Now, the Thirteenth Amendment Brigade

The new platform of the Iowa Republican party has 374 planks, including one supporting the gold standard and another calling for “the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution.” You probably did not know that there was a proposed 13th amendment before the one we have now banning slavery, but there was. Its story:

Return with us now to the tumultuous years leading up to the War of 1812, when fear of “foreign influence”—by England or France, depending on whether you were a Republican or Federalist—was a dominating issue in American politics. Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon, had recently spent several years in the United States, where he married Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful, ambitious daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant. In 1810, Jerome was on the throne of Westphalia, while Elizabeth was in America with their son, Jerome Napoleon. (The couple would never see each other again.) According to historian Michael Vorenberg of Brown University, having a nephew of the emperor of France growing up on American soil might have made the pro-British Federalists uneasy, or, just as likely, suggested to them a way to tie the Republicans to the French Legion of Honor, the Trilateral Commission of its day. Desiring to get out in front of the issue—or possibly seeking to score points against the Federalists, who had their own embarrassing ties to the British aristocracy—Republican Sen. Philip Reed of Maryland introduced an amendment meant to strengthen the existing “emoluments clause” in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution.

This clause reads:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Reed’s proposed amendment extended the ban from office-holders to “any citizen of the United States” and made the penalty loss of citizenship:

“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.”

Reed’s bill passed both houses easily, and as of Dec. 9, 1812, had been ratified by 12 states and seemed headed for adoption, at which point war intervened. Here, histories diverge. The mainstream view is that the “Titles of Nobility Amendment” (TONA) never achieved the necessary 13 ratifications—three quarters of the 17 states as of 1810—and fell further behind as more states joined the union. That ought to have been the end of it, says Jol A. Silversmith, a lawyer in private practice who has written the definitive account of the “missing amendment.” And so it was until the 1980s, when a conspiracy-minded researcher named David Dodge came across an 1825 copy of the Constitution including this provision. Further research led Dodge to conclude that TONA had been ratified by Virginia no later than 1819 and was an accepted, if largely unnoted, part of the Constitution from then until its mysterious disappearance around the time of the Civil War. . . .

In the world of the Thirteenthers, though, it’s all a conspiracy, and the leading suspects are those shady characters who put “esquire” after their names. To quote the Web site Constitutional Concepts, “This Amendment was for the specific purpose of banning participation in government operations by attorneys and bankers who claimed the Title of Nobility of ‘Esquire.’ These people had joined the International Bar Association or the International Bankers Association and owed their allegiance to the King of England.”

Oh, man you just have to love these people. Just when you think they can't get any nuttier, they find a way to go even farther along the dark corridor into the locked ward.

Fortunately, Most Criminals Aren't This Smart

Hacking into ATMs and making them disgorge all their cash.

Visions of Our Solar System

Above, Jupiter's moon Io, and below, Mars, from a new exhibit at the Air and Space Museum titled Beyond: Visions of Our Solar System. Creating these images involved a lot of processing using various sorts of partial and filtered images. From the review at the NY Times:

Color was also an issue, as with the Hubble. “Almost all of these photographs,” Mr. Benson writes, “required substantial amounts of digital processing. Many had never been rendered into color before, or if they had they’d long since vanished.” In general, whether a spacecraft used video technology or digital sensors, three successive shots were taken in black and white, each using a different frequency filter, so color information might later be deduced.

But because the camera might be whipping by a planet at 35,000 miles per hour, these three raw images might not perfectly match. So Mr. Benson and his colleague, a planetary scientist and imagery expert, Paul Geissler, transformed them so they could be superimposed and used to create color pictures. In some cases color information was unavailable and had to be inferred from another mission’s shots of the same landscape. The show’s panoramic glimpse of a Martian dust storm, Mr. Benson explained in an e-mail message, took him months of work, drawing on about 100 images.

Another Cost of War

More evidence that combat is bad for you:

From 4 to 8 percent of adults report experiencing nightmares, perhaps as often as once per week or more, according to sleep researchers. But the rate is as high as 90 percent among groups like combat veterans and rape victims, Dr. Krakow said. He said treatment for post-traumatic stress needed to deal much more actively with nightmares.

How many earths?

One of the scientists involved in the Kepler spacecraft's search for earthlike planets circling other stars says the team has identified 140 planets that are candidates to be "like earth," in that they are small, orbit sun-like stars, and are neither too close nor too far away. More data to come.

