My Idea

Cooking and Human Evolution – see:

University Of Minnesota (1999, August 10). Light My Fire: Cooking As Key To Modern Human Evolution. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm

and

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

Hey that was my idea! Oh well Easy come easy go. That’s what happens when you’re slow out of the starting gate on a hot scientific hypothesis – AND you’re not working in the right field of science. It occurred to me (as an avid cook and more avid eater, and as extraordinary as it sounds in the 21st century to have to say this, evolution believer) a long long time ago that cooking very likely had a profound and, as the above articles suggest, perhaps THE pivotal role in human evolution.

You know how just about everyone advances their pet aspect of humanity that is displayed by no other species – tool-making, or language, or love, and so on and so on? Trouble is, one by one they’re falling by the wayside. Ask Roger and Deborah Fouts about the whole language thing, for instance. But cooking – with the possible exception of whether or not you count those galapagos marine iguanas that eat seaweed and then heat themselves (and their ingested seaweed) to high temperatures in the blazing equatorial sun – still seems to be limited to just humans. And not just limited to, but universally practiced by all human cultures.

And then there’s the brain case issue – cooking foods reduced the requirement in our ancestors for the huge jaw muscles, anchored into a volume of the skull that once released from that application could be turned over to neural occupancy.

I’ve also wondered about and speculated on the role and importance, the nutritional synergy if you will, of combining nutrients in a single cooked dish with multiple ingredients. Cue the nutritional anthropologists.

Ok, all circumstantial – I know that the hardest work of a scientist isn’t coming up with the brilliant idea – after all brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen - but to obtain the evidence that tests the ideas and, more importantly, to discard nearly all of them. I’ll leave it to Prof Wrangham to do the heavy lifting while I get started on a lemon meringue pie.

The Reason for the Season

In the face of crass and unbridled, if not completely unhinged, commercialization of the winter holiday season we have to admit that we somewhat welcome those infrequent reminders of “The Reason for the Season”; alas, so few of those get it right:

Many of our cultural traditions come from an agrarian culture that developed primarily in the northern hemisphere of an approximately spherical terrestrial planet whose axis of rotation is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the axis of its orbit around its parent star. Due to physical principles that govern the motion of celestial bodies, the fundamental symmetry of the universe that gives rise to the conservation of angular momentum, and the geometry and thermodynamics of (approximately) point sources of electromagnetic radiation illuminating distant spheres, this state of affairs produces a highly predictable phenomenon of seasons, significant for its crucial agricultural implications, and dramatically demonstrated twice a year in the reversal in direction of the apparent motion of the parent star with respect to the horizon from a fixed location on the surface of the planet. This latter phenomenon, a solstice, and our understanding of it and our ability to understand it, and our understanding of its place in the unfolding of natural phenomena is exquisitely beautiful and worthy of celebration. This recognition takes nothing – absolutely nothing – away from the metaphor and mythology, the symbolism and legend, and, yes, religion, that has been piled on to the holidays that we celebrate near the winter solstice. Indeed, I propose quite the opposite: that a failure to recognize this as the reason for the season undermines our ability to see and to celebrate the genuine and true majesty and splendor of the world we are so fortunate to inhabit and that we must share with others. Happy solstice

Waterboarding: Everybody Wins

What a wonderful new law enforcement tool our national leaders have made available to us! It’s the dawn of a bright new age in which waterboarding is finally recognized as simply another useful tool in saving lives, and I say it’s about time. We should deploy this new instrument into our law enforcement policies in careful stages, starting exactly as we have, with those who are terrorists, or have been accused of being terrorists, or who might be terrorists, or who might have information about terrorists, or who might be able to accuse someone else of being a terrorist. Cautious and thoughtful introduction of the technique in limited situations like this allow us to more carefully tune it to achieve its greatest utility and to prevent, as it’s been made clear we must, potential targets of the technique from preparing to resist it.

