Israel: In the Beginning

The way new nations are made is usually not very pretty. Most of us live on ground that our actual or national ancestors won for them by dispossession or murder of the previous owners.

Michael Learner is a self styled Progressive activist, rabbi, philosopher and historian. I have been reading his book, Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East. He is a committed Zionist, but he is also a believer in the prospects of a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

His point of view does not prevent him from taking a hard-eyed look at the history. Modern Zionism had several origins including pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe and a maturing Jewish nationalism, but got a big boost from Britain's attempts to grab Arab oil and preserve it's colony in India. Those efforts led the UK to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine and they built up the Jewish communities as a counterweight to the local Arabs by granting them special privileges and ruthlessly suppressing Palestinian efforts at self-determination.

Early Jewish land buying followed the logic of enclosure. Landlords, who for centuries had leased the land in sharecropping arrangements to local peasants, sold to Jews financed by foreign Jewish money, and the peasants were then pushed off the land to make way for the Kibbutz. Perfectly legal, but disastrous for peasants. The amount of land obtained in this way was tiny, only a few percent, but that fact plus the waves of emigrants now fleeing Europe and the Nazis were plenty to inspire Palestinian fear of being overwhelmed.

They responded with violence against Jewish settlers, and Jews in turn organized both a defense force and terror groups to respond. Jews were the first in the Middle East to use mass bombings of civilian marketplaces and other targets, but Palestinians learned to respond. Outraged Palestinians rose up but were crushed and slaughtered by the British, with thousands killed and leaders executed, imprisoned, or exiled.

After WWII, more refugee Jews flooded in from Europe, and the Jewish terrorists turned their bombs on the British. With strong support for the Jews coming from both the US - because of its big Jewish community - and the USSR, because the Zionists were socialists, Britain decided to cut its losses.

At that point, Jews were only a third of the population of Palestine, but unlike the Palestinians, they were well organized. Many had combat experience in Europe, and they were better armed. Most of the Arabs were completely untrained in combat, and their disorganized bands were slaughtered. Israeli tactics, especially those of the Irgun, led by two future Israeli Prime Ministers, were harsh. Deir Yasinn, a peaceful village which had had good relations with its Jewish neighbors, was an egregious example. Some hundreds of men, women and children were murdered. Members of the Hagganah, the Jewish Defense forces, reported that the Irgun had systematically raped and then murdered the women.

This incident led to a pattern of Palestinians fleeing when a village was taken. Lerner doesn't believe that there was a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians but there is no doubt that Jewish leaders generally approved of the idea. When a village was captured, reports Lerner, the Arab men would be rounded up, and some of them - ten or forty - would be lined up against a wall and shot. Not ethnic cleansing perhaps, but certainly a strong incentive to flee. Those who fled were never allowed to return.

Jews suffered huge casualties too, about 1% of the population - compare to three million dead if the US suffered comparably, and these losses doubtless played a part in the ferocity of the struggle.

That's how modern Israel was established, and it's not too different from the stories of other nations, including the US, except in scale. Nor is it too different from the instructions God gave to Aaron and his successors in the original foundation of Israel.

Bee Personal

It's not news that people differ in personality. Some of us are born adventurers and risk takers. Other prefer the armchair adventure. It was news to me, though, that honeybees also exhibit a somewhat similar behavioral spectrum.

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are more than cookie-cutter drones, workers, foragers and queens. They might have individual personality differences similar to our own, according to new research. After studying hives—both in the wild and in the lab—and analyzing genetic and biochemical profiles of bees’ brains, researchers have found that some bees, like some humans, seem to be programmed to seek out new experiences, or novelty. Forager bees are in charge of gathering food outside of the hive, but not all of these bees, it seems, are inclined to strike out and go exploring for new flowers. Only a subset of them—some five to 25 percent—actively scout out new pollen sources.

Even scarier is that the behavioral parallels seem to go all the way to the neuro-transmitter level.

Some genetic differences between scouting and non-scouting brains were predicted. “We expected to find some, but the magnitude of the differences was surprising given that both scouts and non-scouts are foragers,” Gene Robinson, director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement. There were many minute genetic differences. But one of the biggest finds were distinct differences in 10 genes that help to control catecholamine, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) signaling—signatures that have also been linked to novelty-seeking and reward behavior in humans. To solidify their finding, the researchers tried changing the levels of these signals in scouting and non-scouting bees to see if they indeed affected their behavior. Non-scouting bees got extra glutamate and octopamine, while dopamine—a reward neurotransmitter—was inhibited in scouting bees. With these signals switched, the non-scouting bees became more inclined to go explore, and without dopamine, the scouting bees were less so.

Like to be (or bee) a Type-A personality for a week or so? Take this pill.

Tyler Cowen

Economist tells joke...

But ...conveniently forgets punch line.

