Shaken up

And I mean in a good way -- congratulations to Alaska governor Sarah Palin on being tapped as McCain's VP nominee. I didn't think John-John had it in him: he's hit not just a home run, but a home run out of the park.

We've been out of the political loop here at Kavanna for the last month or so, busy with many of life's pressing things. I've been meaning to blog for some time on the changing dynamics of American politics and what's gone wrong with the Republican party, and I will soon. (See here for my earlier thoughts.)

Suffice it for now to say that, with Palin on the ticket and the credibility she brings on the "shrink-bloated-corrupt-big-government" front, McCain has now massively confirmed his earlier, tentative push to break the Republicans out of their self-imposed ghetto. They spent ten years building a prison for themselves out of partisan hysteria and attempts to awe and buy off voters with ever more lavish activist big government. But they found instead that they had only alienated larger and larger swaths of the electorate. Except for 2002, it's placed a steepening cost on them in every election since 1998 and now threatens the party's and country's future.

McCain has his core domestic theme down: run against Congress, and don't be partisan about it. The era of Bush, Rove, and braindead loyalty is thankfully over.

Not bad for a guy with an enlarged prostate :)

POSTSCRIPT: Sissy Willis is also happy: "It's a girl!" No confirmation yet on the HRC suicide watch! ;-D

POST-POSTSCRIPT: And progress on closing the "supermodel gap"?

Shake it up

So here's an interesting twist on the old "challenge-and-response" theory of civilization. It seems most of the world's civilizations, at least in ancient times, were built near tectonic plate boundaries and fault lines. Why the connection? Such regions have more underground water supplies and richer soil (from volcanoes). But maybe a shake-up now and then isn't a bad thing either.

Meantime, the Shroud of Turin is being tested again for authenticity. It's doubtful anyone will ever prove that is was Jesus' burial shroud. But "authenticity" here just means, is it from the first century? Earlier radiocarbon tests in 1988 indicated that the Shroud came from the 13th century. But such test results can be distorted by contaminants, and there's a lot of scientific skepticism about the 1988 tests. So more tests are coming ....

"The death of 1989"

It's the not the return of the Cold War, not by a long shot. But the wave of democratization, market opening, and globalization that began at the end of 1970s is definitely over. It reached its peak in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, but continued until the end of the 1990s, with the fall of Milosevic in 2000. But the last eight years have seen a strong reversal of the trend, which goes to show: positive trends can draw on powerful forces, but positive outcomes are far from inevitable. They require sound policies, leadership, and persistence. They're not part of some automatic unfolding of history.*

There's no ideology or coherent political system that ties these resurgent anti-liberal countries together. They're simply autocracies that learned to adapt and avoid the fate of, say, the Soviet Union, Serbia, or Iraq. (What's happening now in Georgia is best thought of as a cousin of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s -- except the analogue of Serbia, Russia, is winning.) The most sophisticated of these autocracies have learned to smooth-talk their way with skillful twisting of Western concepts and language. Having nuclear weapons helps. But the main common factor among all of them is state monopoly control of increasingly valuable oil and natural gas resources. Already familiar from the corrupt petro-dictatorships of the Middle East, Venezuela, and west Africa, such countries feature the "strong state, weak society" model. The government frees itself from dependency on tax revenue by seizing control of valuable natural resources sold mainly to foreigners. Most other valuable economic activity is controlled by the state as well, not motivated by socialist ideologies, but by simple cronyism and gangsterism. The rest of society and economy go into sharp decline. Russia, in many respects, is the most advanced case of these trends.

We won't be hearing talk of "World War V," I hope. But the common denominator of energy monopoly in a world of sharply rising demand for energy will, I expect, stimulate energy-consuming countries to develop a common strategy to moderate demand and look for alternatives to fossil fuels exported from the petro-dictatorships. Such a strategy is certainly overdue. We also need to step back from our casually reckless adherence to the globalization paradigm and concentrate on repair and defense of existing democracies.

And one more point: the progress and retreat of political democratization, social and economic liberalization, and globalization go hand in hand, contrary to a certain piece of fashionable claptrap now making the rounds on the left.

