Category Archives: Web Article Review

what’s new with genetic engineering

The Week has a roundup.

  • Genetically modified mosquitoes are set to be released in Florida this year and Texas next year. They pass along a gene to their offspring that causes them to die as larvae, potentially wiping out a particularly nasty species that can spread all kinds of disease like Zika, West Nile, and Dengue fever. I know lots of people who have had Dengue fever and it’s nasty. It surprises me we don’t have it in the U.S. yet when we have the mosquitoes now that carry it. Our winter must be just a tiny bit too cool, and how long will that last. The article points out that birds and bats eat mosquitoes. That is certainly true. I tend to think some other little critter will just fill the niche left by the mosquitoes, but we’ll see. Hopefully the birds will have something to eat. As for the bats, I’m kind of mad at them right now.
  • Similar technology is being used to target the diamondback moth and army worm, agricultural pests.
  • University of Georgia made the first genetically modified reptile last year.
  • Genetically modified salmon are already in commercial production.
  • Plants are being modified to absorb more carbon dioxide. (This one actually concerns me. If you release plants that can outcompete native plants that a broad range of insects rely on, there goes your entire food chain. This seems much riskier than targeting one type of insect at a time.)

George H.W. Bush’s September 11 Speech

No, not that George Bush. And not that September 11th. This speech was given shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I remember being impressed by the lofty rhetoric at the time. I had turned 15 just a few days earlier. My family had actually been sight-seeing in Washington D.C. when the invasion happened, and I remember a buzz in the air. Great power competition was over, peace and democracy and human rights and the rule of law were supposedly ascendant.

Our objectives in the Persian Gulf are clear, our goals defined and familiar:

Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait completely, immediately and without condition.

Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored.

The security and stability of the Persian Gulf must be assured.

Americans citizens abroad must be protected.

These goals are not ours alone. They have been endorsed by the U.N. Security Council five times in as many weeks. Most countries share our concern for principle. And many have a stake in the stability of the Persian Gulf. This is not, as Saddam Hussein would have it, the United States against Iraq. It is Iraq against the world.

As you know, I’ve just returned from a very productive meeting with Soviet President Gorbachev. I am pleased that we are working together to build a new relationship. In Helsinki, our joint statement affirmed to the world our shared resolve to counter Iraq’s threat to peace. Let me quote: “We are united in the belief that Iraq’s aggression must not be tolerated. No peaceful international order is possible if larger states can devour their smaller neighbors.”

Clearly, no longer can a dictator count on East-West confrontation to stymie concerted U.N. action against aggression.

A new partnership of nations has begun.

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony.

A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.

This is the vision I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki. He, and other leaders from Europe, the gulf, and around the world, understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.

The test we face is great – and so are the stakes. This is the first assault on the new world we seek, the first test of our mettle. Had we not responded to this first provocation with clarity of purpose; if we do not continue to demonstrate our determination; it would be a signal to actual and potential despots around the world.

America and the world must defend common vital interests. And we will.

America and the world must support the rule of law. And we will.

America and the world must stand up to aggression. And we will.

And one thing more. In pursuit of these goals America will not be intimidated.

Vital issues of principle are at stake. Saddam Hussein is literally trying to wipe a country off the face of the earth.

We do not exaggerate.

Nor do we exaggerate when we say: Saddam Hussein will fail.

Vital economic interests are at risk as well. Iraq itself controls some 10 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves. Iraq plus Kuwait controls twice that. An Iraq permitted to swallow Kuwait would have the economic and military power, as well as the arrogance, to intimidate and coerce its neighbors – neighbors who control the lion’s share of the world’s remaining oil reserves. We cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless. And we won’t.

Recent events have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership. In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability.

Let no one doubt our staying power. We will stand by our friends.

George H.W. Bush, September 11, 1990

So was I just an impressionable 15-year-old taken in by the rhetoric? What does my cynical middle-aged self think? Well, I still think it was a damn nice speech. The U.S. was going to lead the world’s powerful nations through the United Nations in standing up to cross-border aggression against a sovereign nation. We did that, achieved that limited objective, and got out. Everyone except Iraqi soldiers and civilians was happy. Did it make the world safer for giant oil companies that make giant campaign contributions to U.S. politicians for awhile? Sure. But it was a predictable, restrained use of power that other nations (except Iraq) did not feel threatened by. Our strategy and goals have been muddled ever since, and we have lost our credibility and reliability and leadership position. We need to understand that other countries are simply afraid of us because it seems like we can turn on them at any moment. We can learn something from the vision laid out in this speech.

how to fix international relations after Trump

Well, here are some ideas anyway, from Joseph Nye, a professor at Harvard. The basic idea is to “establish rules-based international institutions with different membership for different issues.” In other words, isolate issues and then try to form groups that will be able to reach consensus on each narrow issue.

