Later On

And here’s why.

Dan Colman has a great list of educational videos on YouTube. The list begins:

Also, feel free to check out our list of YouTube favorites.

General

• @GoogleTalks
  • Google has lots of famous visitors speaking at its headquarters, and they’re all recorded and neatly presented here.
• Al Jazeera English
  • The Middle Eastern news service, which has generated its share of controversy, now airs broadcasts in English and presents them here.
• Amnesty International
  • The leading human rights organization brings you various videos outlining human rights concerns across the globe, and the work they’re doing to improve conditions.
• Artists Space
  • Artists Space supports contemporary artists working in the visual arts, video and electronic media, performance, architecture and design, and it promotes artistic experimentation and dialog in contemporary culture.
• Aspen Institute
  • An international nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue.
• Bad Astronomy
  • Bad Astronomy is devoted to debunking myths and misconceptions about astronomy, and also to slap down without apology bad thinking in all its forms.
• BBC
  • A series of videos promoting programs coming out of Britain’s main media outlet. Unfortunately many of these videos are short and not entirely substantive. A missed opportunity.
• BBC Worldwide
  • Ditto.
• Big Think
  • This collection brings you videos featuring some of today’s leading thinkers, movers and shakers.

Continue reading. LOTS more.

The meme meme — the concept of memes — seems to have a lot of power, though it’s still maddeningly imprecise. And it gets its power much the way Darwin’s theory gets its power: it provides an explanation for so many things and a new way of looking at the world around us.

In particular, I can see memes peeking out everywhere in Bruce Brander’s Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization. Indeed, “Western Civilization” is a vast collection of memes that to some degree control to what we will give our attention and toward what goals we will work.

Intimations of Western Civilization’s decline began tentatively but very early, though the earliest warnings may be due to particularly dyspeptic individuals. But with the Industrial Revolution and the dark Satanic Mills, the warnings became more frequent. The complaint was that Western Civilization was setting down the wrong path with all its technology—and yet the technological meme was irresistible. To those with the power to direct the course of nations, it promised wealth and power: a continuing advance in the tools of commerce and war. The American Civil War (1861-65) showed the results of warfare with modern weapons—a lesson repeated in WW I and WW II.

By the end of the 19th Century, a general malaise and feeling that things were not working out well was common enough to be given a name: fin-de-siècle. Many saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1897, as the apogee of Western Civilization, with decline to follow. Although the early years of the 20th Century was a time when the public in general felt that everything was improving—perhaps even war would retreat to minor skirmishes on distant frontiers…

But then The Great War put an end to that, and it was followed by the Great Depression and World War II. Those are not good signs.

The people writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries complained that the West had lost its spiritual direction and separated itself from Nature. I had a hard time understanding that complaint, until a thought struck me as I watched The Tall T. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and up until the early 20th century, people in Western Civilization were surrounded by and dependent upon animals: horses, mules, oxen, dogs—beasts of burden that provided much of the muscle for our labor. That close relationship with animals—where the animal’s continued welfare was important to the owner, and people knew animals: what they needed, how to recognize their moods, how to work with them. This close connection could not but have forced a recognition that humanity has a role and a place among the animals and must find its own balance with nature.

The animals, for most of us, are long gone, except for pets (whose importance I don’t minimize): machines have taken over their jobs and most of us live lives that are far removed from direct involvement with the land, animals, and seasonal rhythms. In this disconnection, the appeal of the technology meme continues to grow: do more things, with less effort—and yet the course we’re on is clearly wrong. The government is growing more and more resistant to an open sharing of power with the people, and the planet (with global warming) is showing the effects of our wrong direction.

The role of the technology meme cannot be ignored, and as pointed out in Brodie’s Virus of the Mind, memes evolve to become popular whether or not they are good for us. And some of the memes seem to have been very bad for us in general.

I don’t wish to romanticize a simpler life: it’s a lot of work for everyone, and it does not by any means preclude injustice and evil. But those we seem to be stuck with, regardless of our way of life.

UPDATE: Let me say it this way. (I’m still trying to figure it out, so these explanations are mostly to myself.) Before the machine age, people lived closer to nature, willy nilly, and had a stronger grasp that they were in a kind of partnership with domestic animals and with the earth. As the technological meme proliferated and evolved, we moved into an age of manufacture and machines, which in the 20′s was deliberately augmented with the introduction of the meme of consumerism (to serve the meme of capitalism), and today, many in advanced nations live urban lives, surrounded by and dependent on technology, with no real feel for their connection to nature and the planet. That’s how businesses are able to get away with despoiling the environment with toxins and wastes to the point where we are in substantial and growing danger of loosing that connection altogether and with it our livelihoods.

