Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
Jeffrey D. Sachs
Yet, in most cases, terrorism is not rooted in insanity. It is more
often an act of war, albeit war by the weak rather than by organized
states and their armies. Islamist terrorism is a reflection, indeed
an extension, of today's wars in the Middle East. And with the
meddling of outside powers, those wars are becoming a single regional
war -- one that is continually morphing, expanding, and becoming
increasingly violent.
From the jihadist perspective -- the one that American or French
Muslims, for example, may pick up in training camps in Afghanistan,
Syria, and Yemen -- daily life is ultra-violent. Death is pervasive,
coming as often as not from the bombs, drones, and troops of the
United States, France, and other Western powers. And the victims
are often the innocent "collateral damage" of Western strikes
that hit homes, weddings, funerals, and community meetings.
...
To be clear, Western actions do not provide Islamist terrorism
with a scintilla of justification. The reason to point out these
actions is to make clear what Islamist terrorism in the West represents
to the terrorists: Middle East violence on an expanded front.
The West has done much to create that front, arming favored actors,
launching proxy wars, and taking the lives of civilians in
unconscionable numbers.
Nice to see an alternative view rarely written about. Read the whole article.
Does tolerating graft undermine national security? Much of the hundred billion dollars the U.S. spent to rebuild Afghanistan was stolen.
Corruption creeps in, unnoticed, "like some odorless gas,"
Sarah Chayes writes in her new book, "Thieves of State:
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,"* and confounds policy
objectives without attracting much policy attention.
Chayes spent most of the past decade living in Afghanistan.
Her book, which is part memoir and part treatise, argues that the
United States has a tendency not just to ignore international corruption
but to compound it, and that in places like Afghanistan
this willful ignorance can be destabilizing and dangerous.
...
Chayes cites a survey conducted by U.S. military commanders in Kabul,
in which captured Taliban prisoners were asked why they joined the
insurgency. The leading reason, according to Chayes, "was not ethnic bias,
or disrespect of Islam, or concern that U.S. forces might stay
in their country."
It was "the perception that the Afghan government was irrevocably corrupt."
...
As a general rule, occupying powers tend to push countries into corruption,
not pull them out of it.
The report says that there is no strict dividing line between psychosis and normal experience: "Some people find it useful to think of themselves as having an illness. Others prefer to think of their problems as, for example, an aspect of their personality which sometimes gets them into trouble but which they would not want to be without."
I wholeheartedly agree.
Research-based tips on finding a delicate way to part ways.
After analyzing the final 45 seconds of the interactions, the
researchers coded and tallied up the most frequent "leave-taking"
behaviors. These included "reinforcement" (short, tacit agreements,
such as yeah and uh-huh), "buffing" (brief transition terms, such
as well and uh), and "appreciation" (an encouraging declaration
along the lines of I've really enjoyed talking with you).
The base rate fallacy refers to the neglect of prior probability of the evidence that supports the conditional probability of a hypothesis.
Naturally, this has policy implications: if you test more and more people,
a large percentage of people will be told they have cancer when they don't
-- leading to more invasive testing that has other real side-effects.
The trick is either to try to test a high-risk subpopulation
(where the prevalence rate is higher) or to improve the test by
reducing its false-positive rate.
22 out of 31 cancers researchers studied could be explained largely by random mutations
Plain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer
and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds
of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations
and not heredity or risky habits like smoking.
It has come to my attention that some of you are becoming unable to eat good food unless it is spiced to within an inch of its life.
If you are unable to enjoy simple, traditional fare that has been
properly prepared with good ingredients, the problem is not with the food;
it is with you.
Health-enhancing flavanols that end up on the shelf will likely appear in form other than chocolate
But there are lots of foods that contain potentially healthy flavanols,
along with other bioactive compounds in complex combinations.
So the question is: Would academic scientists in publicly funded
institutions be so interested in the cocoa bean if the chocolate
industry wasn't supporting so much of the research?