Nexilist Notebook

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.