The New TNN

Monday, June 23rd, 2003

TNN has repositioned itself as the new TNN, the first network for men. Normally I’d applaud a new line-up of animation for adults, but I’m not sure where I stand on the new TNN’s animation behaving badly:

The cult cartoon classic Ren & Stimpy has returned, teamed with two brand new adult series, for a raw and raucous block of late night animation. ‘Toon in for the June 26th premiere beginning at 10pm ET/PT for the hot line-up of Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon, Stripperella, and all new Gary the Rat.

Stripperella?

From legendary Spider-Man creator Stan Lee and featuring the voice of Pamela Anderson — she’s an exotic dancer by night, a sexy superhero by…later night.

Bob ‘The Beast’ Sapp Is Conquering Japan

Monday, June 23rd, 2003

I was shocked to see Bob Sapp mentioned in my Yahoo! News listings a few weeks ago. Now he’s on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. From Bob ‘The Beast’ Sapp Is Conquering Japan:

Bob Sapp was a third-round draft pick in 1997 of the Chicago Bears, and mostly sat on the sidelines. He was dropped by the Bears, picked up by another team, then got suspended for using a nutrition drink that broke the league’s steroid policy. He ended his career in 1999 with crippling tendinitis.

Then he lost his $800,000 in football savings in an investment swindle. He couldn’t find work. He applied for a chance to transport corpses from an Atlanta morgue to a cemetery for $100 a body, but somebody else got the job. Eventually, he won a spot in a second-tier professional-wrestling franchise, World Championship Wrestling. It went defunct.

Today, after one of the most remarkable sports comebacks ever, he is Bob “The Beast” Sapp, a superstar on the Japanese “K-1″ circuit. It pits men using different martial arts, such as karate, kickboxing and tae kwon do, against each other to see who prevails in three short, violent rounds.

Mr. Sapp, 28 years old, has also become one of Japan’s hottest comedians. The 6-foot-3, 380-pounder has appeared in hundreds of Japanese television shows, biting into a foam rubber doll, trying on blond wigs and plugging “Sapp Time,” his hit rap single.

It’s hard to explain just how massive Bob Sapp is:

Mr. Ishii saw Mr. Sapp’s U.S. wrestling matches in 2001 and recognized star quality: a 60-inch chest, 37-inch thighs and a seven-foot arm span.

The Genome Changes Everything

Friday, June 20th, 2003

I quite enjoy Matt Ridley’s work, and he has come out with a new book, Nature via Nuture, that he discusses in The Genome Changes Everything:

For the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe, or is in the process of reading its own recipe. That seems to me to be an epochal moment, because we’re going to get depths of insight into the nature of human nature that we never could have imagined, and that will dwarf anything that philosophers and indeed scientists have managed to produce in the last two millennia. That’s not to denigrate what’s gone before, but the genome changes everything. We know that just because the first one or two glimpses inside this box, the first lifting of the lid of the human genome, reveals to us enormous insights into what’s going on, and just from the first few genes we’re looking at.

What does he mean by Nature via Nurture?

The substance of what I’m interested in is that it’s the genes that are related to behavior, and how they work. The big insight is that genes are the agents of nurture as well as nature. Experience is a huge part of a developing human brain, the human mind, and a human organism. We need to develop in a social world and get things in from the outside. It’s enormously important to the development of human nature. You can’t describe human nature without it. But that process is itself genetic, in the sense that there are genes in there designed to get the experience out of the world and into the organism. In the human case you’re going to have genes that set up systems for learning that are not going to be present in other animals, language being the classic example. Language is something that in every sense is a genetic instinct. There’s no question that human beings, unless they’re unlucky and have a genetic mutation, inherit a capacity for learning language. That capacity is simply not inherited in anything like the same degree by a chimpanzee or a dolphin or any other creature. But you don’t inherit the language; you inherit the capacity for learning the language from the environment.