  • Countries like Russia and China are likely to accept a return to the idea of respect for sovereignty as defined in the UN charter. This allows some bad things to happen within borders, of course, and doesn’t solve disputed borders, but it used to limit cross-border military action and allow for joint international peace keeping missions in smaller troubled countries in less strategic areas.
  • Reboot the World Trade Organization with new international rules rather than bilateral or regional agreements.
  • Continue international financial cooperation, which he says is actually a bright spot.
  • “International ecological cooperation” – he says this has to override sovereignty. Not a lot of specifics here, but a return to the climate treaty and reinvigorating the WHO would certainly be a starting point. I would suggest we need to start taking biodiversity seriously, and also have a look at the long-term stability of the global food supply. Surely this last is something everyone can agree on?
  • Cyberspace – not a lot of specifics, but new agreements and norms are needed. Nuclear and biological weapons are not mentioned, and in fact weapons in general are not mentioned (drones, autonomous weapons, missiles, mines, space weapons?), and I would suggest adding these. Anything that will reduce risk in the short term will buy time to figure out a long term plan to give our species and civilization to make it.

how to fix the U.S. Constitution

John Davenport, a professor (of philosophy?) at Fordham University, has some proposals to fix parts of the U.S. Constitution that he says are outdated. I am 100% on board with cleaning up election finance and clarifying the speech rights of corporations. Others I hadn’t thought about as constitutional amendments, but I think all these ideas are worth considering.

  • Changes to how we do elections: “rotation of early primaries among all our states, automatic runoffs on ranked-choice ballots, fair district lines, and uniform federal requirements for election integrity”
  • “overturning the Citizens United precedent through an amendment that establishes voter-owned elections with public financing of campaigns, very strict limits on all private donations, and requirements for candidates in all federal races (and all cabinet appointees) to disclose ten years of tax records. The amendment should include a clear statement that corporations—whether for-profit or nonprofit —do not have the same rights to spend on “speech” as real persons. Political advertising by corporations and large PACs should be strictly limited.”
  • 10-year gap between serving in Congress and working as a lobbyist, restrictions on all federal officials going to work for industry they were regulating (he doesn’t say how long), restrict access of lobbyists to federal officials, and use tax law to further limit lobbying (he doesn’t say how)
  • get rid of the Senate filibuster, and allow 55% of House members to force a vote (maybe, but consensus is a worthy ideal, and you can’t have 55% of the population voting to gas the other 45%)
  • 18-year term limits in the Supreme Court, which would mean exactly two appointed during each 4-year presidential term. If a justice retires or dies during their term, he suggests picking a lower federal judge by lottery to serve out the remainder of their term. Congress would also be required to vote on judicial appointments within six months (or what, they are automatically confirmed?)
  • Now to limit future Presidents: clarify what constitutes an illegal campaign contribution, treason, contempt of Congress, what justifies impeachment, and require blind trusts.
  • 10 year terms for the Attorney General and director of the FBI, and dismissing them requires agreement between the President and three-fifths of the House
  • limits to appointing family to government positions
  • naturalized citizens qualify for any office after 20 years

This all sounds pretty good. I think we have an enormous amount of inertia built into the system though because any individual or small group of politicians who support the campaign finance measures would pretty easily be ousted by those who do not. It’s like disarmament – everyone giving up the weapons all at once is the best solution for everyone, but those who can trick the rest into doing it while they hold on to theirs would then be able to blow up the others. Corporate and special interest money are the electoral weapons of mass destruction that all parties should give up simultaneously as the best outcome, but instead of arms talks we seem to be in an arms race with no end in site. We’ve had a couple relatively strong leaders make a push on this (Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders) and they’ve come up short. The “mainstream politicians” always argue that it would be nice to give up the weapons, but the other side won’t do it and we have to win before we have any chance to reform the system from within. Then they get elected, and the cycle repeats.

