Is it 1984 yet?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell. 1984

When I read George Orwell’s 1984 back in high school, I wasn’t troubled so much by the idea of Big Brother watching everything. Now we have TIVO that watches what you watch and Homeland Security can tap anyone’s phone and nobody seems concerned. No, what made Orwell’s vision of the future seem unlikely to me then was the notion of an endless war with a shifting identity of “the enemy,” sometimes one, sometimes another. Americans would never fall for that, I figured.  

Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Who is our enemy? Who are our citizen-soldiers fighting in Iraq? The Ba'athists? They're just a ring around the tub. The Sunnis? No, they’re our allies now. The Shi’ia? No, they’re the Iraqi government, which we support. Muqtada al Sadr? Sometimes we’re allies; sometimes enemies. Bush has it confused. McCain is confused. So it’s no surprise that the people are confused. 

Scott McClellan’s admission today that he participated in a grand smokescreen in the run-up to the war only confirms that we are deep into 1984-land.

For an analysis of where this all leads, there is this from the LA Times:

The 'Long War' fallacy
Andrew J. Bacevich
May 15, 2008

Donald Rumsfeld is today a discredited and widely reviled figure. Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's successor as defense secretary, is generally admired for manifesting qualities that Rumsfeld lacked -- a willingness to listen not least among them. Yet on one crucial point, the two see eye to eye: Both believe that the United States has no alternative but to wage a global war likely to last decades.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld wasted no time in telling Americans what to expect. "Forget about 'exit strategies,' " he said on Sept. 28, 2001, "we're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines." Speaking at West Point last month, Gates echoed his predecessor's assessment: "There are no exit strategies," he announced. Instead, Gates described a "generational campaign" entailing "many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world."

For the U.S., the prospect of permanent war now beckons.

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the "Long War" has been about all of these things and more.

Read the whole column at www.latimes.com/news/opinion/ la-oe-bacevich13-2008may13,0,7251551.story

The joys of springtime

One down, one to go. This foal is only 2 days old. His name is Kid. Susan's mare Kate is expecting any day now so we'll have two little ones frisking around.  Spring sure is a lot of work, but it also has its joys.

10 theories of social change

From San Francisco, PZ sends another way to look at the concepts that shape our world (re: the May 20 post: Shakespeare’s world and ours). This is from the Truthout.org website and looks at the big concepts that govern our view of what drives social change. 

Why Change Happens: Ten Theories
Tuesday 13 May 2008
by: Sara Robinson, The Campaign for America's Future

One of the grandest - and most frustrating - things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In fact, there's simply nothing like the Internet if you want to be thrown together with people who have ordered their entire lives around fundamental propositions that would never have occurred to you if you lived to be 100. Behold your fellow earthlings, in all their bizarre and twisted glory....

A lot of these disconnects have to do with all the weird and wonderful theories people have about why change happens. Because we each have our own pet theories of how the world works, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what's likely to happen next. Since these often unspoken understandings are among the things futurists are trained to look for, I thought I'd offer a short taxonomy of the various assumptions people bring to their thinking about what drives social change.

See the 10 theories at www.truthout.org/article/why-change-happens-ten-theories.

Yi Fu Tuan and the God of physics

Thanks to Harry for sending this link to Yi Fu Tuan’s site: http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm. He asks an interesting question about why physicists see God in the universe but biologists don’t, so I have copied the entire (short) post below. The link also gives access to his archives, etc.

May 10, 2008
Dear Colleague:
In 1950, I listened over the radio a debate on "Science and Religion" between the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an agnostic, and classicist Dorothy Sayers, a Christian. Although my sympathy lay with Sayers, I thought Hoyle had the better argument. So imagine my surprise when I learned later that Hoyle came close to accepting Intelligent Design. He was forced to that view by the delicate beauty of stellar nuclear reactions. How could a process so remarkable be just a happy accident? In exasperation, Hoyle is reported to have said, "The universe is a put up job." Hoyle's astonishment is the rule rather than the exception among great physicists of our time. Einstein spoke of the regularities of nature, mathematically precise, as "reason incarnate." He threw around the words "spirit" and "God" rather freely in his philosophical and popular writings. "Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men." Spirit? What spirit? Stephen Hawking wrote: "If we find the answer to [why it is that we and the universe exist], it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." To Max Planck, originator of quantum theory, "There can never be any real opposition between religion and science...They are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition...[and therefore] 'On to God!'"

Isn't there something strange and counter-intuitive in the views of physical scientists? They, after all, study inanimate matter and forces. What room is there in their work for life, much less intelligence, mind, and God? So why do they keep introducing these metaphysical, quasi-religious ideas? Why aren't they all aggressive atheists? Now, if I didn't know better, I would say that biologists are inclined to favor religion and use freely the words "spirit" and "God." They, after all, study life, something that is extremely rare and rather mysterious in the universe. But no. With the exception of Charles Darwin himself, the militant atheists of his day and ours are biologists. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is an outstanding example.