Guarding Liberty from Democracy

Friday, June 20th, 2003

It seems that everyone is reviewing Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In Guarding Liberty from Democracy, Roger Scruton, of The American Conservative, takes his turn:

Ancient writers on political themes would seldom recommend a purely democratic constitution on the grounds that, unless checked by powerful countervailing forces, democracy could at any moment degenerate into mob rule. The argument was refined by later thinkers, and notably in the 19th century by Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, both of whom warned against the “tyranny of the majority.” Unless the constitution protects the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities, they argued, democratic choice could threaten anyone at any time — as it did in Hitler’s Germany. Put another way, the argument tells us that there is nothing inherently liberal in popular choice and that individual freedom might be better protected under an aristocracy than when exposed to the whims of democratic resentment. Indeed, that is what Edmund Burke thought and what he showed to be the case in his great study of the French Revolution.

Scruton’s review turns decidedly…conservative:

In this well-argued and far-ranging survey, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria shows the damage that is being done by this un-nuanced pursuit of the democratic idea and argues once again for a society in which elites are accorded their proper place and esteemed for what they are — the true guardians of individual freedom and the ones who have the greatest stake in maintaining law, order, and accountability in the public realm. His argument is particularly pertinent now, when allied forces are attempting to bring freedom to Iraq by imposing democratic procedures on its people.

Here’s the true core of Zakaria’s argument:

Elected dictatorships, which extinguish opposition, destroy the political process too. It is only where people are free to dissent that genuine democratic choice is possible. Hence liberty should come higher than democracy in the wish list of our politicians. You can have liberty without democracy, but not democracy without liberty: such is the lesson of European history. Before imposing democratic regimes, therefore, we should ensure that civil liberty is properly entrenched in a rule of law, a rotation of offices, and the freedom to dissent. These institutions tend to arise naturally, Zakaria argues, with the emergence of a socially mobile middle class. That is why the transition to democracy is successful in countries with a per capita GDP of $3,000 to $6,000 but not in countries where it is significantly less.

The argument here is pertinent and fascinating. As Zakaria makes clear, there is all the difference in the world between a country where this relatively high GDP is achieved by the enterprise of the citizens and a country where it comes simply from selling off some natural resource like oil. The high GDP of Saudi Arabia is a kind of political illusion since it does nothing to indicate the emergence of a resourceful middle class or the demand for freedom, law, and citizenship that such a class will inevitably make. Thanks to oil, Saudi Arabia exists in a state of feudal hypostasis, even though it can treat its citizens — who are not true citizens but subjects — to a middle-class lifestyle.

Taste Test May Predict Alcoholism Risk

Friday, June 20th, 2003

Taste Test May Predict Alcoholism Risk reports on an odd association between sense of taste and risk of alcoholism:

A new study of children of alcoholics suggests that people at risk for alcoholism may experience some flavors differently than those not at risk for the drinking disorder.

Researchers found that men and women who were not alcoholics — but had an alcoholic father — found salty tastes less appetizing and sour flavors more intense than did their counterparts without alcohol-addicted dads.
[...]
Previous studies have demonstrated an inverse relationship between enjoyment of salt and alcohol consumption. In one, rats bred to like alcohol drank less of a salty solution than rats bred to dislike alcohol.

Giant Spiders, Prickly Sharks Found Off New Zealand

Friday, June 20th, 2003

Giant Spiders, Prickly Sharks Found Off New Zealand reports on some crazy sea creatures recently discovered off New Zealand:

A giant sea spider the size of a dinner plate and armored shrimps are just some of the new species discovered by a marine expedition in deep water northwest of New Zealand.

Researchers on a New Zealand and Australian research voyage also photographed deep sea sponges and a prickly shark, said New Zealand government agency the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

Tacit Knowledge — Writing a Book

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

Tacit Knowledge — Writing a Book describes how the publishing industry doesn’t work the way people would like to think it works:

Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book.
[...]
Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.

