Uzbeckibeckibeckistanstan is important.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan...*

Despite what Herman Cain may believe, these places are important.  I don't blame him for not wanting to know anything about them; indeed, in the West it's hard to find decent maps of Central Eurasia.  The borders and the topography are inscrutable: rivers and mountains are foreign sounding and difficult to place.  The Oxus, the Altai, Samarkand, Karakorum, Baikal: we have no references to these, and we can't find them on a map.  This place is on the periphery of Western culture.  Central Eurasia is the homeland of barbarians and nomads, forgotten places and forgotten peoples.  It is the Other.  The important cultural events happen elsewhere. 

Or do they?  A great grassland sea extends from Budapest to Vladivostok.  Its green and amber waves wash upon five significant civilizations: Europe, China, India, Persia, Arabia.  Over these steppes and prairies wash peoples, and with those peoples ideas, memories, and goods.  Here on the edges of the legible maps of civilization you'll find Islam, Buddhism, Nestorianism, Manicheanism, Taoism, Judaism, and even the paganism of the great open sky all rubbing elbows in ways that their prophets and proselytizers never imagined.

These are the lands of the Silk Road, and of Marco Polo.  The lands of Atilla, Tamujin, and Timur the Lame.  These lands created the stirrup, the composite bow, and the curved sword.  The brought silk, paper, and gunpowder west, and gold and silver East.  The journeys of these peoples are at least as important as the travels of the Spanish and Portugese by sea in later centuries.  But these peoples are all but forgotten.

Central Asia, the "Empire of the Steppes" as Rene Grousset puts it, has always been a land on the periphery.  This is the land of the Scythians of the Greco-Roman period.  Out of the sea of grass came Atilla and his Huns, who pushed the Goths westward and southward to trigger the final fall of Rome.  This land gave us three beacheads upon the shores of Europe: the Finns, a people apart from the rest of Scandinavia;  the Hungarians, who started out as the Magyars, but couldn't shake the reputation of the earlier Huns; and the Turks, who in their turn overthrew Byzantium, nearly came to occupy Eastern Europe, played a pvitol role in European history for 900 years, and who are still important to U.S. relations to NATO and to the Middle East.

We in the West almost remeber Genghis Khan.  He and his troops we vaguely think of as murderous barbarians and thugs.  It's true that our English word 'horde' comes from the Mongolian 'ordu'.  What we don't remember is that the Khanite was the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world.  We also don't remember that the Khanite practiced religious tolerance and freedom of conscience almost unheard of in the 12th century.  We forget that Genghis Khan is remembered in much of Asia as a unifier and builder of nations.  We also forget that it was the recall of Batu in order to establish an orderly succession that freed  Hungary and Eastern Europe from Mongol rule.

It is these people against whom the Great Wall was built.  The Khitai lent their name to northern China, remembered as Polo's 'Cathay'.  It was the Manchu who made Beijing the capital of modern China and re-instituted the civil service exams.  Kublai Khan founded the Mongol dynasty of China, the forerunners to the Ming.  Before the Hollywood elite knew the Tibetans as an occupied people, they were conquerors of their plateau.  It was memory of the pax Mongolia that led to the Mughal empire of northern India.  It was the hurricane that repelled the forces of Kublai from Nippon that first bore the name kamikaze.

Because this sea of grass and sand is the buffer zone between cultures, it will play a pivotal role in the 21st century.  We in the U.S. are in the habit of seeing Afghanistan as some sort of appendage onto the Middle East, peripheral to the culture and conflicts there.  Instead, we might see it as a nearer wing of the vaster stage of Central Eurasia, a place where West meets East.

In recent years, Gitmo has been home to a population of Uighurs, people that briefly became the bane of Western newsreaders who called them instead "Chinese Muslims" because that was easier to pronounce*.  Chinese Muslims?  Chinese, perhaps, because over the years they've become Sinocized, and because a majority of them live inside the lines on the map that China has claimed.  And muslim too, because in this buffer zone of Asia, many unexpected things are true.  But do the newsreaders remember that these are the people who gave their alphabet to the Mongols, the people who served as councilors and advisers in the 'civilized' art of government to Genghis Khan, his sons, and grandsons?  That they are muslim because under the Grand Khanite, there was freedom of conscience and freedom of religion?  "The religions are like the fingers of the hand," Tamujin once said.  Not bad for a barbarian.

