The risks of joining religious fervor to revolutionary politics: lessons from the Weimar Republic

The New York Times > New York Region > Public Lives: Warning From a Student of Democracy's Collapse

Frizt Stern is a historian with a special interest in the collapse of German democracy and the rise of fascism. Recently he spoke about the similarities between modern American right-wing christianity and the fusion of christian images with fascist doctrine in Nazi germany:

'There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented,' he said. 'There was a longing for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although also significant differences.'

HE warns of the danger in an open society of 'mass manipulation of public opinion, often mixed with mendacity and forms of intimidation.' He is a passionate defender of liberalism as 'manifested in the spirit of the Enlightenment and the early years of the American republic.'

'The radical right and the radical left see liberalism's appeal to reason and tolerance as the denial of their uniform ideology,' he said. 'Every democracy needs a liberal fundament, a Bill of Rights enshrined in law and spirit, for this alone gives democracy the chance for self-correction and reform. Without it, the survival of democracy is at risk. Every genuine conservative knows this.'

... 'The Jews in Central Europe welcomed the Russian Revolution,' he said, 'but it ended badly for them. The tacit alliance ..between the neo-cons and the Christian right is less easily understood. I can imagine a similarly disillusioning outcome.

Jared Diamond and the Rwandan Malthusian crisis

Amazon.com: Books: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

I heard Jared Diamond speak once. I was disappointed. He's fairly full of himself, and he seemed prone to claimin other's ideas as his own.

That said, I have give him points for noting that Rwanda's genocide fit the predictions of Dr. Malthus quite well. I thinks he's right; I noted the same thing in my 9/11 essay from 2001. When I was a Watson Fellow in 1981, I read quite a bit about demographics and population density. In the 1970s and 1980s Rwanda was often mentioned as the country closest to a Malthusian crisis. The population was very large, and the environment was being rapidly degraded.

Some people probably imagine than when a Malthusian crisis occurs, people go home and quietly starve. Malthus was not that dim. He predicted the crisis would play out in the form of war, murder, strife and mayhem.

So, kudos to Diamond for mentioning something that thousands must have known was probably true, but none were both prominent and willing to reveal that the horrors of Rwanda had been long anticipated.

Which beggars the interesting question -- who's next? In 1981 I'd have said Bangladesh, but they've quietly been edging away from the precipice for 20 years. Next up would have been other parts of Africa, but disease and war are lowering populations. So, at this time, I'm not sure any largeish nation is likely to repeat the Rwandan experience of a full-fledged Malthusian crisis.

DeLong's social security talking points

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: The Social Security Party Line: Talking Points

Worth memorizing if the discussion comes up. To me the Bush policy makes sense only as part of an overall strategy to severely decrease the size and role of the federal government and to eliminate "progressivity" from the tax code and from benefits (medicare, social security, etc). I think Bush may consider education, however, to be in a different category from social security.

In other words, when Bush talks about the "ownership society", he's talking about something he believes in. (I think he also believes poverty is a sign of God's displeasure, but he doesn't talk about that.)

One can, and should, have legitimate and interesting debates about these goals. Of course such honesty is unacceptable to all sides, so instead Bush will blow hot air.

On second thought, let's not replace Rumsfeld

Salon.com | The torturer general

Alberto Gonzales' arguments in defense of humanity's vilest practice are identical to those used by the generals who fought Argentina's dirty war. It staggers belief that this man is to hold our highest legal post.

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Many of us thought Ashcroft was pretty bad. But when Ashcroft goes, we get Gonzales. On second thought, Ashcroft wasn't that bad.

This has to be Bush's way of punishing us. First Kerik, then Gonzales.

I think I've switched to support Rumsfeld. Were he to go, Bush would have to resurrect Goering as a replacement.

More answers to the "believe but cannot prove" question...

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005

I was misled by the answers the NYT's excerpted. They left many of the best answers behind. The Edge.org site has them all. This one is from Anton Zeilinger. I think he's at least partially correct. Note he's saying that the act of creating information (as in the state of the cat) is creating reality -- or rather, like a wave and a particle, reality and information are inseprable. The act of observation both creates information and reality (dead cat).

What I believe but cannot prove is that quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.