In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better.

Technical pause here: there’s an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between “book publishing” generally and “trade book publishing,” which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing — i.e., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field — two-thirds, if I remember right — doesn’t come from “trade book” publishing. It’s generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There’s real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance — but it’s a very competitive industry.

A Troubling Empire

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

In A Troubling Empire, Edward Luce reviews Eraly’s The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India’s Great Emperors:

One of the most striking aspects of modern India is that almost all its major cities were founded either by Islamic or European imperialists. Nationalists of various stripes are acutely sensitive to this and have renamed Bombay as Mumbai, Madras as Chennai and Calcutta as Kolkata. Even so, no amount of nominal revisionism can alter the fact that many of India’s most visible monuments were bequeathed by imperial invaders. Of these, perhaps the grandest architectural legacy is that of the Mughal dynasty.

A group of Hindu youth activists recently graffitied the Taj Mahal, the most impressive of Mughal buildings, and there have been many such disturbing incidents. Abraham Eraly is one of the many who are deeply concerned that historical revisionism shows no signs of abating in India. From this, he correctly concludes that India’s identity as a nation state is still in the process of being settled.

“In every other major civilisation the past has died so that the future could be born,” he writes. “But India seems to be killing the future so that the past can live on.” The central Hindu nationalist thesis is this: India flowered under a golden age of Hindu civilisation that was systematically destroyed, first by the various Islamic invasions between the 11th and 17th centuries, and then by the British colonial period that lasted until 1947. Finally, after more than 50 years of independence, India has a Hindu nationalist government that can correct the distortions of history. Or, if you take Eraly’s view, a standpoint which is “snared in self-delusions, fighting quixotic battles with the spectres of the past”.

Here’s the part of the book that sounds like fun though:

Instead, Eraly treats us to what another partisan school of history would describe as an “Orientalist” narrative of the kings and concubines of Mughaldom. For those seeking thrills in the emperor’s harem or horror in the fratricidal and parricidal battles of succession, such material is abundant. There are endless accounts of battlefield victories and defeats with the attendant elephant charges and last-minute changes of loyalty. Eunuchs and dancing girls conspire and carouse throughout.

The Little Tyrant

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

In The Little Tyrant, Victor Davis Hanson reviews Paul Johnson’s Napoleon: A Penguin Life and comments on how we excuse “great” men’s atrocities:

Why do so many western intellectuals excuse thuggery and whitewash the crimes of megalomaniacs? I have received more angry mail, for example, over a brief article I published a few years ago called “Alexander the Killer” than about anything I have ever written. And the myth of Napoleon, like that of Alexander the Great, is also deeply enshrined in our collective romance — to question either risks real outrage.

Both dictators were eerily similar in ways that go beyond being military geniuses who ruled entire continents by their early 30s. In each case ghastly records of slaughter were carefully masked by a professed concern for the arts and sciences — e.g., silly tales of Alexander sleeping with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow and his real efforts to bring a legion of Greek natural scientists with him eastward; or Napoleon’s patronage of Vivant Denon (author of the monumental 24-volume Description de l’Egypte) and his gifts of Egyptian booty to a generation of French scholars. Like Hitler’s Speer and de Gaulle’s Malraux, Denon was one of a long line of gifted toadies dating back to Alexander’s Callisthenes, court intellectuals who simultaneously worshiped and loathed the powers that be, who at least noticed them.

This particular excerpt from Johnson’s Napoleon biography made me cringe; it describes Napoleon’s autopsy:

The teeth were healthy but stained black by the chewing of licorice. The left kidney was one-third larger than the right. The urinary bladder was small and it contained gravel; the mucosa was thickened with numerous red patches. Had the urethra been sectioned (or so runs the theory) it would probably have demonstrated a small circular scar, too tight to allow the passing of even small stones. That would have been the key to the slow decline in health and performance that started when Bonaparte was in his late thirties. The body was what doctors call “feminized” — that is, covered by a deep layer of fat, with scarcely any hair and well-developed breasts and mons veneris. The shoulders were narrow, hips broad, and genitals small. We can all make up our minds about these findings, their significance and reliability.

