declined for reasons having nothing to do with Kyoto: rapid deindustrialization and a switch from coal to natural gas in the early ’90’s in Britain, and German reunification with a collapsing East German economy, are responsible for most of Europe’s claimed reductions.

    ClimateGate:
    James Randi has become a climate change skeptic, though he also tries to walk it back. It’s pretty unspired stuff – science doesn’t work by consensus, the climate is too complex to model, normal range of variation, yada yada. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, so there is psychic cost to seeing him go this route. In some ways this isn’t a completely unexpected occupation for Randi – as a magician non-scientist who’s had great success catching para-frauds who fool researchers, Randi has always projected a certain (very mild) contempt for egg-head PhDs who possess arcane knowledge but lack basic street-sense.

    I will say in his defense that, in the course of a very rich and extremely productive life, he hasn’t had quite as much time to acquire science and math as the average scientist. Nor has he lived in any scientific communities. Then again, were I a layman of the Randiian persuasion (a high compliment) I might possibly be a bit of a global warming skeptic myself – the communities in question aren’t unusually confidence-inspiring. Even as a member of a 2000+ person collaboration where people behave very badly indeed, this seems uncommonly dysfunctional. Of course, here too some signs have always been visible – in healthy scientific communities it is not customary to act as if it’s no big deal when it’s shown that one of your money plots acquires a certain shape even when fed brown noise, or that its author doesn’t know PCA, just because as it happens the conclusions can be independently arrived at by other means.

  • Not your customary cuddly Christmas cat!

    Saw this on the evening news recently. I wonder if the cat attacks only when riding the robo-sweeper.

    Some less widely known info on Christmas animals.  Could it be that Vixen and possibly Dancer and Blitzen are the aptly named reindeer of Santa? Rudolph appears to be plain wrong!

  • My vacation hold

    I am leaving for a vacation in a couple of days. So there will be no posting by me probably until the middle of January. Other bloggers too are going to be busy during the holiday season. Postings will therefore be light in the coming weeks. I am looking forward to spending the New Year in New Delhi with family and old friends for the first time in nearly three decades.  Season's Greetings to my co-bloggers and A.B. readers. Hope 2010 will bring good tidings for all. 

  • Snowy Sunday Linkery (Sujatha)

    Is it her art or her age that charms?

    A Twisted Sense of Humor

    Is it a leaf or..?

  • Rationality and Health Maintenance (Joe)

    From the New York Times Well Blog, first, a story about tamoxifen.  Tamoxifen is an antagonist of the estrogen receptor in breast tissue, and some breast cancer cells require estrogen to grow.  It cuts the risk of developing breast cancer in half.  The story mentions other chemopreventions drugs, too.  Apparently, these aren't popular.  This quote stuck out to me:

    The pill is tamoxifen, and Ms. Birkhold, now 52, was considered an
    ideal candidate for it: she tested positive for a breast cancer gene,
    her mother had ovarian cancer, and her aunt had breast cancer. Yet
    rather than take tamoxifen, she opted for surgery to remove her breasts
    and ovaries.

    “I even went so far as to get the prescription” for tamoxifen, she
    said. “But then I started reading more and decided this isn’t the way
    I’m going to go. I don’t like to take drugs.”

    I'm not sure anyone likes to take drugs, at least if they're not fun drugs, but who likes to have surgery?  Or do nothing, if already at a high risk for breast cancer? 

    Second, a story about avoiding injury while skiing.  New ski equipment increases the injury risk.  This quote stuck out to me:

    Similarly, while helmets have reduced the total number of
    skiing-related head injuries by 30 to 50 percent, Mr. Shealy says,
    “when you look at the really serious head injuries, helmets aren’t much
    help.” If you hit a tree at “speeds common in skiing” — 30 miles per
    hour or more on steep slopes — “you will exceed the capacity of the
    helmet to save you.” Helmets also “may promote reckless behavior,” Mr.
    Shealy says. “It’s just human nature.” Skiers still should wear
    helmets, he adds, but should also practice restraint and common sense
    on the slopes, the primary means of reducing your risk of injury
    anyway. “The message,” he concludes “is not: Don’t wear a helmet. It
    is: Don’t hit a tree.”

    The fact that wearing helmets encourages riskier skiing shouldn't be surprising, but what surprised me is that helmets aren't equipped to prevent injury at speeds common in skiing.  Sounds kind of useless.  So why is this guy recommending wearing one?  Yes, it doesn't cause injury, except to the extent it negatively alters behavior, but if it's not going to do any good anyhow, what's the point in wearing one?

    As suggested by the title, I find irrationality in both of these stories, the first with regard to patient behavior, the second with regard to safety advice.  I don't have anything profound to add beyond that — maybe a behavioral economist would — but it is interesting to me.

  • A Practical Atheism (Sujatha)

    Since Ruchira has already proclaimed her (Ir)Religious Manifesto, I thought that I might talk briefly about mine.

    Some of the time, I fit somewhere on the continuum between Atheism and Agnosticism. It's like the flavor of the month. If I feel in a mood to be 'mysterian', I claim Agnostic leanings. If I feel mystery gives me migraines, I lean towards the Atheist viewpoint. After all, there can be no omnipotent God if migraine pains exist -only omnipotent migraines.

