Damelon Kimbrough's Friends

[BRIEF NOTE] On Cornwall. abuse, and conspiracies
The small eastern Ontario city of Cornwall has just seen the end of an exorbitantly expensive inquiry into claims of an organized pedophile ring there. Triggered when police officer Perry Dunlop learned of a sexual abuse scandal that the Roman Catholic Church had quietly settled in 1994, matters quickly spiraled into speculation that dozens of men were systematically abusing young men. Following a series of failed trials, an inquiry into the who affair began, and was already going badly by the time that Dunlop skipped the inquiry. The whole situation is a catastrophe.

It wasn't long before the original premise grew to shocking proportions: a ring or clan of pedophiles that reached into the city's highest corners -- priests, a bishop, a Crown attorney, lawyers, probation officers, possibly senior police officers.

Because so many powerful people were involved, went the theory, the original investigation was blocked, forcing Mr. Dunlop to circle around his own police force. He was the whistleblower extraordinaire, unafraid to put his career on the line to protect abused children.

[. . .]

Mr. Dunlop's role in the case, however well intended, has contributed to a breathtaking expenditure of public resources -- time and money -- not to mention the stain on an entire community.

And Mr. Dunlop doesn't want to talk about it?

Briefly, there were two Cornwall police investigations in 1993, an Ontario Provincial Police probe in 1994 and, finally, the launching of Project Truth in 1997. It spared nothing: The allegations of 69 complainants were investigated, leading to 672 interviews.

Four years later, the OPP were satisfied there was no pedophile ring in the city, but laid 115 charges against 15 individuals. There was but one conviction.

[. . .]

At least one of the witnesses -- an original complainant -- has testified he never saw evidence of a pedophile ring, contrary to an earlier written statement. Those named in the statement? Nah, never saw them. The statement itself? Didn't even read it, he testified.

He claimed he was pressured into making the statements by one Perry Dunlop. Nor was he the only witness to retract outlandish allegations.

"I did anything (Mr. Dunlop) told me to do," said one alleged victim.

Even though the inquiry has, 53 million dollars later, come to the conclusion that there wasn't a conspiracy, the idea will still remain active.

An explanation that to some appears to debunk a conspiracy theory just further confirms others' suspicions, said University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson.

"It's very difficult to disprove a conspiracy theory, because every bit of disproving evidence can be just written off as additional evidence that these conspirators are particularly intelligent and sneaky," he said.

Conspiracy theories are usually started by people who are very untrusting and it gathers steam among others who are somewhat untrusting, Peterson said.

They're psychologically compelling because they neatly tie together troubling facts or assertions, he said. When things go badly there are often many explanations, and an orchestrated conspiracy "should be pretty low on your list of plausible hypotheses," Peterson said.

"A good rule of thumb is: Don't presume malevolence where stupidity is sufficient explanation," he said.

"Organizations can act badly and things can fall apart without any group of people driving that."

While Glaude made no definitive statements about a ring, he declared there was not a conspiracy by several institutions to cover up the existence of any such operation, rather that agency bungling left that impression.

By now, the majority of Cornwall has dismissed the allegation that once spread like wildfire there, but among a small group of people the theory will never die, said columnist Claude McIntosh with the Cornwall Standard-Freeholder.

When historical allegations of sex abuse started surfacing in the 1990s people were certainly talking about the issue, he said. Then a group of townspeople started a website and posted names of people they named as pedophiles.

They also posted an affidavit from one man detailing the most sensational allegation, that ritual sex abuse was performed by men in robes with candles on weekend retreats. He would later recant that allegation at the inquiry.

This sounds a lot like the various panics over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by moral panic related to concern over the breakdown of traditional mores, like the nuclear family or conventional religion. What happened in Cornwall seems to me the consequence of the moral crisis triggered by revelations of clerical abuse. Cornwall is not only a strongly Roman Catholic community, it's a community that has experienced significant economic stresses with high unemployment and low education levels and a relative lack of investment in public facilities. A Roman Catholic priest really did abuse a child; the Roman Catholic Church really did try to cover it up. Especially when life is already strained, it's not such a big stretch go from a trusted religious authority betraying the public interest in a specific fashion to any number of trusted authorities engaging in orchestrated horrors. Besides, as Peterson notes, conspiracies tend to be more coherent than the idea that bad things just happen in isolation for no particular reason, more comforting in a way since they offer a sense of predictability and thus an ability to control the conspirators through public action.

I also recommend Religioustolerance.org's analysis.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the utility of false charges of anti-Semitism
The Toronto Star has it.

he United Church of Canada and other Canadian churches are demanding Prime Minister Stephen Harper explain why one of his cabinet ministers accused them of being anti-Semitic.

The United, Catholic and Anglican churches are part of KAIROS, an aid group that was shocked to hear Immigration Minister Jason Kenney say its funding was lifted as part of the Conservatives' effort to cut off anti-Semitic organizations.

"It's a horrible charge to make, and to do it with so little thought cheapens the reality of anti-Semitism in the world and diminishes the very careful attention that it deserves," said United Church spokesperson Bruce Gregersen. "We're quite disappointed in the government on this.

"The policies of KAIROS have all been approved by the collective board of KAIROS, so in a sense what Mr. Kenney is doing is accusing Canadian churches of being anti-Semitic and I think that's really unfortunate," Gregersen said in an interview.

Sam Carrière, director of communications for the Anglican Church of Canada, said the church supports a statement released Friday by KAIROS, which condemned Kenney's remarks as false and warned the Harper government against letting politics dominate Ottawa's foreign aid priorities.

Besides the United and Anglican churches, Toronto-based KAIROS's members include the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee – Canada.

Working with 21 partner organizations around the world, KAIROS sponsors projects promoting social and economic justice in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Canada's development community appeared stunned after Kenney, in a speech in Jerusalem, cited Ottawa's decision to end 35 years of funding for KAIROS as an example of the Conservatives' push to cut funding for anti-Semitic groups.

KAIROS was "defunded," Kenney said, because it took a leadership role in "the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign" against Israel.

"Minister Kenney's charge against KAIROS is false," the group said in its public response.

