Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel

How much you want to bet that this doesn’t end the conspiracy theories?

By Patrick Appel
Graeme Wood has a fantastic article on Afghanistan in the New Yorker. The piece focuses on the tension between the Hazara minority and Pashtun majority:

At the command level, the decision to exploit one of Afghanistan’s least noted and most bitter ethnic rivalries seems to have been improvised rather than planned. I asked Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, the top Canadian commander, about Khan’s unit, and he emphasized the similarity between Hazaras and Pashtuns, rather than the differences. “The advantage of any Afghan, regardless of their ethnicity, is that they get a better measure of what’s going on on the ground than we could ever get,” he said. “They know when something is amiss in this district.” No NATO officer I met seemed to appreciate the full significance of the Hazara-Pashtun rivalry.

Chris and I talked over the weekend about this surreal vignette:

When the Afghan quick-response force arrived, its soldiers stood looking dazed. We started to move toward the insurgents’ position by fanning in two directions—one of the most basic tactical maneuvers an infantry unit can attempt. The Afghans now looked slightly frightened—less of the Taliban ambush than of their officer, an Afghan captain trained by Green Berets. As he issued commands through a radio, the soldiers moved down the road and into the vineyard, correctly enough but with uneasy attention to detail, like a troupe of dancers staring at their feet. When we had closed half the distance, I crouched in a furrow, amid grapevines, until a soldier ahead of me—a stubbly, spindly man with a backpack full of rocket-propelled grenade warheads—yelped “Gun!” and pointed at the ambush point.

Seeing a weapon triggered the rules of engagement, and we ran toward the position. I kept my head low, looking at the ground a few steps ahead of me to avoid I.E.D.s. We leaped over an irrigation ditch, and, when I looked up to make sure I was still running in the right direction, I saw the soldier again. He had his grenade-launcher in one hand and, in the other, a colossal bunch of grapes, which he had started to eat. By the time we arrived at the place where the surveillance had spotted the insurgents, the Taliban had long since vanished back into the surrounding villages. As we stood in the empty Taliban position, I noticed that most of the Afghan soldiers carried grapes that they had picked up during the maneuver, and that they looked pleased.

by Chris Bodenner
Designer Yu-Chiao Wang had created a stencil-like robe that requires staying out in the sun long enough to leave a darkened pattern on the skin.

by Chris Bodenner
A recent study suggests that the pill could affect the kind of men that women sexually desire. Scientific American:

It’s all about scent. Hidden in a man’s smell are clues about his major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which play an important role in immune system surveillance. Studies suggest that females prefer the scent of males whose MHC genes differ from their own…. A study published in August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, however, suggests that women on the pill undergo a shift in preference toward men who share similar MHC genes.

And that could spell trouble for couples:

Women who start or stop taking the pill, then, may be in for some relationship problems. A study published last year in Psychological Science found that women paired with MHC-similar men are less sexually satisfied and more likely to cheat on their partners than women paired with MHC-dissimilar men.

by Chris Bodenner

In response to the reader who knocked Patrick for assuming that discrediting Andrew was one reason why Palin refused to release her medical records, I’d like to remind all readers of a fundraising email she sent to her supporters in late September:

Friends, in the course of a few weeks, the Obama-Biden Democrats have launched attack after attack on me, my family and John McCain. They’re desperate to win and they’ll no doubt launch these attacks against other reformers on our ticket.

Greg Sargent:

I didn’t remember any attacks on Palin’s family from Obama, Biden, or their top supporters. So I asked the McCain campaign what this was a reference to. Here, according to a McCain campaign aide, are the attacks on Palin’s family from “Obama-Biden Democrats” that the email refers to:

1) Obama finance committee member Howard Gutman questioning Palin’s parenting and her willingness to take on the Veep candidate role when her family is so consuming — a comment he subsequently apologized for.

2) Andrew Sullivan’s demand that the McCain campaign release medical records putting to rest rumors about the birth of Trig Palin.