Come 2014, the Affordable Care Act will prevent insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions: cancer victims and stroke survivors will be able to buy insurance at the same price as otherwise similar applicants. Insurance companies may take a hit to profits, but part of the cost will surely be passed on to the lower-cost counterparts to this high-cost pool. Healthy people might be tempted to opt out, but under the new law, they’ll be required to have insurance. This individual mandate is a natural fix to the problem of adverse selection in health insurance: It keeps the lowest-cost participants from opting out, and as a result the market doesn’t unravel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these solutions rankle the likes of Ron Paul and other libertarians who see the heavy hand of government at work here.

The Hurtling Moons of Barsoom

100 years ago, a pencil sharpener salesman and pulp novel fan decided he could write as well as the people he was reading and wrote the serialized novel A Princess of Mars. Five or six decades later, I fell under the spell of Edgar Rice Burroughs' books and the Mars they depicted. John Carter's Barsoom was a take on Percival Lowell's Mars, rather than the one we know today, a dying planet with canals and vestiges of civilization.

Consequently, I was a bit nervous going to see John Carter, since I was pretty sure they could find lots of ways to mess it up. I was pretty pleased with the result, though, even if Deejah Thoris and her maids insisted on wearing a certain, albeit not too large, amount of clothing, contrary to the naked except for jewelry way I remember them. It was pretty hard to take Carter, devotee of the God of War, as a pacifist, though.

Naturally the fight scenes were shot in the obligatory speeded up motion of contemporary cinema, with the result that they were pretty boring.

I saw it in 2-D, but I suppose it would be good in the 3-D version. For my taste, it was less sappy than Avatar and more fun in the final fights.

Something Strange in the Neighborhood

The recent effects at the European financial barber shop have left me more than a bit confused. Greece owed a lot but could not afford to pay, so a deal was arranged whereby most lenders “voluntarily” accepted a roughly 70% haircut or payout at 30 cents on the dollar. A few percent of borrowers declined the deal, triggering a “credit event” ruling from some somebodies somewhere (the ISDA committee), causing credit default swap (CDS) policies to become payable. Somehow, though, Greece had been able to insert and activate collective action clauses (CACs) in most of the loans, which presumably made them immune to their CDS protections.

(a) So why did anybody accept, unless

(b) The CACs made them, and if so how, and

(c) Why were the few exempt? And

(d) WTH is a collective action clause, anyway?

Science and Engineering

Science and engineering have been intricately linked since the beginning. New developments in science frequently spring from exploitation of engineering triumphs, and fundamental advances in science usually trigger an explosion in engineering innovation. This was brought home to me in recent discussions with some important biologists who describe what they do as biological engineering.

The radical advances in electrodynamics and thermodynamics in the nineteenth century led to the rapid economic and technological advances of the latter part of that century and the first half of the twentieth. The twentieth century exploration of the atomic scale gave rise to the transistor and molecular biology. So far, the twenty-first century is looking like the age of biological engineering.

Some of the things that these bio-engineers are up to look downright weird to this old-timer: building logic gates based on cellular signalling and regulator proteins, or protein and nucleic acid signalling chains. Others seem more natural but still radical, such as using supervised evolution to build new catalytic proteins out of non-canonical amino acids.

None of these bio-engineers appeared to believe that there were a lot of fundamental mysteries in biology or biochemistry to unravel, though they all seemed to think that there were plenty of fun technical tricks still to learn.

According to Blogger, this is my 4000th post - but who's counting?

More Stevereeno

It seems that Landsburg has been chastised by his University President for his rash words ala Rush. He is, however, unchastened, partly, I suppose, because he has tenure, but mainly, I guess, because he is a clueless git who doesn't understand what he did wrong.

Is Science Over?

It seem pretty clear that not only has physics hit a severe dry spell, but all other sciences have been largely reduced to physics. Only cosmology and astronomy still seem to pose fundamental unsolved problems, but those might prove inaccessible. In physics we still have lots of untested theories but not much prospect for testing them. Biology and Chemistry, like most of Physics, are pretty much branches of engineering now. Meteorology and Geology still have some nuggets perhaps, but the big points seem pretty clear. Neuroscience remains messy, but eventually all those threads will doubtless be sorted out too, and it doesn't look like many big surprises are still awaiting.

I figure the big breakthroughs still lie in the field of p

Kochtopussy

...........though I'd always thought of the brothers Koch as more Blofeld than Khan.

My personal distaste for libertarianism is rooted in dislike of its moral principles and disdain for its impracticality, but gets a big boost from the idea that libertarians are really just front men for the oligarchy.

The Cato Institute probably had as much claim to intellectual seriousness as any of the right wing "think" tanks - by which I mean a little, but not much, and apparently had some people in it who occasionally allowed an independent thought to invade their minds. This was apparently too much for the brothers Koch, who used their money and power to stage a putsch against the management. Noahpinion has a masterful dissection:

Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.