The fundamental reason why I believe in this is that it is impossible to make an operational distinction between reality and information... one might be tempted to believe that everything is just information. The danger there is solipsism and subjectivism. But we know, even as we cannot prove it, that there is reality out there...

So if reality exists and if we will never be able to make an operational distinction between reality and information, the hypothesis suggests itself that reality and information are the same. We need a new concept which encompasses both. In a sense, reality and information are the two sides of the same coin.

I feel that this is the message of the quantum. It is the natural extension of the Copenhagen interpretation. Once you adopt the notion that reality and information are the same all quantum paradoxes and puzzles disappear, like the measurement problem or Schrödinger's cat. Yet the price to pay is high. If my hypothesis is true, many questions become meaningless. There is no sense then to ask, what is 'really' going on out there. Schrödinger's cat is neither dead nor alive unless we obtain information about her state.

So I'm walking along and I'm hit by lightning. Nothing, not a passing bird, not myself, observes my fate. Am I dead? Perhaps not until someone observes my body? Hmm. That's definitely weird enough.

There are more like this. It's really worth starting at the beginning and working through the entire list. The physicists, as usual, are whackier than anyone. (This is praise, btw.)

The evolution of the immune system

The Whale and the Antibody: Corante > The Loom >

A somewhat longish discussion on a fascinating topic. Once again one wonders what world the antievolutionists live in. It addresses questions I wondered about back in med school.

America the not-so generous?

The New York Times > Opinion > Kristof: Land of Penny Pinchers

...Americans give 15 cents per day per person in official development assistance to poor countries. The average American spends four times that on soft drinks daily.

In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, we increased such assistance by one-fifth, for President Bush has actually been much better about helping poor countries than President Clinton was. But as a share of our economy, our contribution still left us ranked dead last among 22 top donor countries.

We gave 15 cents for every $100 of national income to poor countries. Denmark gave 84 cents, the Netherlands gave 80 cents, Belgium gave 60 cents, France gave 41 cents, and Greece gave 21 cents (that was the lowest share, beside our own).

It is sometimes said that Americans make up for low official aid with private charitable donations. Nope. By OECD calculations, private donations add 6 cents a day to the official U.S. figure - meaning that we still give only 21 cents a day per person.

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I'd suspected our private donations didn't make up for our limited government donations, but it's good to get the (bad) numbers.

On the other hand ...

The real contributions to eradicating poverty are made through balancing free trade with some measure of support for those dislocated by subsequent changes in economies, and through foreign investment motivated by profit and balanced by some measure of protectective regulation. In that competition America under Bill Clinton, and even under George Bush II, has done relatively well. Since this benefits Americans as well as the impoverished it's an easier sell in some quarters, but since most Americans don't believe it helps them it's also something that's sold silently.

So we should perhaps match France's aid budget (though how much of France's aid is tied aid -- sometimes worse than nothing at all?), but the real battle is fought elsewhere.

Passive smoking and school performance -- causation or correlation?

BBC NEWS | Health | Tobacco smoke dulls child brains

Children exposed to passive smoking are likely to do worse at school than their peers, research suggests.

Exposure to even low levels of tobacco smoke in the home was linked to lower test results for reading and maths.

The greater the exposure, the worse the decline was, the US Children's Environmental Health Center team found among nearly 4,400 children.

The findings support calls to ban smoking in public places, they told Environmental Health Perspectives...

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I was ok until that last paragraph. I think the tobacco merchants ought to be assigned to sell their wares in the heart of Fallujah, but the assertion that this study supports a ban on smoking in public places assumes causation. The study only showed correlation, it wasn't designed to show causation. There's a very strong inverse relationship between IQ and longterm adult smoking, but the evidence suggests that the IQ is primary. Since IQ (the test result that is) is strongly influenced by heredity, and perhaps secondarily by uterine environment, it's hard to imagine this study could really account for those affects.

I'd bet that they've discovered an unsurprising correlation and that cessation of smoking in the home would not increase test scores. (However a better uterine environment due to smoking cessation might make a difference -- but that's not passive exposure. Intrauterine smoking is a direct exposure.)

Edge asks scientists a great question: what do you believe but cannot prove?