Wikileaks and the Afghan War

I agree with Matt Yglesias and Amy Davidson: these leaked documents don't provide any big news items about Presidential lies or the like. What they do is underscore the messiness of war. They speak about deaths from friendly fire, deaths from mistakes in bombing, deaths from fighting between the Afghan Army and the Afghan Police. They speak about bribes and fraud and an orphanage without orphans. They speak about the ambivalence of power in a land where everybody seems to be hedging his bets and some are flagrantly playing both sides to get whatever they can. We want wars to be neat clashes of one army against another, with the good guys winning, and these documents remind us that wars are never like that.

I am not a pacifist, and I supported our initial invasion of Afghanistan. But in every war the good that might be done has to be weighed against the very high price of war in chaos, death, and corruption.

Ediacara Fauna

Nice summary article on the strange fossil life forms of the Precambrian, by Sean Carroll at the New York Times. With slide show.

As the article indicates, the big mysteries of paleontology -- how did Cambrian life emerge from nothing, and why did the explosion happen when it did -- are becoming less mysterious. Such a wide diversity of life forms has now been documented from 635 to 542 million years ago that this epoch has now been formally dubbed the Ediacaran Period. It was once said that none of the Ediacaran life forms seemed to be related to modern life, but now paleontologists are positing possible relationships. And the emergence of Ediacaran life can be connected to the rapid rise in oxygen levels in the ocean at the end of the great ice age called "snowball earth."

There are mysterious in science, but there are also ways to make progress. And the more we learn about the distant past, the more sense evolution makes. However, the alleged fossil above is clearly the mark of the devil's cloven hoof, left during the age when he ruled the earth.

Language and Culture

These days linguists and psychologists are very interested in the question of how, and to what extent, the language we use influences our thinking. This is a cool example:

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

I feel like the learning of languages and the study of other cultures has greatly influenced the way I think about the world. I can't imagine how anyone who really knew other cultures could espouse the sort of willfully ignorant nativism one commonly finds among American populists -- "we have nothing to learn from foreigners," "if you like the way its done where you used to live why don't you go back." And yet evidence suggests that I am wrong, and that some people can travel the world and come back more convinced that everyone else is wrong. So the causality my be reversed; I may have chosen to learn about other cultures because I am open to different ways of thinking and acting.

In the Waves

The Murkiness that is Afghanistan

Documents published by wikileaks show that American officials think Pakistani intelligence cooperates with the Taliban to oppose the US and the Karzai government in Afghanistan.

I suspect that many of the particular claims in these documents are not true, because Pakistani intelligence works very hard to create a cloud of uncertainty around its actions in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. They seem to be playing double, triple, even quadruple games. But it seems clear from this ongoing mess that the last thing they want is a stable, centralized, American-allied nation on their northwestern border. Their ambivalence is another reason I think we will never achieve our aims in Afghanistan.

$88,000 a Year for a Drug that Doesn't Work

More adventures in modern medicine: will the FDA have the guts to withdraw approval from a hugely expensive drug that doesn't work?

Language Politics in Indonesia

When the Dutch conquered Indonesia in the 1600s, the islanders spoke hundreds of different languages. In 1928, the leaders of the independence movement rather arbitrarily chose one, which they dubbed Bahasa Indonesia, to become the national tongue, and after independence required that it be taught in all schools. But many Indonesians, especially the poor, continued to speak their native languages (Javanese, etc.) and some of the elite continued to speak Dutch. Now much of the Indonesian elite prefers to send their children to private schools where they are educated in English, and there has also been a resurgence of some of the local languages. Bahasa Indonesia is squeezed in between, and some people worry that it is threatened. Before you fret about the spread of imperial English and the loss of local culture, remember that Bahasa Indonesia is not the native language of most Indonesians, but something they have to learn in school. Many of them are deciding that if they have to learn a second language it might as well be one that will help them get ahead in the world. There is also a political angle, because the Suharto dictatorship tried to force the use of Bahasa Indonesia and ban the local languages from public use, so some people see using their native tongues as an assertion of freedom.

I wonder if Bahasa Indonesia will fade away over the next few decades and Indonesia will become like India, where English is the common tongue for people who speak many different languages at home.

Storm Blowing In

What Liberal Elite?

What is it with all this "liberal elite" crap? Ever since Roosevelt, Democrats have been the party of the poor in America, Republicans the party of the rich. Take 2004, when Kerry won 63% of the vote among people with incomes under $15,000, while Bush won 63% of the vote among those with incomes over $200,000. Right down the line, the more money people have, the more likely they were to support Bush. Even in the rout of 2008, McCain/Palin won a slight majority of voters with incomes over $100,000. Ross Douthat makes what I suppose he thinks is a keen insight when he says the elite is "center-left and Clintonian rather than deeply left-wing," but in 1996 Bob Dole won all the income categories over $50,000, including 54% of those with incomes over $100,000. (You can get all these numbers off wikipedia and lots of other places. They aren't exactly secret.)

