[PHOTO] Hotel Chelsea

What can I say about this storied institution that others haven't already said?

[LINK] "Why Eugenics Will Always Fail"

Esther Inglis-Arkell's io9 essay on some of the problems likely to face any large-scale human eugenics program is worth reading. The central argument, that we just don't know enough about our genetic inheritance to hack it about, is one that will give way over time, but that will remain an important factor nonetheless.

Selective eugenics cannot do otherwise but have an effect. Obsessively manage a familial line over generations, and it will change a species. However, every species will respond differently. Assuming that eugenics will have as much of an effect on humans as it does on other species is wrong. Assuming it will have the same effect it does on the more genetically pliable species can be fatal.

Even the success that we see with dogs comes at a price. Though different breeds of dogs might have a trait that's desirable to humans, they aren't more fit to survive than their wild compatriots. And what becomes of all their selective breeding? Aside from any number of diseases, weaknesses, and health problems endemic to dog breeds, they lose biodiversity. It's estimated that five percent of wolves' diversity was lost when they became domesticated dogs. When those domestic dogs were obsessively bred to make, say, a golden retriever, they lost another thirty-five percent of their diversity.

Humans don't have that much biodiversity to lose. Grab any two humans on Earth and they're likely to be more similar to each other, at the genetic level, than two chimps from the same tribe. It's thought that the human race came close to extinction in the past, and that the few survivors became genetically close to each other. Losing another thirty-five percent of our diversity is not a tempting prospect. Going back to the dog model, scientists generally agree that their mutations don't involve introduction of new genes, but expressions of ones already existing ones, which is why they can still interbreed so well. All that difference in genetics is what allowed them to change form in order to adapt to different conditions. Human eugenics isn't going to be about trying to create many different breeds, but about going for an ideal. Limiting our biodiversity in the name of one ideal, or even a chosen few, doesn't just change the human species in the present, it cuts off our capacity for change in the future. It's widely acknowledged that a species that limits its gene pool leaves itself extremely vulnerable to any change from its ideal conditions. If the world itself changes — which is pretty much a guarantee — the human population could very well be stranded at a dead end.

So what would we gain for this vulnerability, and this expenditure of energy and care on selective human eugenics? What's the ideal trait that we'd like for future humans to have? The general consensus on what we'd like to breed into the human population is intelligence. The human brain wants to preen and protect itself. This separates us from the animals! Except there's no pure way, genetically, to do that. During a recent interview with Io9, Gary Karpen, a UC Berkeley biologist, has said flat-out that, given all possible genetic information about a child, it is in no way possible to predict intelligence. There are too many traits bound together, too many ways that genes might be expressed. The leader of the Human Genome Process, Francis Collins, said the same in his own book, claiming that no amount of genetic tinkering could give people designer babies with intelligence to order.

Well, what about other things? Strength? Fertility? Resilience? The problem is there is no one smart gene, or fertile gene, or strong gene. Mix the DNA of two geniuses and, even assuming somewhere in the soup of their DNA intelligence is passed down, it drags a net of other traits along with it. Those who manage animal breeding notice the same. When one can breed in a trait like swiftness in horses, or health and fertility in chickens, it generally comes with any number of other characteristics. Thoroughbreds and "hot-blooded" horses are notoriously temperamental. One study in poultry husbandry showed that even moderate increases in hen fertility and health came with increase in aggression, hysterical behavior, weird imprinting responses in the young, and odd sexual behavior. Good luck with that mixed in to the human population. Eugenics can't be a scalpel. It's a club. Even assuming we could get an extraordinary trait in one area, it would come with a whole host of other traits that wouldn't be so desirable.

[LINK] "McDonald's staff took offence to digital glasses, Toronto cyborg says"

My initial response to self-proclaimed Canadian cyborg Steve Mann's report that he was assaulted in a Paris McDonald's for his various cybernetic augmentations, including a physically embedded virtual camera, was incredulity.

On lengthier consideration, I wonder if this incident might be taken as the first incident in the development of prejudice towards people with electronic or mechanical augmentation--hostility towards people with wheelchairs, or seeing eye dogs, comes to mind as a close parallel. I'm inclined to bet that, as the world's population ages and the technology advances, incidents of this kind might become more common.

A Toronto computer engineering professor known for augmenting his body with various cyborg-like computing devices has been attracting media attention after he reported on his blog that staff at a McDonald's restaurant in Paris tried to pull his digital glasses off his head.

