Globally Rational

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People often talk about how they prefer “natural” cures or “natural” foods or other things of a “natural” nature. I’m not one of those people.  I don’t deny the value of preserving the environment… but as far as the difference between eating “organic beef” (I won’t even bring up the fact that all beef is technically “organic”) and regular beef, I don’t see the benefit.  Personally, I’d rather eat a cow that received antibiotics to kill all of the bacteria.

Sure, I understand that you don’t want to be pumped full of drugs every time you eat a hamburger.  But luckily, I also understand that antibiotics are cleared out of the cow’s system before it’s slaughtered… unless you have a mutant cow with no kidneys, in which case the antibiotics would kill the cow before it’s slaughtered.  In the end, you’re effectively choosing between a piece of meat that may be infected and another piece of meat that’s exactly the same except for the fact that it’s not infected.

I realize that people are afraid of ionizing radiation in their food… but what about the fact that all of the radiation decays from the food well before it hits the shelves?  You may not like the idea of genetic engineering… but how does it actually affect anything except for the price of the food?  Yeah, growth hormones sound “unnatural”… but the hormone is denatured when you cook the meat, so why would I care?

If a beaver builds a dam, it’s natural… but if a human even builds a swimming pool, it’s not.  If a bee extracts honey from flowers, it’s natural… but if a human extracts sugar from apples, it’s not.  If a bird builds a nest, it’s natural… but if a human builds a house, it’s not.

But if the heat starts a forest fire, it’s somehow a problem; if we don’t put it out, then Smokey Bear will come and yell at us.  Who says that we have a right to stop the natural life cycles of the forests?  Is it the same person who says that only beavers are allowed to build dams and only birds and bees are allowed to build domiciles?  Where do we draw the line?  Is it “natural” to make spears and hunt animals?  And where do monkeys fall in all of this mess?  Recently, we’ve found chimps using tools… should we be telling them to go back to the natural way of doing things?

Try to get everybody to only eat organic food.  See how long it takes before we experience a Malthusian catastrophe.

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I saw an article today suggesting that, for the first time, the average TV viewer is now over 50 years old. I think it’s interesting to note that top TV characters, on the other hand, seem to be getting younger as time progresses. If you look at the progression from “I Love Lucy” to “The Brady Bunch” to “Cheers” to “Friends”, it seems obvious that the most popular comedy-type shows feature younger and younger characters.

Here are some of the top comedy shows of the 20th century, along with the ages of the main characters during the show’s first season. I chose all of the comedy shows that have at some point been the #1 show in America by ratings, not including shows about families or kids (if I didn’t have enough examples for any particular decade, I threw in some shows that may never have been #1 but are still really good):

1950’s: “I Love Lucy” (main actors were in their 40’s)
1960’s: “The Andy Griffith Show” (Andy was 35-45), “Gunsmoke” (main character was 35-40), “Bewitched” (the husband was 35-40)
1970’s: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (Mary was mid-30’s), “Laverne and Shirley” (They were both mid-30’s), “Three’s Company” (mid-30’s)
1980’s: “Cheers” (Sam was mid-30’s), “Who’s the Boss” (Tony was mid-30’s)
1990’s: “Seinfeld” (Jerry was mid-30’s), “Friends” (they were all mid/late-20’s)
2000’s: “Scrubs” (JD was mid-20’s), “Chuck” (mid-20’s)… sorry, these are the best two I could come up with for the 2000’s because the rest of the good shows all feature a wide range of ages (marketing people are starting to figure out how to target a broad demographic).

You’ll notice a similar trend if you look at medical shows (Marcus Welby M.D. was over 60, Quincy M.E. was 50something, while House M.D. is 40something and his assistants are mid-20’s), legal shows (i.e. “Matlock” vs. the cast of “Boston Legal”), or any other specific genre. And look at the people who have sold the most music albums by decade:

1950’s: Harry Belafonte, Henry Mancini, some movie soundtracks
1960’s: Mostly soundtracks, the Monkees, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly
1970’s: Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Elton John, Led Zeppelin, others of similar age
1980’s: AC/DC, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, others of similar age
1990’s: Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Tupac, others of similar age
2000’s: Linkin Park, Usher, Eminiem, others of similar age

They are all around 25-30 years old at their peaks. So it seems like we like our TV characters to get younger, but our taste for musicians’ ages aren’t really changing. That means that it’s not just the aging population that is being reminiscent of younger days; the real cause is something else…

That “something else”, in my opinion, is the evolution of the field of marketing. Here are the reasons why I think that the marketing applies to TV characters more than to musicians:

–TV networks have a limited number of programs that they can show in any 24-hour period (music labels, meanwhile, can produce as many albums as they want). So, the TV studios have to make sure to appeal to as many people as possible with each show, while record labels can make different albums for each demographic.
–Garage bands can still “come from nothing” by just making good music with no regard to marketing. TV shows, on the other hand, are produced in a boardroom.
–Each TV show has to appeal to a wide demographic in order to look juicier to advertisers.
–People tend to just turn on the TV and watch whatever is most appealing. When they buy music, it’s much more premeditated.

