So I visit a rundown zoo and see hyenas in miserable cages, lions in miserable cages, and antelopes in miserable cages. I'm disgusted by their conditions, so I attack the zookeepers and set the animals free. The lions eat the antelopes, the hyenas eat the antelopes (and sometimes the lions, too), and the antelopes run for shelter. Should I feel bad for not having minded my own business? No way, says Charles Krauthammer. Hey, who knew that lions liked to eat antelopes? "We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war."

• The first general theme that compels attention is that no nation that began a major war in this century emerged a winner.



• With regard to the problem of the outbreak of war, the case studies indicate the crucial importance of the personalities of leaders.



• The case materials reveals that perhaps the most important single precipitating factor in the outbreak of war is misperception. Such distortion may manifest itself in four different ways: in a leader's image of himself; a leader's view of his adversary's character; a leader's view of his adversary's intentions toward himself; and finally, a leader's view of his adversary's capabilities and power.



• There is a remarkable consistency in the self-images of most national leaders on the brink of war. Each confidently expects victory after a brief and triumphant campaign.



• This common belief in a short, decisive war is usually the overflow from a reservoir of self-delusions held by the leadership about both itself and the nation.



• Distorted views of the adversary's character also help to precipitate a conflict.



• When a leader on the brink of war believe that his adversary will attack him, the chances of war are fairly high. When both leaders share the perception about each other's intent, war become a virtual certainty.



• A leader's misperception of his adversary's power is perhaps the quintessential cause of war. It is vital to remember, however, that it is not the actual distribution of power that precipitates a war, it is the way in which a leader thinks that power is distributed.



• Thus, on the eve of each war, at least one nation misperceives another's power. In that sense the beginning of each war is a misperception or an accident. The war itself then slowly, and in agony, teaches the lesson of reality.

One comment I'd make is that Stoessinger's data set is necessarily limited in certain ways. For instance, he's not able to fully analyze the thoughts and actions of the leaders of closed societies, because that information is not available to him. Thus his analysis of why Stalin ignored the clear and specific (and accurate) warnings he received about Hitler's forthcoming attack is mostly speculative. Similarly, he can only speculate about why the North Koreans (or the Soviets using them as proxies) invaded South Korea, and his primary analysis in the case study therefore concerns the United States' response to the attack. Given that our current government is the most secretive and closed-off we've seen since World War II, it's difficult to apply Stoessinger's conclusions to the actions of the Bush Admnistration in invading Iraq and in their current (quite obvious) search for a casus belli to justify their long-held desire to attack Iran.

One other thing -- it's quite clear from the Administration's recent actions that, contrary to one of Stoessinger's points, Bush and Cheney have learned absolutely nothing from this war as it's progressed [sic] so far; instead, it's the American people, who began by mistakenly being supportive of Bush's invasion, who have learned those difficult lessons.

Still, I certainly agree with Stoessinger that the personality of the leaders is a primary determining factor: although it's hard to be sure, because much of what they've done really makes very little sense, the war is Iraq seems to ultimately be the result of Cheney's authoritarianism and Bush's many weaknesses being worked on by the fantasies of the neo-cons.

* The material I've quoted is from the Seventh Edition of the book. For the current edition, the Ninth, three other studies are apparently included, according to a customer review on Amazon.com: the wars between India & Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan & the American-Iraqi war. I'm unsure if the last refers to the current war or the Persian Gulf war, but I assume the former, and I would be very interested in getting hold of it to see how Stoessinger breaks down the cause(s) of Bush's war.

Addendum: I haven't been able to find anyplace where he spells out his thoughts about the current state of the Iraq War in more detail, but his speakers bureau listing says: "Dr. Stoessinger believes that history points to an honorable exit strategy from Iraq, whereby the United States would depart with a sense of accomplishment." That seems pretty damned optimistic to me.

I just finished watching San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom apologize for having a sexual relationship with the wife of his former campaign manager, Alex Tourk.

"I'm deeply sorry," he said during a brief City Hall news conference.

The TV described this as "Breaking News." By what definition? I mean, really, why is this anybody's business -- except for Mr.

Newsom, Mr. Tourk, Mr. Tourk's wife (the evocatively named Ruby Rippey-Tourk), and Mr. Newsom's ex-wife.

Why is this a public matter?

Exxon Mobil Corp. Thursday reported the biggest annual profit on record for a U.S. corporation - earning more than $75,000 every minute of 2006 on the back of record oil prices.

The world's biggest publicly traded company by revenue posted net earnings of $39.5 billion on revenue of $377.6 billion last year, topping its previous profit record of $36.1 billion in 2005, which at the time was the largest for any U.S. company.

Not adjusted for inflation, oil prices hit a record high of $77.03 a barrel last July, pushing gasoline prices above $3 a gallon nationwide.

