Afghanistan

View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan

This article in the NYTIMES online by C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, and Eric Schmitt, with contributions from Jacob Harris and Alan McLean takes as its starting point the recent publication, through Wikileaks, of thousands of classified documents about the ongoing military operations in Afghanistan.

The article is unpleasant reading. It details, in example after example, how difficult it is to stabilize a country that doesn't seem to have any interest in stabilizing itself.


My reflections:

1) This is not about Afghanistan, but about every single nation in the world that is falling apart because it can't feed its population at a living standard they're willing to accept. While Islam is certainly adding flavour to the problem, the underlying problem is that people are fighting for control over resources. Afghanistan is too hot and too dry, and its population is too hungry. We either have to feed them or fight them.

2) The conflict is being shaped not so much by Islam, but by a lethal triangle of Western inventions. The first corner of the triangle is dirt cheap, mass-produced high-tech weaponry and explosives. The second is dirt cheap transportation. The third is dirt cheap communications. It's the combination of all three that enables modern insurgents to do things today that only national armies could do in the past.

Add to that, if you like, that our modern, industrial agriculture has pushed food prices so low down, that there's no way that Afghanistan can make a decent living from growing food for the world market.

3) The driving force behind the current conflict isn't so much Islam, as the money that the Afghans can manage to suck out of Western nations, in exchange for heroin. Until we learn to take care of our own heroin addicts, the Afghans are going to keep doing it for us.

4) Armies in a war are a little like businesses in a market place: If all else is equal, victory will go to the party with the lowest operating costs. In Afghanistan, our operating costs per shot fired are simply enormous, compared with what the enemy has to pay.

That much being said, all other things are of course not equal. Our weapons are more sophisticated, and we have more of them. The insurgents, on the other hand, can hide in the civilian population, and is free to torture and murder anyone they suspect of collaborating with us.

- o 0 o -

I'm left with a strong impression that the war in Afghanistan can't be won, because I can't imagine how anyone can manage to stabilize a place like that. Their education level is low. They have no fisheries. There's very little industry. It's too hot and too dry, and the soils probably way too saline for their agriculture to have any hope of competing with ours. There's no reliable civilian infrastructure. And yet, as long as there's a western market for expensive heroin, the place is a bubbling cauldron of money. This place is going to continue to mean TROUBLE.

:-J

"Gluten free" isn't the same as gluten free

"Gluten-free" foods may be contaminated

This article by Genevra Pittma brings our attention to a new study of supposedly naturally gluten free products. Unfortunately, many of these appear to contain gluten after all.

Researchers analyzed 22 naturally gluten-free grains, seeds, and flours off supermarket shelves. They tested the amount of gluten in those products against a proposed Food and Drug Administration limit for any product labeled gluten-free, 20 parts contaminant per million parts product.

Seven of the 22 products wouldn't pass the FDA's gluten-free test - and one product, a type of soy flour, had a gluten content of almost 3,000 parts per million, the authors found. Other products from the sample that weren't truly gluten-free included millet flour and grain, buckwheat flour, and sorghum flour.

My reflections: This study illustrates one possible reason why children on a GFCF diet don't improve more than they do: Gullible researchers think the children are on a Gluten Free diet, while they are, in reality, only on a "Gluten Free" diet.

:-J

Why argumements escalate

How facts backfire

One of the most thankless jobs a lawyer can take on, is to try to dampen, rather than escalate a conflict. This article by Joe Keohane sheds some light on why this is so.

Instead of giving you an explanation or a summary, I'll give you a few selected quotes.


"New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire."

"... people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are."

"A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”"

"... relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods."

My reflections: This article explains all the main reasons why arguments tend to be self-reinforcing. The sentence "The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are" echoes particularly strongly with me. The more important it is for us to resolve a conflict, for example with someone we love and feel dependent on, the harder it is to do it. Our ability to catch our own mistakes are always at the weakest, when we need them the most.


:-J

The dangers of sitting

The Men Who Stare at Screens

This article in the NYTIMES by Gretchen Reynolds brought the insight that sitting too much involves dangers that can not be undone by bouts of exercise.

