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Revenge, violence, fear and risk

From the New Yorker

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”

I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.

See the video below of Stephen Pinker’s TED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.

I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.

Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.

Hey this can’t be mine….mine’s bigger.

Via BoingBoing this headline on Reuters:

Penis theft panic hits city..

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

These remarkable con artists, the penis thieves, though I would prefer the more substantial sounding cock snatchers or dick filchers, seem to be able to make the victim believe that something that is still there no longer is…kind of a reverse of the fairy tale…the emperors new member.

This curious news is one manifestation of what has been called penis panics where numbers of men will believe that their genitals have disappeared or are shrinking….in Asia this is know as koro. I like that word, reminiscent of sashimi, more than the medicalized Genital Retraction Syndrome.

At Kuro6hin, an article on Koro has the following:

Whilst penis theft would seem a fairly simple charge to refute, victims in an 1990 Nigerian outbreak (reported on by psychiatrist Sunny Ilechukwu) often believed that their penises were returned at the point of public accusation. Some even went as far as undress to prove their accusation to onlookers, subsequently claiming that their ‘returned’ penis had been replaced but was shrunk, leading them to think it must be a ghost penis or perhaps the wrong one.

which leads us to..

Transplanted penis removed after psychological issues

Doctors have previously succeeded in reuniting men with their sexual organs after traumatic accidents or attacks, but the Guangzhou operation is the first in which a donor penis has successfully been attached to another man, The Guardian reported.

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis after just two weeks.

“Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said.

An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Maybe it was a ghost?

Food crisis

From the NYT

- Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger:

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

and

The Poor Eat Mud

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”

At Der Spiegel

- The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis, we have another part of the story.

Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.

The Chicago Board of Trade is the nerve center for global futures contracts.
But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.

Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.

Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.

“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”

He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”

Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.

Capitalism is literally consuming itself.

The Onion, plastic surgery, the law and seeking abortion

Every couple of weeks or so, the Onion strikes gold:

Oprah Launches Own Reality

(CHICAGO)—Calling it the next logical step in her celebrated career, and a groundbreaking achievement in applied quantum field theory, media giant Oprah Winfrey unveiled her latest project Monday: a completely separate realm of existence, known as OpraH, which she will control on the subatomic level.

“Now, Oprah’s always on!” Winfrey said through an interspatial image of herself broadcast between her world and ours. “I’ve created a place where anyone can come to share and laugh and feel totally free from the conventional laws of the physical universe.”

“I invite you all to be guests in my new reality,” she added.

This latest addition to Winfrey’s empire—which already includes her flagship talk show, a reality TV program, an influential book club, O magazine, the thoughts and emotions of millions of viewers, and two television networks—is Oprah’s first foray into large-scale nucleosynthesis. Developed over the past three years by the theoretical physics wing of her company, Harpo Productions, >OpraH was reportedly created by tearing a small hole in the fabric of known reality. The talk-show host then went about restructuring an infinite number of never-before-seen particles to produce a separate dimension, which is currently oscillating around Chicago.

According to her aides, Winfrey was personally involved in the most minute details of planning, from the type of coffee served in the green room of her new studio facility to the genetic makeup of every organism she deemed worthy of receiving life.

Plastic surgery book

Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a renowned plastic surgeon, wrote My Beautiful Mommy to help patients explain their transformation to their children. The story guides children through Mommy’s surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way.

This has been news here and there in the blogosphere: yes, I suppose why not have a book explaining what could be a confusing time but its been pointed out that there is no questioning of the procedure itself. Nothing wrong with a nip and tuck for mommy but there just might be cause for concern if its passed off as either necessary or as anything but cosmetic. “And now you have even a better mommy” sort of talk.

Oregon: our laws are copyrighted and you can’t publish them

This is rather insane. As I understand it, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Kind of get you coming and going then. You’d think if you want people to abide by laws which supposedly are devised to make society run more smoothly and equitably that you would let people know what those laws actually are.

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.”

Under a Reagan-era policy revived by President Bush in 2001, USAID denies funding to non-governmental organizations that perform abortions, or that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations.”

A librarian at the University of California at San Francisco noticed the new censorship on Monday, while carrying out a routine research request on behalf of academics and researchers at the university. The search term had functioned properly as of January.

Puzzled, she contacted the manager of the database, Johns Hopkins’ Debbie Dickson, who replied in an April 1st e-mail that the university had recently begun blocking the search term because the database received federal funding.

Won’t let you know the laws, and won’t give you information; only in China you say?

In the news today…digital hots and brain damaged arts.

1. From The Daily Galaxy

Binary “Hot or Not”: Scientists have Developed a Computer that can Appreciate Female Beauty

Tel Aviv computer scientists have developed a computer that can appreciate female beauty. They don’t seem to be aware of the danger of this work, since giving an internet-enabled computer the ability to enjoy the female form will cripple it far worse than any virus.

This a very funny article but I feel this is a rather scary development: the forces of oppression and conformity have just taken the game to a whole new level.

2. In the New York Times

A Disease that Allowed Torrents of Creativity

Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity.

“We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.”