Yippee! Keep on driving those SUVs -- it's your civic duty to keep the oil companies floating in dough. They say they need those record profits to compete with foreign oil companies, because the profits help them to ... help them to... Well, I guess the profits really don't help them, do they, because if they money was going to do something, it'd be plowed back into the company, and it wouldn't be profit then, would it?

But fear not, Exxon Mobil is doing their part -- why they spent $19.9 billion on oil exploration and production, which is up 12% from the year before, but still amounts to only about half the amount they chose to take in profits. Gee, I suppose they could have reinvested half of their profits, another $20 billion, into alternative energy development, I suppose that would have been helpful. Oh, but then their stockholders would only have a little less than $20 billion to divide up and who's going to invest in a company that shows only a measly $20,000,000,000 profit!!

It's a tough world out there in the corporate jungle, pity the poor companies like Exxon Mobil who are forced to take staggering profits just to stay alive.

520) I wish you were my obedient humble servant.[...] I should begin by a little flogging.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel
engineer and builder,
in response to
John Scott Russell,
owner of the shipyard building
Brunel's steamship
"The Great Eastern" (c. 1857)
quoted by Doug Stewart in
"There was too much Jonah
in Brunel's hapless leviathan" in
Smithsonian (11/94)

521) My question is, why do people wear clothes made from thin, delicate material, and a thing that hangs from the neck, and shoes with no soles? A tie gets caught in things, and there aren't enough pockets [...] and if you do anything, by the end of the day those delicate clothes get dirty and ruined. So I wear these clothes [jeans, a denim work shirt and square-toed leather boots] because I work. And frankly, the message sent by suits and ties -- which is, 'I don't really work' -- is offensive to me.

Dean Kamen
multimillionaire inventor and engineer,
quoted by Steve Kemper in
"'If you do not want to hear about
what he does, do not ask'" in
Smithsonian (11/94)

522) I hope that this whole experience [a robot-design competition] has convinced you that technology is accessible, rewarding and fun, and that you'd better work at it now. There are only two alternatives: you'll be dumb or you'll grow up and be a lawyer.

Dean Kamen
multimillionaire inventor and engineer,
quoted by Steve Kemper in
"'If you do not want to hear about
what he does, do not ask'" in
Smithsonian (11/94)

523) The classification of the planet's life-forms has implications that reach beyond biology. Take the capybara, a shy and intelligent rodent that in size [...] and color looks much like a pig. Yet in the 16th century, in response to a petition by Venezuelans and Colombians, the pope decreed that the capybara is a fish. The dispensation enables observant communicants to consume the creature during the fast of Lent [...] Likewise gracing the Lenten menu in parts of Canada is the beaver's tail. The scaliness and predominantly aquatic environment of the appendage persuaded the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris in the early 1700s to place it in the piscine order. The faculty of divinity at the University of Paris graciously deferred to the superior scientific acumen of its colleagues.

Madhusree Mukerjee
"What's in a Name?" in
Scientific American (11/94)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 719 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the defendant but journalism seemed at times to be on trial Wednesday as two reporters were questioned about their methods.

Libby's attorneys asked former New York Times reporter Judith Miller about her spotty memory and former Time reporter Matthew Cooper about his sloppy note-taking and inconsistent handling of confidential sources.

It's exactly what journalism groups feared when the trial began. Roy Peter Clark, an instructor at the Poynter Institute journalism center, predicted when the trial started that it would make both government spin doctors and reporters look bad.

The first part of that prediction came true early in the trial. On Wednesday, journalists had their day.

"If you take that snapshot as representative of the whole industry, it can make us look pretty bad," said Jane Kirtley, a media ethics professor at the University of Minnesota.

[...]

[Cooper's] testimony underscores the fact that reporters do not share a common understanding of what terms such as off-the-record and on background mean.

Clark said cross-examination makes any profession look bad, from emergency room doctors to high school teachers. The craft of journalism, he said, isn't always pretty but that doesn't mean its practitioners are irresponsible.

"In this case," Clark said, "the public will be watching sausage being made."

513)
It's like Spring-Training in real football.
Nothing personal, but let's forget the star-in-
College shit. Now you're going to learn to
Play Football. Let's try running into things.
First you have to learn to throw your weight
Way out in front. It's got to be ahead of you.
As close to the ground as possible. If you
Don't run into something, you fall down.
Like when you run down hill and lose control.
But in practice here and in real football
You will almost always run into something,
Equal and opposite, and the result will
Lift you both up, like continents colliding.
And the stronger will go forward. That's
What you're getting paid to fucking do.

Robert Ashley
Foreign Experiences (opera, 1994)

514)
No, George, there is your mother, my mother and birth control.
These are three reasons why we should not get married.

