CDarwin

Hmph, that is really interesting. The same thing happened to Estonia too, as I recall, when they were about to remove a memorial to Soviet soldiers in WWII. In that case, it turned out not to have even been the Russian government, but a private Russian living in Estonia. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same thing here.

In... other... news, the Russians are pulling back in Georgia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7555858.stm There's a lot of other news bits in that worth reading as well. Georgia is pulling out or the CIS, for example. That could have repercussions. This is good news on two levels. One, of course, the fighting has stopped. Yay peace. But more generally it signifies that the Russians do apparently care enough about international opinion to desist in military operations, something a lot of analysts were skeptical about. It was almost as if while the whole world was watching China, some enormous shift had happened in Russia. And of course Russia has been changing. It probably feels more nationalistic and more threatened than any time since the Cold War.

From what I can tell, this is how it breaks down: Georgia's President got elected on a platform promising to reign in the semi-autonomous territories (South Ossetia and Abkhazia). Meanwhile the these territories have been continuing to move toward less semi- and more full- autonomy, and the Russians have been happy to give them cover. Now Georgia was finally stupid enough to let itself get baited into invading South Ossetia, and the Russians are taking the opportunity to punish them and assert their supremacy. Basically, everyone's screwed up here. The Georgians should never have tried to re-assert control over South Ossetia (and cause something like 1,400 mostly civilian casualties in the process, apparently), and the Russians really need to get their head around soft power. You don't have to let the Ukraine stiff you on gas, but you don't shut off half the supply to Europe as a negotiating tactic, either. If Georgia tries to violently re-assert control over a minority, raise a massive stink about it and drive a wedge between Saakashvili and the West. Don't start bombing Georgian cities and making them look like martyrs for the cause of freedom. The references to ethnic cleansing were, I suspect, made specifically to remind the international community of when it recently enthusiastically backed the succession of Kosavo from Serbia. Russia should have just stuck to that chord. There are Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia and Abkazhia, as part of a CIS mission from earlier in the 90s. That's who Putin and the Russians have been referring to specifically. The Ossetian people themselves are also divided into two territories, South Ossetia (Georgia) and North Ossetia (Russia), and the South Ossetians have repeatedly expressed a desire to join North Ossetia as part of Russia, and generally look to Russia as their protectors. There's nothing official there, though.

Well I didn't set the goalposts there in the first place. My point was just that Iraq stands a better chance of developing successfully if it's oil wealth isn't used to pump up general revenues, and statistics bear me out. Well how much of that is which side of the world political order Iran is as opposed to Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia is governed a religiously autocratic monarchy, in many ways more conservative than Iran has been for years. Women dress more liberally in Iran and can drive, for example. Finally, there's an actual constitutional separation between secular and religious government in Iran. The secular executive (the president) is relatively powerless and the religious authorities have two levels of input as to his selection, and in this case the current administration happens to be nutty and jingoistic, but the fact that the position exists genuinely shows promise. And Iran has elements of a non-oil economy. I'd say Iran has brighter prospects for a future involving internal reform and not revolution than Saudi Arabia. But that's way off topic.

I wouldn't call Saudi Arabia a ruined state either, but it's one that would be tomorrow if the oil ran out. It's government hasn't had any incentive to reform or sustainable economic development. It doesn't have a middle class, a civil society, or developing traditions of constitutionalism and civil liberties. And its economy relies on unskilled labor, often from countries with higher literacy rates that Saudi Arabia because education there is so poor. Name a country with a liberal, effective government whose primary source of income is natural resource wealth. The UAE is the only state I can think of that comes close.

Never trust a man in a beard.

Eh, may very well not be good news. Lots of natural resource money can ruin a state, since all it needs to spend it on to increase revenues is more oil infrastructure. States with lots of oil money don't need to tax, states that don't tax don't feel any obligations to their citizens. Thus, you get countries like Saudi Arabia, where taxes are piteous but so are reforms. The original plan was to put all Iraq's oil money into a special account, and only let a small percentage of it contribute to general revenue. I'm not sure if that's still in effect of not. I somewhat doubt it.

Oh, certainly. It's not very highly alcoholic, though.

Very odd, off the wall question: Is kvas (Russian drink made from fermented dark bread) considered alcoholic in the United States, such that an underaged person couldn't consume it? Does anyone know? Apparently it's served in schools in Russia.

I still wonder what a consumption tax would do to economy. I don't suppose that's ever going to happen, though. Perhaps it shouldn't.

That wasn't quite my meaning. I meant what should Iraq mean to future US policy.