Thus some patients with FTD develop artistic abilities when frontal brain areas decline and posterior regions take over, Dr. Miller said.

I’ve never believed the old saw about everyone being visually creative; my own dismal attempts at pottery and painting are my greatest evidence. Despite great and aesthetic intentions, I was perhaps the worst and most unintuitive potter in history. And it was not drummed out of me by growing older either. I’ve helped in preschool classes with kids during an art session and even then the artistic ability is clearly entirely absent in some. Its like any other ability; some have it and some don’t. So, this idea that a brain malfunction could bring it on kind of threatened my theory, and then, aha, vindication as I read on.

In the most common variant, patients undergo gradual personality changes. They grow apathetic, become slovenly and typically gain 20 pounds. They behave like 3-year-olds in public, asking embarrassing questions in a loud voice. All along, they deny anything is wrong.

Yeah, that’s a little more common.

Poverty and Fear: Two readings, no comments

1. From Boston.com, The Sting of Poverty: What bees and dented cars can teach about what it means to be poor - and the flaws of economics.

In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale. Social conservatives have tended to argue that poor people lack the smarts or willpower to make the right choices. Social liberals have countered by blaming racial prejudice and the crippling conditions of the ghetto for denying the poor any choice in their fate. Neoconservatives have argued that antipoverty programs themselves are to blame for essentially bribing people to stay poor.

Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

2. From Skeptic.com, Journalist-Bites-Reality! How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (by Steve Salerno).

a. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” That’s a diplomatic way of phrasing the uncomfortable but factually supported truth: that if your child is not molested in your own home — by you, your significant other, or someone else you invited in — chances are your child will never be molested anywhere. Media coverage has precisely inverted both the reality and the risk of child sexual assault. Along the way, it has also inverted the gender of the most tragic victims: Despite the unending parade of young female faces on TV, boys are more likely than girls to be killed in the course of such abuse.

b. Far worse than hyping a story that represents just .5 percent reality, is covering “news” that’s zero percent reality: There literally is no story. Even so, if the non-story satisfies other requirements, it will be reported anyway. This truism was not lost on the late David Brinkley, who, towards the end of his life, observed, “The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

On June 9, 2005, as part of its ongoing series of “Security Updates,” CNN airs a special report titled “Keeping Milk Safe.” Over shots of adorable first-graders sipping from their pint cartons, CNN tells viewers that the farm-to-shelf supply chain is vulnerable at every point, beginning with the cow; with great drama, the report emphasizes the terrifying consequences such tampering could have. Nowhere does CNN mention that in the history of the milk industry, no incident of supply-chain tampering has ever been confirmed, due to terrorism or anything else.

c. However history may remember Mad Cow as an actual pathology, this much is sure: The media inflamed scare has been fatal to jobs — most directly in the meat packing industry, but in related enterprises as well. It has soured consumers on beef. It has caused volatile swings in livestock prices. It has mandated new protocols that add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the average cattle rancher’s cost of doing business. It has caused us to cut ourselves off from key beef suppliers, fomenting minor crises in diplomacy and commerce. A 2005 survey reckoned the total cost of Mad Cow to U.S. agricultural interests at between $3.2 billion and $4.7 billion. This, for something that has killed far fewer Americans in 10 years than the 200 who die each month from choking on food or food substances.

How you too can repel mosquitoes…

This curious paragraph from an Alternet posting titled: Penis Cancer: My Private Hell.

Radiotherapy, while painless in itself, targets high-energy X-rays, and other rays, at the source of cancer. The side-effects can be horrific. Edwards’s penis all but disintegrated before the skin could renew itself. “It was the most painful experience of my life,” he says. But not all the effects were unpleasant. “About six months later, some American collectors of mine invited me to recuperate by their pool. Every time a mosquito landed on me, the radiation still inside me would kill it. It became my party trick.”

By the way, the collectors referred to are clients, he is an artist, and in the end, things turned out quite well, he’s doing well -in all ways.

Dying on time..

Good post over at Science Based Medicine, where Mark Krislip writes through his experience as a physician about people who seem to be able to choose when they die. Not as in suicide but rather those who seem to die not so much from a particular illness or assault but from the recent death of a loved one, or having finally made it to a desired event.

Sometimes, and not very often, people die of nothing in particular. They just die. You get an autopsy, and there does not appear to be any single event that caused the death, nor does the sum of the underlying diseases seem to have lead to death. Usually it is the advanced elderly who just die. There reaches a point where the organism shuts down. I once had a patient die as I walked into the room on rounds. He looked at me and then died. He had many medical problems, but none that should have killed him, and his blood work on the day of death was normal and his autopsy had no clue as to why he died. Creepy. I like to have a definitive cause of death, but I do not always get one.

It is certainly something that many people cannot do or more of the pain wracked terminally ill would take this easy way out. But in general, I think if you had the talent it would probably get stronger with age, or even more likely that the gift would emerge as the body weakened with age and its counterbalance, its imperative to live diminished.

Its a good thing we don’t have the ability because if you could summon it up in a moment of despair, there would be quite the spike in teenage death.

Worth repeating

Couldn’t resist repeating this one just posted on GrowABrain this morning…