But it’s important to begin considering its next stage of deployment and I humbly propose one I find as perhaps the most compelling: cases involving the report of an abducted child. This scenario perfectly exploits all of the best and most promising features of waterboarding: the speed with which it provides information to interrogators, its potential to save lives in time-sensitive situations, its harmlessness to those who undergo it, and the ease with which it can be applied with limited resources.

We know that minutes and hours matter in child abductions – the likelihood of recovering a child alive after a stranger abduction falls very rapidly as time elapses. We also know that police frequently lose precious hours and days trying to establish whether the parents themselves should be considered suspects. So making sure that police have all the information from parents quickly, makes all the difference in where police resources are directed early on in these situations, ultimately determining the survival potential for many of the children involved.

So here is how I see what should happen: upon reporting a child missing, police should immediately interrogate the childs parents with the technique of waterboarding. No more namby-pamby rapport building or good-cop, bad-cop routintes, or any other tricks of the police interrogation trade that, when they work at all, can take hours or days to generate information. Information extracted from parents by rapid resort to waterboarding will insure that police resources in these time-sensitive circumstances will be most appropriately directed to recovering children who are in mortal danger: no more wasted police time in corroborating a parents account of events, no more wondering if the parents were involved and squandering police resources and effort on lines of inquiry that go nowhere, no more guilty parents sending police off on wild goose chases, and no more coddling of monsters who are responsible for their own children’s deaths.

Indeed, as word spreads of the effectiveness of waterboarding in these situations as inevitably it must due to the blabbermouth liberal media, I think it is likely that criminally involved parents, will soon become less likely to seek out police involvement. This will, over time, give police so much more confidence in the accounts of abduction of those parents who do come forward with a willingness to be waterboarded to get an aggressive investigation underway, and with that confidence will come the resolve and the empathy that will result in many more of these situations ending happily.

Only those who are morally bankrupt beyond redemption could argue against such an approach in these situations. Waterboarding, is recognized by its proponents and practitioners as speedy, harmless and productive. It is inexpensive and so will save precious public resources and most important of all it will save childrens lives. Join me in contacting your representatives to demand WPACEW legislation now: Waterboarding Parents of Abducted Children: Everbody Wins!

Waterboarding = Forced Water Inhalation

In recognition of the extraordinary situation we face in which morally challenged national leaders have generated a “debate” about whether waterboarding is torture, and in which some “reasonable” observers have given credence to the merits of such a debate, and in which a complicit national media in presenting the “debate” has nearly universally adopted the clever and mild euphemism, simulated drowning, perfectly packaged for a population immersed in seeking out virtual experiences (grand theft auto, internet porn, second life, simulated drowning, they sound all of a piece, no?) I propose a modest modification to the language used in referring to this innterrogation/punishment/revenge technique: let’s call it “forced water inhalation”. It serves the same purpose as the euphemism – to briefly and pithily elaborate on the physiological basis of the technique – while more appropriately characterizing it.

Declining Support for Suicide Bombings - A Very Dim Bright Spot

Typically, terrorism is one of the tactics pursued by those who know that they would face certain, immediate, and overwhelming defeat in a conventional military confrontation with their opponents. Thus environments that support relatively small cores of zealous terrorists are, almost by definition, those in which terrorism can flourish.

It is tempting at first glance to view as good news for the “Global War on Terror”, new Pew Global Attitudes Project data, showing declining support for suicide attacks (for instance, the striking decrease from 40% in 2004 to 13% in the current report for Moroccan respondents), and that was recently reported in a letter to the editor in my local newspaper. Such a decline in support can be helpful in combatting terrorism; it is not, however, by any means the end of the story.