The farmer

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

I read a few pages of Carnage and Culture this past weekend. Then I stumbled across an article on the author, The farmer:

Victor Davis Hanson leads a double life. A fifth-generation raisin farmer in California’s fertile Central Valley, Hanson is also a historian of ancient Greece, a lyrical defender of American agrarianism, and a prolific contributor to conservative opinion magazines. His columns so caught the fancy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that he has enjoyed audiences with both. It’s hard to say which is stranger: that a raisin farmer should exert such influence, or that a classics scholar should.

It helps that one of Hanson’s areas of academic expertise coincides with the national agenda: war. ”Carnage and Culture,” his recent book arguing that the West has produced a uniquely effective military culture thanks to inherited Greek values, was a New York Times bestseller and a particular favorite of Vice President Cheney. Random House has paid a stunning $500,000 for Hanson’s forthcoming book on the Peloponnesian war.

These are confusing times, and Hanson wields a few simple ideas with blunt force. Western culture, in his view, emanates from ancient Greece and prizes consensual government, private markets, self-criticism, and rational inquiry. Where such values are found, political, economic, and military preeminence follow. The non-Western world lags behind the West because it does not share in the Greek cultural legacy, having opted instead for despotism, theocracy, illiberal markets, and the plain old laziness that has men whiling away afternoons playing backgammon in the cafes of the Middle East.

I may have to go back and get a classics degree — in my copious free time.

What Makes You Who You Are

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

In What Makes You Who You Are, Matt Ridley attacks the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and gives some quick background:

It was Charles Darwin’s eccentric mathematician cousin Francis Galton who in 1874 ignited the nature-nurture controversy in its present form and coined the very phrase (borrowing the alliteration from Shakespeare, who had lifted it from an Elizabethan schoolmaster named Richard Mulcaster). Galton asserted that human personalities were born, not made by experience. At the same time, the philosopher William James argued that human beings have more instincts than animals, not fewer.

In the first decades of the 20th century, nature held sway over nurture in most fields. In the wake of World War I, however, three men recaptured the social sciences for nurture: John B. Watson, who set out to show how the conditioned reflex, discovered by Ivan Pavlov, could explain human learning; Sigmund Freud, who sought to explain the influence of parents and early experiences on young minds; and Franz Boas, who argued that the origin of ethnic differences lay with history, experience and circumstance, not physiology and psychology.

Galton’s insistence on innate explanations of human abilities had led him to espouse eugenics, a term he coined. Eugenics was enthusiastically adopted by the Nazis to justify their campaign of mass murder against the disabled and the Jews. Tainted by this association, the idea of innate behavior was in full retreat for most of the middle years of the century. In 1958, however, two men began the counterattack on behalf of nature. Noam Chomsky, in his review of a book by the behaviorist B.F. Skinner, argued that it was impossible to learn human language by trial and error alone; human beings must come already equipped with an innate grammatical skill. Harry Harlow did a simple experiment that showed that a baby monkey prefers a soft, cloth model of a mother to a hard, wire-frame mother, even if the wire-frame mother provides it with all its milk; some preferences are innate.

Ridley also gives a succinct description of how a few genes can make a huge difference:

To make grand changes in the body plan of animals, there is no need to invent new genes, just as there’s no need to invent new words to write an original novel (unless your name is Joyce). All you need do is switch the same ones on and off in different patterns. Suddenly, here is a mechanism for creating large and small evolutionary changes from small genetic differences. Merely by adjusting the sequence of a promoter or adding a new one, you could alter the expression of a gene.

