American Conservatism

Will Wilkinson:

American conservatism is a movement consumed by protecting and asserting a certain fabricated conception of the traditional American way of life against imaginary enemies. Support for small government is no more than a bullet point on the Right’s “What We Believe” cheat sheet, mouthed at opportune moments.

And more:

The silly controversy over the downtown mosque is excellent evidence that the conservative movement has become obsessed to the point of derangement with a right-wing version of identity politics that sees everything through the lens of the assumption that American identity is under seige. The modus operandi of the populist right is patriotic semiotics gone wild. 9/11 was a Great Awakening and Ground Zero is a sacred scar representing the sacrifice of those thousands who died in fire in order to shake the rest of us into recognition of the great existential threat to the American Way of Life. To refuse to resist the placement of a mosque next to the grave of those martyred in the Great Awakening is to fail to have heard the call, to fail to understand the battle now underway, to complacently acquiesce to the forces slowly transforming America into something else, into something unAmerican, a place for some other kind of people, a place not worth fighting for. It is to, as they say, “let the terrorists win.”

More on the Failure of "Enhanced Interrogation"

Think Progress has a round-up of statements from American agents and leaders about the failure of the Bush administration's torture regime to produce useful intelligence. A sample:

Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. That would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone ‘talk;’ however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. [Gen. David Petraeus, Letter to Multi-National Force-Iraq, 5/10/07]

The Latest Hysteria

The news from Toronto:

A group of central Ontario parents is demanding their children's schools turn off wireless Internet before they head back to school next month, fearing the technology is making the kids sick. Some parents in the Barrie, Ont., area say their children are showing a host of symptoms ranging from headaches and dizziness to nausea and even racing heart rates.

They believe the Wi-Fi setup in their kids' elementary schools may be the problem.

The parents complain they can't get the Simcoe County school board or anyone else to take their concerns seriously, even though the children's symptoms all disappear on weekends when they aren't in school.

"Parents are getting together and realizing this is the pattern," said Rodney Palmer of the Simcoe County Safe School Committee. "We went to the school board and they did nothing."

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia, have been reported in 14 Ontario schools in Barrie, Bradford, Collingwood, Orillia and Wasaga Beach since the board decided to go wireless, said Palmer.

"These kids are getting sick at school but not at home," he said. "I'm not saying it's because of the Wi-Fi because we don't know yet, but I've pretty much eliminated every other possible source."

Every other possible source? Hmmm. What about, their kids just don't like school? Or, as Steven Novella suggests, sleep deprivation, which could explain all of these symptoms and which would go away on weekends when the kids sleep in. Whatever the problem, it isn't likely to be wi fi, which produces a very small part of the radio energy we are exposed to from myriad sources. On the brighter side, at least the school board is ignoring them.

The World Beneath

There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything -- animals, plants, people -- save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this underworld, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underworld are different from ours because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the outer air.

--Cherokee creation myth

Guns in America

I have given up on gun control as any kind of solution to our problems with violent crime. Too many Americans feel too strongly about their right to own and carry guns for gun control to make any headway as an issue. For Democrats to push the issue will just hand elections to Republicans, and what would that accomplish? And, philosophically, I think that it is generally a bad thing for a democracy to try to ban something that millions of generally law-abiding citizens think is their right. Guns creep me out, but I suppose I am just going to have to learn to live with them -- isn't tolerance a big part of what liberalism is about?

Happy Birthday, Mary

My elder daughter is 16. Her mother made the cake.

Floods in Pakistan

Amazing collection of pictures.

Explaining the Rise in Autism

Sociologist Peter Bearman of Columbia and colleagues have completed a major study attempting to explain why the rate of autism has increased more than 500 percent over the past 20 years. They found that they could explain more than half of the increase with the following three factors:

Better diagnosis, that is, differentiating autism from mental retardation. They estimate this accounts for 26% of the increase.

Awareness. By comparing the rate of autism in children who live near another child with autism to the rate among those who don't, they estimate that increased awareness of autism accounts for 16% of the increase.

