Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Jack Goldstone

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Here’s a long interview with Jack Goldstone in Salon, who wrote the 1991 book Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World. His basic idea was that when “selfish elites” starve the government of resources, things get hard for ordinary people (from the poor to the upper middle class, I would say), and that is when revolutions can happen. He says when a society mostly consists of older, less educated people in a stagnant income situation (like former Soviet socialist republics), revolutions are more likely to be peaceful and focus on reform. When a society has more young, educated people in an economic freefall, that is when violent revolutions are more likely to happen. His vision of a stable society is one where elites agree to share the wealth somewhat to promote stability, then they educate and develop cohorts of future elite leaders. Too many educated people chasing too few elite roles is dangerously unstable, in his view. A thought that occurs to me (not in the artcle) is you can see a basis for the emphasis on STEM – educated people in a narrow way that allows them to earn a living and contribute to the larger economy, without the likelihood of them becoming politically active.

The solutions he offers are non-partisan problem solving in Congress, blue ribbon panels, and “citizen assemblies”. It’s a long article and my thoughts above barely scratch the surface.

By the way, here is what a “citizens’ assembly” is according to Wikipedia:

A citizens’ assembly (also known as citizens’ jury or citizens’ panel or people’s jury or policy jury) is a body formed from citizens or generally people to deliberate on an issue or issues of local or national or international importance. The membership of a citizens’ assembly is randomly selected, as in other forms of sortition. It is a mechanism of participatory action research (PAR) that draws on the symbolism, and some of the practices, of a legal trial by jury. The purpose is to employ a cross-section of the public to study the options available to the state on certain questions and to propose answers to these questions through rational and reasoned discussion and the use of various methods of inquiry such as directly questioning experts. In many cases, the state will require these proposals to be accepted by the general public through a referendum before becoming law.

November 2020 in Review

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Only one month to go in this tumultuous year. In current events, the U.S. election was obviously a major historical event, and Covid-19 continued to spiral horribly. But my loyal readers (all 3-10 of you worldwide…) don’t need me to cover current events.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: It seems likely the Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump U.S. foreign wars may just grind on endlessly under Biden. Prove us wrong, Joe! (I give Trump a few points for trying to bring troops home over the objections of the military-industrial complex. But in terms of war and peace, this is completely negated and then some by slippage on nuclear proliferation and weapons on his watch.)

Most hopeful story: The massive investment in Covid-19 vaccine development may have major spillover effects to cures for other diseases. This could even be the big acceleration in biotechnology that seems to have been on the horizon for awhile. These technologies also have potential negative and frivolous applications, of course.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: States representing 196 electoral votes have agreed to support the National Popular Vote Compact, in which they would always award their state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Colorado has now voted to do this twice. Unfortunately, the movement has a tough road to get to 270 votes, because of a few big states that would be giving up a lot of power if they agreed to it.

why we’re numb to mass death

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I’ve always found close up pictures of Hiroshima victims to be some of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen, and yet knowing that 100,000* people were vaporized in a fraction of a second has less emotional effect. We also get numb to hearing about steady numbers of deaths that add up to a lot over time, like car accidents. I’m not a monster – this is a bug in human psychology. This article in Axios gives other examples of the phenomenon, from the Holocaust to the Rwanda genocide to the U.S. coronavirus meltdown. The article links to an academic paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon, who studies this “psychic numbing” effect.

A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately. However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies – such as genocide – or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. We believe this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. We shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

I’ve often thought about a class that would teach the history of a war or tragedy by the numbers, by focusing on the number of deaths, who the people were, where they occurred and when they occurred. I think that would be educational (if depressing). But to put it in perspective you might need some visuals. One idea would be a stadium with people vanishing from seats. (This would work for, say, up to 100,000 deaths.) For even larger numbers, maybe you could start with a point in the center of the town where the class is being held or where students live, and then expand the dot outward as though all the people who live inside it were to vanish. You could even make this an app based on census data, and let the user pick the center of the bubble. Then finally, you probably should tie some of the deaths to individual stories, or interviews with survivors, friends and family. For me personally though, the numbers are important to put the emotional stories in context, and I am wary of news stories that don’t have numbers. Morbid stuff!