I find this difference between physicists and biologists puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with hinges on "beauty." Physicists are struck by the beauty—the mathematical elegance—of natural laws. Biologists, so far as I know, never see anything beautiful in what they study: not only is ecology messy, even the DNA is complicated, untidy stuff. Life is ugly because it is a product of evolution. A lot of redundancy is built into life's functions to ensure its survival. The "God" of biologists—if biologists ever get to postulate such a being!—is an engineer, not a mathematician. The engineer, having just designed a bridge that perfectly adapts to a specific set of conditions, then more or less arbitrarily adds a factor of ten to its tensile strength, just so that it can survive a once-in-fifty-year blizzard! No wonder bridges are so clunky and ugly. No wonder, dear colleague, we—built by nature or God the engineer—are so ugly. Such uglinesses don't require that we postulate "intelligence" or "God."
Yi Fu

Shakespeare's world and ours

There’s no reason I’m thinking about Shakespeare today except that I was recently in his hometown. But it occurred to me that most of us are familiar with his plays and find him very perceptive about human nature and a generally wise guy. But what would it be like to hold a conversation with him? Consider all of the concepts that we take for granted in our worldview of which Bill was completely ignorant. Here are 25 that I thought of this morning:

1. The age of the earth
2. Radioactivity
3. Bacteria and the germ theory of disease
4. Oxygen
5. Evolution
6. Space (rather than ether)
7. Blood circulation
8. Neanderthals
9. The speed of light
10. Ice ages
11. Gravity (the theory of)
12. The atom
13. Rock stratification indicating age
14. Right brain / left brain
15. Plate tectonics
16. DNA and genetic inheritance
17. How sex makes babies
18. Why the sun is hot
19. Psychoanalysis and the subconscious
20. Dinosaurs
21. The big bang theory
22. Meteorology / how weather happens
23. The finite nature of natural resources
24. Calories
25. The on/off switch

My guess is that in the first five minutes of our dialog, we would get stuck on a concept that we think of as essential to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but that would be entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare.

At least he knew, or could have known, that the Earth orbits the sun, since Copernicus published that opinion about 50 years before Shakespeare was born. On the other hand, Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Church to shut up about heliocentrism in the same year Shakespeare died, so it wasn't exactly accepted fact in all quarters. 

So the next time we are tempted to think we have the ultimate answer to any question at all, I guess we should stop and ask what fundamental concepts we might be ignorant of that our colleagues from 2408 (if humanity lasts that long) will consider basic to understanding the world. Just a thought for the day to put things in perspective.

Chowder head

Somewhere I heard about this book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and thought it might be a good recommendation for the Drinking & Reading Society, it being about the natural world and man’s relationship to it and all. Fortunately, I listened to it on tape first. There are way too many recipes and pointless meandering interviews with former Labradorean fishermen and not enough science or even history.

The only real lesson is to remember that people not so long ago thought cod were inexhaustible – like the buffalo, the northern forests, and hundreds of other inexhaustible resources that now stand exhausted. I suppose it’s useful to have one more example, but haven’t we learned this lesson yet? I suppose not; while changing tapes I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh’s daily rant to the effect that “People, there is no such thing as global warming. Humans aren’t doing anything to harm the planet.” Maybe he should read Cod.

But, so you don’t have to, I have included this 5-star review off the Amazon website from Cloudia in Seattle:

There's a cartoon in Matt Groening, the nine types of professors. One is the single-minded type, as in "The country that controls magnesium controls the world!" His main drawback is that he could be right. Cod sort of reminds me of that.

You may not have known how important or popular this particular fish was to most of our ancestors in Western civilization, but, according Kurlansky, Cod was practically like bread. It was easy to fish, there was a ton of it, and once Europeans learned the various ways of drying it (with cold and/or salt) all people could think about was trading this staple. Yes, Kurlansky's book is single-minded, and at times you might forget this is a fish tale. When the Vikings found America, what where they looking for? And how did they manage to sustain themselves through the long ocean voyage? The answers are of course, cod. Kurlansky also has a few outlandish things to say about another favorite topic of his, the Basque, who it appears had been regularly fishing for Cod in Newfoundland long before Columbus found America. They were really good at keeping a secret, you see.

Fortunately, there's a serious, or, at least more socially acceptable side, to Kurlansky's fish story. The fishing trade really is threatened. You can no longer practically walk on Atlantic cod. Even Icelanders who found their entire economy changing from one of sustenance to a first world service economy, during the two world wars, have a difficult time protecting their dwindling stock. If Aldous Huxley's grandfather, Thomas, asserted in the 19th century that cod would never become extinct, it was only because he could not imagine the rapid technological changes which would turn fishing into harvesting, and the classic practice of drying fish into freezing it, on board the fishing boats themselves. Good-bye bacalao, hello fishsticks.

It's a sad tale as ways of life dwindle and change, and even the very essentials of human existence that have lasted for thousands of years go unheard of by the post-industrial society. But are we really evolving into something better? Kurlansky peppers his narrative with quotes from notables throughout the ages and interesting, if often archaic, recipes.

OK, so now you don’t have to read the book unless you really, really want to.

Bad year for bluebirds

Today I removed another empty bluebird nest. Two days ago it had a tiny mass of naked wriggling bluebird chicks a few hours old. Now there's no sign of chicks nor birds. No remains of any kind, which suggests a snake or similar varmint. This box was on a metal pole, but that's no guarantee against intruders, especially snakes. The other nest that had eggs is also empty, although the birds have started a new nest. I'm not terribly hopeful. The later in the season, the poorer the chances they will survive. Meanwhile, there are eggs in the box behind the house, but that's on a wooden post and besides it's much too close to the wrens (no, we don't keep wren houses, but they are prolific anyway) which means the odds are against success in this box too. That makes three nests with eggs or chicks destroyed by predators this spring - two by land and one by air. It's been a tough spring all around.