Perception

When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

...

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game emerged from a small but growing counter trend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition...

Some of this research went back a generation. It was in the 1960s that researchers discovered that aspects of visual perception varied from place to place. One of the classics of the literature, the Müller-Lyer illusion, showed that where you grew up determined to what degree you would fall prey to the illusion that these two lines are different in length.

Researchers found that Americans perceive the line with the ends feathered outward as being longer than the line with the arrow tips. San foragers of the Kalahari, on the other hand, were more likely to see the lines as they are: equal in length. Subjects from more than a dozen cultures were tested, and Americans were at the far end of the distribution  –  seeing the illusion more dramatically than all others.

...

The most interesting thing about cultures may not be in the observable things they do –  the rituals, eating preferences, codes of behavior, and the like  –  but in the way they mold our most fundamental conscious and unconscious thinking and perception. The different ways people perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion reflects lifetimes spent in different physical environments. American children, for the most part, grow up in box-shaped rooms of varying dimensions. Surrounded by carpentered corners, visual perception adapts to this strange new environment (strange and new in terms of human history, that is) by learning to perceive converging lines in three dimensions. When unconsciously translated in three dimensions, the line with the outward-feathered ends appears farther away and the brain therefore judges it to be longer. The more time one spends in natural environments, where there are no carpentered corners, the less one sees the illusion.

...

The turn ... is not an easy one; accounting for the influence of culture on cognition will be a herculean task. Cultures are not monolithic; they can be endlessly parsed. Ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, economic status, parenting styles, rural upbringing versus urban or suburban – there are hundreds of cultural differences that individually and in endless combinations influence our conceptions of fairness, how we categorize things, our method of judging and decision making, and our deeply held beliefs about the nature of the self, among other aspects of our psychological makeup.

Well, yes...

The prisoner’s dilemma is a theoretical tool, but there are plenty of parallel choices – and free riders – in the real world. People who are always late for appointments with others don’t have to hurry or wait for others. Some use roads and hospitals without paying their taxes. There are lots of interesting reasons why most of us turn up on time and don’t avoid paying taxes, even though these might be the selfish “rational” choices according to most economic models.

Crucially, rational actor theory appears more useful for predicting the actions of certain groups of people. One group who have been found to free ride more than others in repeated studies is people who have studied economics... Economics students “informed on” other players 60% of the time, while those studying other subjects did so 39% of the time. Men have previously been found to be more self-interested in such tests, and more men study economics than women. However even after controlling for this sex difference, ... economics students were 17% more likely to take the selfish route when playing the prisoner’s dilemma.

Detachment

The last meal as a cultural phenomenon grew even as capital punishment faded from public view, and in less than two centuries the country has gone from grisly public hangings, in which the prisoner was sometimes unintentionally decapitated or left to suffocate, to lethal injection, the most common form of execution in America today, in which death is “administered.” The condemned are often sedated before execution. They are generally not allowed to listen to music, lest it induce an emotional reaction. Last words are sometimes delivered in writing, rather than spoken; if they are spoken, it might be to prison personnel rather than the witnesses. The detachment is so complete that when scholar Robert Johnson, for his 1998 book Death Work, asked an execution-team officer what his job was, the officer replied: “the right leg.”

Manifest

What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, specters, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies, hob-thrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubuses, spoorns, men-in-the-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tales, knockers, elves, rawheads, Meg-with-the-wads, old-shocks, ouphs, pad-foots, pixies, pictrees, giants, dwarfs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprets, spunks, conjurers, thurses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag-foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraiths, waffs, flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers, pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies, cauld-lads, death-hearses, goblins, hob-headlesses, bugaboos, kows, or cowes, nickies, nacks, waiths, miffies, buckies, ghouls, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy-carlins, pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles korigans, sylvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sibyls, nicknevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps, cutties, and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!

