Teleologic Blog: November 2005 Archives

« October 2005 | Main | December 2005 »

November 29, 2005

The Spanish Civil War - Dos Pasos and Hemmingway...

Neo-NeoCon has (as usual) a very engaging post on her Blog which centers on a New Yorker review of a book. The book in question: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch; takes up the question of what really happened in Spain during the war.

As you can tell from the Wikipedia article, it was very confusing.

Here is where the New Yorker review comes down:

Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal.

Yes, you heard that right. The "good" side in the Spanish Civil war was just as "bad" as the "bad" side in the war. There was really little reason to choose between one side or the other. Both sides murdered their political enemies, both side lied about what they were doing and why. Both side made friends with the most evil governments on the planet.

What should have been done? The British and French reaction, to stay out of the fight and support neither side, actually seems like the right thing to do, given the reality of the two sides... And yet, if they had intervened, the war almost certainly would have ended sooner, the suffering might have been much reduced. It would hardly have mattered which side the British or French choose to support.

Sometimes it seems as if civil wars are necessary to resolve contradictions in society which cannot be settled through dialog. I would argue the U.S. Civil war falls into that category. Was the Spanish Civil war necessary? Was the Lebanese civil war necessary? I have no good answers to these questions.

Sometimes, there are no good choices, only bad ones. Was the choice not to interfer with the Spanish civil war the least bad choice? Or just the easiest?

Posted by rakhier at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

News on the Cancer Front...

We have learned something new about cancer: the Immune System ought to be fighting it but doesn't. From the New York Times science section:

The old idea, Dr. Pardoll said, was that cancers arise every day but the immune system destroys them. Anything that weakens the immune system - stress, for example - could hinder this surveillance. The result would be a cancer that grows large enough to resist the body's effort to heal itself. "Nobody believes that anymore," Dr. Pardoll said.

Dr. Fred Applebaum, director of the clinical research division at the Fred Hutchinson Center, said that he and most other cancer experts believed the theory. But then they looked at mice that were genetically engineered to have no functioning immune systems. "They really don't show a huge increase in the incidence of cancer," Dr. Applebaum said.

For example, researchers looked at people whose immune systems were suppressed because they were taking drugs to prevent rejection of a transplanted organ or because they had AIDS.

"There are small increases in certain types of cancers," Dr. Applebaum said, but those tend to be cancers that are associated with infections - like stomach cancer, associated with ulcer-causing Helicobacter pylori; liver cancer, associated with hepatitis B and hepatitis C infections; Kaposi's sarcoma, associated with herpesvirus 8 infections; lymphoma, associated with Epstein-Barr virus; and cervical cancer, associated with human papillomavirus. "The common types of cancer, the ones that cause the huge burden of suffering in humans, really aren't increased," he said.

What happens to the immune system in cancer patients? It should be protecting them. Every tissue of the body is larded with white blood cells, and cancers are no exception. In fact, Dr. Pardoll said, in some tumors, including melanomas and kidney cancers, white blood cells make up 50 percent of the cancer's weight.

And cancer cells are clearly foreign tissue. Their surfaces are studded with proteins that look very different from the proteins on normal cells. The T cells of the immune system, which should start the attack, are perfectly capable of recognizing the foreignness of the cancer cells. But for some reason, they do not.

Why not? The answer, Dr. Pardoll, Dr. Allison and others have found, is that proteins on the surface of cancer cells turn off the immune system's attack. At the same time, the tumor is excreting molecules that recruit immune system cells to help it metastasize, spreading through tissues and organs.

"We knew very little about what regulated these immune responses to tumors until very recently," Dr. Pardoll said. "We now are in a position to totally rewrite the book."

One immediate consequence of this line of thinking is a new idea for treatment: scientists could seal off the cancer cells' proteins that block the immune system and enable white blood cells to kill the tumor. Or they could make the immune system more aggressive. To do that, they can block a molecule on the surface of T cells, CTLA-4, that tends to dampen the immune response.

The first strategy is only starting to be investigated because the discoveries are so new. But the second strategy is well under way.

In mice, said James Allison, chairman of the immunology program at Sloan-Kettering, some cancers went away after just a single injection of an antibody to CTLA-4. Other cancers required a vaccine, as well, to bolster the newly unleashed immune attack. But then, Dr. Allison found, even the most intractable tumors in mice were destroyed.