KAIROS has raised questions about Israeli government policies but rejected the idea of a national boycott against Israel two years ago, its executives pointed out.

"To label KAIROS's criticism of Israeli government actions as `anti-Semitic' silences dissent and honours no one," the statement said. "KAIROS has a clear position of support for the legitimate right of the Israeli people to a safe and secure state."

Like Canada, Australia, Argentina, or another states and/or regions, Israel is a country of mass immigration. How can't it be, when the whole point of Zionism was to bring millions of Jews to a territory thinly populated by tens of thousands who constituted only a small minority, and when only one Israel president has actually been born in Israel? Like these other countries of mass immigration, Israel has remnant native populations, survivors of state-building. Unlike all of these countries of mass immigration save South Africa, these natives not only retain a strong sense of their own identity but actually live by the millions in their homeland. This, of necessity, complicates Israeli life in much the same way as the African majority complicated apartheid-era South African life. (Much the same way. I'm not claiming an absolute identity, although the fact that both countries ban marriage across ethnoreligious groups says something.)

Israel's a state that actively pursues policies of ethnic discrimination on a vast scale. People who belong to the Jewish ethnic majority are privileged, not only relative to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territory, but relative to the Palestinians living within Israel who are themselves Israeli citizens. People who are Israelis are immensely privileged relative to Palestinians, who get to see their land and their resources appropriated while any number of Israelis hope that if they make life for Palestinians difficult they'll leave. This is a detestable policies, just as detestable as the Serbian discrimination against Bosniaks and Albanians in the 1990s, or East Timorese in the 1970s and 1980s, or Western Saharans now. So long as an Israeli consensus in favour of these discriminatory policies exists, why not place public pressure on Israel?

Yes, yes, I know that there are other societies where worse things happen, but so what? Yes, yes, I know that critics might come from societies with their own problems, but so what? So long as the critiques are valid, and so long as the critics aren't denying the charges own relevance to their own societies' issues, the standard act of dismissing critics--here in the case of Israel as elsewhere--can only be read as an intellectually lazy and morally contemptuous effort to shrug off legitimate dissent. Trying to drown out criticisms by demanding an infinity of footnotes is silly. Yes, yes, I know that the Palestinians have done bad things, but we're not talking about that. Arguably they wouldn't be if not for ongoing Israeli colonization.

Israel might well have achieved some sort of integration into the Middle East had it sincerely entered peace negotiations instead of having an electorate unwilling to make sacrifices for a fair settlement. (I'm not talking about Israel's neighbours because Israel's neighbours aren't the subjects here.) Instead, Israel seems to have opted for a future as a Western marcher state, Israeli leaders talking about the threats of Muslims and warning about Eurabia.

And this can't be criticized? I never liked Jason Kenney. I now have another reason to hold him in contempt.

[LINK] "Israel Harvested Organs in '90s Without Permission"
Wow. Just wow. Such a shocking lock of medical ethics, such an apparent willingness to embrace a version of the blood libel.

Israel has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without permission of their families.

The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said, ''We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.''

The Channel 2 report said that in the 1990s, forensic specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.

In a response to the TV report, the Israeli military confirmed that the practice took place. ''This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer,'' the military said in a statement quoted by Channel 2.

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. ''We'd glue the eyelid shut,'' he said. ''We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids.''

Many of the details in the interview first came to light in 2004, when Hiss was dismissed as head of the forensic institute because of irregularities over use of organs there. Israel's attorney general dropped criminal charges against him, and Hiss still works as chief pathologist at the institute. He had no comment on the TV report.

[. . .]

Complaints against the institute, where autopsies of dead bodies are performed, at the time of Hiss' dismissal came from relatives of Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as Palestinians. The bodies belonged to people who died from various causes, including diseases, accidents and Israeli-Palestinian violence, but there has been no evidence to back up the claim in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians for their organs. Angry Israeli officials called the report ''anti-Semitic.''

The academic, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said she decided to make the interview public in the wake of the Aftonbladet controversy, which raised diplomatic tensions between Israel and Sweden and prompted Sweden's foreign minister to call off a visit to the Jewish state.

Scheper-Hughes said that while Palestinians were ''by a long shot'' not the only ones affected by the practice in the 1990s, she felt the interview must be made public now because ''the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, (is) something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.''

What is there to say, apart from noting that at this stage unquestioning diasporic support for Israel is about as morally sketchy as unquestioning diasporic support for Serbia or Armenia or any other country involved in atrocities directed against the disfavoured?

[LINK] "'The buck stopped nowhere' at Foreign Affairs on Colvin's warnings"
Grand news re: possible Canadian complicity in torture in Afghanistan

As Richard Colvin fired off warnings about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan in 2006, the diplomat's missives bounced into the computers of Foreign Affairs without ever really landing.

Inside the Department of Foreign Affairs, the biggest Canadian overseas commitment since the Korean War was organized like any other file. Diplomats in Kabul and Kandahar had different supervisors. In separate corners of the department's Sussex Drive headquarters in the Pearson building, the peacekeeping desk would handle one memo, the human rights desk another, defence relations a third.

Mr. Colvin sparked a firestorm at the highest levels in Ottawa when he told a parliamentary committee that he warned for a full year that detainees Canadian troops handed over to Afghan forces faced torture before the government began to monitor them.

But behind that furor is another story: outside the combat-focused military, no one was in charge in the early part of the Afghan mission.

A scattered batch of mid-level officials, lacking the incontrovertible proof that Canadians had no means to find, didn't have the overall responsibility or weight to push for big change.

“The buck stopped nowhere,” said one official involved in the Afghan mission.

Worse, apparently the Canadian military was hostile to the oversight of civilians like Colvin.

Mr. Mulroney needed the co-operation of generals, who hated having a diplomat vet their plans. The military had long viewed Mr. Colvin as a nuisance because he persistently pushed different views on issues such as limiting civilian casualties and removing Kandahar's governor, and interrupted during officers' briefings.

“It became easy to discount Richard because he's a pain in the ass,” recalled an official. “David could go to senior military people and say, ‘I understand. People like Colvin, they're part of the old mentality, and I'm going to rein them in.' It threw them an olive branch.”