Fish

While searching for confirmation of the animals the Vatican had reclassified as fish so that they could be eaten during fasting - capybaras, sea turtles, beavers and barnacle geese, allegedly - I was more taken with this video of capybaras placidly stealing cabbage from a curmudgeonly swan.



As you would be.

Phenakistoscope

From, via.

Conflict

All of Osvaldo Cavandoli's La Linea are available on Youtube, for now. I love these things.



They were played as filler on the ABC for years, but it appears I was wrong to think they were made by the same mob who did the glorious claymation The Red and the Blue films, or AEIOU which made animations out of impressions in sand, which were also used to fill gaps in the ABC's schedule.





But that was Francesco Misseri and his company, someone else entirely, who specialise in animation in odd media. As well as clay and sand they use paper, ribbons and water, or so says their website. A later effort, seeming to be another example of the dire spread of CGI (but perhaps not), is Pozzie, a boy who is a water-droplet. Cute but not as amusing, lacking as it does the hilariously infuriated characters of the earlier stuff.



I suspect the attitude is: small children must be spared conflict. Which means they are spared narrative, character and drama, of course. And laughs.

Cap in Hand

Being on hols at present I am even more than usual out of the mainstream news loop, so it was only yesterday I heard about the death of Chopper Read and of the Australian Labour Party.

I kid, I kid: here's why Bill Shorten is entirely suited to be leader of the ALP.

Apparently he was also schooled by Jesuits, which Gerard Henderson, being an utter cretin, thinks proves something.

Bite

Lightening the mood, here's Peter Watts reporting on a tick that gives victims of its bite an allergy to meat (though the flesh of birds and - ahem - primates would still be OK). Given what immediately occurred to me, I was pleased to discover on reading further through the post that I wasn't the only person who saw the potential for militant vegetarians to attempt a weaponisation. There would probably be unforeseen collateral effects, as in the mode of The Moral Virologist, although what exactly hasn't yet come to mind.

Woy Stanfer Strayer

I probably won't be doing a summary of Senate candidates for this election as I have done in the past, as it's likely to be too fucking depressing. Not only do we have a record number of parties running this time, we seem to have a record number of parties running with the word "Australia" in their title.

Rise Up Australia Party

Katter's Australian Party

Australian Voice

Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party

Building Australia Party

Uniting Australia Party

Bullet Train For Australia*

Australian Protectionist Party

Australia First Party

Australian Independents

Australian Democrats*

The Australian Republicans*

Secular Party of Australia*

Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party

Never a good sign.

Other preferred parties include the anti-Islamic Rise Up Australia Party, and the Australian Christians party, which wants to cut the intake of non-Christian migrants and take more African Christians.

And how about the Australian Protectionist Party, which favours a racially/religiously discriminatory migration policy, the rebuilding of tariff walls and freer access to firearms for those of approved “cultural background”. Really.

Poor bloody fellow, my sodding country.

Meanwhile the Wikileaks Party manages to shoot themselves in the foot, apparently with the same shotgun they're biting the barrel of while pulling the trigger with their big toe.

In official election tickets lodged with the Australian Electoral Commission, they have said they want the fascist Australia First Party, the pro-shooting-in-National-Parks Shooters and Fishers Party, and the “mens rights activist” Non-Custodial Parents Party to win a seat instead of the Australian Greens. In New South Wales, if you take the easy option and just tick the Wikileaks Party box in the Senate, and if they don’t win, your vote will go to those three right-wing parties before it goes to the Greens.

* Ok, to be fair, that's probably just to avoid confusion, a la UK Squeeze.

Hotel de Michelin

A private hell for Cayce Pollard, from the sculptures of Takanori Aiba, via, via.

Diagnosis

The more interesting question is who needs the DSM anyway? First of all, bureaucracies. Everyone in North America who hopes their health insurance will cover or at least defray the cost of treatment for their mental illness must first receive a diagnosis that fits the scheme and bears a numerical code.

...