POSTSCRIPT: Some fine reporting, as always, from Michael Totten. Also, thoughts from Paul Berman, who has rightly declared the "death of 1989."
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* The developments of the last decade have discredited not only the naive arguments of economic determinists (prosperity leads automatically to political liberalization), but the European post-historical fantasy of "soft power." The "end of history" has, well, ended. It didn't die all at once, but in stages: the rise of al Qa'eda and the 9/11 attacks, the return of Russia and China as great powers, the sharp rise in commodity prices, and so on.

Oh yes

Readers of my travelogue from last fall might recall my revulsion at crocs, especially on adults, and especially in the Holy City.

Well -- it turns out there's Facebook group with over a million members, I Don't Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass. And they're even sponsoring an International Put Away the Crocs Day on December 16, 2008.

Not that I need to put away any crocs for a day.

Basic research and why it's important

Recently, Physics Today, flagship publication of the American Physical Society (but not a refereed journal), published an interesting article on "soft," liquid or liquid-like states of matter (requires subscription). I was struck by how much progress has been made in the last 30 years on the subject and by how much that progress was due to the interaction of applied and basic, or pure, research. Such achievements show better than any abstract argument why science can't function without both.

Basic research is not necessarily theoretical -- it can include experiment -- but it is conducted with no immediate application in mind. It's obvious enough that pure research needs both experimental and applied research. (Ignore this, and you get string theory.) I don't think any successful pure research was ever not a result, direct or indirect, of some attempt to solve an applied problem.*

But applied research needs pure research as well. The reason is that applied research, carried far enough, encounters or poses problems that applied research alone cannot answer. Re-posed as pure research, these problems and their eventual solutions in turn often have unexpected and broad ramifications. There's Fourier analysis, for example; 200 years ago, it was mainly a mathematician's curiosity. But by the late 19th century, it was already very practical. Today, most of the technological gadgets we encounter day to day owe something to Fourier's discovery.

Weather and climate constitute a case where understanding beyond a certain point fails because of large, unanswered basic questions about the definition, nature, and prediction of "climate" over long times. The pressure on scientists to resolve questions that currently lack answers is what has produced the groundless para-science of "global warming." Without the real thing, empty mummery and BS fill the void. A "consensus" is manufactured. Pressure to conform to this consensus overrides scientific standards and critical thinking. Demands for policy-ready conclusions are a major culprit.

POSTSCRIPT: With hurricane season upon us, making climate predictions more useful is becoming topical. But typical weather predictions of a few days or the two-week type are all that's needed to get people out of the way of incoming storms.** There's no point in creating an industry of bogus "long-term forecasting." At the present stage of the science, such an industry can be no better than reading tea leaves, beyond obvious seasonal and other astronomical patterns.

The value of basic research arises from the apparent paradox that, to be useful in the long run, it has to be "useless" in the short.
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* That's true even of subatomic physics, which has its origins in 19th century theories of electromagnetism and early 20th century attempts to combine electromagnetism and quantum mechanics.

** Even better is finding ways of discouraging people from living in likely storm paths in the first place -- or at least, not encouraging them.

Wealthier countries have early warning systems in case of severe weather. A helpful step would be to make these early warnings more available in poorer countries. But such steps have nothing to do with improving weather forecasting or climate science. They're about making already-known information better disseminated and, in that sense, "more useful."

Back in Madrid

But it's different this time. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called a conference on interfaith dialog in Madrid, and the American Jewish Committee, after some initial hesitation, sent a rabbi as a representative.

There are times when I wonder whether all such things aren't really all about Iran. Stay tuned.

Thank god for evolution

As a proponent of the "new" atheism, Richard Dawkins is, like Christopher Hitchens and others, sometimes annoying. But when it comes to explaining the nuts and bolts of evolution, few do it better.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection. To mark those dates, the BBC has started an evolution series on Channel 4 with Dawkins, also available from Dawkins' Web site.

For another look at the exciting and controversial world of biblical archeology, television viewers will be able to take in the two-hour Nova special on PBS this coming November (trailer here). From the previews, it seems the content should be taken with a grain of salt: it's unlikely the Bible was written by hundreds of authors, and archeological remains and linguistics tell us that the ancient Israelites were definitely not Canaanites. But this is journalism, after all -- it's not supposed to be accurate, just ... umm ... "provocative" :)

(Hat tip to Adam.)