In one sense, this is a bit depressing. It means that until scientists know how to find gene promoters in the vast text of the genome, they will not learn how the recipe for a chimpanzee differs from that for a person. But in another sense, it is also uplifting, for it reminds us more forcefully than ever of a simple truth that is all too often forgotten: bodies are not made, they grow. The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body. It is a recipe for baking a body.

The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body. It is a recipe for baking a body.

Too Smart To Be So Dumb

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

Too Smart To Be So Dumb makes an age-old point:

The truth, which Orwell pointed out, is that truly brilliant people and truly talented people often believe truly stupid things: G.B. Shaw believed in Hitler and Stalin. Norman Mailer believed that convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbot deserved to be paroled because he could write well (and that we went to war in Iraq to bolster the white-male ego). Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich believed that the few hundred of us still alive after the ecological holocaust of the ’80s and ’90s would be living in caves. The academic establishment believed in the efficacy of bilingual education and largely continues to believe that communism spreads prosperity and social justice. Princeton professor of bioethics Peter Singer believes that parents ought to be able to murder their disabled children. And Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta believes that a 70-year-old lady from Vero Beach and a young Arab man chanting Koranic verses are equally likely to hijack a plane.

American Bioscience Meets the American Dream

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

In American Bioscience Meets the American Dream, Carl Elliott makes a fascinating point:

Even as we use medical technologies to transform ourselves, often in the most dramatic ways — face-lifts, personality makeovers, extreme body modifications — we describe these transformations as a way of finding our true selves.

Some examples:

The transformation in Fussell’s appearance is astonishing. Photographs in his memoir show a shy-looking 22-year-old man, bony and longhaired, legs crossed and seated in a lawn chair. Several years later, they show a man so changed it is difficult to imagine it is the same person: an enormous, oiled, steroid-enhanced bodybuilder with a buzz cut, muscles bulging freakishly, eyes glazed, veins popping out all over his body, strutting and preening on a stage in southern California. But how does Fussell describe the change? As a transformation into his true self. It was his need to discover and reveal himself that drove him to steroids. “I, for one, couldn’t wait three or four or five more years to become myself,” Fussell writes. “I was so uncomfortable not being me that I had to have (steroids) now.”
[...]
When Williams began giving public interviews about his condition several years ago, it was as a paid spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Paxil, the first antidepressant approved by the Food and Drug Administration for social anxiety disorder. Williams explained to the press that medication had allowed his true identity to emerge. “As part of my treatment program,” Williams said, “my physician prescribed the antidepressant Paxil, in combination with therapy. Soon thereafter I was able to start acting like the real Ricky Williams.”
[...]
“I have been born again,” he told the astonished group. “I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me.” The psychiatric experience to which Grant was referring was the result of LSD, which he claimed to have used more than 60 times. As he sat tanning himself on the deck of a pink submarine, Grant described the way that LSD had put him in touch with his inner self. “I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities,” Grant said. LSD allowed him to get past the mask that had hidden his true nature. “I had to face things about myself which I had never admitted,” Grant said. “I was an utter fake.” Only with LSD was he able to overcome this fakery and become who he really was inside.
[...]
“I know this is not a personality flaw,” said one executive who had begun taking stimulants. Many people concluded that stimulants had restored to them a true self that had been hidden by pathology. One patient taking Ritalin told Time magazine, “I had 38 years of thinking I was a bad person. Now I’m rewriting the tapes of who I thought I was to who I really am.”

I left off the examples of sex-reassignment surgery and voluntary amputation.

Addicted to Oil

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

In Addicted to Oil, Elizabeth Shelburne summarizes U.S.-Saudi history before interviewing Robert Baer, a CIA veteran:

The history of U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia goes back nearly to that nation’s birth. In 1933, a year after the kingdom was declared, the first American oil concession was granted. Over time, U.S. interest in Saudi oil evolved into a company called Aramco, which controlled all of the oil in Saudi Arabia — 25 percent of the world’s total. Aramco was a private company held by four large U.S. oil companies, with immense influence on the U.S. government. (It is now wholly owned by the Saudi government.) Moreover, the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia extends beyond this private interest — as early as 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt asserted that protecting the kingdom, and its oil, was of vital economic importance to the United States as a whole. The precedent of maintaining a friendly relationship with Saudi Arabia, for both public and private reasons, has remained unchanged in the intervening years.