But at the end of April, 2007, Mr. Harper's government was under fire in Parliament over the treatment of detainees after The Globe and Mail published prisoners' accounts of torture.

Mr. Mulroney issued orders for diplomatic pressure. Mr. Colvin replied that Canada needed a new transfer arrangement with Afghanistan – and Mr. Mulroney curtly told him to follow his orders.

[LINK] "Buying green could make you more likely to lie, cheat and steal: study"
This article doesn't surprise me that much.

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, University of Toronto researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong studied how students behaved after being given the option of purchasing environmentally friendly products, like organic yogourt or biodegradable laundry detergent, or conventional items.

They found students who chose green products were less likely to act altruistically afterwards than those who were simply exposed to green products.

The study, said Mazar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, builds on research into the idea of "moral regulation" - that people either consciously or unconsciously balance bad deeds with good ones.

"What has been shown so far is that when we engage in actions that give us some kind of moral, warm glow - let's call it that - that afterwards we are more likely to transgress," Mazar said.

"What we don't know, and what the interesting question is, is how much is really a conscious, deliberate thought process? We don't know that."

In one experiment, students were assigned to one of two computerized "stores" filled with either predominantly green products or conventional items. Once assigned to a store, some students were asked to think critically about the products, while others were told to go shopping.

The students were then given six dollars and told there was a person in another room with whom they were supposed to share the money, keeping whatever they didn't give away for themselves.

The students who were simply exposed to the green items parted with more money than those who were exposed to the conventional products. But when it came to the students who made purchases, the opposite was true: those who bought green items actually gave less than those who spent their money on non-green alternatives.

As Mazar goes on to note, this doesn't mean buying environmentally friendly products is bad.

While the findings might deflate the self-righteous air of those who brag about bringing canvas bags to the grocery store, Mazar says it definitely shouldn't be seen as a condemnation of environmentally friendly purchasing habits.

That, she feels, would be a gross misunderstanding of the point of the research. The study shows we should be aware of our tendency to treat buying green as a moral act, said Mazar, rather than as our responsibility to the planet.

"What we wanted to point out is if you start to moralize particular actions . . . then there is a danger that people get this kind of warm glow. And that can be used afterwards to engage in less, maybe, social or altruistic behaviour," said Mazar.

"But this doesn't mean that you should not buy environmental products."

Mindfulness clearly matters. Still more important, I'd say, would be the introduction of mandatory rules regarding environmentally friendly consumption as opposed to voluntary opt-ins. If people don't, in fact, have to think about deciding between products which are more or less environmentally friendly (or non-hostile), then there would not be this risk of consumers unconsciously takking their green consumption as a license to do whatever.

[META] Blogroll Additions
Everyone, I'd like to you welcome my friend Stephen Degrace's Infinite Recursion to the blogroll! Tech, and django and more, it's all there at this three-in-one blog.

[PHOTO] Looking out

Looking out
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I photographed this pensive wooden head looking out of an enclosed front porch on Ossington Avenue at the beginning of this month.

[PHOTO] Under the bridge
The railroad on Prince Edward Island closed down in 1987 for want of economic sense, leaving the trail to be converted into the (rather nice) Confederation Trail, a nice place to go hiking or biking. One thing among many things that I like about my home in Toronto is that it lies directly south of a freight line belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the movement of the trains punctuating my days and lulling me to sleep. The same line has also been suggested as the corridor for a midtown commuter rail line, one that would also connect to the Summerhill CPR station on Yonge Street that I've photographed before.

Crossing midtown Toronto as it does, this rail line can't help but cross over streets. Below are pictures of the undersides of two of these bridges on two of these streets.

Railway bridge at Yonge by Summerhill
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is the bridge crossing Yonge Street at the Summerhill stations, TTC and CPR both.

Railway bridge at Dupont and Dovercourt
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This is one of my neighbourhood bridges, at Dupont and Dovercourt.

[FORUM] How do you interact with people on social networking sites?
Torontoist writer David Topping's suggestion, after reading an article featuring a chart demonstrating that going on a trip to IKEA is worth a handjob at market prices, Toronto-area eye weekly is losing track of the big picture and becoming the forum for a collection of people writing personal essays, rings true to me. Certainly I confirmed that opinion after I read Chander Levack's front page article in the latest eye weekly, "Why I Committed Facebook Suicide: killing yourself to live," wherein Levack describes how Facebook became just too much for her ("I had 1,223 friends on Facebook, status updates everyone “liked” and the sneaking suspicion I was losing my real self to my more perfect profile. This week, I said goodbye to all that").

Levack's article baffles me, frankly.

You see, on Facebook I have 1,223 friends (two recently deleted and five hidden), who are constantly inviting me to ’60s dance parties, Toronto public space meetings and indie-rock concerts in abandoned factories. People “like” me — at least they say they do. They instantly respond to my thoughts and feelings about the world: a link to a Nirvana B-side, a quip about Kensington Market veganism, ruminations on what I’ll eat for dinner (though it will mostly likely be frozen peas). On the internet, I’m popular.

Recently, though, I’ve noticed that logging on makes me break into a cold sweat, as if I could never measure up to the persona I’ve created. The nagging red notifications rack up as I post covert messages to be deconstructed, stymied by the responsibility of portraying myself the way I want to be seen. I want to be “liked,” and so I post Kids In The Hall sketches at three in the morning. But if you ignore me I will crumble, unsure of my place in the world wide web.

I spoke to a psychologist, who said that even Howard Stern suffers from social anxiety disorder, but my reliance on Facebook has nothing to do with how I function in the real world. It’s just that I prefer the website’s controlled amicability to the tenuous nature of real relationships. At my lowest points (the headache and signature eye burn that proves that you have Facebooked too hard and too long, frittering away time examining the photos of your third cousin’s boyfriend’s Birthright trip), I flirt with the idea of suicide. Not real suicide, which contrary to the M*A*S*H* theme song, is not painless, but the idea of permanently deleting my profile. Facebook suicide.

