Nexilist Notebook

The argument that corporations are entitled to the rights of people under the consitution is a terrible principle and has done great damage to our country and our world.

The recent decision of the Supreme to allow unlimited coporate spending on issue ads prior to elections was absurd.

Who speaks when a corporation “speaks?’ Whose opinions are being expressed? It  will not be the opinion of the workers, customers, shareholders or suppliers.

Who decides when a corporation will “speak?” Obviously, it will be the management. So, will the opinion of the managers be expressed. No, it is illegal for management to use corporate resources to express personal opinions. So, when a corporation “speaks”, it will not be expressing the personal political opinion of any of the people who are involved.

What type of opinion will be expressed by the corporation? Management can be challenged in court if they make decisions that cost the coporation money. They are legally obligated to see that their decisions always attempt to increase the corporate profits. So, therefore, we can assume that the only political opinions to be expressed by a corporation will be to try to influence our political system to increase their profits.

This can only lead to disaster for the citizens of our country.

There is a big debate going on about our involvement in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues that don’t seem to be part of the conversation.

The most populace tribe in Afghanistan is the Pashtun. They comprise about 40% of the population and inhabit the Northeast part of the country. The Western part of Pakistan is also Pastun. Part of what we are dealing with is the fact that the Pastun don’t respect the border with Pakistan. It was drawn down the ridgeline by Durand in 1890 and represents the truce line in a war between the British and the Afghanis.

The Tajiks are the next most populace tribe and comprise about 25% of the population. They inhabit the Northwest part of Afghanistan and also have their own country to the north, Tajikistan.

The Pastuns have ruled the country for centuries but were ousted from power when the US drove out the Taliban in 2002. In order to accomplish this, the US aligned itself with Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance. The rise of the Tajiks to power in the central government does not sit well with the Pastuns. They do not trust the government partly because it is dominated by Tajiks.

Then there is the matter of corruption. The Afghan government is corrupt from Karzai down to villiage policemen. The Afghani people are upset and angry about this. They don’t see the US exerting much effort to clean up the corruption.

There is a lot of talk about building up the Afghan army in order to stabalize the country and allow us to withdraw. The Afghan army is a joke. Afghanis can make more money working for the Taliban than they can in the Afghan army. Soldiers in the army regularly desert taking weapons, equipment and supplies with them. Many of them cannot read or write. Unfortunately for us, the Pastuns will reject Tajik soldiers in Pastun lands and the Pastuns will be disinclined to join the army because they see it as being aligned with the US occupiers. 

Obviously, we cannot stabalize Afghanistan unless Pakistan cooperates. We have been able to throw our weight around in Iraq and Afghanistan because of their small populations; about 25 million for Iraq and about 15 million for Afghanistan. But we still have not been able to completely dominate and stabilze either. Pakistan is another matter entirely. They have a population of about 220 million or about 2/3 the size of the US population.  If 1% of Pakistanis are violent and hostile to the US, that is 2.2 million potential enemies.

Pakistan becoming increasingly upset by what they see as the interference of the US in their affairs. The recently announced Pakistan aid package of 1.5 billion for each of the next 5 years comes with some big strings attached. One of the most problematical is our attempt to regulate how they promote officers in the army. The US army is contolled by the civilian government and not influential in civilian affairs. Unlike our army, the Pakistani army is very powerful in their civil society. The upper echelons of the army live in their own subdivisions, the army has extensive investments in business and land and the army has ruled Pakistan on and off since its founding. Any arrangements we make with Pakistan will have to have the approval of the Pakistani army.

When Pakistan was founded, the British drew a line down the middle of the Punjab tribal lands. The Muslim Punjabis moved west and the Hindu Punjabis move east when Pakistan was split off from India. The Pakistani army has used angry Muslim Punjabis for their proxies in causing border clashes with India. They have poured money and weapons into Pakistani Punjabi terrorist groups. Now some of the Punjabi terrorists are working with the Taliban.

In the south of Pakistan, the Baluchi territories are the site of more ethnic strife and suppression. The Baluchis would like to be independent. Now the Taliban are commanding their fight from the southern city of Quetta which is in Baluchistan. So there is a coalition of Pashtun Taliban, Baluchi revolutionaries and Punjabi terrorists carrying out attacks in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the army is divided with respect to who they are willing to fight and who they support. The Pakistani people are scared of India, upset with their government, pushed around by their army, worried about terrorists and mad at the US.

We cannot win in Afghanistan because we cannot deal with the problem of Pakistan and we can’t break even. If we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be bloodshed and suffering. If we stay, there will be bloodshed and corruption. Sort of like that old story about riding a tiger. Can’t stay on and can’t get off. We are addicted to television and movies where problems are solved in an hour or two. There is no happy ending here. We seem to be faced with trying to select the lesser of more than two evils. If we can even figure out what that is.