Baer’s take on Sunni Islam:

We, as a country, not just the CIA, didn’t think that Sunni fundamentalism was all that bad. It helped us defeat Egypt in a large sense, and it helped us in the Yemen civil war in the sixties, and then in Afghanistan. So we were supportive of Sunni fundamentalism, never thinking that once the Russians were run out of Afghanistan the Sunnis would turn on us. It was a failure to see forward to this possibility. It wasn’t just the CIA. It was the CIA, the State Department, the White House, and the American press as well. They all said, “Saudi Arabia is a medieval country, we don’t really need to worry about it, it’s very conservative, it doesn’t change very fast, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. They pump the oil, they bank our oil, they buy our weapons, it’s all to our advantage.”

U.S.-Saudi relations:

There’s an extremely close relationship between the White House and the king of Saudi Arabia, along with the oil minister and the ambassador. You can call the ambassador up and say, “Look, we’re forecasting a shortage in the world oil market because of speculation. Can you pump more?” In every crisis, the Saudis have come through. Let’s be frank about it — they were our best allies in the Middle East. They banked this oil — 2-3 million barrels — at a very high cost, they never got reimbursed for it, and they were always there. The Iran-Iraq war, they were there. When the Iraqis overran Kuwait, they were there. Strikes in Venezuela, they came through and pumped more oil. They had their own interests, but they also protected our markets as well.

How the royal family divvies up oil money:

It’s all hidden in defense and construction contracts. What has happened is that the price of Saudi oil is really transparent when it’s sold. Aramco has contracts, they sell oil at world prices, and they get reimbursed. It’s part of their budget. Some of their oil is called “political oil” which they give to their allies for free, whether it’s Yemen or Jordan, or at times, Bahrain and even Afghanistan and the Taliban. Where the money is stolen — and I call it stolen; the Saudis might not — is in construction and defense contracts. You pay commissions of 20-40 percent for arms deals. That’s divided among senior princes in the royal family and commission agents. The same thing happens in construction. When they rebuilt Mecca and Medina, they were overpaying for projects and the money went into the royal family, into the bin Laden family, into the bin Mahfouz family. I mean, what’s a commission? If you get 40 percent on a deal, it seems like bribery to me. And the royal family divides these commissions up, which supplements money they get in their allowances.

Hey, Wanna Score Some Cheese?

Thursday, June 19th, 2003

While we were visiting Ireland, we had to explain to Irish friends why Americans wanted to buy cheese so badly — and why they’d have to sneak it home. From Hey, Wanna Score Some Cheese?:

Even as America guards its borders against threats from abroad ranging from terrorism to mad cow disease, one intruder is proving particularly difficult to keep out: illegal cheese. The stinky French kind.

Cheese lovers — a fast-growing constituency in the U.S. — covet the stuff because it is made from raw, unpasteurized milk. That is the ingredient that gives many French and other handmade cheeses their distinctive, complex flavors. But the Food and Drug Administration bans the sale of all cheeses made with raw milk that haven’t been aged for at least 60 days. It says they are unsafe because raw-milk products can carry pathogens including E. coli and listeria.

The rule is even more restrictive for cheeses made in that hotbed of forbidden fromage, France. Thanks to a listeria outbreak in the mid-1980s, the U.S. bans any soft raw-milk cheese that is produced there, regardless of how long it is aged. These rules prohibit even basic cheeses like genuine Brie and Camembert. (Sorry, but the Brie that supermarkets stock here has been pasteurized, making it more bland and rubbery than the real thing.)