* Okay, I admit the “100,000 people in a fraction of a second” is just a number I picked somewhat for shock value. According to Wikipedia, 70,000-80,000 people were either vaporized instantly or burned to death shortly after the blast. Then a bunch more died of radiation poisoning of course. Does this make it any better? No, when it’s my turn please just vaporize me.

QAnon: a game or not a game? and, some thoughts on raising kids, or why a goat is actually not a son of a bitch

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This article about how QAnon is a game but not a game is clearly written by QAnon him or herself. He or she purports to believe QAnon is just a propaganda technique to indoctrinate people into various racist/right wing ideas, not by explicitly stating those ideas, but by leading people to follow a trail of “breadcrumbs” that result in them thinking they arrived at these ideas through their own cleverness. Breadcrumbs that consist of random events people will naturally try to build patterns out of. Then they are connected to other people who have arrived at similar ideas, entering an echo chamber where they can all just sit around sucking each others’…er, reinforcing each others’ beliefs. The fact that it resembles centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Gargamel from the Smurfs (come on, you know Hillary Clinton would love to drink sweet blue Smurf blood and melt those suckers down to gold in the basement of a pizza parlor if she ever got the chance) is just a coincidence. The coincidence that all those coincidental events appear to be a coincidence is just a coincidence. Next they’ll be telling us that Cuban mobsters with CIA connections didn’t murder JFK, or that Exxon and the Koch brothers didn’t pay people to act as fake “grass roots protestors” to cast doubt on obvious global warming science, or that the insurance industry didn’t pay off our elected officials to make sure Americans don’t have access to a health care system that could deal with a deadly global pandemic (which wasn’t created by the bat people in unholy fornication with the lizard people.)

The author tries to convince you that when most people make the A-OK hand symbol, they actually do not have any satanic intent. For example, astronauts >> aliens >> Satan!!! Do your own research.

The thing with the goat horn symbol is kind of weird though. I used to think it just meant two outs in baseball. I just feel bad for goats.

The horns of a goat mainly perform two purposes. The first purpose, and the one that is perhaps not as well known, is to act as an air conditioning system during hot weather. The horns help regulate body temperature.

The second function of a horn, which is maybe more familiar, is for a goat to protect itself. Goats often communicate by “butting” things. They play by butting or can even show affection. Two of our girls ask for pets by “gently” ramming us in the thigh (it’s bittersweet love). When a goat is threatened, the horn communication becomes more aggressive. They will lower their head and flatten their ears toward their attacker. The thick plate at the base of the skull and the sharp horns act as a great defense system; in some ways it’s like two swords and a shield ready to fight off predators—or a competing buck.

Raising Kids

So contrary to popular opinion, one thing we should be able to agree on is that baby goats are not evil. They are not even sons of bitches. They’re just kids.

Hillary Clinton speaks

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In Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton has a laundry list of ideas for U.S. war policy. (I like to say war instead of defense or security. Because that’s what we’re talking about. She talks a little bit about pandemics and climate change early on, but she gets down to war and weapons pretty quickly. This gives us a pretty good idea about what she would have been doing for the last four years.

  • Retire aging weapons systems and close unnecessary bases (as she explains, easier to say than do because each factory and each base supports the economy of some place, and the elected officials representing that place will fight tooth and nail against the cuts. She says one way around this is for Congress to agree on an up or down vote on a comprehensive package of reforms, rather than argue over individual bases or factories.)
  • “Invest in accelerated maintenance and next-generation submarines” rather than new aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable to clouds of cheap missiles and drones.
  • Long range bombers
  • “mechanisms that allow for consultation with China and Russia to reduce the chances that a long-range conventional attack is mistaken for a nuclear strike, which could lead to disastrous escalation.” (Joe here, yeah, we’re coming to bomb you, but it’s just the strongest normal bombs we have, nothing to worry about…)
  • fewer active-duty soldiers and tanks
  • “upgraded intelligence and communications systems” (shuttered tank factories take note, this is the stuff you need to learn about…)
  • “a renewed commitment to diplomacy” (Joe here…yeah, we just want to talk…just talk and maybe we won’t have to blow shit up)
  • “it will make sense for other NATO members to concentrate on strengthening their conventional ground forces so that they can deter incursions in eastern Europe or lead counterterrorism missions in Africa.” (Joe here…no, those aren’t our guns by your border…we just sold them to the guy who lives there…nothing to worry about, just stay away from your border and everything will be okay…)
  • “rebuilding of the country’s industrial and technological strength” (especially things that are useful for war and weapons…) “It’s not enough anymore to prioritize materials and technologies used for weapons systems and semiconductors; the United States’ security also depends on the control of pharmaceuticals, clean energy, 5G networks, and artificial intelligence.” 