I believe that a government that becomes closed — a government of secrets and indefinite imprisonment without charges that functions mainly to defend wealth and privilege and hereditary access to power — is a government that is heading for a downfall. The more the government becomes removed from the mission of increasing the general welfare, the sooner its decline will become evident. And, even now, the Roberts Court is poised to give corporations more control of the political process than they already enjoy.

Gary Wills has an interesting article in the NY Review of Books on this general topic:

George W. Bush left the White House unpopular and disgraced. His successor promised change, and it was clear where change was needed. Illegal acts should cease—torture and indefinite detention, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation, unilateral canceling of treaties, defiance of Congress and the Constitution, nullification of laws by signing statements. Powers attributed to the president by the theory of the unitary executive should not be exercised. Judges who are willing to give the president any power he asks for should not be confirmed.

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration. The whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch. The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the "war on terror"—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order.

The truth of this was borne out in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency. At his confirmation hearing to be head of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition"—the practice of sending prisoners to foreign countries—was a tool he meant to retain. Obama’s nominee for solicitor general, Elena Kagan, told Congress that she agreed with John Yoo’s claim that a terrorist captured anywhere should be subject to "battlefield law." On the first opportunity to abort trial proceedings by invoking "state secrets"—the policy based on the faulty Reynolds case—Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, did so. Obama refused to release photographs of "enhanced interrogation." The CIA had earlier (illegally) destroyed ninety-two videotapes of such interrogations—and Obama refused to release documents describing the tapes.

The President said that past official crimes would not be investigated—certainly not for prosecution, and not even by an impartial "truth commission" just trying to establish a record. He said, on the contrary, that detainees might be tried in "military tribunals." When the British government, trying a terrorist suspect, decided to use some American documents shared with the British government, Obama’s attorney general pressured it not to do so. Most important, perhaps, was the new president’s desire to end the nation-building in Iraq while substituting a long-term nation-building effort in Afghanistan, run by a government corrupted by drug trafficking and not susceptible to our remolding.

Even in areas outside national security, the Obama administration quickly came to resemble Bush’s…

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The Obama Administration tends to make big announcements that amount to nothing, while striving to maintain the presidential power status quo. I pointed to Daphne Eviatar’s article yesterday about this, and now Glenn Greenwald weighs in with a long and thoughtful column.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, The Tall T is an interesting and satisfying western, based on an Elmore Leonard short story. You also see a very young Henry Silva, a strange-looking dude, already playing villain roles.

I also saw The Cleaner, with Ed Harris and Samuel L. Jackson. It was a good movie, and the cinematography was (IMHO) outstanding. And I started The French Kiss, with Kevin Kline, Meg Ryan, and Matthew Broderick Timothy Hutton, which is much more enjoyable than I expected.

The photo is false: I accidentally picked up Lilac instead of Mosswood, but I discovered the error after the photo: this morning was Mosswood all the way.

The Simpsons Persian Jar 2 Super created the usual fine and curiously effective J.M. Fraser lather, and the Big Grip with its previously used Astra Keramik Platinum blade did a fine job.

And the Mosswood aftershave was a fine finish.

Yours will too.

As regular readers know, I tend to read several books and watch several movies at a time: I’ll stop, mark my place, and spend some time on another title. My DVD player helps, since it remembers at what point I stopped watching each DVD. And now I find that Roku also remembers, and when I go back to some movie in my queue, I can either start again at the beginning or resume from where I stopped.Very nice. It also allows you to remove movies from your watch instantly queue—either because you didn’t like it or you finished it. Very, very nice.

ALSO: Navigation is totally intuitive: it’s a hierarchy, and the arrow keys (L, R, Up, Dn) work just as you would expect. And, of course, you can rate the movies.

BTW: I recommend The Tall T. Based on a story by Elmore Leonard. Starring Randolph Scott and Richard Boone. From 1957, the year I was graduated from high school.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

The state secrets privilege allows the government to conceal certain evidence in a court case that, if disclosed, would endanger national security by revealing “state secrets”. But who gets to decide what is a state secret and whether it will actually endanger national security has long been a point of contention. The Department of Justice, first under President Bush and then under President Obama, has invoked the privilege to ask courts to dismiss every single legal case that has come before them seeking compensation for torture or warrantless wiretapping by the government. That’s led critics to charge that the administration is trying to use the evidentiary privilege not to protect national security, but to conceal government wrongdoing and avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Today’s announcement says the government will use the privilege more sparingly, and requires the attorney general himself to sign off on its use. But the provision does not bar the government from using the privilege to try to dismiss cases alleging government wrongdoing.

