Is this Progress?

An interesting little video from 1968, in which Noam Chomsky debates William Buckley about the Vietnam War. What struck me is how very civil they both were towards each other, even though they held such different views on a highly divisive issue:

Now flash forward to 2006, and look how the host of this show abuses the mother of a slain soldier:

So, what have we gained by being so abusive and rude to people because they hold different views?

Do Americans really deserve such hosts, who are rude and abusive, and have no content or original thoughts to back up their outrageous behavior? Is political debate only entertainment, or does it serve some other social function, which would demand a certain level of quality?

If Americans don’t demand this certain level of quality, will they every get it?  Do media companies have a responsibility, other than higher ratings?

Economist on Bio-Terrorism

Well, just a slight ripple in the press, about the lack of preparedness for a bio-terror event, and the glacial pace that the authorities are preparing for such an event is contrasted with the near certainty among those leaders polled that a bio-terror attack is likely within the next 5 years. This is from the Economist, which IMHO has had consistently better reportage about Science and Health Issues. Perhaps their Art department and their Science and Technology staff have both been somewhat immune to the long, slow quality decline in the Economist I have noted over the last 6 or seven years or so?

Also, recall another Economist article “Chronicle of a Disease Foretold” from 1990 or so, another example of thoughtful reporting about the intersection of globalization and disease processes.

BUG-BOMBS AND BACTERIA

Can the line against bio-terror hold?
Dec 13th 2006

From The Economist print edition

Efforts to avert germ warfare succumb to low expectations

IMAGINE if the tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 that killed a former Russian agent, Alexander Litvinenko, in London last month—contaminating his family and more than a dozen other people from London’s Mayfair district to Hamburg and Moscow—had instead been minute droplets of highly contagious smallpox virus, genetically engineered to neutralise vaccines. Does that sound too hard a trick for a would-be suicidal terrorist to pull off? In early 2001 a team of Australian-based scientists attempting to find a contraceptive vaccine for mice slipped a gene into the mousepox virus that inadvertently turned the normally mild strain deadly.

….

Yet a recent survey by Amy Smithson of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC, found that over 80% of past and present senior American officials, congressmen and non-government experts interviewed thought a biological attack in the next five to ten years to be likely, very likely or else a dead cert.

….

Meanwhile, before the next review in 2011, annual meetings of experts will actually spend less time (one week, instead of two until now) discussing ways to improve lab safety and the security measures needed to govern dangerous pathogens, and on developing codes of conduct for those working in the biotech industry.

Well, thank heavens the safety of the American People is GWB’s first priority, otherwise, we’d be in real trouble, right?

Outbreak of What in Boston?

Here’s a story that I’ll follow. It’s about an outbreak of Pertussis in Boston, only it turns out it really wasn’t Pertussis, nobody knows what it is. I had postulated that a free press is a key element to bringing public resources to bear on health issues, and to the ultimate control of epidemics, so this outbreak seems like something relevant to study. The prevention of epidemics and other public health emergencies can’t be done through market action alone, for many reasons, cheifly that a functioning healthcare infrastructure is enormously expensive and needs to be built long before a disease outbreak, not during it. An excellent example is the way London managed to get its cholera outbreaks under control, discussed in my post about Steven Johnson’s excellent book the Ghost Map. Also, just a few sick poor people can spread disease to those who can afford medicine, so it’s a classic case which calls for collective action.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

With this quote, Winston Churchill summed up how the next World War would be fought. It’s notable how often he uses the phrase “the minds of men” when describing the future. The Churchill Center had sent me an email describing the number of times this phrase reappears–I believe the number was in the 100’s. Now, I am no raving Churchill fan, as he had some notable moral lapses, namely in his lack of support of Poland in the second half of World War II (as in he completely forget that Poland existed, see Norman Davies excellent books; Rising ‘44 is particularly recommended) and his decision to have Dresden bombed.  However, despite his moral shortcomings, he was an individual with insights and experiences that are both singular.  So it is notable how convinced he was of the centrality of “the minds of men” in the next conflict.

It’s clear that the present US administration hasn’t a clue as to the significance of this, although Al-Qaeda has listened (or perhaps reached the same conclusions on their own, I am not sure, but it really doesn’t matter.)

If you’re not worried, you’re REALLY not paying attention…

Or, all hail King George! (And if you don’t , I’ll cut your newspapers to ribbons…)

So here’s what a recent Op-ed piece looked like in a major newspaper. A petty Thirld World dictatorship? An Eastern Bloc Country before Perestroika?

NO, it’s AMERICA and it’s TODAY, 23 December 2006.

New York Times: What We Wanted to Tell You About Iran

The Free Press, Famines, and Disease Outbreaks

There are so many little nuggets in Amartya Sen’s book Development as Freedom that I really don’t know where to start, as there were so many little post-it notes stuck at passages that I thought were either entertaining or made excellent points, or contained interesting perspectives on points I’d thought about before that I stopped trying to keep track about halfway through the book. But certainly a key observation was that there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy which also had a working free press.

