and I was there for the start of it all...

Via Wired's Campus blog:

Disease control specialists are looking at the WoW plague that broke out two years ago because it apparently modeled how real diseases spread.

One thing I thought of was that it was transmitted through animals to human(oids) - those hunter pets!?!#$#*! As if they're not OP enough already!!1!1eleven

The article from TimesOnline is pretty much info-free, unfortunately. It's just a teaser for the real study to be released next month in Lancet.

But call me provisionally skeptical that you could learn anything of use. People's WoW behavior doesn't model their real-world behavior because real world death isn't overcome by a simple corpse run. When the plague broke out I flew into Ironforge to try and cleanse as many people as I could. I kept myself and people around me alive until my mana ran out, then we found ourselves making said corpse run.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if that was an accurate predictor of behavior - if I were a doctor in real life. If it's a given that I head some medical capacity maybe I would have tried to help. Then when resources ran out I'd have been in the infected zone with no defense, and then eventually dead.

Of course, even then I ran right back in the middle of things to laugh it up some more, and died a second time. Had I not been a pally I would have flown into IF just to see it happen. Which I would emphatically not do in rl. So we'll see what this study has to say, but for now I'm a skeptic.

Iraq for Sale

The depth of corruption and depravity the Bushies unleashed in Iraq knows no bounds. The whole war was basically an unsupervised giveaway to any corporation with Republican ties. These were then given millions - billions, total - of taxpayer money with no means of accounting for it. The waste and fraud have been document in the film Iraq for Sale. But new reports are coming out all the time, including a new Rolling Stone article that details the incompetence and contempt these people display:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

OK, I'm gonna stop reading this morning because I'm getting really angry.

insane.

This is just insane. Madness. Evil. WHAT THE FUCK:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

Pentagon creates campaign war room

From Talking Points Memo: the Pentagon is setting up a 24/7 news desk to control info coming out of Baghdad and develop rapid response to critics:

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad _ serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

But you shouldn't think of this as a propaganda group, oh no!:

Less than a year ago, Smith developed plans for teams of people to "develop messages" for the 24-hour news cycle and "correct the record" when news agencies put out what the Pentagon considered inaccurate information.

At the time, he outlined an operation that resembled a political campaign _ such as that made famous by Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign war room _ calling for a "Rapid Response" section that quickly answers opponents' assertions.

It was set up to focus more resources on the Internet and blogs and book civilian and military guests on television and radio shows.

While portions of the plan were put in place, much of it was shelved when Donald H. Rumsfeld stepped down as defense secretary and Robert Gates took over. At the time, Rumsfeld was complaining bitterly that the news media were focusing too much on bad news coming out of Iraq and not enough on progress there.

Defense officials denied that the program was a propaganda tool or that it was set up to respond to the eroding public support for the war.

Army of Dude

Army of Dude - One of the few remaining milbloggers the army hasn't yet shut down. A recent post:

What has been bothering me this whole deployment is the brevity and formality in which the media handles the death of soldiers. It always goes, “PFC John Smith, Norman, Oklahoma, killed by enemy small arms fire in Baghdad. Assigned to 1/43 Engineers, Third Infantry Division.” What a crock to read that in a paper. It would be wholly appropriate to dedicate a full color photo and a real biography in every paper in America. The anonymity of dead soldiers would evaporate and the public would be forced to look at the faces of the fallen. Would it set in progress change? Perhaps. It certainly would go to show that we’re out here every day, dying for an ideal long forgotten. As for me, I started to sign these entries with my initials long ago to avoid detection by superiors. I could and still can get in trouble for what I’ve written. Lately this blog has been passed around to dudes of every rank, and those who would be punishing me have become readers. So it’s no longer necessary to be sneaky and secretive, another anonymous soldier. My name is Alex Horton, and I’m a 22 year old from Frisco, Texas. I can recite Pulp Fiction line by line and my favorite color is blue. I want to be a journalist when I grow up, and I want to see every part of the world. For the first time in my life I’m an avid reader. Fifteen months here has been fifteen months away from Lauren, the girl I’m crazy about. This wouldn’t be much of a blog without her, as she’s the inspiration for anything creative coming out of me, my beautiful muse.

In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.

Herbert Hoover said, "Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die." These are the young men we can’t afford to go without. Brian Chevalier and Jesse Williams, George Bush and Secretary Gates, we’re all flesh and blood. Every life is sacred. You probably don’t know the names of the first two. But you should.

Makes me cry. This guy and other like him are the Eric Maria Remarques of our time, and I can only hope that it's him and not the Ernst Jungers who influence how this war is interpreted here after it's over.

Another recent post describes the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness experienced by a self-aware soldier with the soul of a writer:

This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.

Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck. The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night. I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

We need to bring him and his brothers home for good. Now.

monkey baby talk

Two aspects of this story:

1. people can tell baby talk from regular talk even in languages not their own

2. monkeys (at least some kinds) use baby talk with their babys.