Since a terrorist movement can be, and usually is, structured around relatively small zealous cores of followers, it is well worth asking whether declines in support that still leave significant minorities supporting terrorist acts are consistent with other trends in the ongoing “Global War on Terror” in which we have been engaged now for six years. That’s where the data gets very ugly. In 2004 the U.S. State Dept proudly rolled out data showing that by several measures, incidents of international terrorism in 2003 had reached their lowest levels since 1969, at least implying that the “Global War on Terror” was responsible. Let’s make this clear – this data, incidents of international terrorism, is what the State Department self-selected as an assessment of progress in the “Global War on Terror”.

What has happened since then? The most recent State Department report of incidents of international terrorism, for 2006, shows that by virtually every measure acts of terrorism have skyrocketed. Let’s pick a single measure: number of individuals killed in terrorist acts. In 2001, an especially notorious year for deaths from terrorist acts, the State Department reported 3547 worldwide deaths from terrorist acts. Five years later, deep into the “Global War on Terror”, the State Department reported 20,498 deaths in terrorist acts, this following 2004 during which they tallied 14,618 deaths. So briefly, our five year investment has bought us a well over 500% INCREASE from 2001 in this measure of the effectiveness of the “War” that presumably should be decreasing if we are succeeding.

An alternative hypothesis to the “good news” of the Pew Report is that the “Global War on Terror” is having the effect of metastasizing and hardening, and perhaps even growing, international terrorist movements. Popular sentiment may be growing against these movements, indeed, perhaps largely because of these effects, but once more, terrorism can and does thrive, is designed to operate, in small cores at the margin. And don’t get me started on how this analysis is also consistent with recent National Intelligence Estimates.

So…, Pew, Schmew, I think we’re in deep, deep Doo-Doo.

Bush and the Bully Pulpit

“I remind people that, like when I’m with, Condi, I say she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C student and just look at who’s the president and who’s the adviser.”

I know, I know, there are more substantive issues about which I should be concerned, but there is, I am certain, a doctoral dissertation lurking in coming to understand how we have arrived at a point where the President of the United States comes before a press conference and stumbles through such a deeply unfunny, smug, unenlightened, degrading, irrelevant statement in just 30 short words. Whether he has actually ventured this observation to others, or whether he blurted it out here for the first time, "misunderestimating" its profound offensiveness, it is so inappropriate in so many ways, that it is uncomfortable to hear. Even though Dr. Condoleeza Rice is clearly not the only target of the benighted sentiment seething in this utterance and has made, in my opinion, some pretty severe mistakes for which she and we are bound to suffer, she is incontrovertibly a highly accomplished and important – not to mention ambitious – figure, and it made my insides squirm to think of her having to tolerate this. In the context of a range of past and unfolding revelations of how the President accepts, encourages, and arranges the humiliation and degradation of those working with him, how could one not but conclude that, at least in his personal interactions, this man has the sensibilities of a profoundly insecure and deeply disturbed third-grade bully. It seems even Jon Stewart cannot find a funny angle in this. Is it perhaps more the stuff of tragedy?

Civilian Control of the Military

An utterly misguided and foolhardy recent editorial on huffingtonpost has called for a military coup against President Bush. However, for a long time now, the manner in which the present administration has handled the principle of civilian control of the military has deeply bothered me. This handling has, I would maintain, significantly weakened the nation's commitment to the principle in a variety of ways, including:

• military commanders have not been held strictly and visibly accountable for a variety of grave failures

• avid pursuit of privatization of a variety of military functions and further failing to enact policies that hold these military contractors to standards of conduct at least consistent with the principle of civilian control of the military

• rhetoric in a range of contexts that frequently sidles up to the idea of allowing the military to make policy decisions, e.g., listening to the troops

• disconnecting a majority of Americans from an "ownership" relationship with the military through a refusal to ask for significant shared sacrifice

• equivocation on the obligations of the U.S. Military under both U.S. and international law

The breadth and seriousness of this record warrants that any responsible position of outrage grounded in the principle of the profound importance of civilian control of the military should recognize these ongoing, real policies that actually are - as we "speak" - undermining the principle.