WhirledView

Thank you Cheryl

By Patricia H. Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe

Last week, Pew reported the results of recent surveys of American scientists and the American public on the status and perceptions of science and scientists in this country. Among the findings was the existence of a gaping hole in understanding between the general population and this country’s scientists─ despite the fact that the scientific profession is still held in high regard here.

Yet only three percent of the over 2000 American scientists polled said they often spent time talking to reporters, only 18 percent said they wrote for blogs, while 85 percent said that public ignorance of science was a significant problem and the media’s coverage of science was dismal. Cheryl is one of those 18 percent who does write about science in layman’s terms and over the past five years she has done yeoman’s service on WhirledView in the pursuit of this crucial educational endeavor.

She also did yeoman’s service in keeping this blog functioning through thick and thin.

But it’s been several years since the three of us founded WhirledView and sometimes it’s time for change. So please do visit her at Phronesisaical, on Facebook and Twitter. We will miss her, but we will do our best to continue to make WhirledView a class act.

Be assured that WhirledView will continue to look at our world critically─and with affection. We will continue to write on international politics, US foreign policy, public diplomacy, but as ever we will stray into the arts, the law, domestic politics and other aspects of our always fascinating, but often frustrating era. Even science, especially the political impact of scientific matters.

Moving On

by Cheryl Rofer

There’s no easy way to say this, I guess: I’m leaving WhirledView to go to phronesisiacal.

I’d like to thank everyone…Ugh. All I keep coming up with are platitudes and commonplaces, what one usually does when one (note that impersonal pronoun!) isn’t saying all that one might say. Let’s just say that after almost five years, too many differences have accumulated.

There’s been a lot of good for me in WhirledView. I think I’ve tightened up my writing because of blogging’s requirements, and I’ve made a lot of good blogfriends, some of whom I’ve even met in real life.

I’ve enjoyed the comments we get, although WhirledView’s readers are less voluble than those on other blogs.

Naturally, I hope you’ll continue to read me at phronesisiacal. And that you’ll continue with WhirledView too. I’m on Facebook and Twitter (cherylrofer) too. My Twitter feed has some of the elements of my yardblogging.

My best wishes to my colleagues as WhirledView continues.

Imposing Our Narratives

by Cheryl Rofer

I've not said much about the demonstrations in Iran because I feel I don't know enough about what they are about. The possibility of a stolen, or at least dishonest, election. Dissatisfaction with the regime's power and how it's used. Both are very likely. But what is proposed to replace them?

Mousavi is one of the candidates approved by the Supreme Council. He wouldn't be on the ballot otherwise. Would he be easier for the United States to deal with than Ahmadinejad? Probably. But how different would his agenda be? I simply don't know.

Alistair Cooke tells us today that the central struggle is between various factions of the clergy. That seems to me to fit the facts at least as well as, and perhaps better than, a narrative about the desire of the Iranian people for freedom and democracy, alluring as that narrative may be.

And then there's the trouble in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as some would have it. The taking sides in the US has been almost amusing. Conservatives see the Uighurs as part of the great Muslim conspiracy and thus align themselves with the Chinese government (Chicoms, I think they call them). Here's a view from a China expert that, I guess, the US conservatives could love, although, as Jamie points out, this doesn't speak well of the Chinese government either.

The Chinese seem to be handling their "minorities" problem about as well as the Soviet Union did. Russia's got some problems in that department too. The basic problem is that both China and Russia are empires. Very old empires, to be sure, but nonetheless agglomerations of disparate people who may not be pleased to be part of that polity.

UN in Santa Fe?

by Cheryl Rofer

Now that the movie industry has discovered Santa Fe, we see constantly changing yellow signs directing the crew and others to today's filming. They are remarkably standardized, each bearing an abbreviation referring to the title of the film. While I was stopped at the St. Francis and Cerillos intersection the other day, I saw this one:

UNDOC, hm? I'm not following which movies are being filmed here well enough to guess at that one. But my brain automatically referred to the United Nations.

Attitudes Change

by Cheryl Rofer

Nuclear weapons were first developed in the 1940s. The Soviet Union detonated its first in 1949. With the development of thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s, the arms race was on. The United States had one big enemy and big weapons. So did that enemy.

Early on, some strategists recognized that these big weapons were so destructive that they could never be used in a military exchange. But new things are intriguing, the dangers of Soviet expansionism were real, as was the irreconcilability of two big worldviews. So many in the military saw nuclear weapons as something that could and, under appropriate conditions, should be used. Books were written about strike and counterstrike, deterrence, first use; how-to guides for nuclear war. Better dead than Red, the saying went, recognizing that the end state might be everyone dead.