I'm SO glad I never got a TV.

:-J

News about the human microbiome

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

This article from the New York Times, by Carl Zimmer, should be obligatory reading for anybody who wants to characterize bacteriae as either good or bad.

Some quotes:

"Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since. "

"In the mouth alone, Dr. Relman estimates, there are between 500 and 1,000 species. “It hasn’t reached a plateau yet: the more people you look at, the more species you get,” he said. The mouth in turn is divided up into smaller ecosystems, like the tongue, the gums, the teeth. Each tooth—and even each side of each tooth—has a different combination of species. "

"Scientists are even discovering ecosystems in our bodies where they weren’t supposed to exist. Lungs have traditionally been considered to be sterile because microbiologists have never been able to rear microbes from them. A team of scientists at Imperial College London recently went hunting for DNA instead. Analyzing lung samples from healthy volunteers, they discovered 128 species of bacteria. Every square centimeter of our lungs is home to 2,000 microbes. "

" Out of the 500 to 1,000 species of microbes identified in people’s mouths, for example, only about 100 to 200 live in any one person’s mouth at any given moment. Only 13 percent of the species on two people’s hands are the same. Only 17 percent of the species living on one person’s left hand also live on the right one. "

"One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal, ...”

"The Imperial College team that discovered microbes in the lungs, for example, also discovered that people with asthma have a different collection of microbes than healthy people. Obese people also have a different set of species in their guts than people of normal weight."

My reflection: It's going to take a LONG time before reductive science manages to make sense of the interactions between all these bacteriae and ourselves. In the mean time, we'd better approach the subject with some humility. Remember how the polio epidemic got started? It turned out that the main cause was cleanliness: People were meeting a new microbe later in life than they used to.

:-J

Reflections on Risk

This morning, I ran the numbers on traffic fatalities in the US and Norway.

The background was a Charles Krauthammer's article in the Washington Post, "A disaster with many fathers", where he insinuates that there would be fewer oil spills if the oil companies were allowed easier access to other potential oil fields, in shallower water. To me, that's like saying that there would be fewer traffic accidents if roads were better and cars were cheaper, so drivers could afford to upgrade to newer, safer models.

This hypothesis is testable. America, for example, has fantastically good roads, compared to Norway. Their fleet of cars is also much younger, thanks to the fact that cars cost next to nothing there.

Does this lead to fewer accidents? Apparently not. The US has 2,4-2,6 times more traffic related fatalities per inhabitant per year.

My first idea when I saw this number, must that it must be due to Americans driving more than Norwegians. Wouldn't better roads lead to more driving and then to more accidents? If so, that would be bad for Charles Krauthammer, since it would imply that better access to more oil fields would simply result in more drilling and more oil spills.

When I checked the numbers, it turned out that Americans do indeed drive more than Norwegians, but only enough to explain 15% of the effect.

My wife suggested that the remaining 85% difference might be due to higher fines and stricter law enforcement in Norway. It's true that the fines for speeding are higher here, but the enforcement is actually laxer: In Norway I see policemen doing speed checks once or twice a year, and in America I see them several times a day when I'm doing long road trips.

My conclusion is that the remaining 85% of the difference must be due to the fact that Americn drivers (just like Norwegians) compensate for better roads and cars by adapting their driving style to the perceived level of risk they're comfortable with, and that Americans are collectively less risk-averse than Norwegians.

There's no reason that Americans in general would behave more responsibly in boardrooms than behind steering-wheels. What we really, really need to do, is to create systems of governance in the widest sense, that keep the risktakers out of positions where we can't afford to have them. Like in certain parts of the banking system, or behind automatic weapons. We need to limit their freedom, in order to preserve our own opportunities.

Why aren't Americans more risk-averse? Is it because America is populated by the descendants of people who preferred the risk of the great unknown, to the certainty of what they had at home? If so, it's strange to see how strong the effect is, and just how Kraut-headed (sorry, but that pun was irresistible) Charles Krauthammer is in his belief.

How far does the Tea Party Movement want to go?