“They don’t anywhere say, ‘we will not seek dismissal on state secrets grounds at the outset’” of a case, said Ben Wizner, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who’s come up against the privilege while representing victims of torture. “They say we’re going to make an effort to apply it as narrowly as possible. But that doesn’t change what they’ve been doing all along.”

What the Department of Justice has been doing all along is essentially what the Obama administration has done in one case Wizner’s working on, in which a victim of torture due to the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program sued Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, claiming the company was partly responsible for helping transport CIA prisoners to other countries to be tortured. The government claimed that allowing the case to go forward would reveal state secrets and endanger national security, and asked the court to dismiss it. Eventually, the ACLU won the right to proceed with the litigation, but the Obama administration in June asked the court of appeals to reconsider and dismiss the case.

“Any new policy will be an empty gesture if the administration continues to assert the same expansive theory of state secrets to dismiss cases brought by torture victims,” Wizner said Wednesday. “At the same time that they are rolling out this new policy with fanfare, they are asking the Ninth Circuit [Court of Appeals] to reverse its own decision and rehear the case because of state secrets.”

The Jeppesen case is one of several where the Obama administration has made the same expansive arguments that entire cases should be dismissed to protect state secrets, rather than simply excluding the particular piece of evidence that could actually endanger national security.

The real problem, say critics, is that the Obama administration is trying to use its new policy as a way to prevent the passage of legislation that will clarify the role of the executive versus the role of the courts.

“The Bush administration’s approach to state secrets was …"

Continue reading.

From Crooks & Liars by Nicole Bell:

Project Censored, a media research project operating out of Sonoma State University in California has spent several years looking at media accountability and how the freedom of the press aids democracy:

At Project Censored, we examine the coverage of news and information important to the maintenance of a healthy and functioning democracy. We define Modern Censorship as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story – or piece of a news story – based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).

The latest edition of Project Censored is in and available on Amazon:

Here’s this year’s top 25 stories:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

Interesting:

A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings — the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level — appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature. The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein’s structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor’s primordial form.

The discovery of evolutionary bridge burning implies that today’s versions of life on Earth may be neither ideal nor inevitable, said Joe Thornton, a professor in the UO’s Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

"Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards," Thornton said, "but the issue has remained unresolved because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms. We solved those problems by studying the problem at the molecular level, where we can resurrect ancestral proteins as they existed long ago and use molecular manipulations to dissect the evolutionary process in both forward and reverse directions."

Thornton’s team, which included UO research scientist Jamie Bridgham and collaborator Eric A. Ortlund, a biochemist at Atlanta’s Emory University, focused on the evolution of a protein called the glucocorticoid receptor (GR), which binds the hormone cortisol and regulates the stress response, immunity, metabolism and behavior in humans and other vertebrates.

"This fascinating study highlights the value of studying evolutionary processes," said Irene Eckstrand, who oversees evolution grants at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "By showing how molecular structures are finely tuned by evolution, Dr. Thornton’s research will have a broad impact on basic and applied sciences, including the design of drugs that target specific proteins."

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Very interesting findings:

In a study published in the September 24th issue of Nature, an international team describes how they harnessed modern genomic technology to explore the ancient history of India, the world’s second most populous nation. The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. The study, which has medical implications for people of Indian descent, was led by scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India together with US researchers at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

"This work is an outstanding example of the power of international collaboration," said Lalji Singh, senior author of the Nature paper, who is a Bhatnagar Fellow and the former director of CCMB. "Scientists in India and the United States have together made discoveries that would have been impossible for either group working alone."

Although the genome sequences of any two unrelated people differ by just 0.1%, that tiny slice of genetic material is a rich source of information. It provides clues that can help reconstruct the historical origins of modern populations. It also points to genetic variations that heighten the risk of certain diseases. In recent years, maps of human genetic variation have opened a window onto the diversity of populations across the world, yet India has been largely unrepresented until now.

To shed light on genetic variability across the Indian subcontinent, the research team analyzed more than 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups, representing 13 states, all six language families, traditionally "upper" and "lower" castes, and tribal groups.

These genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations. "Different Indian groups have inherited forty to eighty percent of their ancestry from a population that we call the Ancestral North Indians who are related to western Eurasians, and the rest from the Ancestral South Indians, who are not related to any group outside India," said co-author David Reich, an associate professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

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I wonder when global-warming deniers will start to crumble under the weight of evidence—it could be a long time, considering that some people continue to believe that the Earth is flat and that the moon landings never happened. The latest evidence:

The most comprehensive picture of the rapidly thinning glaciers along the coastline of both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets has been created using satellite lasers. The findings are an important step forward in the quest to make more accurate predictions for future sea level rise. Reporting this week in the journal Nature researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements* from both of these vast ice sheets shows that the most profound ice loss is a result of glaciers speeding up where they flow into the sea.

The authors conclude that this ‘dynamic thinning’ of glaciers now reaches all latitudes in Greenland, has intensified on key Antarctic coastlines, is penetrating far into the ice sheets’ interior and is spreading as ice shelves thin by ocean-driven melt. Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.

Lead author Dr Hamish Pritchard from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) says, "We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across such large areas of coastline – it’s widespread and in some cases thinning extends hundreds of kilometres inland. We think that warm ocean currents reaching the coast and melting the glacier front is the most likely cause of faster glacier flow. This kind of ice loss is so poorly understood that it remains the most unpredictable part of future sea level rise."

The scientists compared the rates of change in elevation of both fast-flowing and slow-flowing ice. In Greenland for example they studied 111 fast-moving glaciers and found 81 thinning at rates twice that of slow-flowing ice at the same altitude.They found that ice loss from many glaciers in both Antarctica and Greenland is greater than the rate of snowfall further inland.

In Antarctica some of the fastest thinning glaciers are in West Antarctica (Amundsen Sea Embayment) where Pine Island Glacier and neighbouring Smith and Thwaites Glacier are thinning by up to 9 metres per year.

Source: British Antarctic Survey

Interesting post by Steve Benen at Political Animal:

There are plenty of discouraging poll numbers for Democrats that have been released lately, but there’s little evidence that Republicans are capitalizing in any meaningful way. The party is still less popular than the Democratic majority, and the GOP is still less trusted on most of the major issues of the day.

On health care, for example, the new NBC/WSJ poll shows 45% of Americans approving of President Obama’s handling of the issue. For the Republican Party, the number was 21%. The GOP has done wonders raising doubts about Democratic reform plans, but it’s not exactly persuading anyone that Republicans offer a superior alternative.

With that in mind, Ezra Klein had a good summary of the bigger picture.

The Republican Party’s strategy against health-care reform has been something of a kamikaze mission: destroy the bill through a strategy that also destroys the party, at least in the short-term. The hope is that if they win the war, they’ll be in better shape come the 2010 midterms. Maybe that’ll work. Maybe it won’t.

But if it does work, it won’t leave them in a better position to govern. What Republicans — and, when they’re out of power, Democrats — are doing is essentially discrediting the political process. Piece by piece, bill by bill. The argument, essentially, is that politicians are untrustworthy and Congress is corrupt and interest groups are trying to do horrible things to you and problems are not being solved.

All these thing might be true, but they’re being said, in this case, by politicians who want to take back Congress and start negotiating with interest groups to solve problems. That’s not going to work terribly well, and for obvious reasons. Republicans may think they’ve found a clever strategy in making it hard for Democrats to govern, but what they’re really doing is making it nearly impossible for anyone to govern. American politics is trapped in a cycle of minority obstruction, and though that’s good for whomever the minority is at the moment, it’s not particularly good for making progress on pressing issues.

I think this is almost entirely right, except for one point — Ezra described congressional Republicans as "politicians who want to take back Congress and start negotiating with interest groups to solve problems." I don’t mean to be cute here, but I think that gives the GOP too much credit.

In fact, I’m not sure Republicans are interested in problem-solving at all. They want to take back Congress for the express purpose of stopping the White House from passing a progressive policy agenda. GOP leaders don’t want to govern or "make progress on pressing issues"; they want to stop the process of governing and let the status quo linger.

To be sure, I think Ezra’s entirely right about the consequences of Republican tactics — they paralyze our system of government. The key, though, is that the GOP is almost certainly okay with that.

Put it this way: when was the last time the Republican Party, on the national level, had a coherent policy agenda? It wasn’t 2002 ("9/11, 9/11, 9/11"); it wasn’t 2004 (the bulk of George W. Bush’s stump speech was about John Kerry); it wasn’t 2006 ("9/11?, 9/11?, 9/11?"); and it wasn’t 2008 ("maverick" is not a plan).