In the 21st century, as in the last part of the 20th and before, Asia will be defined by four great powers: Russia, the Middle East, China, and India.  The place where all of these powers touch is an ocean of grass, with amber waves of grain.  Central Eurasia is important, and we might as well learn something about it.

* Nursultan Nazarbayev, Islam Karimov, Roza Otunbayeva, Emomalii Rahmon, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow respectively serve as presidents.
** It's "Wee-goorr", by the way.

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Why Debates Matter

Caller of the day: [paraphrased] "I don't understand why everyone is picking on Perry for his debate performances. I know lots of people who are fine in their day-to-day work who freeze when they're taking exams or certification tests. Having problems when he's center stage doesn't mean he can't do the work of governing."

Umm... I suppose, for thirteen days in 1963, if John F. Kennedy had choked under pressure, everything would have worked out fine?
...

There are those saying that the GOP is having to many debates.  That debates among presidential candidates don't matter or shouldn't matter.

I disagee.  While I have a certain distrust and dislike of organized government (much as I have a dislike and distrust of organized religion), if I'm going to be stuck with a federal government, then there are certain qualities I like in a president.  Debates highlight some of them.

If there must be a commander in chief, let's have one that can think on his feet.  "Nonsense!" some would say.  "Presidents have advisers who provide information and suggest possible courses of action.  All the president has to do is read speeches and make decisions."  There's more to it, I think.  Executives have to learn information, filter it, and make decisions.  While taking information in quickly, they have to be able to filter it.  Rats have to be smelled, biases detected, fallicies unmasked, groupthink disassembled, context gleaned and examined.  This process is best done against a background of a diverse education.  A chief executive who knows where Cyprus is, who knows what the issue is with South Osseta, and who knows who the president of 'uzbeckiceckiceckistanstan' is is better prepared to catch errors, find biases, and detect smoke being blown in his direction than someone who is limping along, leaning on their advisors.

A good debate will highlight that.  It will demonstrate who can think on their feet and who is relying on canned responses.  A debate will show who actually has numbers and facts ready to hand, and who can't go off script.  It will illustrate who has actually opinions on things and who is following a party platform.

Debates matter.  They separate the minds at work from the cardboard cutouts.  And in the case of Michelle Bachman, debates highlight who is bats*** crazy.

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The Kids are Newbs

Let me start off by saying, I like a lot of John Cheese's stuff, and his latest piece for Cracked.com is no exception: "5 Ways We Ruined the Occupy Wall Street Generation."

But I'm not convinced of some of his conclusions.

We've slowly killed off most of the activities where kids get together with other kids and have fun (and in the process, learn how to interact).

 There is a pattern since the mid-Nineties undervaluing online interaction.  Ultimately, it seems to stem from a late twentieth century stereotype of the computer nerd, socially crippled, who interacts solely with dumb machines.  Like all stereotypes, the picture is incomplete.*

The point being, interacting with other people is interacting with people, even if a machine or a network serves as a medium.  When people interact, there are rules governing that interaction; the rules appear emergently, and are one of the foundations of culture.  Follow the rules, and one is rewarded with social success.  Violate the rules and reward is withheld.

Growing up is a process of acculturating the young.  Children learn the rules of their culture, usually in a controlled environment that cushions somewhat their failures and attempts to make clear the lessons to be learned.  Interacting with other children is a step in that process; children learn how to deal with one another, and carry those skills on to their adult lives.

That process still occurs in electronically-mediated environments, like Facebook, Twitter, online Foums, chat channels, Youtube comments sections, or X-Box live.  Children (and adults!) are logging on and interacting with each other.  In the process, they are learning the cultural rules.  Indeed, many such venues have adults who, by virtue of social status if not administrative powers, find themselves able to reinforce successful social interactions and negatively reinforce unsuccessful ones.  Online culture is still culture.

Indeed, there are dark corners of the internet where adult supervision is less-enforced, like /b/.  In places such as these, savvy children, adolescents and young adults get to create their own rules.  Remarkably, a social order of sorts does come into being.  It may not parallel mainstream culture, but a social order does exist.  In the process, children and adolescents do learn social skills and social savvy: much of my social interactions as an adolescent occurred in the local BBS culture.  In a sense, many of my social skills were learned in that environment.

Cheese is correct: kids need minimally supervised fora in which to interact, learn social skills, and have fun.  But the digital computing revolution hasn't necessarily killed that off.  Instead, a local process has simply become more globally distributed.