The "liberal elite" is a big lie. True, musicians and movie stars are probably more liberal than the rest of the population, but although they draw a lot of attention there aren't very many of them and their money is paltry compared to the wealth of the business elite. The real American elite sits in corporate offices, and they are overwhelmingly Republican.

Sisters

Let's Have a Real Debate

So far, Obama and the Congressional leadership are hanging tough on their plan to let the Bush tax cuts on incomes over $250,000 a year expire. So far, Republicans are hanging tough on their plan to block such a proposal, insisting that all of the cuts be extended. Awesome. Let's have this one out. No compromise, no back room deal, just go to the voters with two plans -- tax the rich to provide services for everyone else, or give them the break they want and starve the government.

Demography and Democracy

Democracy only works well when people perceive themselves as belonging to one nation. When they prefer to think of themselves ethnically -- Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Masai in Kenya, Uighurs in China -- then democracy simply turns into a contest of who has the most people.

Consider Kosovo, in the news because the International Court of Justice recognized the legitimacy of its vote for independence from Serbia. Kosovo is the old heartland of Serbia, the location of its most important national monuments. For centuries there was an Albanian minority in Kosovo. Since World War II, the Serbs have become modern Europeans, moving to Belgrade and other cities and having small families. The Albanians remained peasants, remaining in villages and raising numerous children, with the result that they now outnumber Serbs in Kosovo. Because they modernized, the Serbs lost their homeland.

Or Tibet. The Chinese government has for decades been encouraging Han Chinese to move to Tibet--where there was always a significant Chinese population -- with the result that some towns in Tibet now have a Han majority. Tibetans are worried that they may eventually be outnumbered in their own land, and this has fed resentment against Han migrants. Already most of the other ethnic groups in China are minorities in their homelands.

Some other solution than majority rule is needed in these situations, but I don't know what that solution might be. Federalism? A defined power-sharing arrangement, like they used to have in Lebanon? Separate ethnic legal systems, like in the old Ottoman Empire? Whatever it is, a world in which politics is simply a contest in breeding can't be our future.

Vacation (2)

"The beach is the funnest place in the world."

vacation

I am leaving in a few minutes for a week-long vacation. Blogging, if any, will be very light. See you all soon.

A Little Graffiti

Secrecy and Incompetence

A few quick thoughts on the excellent series "Top Secret America" that Dana Priest and William Arkin produced for the Washington Post:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Secrecy is the perfect cloak for incompentence. If nobody knows what you are supposed to be doing, nobody can fault you for not doing it well. If you want to go after waste and fraud in the government, this is certainly the place to look. But how could you, when everything is secret?

Is all this new spending doing us any good? I doubt it. The basic principle of secrecy is compartmentalization. There are probably only three or four people in the government who have access to the work being done in all these organizations, and those people are all too busy to pay attention. The reason we didn't discover and stop the 9-11 plot was that various government agencies did not work together or share information. The bigger we make the intelligence apparatus, and the more of it gets done in secret, the worse that problem gets.

Secrecy is like toughness; it is hard to argue against it without looking like a leftist wimp. "You mean we should just share all of our secrets with al Qaeda?" But in itself, secrecy is not useful, and even when it is, it breeds a wide range of habits that are bad for thinking and make it much harder to get anything done.

Panatal, Brazil

From the National Geographic's Photo of the Day feature.

Black and White New York

A collection of photographs, mostly 1890-1910. This is the Woolworth Building, the tallest in the world when it was built in 1913.

Religious Freedom and the Mosque

We have, in this country, a document called the Bill of Rights. It says,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It does not say that religious freedom shall only be infringed when we don't like it. It does not establish any exception for Muslims, or for mosques in lower Manhattan. It says the free exercise of religion shall not be prohibited.

Given that American conservatives these days spend a lot of time waving around their copies of the constitution, on what basis do they support prohibiting Muslims from freely exercising their religious freedom?

Here is Newt Gingrich:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Ah, so we should just shred the constitution and adopt Saudi Arabia's approach to religious freedom. I thought conservatives hated it when we copied other countries' laws. (Perhaps, Mr. Gingrich, we should instead adopt the Saudi approach to adultery?)