Did you ever wonder why it was that there was so much over confidence out there? Look at the Iraq war, the financial collapse, etc. And the incompetence of organizations as lampooned in Dilbert is not that far from the truth. We all have stories of the problems of dealing with bureaucrats.

Some time back I read that the most realistic people were the pessimists. The optimists were happier but were less realistic than their confidence in their abilities and situation would suggest. 

Then I read about some research that suggested that people will forgive a leader who is wrong some of the time if only that leader is really confident. Apparently people prefer confidence to competence.

It turns out that groups with confident leaders do better than groups whose leaders are not as confident. So even with incompetence in leadership, those groups prosper.

The Peter’s Principle states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Now it has been found that the more you pay someone, the less competently they perform. This would explain Ken Lay who was “unaware of what his subordinates were doing” even with the huge salary that he was drawing.

So, it would seem that though our over-confident leaders may be overpaid and incompetent,  we will still follow them.

We are wired to pay attention to the dramatic and novel. Things that are slow, steady and familiar tend to fade out of our consciousness and concern. This is no where more true than our attitude towards death.

3,000+ died on 9/11 and the country freaked out. The patriot bill was passed, Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded, hundreds of thousands of civilian in the Middle East were killed, our economy was destroyed and “war on terror” hysteria prevailed.

Every year about 50,000 people die on the freeways in car accidents but we keep on driving, 400,000 people die as a result of their use of tobacco products but you can buy ciagarettes in any grocery store, 150,000 died from alcohol related problems but you can by beer in any grocery store, 100,000 people die from doctors mistakes but we still seek medical advice, and so on.

When you add up all the solvable problems that kill Americans, I bet that you would find that we loose 3,000 + EVERY DAY due to causes that could be prevented. And yet, we sink trillions of dollars and thousands of lives into unnecessary and futile wars in the Middle East.

Maybe if we would pay less atention to screaming headlines and more attention to dry statistics, many more lives could be saved.

We tend to think of nations as having some sort of coherence and permanence although we know that nations come and go in the sweep of history. Something about naming things makes us believe that they have some sort of permanence.

There are new nations in some areas where humanity has lived in cities for thousands of years. A lot of these are in the news lately.

Iraq is home to the ruins of ancient cities such as Babylon and Sumer but it has only existed as a nation since the British drew the boundaries after WWI. India and Pakistan also hold many ancient ruins but it was the British again who drew their boundaries very recently.

Around 1846, a war between the British and Sikh resulted in the consolidation of 22 small states into the State of Jammu and Kashmir. After partition in 1947, Pakistan and India both brought pressure on the State of Jammu and Kashmir to accept being merged with one of the two. Several wars were fought over the Kashmir with the first taking place right after partion and ending with a truce in 1948. The “Line of Control” became the border between the area controlled by Pakistan and the area controlled by India. The Kashmir has continued to be a bone of contention between the two countries down to the present.

The North Western border of Pakistan is the “Durand Line” which was drawn by the British in 1893 as a truce line in a stalemated war with Afghanistan. It divides the territory of the Pushtuns. The tribal people living in that area do not recognize the legitimacy of that border. This is in the headline regularly as fighters pass back and forth across the Durand Line in a batter with Afghan and US forces.

Pakistan was severed from the British India colony in 1949. The “Radcliffe Line” was drawn to separate new Muslim and Hindu countries when the British granted the former colony independence.  The Radcliffe Line runs down the middle of the Punjab territories. Millions of people of Muslim faith moved to Western Punjabe in Muslim Pakistan and millions of people of the Hindu faith move to East Punjab in Indai.

South East Pakistan is the territory of the Sindh people. The ancient Indus valley sites of Moenhodaro and Harappa flourish between 2500 BC and 1500 BC and are hailed as “one of the most developed urban civilizations of the ancient world.

South West Pakistan contains part of the tribal lands of the Balochistanis. They also live in South Eastern Iran and Southern Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, they are a people divided by arbitray borders who desire a homeland and peace. The Pakistan central government has committed many atrocities againt these people with little attention of the Western media. The Iranians have also treated them harshly.

Pakistan is a patch work quilt of  peoples who do not care for  each other and who do not get along. They are divided by ancient hatreds and disputes. And they are connected to their ethnic brothers across arbitrary borders recently drawn by colonial powers and recent wars. This is a recipe for strife.

