Steven Pinker in Edge.org:

Today the vast majority of the world's people do not have to worry about dying in war. Since 1945, wars between great powers and developed states have essentially vanished, and since 1991, wars in the rest of the world have become fewer and less deadly.

But how long will this trend last? Many people have assured me that it must be a momentary respite, and that a Big One is just around the corner.

Maybe they're right. The world has plenty of unknown unknowns, and perhaps some unfathomable cataclysm will wallop us out of the blue. But since by definition we have no idea what the unknown unknowns are, we can't constructively worry about them.

What, then, about the known unknowns? Are certain risk factors numbering our days of relative peace? In my view, most people are worrying about the wrong ones, or are worrying about them for the wrong reasons.

Resource shortages. Will nations go to war over the last dollop of oil, water, or strategic minerals? It's unlikely. First, resource shortages are self-limiting: as a resource becomes scarcer and thus more expensive, technologies for finding and extracting it improve, or substitutes are found. Also, wars are rarely fought over scarce physical resources (unless you subscribe to the unfalsifiable theory that allwars, regardless of stated motives, are really about resources: Vietnam was about tungsten; Iraq was about oil, and so on.) Physical resources can be divided or traded, so compromises are always available; not so for psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or ideology.

Climate change. There are many reasons to worry about climate change, but major war is probably not among them. Most studies have failed to find a correlation between environmental degradation and war; environmental crises can cause local skirmishes, but a major war requires a political decision that a war would be advantageous. The 1930s Dust Bowl did not cause an American Civil war; when we did have a Civil War, its causes were very different.

More here.

American mythology was forged in the early part of the 20th century, in the overlapping years between the final days of the Wild West and the beginnings of Hollywood. Some of the west’s most fabled characters realised that the overlap could be fruitful: the famous lawman and Nietzsche-lookalike Wyatt Earp was a deft handler of his own public relations, while Buffalo Bill’s stage show, which the bison-hunting showman took to London and Paris in the 1880s, was an object lesson in how to dramatise the life of a cowboy, and an inspiration for early film-makers, whose uncomplicated take on subjects such as the Great Train Robbery found mass appeal. It is both a boon and a curse for American civilisation to be the only one mythologised in modern popular culture. In a fledgling nation, this art form immediately resonated with a public anxious to establish an ethical code. The frontier: beautiful metaphor, scary place. America needed its heroes to be better, and badder, than the baddest guys in town. It needed expert gunslingers to persuade people that their future prosperity should not depend on guns. In that respect, the cowboy was a self-destructive hero, which doubly ennobled him.

more from Peter Aspden at the FT here.

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan in the NY Review of Books blog:

Since the sad death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, there has been a lot of discussion of the extent to which the criminal prosecution hanging over him contributed to his suicide. Some have pointed their fingers at MIT, suggesting that, by failing to waive its complaint against him for using its network to download files, the university bears some responsibility for his suicide. MIT has now set up an internal investigation. The prospect of a felony conviction and aprison sentence would be enough to make anyone think that his or her life is effectively over. For a young and exceptionally talented person who acted from noble motives, the idea of going to prison must have been even more shattering, and the depression from which he suffered would have magnified its impact in ways that those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced that condition cannot fully imagine.

The fact that JSTOR has made millions of documents freely available, after Swartz had downloaded them, shows that his actions have had what many people—perhaps to some extent even JSTOR, which after all is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to scholarly publications—believe to be a public benefit. Thousands of researchers are currently putting all of their downloaded PDF files online, often in breach of copyright, as a tribute to Swartz.

There is no doubt that we should improve access to scientific resources, and the Internet makes it almost inevitable that this will happen. The only question is when. As Lawrence Lessig argues, this is knowledge paid for in large part by our taxes. More important still, in the long run, will be raising the level of general access to information throughout the world. The price now asked for a single journal article is equivalent to a month’s earnings in many countries. The Internet makes the ancient dream of a universal library possible. Why should not everyone, anywhere in the world, be able to use, without charge, all the available knowledge that humans have created?

Deborah Baker in Caravan:

Since the Gurkha War of 1814, the Kingdom of Nepal had been off limits to foreigners, especially the English; available maps had been entirely the work of Indian surveyors unsupervised by British colonial officials. But with the permission of the Maharaja of Nepal, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) sent a small team to investigate the devastation, led by an English geologist. The four men left Calcutta in early February and travelled for several months in bullock carts and on royal elephants, completing three separate traverses over ranges in both Nepal and Bihar before completing their trek at Darjeeling.