The New York Times > Science > God (or Not), Physics and, of Course, Love: Scientists Take a Leap

The NYT synopsizes interviews published at Edge.org. The interviews are in answer to the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?". I asked Kip Thorne, a Caltech cosmologists, a similar question (except I asked about wildest speculation rather than belief) in 1981 during a symposium. His answer, which I now dimly recall, was that time travel was possible, but not into our universe. That was before such ideas became commonplace.

Here's my synopsis of the NYT article, I omitted the ones I thought were silly, dull, or obvious. Their audience seemed more cautious than the scientists I've known, perhaps because they are also public figures.

Roger Schank
Psychologist and computer scientist; author, "Designing World-Class E-Learning"
I do not believe that people are capable of rational thought when it comes to making decisions in their own lives. People believe they are behaving rationally and have thought things out, of course, but when major decisions are made - who to marry, where to live, what career to pursue, what college to attend, people's minds simply cannot cope with the complexity. When they try to rationally analyze potential options, their unconscious, emotional thoughts take over and make the choice for them.

SO-SO. All conscious action arises from desire/emotion, so at root all choices are non-rational. Pure rationality without desire is probably completely inert. Yeah, complexity overwhelms our limited capacity to analyze problems, but analysis isn't most people's strength to begin with.

Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist, Oxford University; author, "The Ancestor's Tale"
I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all "design" anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

OK. I mostly agree, until he says the universe cannot be designed. Some cosmology models would allow one to configure the staring parameters of an artificial a universe. Of course if we live in a simulation then all bets are off.

Kenneth Ford
Physicist; retired director, American Institute of Physics; author, "The Quantum World"
I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy.
I am not even saying "elsewhere in the universe." If the proposition I believe to be true is to be proved true within a generation or two, I had better limit it to our own galaxy. I will bet on its truth there... Believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is another matter.

WIMP! Almost everyone believes bacterial life exists elsewhere in the galaxy.

Lynn Margulis
Biologist, University of Massachusetts; author, "Symbiosis in Cell Evolution"
That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors.

DUH. This one seems too obvious.

David Myers
Psychologist, Hope College; author, "Intuition"
As a Christian monotheist, I start with two unproven axioms:
1. There is a God.
2. It's not me (and it's also not you)...

I enjoyed reading his exposition. Sounds like he could be a quite interesting writer.

Donald Hoffman
Cognitive scientist, University of California, Irvine; author, "Visual Intelligence"
I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being.
The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.
Indeed the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not. For the point of an interface, such as the Windows interface on a computer, is simplification and ease of use. We click icons because this is quicker and less prone to error than editing megabytes of software or toggling voltages in circuits.
Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.
If this is right, if consciousness is fundamental, then we should not be surprised that, despite centuries of effort by the most brilliant of minds, there is as yet no physicalist theory of consciousness, no theory that explains how mindless matter or energy or fields could be, or cause, conscious experience.

OMMMM. On the one hand, he sounds like he had a lot of fun in his undergrad days. On the other hand, this is pretty much what the 'world-is-a-simulation' folks would say, and I find them oddly persuasive.

Nicholas Humphrey
Psychologist, London School of Economics; author,"The Mind Made Flesh"
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

EXCELLENT. I've believed this ever since I did my UMinn Cognitive Science class about 8 years ago.

Salon's 'Ask the Pilot' puts a knife in the Laser Beam Terrorists

Salon.com Technology | Ask the pilot

Listen to Michael, an Airbus A320 pilot for a major U.S. airline (who asks to be kept otherwise anonymous): 'Here we have cleaners and caterers able to board and roam through aircraft with no security screening whatsoever, yet people are worried about laser beams? Our priorities are insane.'...

... Just how upended is the hierarchy of priorities? At most American airports now, passengers and their hand luggage receive only token screening for explosives. Fliers must surrender their metal sharps, yet aren't specifically searched for the most likely and dangerous terrorist weapon of all. Meanwhile, a pilot cannot bring a fork onto his own jet, yet caterers, cleaners and ground staff can step aboard free of scrutiny. It wasn't laser beams or knitting needles that downed two Russian airliners last August. Or Pan Am 103 for that matter, 16 long-forgotten years ago. We're expected to believe saboteurs would spend thousands of dollars on sophisticated lasers when a few cheap ounces of Semtex would be immeasurably more effective?