There is also the small matter of the U.S. Constitution being our king and god. Seriously, we don’t have a sovereign ruling by divine right, so we treat the Constitution almost as a holy text that should be changed infrequently and only with a damn good reason. And there is some advantage in this – constitutions have come and gone in almost all other countries since 1783, while the U.S. form of government has proven pretty stable. The flip side of stability is resistance to change. The system was intentionally designed that way, but maybe we have gone so long without tightening a few screws here and there to keep it from wobbling, and now big structural changes are needed to keep it from collapsing.

I would also get rid of the electoral college and the states, by the way. Or if I didn’t get rid of the states entirely, I would make it much easier to carve out new ones from bits and pieces of the old ones. State borders have zero cultural, economic, or physical significance. Their time has come and gone and they are holding us back.

decrease in U.S. child deaths

This blog crunched the monthly numbers on death from all causes in the U.S. (something the CDC still manages to do well) and came up with an unexpected result: the number of children (under 18) who died each week since mid-March is down 15-20% compared to the long-term average. The conclusion? Children have not been in and around cars, and CARS KILL CHILDREN. “15-20%” seems a bit abstract, but it means 85 U.S. children per week DID NOT DIE, who otherwise would have been killed by cars. Cars are a worldwide serial killer of children – why do we put up with it? Our children need to be able to walk or bike to school, and we all need safe walking and biking infrastructure that is completely separated and protected from cars. Now!

The blogger is a self-described climate change skeptic by they way, and I don’t full endorse all of his views, and there are many nuances to the data that he made choices how to deal with. So have a look and make up your own mind, but I actually find it convincing.

ask not what Bernie Sanders could have done for you…

Warning: political post follows! I’m still thinking about why the continuing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are bothering me a little bit. This Ross Douthat post (the New York Times token conservative op-ed guy) has helped me crystallize it a little bit. Police violence is an important but narrow issue. Renaming streets and tearing down statues is justified in some cases but doesn’t do much to address systemic problems. Maybe the movement will expand to encompass larger issues like violence of all types, mass incarceration, discrimination and inequality afflicting black people. All good, but only a slice of the much larger problems affecting our country and planet.

Many of the people demonstrating in the streets voted overwhelmingly against the candidate who would have done the most on these issues. The article is called “The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders”. The way I look at it, Bernie Sanders didn’t fail, we all failed to support the candidate who could have brought about real change for all the hard working people of this country, black people included. The “socialism” Bernie stood for was to take just a little of our country’s enormous wealth and use it to provide the benefits that would make ordinary people’s lives better, and that most other wealthy and even functional-but-not-so-wealthy countries in the world are providing. Health care, education, child care, and retirement for a start. If we ever decide to pay reparations for slavery, it is likely to look…something like this. Bernie would have fought to provide these benefits to the descendants of enslaved African people, and to everyone else who needs them. Big business and wealthy individuals would have fought back, tooth and nail. And Bernie would have maybe led a Congress that would have fought back by enshrining meaningful anti-corruption provisions in our nation’s Constitution. He would have led us in doing our nation’s fair share (at least) to address the climate crisis and accelerating ecological collapse. Maybe. Most likely, he would have made real progress on one or two of these issues in our messy real world political system, then tried to lay the ground work for others to continue the fight. But that is more than the next Joe B. Democrat in line is likely to do. Prove me wrong Joe!

Chinese government and genocide

There are reports that the Chinese government is forcibly sterilizing women in detention camps.

Women who had fewer than the legally permitted limit of two children were involuntarily fitted with intrauterine contraceptives, says the report.

It also reports that some of the women said they were being coerced into receiving sterilisation surgeries.

Former camp detainees said they were given injections that stopped their periods or caused unusual bleeding consistent with the effects of birth-control drugs.

Guardian

The report goes on to say this might be genocide. I don’t understand the “might”. Let’s review the UN definition of genocide. And remember these people are either in detention camps or under heavy surveillance designed to suppress their religion, language and culture.

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

UN

I just don’t see the ambiguity.

I’m not against intrauterine devices by the way. They are safe, effective, and reversible. Maybe we should pop one into every girl around age 13 or so (I don’t know the minimum safe age, I’m not a doctor), then let her decide when and if to take it out as an adult. The seemingly intractable abortion debate might go away. We need an equally safe, effective, and reversible male contraceptive too.