The first DSM (1952) and its successor, DSM-II (1968), were heavily influenced by the psychoanalysis then dominant in the United States. But with DSM-III in 1980 there was a new beginning. There were two notable causes, aside from the waning of psychodynamic therapy. First was the discovery of a genuinely effective drug for controlling mania... Second was a comparative study in 1972 of diagnoses of schizophrenia in London and New York. It was a rude comeuppance. Schizophrenia was diagnosed about twice as frequently in New York as in London. Symptoms were agreed on, but not the final diagnosis. ‘Operational’ criteria had to be fixed. Since we did not understand the causes of most mental illness – or rather there were too many incompatible theories of causation – we should rely on syndromes, on observable patterns of symptoms, behaviour in short, on which there could be some agreement. This approach is often called Kraepelinian, after the great German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin...

...

In Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (2005) Andrew Lakoff writes about gene-hunting drug companies which want lots of spit and blood samples so they can try to match up a disease with DNA, devise a way to detect the malady through DNA markers and then find a new drug that will ameliorate the symptoms. Mental disorders have to be identifiable by means of the DSM, because the US is the biggest market for medications. Partly to avoid ethics committees, and partly to keep a global net in place, the gene-hunters often go to impoverished places. In one case, a French drug company wanted DNA from bipolar patients. There was an underfunded mental hospital in Argentina, but it was psychodynamic in practice. Bipolar disorder is Kraepelinian, not Freudian, and so the hospital had no patients diagnosed as bipolar. The drug company made an offer the hospital could not refuse. So it reclassified its patients to DSM standards; doctors rethought and the patients experienced the symptoms in new ways. Such are the mechanisms of cultural imperialism.

- "Lost in the Forest", Ian Hacking reviews the DSM-5 in the London Review of Books.

Retirement

The Australian government is currently spending about $32 billion per year on superannuation tax expenditures (taxation based incentives for superannuation contributions). It has been estimated, by the superannuation industry, that this $32 billion in tax expenditures is currently saving the government about $7 billion in pension costs. So, if we dumped all of the superannuation tax concessions, we could not only provide pensions to all of those who would become eligible but also increase payments to provide a more comfortable retirement.

...

About 38 per cent of the superannuation tax expenditure goes to the wealthiest 10 per cent, which means that by 2014–15 the top 10 per cent of income earners will receive over $17 billion in tax concessions. So why exactly are we planning to spend $17 billion per year helping the wealthiest Australians save for their retirement?

- Warwick Smith at Overland.

Reproducibility

Taxonomise!

On Wednesday a formal proposal appeared for discussion: “Propose merging Category:American women novelists to Category:American novelists.” Nominator’s rationale: “As per gender neutrality guidelines, gender-specific categories are not appropriate where gender is not specifically related to the topic. This subcategory also creates the unfortunate side effect that Category:American novelists contains only male novelists.” Many users quickly posted comments agreeing.

...

A large majority of commenters voted “Merge.” Some deployed the terms “ghettoization” and “back of the bus.” Then again, a few are voting for ghettoization — or as they say, “Diffuse women but not men,” diffuse being the term for sending members of a parent category out into a subcategory. At least it’s arguable that “women novelists” is a category of cultural and sociological interest. It was noted that Wikipedia features an extensive article on Women’s Writing in English, as part of Wikiproject Gender Studies and Wikiproject Women’s History.

“We should not let the media impose their view of political correctness on Wikipedia,” wrote Petri Krohn, who identifies himself as a Finnish “writer and Internet commentator.” He added — I think with a straight face — “We might also add some generic warning on American people category pages that they mainly contain white males and one should look into the subcategories.”

- James Gleick at NYRBlog.

The research used something called a “memory confusion protocol”. This works by asking experiment participants to remember a series of pictures of individuals, who vary along various dimensions... When participants’ memories are tested, the errors they make reveal something about how they judged the pictures of individuals – what sticks in their mind most and least.

...