Towards the bottom, she gets to nuclear weapons:

Perhaps most important, the United States needs a new approach to nuclear weapons. For starters, it should not be deploying low-yield nuclear warheads on submarines or nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which expand the range of scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons and increase the risk of a misunderstanding escalating quickly into a full-blown nuclear exchange. Nor should the United States spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years on its nuclear arsenal, as is currently planned. Instead, it should significantly reduce its reliance on old intercontinental ballistic missiles, pursue a “newer and fewer” approach to modernization, and revive the arms control diplomacy that the Trump administration scrapped. A top priority should be to extend the New START treaty with Russia, which Ellen Tauscher, the State Department’s top arms control official, and I helped negotiate at the beginning of the Obama administration. It will also be important to persuade China to join nuclear negotiations.

Foreign Affairs

(Joe here…yeah…no, not the small ones, just the really big ones…no, nothing to worry about, they’re so big we would never even think about using them…no…right, we want you to throw yours away…yeah, we’ll throw some of ours away too…right, nothing to worry about, the old ones, not the new, really really big shiny ones, which are so big and pretty we would never even think about blowing them up…yeah, we know we have a lot more of them, just throw some of your new ones away and then maybe we’ll throw some of our old ones away while we’re building the shiny new ones…)

mass incarceration

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Maybe I’ve finally put my finger on what bothered me about Black Lives Matter. Of course I’m not in favor of police brutality and nobody should be. Police brutality is a huge problem for the people on the receiving end of it, and it needs to be addressed. Addressing it would only remove drop from the bucket of violence and injustice in this country. We need to identify and address root causes of violence and injustice, but maybe that is too vague a concept for people to be marching in the streets about. Mass incarceration is concrete – we hear the numbers frequently, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. For every 100 or so people you see walking on the street, there is one American in a federal, state, or local jail. And some of those people on the street are on probation and parole. Add in friends and family of all those people, and a huge proportion of the population is affected, certainly enough to get a march together.

So what can we do about it? Just trying to reason it out, I would first identify things that don’t need to be crimes, and don’t make them crimes any more. Drug use and possession come to mind – unless you are selling drugs to children, you are really only hurting yourself and/or other consenting adults, and this should be dealt with through the health care system (we need a health care system!). Go ahead and legalize prostitution. Gambling is pretty much legal already. There might be other things in this category I haven’t thought of. Next, find non-violent ways to treat non-violent crimes. For example, address property crimes by taking away property.

Finally, you come down to just violent crimes, and violent criminals do need to be taken off the streets. But you can try to find ways to reduce and prevent crime rather than just treat the symptoms. Ultimately, as suggested in this Brennan Center for Justice report, the answer is to look at all those approaches and programs that have been tried on a small scale, follow the evidence, and then try to scale up the ones that have been proven to work. Things that have been tried include “deferred-sentencing diversion programs, pre-booking diversion programs, and alternative court models, including mental health and drug courts.”

This is hard, but unlike say, education, mass incarceration is pretty easy to measure and determine if we are making progress or not.

mRNA vaccines

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According to Der Spiegel, the mRNA vaccine development technology accelerated to deal with coronavirus could be adapted to protect against some forms of cancer and other diseases. In fact, some scientists working on these other diseases switched temporarily to coronavirus vaccine development, and will eventually go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The trick is that each patient receives an mDNA that is precisely tailored to the genetic profile of the cancer they are suffering from. These personalized cancer immunotherapies are still considered experimental, but the results of the initial study were so promising that Türeci, Şahin and their team were able to publish their results in July 2017 in Nature, the prominent scientific magazine. Almost two years later, a 52-year-old skin cancer patient in the U.S. received the experimental BioNTech treatment, after which he told Nature: “I was actually witnessing the cancer cells shrinking before my eyes.”