Errol Morris, director of the film “The Fog of War,” an extended interview with Robert McNamara, reminds us of those times. He quotes General Buck Turgidson in “Doctor Strangelove”: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed” as Turgidson suggests a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union to mitigate its reaction to the dropping of a hydrogen bomb by a single, partly disabled B-52 headed toward its target.

The reason “Doctor Strangelove” spoke to the times was that it was easy to imagine generals like Turgidson and the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper. It was easy to imagine nuclear war being evoked so casually. The remarks of the real, non-movie-character General Curtis LeMay in the daily newspaper were all too similar. The drills for schoolchildren, the fallout shelters, all testified to the societal belief that a nuclear war might be fought. The movie’s release in 1964 was an early indication that nuclear war might be becoming genuinely unthinkable. Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense in 1961.

Evolution Everywhere!

by Cheryl Rofer

I don’t know if it was something in the way I was thinking a while back, maybe it was Darwin’s birthday and then my nephew’s campaign to have the family’s mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA typed by the National Geographic’s Genographic Project, or if it was just that evolution is indeed the unifying idea of biology. But when I read this in the 24 April Science,

In humans, a deficiency of the mitochondrial protein frataxin lads to Friedreich’s ataxia, a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease. Frataxin has been implicated in heme metabolism and in the assembly of Fe-S clusters.

I had to pause and appreciate the complexity that evolution has worked into our bodies. Then I went on to read a book review about slime molds, which sometimes live as individual amoeba-like cells and sometimes group together into a larger organism, which must have been a step (or something like it) in the development of multi-celled organisms from single cells.

Let me try to unpack all that evolution.

Mitochondria, now part of most organisms’ cells, were once free-living organisms themselves. They became subordinate members of other cells some long time ago. They produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an essential source of energy for cell processes. At some point, an organism without mitochondria tried to eat, or otherwise engulfed the free-living proto-mitochondrion. Or perhaps the proto-mitochondrion was a parasite that bored its way into another cell. It turned out to be a happy association. We don’t see free-living mitochondria today, so presumably this has been a favorable outcome for the ones who decided their future was inside other cells as well as their new owners.

Then those single-celled supercharged mitochondria-carriers got together into organisms, maybe the way slime molds do. Slime molds are fascinating. They live as single amoeba-like cells until, for some reason, they find it necessary to make spores. Then they get together and form a fruiting body. Here's a time-lapse video of them doing it. (I'm not seeing the video just now, although it was there when I first posted, so here's the link to YouTube.)

Head Iseseisvuspäev!

by Cheryl Rofer

I'm a bit conflicted today. Yes, as the title of the post implies, I'll be celebrating Fourth of July tonight with friends. But it's the first Üldlaulupidu since 1999 that I haven't attended. There are many complicated reasons for that, and I'm not totally unhappy I'm not in Tallinn beyond always thinking that it would be nice to be in Tallinn.

So here's a mini-lalupidu. Still photos are taken from today's orgy of laulupidu photos in Postimees.

It always rains, of course, for laulupidu, although some of the photos have a bright blue sky in them. Fortunately, the northern Europeans, Finns especially, manufacture thin rain ponchos that sell (or did the last time I was there) for about a dollar apiece. They come in a little case, about four centimeters by six, only a few millimeters thick. But don't think about folding them back up when they're dry. They're usable, but they'll never see those dimensions again. I've still got an unused one in my day pack.

Unresolved in Iran

by Cheryl Rofer and Patricia H. Kushlis

Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, was kind enough to participate in a conference call with bloggers today. He wanted to emphasize, that, although the demonstrations have quieted down, the movement hasn’t ended and the election results are not yet resolved.

In contrast, John Bolton is willing to ratify the victory of his alleged enemy, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so that he may give the Israelis the go-ahead for (you guessed it) bombing Iran.

It’s easy to cover a demonstration of thousands or hostile words from one person or another, but Parsi emphasized the power of the quiet, patient approach that the Obama administration has taken toward Iran. An external threat always unites a country. When the head of another country, such as President Bush, threatens regime change, even the internal opponents of a regime have to mute their criticisms lest they open their country to a greater external threat. Obama’s statements of mutual respect, Parsi said, dissolves the “glue” that the regime change rhetoric provides.

If we want to see dissent in Iran censor itself, Bolton’s bluster is the way to go. But President Obama is smarter than that.

Bolton makes much of Iran’s nuclear program, his motivator for attack. Parsi said that there is no information that the nuclear program has slowed down, nor would one expect the election to have that effect. If Mousavi were president, he has said that he would continue the civilian program, but Parsi said it is likely that Mousavi would try to build confidence in the world community that the program was indeed for civilian power, probably by re-implementing the Additional Protocol Iran has signed and which allows more intrusive IAEA inspections. Iran would likely want something in return for this, perhaps moving consideration of its nuclear program back to the International Atomic Energy Agency from the United Nations Security Council.

