Voder-Vocoder

If Pervez Musharraf had just declared himself King of Pakistan years back no one would have minded (except me; personally I hate kings (“mostly rapscallions”)). Do we ever ask the king of Saudi Arabia or queen of England to step down in favor of a democratically elected head of state?

“I call upon all men of goodwill to be maladjusted”

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian.

[...] Imagine—here let me now address non-Indian readers—somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself than your own ancestors?

—From 1491, by Charles C. Mann

My current reading project is to get to all those nonfiction books which I’ve have been meaning to read for years. The last two I read, 1491 and Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty have a common theme: the impact of disease on world events. One of the major points of 1491 is that our understanding of Native American civilization is skewed by the fact that as many as 95% of them died as a result of Old World disease. One of the major points of The End of Poverty is that many of the places in the world with endemic extreme poverty are in that position mainly as a result of diseases such as malaria and aids.

And it seems so foreign to me. I’ve never lost a single friend or acquaintance to a communicable disease. Cancer, heart disease, old age, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver: these are the killers I know, not malaria or smallpox.

Number dead as a result of 2001 September 11 Hijackings: 2,973

Number dead as a result of Iraq War: 65,000+

Number dead as a result of Traffic Accidents in US in 2005 alone: 43,443

Update 2006-09-18: Ryan Singel says it much better here:

With that in mind, here’s a handy ranking of the various dangers confronting America, based on the number of mortalities in each category throughout the 11-year period spanning 1995 through 2005 (extrapolated from best available data).

S E V E R E
Driving off the road: 254,419
Falling: 146,542
Accidental poisoning: 140,327

H I G H
Dying from work: 59,730
Walking down the street: 52,000.
Accidentally drowning: 38,302

E L E V A T E D
Killed by the flu: 19,41
Dying from a hernia: 16,742

G U A R D E D
Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536
Electrocution: 5,171

L O W
Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949
Terrorism: 3147
Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554

(more…)

“His suggestions for securing the U.S.-Mexico border went beyond walls to include moats, fiery moats and fiery moats with fire-proof crocodiles.” (source)

Fire-proof crocodiles are expensive. Wouldn’t ut be easier to have TWO parallel moats, one filled with crocodiles, and another one filled with fire?

Image below the fold
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Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas): “None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.”

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.): “‘Give me liberty or give me death.’”

(source)

Happy Día de la Resistencia Indígena!

He [Jared Diamond] elaborated a bit on his book’s account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, “The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!” The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since.

Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes:

• “Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem.”
• “This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it.”
• “Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research.”
• “Just have faith. God will provide.”

—Summarized by Stewart Brand (source)

That was Jared Diamond’s take on the impending end of things. I’ve already made that analogy.

Via Billmon, who has more to say:

Ordinarily, I’d be the last one to challenge Jared Diamond’s thinking — the man is a genius. But in this case I have to wonder if he isn’t overanalyzing things. Maybe the reason humans act so dumb isn’t because of their intellectual frame of reference, or their clan structure, or because they lack historical awareness. Maybe people act dumb because a lot of them are dumb — dumb as turnips. So stupid they have trouble each morning remembering that their shoes go on their feet. So mentally challenged they have to use crib notes to remember their ABCs. So monumentally dense they can’t even do the job of a cable news talk show host — or at least not properly. Borderline vegetative, in other words.

If my boss nicknamed me Turd Blossom, I would quit. And possibly sue for harassment.

Many analysts have noted the transformation of Al Qaeda from an organization to a movement—that is, from a top-down, centrally directed terrorist group to a decentralized “franchise” operation, in which local operators like Abu Zarqawi and the Madrid bombers make their own plans and pursue their own tactical objectives.

John Robb, the systems analyst behind the blog Global Guerrillas, argues that this evolution may actually have improved Al Qaeda’s long-term survivability and operational effectiveness, even if it rules out large, complex attacks like 9/11. A highly decentralized network of terrorist cells, he argues, can use something analogous to market mechanisms to coordinate its actions—learning to avoid the mistakes and imitate the successes of other cells.

If true, it could mark the birth of an entirely new type of conflict—a “fifth generation” warfare in which the enemy not only isn’t a nation state, but isn’t even an entity—like the Viet Cong or the Shining Path or the PLO. It’s almost impossible to imagine how a security establishment that yet hasn’t learned how to fight a fourth generation insurgency is going to cope with that.

—Billmon (source)

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place with thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder – its DNA – xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

—NS (source)

If Terror is now nothing more than a franchise—anyone with a high school education, access to a public library (you don’t even need to check books out), and a grudge can start a cell—then we need to rethink how we deal with it. How do you deal with spoiled brats who throw tantrums? Ignore them.

What do these kids want? (1) They want to be on TV. (2) They want you to be afraid of them.