3) A user diary on DailyKos, which is of course the site of leading Obama supporter Markos Moulitsas, raising questions about that pregnancy.

And that’s it.

Of course Andrew wasn’t the sole motivation for Palin’s cat-and-mouse game; Patrick never said so.  But it’s pretty indisputable that The Dish was a significant factor, for better or worse.  Sargent’s reporting proves that raising money off the media backlash and calling out Andrew by name were explicit tactics by the McCain campaign. It’s not aggrandizing Andrew; it’s just fact.

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

I have to take issue with your earlier reader’s comment:

"Unlike in (most) religion, there are no scientific hypothesis (beliefs) that could not be changed if the evidence so indicated."

The problem with this formulation is that the nature of scientific hypotheses and religious beliefs are so very different.  Scientific hypotheses in and of themselves have no moral content, whereas religious beliefs are of course primarily concerned with morality.  Or as the (somewhat crude) saying goes, science deals with the "how," religion with the "why."  A scientific hypothesis has no value for the scientist as human being when she is confronted with a moral dilemma. 

Neuroscientists today use investor-trustee games and brain imaging technology to watch the moral decision-making process in real time—something never before possible and yet even in this arena the hypotheses are limited to the "how."  Science cannot tell her what should or should not be done, but can only make predictions based on previous experimental or observational data about what might or might not happen if she takes one course of action.  The moral judgment is up to the scientist.  Take an example in which there is MORE than overwhelming evidence: that smoking can cause cancer.  Is the scientist (or anyone else) who refuses a cigarette based on that evidence making a moral judgment?  Yes!  The scientific data say nothing about whether cancer or death are BAD and things to be avoided, only that they are likely to happen. 

I think Ward’s point and perhaps James’s as well is that all of us, scientists or not, are living, breathing human beings of a certain time and place and as such we will never have enough information to deal with every single problem or potential problem using an evidence-based decision making process.  We must therefore by default adopt some beliefs for which there is "less than overwhelming evidence" to guide us through life.  This says nothing about whether you can change those beliefs over the course of your life, only that you will have to commit to some before there is ample data.

While I will agree that scientific hypotheses are certainly more malleable than religious beliefs, I think it’s fairly obvious from history that religious beliefs can and do change as well, just mostly on a much longer timescale and rarely within an individual’s lifetime.

Another adds:

I haven’t read the Ward, but both the reader replying to him and Ward himself (based on the reader’s quotation from Ward) omit a crucial part of James’ claim, which is that the case must also be one that can’t be settled on "intellectual grounds" (i.e., by reasoning either apriori or aposteriori). So cases for which sufficient evidence could be presented one way or the toher were not among those about which James thought we had a right to believe despite a lack of evidence.

I’m not endorsing James here, just noting in his defense that, if he was wrong, he wasn’t *that obviously* wrong.

Beijing, China, 7.14 am.

By Patrick Appel
A list of pricey URLs.

by Chris Bodenner
NewScientist:

A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9-mm handgun as a medical device and hopes the US government will reimburse seniors who buy the $300 firearm. But the US Food and Drug Administration says there are currently no formal designations of the gun as a medical device. Called the Palm Pistol, the weapon is designed for people who have trouble firing a normal handgun due to arthritis and other debilitating conditions.

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

I am glad you hold Andrew Sullivan’s influence in such high regard. But to think that the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t release Sarah Palin’s medical records so they could discredit Andrew Sullivan is ludicrous. Sorry, for as much as we love him, most people in the US have never heard of Andrew.

You have just ruined any clout you had to defend Palin’s case by offering this bizarre rationale as to why the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t release her records.

This reader misunderstands my former post. I don’t think that discrediting Andrew was the primary reason the McCain campaign didn’t release medical records. But Goldfarb sliming Andrew via Howie Kurtz shows that they did use the rumors in this manner. My main point was that the rumors helped Palin more than they hurt her. The rumors enraged the GOP base and created sympathy among even those on the far left. Killing the story wasn’t worth their time.