Using this protocol, the researchers tested the strength of categorisation by race, something all previous efforts had shown was automatic. The twist they added was to throw in another powerful psychological force – group membership. People had to remember individuals who wore either yellow or grey basketball shirts, and whose pictures were presented alongside statements indicating which team they were in. Without the shirts, the pattern of errors were clear: participants automatically categorised the individuals by their race (in this case: African American or Euro American). But with the coloured shirts, this automatic categorisation didn't happen: people's errors revealed that team membership had become the dominant category, not the race of the players.

...

So despite what dozens of experiments had appeared to show, this experiment created a situation where categorisation by race faded into the background. The explanation, according to the researchers, is that race is only important when it might indicate coalitional information – that is, whose team you are on. In situations where race isn't correlated with coalition, it ceases to be important.

- Tom Stafford at BBC Future.

Nice People

It was no war of ideas at all, and on the ground in 2004 in Iraq, even a slightly retarded child could have analyzed the war more accurately than Packer. The war of ideas existed solely in D.C., and it was a war of cocktail parties. Packer, evidently, never understood the critique of American power - which was that it actually created the dictatorships for its own reasons historically, just as it created the jihadi network used so efficiently by Al Qaeda after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, just as it created the idea that hitting a superpower within its borders - hitting the Soviet Union through sabotage in Central Asia, for instance - was an "idea" that was conceived and distrusted by the CIA handlers of the Afghani "resistance" - etc., etc. In other words, American power was not about ideas, but about American interests, which in turn reflected different factions within the American compact – corporations, for instance. And in turn, these interests were not consistent one with another - they compete. So much, then, in two sentences, for the critique of American power. But such a critique went right over his narcissistic liberal head - since Packer evidently understood the entire war as nice people like him vs. not nice people. Who wanted "tyranny".

- Mr Gathman. See also.

Secondary Strike

Sayed told me that it took a team of 12 people four hours to sort through the body parts, try to identify people and gather the dead bodies. ‘We were extremely afraid because three drones continued to fly above and we feared a secondary strike, because it has happened before, where they strike the rescue teams.’ US military slang for a secondary strike aimed at rescue teams, on the logic that first responders must be ‘up to no good’, is a ‘double tap’. When they kill someone, drone operators call it a ‘bugsplat’.

- Low-Flying Drones

Reveal

Although he called Nixon’s actions "treason," LBJ decided not to reveal the sabotage, because of how he knew about it - the FBI had tapped the South Vietnamese ambassador’s phones and LBJ had transcripts of the ambassador’s talks with Nixon’s intermediary, Anna Chenault, and revealing Nixon’s involvement in the scheme would have meant revealing the illegal wiretaps. Oops. Johnson’s administration did pass the information on to the Humphrey campaign, which chose not to use it either, since their polling suggested that they would win. Oops, again.

Ah, Democrats...

Like

Last December, the Global Times, China's English-language tabloid, ran a story on the local punk band Bear Warrior, which found an ingenious way to measure the audience response to their songs. Its lead singer is a graduate student majoring in precision instruments at a university in Beijing, so he designed a device—"POGO Thermometer”—that measures the intensity of the audience's dancing through a series of sensors embedded in the floor carpet in the music hall. The signals are then transmitted to a central computer where they are closely analyzed in order to improve future performances.

According to the Global Times, the band found that fans “started moving their bodies when the drums kicked in, and they danced the most energetically when he sang higher notes.” As its lead singer put it, “the data helps us understand how we can improve our performance to make the audience respond to our music like we intend.”

- The Curse of “You May Also Like”

The upside for Facebook is that by having other websites link themselves in through the Open Graph, they are able to collect information about user habits beyond the confines of their own pages. Whenever the Like button is clicked, Facebook’s data system receives information about the pages their users frequent. In this way the Like button operate as tendrils, passing data back to a central nervous system. From this data, the many and varied pieces of code that make up the website’s brain can decide how to proceed, often making ads relevant to your previous browsing appear on your screen...

Apart from the rarely used Share and Report buttons, your options are to Like or Comment. This is an uneven choice. By forcing this dichotomy, Facebook requires that any negativity or disapproval must be expressed through a comment...