Dr. Allison licensed the technique to Bristol-Myers Squibb, which is working with Medarex to see if the method will work in humans.

This is huge news. The immune system should be killing cancer cells but it doesn't. Mice without functioning immune systems don't get cancer at a higher rate than normal mice. Minor tweaks to the immune system MIGHT get the white blood cells kill cancer cells. Wow.

Posted by rakhier at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

Gingseng Seems to Help Fight the Common Cold...

This news story made some waves.

The study shows that patients taking ginseng during the four-month winter period experienced fewer colds, and those that did develop one experienced a less-intense version of the virus.

In the study, researchers, from the University of Alberta in Canada, administered either a common ginseng extract or placebo to a study group of 278 patients. Each patient possessed a clean bill of health yet admitted to having a susceptibility to colds, as they experienced at least two of them during last winter.

Sixty-four percent of the placebo group and 55 percent of the ginseng group contracted colds over the the study period. 23 percent of the placebo group experienced two or more colds during the winter, while only 10 percent of ginseng patients suffered similar circumstances.

On average, the length of cold for the ginseng group was 8.7 days, compared to 11.1 in placebo subjects.

This is a good scientific study (double-blind) and it should significant positive results. Combine this with the long-standing belief and use of gingseng in Chinese medicine and I think we have a winner. Certainly, gingseng won't hurt you, unlike other herbal medicines I can think of.

I went out and bought some the next day.

Posted by rakhier at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)

Interesting Moview Review Site...

The web site/blog Libertas is a movie review/comment site from a conservative perspective. Since this is a perspective I now find myself sharing I appreciated their comments on some films.

Highlights of the site are the extensive comments about the recent Star Wars films:

Episode One - Phantom Menace
Episode Two - Clone Wars
Episode Three - Revenge of the Sith

My comments: I agree with much of what he says about Episode One. It IS a spectacular duel at the end between Darth Maul and the two Jedi. I've watched that duel at least 10 times and its still a master piece.

I like many parts of Episode 2, the chase through Coruscant, Obi Wan's visit to the Cloner world, and the entire last 45 minutes. However, as a film, its a sad excuse for a coherent work of art.

I thought Episode 3 (though I've only seen it once) was an disaster from start to finish, mitigated only by a two scenes: the by-play between Obi Wan and Anakin inside the giant space ship and the scenes where Anakin and Padme are seperated and Anakin is thinking about betraying the Jedi order. I'm seriously tempted to NOT buy the last film on DVD, we shall see...

BTW: On an unrelated note - I enjoyed watching "Troy". I thought Brad Pitt captured some of the raw cold-blooded killer which made Achiles the archetype of a warrior. There were lots of things wrong with the film but the opening sequence and the attack on the shore of Troy really worked for me.

Posted by rakhier at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

How to Find Good Products...

The NYTimes had an article in which they praised the work of three people who posted extensive product tests online.

Julie Streitelmeier reviews products on The-Gadgeteer.com
Brett Jiu reviews products on Amazon.com (and no, I can't figure out how to find his reviews... sorry)
Dmitriy Kozin reviews products on Epinions.com (I couldn't find him either... wierd)

Have fun shopping!

Posted by rakhier at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

The Problem with Feminism - no children for top end women

This essay by James Pinkerton for TCS is a good read on the state of relations between the sexes circa 2005. Pinkerton makes the arguement that in a real sense, Hugh Heffner's vision of the world has won, for the moment.

First, the Playboy Mogul publicly exults in his singleness, bragging about all his many conquests, even as he nears 80 -- while for her part, Dowd publicly laments her aloneness. OK, but that's changeable, one might say. Hefner is almost dead, while there's plenty of time for Dowd to get married.

But the second difference between Hugh and Maureen can't be changed. And that is this: Hefner, by his two ex-wives, has four children -- two of them he fathered when he was in his 60s -- while Dowd, who will turn 54 in January, has none. She can get married, she can even adopt -- but absent some miraculous medicine, she can't have children of her own.

Thus we come to the fundamental asymmetry of the sexes: Thanks in no small part to Hefner's philosophizing, men can fool around and then have kids pretty much whenever they want -- as such late-December fathers as Norman Lear and the late Tony Randall have demonstrated.