Robert Ashley
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (opera, 1991)

515) Up close and personal the [Washington, D.C.] capital community was phony beyond belief or toleration [...] a city of hypocrisy, a Mecca of hypocrisy, a Vatican of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy of the place impoverished conversation, undermined friendship, stupefied the mind, saddened the heart. Washington, I learned, was to hypocrisy what Mexico City is to smog, what France is to ethnocentrism, what Chernobyl is to nuclear risk, what Newcastle was to coals.

Paul Weaver
News and the Culture of Lying (1994)

516) A Rhode Island College psychologist says he has uncovered a strange quirk in the voting behavior of people who believe in psychic powers, UFOs, and other elements of the supernatural. While most believers tend to be liberal in their views, Tom Randall [...] says his surveys have shown that a disproportionate number tended to vote for third-party conservatives. [...] Third-party supporters had, by far, the highest level of belief in the paranormal. (Republicans had the lowest.) Randall said that the findings seem to suggest that such supporters of third-party conservatives may be embracing candidates who offer quick, easy, and almost magical solutions to problems. "I suspect a degree of magical thinking characterizes (the type of voter) who is dazzled by the charismatic charm of, say, a Ross Perot..."

C. Eugene Emery, Jr.
"New Age Believers Favor Third-Party Conservatives" in
Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994)

517) With the advent of spin doctors, lawyers finally have someone they can look down on.

Ed Fitzgerald (10/13/94)

518) The problem for the press is that its core values, such as objectivity and skepticism, do not mesh well with the rally-round-the-flag passions that swept the country in wartime.

Howard Kurtz
Media Circus (1993)

519) As a species, we seem to have reached a plateau in our intellectual development. There is no sign that we are getting smarter. [...] We have learned a lot in 2,000 years, yet much ancient wisdom still seems sound, which makes me think that we have not been making much progress. We still do not know how to resolve conflicts between individual goals and global interests. We are so bad at making decisions that, whenever we can, we leave to chance what we are unsure about.

Marvin Minsky
"Will Robots Inherit the Earth?" in
Scientific American (10/94)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 720 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

Airbus, maker of the delayed A380 superjumbo, is in talks with two potential buyers of private versions of the $300 million plane that the company calls the "flying palace."

"They are not customers until they sign, but there are two very interested parties," Richard Gaona, vice president of Airbus' executive and private aviation unit, said in an interview Monday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. "It's going to be a private jet," Gaona said, adding that one of the customers was in the Middle East.

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

[...]

In the United States we have turned our backs on the working class, with much of the worst assaults, such as NAFTA and welfare reform, pushed though during President Clinton’s Democratic administration. We stand passively and watch an equally pernicious assault on the middle class. Anything that can be put on software, from architecture to engineering to finance, will soon be handed to workers overseas who will be paid a third what their American counterparts receive and who will, like some 45 million Americans, have no access to health insurance or benefits.

There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us “an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

[...]

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to “secular humanists,” to “nominal Christians,” to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power. And we are not in a period of crisis now. But another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, a series of huge environmental disasters or an economic meltdown will hand to these radicals the opening they seek. Manipulating our fear and anxiety, promising to make us safe and secure, giving us the assurance that they can vanquish the forces that mean to do us harm, these radicals, many of whom have achieved powerful positions in the Executive and legislative branches of government, as well as the military, will ask us only to surrender our rights, to pass them the unlimited power they need to battle the forces of darkness.

They will have behind them tens of millions of angry, disenfranchised Americans longing for revenge and yearning for a mythical utopia, Americans who embraced a theology of despair because we offered them nothing else.

Fox's Roger Ailes is getting a First Amendment award.

[Thanks to Romaine]

When 75,000 football fans pack into Dolphin Stadium in Miami for the Super Bowl on February 4, at least a few may want to carry notes from their doctors explaining why they're radioactive enough to set off "dirty bomb" alarms.

With the rising use of radioisotopes in medicine and the growing use of radiation detectors in a security-conscious nation, patients are triggering alarms in places where they may not even realize they're being scanned, doctors and security officials say.

Nearly 60,000 people a day in the United States undergo treatment or tests that leave tiny amounts of radioactive material in their bodies, according to the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It is not enough to hurt them or anyone else, but it is enough to trigger radiation alarms for up to three months.

This is of interest to me, and in fact I thought about it just last week when I underwent a stress test to check out how my heart is doing after my heart attack and stent implantation of 2 1/2 years ago. The procedure involves the injection of radioactive thallium before and after the test, so they can take before and after pictures of the heart using the emitted radioactivity. As I waited to talk to the doctor about the results, I wondered if on the way home on the subway I might not set off one of the new "dirty bomb" detectors rumored to be around (and under) the city. Nothing happened, though, except that I almost missed my stop due to being engrossed in the book I was reading.

Good thing I'm not planning on flying anywhere in the next couple of months. That could be fun!

(Oh, and my heart is doing just fine, thank you.)

Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It's hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter).

One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.

In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.