Now this is a debate we're probably having about 20 years too soon, as we don't know what's finally going to become of Iraq, nor can the indications we've seen so far tell us much definitively. As far as I can tell, and I'm limited not only by how little anyone can know but also by the fact that I know much less still, Iraq stands the best chance of all of them of shaping up into something like Lebanon with a stronger economy. But this is an inevitable debate, because it has immediate ramifications to US policy in the now. So, what should the Iraq experience mean to us? Should we take away from Iraq a general condemnation of interventionism principally in the name of nation-building? Should we simply take away practical lessons of how not to run a nation-building project? Was the Iraq project doomed to failure by the beginning, was it an arrogant expression of American imperial idealism, or was it simply botched in execution? I'm really just asking. I'm not going to try to offer an opinion here because I really don't think I can offer one. So, don't jump on me, Pangloss. I can understand elements of both approaches to what's happened in Iraq. It was a little arrogant to think that the great, noble United States can waltz into any nation it wants, knock down its autocratic government, and bequeath it the glorious gift of liberal democracy like handing down a potted petunia. But on the other hand, you can definitely point to specific actions that were taken in the course of nation-building (disbanding the army, privatizing state industries, de-Baatification) that if not taken or handled differently could very plausibly had led to a different outcome for the country. And of course things are calming down, at least, now, broadly in response to constructive shifts in US policy. But I always talk to much when I don't have anything to say. So what do you think?

Right, right, though not all paleontology deals with bones. It's an integrative field, certainly. I know, you just seemed so exhaustive including all the different mutations of zoology and even mycology it struck me amusedly that you forgot botany.

Paleontology is an interesting inclusion. It's more generally considered a branch of geology, and you need a lot of geology to make sense of it, but if you're interesting in ecology, evolution, or any kind of zoology you might just take to paleontology too. You forgot botany too, ecoli.

It's not demonstrably that politicians are any worse in character, either. They're just not allowed to be principled any more. Every little step in the process is under the public eye, so at every stage politicians have to cater to the few and vocal: the special interests and the partisan fanatics. That's transparency and democratization for you.

As Pangloss noted, general education will vary. The major requirements for any anthropology degree will also vary pretty strongly depending on if your university has a general program that includes archaeology and biological anthropology (to use North Carolina examples, like Wake Forest), or one that is only sociocultural anthropology (like the University of North Carolina or Appalachian State), or one that has their anthropology department combined with sociology, as many smaller liberal arts schools do (like UNC: Asheville). Duke University is the only I've see that has an exclusively biological anthropology program for undergraduates, to add that to the diversity. I only know this because I've been doing a lot of college browsing for the past year or so for good anthropology departments, as I'm about to start into one.

Really I think that last bit is a real strength of popular science: history. I read a lot of human evolution books, and I certainly wouldn't be able to piece together a fossil skeleton, no, but by gods I could tell you the history of paleoanthropology, or of the Dayton trial, or of the Leakeys, or of Lucy, etc. They're also not bad for leading you further into more technical reading. And of course popular or semi-popular books in the social sciences can be serious scholarship in their own right.

True enough. Perhaps my definition put the cart before the horse a bit. Music has an emotional effect on humans before it can be given meaning culturally. That's pretty readily translatable. But it does have cultural meaning.

Human music has a cultural dimension. I would say that's what makes it "music," as opposed to simply noise. It, like language, means something culturally. That's yet to be definitively established. Perhaps the cows behaved as they did for some other reason. But anyway, the reason most mammals wouldn't enjoy human 'music' has nothing to do with the fact the humans call it 'music,' and much more to do with the fact that it consists of so many loud and varying noises, which would unsettle them. It's the same thing with other sounds that wouldn't really mean anything to animals, like jack-hammers, but they none-the-less would rather avoid. Of course there's a range of tolerance even still.

Their reproductive rate isn't at replacement level, though. I don't think that would effect the mountains and probably not Reykjavik, though it might make the nudity and mmorpg's hard to keep running without, you know, people.

Animals tend not to like music, and the softer and slower the better. They've done lots of experiments exposing primates to music trying to find out about the evolution of the human penchant, but no luck. Mammals take no music over music almost every time.

Well, his performance on energy issues in the Simpsons Movie wasn't very impressive, so I think we have to take that into consideration... But anyway, Schwarzenegger has shown a good-faith willingness to listen to expert opinion, and I think that might be more important for an Energy Secretary that than being simply a PhD. Being as Energy is our sort-of Ministry of Science, it seems like what it needs is a courageous, knowledgeable politician who's going to be able to fight for the funding and the priority that American science needs. Schwarzenegger is high profile enough, if nothing else, to get some attention in Washington.

I think you've got that backwards. It was seven of the clean animals (and all fowl), and two of all the unclean (except some fowl). So there would have been some clean animals left after the sacrifice. I'd be a lot more concerned for all the unclean animals Noah dumps on Mount Ararat. Those two, poor little koalas had to successively crawl then swim all the way back to Australia. Where a lot of other marsupials also decided to go, for no particular reason.

You would test it by looking at the function of storytelling in different societies, and also by seeing if television has a different effect than oral stories that might make it different as a medium. But, what adriaan is saying isn't completely novel. Stories are already recognized as an important component of socialization in early childhood and social coordination for adults. It's a kind of refresher course on the society's values, beliefs, and traditions. Not to be discouraging. It's a good thought. It's good to see a nice, cogent cultural explanation. These days we tend to run to the biobable too quickly.

How did that break any Law?