People are getting better at selling things to us. Honestly, I like the product… I love watching many of today’s TV shows. Still, I won’t deny that most of those shows have lost the soul that broadcast television once had. If Andy Griffith (or even Jerry Seinfeld) tried to turn his comedy into a TV show today, the networks would laugh at him.

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This is another in my set of “Sunday Rewinds”, where I re-post one of my favorite articles that I wrote back when nobody was reading. FYI, the status of North Korea has changed a little bit since I first wrote the article.

Wikipedia defines “terrorism” as “violence against civilians to achieve political or ideological objectives by creating fear.” Here are some examples of accepted terrorist organizations:

• —Al-Qaeda, for obvious reasons.
• —The Irish Republican Army (IRA), which conducts violent attacks in an attempt to promote the independence of Northern Ireland from the UK.
• —Hamas, a political party that is said to sponsor violence against Israel.
• —Khmer Rouge, a violent Communist group that controlled Cambodia for part of the 1970s.
• —The Ku Klux Klan, which is responsible for ethnic/racial violence in the US.

Anyway, you get the point. But what about state-sponsored terrorism? We spent a lot of time, resources, and money fighting many of the small groups: for instance, we fought al-Qaeda and the Khmer Rouge directly (with heavy casualties) and we fought Hamas by supplying money and weapons to their targets. Meanwhile, we ignore state-sponsored issues:

• —China’s atrocities against Tibetans speak for themselves, but China is still hosting the Olympics and is still one of our biggest trading partners. They also don’t let the local media tell their residents about the violence, while the Great Firewall of China prevents any Chinese residents from accessing international news.
• —North Korea is as dangerous as ever and, unlike al-Qaeda and Iraq, they have weapons of mass destruction. We seem to just ignore them.
• —Israel still continues to kill far more Palestinian civilians than vice versa. Why do we continue to pay for them to do it?
• —We ignore state-sponsored terrorism in countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia/Eritrea, but we are all over it every time it touches Yugoslavia. My guess is that it’s because it’s much easier for white America to be sympathetic with white Yugoslavia. It’s also interesting that the news never mentions that the terrorism in Yugoslavia was primarily non-Muslims killing Muslims, but they always mention religion when Muslims kill non-Muslims. The same thing happens in Israel… it’s never “Jews killing Muslims”, but you hear a lot about “Muslims killing Jews/Israelis”, even though the former is much more common than the latter.
• —And, of course, there are the allegations of US sponsorship of terrorism, which seem to be irrefutable. Take a look at the link.

It’s hard to make a conclusion with such a small data set… but it’s good food for thought. This tells you a lot about how the US, as a nation, feels about various groups. We tend to ignore all evidence that is contrary to whatever issue it is that we want to support. We want to support China, so the Tibetans are irrelevant and the Olympics will continue. We want to support Yugoslavia, so we make Rwanda less important (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was very efficient and took care of the issues… the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, on the other hand, has accomplished almost nothing). I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t help Israel or Yugoslavia… but I think we should find a way to help Tibet and Rwanda at the same time instead of discriminating heavily in favor of one or the other.

Leave a comment and tell me what you think about this one. There are many possible explanations and conclusions, and I think we’d all like to see different opinions.

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We all hate child molesters.  Even child molesters hate child molesters.  We can all agree that they deserve whatever sort of punishment we can give them… but where do we draw the line?

Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal recently signed a bill allowing chemical castration for convicted sex offenders.  While the law borders the realm of “cruel and unusual punishment”, I can see plenty of positives too…

PROS: Child molesters are sick.  They tend to be repeat offenders, and the reason is because of their natural tendencies.  As much as I’d hate to suppress somebody’s natural tendencies, I think it’s necessary in cases like this one… chemical castration means that these people will never commit these sorts of acts again.  And it means that people are less likely to do it in the first place.