Now we certainly do sometimes limit where large churches can be placed, based on zoning ordinances, environmental laws and the like. So one could imagine blocking a mosque from the actual WTC site. But this mosque, which is actually a "Muslim Cultural Center," is two blocks away. In lower Manhattan, two blocks in a long way; measured by the number of residences and businesses in between, this is more like a mile in suburban terms. This is a complete non-issue seized on by conservative demagogues who want to boil their followers' blood.

And yet there is, I think, a deeper issue. Gingrich seems to think, as Kissinger used to think, that we should fight evil by becoming more like it. I believe that we should fight evil by becoming as little like it as possible, and by instead re-affirming our own traditions. Especially the ones embodied in the Bill of Rights.

More from el Zotz

National Geographic has a slide show of artifacts and excavation photos from the recently opened Mayan royal tomb at El Zotz.

The Gift of Science

What we lose in mystery we gain in awe.

--Francis Crick

More Trouble in Afghanistan

The Washington Post:

The man who served as President Hamid Karzai's top intelligence official for six years has launched an urgent campaign to warn Afghans that their leader has lost conviction in the fight against the Taliban and is recklessly pursuing a political deal with insurgents. . . .

That view is shared by a growing number of Afghan minority leaders who once participated fully in Karzai's government, but now feel alienated from it. Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek politicians have expressed increasing concern that they are being marginalized by Karzai and his efforts to strike a peace deal with his fellow Pashtuns in the insurgency.

Afghanistan is really an impossible country, and I foresee a spiral back into chaos and civil war no matter what we do.

Maybe, Finally, Some Rational Defense Budgeting

Since 9/11, the Pentagon's budget has been rising 7% a year in real terms, and that's apart from the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our military spending is now about equal to that of the entire rest of the world, and nine times greater than that of our closest challenger, China. We all knew Obama couldn't do anything about this in the short term, with wars going on and Republicans eager to charge him with softness and not supporting the troops. But it seems that all the fooferaw about the budget deficit, along with the winding of US fighting in Iraq, has provided the cover to at least talk about cutting the defense budget. The NY Times:

Lawmakers, administration officials and analysts said the combination of big budget deficits, the winding down of the war in Iraq and President Obama’s pledge to begin pulling troops from Afghanistan next year were leading Congress to contemplate reductions in Pentagon financing requests.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has sought to contain the budget-cutting demands by showing Congress and the White House that he can squeeze more efficiency from the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and weapons programs and use the savings to maintain fighting forces.

But the increased pressure is already showing up in efforts by Democrats in Congress to move more quickly than senior Pentagon officials had expected in trimming the administration’s budget request for next year.

And in the longer term, with concern mounting about the government’s $13 trillion debt, a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission is warning that cuts in military spending could be needed to help the nation dig out of its financial hole.

There is no conceivable scenario in which we actually need all of the aircraft carriers, submarines, missiles, bombers, and satellites we already have, let alone all the ones in development and production. Let's exercise a little sense here and save the money for things worth doing.

Too Much of Anything is Bad For You

Chronic exposure to cannabinoids during adolescence but not during adulthood impairs emotional behaviour and monoaminergic neurotransmission.

The Purpose of Keeping Pets

Here we go again with another anthropologist who thinks that everything people do must have some evolutionary purpose. Anthropologist Pat Shipman has been trying to figure out why people keep pets. The weirdness of this particular act, which is nearly universal among humans, has occurred to a lot of people. Other animals sometimes adopt a baby of another species for a while, but living with and caring for adult animals of other species is a habit only among humans. Why?

Shipman suggests that the animal connection was prompted by the invention of stone tools 2.6-million years ago. "Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilized bones of their prey," Shipman said. Becoming a predator also put our ancestors into direct competition with other carnivores for carcasses and prey. As Shipman explains, the human ancestors who learned to observe and understand the behavior of potential prey obtained more meat. "Those who also focused on the behavior of potential competitors reaped a double evolutionary advantage for natural selection," she said.

Really? What did we learn from keeping parrots or rabbits that helped us hunt better? And I should point out that while we certainly may have been keeping pets for millions of years, the earliest evidence pertains to dogs and goes back only 32,000 years.

Pet keeping is quite striking, but does it have to have a purpose? I think it could equally well be an unselected product of other changes related to life among a hunter-gathering band: curiosity, the habit of caring for little animals that aren't our own offspring, the intelligence to figure out how to care for and control members of other species, the desire for validating affection without the need to negotiate the complexities of human society.

Not everything we do has an evolutionary purpose.