I've been having a discussion with some of my friends lately about the "Tea Party" movement, and their idea that we should promote individual freedom whenever we can. This is an intensely political question. Is there an easy answer anywhere? The "Tea Party" followers seem to think that there is.

Last night, I read Bob Herbert's article "An Unnatural Disaster" about the oil spill in the Gulf. It struck me immediately that this is an opportunity to discuss the balance between freedom and opportunity in our society: The freedom of for example BP to take risks, versus the opportunities of practically everyone else in the regional ecosystem.

This morning, I was offered Charles Krauthammer's article "A disaster with many fathers" as an alternative opinion the matter. I read it with great interest.

Both articles suffer from the same weakness: They've been written to please the demographic that already subscribes to each columnist's way of thinking. It's as if both of them know that there's thin ice out there in the middle of the lake, and none of them wants to go anywhere near it.

Bob Herbert's take on the issue, is to have more Government Control. I'm not sure that's the only answer. Government employees aren't always competent, and they can sometimes be bribed. My favourite book on the subject is Nevil Shute's autobiographical "Slide Rule", that details why the "capitalist" airship R100 flew as it should, while the government-built R101 went up in flames and killed 48 people.

Charles Krauthammer's views puzzle me more. He seems to be insinuating that the Deepwater Horizon accident was caused by drilling in unusually deep water, and that we'd all be safer if the oil companies were allowed to drill in more locations in shallow water. That is pure nonsense.

The Deepwater Horizon has precious little to do with the amount of water between the rig and the wellhead on the ocean floor, and everything to do with BP's willingness to take risks. At that critical moment in time, just before the well blew out, BP was comfortable with keeping only two cement plugs and a potentially compromised blowout preventer between themselves and disaster.

* They continued the drilling,in spite of the fact that the rubber seal in the blowout preventer was compromised (chunks of rubber were coming up),

* They continued with the drilling in spite of the fact that one of the actuators (there were two) for the preventer wasn't working properly, and

* They started replacing the heavy drilling mud with lighter salt water before placing the third and final cement plug that was supposed to seal the well.

(Source: "60 minutes" interview with surviving crew member and experts on offshore drilling safety).

This was a bit like making love with only two condoms and the ragged remains of a third, when they knew that the baby, if they sired one, was going to be another Adolf Hitler.

I've heard Bob Herbert described is a leftist. That's weird, seen from the European perspective. A real leftist would have argued that the government should not only be the one to decide how many condoms to use: It should also own the whole drilling operation. That's where I've always felt that leftists are delusional.

Krauthammer, on the other hand, is just as delusional if he thinks that oil companies will start behaving responsibly just as soon as they're allowed to drill in shallower water: That's almost like arguing that teenage boys will be less likely to lose their heads when girls have shorter skirts. Some boys will take reasonable precautions. Others won't, and that's how it is.

The question that ought to be discussed at the "Tea Party" is how to keep the latter out of the boardrooms, (or for instance how easy their access to handguns should be, to go off on a related tangent).

My view is that we need systems of governance that keep business (and not only people) in check, because businesses are led by people, and because some of them (like banks and oil companies) are capable of causing truly horrendous damage. However, even small businesses can cause damage that is serious for smaller communities, and since some businesses are led by idiots and other by crooks, there's no exempt them from oversight just because they're small.

What worries me about the "Tea Party" movement is that I only see them arguing one side of the equation: Towards fewer rules and less regulation. That's why I see them as anarchists and fundamentalists, more than right-wing extremists. What I'm wondering is: How far do they actually want to go? Do they think that the current oil spill in the Gulf is the result of an acceptable risk? Do they concede that society needs any safeguards at all against undue risk-taking or outright criminal behaviour on the part of businessmen and corporations? Where, in all the fogbank, do they want to draw the limits?

I agree with them that a simplified society with fewer rules is attractive. As a lawyer I have often despaired over the naive belief that some politicians have, that all problems can be solved if we only get enough rules. On the other hand, I haven't seen a single empirical study indicating that the societies that have the lowest number of rules, or the least amount of government oversight are the ones that function best.

I'm curious about all my friends' views on this.


:-J