There are new rivalries as well. Karachi is a port on the coast of the tradional land of the Sindhis. People who came from the Eastern Punjab in what is now India are clashing with Pushtuns who have come down from the NW Tribal territories. I am sure the native Sindh in Karachi appreciate these recent arrivals murdering each other.

There are stories floating around that the US intends to redraw many boundaries in the Middle East including Pakistan.

“The US State Department has rejected suggestions that Washington is planning to redraft the boundaries of the greater Middle East, including Pakistan, along ethnic and religious lines.

The purported plan appeared recently in the US Armed Forces Journal along with two maps showing the new boundaries.

The article, by Ralph Peters, was the work of an individual and did not reflect the views of the US government, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.”

The articles suggests that the NW tribal territories be shifted to Afghanistan and that Balochistan region of S Pakistan be combined with other Balochistani regions in Afghanistan and Iran to create a Balochistani autonomous homeland. This would leave Pakistan much diminished with just the Western Punjab and the Sindh regions.

I agree in priciple with the author of the article  that:

“International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.”

“Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools — short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East’s “organic” frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. “

Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look, Armed Forces Journal (AFJ), June 2006.
Peters’ Article

Discussion of Peters’ Article

Peter’s article is definitely is food for thought but would be very difficult to implement. But without the changes that he discusses, further bloodshed and suffering are inevitable.

I have always been fascinated by the question of belief. Especially belief in things that are impossible to prove or disprove. I have wondered what the purpose of such beliefs would be.

Recent speculation has suggested that a genetic predisposition to gullibility might enhance survival. This seems to defy common sense.  You would think that the closer a person could come to an accurate picture of reality, the better suited they would be for survival.

The argument goes something like this. If you saw a shadow in the forest and thought that it might be a tiger, you would run away. If you were wrong, no harm done. On the other hand, if you saw a shadow in the forest and dismissed it as a bush and you were wrong, you might wind up dead. Therefore, it would be best to err on the side of belief in a danger. So, those who a little more gullible would survive to pass on their genes while those who were more skeptical would not.

So much for the idividual but what about the group? There has been a big debate in evolutionary theory over whether survival selection operates primarily at the individual level or the group level. Some research with software agents has yielded provacative results. One  group of agents was programmed to believe only things that could be validated. Another group was programmed to believe in both things that could be valideated and things that could not  be validated. It turns out that the group that shared a belief in things that could not be validate fared  better in internal cooperate and external competition than the group that went strickly by what could be validated.

Apparently, belief in things that cannot be validated could enhance survival at both the individual and group level.

Surveys of belief indicate that those with strong religious beliefs live longer, are healthier and happier. Research has shown that being able to understand the reason something happened can help a person cope with stress. So, if a person believes strongly that some supernatural power controls the world and that everything that happens happens for a reason, that person would cope better with stressful events even if they could not aticulate the reason for a particular event.

Loneliness can be very stressful and injurious to health. Believing that an invisible supernatural person loved you and was always with you could help someone cope with loneliness.

Consideration of individual mortality has been shown to be stressful. Believing that a supernatural power can grant eternal life if one believes strongly enough would be helpful in coping with fear of death.

Recently, a gene was discovered that appears to enhance the placebo effect. Apparently, if a person has this gene, they are susceptible to placebos. If you don’t have the gene, you are not. Is this the belief gene?

There seem to be a lot of reasons for a belief in things that cannot be proven or dis-proven to survive. Unfortunately, there are times when such a belief could prove to be fatal. So if seems that skepticism will also survive.

There has  been a lot of debate about whether Bush and cronies should be prosecuted for serious crimes committed during there time in power. I have always been in favor of a full investigation followed by any prosecutions that are warrented. Obama and his people have repeatly agreed with this in a half-hearted way but then said something like “But we would rather look to the future”. Well, that is nice but all criminal prosecution “looks to the past.” They have also suggested that the Bush and crew had advice from lawyers that provided a legal basis for their actions. They thought they were doing the right thing, we were in a war, they told the Congress what they were doing etc.

I recently read an article that really laid it all out clearly. The US signed a treaty which has the force of US law which clearly states that torture will be prosecuted, period. Being in a war is not an excuse. Legal fig leaves are not an excuse. Follow orders is not an excuse.

As far as the defintion of torture, the US prosecuted enemy soldiers after World War Two for water boarding. They also prosecuted lawyers who gave legal opinions to support the crimes of the enemy soldiers.

Recent revelations make it clear that the orderd for US torture came from the White House. It seems pretty clear that a crime has been committed by Bush and his top advisors such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. A Justice Department report has castigated John Yoo, one of the Bush lawyers, for giving legal advice that cited no previous case law or precedence.