Comparing seismographs from Bombay and Kew, England, the long-legged, bearded and alarmingly pale-skinned team leader, 31-year-old John Bicknell Auden, had first judged the earthquake’s epicentre to fall in southeastern Nepal. On reaching the area to camp, however, he read the landscape as a detective might study overturned furniture to reconstruct a violent crime. He concluded that the epicentre was not in the Nepal Himalaya but in the Gangetic alluvium, further south, in north Bihar. In the seismological report he eventually filed with the GSI, Auden’s observations were largely geological. His account of the same journey for the Himalayan Journal, however, revealed a mountaineer’s agenda: to get a close-up view of Mount Everest’s southern face. He would be the first European to take in this view, and the first in over a century to visit the region.

Despite thick spectacles, Auden had a mountaineer’s eye for what he called “the great Himalayan tide”. He used his annual furlough, not to return to England where every stone had been turned over at least once, but to join path-breaking British expeditions in the high Himalayas whenever he could.

In the NYT:

What was the last truly great book you read?

Primo Levi, “If This Is a Man” (original, “Se Questo È un Uomo,” 1947). At one level, Levi’s book is about how as a young Italian Jewish chemist joining the resistance during World War II, he was captured, sent to Auschwitz, and survived. At another level, the book is about our everyday life issues, magnified: the life-and-death consequences of chance, the problem of evil, the impossibility of separating one’s moral code from surrounding circumstances, and the difficulties of maintaining one’s sanity and humanness in the presence of injustice and bad people. Levi dealt with these issues and was lucky, with the result that he survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the greatest authors (both of nonfiction and fiction) of postwar Italy. But he survived at a price. One of the prices, the loss of his religious beliefs, he summarized as follows: “I must say that the experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away any remnants of the religious education that I had had. . . . Auschwitz existed, therefore God cannot exist. I find no solution to that dilemma. I seek a solution, but I don’t find it.”

From The New York Times:

Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9, and she thinks to herself, with the sharp pragmatism of a child that age, “Maybe it would be easier this way.” But Sotomayor’s mother did not rise with relief from her loss; she shut herself in her dark bedroom for a long season of grief. So Sotomayor became a library rat, though without any guidance. (She’d never heard of “Alice in Wonderland” until she got to Princeton years later.) Finally, after months of lonely reading and evenings spent silent with her younger brother in front of the television, Sotomayor literally hurled herself at her mother’s door and screamed at her not to die too. It’s another example of her will, and of her instinct for self-preservation. She tells us that her anger with her mother lingered — another bracing dose of honesty. But she also credits her mother with taking steps to better her children’s future: speaking English with them; buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sotomayor responded by figuring out how to excel in school. She asked the smartest girl in her class how to study. In high school, she joined a debating team, and learned how to structure an argument and speak in public. An older student told her about something she’d never heard of — the Ivy League — and she followed him to Prince­ton. “Qualifying for financial aid was the easiest part,” she writes. “There were no assets to report.”

More here.

Salman Hameed in The Guardian:

An imam of an east London mosque, Usama Hasan, received a death threat for arguing in support of human evolution two years ago. On Saturday, London played host to a riveting intrafaith dialogue on Islam's stance on the theory of evolution. The east London imam was one of the speakers – but this time there were others who shared his viewpoint.

The event, organised by the Deen Institute, was titled Have Muslims Misunderstood Evolution? The speakers included an evolutionary biologist, a biological anthropologist, two theologians and a bona fide creationist.

It lasted seven hours, yet almost everyone stayed till the end. There were more than 850 people in the audience and even though the topic was sensitive and controversial, there was no heckling or disruption. At least from my limited interactions, it seemed that the audience was comprised mostly of young professionals. Most had no strong opinion, but their interest was evident as they were willing to spend their entire Saturday hearing about Muslim positions on evolution.

They were not disappointed.

More here.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, ‘I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:’ no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his material collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in.

more from Emerson’s 1904 essay at Berfrois here.

The argument of the political commentator Walter Russell Mead that the United States has reached an end-stage death match between liberal constituent groups has received widespread attention, especially in the conservative blogosphere. Mead, who teaches at Bard College, contends that The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. In many respects, liberalism is a fat target. Dozens of city and state public employee pension plans are on the verge of bankruptcy – or are actually bankrupt – from Rhode Island to California; in 2010, a survey of 126 state and local plans showed assets of $2.7 trillion and liabilities of $3.5 trillion, an $800 billion shortfall. The national debt exceeds $16 trillion.

more from Tom Edsall at The Opinionater here.