By simply providing a Like option, without the opportunity to Dislike, Facebook creates a place of relentless, expected positivity. The inherent ease in liking compared to the effort required to comment means that criticism requires additional commitment. Far from the vacuous mouse-flutter of a Like, commenting requires the thud of fingers on a keyboard, the unmoving motive of a durable thought. As a result, within this space, negativity has to be viewed as more negative than positivity is positive; you have made the extra effort to disagree.

- How do you like me now?

For Example

I don’t know what happened in Hugo Chavez’s room when he died, 60 years to the very day after Stalin, though I doubt it was anything quite so dramatic. Chavez wasn’t a mass murderer, after all, though he did an enormous amount of damage to his country’s judiciary, to its press, to its public life and to its ever more oil-dependent economy. Like the Soviet dictator, he promised the poor of his country things that cannot be delivered — and still they are expected to turn out in vast numbers for his funeral Friday, while his henchmen begin the battle for succession.

- right-wing cretin Anne Applebaum (via, see also, also).

One anecdote alone should be enough to give the lie to the idea that poor Venezuelans voted for Chávez because they were fascinated by the baubles they dangled in front of them. During the 2006 presidential campaign, the signature pledge of Chávez’s opponent was to give 3,000,000 poor Venezuelans a black credit card (black as in the color of oil) from which they could withdraw up to $450 in cash a month, which would have drained over $16 billion dollars a year from the national treasury (call it neoliberal populism: give to the poor just enough to bankrupt the government and force the defunding of services). Over the years, there’s been a lot of heavy theoretically breathing by US academics about the miasma oil wealth creates in countries like Venezuela, lulling citizens into a dreamlike state that renders them into passive spectators. But in this election at least, Venezuelans managed to see through the mist. Chávez won with over 62 percent of the vote.

- from Greg Grandin's obit in the Nation.

Dictator

While not going so far as to actually do anything remotely dictatorial, Chávez was far from a democratic leader. Instead of competing honestly in elections, he provided services and raised the standard of living for the people of Venezuela, ensuring their gratitude and thereby gaining an unfair advantage at the polls. Much of the funds for this insidious election tactic of ‘making things better’ were rerouted from the newly nationalised oilfields: through this wanton kleptocracy, billions of petrodollars were withheld from deserving rich white people.

- Every Hugo Chávez obituary in the Western press

I'm glad I could lazily link to this. It enables me to avoid posting some wank about Cicero and the Gracchis and how some ruling class schticks apparently never fucking ever get old.

Conducting

Via.

Cultural Capital

... as exemplified by the difference between hipsters and nerds. Via Sociological Images.

Belief System

But what happened to Chaco? It lasted a couple of hundred years and then it was abandoned. There was no manmade environmental catastrophe at Chaco. There was, however, an environmental catastrophe. In fact it was a great drought lasting from 50 to 75 years, about 1130AD to 1180AD. So Chaco was abandoned. People who used to come to Chaco built Chaco-like structures.

What failed at Chaco then? What collapsed? Well, what failed was their belief system. And Pueblo Indians who tell their story today, increasingly to archaeologists who, as a change from their own past, listen to Pueblo Indians talk about their own history...these Pueblo Indians relate how in their past people fell away from the gods, describing Chaco, and thus they abandoned Chaco. In other words, the ritual centralisation which is very foreign to Pueblo Indians today was regarded as an experiment that failed.

After Chaco, new settlements arose, some in imitation of Chaco, but around 1300BC a vast change in the belief system occurred in the south-west. So what failed at Chaco was not only their agricultural system which couldn't survive this big drought, but the belief system that the gods were supposed to make it rain, for example, also failed and a new religious system arose with new material symbols which we can archaeologically identify and securely date, and which have still meaning today to people who live in the south-west.

Norman Yoffee on Questioning Collapse. See also, also.