CONS: Where do we draw the line?  Today it’s child molesters and castration… what will it be tomorrow?  There is a reason why the Constitution outlaws “cruel and unusual punishment”… the point is so that we can avoid a scenario where innocent people are castrated.

What do you think?

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We hear politicians talk a lot about “a lady I met who couldn’t afford to pay for xxx” or “a man in Ohio who lost his job”.  I’ll accept that unemployment rates are a little bit higher than last year, but we can find stories like that at any time, even if the economy is booming.  The question I’d like to ask is this: as a society, are we really worse off than we were in 2000?

The Dow Jones is higher today than it was then, even if you adjust for inflation.  The dollar may be a bit weaker, but that’s more of an international issue than a domestic one; also, the “housing crisis” and the “recession” are supposed to affect other countries just as much as they affect the US.  Gas prices are high, but that’s just supply and demand.  As a nation, is the average person doing better or worse?

Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues (in a Wall Street Journal article) that we’re better than ever:

• Housing prices may have dropped, but that’s only because they surged a few years ago.  People always talked about the “housing bubble”, but people ignored it until the bubble decided to burst.  Easterbrook points out that the average house value today is still about 30-40% higher than it was in 2000 (before the price boom).
• The unemployment rate (~5.5%) is pretty low by historical standards.
• Income is still rising faster than inflation.
• The definition of a recession is “two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth”.  We still haven’t even had one such quarter… the economy may not be growing as fast as before, but it’s still growing.

I think a big part of our problem is that people think the economy is worse than it is.  In a recent survey, 79% of Americans were worried that we may go into a depression (not a recession)… I don’t think they realize exactly how extreme a depression is.  The media hype is fueling our tendency to act like we’re in a recession, which fuels the possibility of a real recession.

The reason why we’re worried is because we’ve become accustomed to the “Great Moderation” of the last couple of decades; economists agree that normal economic volatility has decreased substantially in recent years.  Because of this, every slight downturn seems much worse than it actually is.

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We hear a lot of propaganda aimed at convincing the American people that Arabs are evil, the war is justified, and America is the best thing that ever happened to the world. Some people believe it all, and some people (i.e. the people who are probably reading this) believe none of it… but did you ever think that just some of it might be true?

All other things aside, the slogans “Land of the Free” and “Land of Opportunity” really do describe two of America’s very unique traits. We often take these facts for granted, but the amount of freedom and opportunity available to the American population is unmatched in the rest of the world. Here, we can speak out for what we believe in (although recently, we’re been losing that privilege). Here, you can be whatever you want to be if you set your mind to it. After you hear those things a million times, you tend to take them for granted… but this is the only country where it’s true.

In most countries (even in Europe), the average person does not believe they can be anything they want to be. If you’re born under a tin roof in Indonesia, you’ll probably die under a tin roof in Indonesia. If you speak out against the King in the Middle East, you’ll be detained. If you openly practice Buddhism in Tibet, you’ll be suppressed by the Chinese. If you try to leave your poor village in Pakistan to go to college, you’ll starve before anybody gives you a scholarship/loan. And that’s why the US became the world’s foremost economic and scientific power (I mentioned yesterday how we became the world’s foremost military power).

Recently, more countries have started granting more liberties and have attempted to produce more opportunities. In the process, Germany and Japan have risen as intellectual powers, while London’s financial sector is bringing economic prowess to the UK. Although the US is still leading the world, the rest of these countries are taking our strengths - our belief in freedom and our endearment of the old rags-to-riches story - and implementing them into their own policy. They’ll slowly start to chip away at our status as the world’s best country for scientific discovery and economic advancement… but it will make the world a better place.

Interesting note: the indices that measure democracy and freedom of the press both report that the US is no longer a leader in these two issues (we’ve been dropping quickly in the last few years). If we don’t fix this, we’ll destroy everything we stand for and, eventually, we’ll also lose our place as a leader in liberty and opportunity. The way to fix a declining democracy with fading freedoms is to be aware of the problem… if we know what’s going on and we follow these indices, we can prevent ourselves from slipping.

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Paul Peterson wrote a great article on his blog a couple of days ago.  I won’t do him an injustice by just repeating the whole post here, so I’ll just link to it (click here) and give you an excerpt:

I mention all of this only because of the phrase “anti-christian propaganda”. Facts are not propaganda. Facts sometimes lead a person to believe things that are anathema to a given creed or belief. That is the opposite of propaganda. Christian institutions have historically doled out there fair share of propaganda in the name of the faith. Should I conclude from this that they can dish it out but they can’t take it?