Interesting implications for universal grammar, language ability in other primates.

evolution of Brad Pitt

Semi-interesting article on the evolution of male facial features - "bulldog-like" the article describes, with pinched ratio between brow and chin compared to women. It evolved because women find it attractive, and hence propagated itself.

But the whole thing, at least as written up by this Yahoo news story (LiveScience.com actually) is a bit circular. Faces that have this ratio are 'more masculine' and therefore women are attracted to them. This attraction confirms its own premise. I dunno. And there could be other reasons for the ratio as well... who knows.

In any case it's interesting if the skulls show change over time that the feature did evolve, which seems to be the point.

Darmok?

Fascinating post at The Mahablog about how right-wing political use of myth can be understood through one of the best ST:TNG episodes of all time: Darmok.

The critical passage:

[W]hen righties talk about history, they are not talking about what actually happened in the past. Instead, they are evoking historical persons and events as archetype and allegory.

Thus, when they speak of Winston Churchill, they are not speaking of the real Winston Churchill. They are speaking of what Winston Churchill represents in their minds, which is the stubborn refusal to back down from a fight. In fact, the real Winston Churchill wrote a letter to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1922 advising him that British troops should abandon Iraq.

I think we should now put definitely, not only to Feisal but to the Constituent Assembly, the position that unless they beg us to stay and to stay on our own terms in regard to efficient control, we shall actually evacuate before the close of the financial year. I would put this issue in the most brutal way, and if they are not prepared to urge us to stay and to co-operate in every manner I would actually clear out. That at any rate would be a solution. … At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.

But instead of actually studying the life and words of Churchill for understanding, righties simply evoke the man as an archetype of bulldog, never-give-up tenacity.

See also comment #5, which mentions the role played by the Tale of Genji in Japanese culture and haiku. Because haiku needs to pack as much meaning as possible into a form of limited length, poets use lines from the Tale in order to convey a much greater depth of meaning.

mercenaries in Iraq

Oh wait, we're supposed to call them 'private contractors.' Walter Pincus writes in the Washington Post on how

While U.S. contractors have provided personal security to officials in other conflict zones, those in Iraq are now being used in all aspects of the struggle because, as the CRS report says, doing otherwise would require policymakers "to contemplate an increase in the number of U.S. troops, perhaps increasing incentives to attract volunteers or re-instituting the draft."

This has a couple implications - obviously, the ways in which they can operate in a legal gray zone and the way in which these companies become a shadow enforcement arm of unaccountable elites are among the most severe. (Indypendant article of Aug 15 by Jeremy Scahill - of Blackwater fame) Also that it proves this war is, among other things, designed to funnel money to US corporations allied with Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc.

And it suggests that The Surge is actually more expansive than we've thought, because they can funnel Blackwater into the region without having to report it to anyone.

And also it upps the number of US casualties by at least 1,000.

And it promises the future expansion of warfare around the world -- with, as a bonus, extremist religious connotations. As Scahill says in his interview with Democracy Now:

You know, something happened last year that got no attention whatsoever. In October, President Bush lifted sanctions on Christian Southern Sudan, and there have been reports now that Blackwater has been negotiating directly with the Southern Sudanese regional government to come in and start training the Christian forces of the south of Sudan. Blackwater has been itching to get into Sudan, and Erik Prince is on the board of Christian Freedom International, which is an evangelical missionary organization that has been targeting Sudan for many years.

And finally that there's a good chance our own country is going to be fucked. up. when these people come back from their mercenary adventure. Within 10-20 years after our inevitable pull-out of Iraq, we are going to have to deal with our own home-grown warlords. Of course, they're already in charge now. So how much worse can it get? Scahill:

[W]hat’s really frightening is that you have a man in Erik Prince, who is a neo-crusader, a Christian supremacist, who has been given over a half a billion dollars in federal contracts, and that's not to mention his black contracts, his secret contracts, his contracts with foreign friendly governments like Jordan. This is a man who espouses Christian supremacy, and he has been given, essentially, allowed to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world against secularists and Muslims and others, and has really been brought into the fold. He refers to Blackwater as the sort of FedEx of the Pentagon. He says if you really want a package to get somewhere, do you go with the postal service or do you go with FedEx? This is how these people view themselves. And it embodies everything that President Eisenhower prophesied would happen with the rise of an unchecked military-industrial complex. You have it all in Blackwater.

So maybe that's the best argument for keeping these insane people fighting their happy colonial wars in other countries. Because if they ran out of those to fight they'd just set up their fiefdoms here. Of course, this might just upset people the slightest bit in the countries we choose as our playgrounds, but it's not like a couple dozen pissed off brown people with box cutters could ever attack us back in any way...

"Rally squads"

Republican stormtroopers are GO!!!