This last is important.  Networked communications and global trade have made the world smaller.  An American in the 21st century will need to be prepared to deal with people from outside their own local communities: people who may not speak (or type) English well, who have different cultural assumptions, who have a different body of intellectual and artistic references.  Interacting online gives children and teens a chance to learn to deal with a multicultural world.  And that's worth learning.

* In the mainframe and terminal era, and before widespread telecommuting, computer users would frequently occupy labs with one another.  As often occurs with people in close proximity, a culture formed, with it's own conventions rules, and slang.  Many of those cultural and conversational conventions carried over to electronically mediated interactions.  Over time, hackers generated their own culture: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

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Religious Messages

A pastor friend of mine once promised me, "I will pray for [her] and for you."

I'm a lifelong skeptic and lapsed atheist.  I'm almost certain there's no man in the sky who answers prayers.   There are those militant atheists who would find it hypocritical of me to let it pass.

But I did.

Even though I am not a Christian, I was touched.

Because what he said to me is not "I'm going to inflict a religious ritual upon you without your consent."

What he told me was, "I care about you, and I would like to help.  I am going to do that which I believe is the most powerful, most personal, most compassionate thing I know to do."

And in that translation is everything.

So, my fellow skeptics and atheists, instead of being offended by religious messages and symbolism, let's try to look beyond the shallow meaning of those messages and find the intent of the message.  The humanity in all of the god-talk.

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Climate Change

A reader has asked me to take on climate change.  I've been ruminating on how to approach the topic.  I'm not a climatologist in any sense, so there's not much that I can speak on about the science.  Not that I've let a lack of academic credentials bother me before.

But I think the primary issue I have is that I don't care.  Despite being an avowed leftist who attempts to think in terms of global systems, I don't care about global climate change.  There's not much I know about it.

Here's what I do know:

The Caspian Sea is shrinking.  This isn't purely academic, either.  The Soviet Union stored radioactive materials on an island there, where they'd be safely out of the way.  That island is now a peninsula.  It's not just now accessible from the mainland, it is the mainland.

Lake Chad is roughly half the size it was when it was first charted by Europeans.  The lake anchors the freshwater cycle of a great deal of West Africa.

The Sahara and Gobi deserts are growing.  The American West is getting drier.  Ranchers, farmers, and cities are squabbling over water levels in the Colorado River that drop year after year.  It's entirely possible that the West is coming out of a wetness peak unmatched for the last 40,000 years.

The Tigris and Euphrates valleys used to be a framing area so rich that it anchored the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent.  It's now largely desert and salt marsh.  North Africa was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.  It's now losing ground to an ever-growing desert.

The storied snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro are nearly gone.  Glacier National Park is losing its glaciers.  Continent long cracks are appearing in Antarctic ice shelves.  The Arctic summer is increasingly ice free.

Mean sea levels in Bangladesh and Micronesia keep rising.  By the 22nd century, both of those nations may perish from the face of the Earth.

All of this is local climate change.  Some is the result of warming, others the result of desertification. Is any relevant to the debate on "global warming"?  Maybe not.

But when you add up a lot of local climate change, don't you get a global climate change?

,,,
Let's talk a little bit about the carbon cycle.  No, not this one,  This one.  Here are the basics:

Plants grow.  Through a little miracle chemical called chlorophyll, they're able to absorb solar radiation and use that power to convert CO2 and H2O into various sugars.  This process releases O2 into the atmosphere.  Animals come along and eat plants and inhale O2, converting the starches in the plants back into CO2 and H2O and producing metabolic energy.


When everything is working properly, the two processes are more or less in balance.  Carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, carbon dioxide leaves the atmosphere.  Life, literally, goes on.


The problem is, that oxygen really doesn't care for being alone.  It's a little kinky that way.  Sure, those two oxygen atoms don't mind being in a relationship together, but if they can grab a carbon atom and pull it on in, they'd be much happier that way.  Many current theories of planetary evolution suggest that terrestrial planets like the Earth tend to have atmospheres comprised largely of carbon dioxide and nitrogen.  It's a popular choice, just look at Venus and Mars.  

Earth is special.  Earth gets to have free oxygen.  By all rights, we should have a bunch of carbon in our air, much like our sister-planet, Venus.  But we don't.  That carbon is squirreled away somewhere.  Where'd it go?  Thank the plants (and their tiny friends, the cyano-bacteria).