Bryan Magee in Prospect:

I used to encounter more often than I do now the assumption that philosophy is a branch of literature. In fact when I was younger I often met people-intelligent and educated but untrained in philosophy-who thought that a philosopher was somebody giving voice to his attitudes towards things in general, in the same way as an essayist might, or even a poet, but more systematically, and perhaps on a larger scale: less opinionated than the essayist, less emotional than the poet, more rigorous than either, and perhaps more impartial. With the philosopher, as with the other two, the quality of writing was an essential part of what was most important. Just as the essayist and the poet had a distinctive style which was recognisably theirs, and was an integral part of what they were expressing, so did the philosopher. And just as it would be self-evidently nonsense to say of someone that he was a bad writer but a good essayist, or a bad writer but a good poet, so it must surely be nonsense to say of someone that he was a bad writer but a good philosopher.

This attitude is completely mistaken, of course, because it is refuted by some of the greatest philosophers. Aristotle is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, but all that remains of his work are lecture notes, made either by him or by a pupil. And as we would expect of lecture notes, they are stodgy, bereft of literary merit. But they are wonderful philosophy just the same, and they have made Aristotle one of the key figures of western civilisation. The conventional wisdom has long held that the outstanding philosopher since the ancient Greeks is Immanuel Kant, but I cannot believe that anyone has regarded Kant as a good writer, let alone a great stylist: to anyone who has actually read his work such an idea would be as difficult to understand as some parts of his transcendental deduction of the categories. The founder of modern empiricism and modern liberal political theory, John Locke, is another central figure in western philosophy, but he writes in a way that most people seem to find dull and pedestrian.

More here.

Ian Dille in Texas Monthly:

For more than fifteen years, I followed the accusations, denials, and endless debates regarding Lance Armstrong. I made up my own mind about him long ago, but now the world finally has a verdict. In October the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released more than one thousand pages of evidence, including testimony from eleven of Armstrong’s former teammates and friends, that identified the most celebrated American cyclist in history as the ringleader of a sophisticated doping operation that spanned most of his career. The report left little doubt that when Armstrong competed in the Tour de France, one of the sporting world’s greatest spectacles, banned substances coursed through his body. He cheated, and for a long time, he won. Now Armstrong no longer owns the record seven Tour titles. He’s stepped down as the chairman of the Livestrong Foundation. He’s lost his treasured relationship with Nike. And millions of former fans feel duped and heartbroken.

There can be no question that the past decade of professional cycling was dominated by riders whose performance was enhanced by illegal drugs. In its reasoned decision on Armstrong, USADA stated that 20 of the 21 podium finishers in the Tour from 1999 through 2005 have been linked to doping. An era of cyclists played dirty, but buried in the scandal is a lost generation of American pros who stayed clean during a period rife with cheaters. In fact, no top American cyclist who was born after 1980 has ever received a doping sanction. These athletes played by the rules, but they had their careers stunted by a pharmacological glass ceiling. One of them was my childhood friend Pat McCarty.

More here.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

An important problem with the narrative line of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the Central Intelligence Agency’s quest for Usama Bin Laden, is not just that it comes across as pro-torture but that it ignores the elephant in the room: Bad intelligence elicited by torture almost derailed that quest to put down al-Qaeda by diverting most resources to Iraq.

“Zero Dark Thirty” stands in a long line of Hollywood-Washington collaborations that essentially do the work of propaganda. The lineage includes Michael Curtiz’s 1942 “Casablanca” with Humphrey Bogart, which was produced under the Office of War Information’s guidelines; the director assigned it the government-prescribed theme of “III B (United Nations — Conquered Nations) Drama,” as Tanfer Emin Tunc argues.

The film is misleading precisely because it does what the Bush administration did not do. It stays with Afghanistan, Pakistan and al-Qaeda. At one point a CIA official complains that there are no other working groups concentrating on al-Qaeda, that it is just the handful of field officers around the table. But he does not say that the Bush administration ran off to Iraq and closed down the Bin Laden desk at the CIA. Nor do any of the characters admit that bad intelligence, including that gathered by torture, helped send the United States off on the Great Iraq Wild Goose Chase.

More here.

The Tao Te Ching
… 31. A Weapon is a Tool of Death

A weapon is a tool of death.
A tool of death is anti-Tao.
A man of the Way, leading,
will reject tools of death
if he has a choice.

There is a formal attitude
the left of which is life
the right of which is death.

To the left is peace & creation;
violence & destruction
occupy the right.

There is no beauty in death,
this the wise man understands.

If a man finds beauty in death
his self is compromised to its core.
He has lost the Way.

