Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Problems with the assembly approach to the human (or anything) Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 11:42:48 AM     I ant to take on what  can be called the assembly approach to human phenomena. An example of the asembly  is the following From THE BIRTH OF THE MIND: HOW A TINY NUMBER OF GENES CREATES THE COMPLEXITIES OF HUMAN THOUGHT by Gary Marcus: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465044050/qid=1071262425/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4463915-8209511?v=glance&;s=books   "It is popular in some quarters to claim that the human brain is largely unstructured at birth; it is tempting to believe that our minds float free of our genomes. But such beliefs are completely at odds with everything that scientists have learned in molecular biology over the last decade. Rather than leaving everything to chance or the vicissitudes of experience, nature has taken everything it has developed for growing the body and put it towards the problem of growing the brain. From cell division to cell differentiation, every process that is used in the development of the body is also used in the development of the brain. Genes do for the brain the same things as they do for the rest of the body: they guide the fates of cells by guiding the production of proteins within those cells. The one thing that is truly special about the development of the brain-the physical basis of the mind-is its "wiring", the critical connections between neurons, but even there, genes play a critical role. this can be found at Edge 133 at http://www.edge.org  Comment: take the hand. The assembly approach says that the pianists fingers, for example, built up skills out of parts. The baby's hand is a fist, all moves together. With time (weeks) the fingers begin to differentiate into separate actions. This process is hard to describe fom the assembly perspective. ********

Alternatives in Iraq Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 10:57:47 AM     Lost in the Kay testimony is the idea that we could have let Blix continue, with more police power as the Germans advocated. It is worth thinking through how long the regime would have lasted anyway - certainly not past  Saddham's natural death. ********

Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 10:44:03 AM     An intresting republican candidate http://johnbuchanan.org/ ********

Leak Against This War The Guardian Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 9:54:53 AM     From Daniel Elsberg By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents. I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can. I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now - the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic results. ********

Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 9:09:41 AM     It is important to realize the depth of Bush support, not because he is good or liked (there is some of that belief), but because the perceived alternatives are inefficient bureaucracy, and further alienation through its use. (There is some truth to this). But by my explorations and interviews, both the right and the left see this threat as belong to the other, and the paradox is that, while neither really support it, it is winning. Hence the deep frustration and alienation of the voters. ********

Napoleon and the current situation - Johnson's bio Posted here Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 8:40:18 AM     From Paul Johnson's Napoleon. My intuition was this could be relevant. I am not disappointed. Thereafter, however, the Bonapartist legacy, aided by France's decision to treat the dead ruler as a national hero and exemplar to the world, came into its own. The First World War itself was total warfare of the type Bonaparte's methods adumbrated, and in the political anarchy that emerged from it, a new brand of ideological dictator took Bonaparte's methods of government as a model, first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany, with many smaller countries following suit. The totalitarian state of the twentieth century was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth. It is right, therefore, that we should study Bonaparte's spectacular career unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anxious as we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the twentieth, we must learn from Bonaparte's life what to fear and what to avoid. Comment: compare this to Marshall's essay on Empire referenced yesterday. For deeper background, Spengler, in the Decline of the West, wrote that empires of necessity turn toward the authoritarian, because any sign of weakness will lead others, internal and external, to tear them apart. I say this because it is important to not blame it all on Bush, but to see Bush as an unfortunate choice of President in what is already an unfortunate situation for the US and its people. ********