Older parents. The rate of autism is higher among children of older parents, and the age of parents is increasing. They estimate this accounts for 11% of the increase.

That adds up to 53%, leaving nearly half of the increase unexplained. I don't think this study is anything like the last word, but it is a serious attempt to quantify the skeptic's sense that the rise in autism is just about changes in diagnosis. That these statisticians were not able to account for all of the rise in autism leaves the lingering suspicion that something about modern life is the cause. With vaccines pretty much ruled out by a whole raft of studies, that leaves the disconcerting possibility that almost anything about our lives could be the culprit.

Power Corrupts

Jonah Lehrer:

From prostitution scandals to corruption allegations to the steady drumbeat of charges against corporate executives and world-class athletes, it seems that the headlines are filled with the latest misstep of someone in a position of power. This isn’t just anecdotal: Surveys of organizations find that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from the offices of those with the most authority. . . .

“It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” Mr. Keltner says. “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Why does power lead people to flirt with interns and solicit bribes and fudge financial documents? According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.

Winston Churchill, Hero and Savage

Johann Hari:

George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire.

Fly Geyser, Nevada

Lawton Prison

Archaeologists working in Georgia have discovered remains of Lawton Prison, a major camp for Union POWs in 1864. Union mapmaker and compulsive sketcher Robert Sneden was imprisoned there for a while, leaving us several drawings like the one above. Note the fence marking the "dead line" -- any prisoner crossing that line would be shot.

Life in these prisons was miserable. Lawton's predecessor, Andersonville, gets most of the attention for its fearful death rate, but some Union prisons had death rates nearly as high. Neither side ever invested enough in the prisons to make them livable, although some of the best Union prisons did approach decency by the end of the war.

During the early years of the war, prisoners were regularly exchanged between the two sides. At first this was informal, arranged between officers, but eventually the governments negotiated a formal protocol. This agreement set the value of various kinds of captives as follows:

1 general = 46 privates, 1 major general = 40 privates, 1 brigadier general = 20 privates, 1 colonel = 15 privates, 1 lieutenant colonel = 10 privates, 1 major = 8 privates, 1 captain = 6 privates, 1 lieutenant = 4 privates, 1 noncommissioned officer = 2 privates

In 1863 the Union started using large numbers of black soldiers. The Confederate government considered all these men to be runaway slaves and refused to exchange them, and at one point threatened to hang all white officers of black regiments as insurrectionists. Grant quashed that threat by threatening to hang ten Confederates for every Union officer so treated, and the Confederates gave up on that item. But the Confederate government refused to treat black captives as soldiers. Grant, backed by Lincoln, declared an end to all prisoner exchanges until the Confederacy would agree to treat black soldiers equally. He had two reasons for this; one, he really hated the thought of his soldiers being enslaved, and two, he figured that since the North had so many more men to call on, the ending of exchanges would help the Union cause.

The end of exchanges meant that tens of thousands of captive soldiers had to be kept indefinitely, at great expense. Also, for the first year or so Confederate leaders expected exchanges to resume at any time, so the measures they took for housing prisoners were intended to be temporary. By the end of 1863, the Confederate government was also on the verge of bankruptcy, spending all the money they had on the war and the care of wounded veterans. So the prison system was underfunded and put in the care of men who didn't mind starving a few thousand Yankees, with predictable results.

Jack London

The Call of the Wild is a staple of the middle school curriculum in my safe, friendly suburb, which I find a little bit weird. There is an environmental, pro-wilderness theme, I suppose, but for me the main impression was one of a stark competition for survival in a harsh world where the losers die, and deservedly so. And this is not surprising, since Jack London was a political agitator who advocated bloody revolution, and an even more violent racist. From Johann Hari's review of a new biography by James L. Haley:

This man was the most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders—and he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog. It's as if the Black Panthers were remembered, a century from now, for adding a pink tint to their afros. . . .