And yet while men changed the laws, and the customs, to suit their specific needs such as virility enhancement, women have made no similarly powerful change in areas that affect them specifically, such as fertility enhancement. That is, if women had gotten together and decided that it was as important to extend the age of female fertility as it was for men to have access to Viagra, one can only assume that medical science would have made that change -- science is like that. But women, who outnumber men, both in terms of population and at the ballot box, never organized themselves to demand such a fertility breakthrough...

[I]n the end, the Hefs, dominant as they might be, aren't that smart. They created an architecture that guaranteed pleasure for themselves, but they wrought no guarantee for the long-term survival of their nouveaux value system -- because women, such as Dowd, who have been Hefnerized, are unlikely to have many children. Many of the brightest and most educated women have, in effect, gone on strike, baby-making-wise. And yet until such time as a Playboy-ized economy can run entirely on clones and robots, the future of America will still depend on men and women coming together for procreation. Which is to say, both men and women are necessary.

The inability of the smartest, most successful women to reproduce is clearly a long term problem for any society which allows this to happen. This is happening in the United States (and I think Western Europe and Japan) right now and the trend shows no sign of reversing itself. I don't have any good solutions to this either...

One thing is certain: over the long run (say 200 to 300 years from now) the societies/cultures which manage to get the best women to have children will be dominate vis a vis everyone else.

Posted by rakhier at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

Michael Barone talks about GM...

Michael Barone writes about GM and how the expectations of the 1950s played out over the next 55 years. Worth the read. The whole essay is in the extended section.

Once Upon a Time in America
Why GM and the UAW's postwar economic vision failed.

BY MICHAEL BARONE - Wall Street Journal
Sunday, November 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The end, or the beginning of the end, of a familiar and comfortable world: That's how General Motors' announcement last week of massive layoffs and plant closings, following the bankruptcy of Delphi last month, strikes one who grew up in the Detroit area in the two decades immediately after World War II. In that world, it was easy to imagine you were at the center of the economy. Detroit was then the fifth-largest metropolitan area, the home of the Big Three auto companies and the United Auto Workers--national institutions of the greatest importance. The news media followed the negotiations between the UAW and the Big Three company it picked as a target every few years, and it was assumed that the wages and benefits agreed to would set a pattern for the whole economy.

And a very good economy it seemed to be. Left behind were the Depression and the anxious years of World War II. The UAW was able to negotiate big hourly pay increases and generous medical and pension benefits as well. With no effective competition, the Big Three could pass along the cost of UAW contracts to consumers who seemed willing to pay more for dramatically restyled and heavily advertised cars. General Motors' president, Harlow Curtice, was Time's Man of the Year for 1955. This was a recognition not just of an individual (I wonder how able an executive Curtice was) but of a system; Time might have honored UAW's longtime president, Walter Reuther.

The success of the Big Three and the UAW seemed a fit symbol of America's postwar economic dynamism. In fact, this was an economy characterized not by dynamism but by stasis, to use Virginia Postrel's term in "The Future and Its Enemies." New Deal legislation had been designed not for economic growth but for protection from the downward spiral of deflation. Those laws, not least by encouraging unions, strove to prop up wages and prices and to provide security to workers and existing firms. Keynesian economics was employed to flatten out the business cycle as much as possible and to reduce unemployment.

By the mid-1960s, it was generally agreed that this system worked and would continue indefinitely. The Big Three could always make money by rolling out the big cars families needed to go up north each summer. As John Kenneth Galbraith then argued, auto makers could induce consumers to buy as many cars as they wanted to sell by clever advertising. UAW workers could always look forward to ever-increasing wages and benefits. The big demand in the 1970 contract negotiations was retirement for auto workers in their early 50s. The confrontational labor-management politics of the 1940s and 1950s was replaced by consensus, as Henry Ford II joined Reuther in endorsing LBJ in 1964.

Reuther, a man of great energy and ability, wanted to use the UAW as an entering wedge to transform America into a Scandinavian-style welfare state. His contracts would set the pattern for national wages; the union movement would expand into new industries and unionize most of the economy; growth would enable workers to enjoy not only high wages, but job security, medical benefits, generous pensions. They would be protected against competition by large corporations. Reuther employed a Scandinavian architect to build Solidarity House, the union's headquarters on the Detroit River, and Black Lake, its educational center in northern Michigan. Reuther, like Marx, and like so many other social democrats, envisioned workers devoting their increasing leisure hours to pursuing the culture that seemed so inaccessible to workers earlier in the century.