U.S. still isn’t screening international arrivals!

In looking for that explanation of why some countries have largely dodged the coronavirus bullet while the U.S. is melting down, many people are focused on masks. I wonder if the almost total failure to screen airport arrivals could be the single most important factor. Thousands of plane loads of infected people from Italy landed in the U.S. northeast airports in February and March. The CDC’s screening and tracking protocols completely broke down, and it got out of control before there was any chance to contain it. Fast-forward to June, and they still aren’t effectively screening airport passengers!

Then we arrived in the US. No one at Dulles International Airport checked passengers’ temperatures. SAA had given each passenger health forms to fill in for the US authorities. No one asked for them. No sanitisers were on offer. No social distancing was practised in the immigration queues. People literally breathed down my neck. In Joburg the 2m apart rule was strictly observed.

At the immigration counter my passport was stamped and the very nice border policeman said: “Welcome to America.”

I waltzed over to baggage reclaim, got my luggage and left. I could have walked into the US coughing, sweaty and feverish and not a single authority would have known — they hadn’t bothered to do a basic check that I wasn’t indeed feverish.

JUSTICE MALALA: What three American airports taught me about Covid-19 and political leadership

Before it gets to the U.S. arrival, the article recounts the strict measures in place in South Africa (“one of the nations Trump included in the class of “shithole countries” – direct quote from the article). I’m not familiar with this person or publication, by the way, but it matches my experience traveling in Southeast Asia (Singapore and Thailand specifically) during the 2009 swine flu epidemic. Temperature screening and screening questionnaires were everywhere, beginning the moment I arrived at an airport, and continuing in shopping centers, on public transportation, etc. It was all polite and professional, but I knew that if I developed symptoms I would be taken to a government-run quarantine center for 14 days. (And as long as they had three meals a day and a decent internet connection, that didn’t sound like the end of the day!) Thailand and Singapore have both handled this pandemic very well. Thailand in particular is a middle income country with (until recently) a lot of back and forth travel to Wuhan, China.

You can argue that the “second wave” or “second peak” horror show now unfolding in the U.S. can be pinned on poor state and local leadership, but the early failures of airport screening, tracking, and testing were squarely on the federal government’s shoulders, and they not only failed spectacularly compared to most other countries, they haven’t learned anything!

Edward de Bono and creativity

Edward de Bono is a popular author on the subject of creative and original thinking. This long article is highly critical of him, suggesting that his ideas on creativity and originality are not all that creative or original. It never actually says his ideas are bad, just that he derived bits and pieces of them from the scientific literature without giving credit to the people who actually thought them up.

In the course of criticizing him, the article does a good job of summarizing his ideas.

The Use of Lateral Thinking is a short book with a long reach. Providing no more than a few slight examples of how lateral thinking might work in practice – largely on the perception of shape and function in geometric forms – it proposed four vague principles for problem-solving and creativity: the recognition of dominant polarising ideas; the search for different ways of looking at things; a relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking; and the use of chance.

Aeon

It sounds like decent advice to me. First, you need to learn the rules (i.e., traditional way of thinking about or doing something) before you earn the right to break them. Otherwise you run the risk of reinventing the wheel or coming up with something at odds with indisputable evidence or logic you just weren’t familiar with. Now, you have earned the right to look at the issue from a variety of angles and talk to people across disciplines that might not usually talk to each other. Finally, exposing yourself to a wide variety of information and experiences, and taking time to reflect on them alone and with others, will open your mind to new connections and possibilities.

The article goes on to survey the literature on the subject of creative thinking, which de Bono may have partially drawn on. This includes:

  • a variety of eccentric and famous figures who seem to have been good at letting their minds wander and coming up with interesting things
  • Henri Poncare’s idea of training the mind on a problem, then lettin insights slowly build while we are doing unrelated mindless tasks
  • the Einstellung effect, where people fail to solve a problem because it resembles another problem they know how to solve, but that solution doesn’t work (maybe this contradicts my idea of “learn the rules before you break them”? but I don’t know, maybe it just means that breaking out of the mold takes conscious effort)
  • Gestalt psychology’s idea of “productive thinking”, which emphasized looking at a problem from different angles
  • J.P. Guilford’s idea of “divergent thinking”, characterized by people with “the ability to produce a great number of ideas or problem solutions in a short period of time; to simultaneously propose a variety of approaches to a specific problem; to produce original ideas; and to organise the details of an idea in one’s head and carry it out.” (this sounds like brainstorming to me, other than organizing the ideas at the end, which is the logical next step after any productive brainstorming session)
  • and what do you know, brainstorming. The term was coined by Alex Osborn, who favored groups of 5-10 people thinking together on the same problem, sometimes aided by randomly selected words.
  • More recent research emphasizing the value of individuals brainstorming independently, then combining and organizing ideas through “the productive spark of debate, friction and constructive conflict”. You have to keep it friendly to be productive, in my personal experience.
  • Arthur Koestler, who apparently surveyed many of the topics above in the 1960s and also emphasized the creative role of humor.

So, I’ll attempt to synthesize all this and combine it unscientifically with my personal experiences.

  1. Define the problem you are trying to solve or the question you are trying to answer. Writing it down helps me. Then, “give yourself permission” to think about it gradually over a period of time. Also give yourself permission not to think about it – don’t force it.
  2. Do lots of reading, listening, and thinking, both related and unrelated, fiction and non-fiction. Garden, take walks in nature, listen to or make music, exercise, meditate, and even consider responsible, moderate use of recreational substances. (But consider the cautionary tale of Sherlock Holmes, who could only turn his creative brain off with music and cocaine – Arthur Conan Doyle must have been like that or known somebody like that.)
  3. Keep a notebook (or the electronic equivalent) handy to write down anything related that pops in your head. Review these notes occasionally.
  4. Keep going until you have lots and lots of ideas, then slowly let them gel in your mind. Then start organizing them in writing (or drawing, or whatever makes sense).
  5. Then consider discussing your ideas with other people who have ideas and like to discuss them peacefully. I find it hard to find people like this.

Now you might arrive at a creative idea or solution to a problem or two. It’s hard work and there are no guarantees which means it is not always a good match for billable hours, which could be why you don’t see more of it in the professional ranks. Put another way, your creativity idea will not necessarily make you rich, and it might even make somebody else rich, in which case you may have a case of the sour grapes. Good luck!

Jeff Masters: We’re all going to die!

Jeff Masters, who used to write a neat blog for Weather Underground before weather.com/IBM destroyed everything that was ever good about that site, has a dark take on climate change. He now writes on Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but I notice that one by one my beloved RSS feeds are falling prey to neglect (there’s an RSS feed for Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but not one for Jeff Masters’s blog specifically.)

When the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt, the forests of the Amazon transition to scrubland, and vast swaths of once-fertile land become inhospitable desert, there will be no climate change vaccine that will suddenly bring an end to these essentially irreversible catastrophes. Tens of millions will starve. Wars will break out over scarce resources. Hundreds of millions of climate change refugees will flee rising seas, coasts will be ravaged by stronger storms, and desert-like lands will be without the food and water needed to sustain civilization.

Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections

I think that’s a pretty good elevator pitch for the “why should I care?” crowd: (1) massive melting of ice sheets on both poles leading to catastrophic sea level rise, (2) loss of the Amazon rain forest, which along with the oceans maintains the mix of gases in the atmosphere that we have become accustomed to throughout human history, (3) loss of huge amounts of what used to be productive farm land, due to high temperatures and lack of water. These processes will play out slowly, maybe over decades. We are the frogs in the slowly heating up cook pot. We may see slowly rising prices for food, and we will have to clean up after increasingly frequent storms, floods, and fires. Eventually we may see absolute food shortages. These acute crises will start to affect poorer nations, and poorer people in richer nations, before others, of course. Mass migrations, civil conflicts within nation-states, and geopolitical conflicts between nation-states may break out. Throw in a few random events like earthquakes and pandemics at already vulnerable moments, and things may get dicey.

This sounds awful, and there is certainly no worldwide effort to effectively deal with it. At the same time, science, technological know-how, and financial wealth continue to increase, although they obviously are not spread equally or fairly among the world’s people. We have seen examples of effective leadership and cooperation in the past at times of crisis, and maybe these will emerge again. As Jeff Masters rightly points out though, unlike wars and pandemics, a big difference with climate change is that when it becomes obvious to absolutely everyone that something has to be done, there may be no good options left.