And yet there is an infected scar running across his politics that is hard to ignore. "I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist," he said, and he meant it. His socialism followed a strict apartheid: It was for his pigmentary group alone. Every other ethnic group, he said, should be subjugated—or exterminated. "The history of civilization is a history of wandering—a wandering, sword in hand, of strong breeds, clearing away and hewing down the weak and less fit," he said coolly. "The dominant races are robbing and slaying in every corner of the globe." This was a good thing, because "they were unable to stand the concentration and sustained effort which pre-eminently mark the races best fitted to live in this world."

I wonder if I should explain this to the teachers some time.

The Argument Against Tenure

Christopher Beam:

The most common pro-tenure argument is that it protects academic freedom. Once a professor gains tenure, the thinking goes, he or she can say anything without fear of being fired. Academia thrives on the circulation of dangerous ideas.

The problem is, for every tenured professor who's liberated at age 40 to speak his mind, there are dozens of junior professors terrified to say anything the least bit controversial, lest they lose their one shot at job security for life. Academia relies on young scholars to shake things up. Yet tenure incentivizes them not to. Instead, it rewards students who follow in the footsteps of the elders whose favor they will require when the day of judgment arrives.

I agree completely.

Tenure is being phased out in British universities, and my friends there report that this has made no difference. Professors without tenure become regular civil service employees, whom it is difficult to fire as long as they are doing their jobs; and why would we want to protect professors who are not doing their jobs from dismissal?

The only argument I can see for tenure is the reverse of the usual one, that is, because it provides at point at which universities can get rid of people who just aren't working out. Without the ritual of the tenure review it might be very difficult to ever fire any professor at any point in his or her career.

A Pakistani Nationalist Laments

Long essay, very interesting for an outsider who has little exposure to political debate in Pakistan:

That is where we have failed miserably, allowing religious and provincial identities to supersede the united national identity. If we cannot sit together at one table to productively discuss how to take the country forward without hurling abuse and blaming each other or declaring our own as kafirs, then how can we expect anyone else to listen? . . .

But it is too little too late as the thousands of youngsters emerging from a dilapidated schooling system, unskilled and unprepared, are headed towards a maze of unemployment and dissatisfying social rewards, eventually reverting to religion when all else disappoints. And waiting for them with open arms are religious opportunists with a suicide jacket in one hand and a Quran in the other, convincing these youngsters that victory will come only when they use the one to establish the other, by hook or by crook, to rid the world of infidels. . . .

In a recent editorial, respected columnist Irfan Hussain, in answering criticism levied against Pakistan’s role in the war on terror, said that if the world was concerned as to whose side Pakistan was on, the answer is simple; “on its own side”, of course.

But what the author means by this is painstakingly unclear to the silently suffering majority in Pakistan - the average people blown-up in suicide blasts, the blue-collar workers, the police officers, check-post guards, the havaldars and sipahis who risk their lives every single day fighting the unknown enemy for a cause they do not fully understand. Villages have disappeared, schools, hospitals, communities razed to the ground, thousands and thousands of devastated families, internally displaced people and refugees from drone-attacked zones are living in camps or relocated to over-crowded cities. Setting aside the billions of dollars of losses we incur as a result of the armed struggle, impacting our manufacturing, agricultural, farming and other industries and infrastructure, the human cost of this war is shockingly high, so whose side did the writer say we are on?

Finding Beauty in Twentieth-Century History

Rearmament

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

God and Bedbugs

Alan Good:

Bedbugs, to me, indicate cosmic hostility. Either God doesn't exist, or God exists and hates us (or at least isn't fond of us). I cannot accept that a loving God would create a creature whose sole purpose is to feast on the flesh of his so-called children.

Petraeus Asks for Time

General David Petraeus is back from Afghanistan this week, making the rounds in New York and Washington and trying "to convince an increasingly skeptical public that the American-led coalition can still succeed here despite months of setbacks." Well, good for him; nice that somebody still thinks a decent outcome is possible. But it seems a bit premature to worry now about next summer's proposed withdrawal deadline. Petraeus has a whole year to work with, and if he can't improve the situation in a year, why should we think it can be improved in two years or three or ten? A year is a fairly long time in military terms, after all. He should fly back to Kabul and get to work. If, come next spring, things really are looking up, I might be persuaded to support another extension of our longest war.

