If you want to sleep well and not worry about Bush's new plans for the Middle East, don't read this New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh: "The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?"
Dick Cheney and other conservatives constantly warn us of the “China threat.” Check out these headlines and articles:
This belligerent U.S. attitude that insists that China will inevitably ripen into our next big enemy concerns me for two reasons.
First, why can’t the U.S. work toward an upcoming era of cooperation with China, rather than assuming that we must eventually go to war because China is an emerging superpower? This preference for aggression rather than cooperation is a xenophobic tactic that Neocons have previously used to make “enemies” out of many other countries with whom we should be working to develop strong relationships. What is China’s sin, by the way? China is doing the same things the United States does. For instance, China competing economically with vigor. China is accruing wealth. China is testing sophisticated weapons. China is expanding its influence into parts of the world where petroleum can be found in the ground. Yet the U.S. is paranoid about China. If our frustration is that the Chinese practically own us (along with Japan), that is our own fault that we can’t control our own profligate government spending. I’m not advocating being naive. Perhaps China will someday threaten American interests. I’m suggesting that we should save harsh rhetoric if that happens.
Second, I have a personal stake in …
You don’t know the word "palter"? I didn’t either, until I read a recent paper by Frederick Schauer and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard. The paper’s abstract defines this incredibly useful term, palter: Abstract: A lie involves three elements: deceptive intent, an inaccurate message, and a harmful effect. When only…
Such a strange question to ask! Here’s what brought it on. Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Sarah Brosnan, a post-doc who works with Frans de Waal at Emory University (I’ve written about de Waal’s work several times). Brosnan’s lecture, “Fairness and Prosocial Behavior in Non-Human Primates,” was sponsored by the Washington University School of Business, which illustrates the extent to which primate research is no longer just for primatologists.
Brosnan’s task was to measure the extent to which two highly social species (Chimpanzees and Capuchins) recognize and/or deal with inequity. The experiment was designed to see how pairs of animals react to situations where one animal of the pair received a relatively substantial payment (a grape) for completing a simple task while the other got a less valuable payment (a cucumber) or no payment at all, though accomplishing the same task.
The videos of the experiments were entertaining, some of slighted animals putting on intense displays of frustration or sulking. It reminded me of my own young children whenever one of them perceives that I’ve treated the other one even a little better. I’ll always get an earful from the slighted daughter, even (especially!) when the payoff is a relatively worthless trinket. And it seems that I never learn . . .
What Brosnan and De Waal set out to measure sounds simple, but it became clear that the task was fraught with potential confounding factors. For example, how do you parse out greed versus envy? How …
I didn't know that a sinkhole this size was possible. But here it is, right in the middle of Guatemala City. This makes me wonder what you can do to deal with a hole this big.