It gets better. Does she have any idea what she wants out of Facebook, I wonder?

This week’s Facebook drama — new “privacy” controls that will effectively make even private information public to corporations — draws criticism, yet the website will prevail. I have more faith in Facebook than any other institution in society, because unlike religion and the government, your friends will never let you down.

Clicking through profiles in a somnambulistic haze, I came to realize that I couldn’t see the point of interacting with people in real life anymore, because I already knew everything about them. Better yet, it was what they wanted me to know, mediated by friendly wall-to-wall contact. My Facebook profile was cooler than me anyway.

And the best part is her concluding paragraph.

I logged out of the site and looked at my blue-and-white burial ground, feeling resolved to spend more time communicating with my friends. Had I just killed myself to live? I’m not sure yet. Follow me on Twitter and I’ll let you know how it’s going.

No to Facebook, yes to Twitter? You can find her at @clevack, if you want. I don't, since I'm terribly afraid that any conversation with her would implode.

Where to begin?

Let's start with a personal census. Here on Livejournal I've 264 friends on Livejournal of which 245 are mutually reciprocated. This friends list overlaps substantially with my 262 Facebook friends. Both of these lists overlap nearly entirely with the list 49 contacts I've named on Flickr. My three YouTube contacts are all on Livejournal and Facebook. E-mail's a huge sprawling thing I won't tackle here. As for the wider blogosphere, while I've RSS feeds to three dozen blogs and interact to one degree or another with most of them, there's only a relatively weak overlap with my Facebook friends and I've no idea at how who's interacting with A Bit More Detail, never mind Demography Matters or another upcoming project I'll announce shortly. (Stay tuned!)

Levack seems to have taken Facebook way too seriously. I care about other people, and Internet-based communications and platforms make it relatively easy for me to do this. I can't claim to be an expert, but I've tended to use Livejournal and Facebook primarily as a way to create and sustain relationships with people here in Toronto, and secondarily to sustain existing relationships with people who aren't in my immediate territorially sphere. After that, I use it to remain in contact with people I like based on their web presence, because these people I've never met have interesting things to say, I like remaining abreast of what's going on in their lives, and the possibility always exists of making these virtual friendships real ones should geography permit. That last is what gave me my first anchors in Toronto. It's large, it's sprawling, it's complex, but by prioritizing and planning things I've managed to make it all work for me while avoiding timesinks. I'm not sure how Levack managed to let Facebook overwhelm her to the point that she was uninterested in actually interacting with other people, but I suspect that kind of overindulgence is more the fault of the user than the platform. Why else would she be more likely to trust Facebook over governments and business while shying away from the platform?

This brings me to my [FORUM] question of the day. How do you use social networking platforms on the Internet, new or old? Do you find it easy to use them, do you fear being controlled by them? Are there things you'd like to do more with them or things that you really need to cut back upon?

Discuss/

[FORUM] Do your countries and/or governments dislike experts, too?
Blogger James Bow has some choice words about the Conservative government's populist distaste for experts and what they have to say about the way things are and should be run, even if ignoring them leads to significant net losses for Canadians.

Back in September, Chet Scoville of the Vanity Press reported on a report by Michael Jackson, a law professor at the University of British Columbia. The report criticized the Conservative government’s proposal for revamping Canada’s prison policy. Basicallly, the massive prisons that the Conservatives hope to build are a waste of money, don’t solve the problem of crime, and possibly thwart our ability to rehabilitate these people, and the Conservatives appear to be ploughing ahead with this policy on ideological rather than rational grounds.

Their scathing analysis contends that the government road map starts with what they call an ideological “myth” — that prisoners’ human rights are at odds with public safety.

“What that’s doing is polarizing a discussion about corrections in a really unfortunate way,” Mr. Stewart said.

“It creates the notion that the decent treatment of prisoners is somehow putting the public at risk, when in fact it’s the complete reverse. …

“We don’t believe that abuse improves people.”

For the Conservatives’ part, they don’t outright deny Mr. Jackson’s criticisms. Indeed, they revel in them:

Ian Brodie, Harper’s former chief of staff, told a McGill University symposium last March that criticism of the tough-on-crime policy by sociologists, lawyers and criminologists actually bolsters the Conservative case — because they are held in lower regard than politicians.

“Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition,” Mr. Brodie said. “So we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”

For anybody who believes that politics should be an honest debate; for anybody who holds that democracy is a marketplace of ideas where policies rise and fall on their merits, this attitude should ring alarm bells. Here you have individuals who have worked hard, for years, in their chosen field of study, who have carefully gathered the facts, and have crafted credible arguments based on them, being dismissed because they have done just that. These individuals are arguably closer to the truth than most people — particularly these Conservative politicians — would care to admit, but rather than debate with them, or even agree to disagree, the experts are dismissed because their arguments do not feel right.

This, he goes on to note, has very serious effects indeed.

By disparaging the work of experts to the extent where some people believe that we should do the opposite of what the experts say, you do severe damage to the very people you’re supposed to serve. If you deliberately turn aside good advice, you allow yourself to govern with bad advice, and you govern to the detriment of the country.

[. . .]

Consider that Linda Keen and her colleagues on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission believed that it was important that the nuclear facility at Chalk River be shut down so that necessary safety improvements could be made, and they were attacked as “Liberal appointees” by Stephen Harper and Gary Lunn. Now Chalk River has been shut down in a rather more unplanned way, and the shortage of medical isotopes is getting worse. The director of FEMA during the Clinton years had actual disaster management experience and reasonably coped with hurricane strikes, tornadic destruction, et cetera. George W. Bush’s appointee, Michael Brown, had previously managed the International Arabian Horse Association (and had departed under a cloud), and you can see how well the federal government in the U.S. managed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Partly POV? Sure. I also agree with Bow's analysis.

So, that's Canada. Are there any similar trends in your societies and polities?

Discuss.

[PHOTO] Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt
I live in a frontier zone. I live very close to the southern side of the railway tracks that separates the slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Dovercourt-Wallace Emerson-Junction from a not-so-gentrifying area north of the tracks.