The problem was that the default character of the economy, after the shocks of depression and war, turned out to be not stasis but dynamism. Private-sector unionization peaked in the mid-1950s; employment in unionized firms grew less than in nonunion firms. Union leaders believed that Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed state right-to-work laws, was preventing unionization in the South, the Great Plains and much of the West. But the attempt to repeal 14(b) was one of the few defeats for LBJ's Democrats in the 1965-66 Congress.

The Big Three auto firms--and the UAW--would soon face competition from foreign firms and an unforeseen demand for cars not large enough to take the family up north every summer. Attempts to wall themselves off from foreign competition either failed legislatively or produced perverse results. Faced with domestic-content laws, Japanese and European firms built large plants in the U.S. with nonunion work forces. That has left the Big Three and their spinoffs, like Delphi, with redundant work forces and huge legacy costs in the form of generous pensions and open-ended retiree health benefits.

Union-driven legacy costs have already forced many steel companies and airlines into bankruptcy, with pension obligations fobbed off on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The Big Three auto companies might as well do the same. At least there aren't that many big unionized private industries left to fall. Besides, taxpayers and politicians angry at costs imposed by unions--particularly in the public sector--can always change the rules and reduce unions' bargaining leverage. Just as the economic marketplace eventually reduced the power of the old industrial unions, the political marketplace could, in time, reduce the power of the "post-industrial" unions.

The attempt to protect workers from all risk has turned out to be very risky indeed, since in a dynamic economy large corporations are subject to competition from firms with lower costs. In the auto industry the result is significant pain for those who relied on the Big Three and the UAW; but the result is also a vastly faster growing economy and many more opportunities than provided by the European welfare states.

A broader result has also been the consolidation of a more demotic, market-based culture. On the Michigan freeways going up north, the big attractions are not the UAW's cultural haven of Black Lake but Indian casinos and outlet malls, places where people throng to win sudden riches or to take advantage of low prices on brand-name goods. The attempt, made when the economy seemed static, to promise security and leisure and restrained good taste, has failed. We remain, as we have been in most of our history, a nation of hustlers (as historian Walter A. McDougall so strikingly put it)--a people who strive mightily to get ahead and advance their interests, enjoying the sometimes vulgar opportunities a dynamic economy provides.

Posted by rakhier at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

Instapundit Finds Iraq is a Reverse Vietnam...

Glenn Reynolds has figured out that Iraq in 2005 is a reverse Vietnam. "I said that the Plame scandal was a reverse-Watergate, with the press, not the White House, keeping the important secrets about what happened. But looking at the transcript, I see that Iraq is also a reverse Vietnam..."

Glenn's point is the the press is systematically distorting the picture coming out of Iraq and focusing entirely on the negative - troops killed, Iraqi's murdered - while ignoring all the good which is happening.

I would agree with this analysis. The more you know about what is happening from reports by people who are actually there, the better the war seems to be going.

Posted by rakhier at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

The Scandinavian Model - Not A Success Story...

The Brussels Journal has a great essay in which they look at real peformance of the Scandinavian countries compared to Ireland. Its not a pretty picture for Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.

Job Creation - essentially zero over a 20 year period.
Sweden and Denmark droped 9 and 5 points respectively on the world prosperity rankings (Finland gained 1).
By contrast Ireland has zoomed up the charts, employment has grown, wealth has grown and the Irish tax burden is comperable to the U.S.

Posted by rakhier at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Sharia Law in Australia: Its not going to happen...

Here is a strong put statement by the Treasurer of Australia, Peter Costello:

We are a secular state under our constitution, our law is made by parliament elected in democratic elections.

We do not derive our laws from religious instruction.

There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that’s your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it’s not going to happen.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

TigerHawk updates Steven Den Beste on the Reason for the Iraq War

TigerHawk has gone and updated Steven Den Beste's monumental analysis of the War In Iraq (which is now 2 years old). Den Beste's analysis was brilliant two years ago and re-reading it (with the additions) is still like a blast of cold air from the Sierra Nevada. Wow.

BTW: Maybe Den Beste is back!

Posted by rakhier at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

Getting cold gives you a cold!