The same will be true in 2010 — there’s nothing in particular the GOP wants to do with government, other than to say "no" to those who do have an agenda. And with that in mind, making it impossible for anyone to govern suits Republicans just fine.

Read the comments to the post, too.

I’ve mentioned that Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme is written in a somewhat fervent tone. The reason is that the author, Richard Brodie, feels a sense of urgency—and he is also trying to write in meme-worthy language: that is, language that pushes the primary buttons of danger, food, and sex—mostly danger.

The idea is that memes occupy our mind and attention. Let’s look at one example of a meme that, so far as I can see, is harmless but definitely infectious: singing "Happy Birthday to You" on a person’s birthday. This meme seems inescapable and is replicated endlessly, but dates only to around 1900. It looks like it’s here to say, though.

Memes are subject to Darwin’s law (generalized): memes replicate with variations, and those variations most successful at occupying our attention and getting us to repeat them are the memes that thrive and spread. Evolution occurs because the variations are competing for a finite resource: our minds and our replications.

The problem is that memes work for their own ends, not for our benefit. You can see that most clearly in the earnest efforts of companies to launch successful memes to sell their products. Occasionally one will hit the mark, and a craze will overtake the country (hula hoops, Frisbees, Cabbage Patch dolls, or whatever). Those memes don’t do us much good, nor much harm. But there are other memes that structure how we view society and government and the like.

I’m reading an intriguing book by Bruce Bander, Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization. I can’t recall what prompted me to buy it, but I’m enjoying it. His thesis is that Western Civilization is declining, despite technological advances. According to one of the reviewers, "a well written summary on the essential works of three prominent 20th century social thinkers who made it their life’s work to ponder the rise and fall of past civilizations": Toynbee, Spengler, and Sorokin.

The way that memes (though not identified as such) crop up in the book is interesting—particularly the memes that shape our view of society and government and of the goals they rightfully pursue. I also found memes cropping up in Wright’s fascinating book The Evolution of God, though with more explicitness. After all, that book is a study of how the "God" meme originated and developed in the three main monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (He is not, of course, saying that God evolved, but rather that our memes of God evolved.)

These more powerful and influential memes do make Brodie’s tone understandable: memes are very important in directing our attention and attitudes, and it behooves us to be conscious of them and try to select deliberately those that we will keep in our minds.

Thanks to Dale for pointing out this article by Chalmers Johnson:

However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past — including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us: …

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Not emotions on seeing a dead salmon, but emotions the dead salmon experiences as it sees human faces. From Mind Hacks:

Neuroskeptic covers a hilarious new study that involved brain scanning a dead salmon and finding activation in the brain as it ‘looked’ at photos of human faces.

The authors are not genuinely arguing that dead fish have brain activity but have run the experiment to show that some common statistical methods used in fMRI research will give false positives if they’re not adequately controlled for.

The research, led by neuroscientist Craig Bennett, was presented as a poster at a recent conference and has the brilliant title of "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" and is available online as a jpg.

I’d say that this research was justified on comedic grounds alone, but they were also making an important scientific point. The (fish-)bone of contention here is multiple comparisons correction. The "multiple comparisons problem" is simply the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them will, just by chance, give interesting results.

Most statistics used in psychology, and indeed brain imaging, are based on calculating a p value.

Usually, a p value of less than 0.05 is considered significant and this means that if there was genuinely no difference in the things you were comparing, you would get a false positive less than 5% of the time.

But your average fMRI brain scan analysis can involve 40,000 comparisons, so even if there’s nothing going on, some bits of the brain are going to seem active just through falsely detecting noise and measurement error as real effect.

To help prevent this, you can correct for multiple comparisons by reducing the 5% cut-off to a smaller amount. Unfortunately, some of the standard methods of doing this can be so strict as to create false negatives, when genuine differences are dismissed as statistical noise.

There is no hard and fast rule about which methods to use, but our salmon neuroscientists have graphically illustrated how misleading results can occur if we naively assume that not correcting accounting ‘multiple comparisons problem’ will give us an accurate picture of brain function.

Kudos to the Neuroskeptic blog for picking up on this and for some excellent coverage of this study.

Very good editorial at the NY Times:

The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.

This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.

Now the court is considering what should be a fairly narrow campaign finance case, involving whether Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had the right to air a slashing movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary season. There is a real danger that the case will expand corporations’ rights in ways that would undermine the election system.

The legal doctrine underlying this debate is known as “corporate personhood.”

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