Year: 2013

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Evan Soltas’ article make a decent argument for “catch share” in whaling, though I find it curious he neither quotes nor links to any opponents of the idea (instead choosing to summarize their ideas, which strikes me as lazy and uncharitable). I generally support catch share and other conservation solutions that take human activity into account. But had Soltas done more research, he might have realized another problem–whalers break the rules now, and they will break the rules under any catch share system so long as their home countries don’t care to enforce the rules. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) has no enforcement powers. If you hauled a dead humpback whale (actually not that endangered any more) into San Diego harbor, Federal and State authorities would swiftly descend. The same is not true in Japan. Though they’re allowed to take Minke and other smaller whales for “research” purposes, other explicitly protected whales have always been illegally killed by Japanese whaling fleets without consequence.

Years back, my father (Dr. Stephen R. Palumbi) and his colleague Dr. Scott Baker purchased whale meat from Japanese fish markets and used genetic testing to prove that illegal whales were being taken. Blue, fin, sei and other severely endangered great whales were clearly present in the meat supply. A minor furor erupted, with Japan and various useful idiots denying the incontrovertible evidence in front of their faces. Our family home got a number of threatening calls from Japanese-accented men over the next few years (organized crime is involved in the trade). Baker has since repeated the experiment; the illegal species can still be bought without much trouble in Japanese fish markets.

So, catch share is generally a fine conservation strategy. Given proper enforcement mechanisms, which Soltas simply assumes with a wave of his hand at the end of his piece, it might work for whales. But the problem remains: the rules that exist are not being followed. Do whatever you like with the Minke market, but nobody is seriously proposing that blue whales should be hunted. And yet, they are. Until all parties to the IWC are operating in good faith, the rules shouldn’t budge.

And Evan Soltas could have figured all this out if he’d done his homework.

Another reader adds:

Let’s set aside the argument about whales’ intelligence being a reason not to kill or eat them. Instead, I want to address the notion of establishing a “properly regulated market” in whaling as a way to allow their populations to increase.

The history of attempts to manage fisheries makes it clear that “sustainable” management is extremely difficult to pull off. It takes well-crafted regulations, requires strict enforcement and compliance, and relies on fisheries science which is notoriously difficult to get right. The majority of attempts to regulate fisheries for the sake of increasing fish populations have failed or have been so eroded over time by the interests of those who want fish to maximize yield (which typically leads to overexploitation) that the regulations and systems themselves become meaningless.

The assumption that such a system could be put in place for whales is foolhardly. It runs in the face of fisheries management history and fails to take into account the fact that whales are, like many shark species, slow to regenerate. Their feed sources and habitats have been radically reduced. In some kind of ideal scenario, perhaps one could determine some “sustainable worldwide quota” that, as long as it was adhered to, whale populations would increase. But, this sort of paper plan rarely works out in the real world. The idea lacks credibility when factors like human nature, degraded habitats, food sources and more are taken into account.

(Photo by Charlie Stinchcomb)

by Tracy R. Walsh

Nathan Ingraham reports on a major advance in brain-to-brain communication:

Using a non-invasive brain-to-brain setup, a researcher in one lab was able to send a signal from his brain to control the movements of a second researcher in a lab on the other side of campus. It’s believed to be the first human brain-to-brain interface; previous demonstrations have featured rat-to-rat and human-to-rat communication.

The demonstration focused on a simple computer game: Rajesh Rao, a professor at UW who has worked on brain-computer interfacing for more than a decade, looked at a screen and had to fire a cannon to shoot down an enemy plane while avoiding friendly planes. On the other side of campus, Andrea Stocco had the keyboard to execute those commands, but couldn’t see the game itself. But using their brain-to-brain interface, Rao imagined that he was using his right hand to click the space bar on a keyboard – and Stocco’s right hand carried out the command without any conscious movement on his part. Stocco likened it to an involuntary twitch or a nervous tic.

John Biggs emphasizes that this “is not mind control”:

The subject cannot be controlled against his or her will and neither party can “read” each other’s thoughts. Think of this as sending a small shock controlled via the Internet to trigger a fairly involuntary motion.

But Dan Farber sees big possibilities:

“It’s very much a first step, but it shows what is possible,” [project contributor Dr. Chantel] Prat said. “Right now, the only way to transfer information from one brain to another is with words,” she said. With advances in computer science and neuroscience, people could eventually perform complicated tasks, such as flying an airplane, and dancing the tango, by transferring information in a noninvasive way from one brain to another. “You can imagine all complex motor skills, which are difficult to verbalize, are just chains of procedures,” Prat said.

by Brendan James

Marc Tracy explains why Bush’s critics are captivated by his art:

The paintings are proof that Bush is an artist—that he invests his energies and imagination in creating works that are meant to be aesthetically pleasing and serve no utilitarian purpose. And being an artist is proof that Bush is an honest-to-God person, not the nightmarish, vague presence we all remember. It’s not even that Bush has a soul, just as it’s not even that the paintings are all that good. (And, I mean, are they, really?) It’s that he is of the same species as we are. He possesses an inner life—the very thing whose apparent absence seemed to connect all of his worst outer traits, from his intellectual incuriousness to his bullying nature (the nicknames!) to his economic cruelty to his foreign militarism.