To those of us outside the movement, the fact that libertarians are a proxy army has always been painfully obvious. The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize. Most Americans share the belief that civil liberties are good, war is to be avoided, and high taxes are bad. But the fact that our country's libertarian movement spent so much time fighting high taxes and so little time fighting the encroaching authoritarianism of conservative presidential administrations was a clear sign that some priorities were seriously out of place. Should we really be more afraid of turning into Sweden than turning into Singapore? The contrast between libertarians' continual jeremiads against taxes and their muted, intermittent criticism of things like warrantless wiretaps, executive detention, and torture was a huge tip-off that the movement was really just some kind of intellectual front for America's right wing.

The thing is, the soldiers in this proxy army didn't seem to realize they were a proxy army. They appeared, and appear, to truly believe in their synthetic ideology; they seemed deeply convinced of the Rand/Nozick idea that taxes and environmental regulation represented a more dire threat to human freedom than the authoritarianism that had been the bane of earlier freedom advocates since Enlightenment.

Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip Eli R

The Sounds of Silence

From HuffPost

Scientists have come up with device for silencing speech, but the hand-held "Speechjammer" has people talking up a storm. The scientists--from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology--said in a new paper that the experimental device is designed to help curb "inappropriate speech in public places." But one can easily imagine how the gun-like gizmo might be used as a "weapon" against loud-mouthed protestors and others who voice unpopular opinions. ... The computer-controlled device features a microphone and a loudspeaker that plays back a speaker's voice 0.2 second later. The fraction-of-a-second delay in playback--a phenomenon scientists call delayed auditory feedback--confuses the speaker and makes it hard to continue speaking.

Stormy Weather

Consider climate change, brutal winter in Europe, mild winter in US, and another early and severe start to the US tornado season. Are they connected? Well, the last three are, and a plausibility argument can be made for the first, but the connection is hardly iron clad.

The same positioning of the Polar vortex that brought a brutal winter to Europe made the US winter surprisingly mild, and it too contributed to the abnormal jet stream that promoted the tornadoes. The unusually mild winter also meant the US Midwest lacked snow cover at a time of year when it usually does, and that in turn meant sharper temperature differentials across the front that spawned the tornadoes.

So does climate change play a role? Maybe so. Here the logic seems to be that the unusually low surface ice extent in the Arctic means more evaporation and more Asian snowfall which affects the strength and positioning of the Polar vortex. Let's call that one TBD.

Limbaugh Lower

Rush Limbaugh is used to being the recipient of apologies, not the bearer, but he has apologized to Sandra Fluke for calling her a "slut." Bailing sponsors, threat of a zillion dollar lawsuit, or a sudden attack of human decency? I would guess the middle option, but who knows?

Let's see if the the jackals feel the same pressure as the lion.

Bountiful Saints

The NFL has announced that an extensive investigation has revealed that the NO Saints ran a bounty system for the past three seasons which rewarded players for injuring opponents. From the NYT:

During the past three seasons, while the National Football League has been changing rules and levying fines in an effort to improve player safety, members of the New Orleans Saints’ defense maintained a lucrative bounty system that paid players for injuring opponents, according to an extensive investigation by the N.F.L. The bounty system was financed mostly by players — as many as 27 of them — and was administered by the former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who also contributed money to the pool. The N.F.L. said that neither Coach Sean Payton nor General Manager Mickey Loomis did anything to stop the bounties when they were made aware of them or when they learned of the league’s investigation. According to the league, Loomis did not even stop the bounties when ordered to by the team’s owner.

I predict a few minor wrist slaps - it's not like crippling an opponent was something serious like running a dogfight - and everybody forgets about it. Though I wouldn't bet on Drew Breeze making it through next season in one piece.

If the NFL were serious, it would impose lifetime or at least multi-season bans on the guilty GM and coaches. Players should sit out at least half a season.

Not a very likely scenario.

Pimps and Wimps

The wimpier Republicans are fleeing Flush Limbaugh's little adventure in calling a law student who testified before Congress a "slut" and volunteering to set himself up as her pimp. Never fear, though, little Stevie Landsburg Rushes in where logic, taste, and an understanding of the actual question at issue fear to tread.

What the virginal Flush and Friend forget to mention is that their real beef is with the law, passed by our elected representatives, that mandate employer covered health-coverage, and the fact that Ms. Fluke had the temerity to defend it against certain moralist's attempts to carve out special exemptions to that law.

The Privilege of Being An American

Treasury Secretary Geithner happened to mention that rich Americans should expect to pay more taxes as part of the privilege of being American. Naturally this provoked a spasm of outrage from the Wall Street Journal, which took the form of this benighted nonsense from Larry Lindsey, an apparently dimwitted predecessor. Lindsey bases his attack on a concept of "privilege" unrooted in language, history, or law and a conflation of privilege with inalienable right. Mr. Lindsey seems unaware of the fact that root meaning of "privilege" is a special right granted by law but not available to all, or indeed of the fact that Jefferson never argued for an inalienable right of everyone to be an American or avoid taxes. Less than 5 % of the World's population has been accorded that first privilege, and we guard it jealously, but not jealously enough to have denied it to the WSJ's foreign born owner, a mistake which continues to bear evil fruit.