CKR has speculated, although not at WhirledView, that there might be a faction of engineers and scientists in Iran’s nuclear program who very much want to build a bomb. There were such factions in Israel, in India, and in Pakistan as their nuclear programs developed. Those factions took advantage of political confusion or unrest in those countries to press their cases. Parsi confirmed that such a faction exists in Iran. Their case is very much strengthened by the neocons’ bluster.

The dissidents in Iran continue their resistance. The election is not yet a done deal. It remains difficult to get information from Iran. Bolton, as usual, has it wrong.

Many thanks to Kombiz Lavasany for organizing the call.

Picturing the Manhattan Project

by Cheryl Rofer

Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project, Timothy Joseph. Turner Publishing Company, Nashville, Tennessee 2009, $39.95.

One Christmas eve – I think I must have been about seven – I woke up early and snuck downstairs. Santa had been there. I was always a sucker for construction sets, and there was one I had wanted: long sticks that threaded through paper squares and triangles, with holes at the end to be joined by pipe cleaners. And a book, titled All About Atomic Energy. I built a flying-saucer-shaped enclosure and took the book inside to read. My parents found me asleep with the book in the morning.

The construction set didn’t last – the paper ripped and the pipe cleaners broke – but my interest in atomic energy and, eventually, the Manhattan Project, continued.

It’s more than a half-century ago now since the first nuclear weapons were built, under the extreme duress of a world-shaking competition. It turned out that the German nuclear weapon project had gone badly, but the competition was felt to be real while it was on.

The clothes and postures look as dated now as photos of Nicholas and Alexandra would have looked to me that Christmas. But I still find them moving, the story full of lessons for today. It’s possible that we aren’t paying attention to the best of those lessons.

Timothy Joseph serves up a full portion of Manhattan Project photos in Historical Photos of the Manhattan Project. He takes note of what I think is the best of the lessons: how quickly a new technology was turned into something usable; regrettably, a weapon. We humans are capable of such ingenuity and competence when pressed. We haven’t yet convinced ourselves to be pressed on today’s technical challenges.

Getting It Wrong

by Cheryl Rofer

Here's a crabby post to start your Monday morning wrong. If you are having a bad Monday, don't click on the links. They'll make it worse.

But I found these three articles so egregiously wrong, I wanted to say something about them. Unfortunately (or maybe happily), I don't have time to work through them in detail. Maybe Tuesday will be better.

It's Not the Religion, Fareed!
I like much of what Fareed writes, but here he's reeeaaaaccchhhing for a way to distinguish the people in Iran's streets today from the people in Estonia's streets in 1989. And the other countries that emerged from Communist rule in 1989-1991. He looks around, and finds...religion! The parallels of those countries to Iran fail for a number of reasons. It was an external power, Russian Communism, that held sway in a colonial fashion. Those countries had reasonably well-developed political movements with clear paths of the insurgents to power. Religion was used in Poland as a lever, but it was much weaker in other places. That's why I've gone back to the Russian Revolution of 1917 as an analogy. It's not perfect, but it's much closer than the revolutions of 1989-1991.

Because They're Illegal, That's Why!
Jackson Diehl insists this morning that President Obama go back to business as usual with Israel.

Pressuring Israel made sense, at first. The administration correctly understood that Netanyahu, a right-winger who took office with the clear intention of indefinitely postponing any Israeli-Palestinian settlement, needed to feel some public heat from Washington to change his position -- and that the show of muscle would add credibility to the administration's demands that Arab leaders offer their own gestures.

The gesture has been made, time to return to hypocrisy.

Diehl ignores the UN resolutions and international law on the settlements to argue that they are a trivial bit of fluff that don't matter, and anyway if Israel makes any concessions, the Palestinians won't. And Obama will have to back down and lose face. But perhaps not. A competing newspaper reports this morning that Israel may put some sort of freeze in place; not exactly what the administration is asking for, but more than Israel would have done without the pressure. And we'll see where it goes from here.

Ross Douthat's Reckless Romance
This one is just plain sexism. But what can we expect from the New York Times's pet conservative man? Douthat finds the last week to have been a good one for reckless romance.

The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

Um, Ross, those are all guys breaking up their marriages. Romance has some mutuality to it, and I can't see any of the women involved in those scenarios feeling particularly good just now. But reckless romance rules in Ross's fantasyland. Oh well, he's the guy who thought that cartoon character had to be male. I saw her as female, myself. Who else would have to correct all the guys who are getting it wrong on the internet? (That last one is safe to click.)