Should a wise man be compelled to violence
he will not rejoice. Victory is not
a time for joy. Victory is a funeral
wherein a multitude is mourned.
.

from The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu
An Adaptation by R. Bob

Maryn McKenna in Wired:

A little more than a year ago, I wrote a piece in Scientific American about fecal transplants — replacing the stool in someone’s colon with stool donated by someone else — as a treatment for the pernicious, recurrent diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile infection. I have been a journalist for two decades, and some of my stories have won prizes, triggered hearings and legislation, and caused people to change their minds about significant social issues — but I don’t think anything I have written has ever proved as sticky with an audience as that 1,500-word column. In the 60 or so weeks since it was published, I have heard from more than 100 people — yes, that’s more than 1 per week — who are afflicted with C. diff, believe that a transplant could help them, but cannot find a doctor who agrees that the procedure has merit. A paper published Wednesday evening in the New England Journal of Medicine may give those patients assistance, and change those doctors’ minds. It represents the first report from a completed randomized trial of fecal transplants, and it finds that the treatment worked much better than the powerful antibiotics that are usually given for C. diff infection — so much better, in fact, that the trial was ended early, because the monitoring board supervising the trial’s execution could not ethically justify withholding the transplants from more patients.

Here are the details: A group of Dutch and Finnish researchers enrolled patients with severe C. diff (defined as at least one relapse of infection after antibiotic treatment, plus at least three bouts of diarrhea per day or eight over two days) into three groups, who received either a fecal transplant, or one of two comparative treatments: either the standard course of vancomycin, a broad-spectrum, last-ditch antibiotic, for two weeks; or the same antibiotic course with bowel lavage (a high-volume enema that reaches deep into the colon and is used to clean things out before transplanting stool) added on the fourth or fifth day of taking the drugs. The fecal transplant was donor stool, screened for parasites and infectious organisms, diluted and strained, and given by a tube that snaked up through the nose and down through the stomach to the start of the intestine.

…Of 16 transplant patients (one was excluded for reasons unrelated to the trial), 13 were cured on their first infusion, and two more on a repeat round, making the transplant 94 percent effective. In the two drug arms, the rates were 31 percent in the vancomycin-only group (4 of 13) and 23 percent (3 of 13) in the group receiving vancomycin plus lavage.

More here.

From MedPage Today:

U.S. cancer death rates in 2009 were down 20% from their peak in 1991, primarily because of large decreases in death rates from lung and prostate cancer in men and in breast cancer in women, according to the American Cancer Society. In its annual statistical review of cancer incidence and mortality, the ACS estimated that more than 1 million Americans were saved from cancer deaths since 1991 — the difference between the actual cancer mortality and a projection of continued increases in cancer deaths at the 1975-1991 average. The ACS researchers also estimated that the U.S. would see 1,660,290 new cancer cases diagnosed in 2013 and 580,350 cancer deaths.

…Starting in 1990, lung cancer death rates in men dropped about 30%, from 91 per 100,000 to 62 in 2009. Deaths from prostate cancer per 100,000, which had also peaked in the early 1990s, also plummeted — from 40 to 22. In women, lung cancer mortality appeared to have peaked in 2002 at about 42 per 100,000 and has since declined slightly. The largest decrease in cancer death rates for women has been for breast cancer, down 33% since 1990. Colorectal cancer death rates in women have also declined substantially, but that trend began in 1950, according to the ACS report. Decreases in death rates were seen for most other cancer types. The major exception is liver cancer in men, for which mortality has been edging upward since 1980. Siegel and colleagues also found that 5-year survival rates have been trending upward, even for notoriously poor-prognosis cancers such as lung, pancreatic, and esophageal malignancies.

More here.

“The Receptacle for Suicides”, as Tristman dubs his voguish idea, is a Swiftian institution: utterly outrageous and thoroughly plausible. In offering to make the business of self-destruction both private and classy, Tristman takes it indoors and smothers it with euphemisms, of which “sudden death” was among the most popular in the mid-eighteenth century. It befits a cutting-edge projector to refer, in conclusion, to his would-be clients as “suicides”, a fairly unusual term when The World’s satire was published. The Oxford English Dictionary dates “suicide”, in Tristman’s sense of “One who dies by his own hand”, back to 1732, again in a journalistic context. “Suicide” in the sense of “self-murder” is in use decades earlier, and appears to be Thomas Browne’s coinage. As Kelly McGuire points out in Dying To Be English: Suicide narratives and national identity, 1721–1814, the word has a vexed history. Deploying a pronoun as a prefix in order to describe both an action and a person (a person who is at once victim and perpetrator), it is something of a botched job.

more from Freya Johnston at the TLS here.

Is Europe anything more than the remnants of a grand political delusion? Is there a cultural bond that unites the nations and peoples of this fragmented continent? From Max Weber to Norbert Elias, the greats of European intellectual history have described and re-described Europe as the birthplace of modernity; not, like the other continents, as the “heart of darkness”, but as the energetic centre of civilizing progress. Their attention has focused on the “grand narratives”: industrialization and economic productivity, state and nation building, science and art. Yet might not an examination from the other side – through an investigation of the marginal – provide essential insights into Europe’s development over the longue dureé? Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe’s grand narrative of modernity?

more from Klaus-Michael Bogdal at Eurozine here.