Steve Mann wrote on his blog that while he and his family were eating at the restaurant last month during their summer vacation, an employee approached him to inquire about the glasses.

The employee was initially satisfied with the doctor's note Mann showed him explaining why he wears the technology (Mann does not specify what the explanation is), but three other employees who approached him later did not accept the letter and one tried to remove the glasses from his head.

"He angrily grabbed my eyeglass and tried to pull it off my head," Mann wrote on his blog when describing the actions of one employee. "The eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools."

Mann does not elaborate on why the restaurant staff wanted him to remove the glasses, but he does point to a similar incident reported by CBS News in 2011 in which a travel agent from Boise, Idaho, became involved in a confrontation with an employee at a Paris McDonald's after she tried to take a photo of the restaurant menu.

[LINK] "French History and Language in the American Midwest"

Over at Geocurrents, Nicholas Baldo writes at length about the French heritage of the American Midwest back when it was called the Illinois Country, Le Pays des Illinois.

Once a periphery of French Canada, later becoming thinly-populated "Upper Louisiana", the French heritage of the vast region resisted Anglicization and Americanization much less solidly than that of the modern state of Louisiana at the lower end of the Mississippi. Unlike in Canada and Louisiana, the French fact was just spread too thin to last. Still, as Baldo points out, traces do remain to this day.

The French presence in Le Pays des Illinois initially centered around the town of Kaskaskia, some fifty miles southeast of present day St. Louis (itself founded by the French forty-three years later). Already a focus of Illinois Indian population, Kaskaskia attracted Jesuit missionaries who established themselves permanently in 1703. Along with the nearby settlements of Prairie du Rocher and Fort de Chartres, Kaskaskia soon boasted perhaps seven thousand French settlers (including women), who lived relatively peacefully alongside the local indigenes. Seven thousand is of course a tiny population by modern standards, but even half that number would have made it one of the largest European settlements in North America at the time. While the French fought viciously against Indian enemies such as the Fox and the Iroquois, the Illinois Indians they lived among shared their diplomatic objectives, and tranquility remained the norm within French and Indian settlements. Intermarriage was common, and resulting mixed-race children were known as métis, a French cognate of the Spanish mestizo.

The French Midwest boomed in the 18th Century not because of the fur trade, but because it was well positioned to supply another growing city to the South: La Nouvelle-Orléans. New Orleans, as the Americans would later call it, became wealthy through shipping and the production of market crops, creating strong demand for wheat and oats from upriver. This new economic geography led to the reassignment of Le Pays des Illinois from Canada to France’s new colony, La Louisiane. The first African slaves arrived in Kaskaskia in 1718, but price ceilings on grains imposed by French officials made the purchase of slaves for farming uneconomical. Instead, many French settlers brought their slaves west to Missouri, where recently discovered lead mines in the Northeastern Ozarks offered a higher rate of return. Canada had barely been settled before the Mississippi became the new focus of French colonization, and now Missouri seemed destined to eclipse Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, and the like in a similar fashion.

Located mainly in Missouri, the Ozark Plateau includes the highest topographical features in North America between the Appalachian Mountains in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West. Unbeknownst to most, it is also the site of an unbroken French cultural heritage that stretches back some three hundred years. The etymology of the Ozarks is disputed, but most consider it to be a corruption of the French term aux Arks, or, “of Arkansas”. As previously mentioned, it was lead, or, more precisely, galena ore, that brought the French to the region. Missouri sits on the world’s largest deposit of galena, an ore-body that was close enough to the surface to catch the eye of French explorers. Since galena is often found together with silver, the French naturally imagined they had found their answer to Spain’s Cerro de Potosí, the richest silver deposit ever discovered (located in modern Bolivia). Evidence of this enthusiasm lives on to this day in place names like Potosi, Missouri, currently home to some 2,500 people. The miners’ hopes, however, were misplaced. No silver lay under Missouri’s soil, and settlers were left to mine and farm what they could.

La Vieille Mine, anglicized today as Old Mines, Missouri, is perhaps the most impressive example of French culture in the Ozarks region. Statistics are difficult to come by, but according to residents the region around Old Mines may have been home to over a thousand French speakers (known colloquially as “Paw Paw French”) only a few decades ago. Most were middle aged or elderly at the time, so the area’s distinct Missouri French dialect is likely to go extinct before long. Yet the region remains proud of its linguistic heritage. It stages an annual “Missouri French Festival” replete with dance and merriment. Several buildings remain from colonial French times, including a house still in private use.