At Geary and Dovercourt, north of the tracks, there used to be a grocery store housed in a somewhat aged building that looks almost to be slumping from the non-planular sidewalk. The store's gone now, leaving only a sign advertising the space's availability now.

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Now vacant at Geary and Dovercourt (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[LINK] "If only the Tsar knew!"
Johnny Pez writes about the speculation that Obama might be purposely weakening the health care bill before Congressional discussion for the sake of his party's finances.

In this version of events, Joe Lieberman is not acting on his own to make the bill as unpleasant to liberals as possible. Instead, Lieberman is simply doing what Obama wants him to do: stripping out the parts of the bill that the health-care industry doesn't like, while keeping in the parts that the industry does like. Greenwald notes that Lieberman has received no criticism from the White House for doing this. Rather, the White House has reserved its criticism for Howard Dean, who has pointed out just how corporate-friendly the bill has become and who has publicly called for the defeat of the bill.

This is politics the DLC way: a big wet sloppy kiss for corporate interests and a flip of the bird to the party's liberal base. These are the principles that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has espoused throughout his political career, and presumably that's why Obama made him Chief of Staff in the first place.

If this is what's really going on, then Obama is a DLC Democrat, and always has been. Those who defend Obama, saying that he was helpless to influence events, and that it was all Rahm's fault, or all Joe's fault, are in denial. It's no use crying, "If only the Tsar knew!" because, as always, the Tsar has known, and approved, all along.

Disappointing, sure, socialized health care would be good for the United States, but I've no idea why people expected that President Obama wouldn't act as a politician careful to ensure his continued viability as a leader after he was elected. Expecting him to be a messiah of some sort was ridiculous. The insanely lofty rhetoric used to describe a perfectly good and idealistic man is the sort of thing that got him a Nobel Peace Prize. Just because he's not George Bush doesn't mean that he's an angel.

[BRIEF NOTE] On how you can become famous by blowing up Uruguay
I've always had something of a soft spot for Uruguay. I'm not sure why I've an interest in a country I've never had any significant contact with. Perhaps it's because of Uruguay's long tradition of social democracy, the generally good-natured of a country that, Tupamaros and military regime aside, has helped make the country a somewhat more shabby but still useful and up and coming Hispanophone version of New Zealand. That's why I'm a bit perturbed to see, via Will Baird and Noel Maurer, Uruguay independent filmmaker Frederico Alvarez's short film Ataque de Pánico!. The film features robots blowing up Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. And it cost $US 300.

Among the buildings blown up are (in order), the ANTEL Telecommunications Tower that's the tallest building in Uruguay, the Palacio Legislativo building that houses the national parliament, and the iconic 26-story Art Deco Palacio Salvo tower.

Since uploading the film to YouTube, Alvarez has done well for himself.

Would-be director Federico Alvarez, who runs a post-production visual effects house in Uruguay, filmed 'Panic Attack' with a budget of just $500 in his free time.

The five minute clip - which he then uploaded to YouTube - shows an invasion of Montevideo by giant robots and had special effects which could rival many big budget movies.

Once online it got the attention of thousands of movie fans… and (not surprisingly) studio bosses who wanted to meet with Alvarez to talk about his movie.

The 30-year-old was whisked to LA where he was offered a $1 million directors fee and up to £30 million to make the film, by Mandate Pictures. The plans for the movie are said to have a "compelling original story" beyond big robots blowing stuff up.

Alvarez has also been put up in a new apartment, given a new car and will work with "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi on developing the film.

As Bernard Guerrero said in Noel's comments, it's no surprise that with cheap cool films like this companies owning television networks are trying to unload them as quickly as they can.

[LINK] "Value of a Degree"
At Extraordinary Observations, Rob Pitingolo writes about the declining marginal value of graduate school education.

The first woman to wear high-heeled shoes was at a distinct advantage being several inches taller than everyone else. But as more women started wearing them, the advantage started to fade. Eventually, high-heeled shoes generated no relative advantage, but became a sort of "requirement" in social situations. Granted, there's a big difference here, in the sense that a society is better off when everyone is well-educated, but there really isn't much social gain from women who appear a few inches taller. The problem is that the cost of educating everyone is so painfully expensive.

The Great Recession has had some strange impacts. There are people in my class who aren't even bothering to look for work, because enough people have told them they can just "ride it out" in grad school. I'm not complaining if it means less competition in my own entry-leveljob search, but for the people I care about, I'm not sure how it will ultimately play out. Two years from now, if the economy recovers, which person will be theoretically more employable?.. a bachelor's degree holder with two years of full-time professional experience? or a master's degree holder with none?

No comment.

[BRIEF NOTE] On GJ 1214b
Centauri Dreams' summary of what's known about the newly discovered and very broadly Earth-like world GL 1214b works for me.

At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the planet orbits its star every 38 hours, with an estimated temperature a little over 200 degrees Celsius. Because GJ 1214b transits the star, astronomers are able to measure its radius, which turns out to be 2.7 times that of Earth. The density derived from this suggests a composition of about three-fourths water and other ices and one-fourth rock. Some of the planet’s water should be in the form of exotic materials like Ice VII, a crystalline form of water that is found at pressures greater than 20,000 Earth atmospheres:

“Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a waterworld,” said Zachory Berta, a graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who first spotted the hint of the planet among the data. “It is much smaller, cooler, and more Earthlike than any other known exoplanet.”

That’s quite a find for the MEarth Project, which uses an array of eight 16-inch telescopes that monitor a list of 2000 red dwarf stars. The MEarth array is located at the top of Mount Hopkins, Arizona. MEarth looks for the tiny drop in brightness that indicates a transit, using data processing technologies to extract the planetary signature. If ever there was a find that should galvanize the amateur astronomy community, it’s this one, as David Charbonneau (CfA), who heads MEearth, is quick to note:

“Since we found the super-earth using a small ground-based telescope, this means that anyone else with a similar telescope and a good CCD camera can detect it too. Students around the world can now study this super-earth!”