The paintings are a reminder that—as Philip Roth wrote of the White House during the Clinton years—a human being lived there. Someone who provided unprecedented funding for combating AIDS in Africa and evinced tolerance at a personal level. A son, a husband, a father.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader illustrates how even cultures known for their patience can frustrate people:

Being from Canada, the simple act of trying to exit a crowded city bus usually involves trying to inoffensively indicate to the other passengers that your stop is next. Contrast that with China, where people just push their way through. I went there for the Olympics in 2008 and I soon realized that my apologies weren’t even registering with the locals – in fact, I probably looked like an idiot saying “sorry” every time someone bumped into me on the Beijing metro.

On a similar note, I went to Israel in 2006 and the company that was hosting the visit took us to Masada, the ancient mountaintop fortress. At one point during the tour we ended up in narrow corridor while our group of five Canadians waited for a group of Israelis to pass. After about a minute they cleared out and, as we moved on, our guide laughed at us saying that in Israel, if you don’t push your way through you’ll never get anywhere.

This got me thinking of how my inoffensive Canadian behaviour (standing patiently, not saying anything) could be considered annoying to any Israeli tourists that happened to be stuck behind us.

Another reiterates how rude tourists accompany any economy that suddenly booms:

The “ugly Chinese” tourist has a precedent in the “ugly Japanese” (and the “ugly American” before that).

I remember a couple of decades ago, being in a Munich beer tavern, when the previous generation of Japanese suddenly found themselves rich enough to hit global tourism sites. A group of Japanese tourists, seriously stressed over too much wurst and a lack of rice and miso, celebrated the end of their German tour by knocking back a few too many beers and singing impromptu karaoke in very loud voices. In the end, they got absolutely hammered and jumped atop the tables to show the stunned Western patrons a rousing version of their traditional Japanese summer “O-Bon” dance. It was behavior you see here in Asia during any given local community’s annual harvest festival.

This all has a cogent economic explanation. Paul Krugman, before his current role as shrill liberal attack dog, used to explain the Asian economic miracle in terms of “inputs” boosting productivity, or agrarian laborers leaving farms and rice fields for the factories, stores or those other middle-class employment opportunities that migrated to Asia from the developed world. These jobs pay more than farming. First Japan, a now other Asian countries have created a middle class able to afford travel for the first time.

Yet this new middle class remains steeped in their agrarian roots. At heart, they are rowdy serfs with little time for our stodgy bourgeois notions of personal space, privacy or speaking in a relatively quiet voice in restaurants. In China’s case, you need to throw in the fact that decades of socialist mismanagement of distribution networks instilled in its citizens a deeply – deeply – held notion that waiting patiently in line is a great way NOT to get what you’re waiting for.

These notions don’t disappear just because you now have had a few years of better management. Japan, again, shows how this will play out. You now have a generation of Japanese that have adopted a more restrained way of conducting themselves when abroad.

Another turns the spotlight on American culture:

I was born and raised in Brazil, and live in DC. Americans are indeed very strict about enforcing their personal space in ways that can be frustrating. For instance, when riding the Metro, one will often see a “crowded” train car that actually has a lot space that would be available if people were more comfortable standing in slightly closer proximity. Perhaps Americans’ strong sense of individuality gets in the way of accomplishing collective needs, and we could learn something from our Chinese counterparts.

Still, I wouldn’t go as far as the three Chinese tourists I saw sharing one urinal in a restroom by the Washington Memorial.

Read the whole discussion thread here.

by Patrick Appel

Daniel Gross finds evidence that Republicans are warming to many of Obamacare’s individual components:

In the old days, they used to say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. When it comes to health insurance, it seems a liberal is a conservative who has been mugged by an illness. After having a devastating stroke in 2012, Sen. Mark Kirk had an epiphany about the inadequacy of rehabilitation services for poor people. “My concern is what happens if you have a stroke and you’re not in the U.S. Senate, and you have no insurance and no income,” he told National Journal. “That’s the question I have been asking, and the reality is that if you’re on Illinois Medicaid and are a stroke survivor, you will get just five visits to the rehab specialist.”

The same holds for the pre-existing condition ban.

Clint Murphy, a former political operative, McCain campaign staffer, and cancer survivor turned Georgia real estate agent, recently wrote of his conversion on Obamacare. Although he had long since been cancer free, Murphy still wasn’t able to get insurance as a self-employed person. “I have sleep apnea. They treated sleep apnea as a pre-existing condition. I’m going right now with no insurance,” he said. Murphy said he can’t wait for the exchanges to bet set up in Georgia, so that he’ll be able to purchase insurance without being denied for a pre-existing condition. And even as they cavil about ripping up Obamacare, and hence the ban on pre-existing conditions, it is common to hear some Republicans speak kindly of the ban.

This is a dynamic we’ve seen over and over again in the past 80 years. Republicans shriek, cry socialism, and offer full resistance to any effort to expand social insurance. Then, after a certain amount of time passes and social insurance measures become popular and effective, they stand foursquare behind them and demand they be protected. Every single stinking component of FDR’s New Deal was a disaster, but don’t you dare touch Social Security! Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was a debacle, but keep the government out of Medicare! Obamacare must be torn up root and branch, just don’t kick junior off my insurance plan!