Safe Hands

Except for those few stones that have been destroyed, every diamond that has been found and cut into a jewel still exists today and is literally in the public's hands. Some hundred million women wear diamonds, while millions of others keep them in safe-deposit boxes or strongboxes as family heirlooms. It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.

In developing a strategy for De Beers in 1953, N. W. Ayer said: "In our opinion old diamonds are in 'safe hands' only when widely dispersed and held by individuals as cherished possessions valued far above their market price." As far as De Beers and N. W. Ayer were concerned, "safe hands" belonged to those women psychologically conditioned never to sell their diamonds. This conditioning could not be attained solely by placing advertisements in magazines. The diamond-holding public, which includes people who inherit diamonds, had to remain convinced that diamonds retained their monetary value. If it saw price fluctuations in the diamond market and attempted to dispose of diamonds to take advantage of changing prices, the retail market would become chaotic. It was therefore essential that De Beers maintain at least the illusion of price stability.

- Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?, via Slate.

Reserve

To guarantee their soundness, all major banks are required to keep a certain amount of reserve cash at the Fed. In years past, that money didn't earn interest, for the logical reason that banks shouldn't get paid to stay solvent. But in 2006 – arguing that banks were losing profits on cash parked at the Fed – regulators agreed to make small interest payments on the money. The move wasn't set to go into effect until 2011, but when the crash hit, a section was written into TARP that launched the interest payments in October 2008.

In theory, there should never be much money in such reserve accounts, because any halfway-competent bank could make far more money lending the cash out than parking it at the Fed, where it earns a measly quarter of a percent. In August 2008, before the bailout began, there were just $2 billion in excess reserves at the Fed. But by that October, the number had ballooned to $267 billion – and by January 2009, it had grown to $843 billion. That means there was suddenly more money sitting uselessly in Fed accounts than Congress had approved for either the TARP bailout or the much-loathed Obama stimulus. Instead of lending their new cash to struggling homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were literally sitting on it.

Today, excess reserves at the Fed total an astonishing $1.4 trillion."The money is just doing nothing," says Nomi Prins, a former Goldman executive who has spent years monitoring the distribution of bailout money.

- Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

Ear Wax

“It was one of those refractory cases,” Goldberg told me recently. “The doctors had tried everything: several types of antibiotics, antifungal drops, the works. That was standard practice, and we were proud of ourselves for doing it.” ... He spoke almost wistfully, as if recalling an antiquated practice, like bloodletting. Despite repeated treatments, the man’s ear had not improved. But on this day he walked into the clinic with a smile, and Goldberg soon saw why: the ear looked great. “I have not felt this well in years,’’ the patient said. “Do you want to know what I did?” The doctor assumed that one of the drugs had finally found its mark. “I took some wax out of my good ear and put it into my bad ear, and in a few days I was fine,” the patient said.

“I thought he was nuts,’’ Goldberg told me. He never gave the encounter another thought—until a couple of years ago, when he began to investigate the causes of those common ear infections. Goldberg explained that earwax contains many bacterial species and that antibiotics might have destroyed one or more in his bad ear. “It was actually something like a eureka moment,’’ he said, chuckling. “I realized that this patient was the perfect experiment: a good ear and a bad ear separated by a head. That guy wasn’t crazy; he was right. Clearly, he had something protecting one ear that he then transferred to the other ear. Drugs didn’t cure him. He cured himself.”

- Germs Are Us

Reach

Tonight Rage is being programmed by Margaret and David, and they played the above, the James Cameron directed video for "Reach" by Martini Ranch, a new wave band featuring Bill Paxton. The video stars Paxton, Kathryn Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Judge Reinhold and Bud Cort, among many others.

Mise en Abyme

...is the phrase you're looking for.

Epidemic

The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic provides the best-documented case of a switch in the mass perception of reality. In April 1954 the police received numerous reports of “pits and dings” that appeared in car windshields in Bellingham, Washington. The pitting spread in waves from town to town, heading for Seattle. It reached the city as expected, provoking thousands of emergency calls from panic-stricken citizens. And then it suddenly stopped—or, as some claimed, drifted out to sea. What had happened? Apparently people began to look for the first time at their windshields instead of through them, but why they did so, en masse, remains a mystery.