    I came by the atheism fairly gently. I noticed there was no being to fulfill my fervent prayers for some trifle as a kid, and without giving it much thought, slid into a don't know, don't care mode regarding the existence of a god(s). I learned and adhered to the form and ritual required by the religion I was brought up with, but there was no inherent belief in the magical properties of ritual or belief. It become something to be used if in the mood for it, and ignored if it didn't suit.

    Tasked with bringing up kids and wanting them to know of their culture and heritage, I tried assiduously to study as well as expose them to whatever I could about my birth-religion. But there was no core of  wanting- to-believe to sustain it. It was nothing more than a hollow shell. The kids have sensed this long since, and seem to have adapted to the exposure, much the same way as I did.

    There is no militancy, no urge to convert all to the same viewpoint. Chiefly, because it matters little whether one is a Christian or Hindu or Jew or Wiccan or Buddhist or whatever. It's enough to lead a moral life of sorts, following largely the Golden Rule, without being bound by any religion in particular. There is similarly no militant urge to convert others to the atheist standpoint, no anti-theism like Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett et al. If religion brings you happiness and doesn't get in my way, go for it. If it doesn't, feel free to ditch it or even diss it, like 'Ditchens'.

    I would have coopted the term 'Practical Atheist' to describe the above approach, but found it had already been given negative connotations by theists, as referring to someone who professes religiosity, without true belief in the deity of choice.

    "This is a category used by some religious theists to describe all those
    theists who technically believe in a god, but who behave immorally. The
    assumption is that moral behavior follows automatically from genuine
    theism, thus immoral behavior is a consequence of not genuinely
    believing. Theists who behave immorally must really be atheists,
    regardless of what they believe. The term 'practical atheist' is thus a
    smear against atheists generally."

    Maybe it's time to reclaim the term proudly:

    "I am a Practical Atheist. I adhere to the external form of my birth-religion, primarily to please my elders- After all what is a small fib to let them live with peace of mind. Internally, I don't particularly worry about my 'eternal soul' or salvation of any kind. All that matters is this life, and how I live it."

    Maybe there is something to being a female that has to do with this practical approach to practicing atheism. It's a secret version and let's itself be known to the children  around the age that they start to question the existence of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. There is no Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus (only a long-dead historical personage of that name)—-just someone who is very alive and real and loves you very much. The nitty-gritty of diaper changing and mopping up messes day after day lead you to the conclusion that there is no magic, only hard work that has to  be done to get the kids and house clean and the dishes done. From no magic, it is but a short step to 'no supernatural solutions' to 'no miracles' to 'no benevolent and omnipotent deity'.

    Surprisingly many of the women among my acquaintances seem to adhere to this practical atheism. The true believers among them are probably numbered in the handful, while the majority glide by gracefully following the form of whatever religion they profess, untouched or untrammeled by any deep beliefs.

    Only coincidences exist. Take joy in the good ones, and don't let the bad ones get you down. After all, tomorrow is another day, as another practical atheist said in 'Gone With the Wind'.

    Here's an interesting musing on the 'Gentler Face of Atheism', free of the accusations of misogyny levelled at atheism by Kathryn Lofton.

    "We all know the names (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens) of those angry
    white men who tend to antagonize the world’s believers. But the most
    persuasive voices for the ‘new New Atheism’ tend to be women."

    Also, from the same article, comedienne Julia Sweeney's take on how she became an atheist.

  • “Houston, We Don’t Have A Problem”

    Last night Houston elected an openly gay mayor in a closely fought election run-off. And she is a woman. Annise Parker, a long time Houston city official and a lesbian, became the mayor of the country's fourth largest city, winning 53.6% of the votes. I am now hoping that the excellent outgoing mayor of Houston, Bill White, a Democrat, will unseat Rick Good Hair Perry in the 2010 guberatorial election.

    Annise Parker
    HOUSTON – A lesbian candidate won Houston's mayoral election Saturday night, a vote that made the city the largest in the U.S. to ever have an openly gay mayor.

    "This election has changed the world for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. Just as it is about transforming the lives of all Houstonians for the better, and that's what my administration will be about," City Controller Annise Parker told supporters after former city attorney Gene Locke conceded defeat.

    Parker got 53 percent of the vote. More than 152,000 residents turned out to cast ballots in the fourth largest U.S. city.

  • Music as Medicine for Wounded Vets (Andrew)

    Bandaid I have a short piece up in the January 2010 issue of Popular Science about a promising form of music therapy used in the arduous process of healing traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) in veterans.  Because of the pervasiveness of IEDs, and because body armor allows soldiers to survive many explosions that might have killed them in earlier wars, TBIs have been called the "signature wound" of the Iraq War.

    People, this is a big problem.  Symptoms and recovery can take years — assuming that the veteran doesn't feel stigmatized about asking for help for memory problems and depression, and can get the treatment.  The article takes a low estimate of "hundreds" of young veterans coming back with serious brain injuries — although the Rand Corporation has a high estimate that over 300,000 young veterans have at least mild traumatic brain injury (like any wound, TBIs are on a spectrum of severity).  Let's hope the American people are willing to step up and make sure that veterans get the costly rehab they deserve.