A recently published study by Cardiff's Common Cold Center (in Wales) shows that getting cold does make it far more likely that you will "come down with a cold". This notion had been dismissed as impossible for the last 20 years but Cardiff researchers have proved it.

The other 90 in tests during the common cold "season" sat with their feet in an empty bowl.

During the next four or five days, almost a third (29 percent) of the chilled volunteers developed cold symptoms -- compared to just 9 percent in the control group, the scientists said.

Why might this be true?

If they become chilled this causes a pronounced constriction of the blood vessels in the nose and shuts off the warm blood that supplies the white cells that fight infection.

The reduced defences in the nose allow the virus to get stronger and common cold symptoms develop.

Although the chilled subject believes they have 'caught a cold' what has in fact happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold.

Like many people, this study confirms long-held beliefs. Its nice to see that the belief is true.

Posted by rakhier at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2005

Riots by the Lower Class in France...

I think there are two essential texts to read to understand what is going on in France right now. First is Theodore Dalrymple's essay for City Journal Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (from the fall of 2002). (You can find it in book form here.)

An exerpt here:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

The other essay is by Paul Belien in Brussels Journal. Here is an exerpt

The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory.

France, and much of Western Europe is facing a number of real problems. The people don't work very hard. They aren't having very many children. They are retiring at very early ages and they want to state (i.e. everyone else) to take care of them. The attempt to import cheap laborers from the Moslem world while still insisting that countries derived their nationality from a shared history and culture has failed.

I don't see much in the way of good solutions for France (or the Netherlands). Their economic system is going to fail but hasn't failed yet. The people who have the political power are still quite comfortable in their cozy jobs with their six weeks of paid vacation a year. Historically it is very rare to see reform before disaster. Only high quality poltical systems tackle problems before they become disasters, and high quality political systems are rare.

As a reading of Dalrymple's essay shows, the situation in France now is not very different from the situation 3 years ago. Back then cars were burned, stores were destroyed and the police didn't enforce laws in the Cites. The only difference now is the frequency of the violence, not the degree.

As Greg Djerejian points out

During a time when national unity might be demanded, with parts of the country literally in flames, the public is left to ponder the sad reality that de Villepin and Sarkozy are still going about their inter-elite squabbles and maneuverings in advance of the next presidentials. Crisis? What crisis?

Posted by rakhier at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2005

What the heck was George Tenet doing in 2003?

This essay by a former member of the CIA is a must read. He has two questions for former CIA head George Tenet:

1. Why did the CIA, under your direction, treat the Vice President’s query about Iraqi efforts to purchase yellowcake in Niger so casually?

2. When Joe Wilson started blabbing in public about his CIA mission to Niger – and lying about what he reported to the CIA upon his return – why didn’t you say something rather than allow the President’s credibility to be shredded?

As the writer points out "a direct query from any of the four or five top Administration officials took precedence over everything else. After all, they were our primary customers" - those four being the President, the Vice President, Sec. of State, Sec of Defence. So what the heck was George Tenet doing when V.P. Cheney asked for confirmation of a rumor that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from some African country in the last 5 years?

Posted by rakhier at 10:21 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2005

You won't believe how nasty computer security wars have become...

This essay by Mark Russinovich details how Sony installs a super secret piece of software onto your computer when you try to play a "protected" CD or DVD and then hides the software and does not allow you to de-install it. In a nutshell this code is identical to a virus.

To do this, the code makes use of a new technology called Rootkits (which you can read about here).

As Mark writes "persistent rootkits work by changing API results so that a system view using APIs differs from the actual view in storage... It is theoretically possible for a rootkit to hide from RootkitRevealer. Doing so would require intercepting RootkitRevealer's reads of Registry hive data or file system data and changing the contents of the data such that the rootkit's Registry data or files are not present."

As one comment put it: "It's like discovering that your cough medicine actually changes your DNA in irreversible ways... and nothing on the label says so. Then you find out that the reason for the DNA change was just to make you allergic to knock-off cough medicines, not to make you any healthier."

First, this is illegal under California State law and the laws of several other nations, so Sony is in serious legal trouble over this.

Second, this reveals the danger inherent in being allowing software to re-write basic operating system calls. I know all about this as we used this basic trick to get After Dark screen saver to work.

Posted by rakhier at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)