Sifting through this material, what stands out is that the radius measured for GJ 1214b is larger than expected by current models. Remember, this is the second time we’ve found a transiting super-Earth, the first being CoRoT-7b. The latter has a similar mass but the radius of GJ 1214b is much larger. Indications are that a surrounding atmosphere some 200 kilometers thick is adding to the drop in stellar light measured in these transits. Charbonneau again:

“This atmosphere is much thicker than that of the Earth, so the high pressure and absence of light would rule out life as we know it, but these conditions are still very interesting, as they could allow for some complex chemistry to take place.”

Apart from the fact that this world can be found with a small ground-based telescope--who knew planet-finding could be so easy just a couple of decades ago?--this ocean planet could be quite typical: "Planetary objects that form in the outer solar system begin as a comet-like mixture of roughly 50% water and 50% rock by weight. Simulations of solar system formation have shown that planets are likely to migrate inward or outward as they form, presenting the possibility that icy planets could wind up in orbits where their ice melts into liquid form, turning them into ocean planets."

By comparison, GJ 1214b's density would make it 50% denser than the ice-rock Jovian moons of Callisto or Ganymede and is comparable to that of famed Europa. GJ 1214b's much too hot to be a Europa, sadly, but at least there's some interesting chemistry going on.

[LINK] Some Friday links

At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew's very skeptical about the good sense of ideas to save money on the TTC by cutting service: positive feedback loops in negative directions are always nasty. (Thanks to mindstalk for correcting my terminology.)

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shows pictures of the footsteps of the Apollo 12 astronauts taken by a recent Moon probe.

Centauri Dreams reports that, in the recent tradition of astronomers finding smaller and more distant objects, a small chunk of ice a bit less than one kilometre across was found seven billion kilometres away from Earth by the Hubble.

The Global Sociology blog tackles the nurture-versus-nature debate on gender differences and argues strongly on nurture's side.

Joe. My. God lets us know that a North Carolina politician mocked the sexual orientation of another politician's dead gay son, and that Rwanda is also considering strongly homophobic legislation on the Ugandan model.

Language Log's Geoff Nunberg discusses the question of how linguists should respond to conflicts of interest, with the discussions expanding upon what a conflict of interest for linguists actually is.

Murdering Mouth wonders how, or if, you can break through to someone operating under a completely different paradigm.

Inspired by Douglas Muir's posts from the Congo at Halfway Down the Danube, Noel Maurer uses Mexican history to demonstrate that banks and breweries can survive extreme levels of violence.

Slap Upside the Head reports on anti-gay freakouts, among gamers unhappy with a same-sex encounter in a video game, and with homophobes who don't like a Nova Scotia MPs inclusion of a picture of him with his husband on his Christmas mailing.

the F OR V M discusses the question of whether or not the failing of US companies to bid on Iraqi oil means that they expect significantly greater instability in that country in a year's time.

[LINK] "Who invented the totalitarian state?"
Understanding Society's Daniel Little asks this question. As someone who studied the efforts of the Tudor state to police the beliefs of a not-very-Anglican nobility and its subordinates and is familiar with the Inquisition's efforts to assimilate religious minorities into Catholicism, it doesn't surprise me overmuch that those first efforts fell short of the prerequisites for true fascism.

A striking feature of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century is their aggressiveness and brutality towards all opposition. These fascist states were ruthless and effective in their ability to attack and dismantle oppositional groups -- including communists, labor unions, radical peasants, rent resistance organizations, liberals, and anarchists. Chuck Tilly's discussion of "trust networks" is relevant here; the balance of power between the trust networks of civil society and the central power of the state apparatus shifted profoundly with the advent of the modern dictatorship; Trust and Rule.

One index of the administrative and coercive capacity of the state is the degree to which it is successful in exacting a greater percentage of the national wealth in taxes. Weak states are relatively inefficient at collecting taxes. So careful historical study of systems of taxation is an important contribution to the topic of the power of the state. Isaac Martin, Ajay Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad's The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective provides a good exposure to the field of comparative fiscal sociology. With a foreword and article by Charles Tilly, it examines the ways in which states since the early modern period have intensified their ability to collect tax revenues.

One piece of this new capacity was organizational. Fascist states in the 1930s created bureaucracies of surveillance, enforcement, punishment, and killing that went vastly beyond the capacity of nineteenth century state organizations. The organizations of police and army in Italy, Spain, and Germany took major steps forward in size and complexity in the twentieth century. The personnel of the forces of coercion -- police and other armed state forces such as militias -- were few in the early nineteenth century; but by the middle of the twentieth century these numbers had grown exponentially.

Improved communication and transportation were also key to the possibility of the totalitarian state. The telephone and the railroad allowed fascist states to collect information quickly and to move their forces around the cities and countryside efficiently; functionally, this meant that rural groups and ordinary people were no longer buffered from the state by poor roads and rudimentary communication.

Another technological advance that was crucial for the totalitarian state was a substantial improvement in the technology of record keeping and retrieval. James Scott argues that the modern state's imperative to regiment and record its population is fundamental to its capacity to collect taxes and conscript soldiers -- and therefore fundamental to the nature of modern political power (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed). The technology of organized record keeping improved dramatically in the first several decades of the twentieth century -- thus making the state's goal of closely monitoring its subjects more attainable. (Edwin Black describes the use of IBM punch card systems to manage National Socialist records of Jews and other enemies in IBM and the Holocaust.) So communication, transportation, and record-keeping were crucial to the creation of the totalitarian state.

This has further implications for the understanding of liberal democracy and of current events.

Liberal democratic states too increased their capacity to impose their will at the local level. What distinguished totalitarian regimes was the set of ideological and political goals that fascist states sought to accomplish on the basis of their greater repressive capacity and the cult of violence that each embodied. Other states took some of these sorts of steps forward in the twentieth century; the "reach of the state" increased dramatically in the United States, France, and Britain as well. The administrative functions of the state and the ability to extract revenues through taxation increased exponentially. It would be interesting to compare the total tax percentages in 1860 and 1930 for the United States and France; surely the increase is dramatic. And likewise, the personnel of these states increased dramatically during the same time period as a percentage of population. But this broad increase in state capacity did not lead to repression and dictatorship in these countries.