The US MUST prosecute George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for the crime of torture. If the Obama adminstration does not feel that we should “look back” and pursue these criminals, then they should stand back while they are prosecuted. Then Obama can pardon them and we can get on with our Democracy.

If this does not happen, then it will be proof that there are two systems of law in this country. One for the powerful and one for everyone else.

I recently read an article about potential relative influence of the father’s genes versus the mother’s genes on a developing embryo.

The theory held that the best outcome from the father’s point of view would be for the child to be as big as possible at birth to give it the best survival chance. The child’s personality should be demanding of the mother’s time and energy and not particular concerned with other children of the mother because they might not have the same father.

On the other hand, the mother’s best outcome would be for a lower birthweight baby which would have made less demands on the mother physically during the pregnancy. After birth the child should be less demanding on the mother’s time and energy and more sensitive to the needs of other children because they all have the same mother.

Taken to the extreme, the predominance of the father’s genes could potentially lead to autistic individuals who are oblivious to the social cues that signal needs and concerns of other. The extreme result of the mother’s genes could be schizophrenia where great sensitivity to the world overwhelms the individual.

I was fascinated by this conjuction of genetics, embryology, physiology, physchology, sociology and pathology.

Well, the clock is running out on UN permission for the US to occupy Iraq. We need a new agreement with the government in Iraq by the 1st of January or we will have to leave.

The Bush gang has been applying a lot of pressure to the Iraqi government to sign some sort of Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The Iraqis want all of our troops back to their bases by June 2009. And all of our troops out of Iraq completely by 2010. But we got them to accept 2011.

The main sticking point seems to be that the US wants immunity for troops on active duty and the freedom to carry out any attacks anywhere at any time and to arrest anyone.

The Iraqis want the US to ask permission and coordinate military activity. They want to be able to enter the Green Zone at will and examine records and emails.

The discussion was stalemated for months but recently a draft agreement has surfaced.

Iraq has said that it will need to be approved by their parliment. Bush says that it is not a treaty so our Congress does not need to see it.

Bush wants to get something in place that will commit the next president to the situation in Iraq but the Iragis are not so eager. They have their own election coming up and it won’t help their popularity to be seen cooperating with the US.

Al Sistani, the revered Iraqi Shiite cleric had been in favor of an agreement if the Iraqi parliment passed it. However, he recently came out against it.

Muktada Al Sadr put 100,000 followers in the Iraqi street recently to protest the agreement.

Al Hakim, a rival of Sistani for most influential Shiite in Iraq recently issued a Fatwa that it would be against the Koran for Iraq to sign a SOFA with the US.

Now comes the US attack inside Syria. Senior US officials have said that we reserve the right to attack targets in other countries when ever we deem it necessary. And that the Syrian attack was a “warning” to Syria to do more to prevent Al Queda from coming into Iraq. After a furious reaction by Syria, Iraq demanded that a provision be added any SOFA agreement with the US to the effect that if the US EVER attacked another Middle Eastern country from bases in Iraq, the SOFA would be immediatly cancelled.

The CIA organized the Syrian raid to kill a key provider of soldiers, weapons and money to Al Queda in Iraq from Syria. Considering the inevitable reaction by Iraq and Syria to the raid, you have to wonder what the CIA was thinking. Did they really believe that Syria would be intimidated or did they deliberately sabatoge the SOFA negotiations?

And finally, the US just issued an ultimatum that if Iraq does not hurry up and sign the agreement, the US troops would pull back to the US bases in Iraq and stop any assistance as of Jan 1st.

It seems to me that they may just call our bluff. After all, they did want us back in our bases by June 09 and January 09 is just a few months earlier. And, in any case, in a few months there will be a new US president and they might get a better offer than Bush’s.

Aside from the obvious problems with diet and health care, poverty is bad for your health.

Research shows that the greater the disparity between the rich and poor, the greater the disparity between life expectancy when other factors have been taken into account. The belief is that there is a pyschological burden in being very poor when there are very rich people around.

Apparently beauty can be beneficial to health. The rich can afford to surround themselve with beautiful objects but the poor must live in squalor. When they fall ill, their surroundings do not help them recover.

The rich can select their environment and insure that nothing noxious occurs there. The poor find themselves living next to factory smoke stacks, landfills, sewage plants, etc. These are bound to be bad for their health.

With all of this, the poor serve as a breeding ground for illness that may leap to more affluent populations. Without health insurance, they fill emergency rooms, increasing the burdent on an already collapsing health care system in our country.

And finally, when hope is gone and desparation the normal emotion, the poor also become a breeding ground for violence, crime, terrorism and revolution.

It is in the best self interest of us all to do what we can to allievate poverty least it bring down our civilization around our ears.