Robert Darnton in the NYRB. The rest of the article is about some 18th century giant killer wolf, for some reason.

Stock

Via Colossal.

Centralia

Wisdom

Children are stupid and rotten and conformist, and elevating their weakness to a point of pride is insane. Trying to make them to stop being that way isn't confusing or cruel; it's one of the basic duties of being a parent and adult. Any pundit who starts holding forth on the superior behavioral wisdom of small children deserves to be bitten by one.

From "Down with Toy Apartheid", Tom Scocca on our current era's increasingly demented obsession with colour-coding children, and not even the funniest paragraph.

Struggle

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass, as partially cited in a review by Mr Proyect of the latest typically Whiggian Hollywood historical epic.

National Emancipation

In 1918, the remnants of the multinational Habsburg and Ottoman empires were carved into sovereign nation-states, in accordance with the Wilsonian ideal of “national self-determination.” As Hannah Arendt perceptively argued, the world stood convinced in 1918 that “true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation, and that people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.”

The problem with this principle was that borders and nations were not neatly aligned in Eastern and Central Europe. Citizens of the Habsburg Empire’s many linguistic, national and confessional groups were hopelessly intermingled. In many cases it was not even clear who belonged to what nation, because so many citizens of the empire were bilingual or indifferent to nationalism. Equally important, in spite of the rhetoric of national self-determination, the frontiers of the new successor states had been drawn with geopolitical imperatives in mind. Even though German speakers formed an absolute majority in the borderlands of Czechoslovakia (which would come to be known as the Sudetenland), and most wanted to join the Austrian rump state, the region was forcibly annexed to Czechoslovakia for the sake of the state’s economic viability.

A new so-called “minority problem” was born in interwar Eastern Europe, with German speakers and Jews ranking as the largest minority groups. While all of the successor states were forced to sign minority protection treaties (much against their will) and the League of Nations was charged with enforcing them, such treaties held little purchase on the ground. Czechoslovakia, which still enjoys a reputation as the most liberal, democratic and “Western” state in interwar Eastern Europe (and styled itself the Switzerland of the East), launched a “colonization” scheme to populate the German territories with large Czech families. It also arbitrarily fired German civil servants, closed German schools and, in many cases, forcibly reclassified self-declared Germans as Czechoslovak citizens on the census in order to shrink the official size of the German minority.

The presumed link between democratization and nationalization in 1918 enabled Eastern European leaders to justify such policies in the name of democratic values. And if minority protections offered one potential “solution” to the “minority problem,” the failure of these protections led many policy-makers to embrace the more radical alternative of forced population transfers. All told, between 1918 and 1948, millions of people were uprooted to create homogeneous nation-states: Greeks were swapped with Turks, Bulgarians with Greeks, Ukrainians with Poles, Hungarians with Slovaks. Certainly, population transfers were more “humane” than the wholesale extermination suffered by Armenians and Jews. But surely there are choices other than extermination and ethnic cleansing?

The existence of a large, disgruntled German minority in Eastern Europe ultimately provided Hitler with a welcome pretext to overrun the region in the name of “liberating” Germans in the East. The Nazi regime also justified its brutal campaign to “Germanize” occupied Eastern Europe as a way of exacting reparations for the decades of denationalization allegedly suffered by the Volksdeutsche between the wars. The Third Reich simultaneously launched an ambitious plan to bring Germans “home to the Reich,” by transplanting hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from the USSR and Tyrol to its newly annexed Polish territory and assigning them to homes, businesses and farms recently expropriated from deported Poles and Jews.

Ironically, then, the postwar population transfers completed a process of segregation and ethnic cleansing that Hitler himself had begun.

"A Brutal Peace: On the Postwar Expulsions of Germans", Tahra Zara reviews Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War by R. M. Douglas.