I think I’d like to expand “Christian” to “Christian/Muslim/Jewish/others.”  I don’t have a problem with monotheistic religion (I call myself “Muslim”), but I’ve noticed many of my people use religion as an excuse to dismiss facts as “propaganda” seconds before they start spewing a counterargument filled with propaganda.  Read Paul’s article; I would have written about it myself if I’d thought of it first.

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As I’ve mentioned before, I really don’t mind sacrificing my privacy if it means that the government can keep better tabs on what everybody is doing (and use that information to catch criminals and terrorists).  It seems to me that people can get away with a lot of questionable acts with the excuse that it’s a part of their private life.

Recently, a public court ruled that the White House doesn’t have to reveal internal correspondence.  It seems that a significant chunk of emails, which may have contained information about the Iraq War, were permanently deleted before they were released to the public (in defiance of previously accepted regulations).  Apparently, the President can cite his own privacy as a good reason to not justify his own actions.

I can’t put it any better than the article itself… click here to check it out.

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There’s a fact that I’ve always taken for granted; recently, I learned that it’s not common knowledge. It was always so obvious to me that I started to wonder why most people don’t know this.

Did you know that the Middle East is generally impressed with Western culture? People often think that the anti-American sentiment we always hear about implies an imminent culture clash in rapidly developing emirates like Dubai. In fact, a lot of the people in the developed part of the Middle East love the concept of our clothes, movies, and even cars (eek!). I can’t think of any logical reason why people in an oil-rich Sultanate would choose to drive a Ford/Shelby Mustang GT instead of the far-superior and equally-priced Nissan Skyline GT-R (or BMW M3 or Audi RS4) but for some reason, “American” is synonymous with “classy” there. Why don’t most Americans know this?

Don’t get confused… they hate our foreign policy and our Americocentrism. But Kuwait’s beachfront also has a popular restaurant called Big Al’s Steakhouse, right between the Applebee’s and the Ruby Tuesday (keep in mind that beachfront property is not cheap… there are much better Arab restaurants down the street, but they’re not nearly as popular). If you have an American passport or an American degree, you are a first-class citizen; my Pakistani passport, on the other hand, isn’t even good enough to get me a full-access visa despite the fact that I have connections there. How can they hate American foreign policy but like our culture?

Well, the answer is simple: most of the world is, unlike us, capable of distinguishing a country’s political policies from their individual people. In my birth country of Pakistan, for instance, most of the people resent the past British rule and India’s firmness with regard to Kashmir. Meanwhile, they have no problem moving to England or making friends with Indians. The reason is because we understand that our friends in India and England are not the ones who make those policies… and that those policies don’t directly affect us anyway.

So why is there growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the US? I have no qualms about hating Al-Qaeda or even Ahmadinejad. But why does the average American maintain a personal feud with the average Palestinian who wants nothing more than the right to go back home? Most Muslims are peaceful and don’t share the radical right-wing views. Most Arabs understand the difference between Bush’s failed policies and the average American’s blissful ignorance… why can’t most Americans understand the difference between Osama bin Laden’s belligerence and the average Arab’s benevolent neutrality?

Enter propaganda. If you can be convinced that all Arabs hate all Americans, it’s much easier to convince you to endorse a campaign against them.

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Today’s LA Times has already started to speculate as to Tim Russert’s replacement after his tragic death yesterday. Their selections are all the obvious ones… it’s mostly just NBC’s top political men, like Chris Matthews and David Gregory.

With all due respect to Matthews and Gregory, I don’t think that either of them will ever be able to fill Russert’s shoes. Although they are great correspondents and each maintains his own high-quality show, neither can match Russert’s ability to think on his feet and win a debate with a high-class politician. I have only seen one other person who can talk to a top Washington official and pose follow-up questions with confidence and purpose.

The problem? Well, he’s a comedian.

The only person who can even dream of rivaling Russert’s quick-thinking interview skills is Jon Stewart. He is the closest thing that I’ve ever seen, but he’ll never be taken seriously because… well, he doesn’t really take himself seriously. Instead of being thought of as a potential replacement for Tim Russert, NBC might be signing him as a replacement for Conan O’Brien. Just watch Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire during the 2004 election (especially the 3-minute mark of the following video)… I think he singlehandedly brought the demise of that show:

Now try to tell me that he’s not amazing.

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