[LINK] On Michael Ignatieff misreading Syria as a Cold War-style proxy war

In his post "Another good reason Michael Ignatieff is not Prime Minister of Canada", Noel Maurer links to Michael Ignatieff's essay in the New York Review of Books, "How Syria Divided the World".

The Syrian conflict has triggered something more fundamental than a difference of opinion over intervention, something more than an argument about whether the Security Council should authorize the use of force. Syria is the moment in which the West should see that the world has truly broken into two. A loose alliance of struggling capitalist democracies now finds itself face to face with two authoritarian despotisms—Russia and China—something new in the annals of political science: kleptocracies that mix the market economy and the police state. These regimes will support tyrannies like Syria wherever it is in their interest to do so.

[. . .]

The Syrian conflict has laid bare how little the West understands Russia and China’s new approach to the world. Kofi Annan’s plan for Syria was based on the assumption that Russia’s real interest was in demonstrating to the US that it was the indispensable ally in the creation of a post-Assad transition. Annan’s attempt to secure Chinese support for his plan made a similar assumption.

What makes Syria a hinge-moment is that Russia and China are proving that they have no strategic interest in transitions beyond dictatorship, not just in Syria but anywhere else. Both Russia and China see Syria not through the prism of international peace and security or human rights, but through the logic of their own despotism. For Putin, Syria is Chechnya; for China it is Tibet. They understand Assad perfectly. He is doing what they have done many times and they want the world to understand that they will support any dictator facing similar challenges.

Maurer argues that the limited amount of interference and less significant transfer of arms is nothing compared to what went on in other proxy wars, like--say--Vietnam.

[T]hree attack helicopters is nothing compared to the massive amounts of materiel that went through Haiphong or over the Chinese border. Here is a CIA estimate of around 2,000 Soviet air defense personnel in North Vietnam circa 1965. There is also a frustratingly vague CIA estimate of Soviet military aid at the beginning of the war, but it gives some sense of the scale, and it dwarfs anything going to Syria. More information is in this 1968 CIA report about Sino-Soviet conflicts regarding military aid to the DRV. The discussion is over trainloads, for months, and massive airlifts, and shipments through Haiphong ... including potential Soviet military responses to a U.S. blockade.

And then the money document from 1968: go down to the last two pages. 2,230 artillery pieces in 1967! 70,000 tons of ammunition! 3,810 surface-to-air missiles! 123 armored vehicles! 700 vehicles from China, another 24,000 tons of ammunition, and 61 MiG fighter jets!

(By the way, did you know the U.S. operated unmanned drones in Vietnam? Page 2.)

Dude, that was a proxy war. This is Russia and China being annoying.

Yes, he provides links. And the commenters at the New York Review of Books, in the main part, point out that Syria's near-term future is not likely to include liberal democracy, or ethnic pluralism, et cetera, so Ignatieff's line of argument is severely compromised.

It's a shame what happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, I supposed, but Maurer's right: Canada's lucky not to have had Ignatieff in a position of actual power.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton is rightfully unimpressed with the way in which the organizers of the London Olympics are criminalizing precrime, even, and engaging in massive over-protection of copyright, et cetera.


• The Burgh Diaspora approves of Brazil's response to brain drain by treating the emigration of Brazilians trained abroad as a way to plug into global networks, as opposed to Ecuador locking its education migrants into restrictive contracts requiring them to come back.


• Daniel Drezner notes that there's nothing that can be done at this point to control the Assad regime.


• Eastern Approaches notes that counting on Poland to be automatically pro-American is, for any number of reasons, a dated assumption. Poland is a European country of note, after all.


• Geocurrents notes the expansion of Russian influence in Tajikistan.


• GNXP's Razib Khan notes the lazy assumption of many that Iran has always been a Shi'ite-majority country when in fact its current religious configuration is a product of the modern era.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis is pessimistic about the prospects for political mobilization to deal with environmental change when human beings are able to normalize extreme variations fairly readily--he cites the expectation of people in the Great Plains that the unusually rainy weather of the 1880s and 1890s was normal.


• At The Power and the Money, Douglas Muir discusses three possible ways Syria might be partitioned by the Assad regime--all involving substantial ethnic cleansing--and finds them all lacking in plausibility.