Tom Friedman, writing about Iraq, said so many times that "the next six months will be crucial" that people started joking about "Friedman units." General, you have two Friedman units to work with, and if you want more time and money, you had better make them crucial.

Hollywood Cemetery

I took three of my children down to Richmond, Virginia this weekend for a group birthday party at my father's house. Yesterday afternoon Mary and I went to Hollywood Cemetery. This wonderful Victorian graveyard has long been beloved of me and my friends; two of my old friends were convicted of skulking there, twenty-some years ago. Sharing it with my goth daughter was a fabulous experience.

The Joy of Trees

Ben and Clara, this morning.

New Drugs for Hepatitis C

Today's excellent medical news, via Nature:

A new generation of drugs with the potential to cure hepatitis C is set to flood the market. . . .

The virus infects liver cells and can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer. It affects about 3% of the world's population — and new treatments are urgently needed.

Currently, patients spend about a year taking a combination of interferon-α, a protein that boosts the immune system, and ribavirin, an antiviral drug that does not specifically target HCV. Roughly half of all patients with hepatitis C are cured by this course, but it can also cause serious side effects, such as depression, anaemia, and flu-like illness.

Enter Vertex's drug telaprevir and Merck's boceprevir. Both block HCV's protease enzyme so that it cannot carry out one of its key tasks. All of HCV's proteins are initially produced as one long polyprotein, which needs to be cleaved into its component proteins by the protease. Blocking the protease prevents the virus from producing functional proteins.

The companies will submit their medicines to the US Food and Drug Administration by the end of this year, with an eye towards approval in mid-2011.

Data released this month fulfil the pharmaceutical industry's high expectations for the effectiveness of these drugs. Boceprevir, combined with interferon-α and ribavirin, cured the infections of about two-thirds of the patients who followed a 48-week course, Merck announced on 4 August. Some patients were able to finish the course even sooner, at 28 or 36 weeks.

Telaprevir, also combined with the standard drugs, cured 72% of patients after just 24 weeks of treatment, Vertex said on 10 August. Patients who responded quickly to the drug, within 4 to 12 weeks, were the most likely to be cured by it. Another phase III trial of telaprevir, the results for which Vertex released in May, had already demonstrated the benefits of the 24-week course, but the latest study confirmed that it was just as effective as a 48-week regimen for most patients.

Hepatitis C is a major problem in China, and many of the children available for adoption as "special needs" children are infected.

Obama on the Manhattan Mosque

Our ever-cautious President finally takes a stand:

This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are.

Electrical Giants

These pylons by Choi and Shine, architects, have been designed to carry high voltage lines across Iceland. I love them, and I hope somebody builds some:

This design transforms mundane electrical pylons into statues on the Icelandic landscape.
Making only minor alterations to well established steel-framed tower design, we have created a series of towers that are powerful, solemn and variable. These iconic pylon-figures will become monuments in the landscape. Seeing the pylon- figures will become an unforgettable experience, elevating the towers to something more than merely a functional design of necessity.
The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. As the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.
In addition, the pylon-figures can also be arranged to create a sense of place through deliberate expression. Subtle alterations in the hands and head combined with repositioning of the main body parts in the x, y and z-axis, allow for a rich variety of expressions. The pylon-figures can be placed in pairs, walking in the same direction or opposite directions, glancing at each other as they pass by or kneeling respectively, head bowed at a town.

Cannibalism among Early Humans

Bones deposited in a Spanish cave around 800,000 years ago show that early humans (Homo antecessor) practiced cannibalism:

Cut marks (slicing, chop, and scraping marks) on the cranial segment are abundant on the base of the temporal bones, face, and zygomatic bones: segments with a large amount of muscular attachments and ligaments. Cut marks found on the face indicate skinning and defleshing activities. Cranial fragments also display abundant evidence of breakage (percussion pits and adhered flakes) mainly located on the lower part of the cranium. The majority of zygomatic bones are broken in a similar manner to those documented in Native American cannibalized remains and Neolithic (post 9500 BC) individuals.