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This Salon pilot/journalist works hard to keep his scorn under control. He utterly demolishes the whacky idea that terrorists are bothering with laser attacks on airplanes. If they wanted to take down airplanes, Semtex is vastly more effective.

The lasers are coming from the same people that drop rocks of overpasses and cut pages out of library books. In other words, from cowardly scum and brain-dead teenage boys.

Of course in the longer run we do have a problem. Now this bottom-fishing 0.001% of the population gets to play with lasers. What toys will they have in 30 years?

Center for Personalized Education for Physicians

Physician Evaluation Services - Educational Intervention

In response to today’s society where a person’s financial and family responsibilities can change quickly and unexpectedly, career mobility and preparedness is paramount. CPEP’s new program enables physicians to return to clinical practice with the training and support they need to resume their medical career after an extended absence. Physicians are eligible for this program if they were in good standing in the medical community prior to leaving practice.

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Traditionally one could leave practice for some years, then return and resume practice without formal retraining. Colorado no longer allows this, so a reentry market has developed. Good to keep note of this for non-practicing docs like myself.

Orwell uber alles

Ugly Truths About Guantanamo (washingtonpost.com)

Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration -- calling suicidal terrorists "cowards," naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word "torture." Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of "organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death." Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is -- or was until recently -- considered perfectly legal.

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The current Orwell Awards focus on "freedom of the press". A noble cause, but not the root of Orwell's concerns. He would perhaps be more concerned about the "corruption of the press", a phenomena now well established in America.

We need a different group than journalists to present a new set of Orwell awards for 2005. I suggest High School english teachers, and I nominate George Bush as the premiere winner.

Tsunami Victims: VISA/MC waive transaction fees?

Tsunami Victims: How to Help (washingtonpost.com)

From a WaPo transcript about aiding Tsunami victims:

Los Angeles, Calif. With so many people making spur-of-the-moment donations, I bet that Visa and Mastercard are making a fortune from the fees they charge. Are they going to waive these fees? They should!

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Hmmm. This is an interesting question, one that didn't occur to me. The administrative costs to VISA/MC and AMEX on these types of donations is presumably quite small. It would be good corporate policy for them to donate their fees.

In fact it probably wouldn't be that hard for them to do so. If Americans donate $200 million via credit cards to this cause, fees are less than $5 million. I suspect AMEX/VISA/MC can manage that donation.

Krugman returns: the privatization of social security

The New York Times > Opinion > Krugman: Stopping the Bum's Rush

... we can't have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis - unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don't count.

Politically, that seems far-fetched. A general fiscal crisis, on the other hand, is a real possibility - but not because of Social Security. In fact, the Bush administration's scaremongering over Social Security is in large part an effort to distract the public from the real fiscal danger.

There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is five times the budget office's estimate of Social Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses.

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The Bush plan only makes sense if one assumes he will also privatize medicare.

American Chechnya -- the Economist's perspective

Economist.com | Iraq

The Economist this week features a grim summary from one or more embedded journalists (the Economist does not provide bylines). It reminds me a bit of the letter home from the WSJ's Iraq journalist, only this one was printed.

It has been well cited in the blogs I read. The news is relentlessly grim throughout Sunni Iraq. Fallujah is described as "demolished", which reminds me a bit of Grozny.

The US is hanging on until the Shias take over and the Kurds split away. After that, presumably, the true civil war begins.

One paragraph stood out for me:

Barely six months ago, Mosul was one of the most tranquil spots in Iraq. Now it is one of the most violent, and least policed. It may be no coincidence that, until last January, around 20,000 American troops were billeted in and around the city and led by a most dynamic commander. With troops urgently required elsewhere, they were replaced by 8,500 soldiers, around 700 of whom were diverted to Fallujah and Bagh.

So with sufficient forces, and extraordinary leadership, it might have been possible to occupy Iraq and hold real elections. Of course the US doesn't have a large enough army to do that, it would take years for us to build an army of occupation, rather than one of invasion, and it would probably require something like a draft.

I've always supposed the real issue with Shinseki's @2001 300,000+ prediction was that it meant, effectively, that we couldn't invade Iraq in the first place. If that's true, it's rather interesting that the print media didn't point this out a few years ago.