It's true, animals eat plants, and so liberate carbon back into the atmosphere.  But not nearly as much as could be there, because a great deal of carbon is fixed into plant matter.  It's in the trees.  It's in the soil.  It's in the limestone.  And since trees enjoyed a several million year long success story on the planet, a lot of the carbon that was formerly trees is in the ground: coal.


Animals have been helping, to be sure.  Sometimes they die without giving up all of their carbons.  Sometimes, when animals and other non-tree sludge dies, it gets trapped underground.  It becomes oil.


Picture the Earth 100,000 years ago.  Tons of formerly atmospheric carbon is underground as coal and oil.  Tons more is built into wood and other plant matter on the surface.  Other carbon is moving through the ecosystem: air to plant to animal to air.  Everything is, to quote a recent decade, groovy.  There's a sense of balance.  Sure the pendulum swings from one extreme to another, from too much carbon in the air to too little.  But there are plans in place, too much free oxygen and you get more animals and more active animals.  Forest fires release carbon into the air.  Too much carbon, and plants grow faster.  Animals become lethargic and die off.  The pendulum swings back.


But then a buncha' monkeys come to a startling conclusion: "fire good."  Homo erectus tames fire, becomes adept at using it, lighting it, carrying it around.  Trees start to fall; carbon fixed in wood is liberated back to the air.  The monkeys start to have other bright ideas.  Trees are felled to build things.  Forests are cleared to create cropland.  Logs are feed to the flames.  Sure, a lot of the wood stays intact, keeping carbon out of the air, but with the loss of each tree is a loss of carrying capacity.  That tree will no longer scrub carbon from the air.  Whole continents are cleared of forests.  Easter is deforested to roll old statues around.  Minorca builds the Spanish treasure fleets.  The Black Forest feeds German industry.  Haiti kills its trees and wrecks its whole ecology and thus its economy.


Sure, a lot of trees give way to other plants.  But crops don't fix carbon: they grow and then are eaten.  Crops are essentially carbon neutral.  Grasses and grains aren't the carbon sinks the old forests were.


Then the monkeys get another bright idea: dig the carbon out of the ground.  Light it on fire.  Release it back into the air.  "What inspires in us this madness, that our existence should be defined / by a light that we can't see."   The plants do their best, but by now they're outnumbered.  The trees are dying.  Their maritime allies, the algae and cyanobacteria and other oceanic plant has been poisoned; many by the carbon drilled from the ground and allowed to spill across the sea by clumsy monkeys.  "We torch the Earth until it bleeds, rain ashes from the skies, just to make a light no one can see."


So the carbon climbs again into the sky...

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PSGD

To be added to the neo-logisms page:

Public school girls' disease (PSGD): The sad pathology of our culture wherein young women are trained to hide their intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking skills for the illusion that boys will like them that way.  While many cases can be cured by exposure to higher education, too many bright minds are lost each year.  We need to act now to stop the spread of this disease.

And any young men reading this?  Smart girls are sexy.  Learn this now.

(and smart girls in lab coats?  Very sexy.)

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The Philosophical Journey pt.1

"A ship in the harbor is safe.  But that's not what ships were built for."

Religious faith, political ideology, artistic school, all these are safe harbors.  They protect from the elements: error, uncertainty, and a hurricane of questions.  Food is plentiful, there are warm drinks and warmer company.  But ships are not built to stay in harbor.  Ships are vehicles of exploration, of trade, and if necessary, of war.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

The ship of our philosophy was meant to leave port.  To brave the stormy and restless seas.  It's not easy: the food is short, the work long, the rum is always gone.  At any moment we could founder and be lost without a trace.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

So our ship of philosophy sets forth on the wine dark sea.  We jorney from port to port, dropping anchor.  We trade our goods: thoughts and ideas, questions and concepts.  Some ports become centers of trade, the destination of hundereds of ships.  Goods flow in and out.  Other ports are samll, but vital sources of rare jewels and precious stuffs.  But no matter how rich the port, how safe the harbor, the ship sails on.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

From time to time, we are buffeted by storms, great gales that blow us from our course.  From time to time, we find ourselves in uncharted waters, espying new headlands.  Sometimes we even set out for these unknown quarters of the Earth, seeking new vistas and hoping to uncover new territory and perhaps even a wealth of new ideas.  But even here we do not tarry.  A ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships were built for.

"Tonight we light the fires, we call our ships to port.  Tonight we walk on water, and tomorrow we'll be gone."

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