One nice detail is that the butchering process seems to have been the same for humans and other animals.

Horror of the Day: Rabid Vampire Bats

From the Daily Telegraph:

Vampire bats infected with rabies have bitten more than 500 people in Peru, leading to the deaths of four children and prompting the country's health ministry to dispatch an emergency team of bat hunters into the Amazon. . . .

Vampire bats usually feed on the blood of livestock and other animals, attacking them at night while they sleep. But some have recently started preying on humans, after their woodland habitat began to shrink because of deforestation.

Dura-Europus

Nice feature in Archaeology Magazine about Dura-Europus, a Hellenistic city on the Euphrates River. Excavations in the 1930s uncovered fascinating remains dating to the whole period from 300 BC to the city's destruction in 256 AD, including the oldest known Christian baptistry, the oldest Synagogue outside Israel, and a Mithraem or temple of Mithra.

The picture above shows Mithra as a Palmyrene archer, from the Mithraem; below is an excavation photo of the Mithraem.

And this fresco, from the Synagogue, shows Mordecai and Esther.

The Gay Church

Long essay by Colm Toibin about homosexuality in the Catholic Church and its relationship to child abuse by priests, Vatican II, and many other things. Toibin recognizes that the church has been caught out by social changes that have shaken all our institutions, and that the huge number of accusations against abusive clergy represent, not a wave of pedophile priests, but a new willingness among victims to come forward that is itself a feature of the changing sexual climate of our times:

This new fearlessness on the part of victims is, as [Irish bishiop] Jones would have it, a feature of the age in which we live; it is this same age in which homosexuals have won freedom and celibacy is viewed with suspicion. In many parts of the world now there are gay priests who entered the seminary in good faith, and found self-knowledge and more good faith among the flutterers there. They are either celibate as a conscious, thought-out choice, or they use the gay scene when it suits them. Many of them are open to themselves and, to some extent, to their congregations about their sexuality, which is no longer a poison, but a gift, a way of understanding others, including Christ himself and his apostles, whom the world wished to victimise and marginalise. This poses a serious problem for the Catholic hierarchy, serious enough for them to ignore it, which is one of their skills. It is one of the most notable features of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Caged Birds and Cheap Food

Farmers in Ohio have agreed to phase out the caging of chickens and pregnant sows, among other humane measures, to avoid a referendum on these issues that they feared they would lose. This follows the 2008 California vote that banned similar practices, and will no doubt lead to similar drives in other states.

I think this is a good thing; I already buy cage free eggs and chicken. The egg producers' association says prices will rise 25% as these rules are implemented, which is interesting, because the eggs I buy cost about 40% more than the regular ones. I guess I am paying a conscience premium. But I can well afford it, so there is no reason for farm animals to suffer confinement on my behalf. A rise of 25% in prices for meat and eggs would be a real burden on poor Americans, though, which is something we need to think about. But as Americans become more and more sensitive to the feelings of animals, it seems to me that factory farming as we know it simply cannot go on; the farmers interviewed by the Times sense this, too, and many of them will be happy to switch to more humane methods provided everybody else is required to do the same. I predict that in a generation factory farms will seem like the polluted rivers we once tolerated as the price of wealth, and that we will feel better for having left them behind even if that makes us a little less rich.

Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy is my favorite contemporary artist. I think his outdoor creations combine great beauty with a boy's love of having fun in the woods. The things he installs in galleries don't impress me nearly as much; when he works in a confined space for big money he seems to lose the spontaneity that defines the things he assembles in the woods or on the beach. He has a partial digital catalog online here, not great pictures but they do give you a taste of his creations.

The Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters

Illustrated by Gojin Ishihara, 1972. This is the illustration for Tengu, a bird-like demon.