How to get out of a tight shell
Check out this fantastic video of a large crab squeezing out of its tight shell. As is typical with nature videos, this is more amazing than most fiction. Monster Crab Exits Shell - Watch more Funny Videos
Most media outlooks ignore the real story regarding Afghanistan
In light of Rolling Stone's incredibly revealing article on the muddled and chaotic U.S. policy regarding Afghanistan, most media outlooks are focusing the demotion of General Stanley McChrystal but ignoring the real issue regarding Afghanistan. Joshua Holland of Alternet explains:
[T]he story by Rolling Stone reporter Matt Hastings also reveals just how narrow the discourse about our Afghanistan adventure really is. Because while we’ll be treated to tens of thousands of column inches and hours of cable news blather about McChrystal’s “insubordination,” or whether Obama looks “tough enough” in handling the situation, the most important part of Hastings’ article is largely being ignored by the corporate media. Hastings told a tale of a project with no hope for success. His story shows us that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is all about tactics dressed up as a strategy. It’s a profile of a military establishment running on inertia -- unable to withdraw because withdrawing is an admission of defeat, but also unable to accomplish the wholly unrealistic tasks put before it.Andrew Sullivan is another writer who is not getting distracted by false issues.
One suspects there is simply no stopping this war machine, just as there is no stopping the entitlement and spending machine. Perhaps McChrystal would have tried to wind things up by next year - but his frustration was clearly fueled by the growing recognition that he could not do so unless he surrendered much of the country to the Taliban again. So now we have the real kool-aid drinker, Petraeus, who will refuse to concede the impossibility of success in Afghanistan just as he still retains the absurd notion that the surge in Iraq somehow worked in reconciling the sectarian divides that still prevent Iraq from having a working government. I find this doubling down in Afghanistan as Iraq itself threatens to spiral out of control the kind of reasoning that only Washington can approve of.In this earlier post, I wanted to know what we are getting for a billion dollars every 3 days. Where's the good news from our two long wars? We still haven't even heard any benchmark for success, either in Afghanistan or Iraq. These wars, which usually are all but invisible in the American media, are financially and morally bankruptcy our country.
Putting the incentives in the wrong place
At Slate.com, Eliot Spitzer argues that the BP disaster and the Wall Street disaster have something in common:
The law of incentives is what links the Wall Street cataclysm and BP's ongoing eco-disaster: In each case, we socialized risk and privatized gain, creating an asymmetry that created an incentive for private actors to accept and create too much risk in their business model, believing that at the end of the day, somebody else would bear the burden of that risk, should it metastasize into a disaster.
He mentions the astounding fact that in their current risk analysis of the too-big-to-fail banks, the Wall Street agencies assume that the federal government will come to the rescue with future bailouts. What we have is amazing. Public risk and private gain don't begin to pass the smell test. We are doling out corporate welfare where it is not needed and where it is not in the best interest of the taxpayers. And somehow, this catastrophic system passes as "the free market" among many modern-day free market fundamentalists. Spitzer points out that there are two ways to deal with businesses that engage in dangerous activities, tort liability and regulation, and that the public will be protected only if we have at least one of these.A regime of full tort damages and recoveries is one way to balance safety and exploration, or investment and risk, or whatever economic activity we are discussing. But there is another way: meaningful and vigorous oversight to impose safety standards that are dictated not by the market for insurance but by the judgment of serious experts in a regulatory context.
Change blindness and its political ramifications
I recently discovered this entertaining video of a simple and impressive change blindness experiment. Here are many additional examples from the lab of psychologist Dan Simons. I've also posted on this topic before here. If you like trying to find the changes, can you find the nine changes in this short video? It's amazing that we are so oblivious, yet so many of us are also so confident that significant changes won't will slip past us. This undeserved confidence makes us politically vulnerable too, I believe. It takes massive effort to remember that hundreds of politicians who are making claims this month previously made directly contradictory claims only a few months or a few years ago. Whether it's a change that occurs over a few seconds or a few years, the problem is similar--inability to attend to all of the details around us, especially when we are not primed to be looking for those changes. [more . . . ]
Penn Jillette is right and left
What are Penn Jillette's politics? He discusses this topic at Vanity Fair:
You can't believe how pro gay and pro freedom of speech I am. I'm way out beyond anyone on the Left. And as for fiscal conservatism and small government, I'm so much further to the right than Glenn Beck. Nobody is further left and further right than me. As I'm fond of saying, if you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a sharp left on sex and it's straight ahead.He also speaks freely (as he always does) on belief in God:
I do believe that a belief in god is crazy, but that doesn't mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy . . . I'm sure they're not lying. Their belief may be genuine. But it's like arguing that fairies are coming out of my toaster in the middle of the night. You can't prove to me that there aren't fairies in my toaster, but that doesn't mean you should take me seriously. What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for Allah.