This topic is historically interesting; much turns on how we explain the power and human tragedies associated with Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy. But it is also interesting today when we consider the undisguised efforts of the Iranian state, and its Republican Guard military organization, to dominate the whole of Iranian civil society. Here too we see the use of surveillance, intimidation, mass arrests, forced confessions, and political murder as tactics in the effort to control civil society.</blockquote<

[LINK] "Ottawa invites bids on CANDU"
Thanks to

zibblsnrt for pointing me to the news that the Canadian federal government is selling off' the CANDU division of Atomic Energy Limited of Canada. Once a bleeding-edge technology worthy of international export, decades of underinvestment have made the reactor design not very desirable internationally. Still, in an era when France among others is exporting its own technology, it is sad news for a Canada that needs rather more investment in research and development and high-tech industries if it's to avoid an economy based largely on natural resources exports.

The Harper government on Thursday invited investors to submit bids on the CANDU reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the latest step in the government's plan to restructure the Crown corporation.

In a news release, the government said bids would be assessed on how well they meet a number of objectives, which include: "ensuring that Canadians have nuclear as a safe, reliable, and economic clean energy option; controlling costs to the government while maximizing the return on the taxpayers' investment; and positioning the nuclear industry in Canada to seize domestic and global opportunities."

"Nuclear energy is an emission-free source of power that is experiencing a renaissance around the world," Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt said in a statement.

[. . .]

A government review released at the time concluded the reactor division was simply too small to compete with global nuclear giants. This fall, investment bank Rothschild submitted recommendations on how the restructuring should proceed, but the government has so far declined to release the report.

A number of nuclear players are believed to be interested in the CANDU division, including Areva, which is majority owned by the French government, as well as SNC-Lavalin and Bruce Power.

[LINK] "'Guilty' Battlefield Robots"
Whenever I've mentioned this Volokh Conspiracy news item, posted by Kenneth Anderson, to my friends, they've reacted by invoking the humanoid robots of Terminator 2. Thankfully, the source article doesn't give a hint of that.

[I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative — acting rationally and with a sense of moral duty. This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective.

“I believe these systems will have more information available to them than any human soldier could possibly process and manage at a given point in time and thus be able to make better informed decisions,” he says.

The software consists of what Arkin calls “ethical architecture,” which is based on international laws of war and rules of engagement.

Anderson's worried about this idea, on methodological grounds.

Although I am strongly in favor of the kinds of research programs that Professor Arkin is undertaking, I think the ethical and legal issues, whether the categorical rules or the proportionality rules, of warfare involve questions that humans have not managed to answer at the conceptual level. Proportionality and what it means when seeking to weigh up radically incommensurable goods — military necessity and harm to civilians, for example — to start with in the law and ethics of war. One reason I am excited by Professor Arkin’s attempts to perform these functions in machine terms, however, is that the detailed, step by step, project forces us to think through difficult conceptual issues regarding human ethics at the granular level that we might otherwise skip over with some quick assumptions. Programming does not allow one to do that quite so easily.

And it is open to Professor Arkin to reply to the concern that humans don’t have a fully articulated framework, even at the basic conceptual level, for the ethics of warfare, so how then is a machine going to do it? “Well, in order to develop a machine, I don’t actually have to address those questions or solve those problems. The robot doesn’t have to have more ethical answers than you humans — it just has to be able to do as well, even with the gaps and holes.” I’m not sure that answer (which I’m putting into Professor Arkin’s mouth entirely hypothetically, let me emphasize) would be sufficient — partly because I suspect that intuitions applied casuistically by human beings often encode and respond to facts that affect our ethical senses in ways that would not really be articulable, by human or machine. And partly because we probably do think that in various ways, the machine has to be better than the human.

Is he right? I'd like to believe that he's not, but humans hardly start out from a blank slate without any ethics-biasing inheritances.

[BRIEF NOTE] On Nauru and the money you can make from diplomatic recognitions
The Micronesian Pacific island state of Nauru is a country with a horrible economic history. Once one of the richest countries in the world thanks to the phosphates mined from the guano that covered the circular island's interior, these funds were exhausted thanks to bad investments, leaving an impoverished country with an interior that's an effective wasteland and inhabited by terribly poor and unhealthy people. For a time, Nauru dealt in dodgy financial services, money laundering and the like, and more recently gained fame as a country that hosted Australian asylum seekers in detention camps. The island's future is grim, and will certainly depend hugely on support from its Australian patron, especially for funds.

Russia's also involved now. Nauru just recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in exchange for money.

Kiren Keke, Nauru's minister of foreign affairs, trade, and finance, visited the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, today, where he said that his country is ready to begin discussions on recognizing the region as an independent country.

On December 13 Keke was in Moscow, where he held talks with Kremlin authorities on Russia's allocation of $50 million for "urgent socioeconomic projects in Nauru," according to RFE/RL's Russian Service.

In mid-November, Russia actively participated in an international conference for donors to Nauru, which has some 14,000 inhabitants and is thought to be the smallest republic in the world.

Breakaway leaders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia announced their territories' independence from Georgia soon after the five-day military conflict between Georgian and Russian forces.

The pro-Moscow governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela recognized the rebel regions' independence this year.

Andrei Zagorsky, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Affairs, told RFE/RL that the practice of "buying the loyalty of other countries" is not new.

He said that if Russia's goal is to increase the number of countries that recognize South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, then Moscow's strategy is justified.

Australia needn't worry that Nauru's falling into a Russian sphere of influence, though, since Nauru has also recognized Kosovo's independence, making it the only sovereign state in the world to recognize all three countries--Kosovo, South Ossetia, Abkhazia--at once.

"We have established relations with the world's biggest nation (Russia), and now with the smallest," Abkhaz Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba told Reuters.

But Georgia said Russia had "bought recognition." "It doesn't change anything in international politics," said Minister for Reintegration Temur Iakobashvili. "If someone is happy that Abkhazia is now recognized by the country no one knew about yesterday, let him be happy."

Russia's Kommersant newspaper cited a source on Monday as saying Nauru had asked Russia for $50 million for projects on the island, which once made its money from exporting phosphates mined from fossilized bird droppings.