Portions of the Presidential Advance Memo have been released (pdf from ACLU):

Inside the event space, the manual advises, White House advance personnel should preposition “rally squads” that can swarm any protesters at the event and “use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.” The rally squads can be formed using “college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities,” the manual notes.

Young aggressive jocks blocking political opponents from displaying their allegiance. Just how the SA got its start.

(In fairness, ABC article notes that the Kerry campaign blocked opposing t-shirts with its own cheerleaders too. But that's different than rooting through the crowd for silent opponents and having them arrested by the police. I the use of the word "swarm" here...)

(A second point in fairness is that the manual does mention that you can ignore protesters who are not disrupting the event. And that you should avoid physical confrontation, because that is what they want. But this was the case in SA policy as well. And also in both cases, your stormtroopers are never likely to be deliberative in their swarming given the pressures on them to protect The Leader from anything embarrassing - including the knowledge that not everyone agrees with him.)

(ABC reports available here)
(hat tip Pandagon)

dogs and cats, living together...

...mass domestication!! Some interesting links from the Reality-Based Community concerning the timing of domestication of dogs and cats.

This one cites a date of 100k-15k years ago for dogs (with the author thinking 13k), while this one supports the 15k. (100k is the date wolves and dogs diverged, which could have happened through normal natural selection.) As for cats, looks like it's about 12k years ago.

But RBC also includes a cool link to Kipling's "The Cat Who Walks By Himself", about how Woman domesticated all the animals (including Man), but the Cat was the only one able to bargain on its own terms and retain some independence. Could be a cute read to go with Diamond.

Vikings!

The reconstructed Viking ship from 1024 has just reached Dublin. Took them months, and it sounds like they never would have made it without modern tech help. Really makes you appreciate what people went through back then just to travel in one little corner of the world.

1800 change in human nature

Now only if we could have a change in the nature of the human at 1600 (rimshot)

But in seriousness, here's a new article from the NYT Science section on the emerging industrial culture of the 19th century. One of his keys is the counterintuitive concept of "downward social mobility":

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.

He has a lot about genetics that may take things a little too far. Doesn't seem like these values have to be encoded in genes for them to have the same effect. (And besides, evolution can't operate in that short a time period.) But it's an interesting thesis when read on the cultural / institutional level.

documentary on Prussian Blue

Nazi pop twin moppets sieg HEIL!!1!!eleven!! New documentary about them with many scary scenes. Via Orcinus and SPLC blog. Watch it via Dutch Google here.

Diamond refuted?

Looks like you can domesticate hippos after all! Jared Diamond turns over in his grave. (He's not dead? Oh, uhh..)

awesome!

Very well written (duh!) guide for student writing by Michael O'Hare. (pdf here)

Some of it is actually a bit pretentious (avoid Latin/French cognates as post-1066 invaders of the English language -- whaaa? you must be joking...) but most is useful and can be stolen adapted to my own guide to student writing.

updated human timeline

The timeline of human evolution just got more complicated, as it does every few years or so.

The old theory was that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became us, Homo sapiens. But those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years, Leakey and colleagues report in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

Leakey's co-author notes that human evolution is a

"chaotic kind of looking evolutionary tree rather than this heroic march that you see with the cartoons of an early ancestor evolving into some intermediate and eventually unto us."

That's the point I'd want students to get out of this article. It's not a straight line, its many branches and dead ends.

Sherman on war

Amen, brother! It's the warriors themselves who are often the most antiwar.

our torture system

Trying to not spend too much time dicking around online so that I can actually finish my fracking dissertation. But this makes me cry:

"The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. 'It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,' an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. 'At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'"

[...]

"A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the 'takeout' of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to 'sodomy.' He said, 'It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.' The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, 'because it’s demoralizing."

From jane Meyer in the New Yorker, hat tip Digby.

omfg cia rofl

Too good not to note for posterity:

Perhaps the most comical of all CIA clandestine activities — unfortunately all too typical of its covert operations over the last 60 years — was the spying it did in 1994 on the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, who sought to promote policies of human rights and justice in that country. Loyal to the murderous Guatemalan intelligence service, the CIA had bugged her bedroom and picked up sounds that led their agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary, Carol Murphy. The CIA station chief "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy." The agency spread the word in Washington that the liberal ambassador was a lesbian without realizing that "Murphy" was also the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog. She was actually a married woman from a conservative family.

From Chalmers Johnson's review of Legacy of Ashes.

'Shock Troop' supported

TNR did their investigation, the story held up.

I found the last bit rather revealing:

Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.

And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is government propaganda. Like how they banned soldier blogs. That's their goal in all this.

Life after humanity

A British architectural site provides a look at London over the centuries after its abandonment by humans. (Originally published in 1996 by the New Scientist).

Makes good companion reading to The World Without Us, which I just ordered from Amazon.

totalitarian handbags?

Fascist chic reaches a whole 'nother level.