Der Spiegel

If a massive investment can break a log jam that has stymied research progress into a particular problem for decades, why don’t we do it more often? It would seem to support one of our most competitive industries, create jobs and stimulate the economy in the short term, and I would imagine it has a long term economic payoff. It would be nice to have an HIV vaccine and a male contraceptive shot or pill, just to name a couple.

Since this is publicly funded, will the “recipe” be made available to the WHO or other countries’ health agencies for free. That would seem like the moral thing to do. I also wonder though if the technology could be put to nefarious purposes like biological warfare or terrorism.

What’s new with emergy?

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Okay, I basically understand what emergy (embodied energy) is – the amount of energy incorporated (as opposed to lost to heat) in something useful, like an organism or a whole ecosystem. I am partial to the concept just from secondhand exposure to Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida. I never studied with him, but I knew some of his students and absorbed a little bit of his ideas through osmosis, and then I went back and did some reading later when I realized what I had missed. This paper is co-authored by Mark T. Brown, Odum’s long time collaborator who is still at UF pumping out studies on the subject.

The paper is interesting just for its literature review of other studies of ecosystem services and ecosystem function. The methods section has a nice run down of available spatial layers on energy, biomass, and ecosystems. The conclusion is that ecosystem functions are valuable, we have destroyed a lot of them, we are continuing to destroy them, and we may not be able to survive without them.

How could the U.S. end pro-war policies?

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The other day I called Biden pro-war, which might seem a little harsh. How would the U.S. actually go about reducing its military commitments, if it wanted to? I think the starting point is to realize that other countries are actually afraid of us. We have the world’s most powerful (most expensive anyway) military, and we use it frequently. The confrontations we are involved in with Russia and China tend to happen very close to those countries’ borders, and yet our rhetoric treats them as the aggressors.

Here is one set of ideas from the Defense Priorities think tank. Now, this think tank is funded by libertarian ideologues like Rand Paul, who just want to starve the government until it goes away, and corporate plutocrats like the Kochs, who just want to starve the government so they can keep all the money in their own pockets. Any money they save would not be reinvested in, say, Social Security if they were in charge. It would just be diverted to the rich and powerful. Nonetheless, the actual ideas for shrinking military commitments seem to be serious, and various factions who normally don’t agree might be able to come to a consensus in the short term, then argue about how to reinvest the proceeds later.

First step is to bring troops home from the Greater Middle East, from Afghanistan to Africa. Obama won a Nobel Prize just for saying he was going to do it. he didn’t do it. Trump said he was going to do it, and he also was not able to do it. Not only that, we blundered into conflicts in Libya and Syria under their administrations that seem intractable and have no obvious benefits, to us or to the people actually in those countries. It’s time to just announce dates for withdrawal and then withdraw.

Second step is to say NATO is done expanding. In retrospect, trying to expand NATO (starting under Bill Clinton) was very threatening to Russia, and we quickly lost their trust and cooperation. The nations of Europe are much more powerful technologically and economically than Russia. We can pull troops back while still supporting them with training and equipment (either giving or selling these things to them, the latter keeping the military-industrial complex here at home happier and less nervous.)

Similarly, in Asia we can pull troops back while supporting with training and equipment. South Korea and Japan are incredibly powerful countries that can fend for themselves day-to-day with some assurance that we would ride to their aid if actual armed conflict breaks out.

Terrorist threats can still be dealt with through intelligence and law enforcement operations. Arguably, our foreign military adventures have probably inspired more potential terrorists than if we had never gone on those adventures. We can make it clear that we are not a threat to other sovereign nations, and then we can spend a decade or two practicing what we preach so that they might actually start to believe what we say.

I might add to this negotiating hard for nuclear arms reductions and nonproliferation, and leading by example on these. Also reengaging and trying to reinvigorate the United Nations. Not being a military threat to other sovereign nations doesn’t mean we ignore human rights abuses within their borders. It means we work in concert with the world community to apply pressure to solve these problems.