Asked if Nauru had been paid to recognize Abkhazia, Shamba replied: "You don't establish diplomatic relations like that ... although of course the entire international practice is sheer bargaining to a certain extent."

Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley suggested in a recent post ("Does Criticism of Nauru's Foreign Policy Constitute Slut Shaming?") that these multiple recognitions of controversial new states have given Nauru "Golden Breakaway Status."

[LINK] "Magersfontein, December 11th"
Over at the Power and the Money, Jussi Jalonen writes about Finland's supportive relationship to the Afrikaners in the Boer War and how this support both reflected and shaped Finnish national identity, even though this participation's only legacy are news articles about some minor ceremonies that could well take the ordinary Finn by surprise.

Why did independent Finland celebrate a battle fought in a British colonial conflict in South Africa? Simple: Finnish volunteers had fought in the battle as soldiers of the Scandinavian Corps of the Boer forces. The Scandinavian Corps was founded in Pretoria on September 23rd, 1899, supposedly as a testimony of loyalty felt by the Scandinavian immigrants towards the South African Republic. It included 118 men; 48 Swedes, 24 Danes, 19 Finns, 13 Norwegians and 14 other miscellaneous nationalities, mainly Germans and Dutch. In addition, three Swedish women served as nurses in a separate ambulance unit. The Scandinavians fought in the siege of Mafeking and the battles of Magersfontein and Paardeberg; of these, Magersfontein was the most significant.

[. . .]

The first one is the impact of migration on war, both civil and interstate. Those Finns who volunteered to fight in the Boer forces were, of course, immigrants, people who had come to the gold fields of Witwatersrand in search of wealth and a better life. Some had arrived directly from Finland, others came via United States. The uptick in immigration to the Transvaal had been one of the proximate causes of the war, and the British guest-workers and settlers — the so-called “uitlanders” — formed a fifth column through which the British Empire sought to strengthen its grip over the Boer republic.

[. . .]

The Boer resistance against the British Empire set an example for national movements of the time. Both Sun Yat-Sen and Arthur Griffith paid special attention to the Boer struggle. This explains the Finnish fascination with the Boers. At the time of the war, the Grand-Duchy of Finland had become a target of Russian imperial reaction. The February Manifesto of 1899 began a Russian attempt to abrogate Finnish autonomous institutions and integrate it into the Russian Empire. The Boer resistance to Britain aroused sympathy in beleaguered Finland, and the participation of the Finnish volunteers in the battle on the Boer side became as a source of pride. Arvid Neovius, one of the organizers of the underground opposition to Russia, wrote an article where he spoke of the “intellectual guerrilla warfare” and argued for modelling Finnish passive resistance to Russia on Boer hit-and-run-tactics. The South African national anthem became a popular protest song that eventually found its way into Finnish schoolbooks. Finnish participation in another country’s war of national liberation was very much alive in 1924, only seven years after independence, and long before recognition of the sins of apartheid clouded the European view of the Afrikaner “liberation struggle.”

The Battle of Paardeberg, it's worth noting, is the one commemorated by Charlottetown's Boer War memorial. It's interesting how the Boer War had its own influence on Canadian nationhood, by making Canadians--not only French Canadians--consider their relationship with an empire that would get involved in controversial bloody conflicts like the Boer War.

[LINK] "Salaam aleikoum, Latinoamérica"
Courrier International's Patricia R. Blanco has an article describing the rather large and influential immigrant diaspora from the Arab world in Latin America.

They are political leaders, intellectuals, soldiers, bankers, artists and entrepreneurs. Just mention some people, like the Argentine president Carlos Menem (of Syrian origin), or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (of Lebanese origin), and you'll illustrate the extent of Arab emigration to Latin America. during the first third of the twentieth century. Subsequent generations have kept some of their Arab roots, but "in their own interest, the first emigrants committed a kind of cultural suicide to ease their integration," explains Abdeluahed Akmir, a Moroccan university professor who oversaw the drafting a book on the subject. The first Arabs, derogatorily called "Turks" because they came from the Ottoman Empire, wanted to ensure that their children would not face with the rejection they had themselves suffered. "They gave them Spanish names, they did not teach then their mother tongue, and they converted to Catholicism, registering in religious schools," explains Professor Akmir. The conversion has not been so difficult, because the first waves of emigrants were composed mainly of Maronite Christians and Orthodox.

[. . .]

Many Latin Americans have "discovered" the Arabs, especially in the region of the Triple Border, an area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which hosts a large number of new Muslim migrants. Those who were marginalized on ethnic grounds in the early twentieth century are now excluded for religious reasons. The result is a confusion between race and religion among Arabs and Muslim world. And this new form of discrimination has prompted new generation Arab-Latin American, who reject the association between Islam and terrorism, and who again assert their identity, engage with their culture and feel proud to belong to the civilization of their ancestors.

[LINK] "Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes"
I posted this MSNBC article, taken from 3 Quarks Daily, especially for

schizmatic.

Chimpanzees and great apes are genetically similar to humans, yet they rarely live for more than 50 years. Although the average human lifespan has doubled in the last 200 years — due largely to decreased infant mortality related to advances in diet, environment and medicine — even without these improvements, people living in high mortality hunter-forager lifestyles still have twice the life expectancy at birth as wild chimpanzees do.

[. . .]

Over time, eating red meat, particularly raw flesh infected with parasites in the era before cooking, stimulates chronic inflammation, Finch explained. In response, humans apparently evolved unique variants in a cholesterol-transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates chronic inflammation as well as many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries.

One variant found in all modern human populations, known as ApoE3, emerged roughly 250,000 years ago, "just before the final stage of evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa," Finch explained.

ApoE3 lowers the risk of most aging diseases, specifically heart disease and Alzheimer's, and is linked with an increased lifespan.

"I suggest that it arose to lower the risk of degenerative disease from the high-fat meat diet they consumed," Finch told LiveScience. "Another benefit is that it promoted brain development."

[PHOTO] Northern Spirit I, Harbourfront

Northern Spirit I, Harbourfront
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The Northern Spirit I is docked at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre.

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