Types of Knowledge

An interesting excerpt from Collapse by Jared Diamond, about the native intelligence of New Guinea highland farmers, the utility and longevity of that knowledge:

New Guinea is the large island just North of Australia…lying almost on the equator and hence with hot tropical rainforest in the lowlands, but whose rugged interior consists of alternating ridges and valleys culminating in glacier-covered mountains….The terrain ruggedness confined Europeans to the coast and lowland rivers for almost 400 years, during which it became assumed that the interior was forest covered and uninhabited…It was therefore a shock, when airplanes chartered by biologists and miners first flew over the interior in the 1930’s for the pilots to see below them a landscape transformed by millions of people previously unknown to the outside world…..we know now…that agriculture has been going on there for about 7,000 years–one of the world’s longest-running experiments in sustainable agriculture.

…their farming methods are sophisticated, so much so that European agronomists still don’t understand today in some cases the reasons why New Guineans’ methods work and why well-intentioned European farming innovations failed there. For instance, one European agricultural adviser was horrified to notice that a New Guinean sweet potato garden on a steep slope in a wet area had vertical drainage ditches running straight down the slope. He convinced the villagers to correct their awful mistake, and instead to put in drains running horizontally along contours, according to good European practices. Awed by him the villagers re-oriented their drains, with the result that the water built up behind the drains, and in the next heavy rains a landslide carried the entire garden down the slope to the river below. To avoid exactly that outcome, New Guinea farmers long before the arrival of the Europeans learned the virtues of vertical drains under highland rain and soil conditions. (page 280)

My observation is that the knowledge of the European and the New Guinea highlander were different in one very crucial way: the way that the knowledge was acquired. The knowledge that the New Guinea highlander had was acquired over many generations, iteratively, through trial and error. Such knowledge could be called evolved knowledge, because it evolves, good replacing bad, and no overall theoretical framework is required to advance such knowledge. It also had a unique relation to the site at which the knowledge was acquired.

The Ghost Map & 5GW: The answer is blowing in the wind

John Robb has an interesting post in which two astute points are made, and flowing from these, an important question is raised. The answer to his question depends on our thinking across disciplines, to see a very similar structure in a problem that was solved in Victorian London. A comparative analysis of the differences and similarities of John’s question to the problem in Victorian London provides a clear path forward, showing us how to address John’s question. First, his post starts:

Friday, December 08, 2006
THE NEW THREATS
As the debate over the value of the Iraq study group’s report rumbles on, it’s important to reflect on larger frame within which this debate is taking place. This frame, little discussed, encapsulates nature of the threat we face in Iraq and will be increasingly likely to face in the future. With Iraq, we can catch a glimpse of a the new class of threat that will increasingly define our future (and given that even a glimpse is enough to stump the establishment should be a dire warning). This new class of threat is characterized by its bottoms up pattern of growth rather than the familiar competition between nation-states. It percolates upwards through catalyzed organic growth until it overwhelms our ability to respond to it. These new threats include (not exhaustive):

• Global guerrillas: Open source warfare and systems disruption. Fragmentation and chaos that can swallow states and regions. In the mid-term: super-empowered actors that can wield bio-weapons.
• Peak oil and resource depletion: The acceleration of resource consumption due to the mainlining of China and India at the very point these resources are reaching capacity limits.
• Global warming: Not the slow change discussed, but rather a cascading change in weather patterns and ocean flows that drastically change continental climates. Ditto the mainlining of China and India as a driver here too.
• Pandemics: Bird flu and other forms of infectious disease that can sweep the world in the matter of days. Have infection, will travel.

The two points implied here are that: (1) sustainability and the response to the 5GW war are linked, (a theme of several posts I have made here at enigma foundry, as well as several comments I have made over at Global Guerillas) and (2) bio-weapons are the pre-eminent threat and weapon of choice for those who want to cause modern western states to fail.

Now the very important (in fact crucial) item we see here is the contention of the extremely small scale structure (the global guerilla) with with the large scale structure (the world’s last remaining super-power). Any time there is contention between items of very different scales, it is a sure sign that the equilibrium of the system is being disturbed. (This will be explored in future post I will write about Persistent Networks)

Public Health Issue in China Glossed over (again)?

A couple of interesting articles about a possible public health situation in China. Due to the realities of modern travel, though, any public health issue is not just a national issue, but one of international concern. It is an example of a reason being given for observed cluster of symptoms, that is really almost certainly unsupported by conclusive evidence.

But the cause of this cluster is presented as conclusive, and that’s one of the hallmarks of poor reporting about Public Health issues: no doubt or uncertainty is allowed to exist in the published accounts, when in fact there is doubt/uncertainty as to the cause. This is frequently observed in reporting on Public Health issues which have another warning flag: no actual public health authority is part of the reportage, because that Public Health Authority would likely introduce some level of doubt.

Conceptualizing Bio-warfare

The popular image of Biological Warfare engages our attention through references to exotic illness that cause rapid death, and are extremely contagious. The Ebola or Marburg Hemorrhagic Virus is typical of those that are mentioned on CDC’s special pathogen branch lists. Descriptions of civilization-killing diseases in the popular media are similar: consider, for example, the book Oryx and Crake, the film 28 Days After, The Stand by Stephen King. Other books that I have read include The White Plague by Frank Herbert and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, and they all have a similarly rapid plague that sweeps through and destabilizes/destroys civilization.

However that isn’t the way a really serious biological incident would likely unfold, because any fast moving disease would also admit the possibility of isolation/quarantine/travel restrictions which could stop its spread, and because it existence would be quickly identified. The really dangerous disease would be something that is very quickly spread, but which have a very long prodrome, that is the time between infection and the point at which the clinical features of the disease become apparent.