About Making Assumptions: Looking Up Lisa Blatt Before Finishing This Post

 A week or so ago an attorney arguing before the US Supreme Court claimed:  [You can read the transcript here page 28.]

"but, yes, it's just been -- I mean, the world has been around for, like, 7,000 years, and no country has ever tried another country.

(Laughter.)"

The case is TURKIYE HALK BANKASI A.S., )AKA HALKBANK, )  v. UNITED STATES and involves a challenge to the US' ability to bring suit against a Turkish bank on the grounds it is part of the sovereign nation of Turkiye.  (Yes, that's the new formal name of the country.)

"the world has been around for, like, 7,000 years"

Was this a joke?  Was it pandering to the Federalist Society appointed judges?  Was it the attorney's actual understanding of how old the world is?  

Trying to comment meaningfully on today's world is how I imagine a mosquito swarmed caribou in the midsummer Arctic must feel.  Every bite hurts a little but there are just too many to deal with. 

But I also know we must stand firm.  All the voting fraud legal losses have weakened Trump and his follower, and claimed  We shouldn't assume they have more power than they have.  

That said, I looked up Lisa Blatt to see if she's also a docent at Kentucky's Noah's Ark Encounter?

Sarcasm often floats over people's heads.  I learned quickly that I couldn't use it in class because there were always a few students who took my words literally.  

Not everything is as it appears.  Lisa Blatt is said to be the female attorney who has appeared most frequently before the US Supreme Court.  She's also a former RBG law clerk.  

Here's an interview with Lisa Blatt chair of the Supreme Court and appellate practice at Williams & Connolly, that makes it pretty clear that she knows the world is more than 7000 years old and this might have been an unintentional bit of humor.  

 Is this post worth writing? If I just dealt with one mosquito among millions?  I think so, because the real point is to be careful about jumping to conclusions - which seems to happen with greater frequency as online media rush to be the first to report anything.  And if anyone reads this and checks on an assumption she's about to make, then yes.  

And I'm going to reiterate this theme in an upcoming post, so this is just a seed to get you ready.  

How Close Are Trump's Actions To Putin's Priorities?

Is Putin pulling Trump's strings?  Let's look at some of the signs.

What are Putin's biggest obstacles?

1.  NATO, as weak as it is, is still a threat.  Anything he can do weaken NATO would help him restore the Soviet era power balance in Eastern Europe - Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, etc.

2.   China has a long, long border with Russia and there's always been conflict on that border.  Anything he can do to weaken China's ties with the US would be helpful.

3.   Turkey holds the key to the waterway from southern Russia.  Good relations with Turkey is to Putin's advantage.  Putin's performance in Syria contributed to refugees into Turkey and Europe, destabilizing the EU and threatening Turkey's acceptance into the EU partnership.  But Putin forgave quickly Turkey shooting down a Russian military plane and is making nice to Turkey.

4.   The US Intelligence agencies are always keeping watch on Russia.  The less capable they are, the more power Russia has.

Now, what are some of the things Trump has been promising to do?

1.  NATO is obsolete and doesn't pay its bills according to Trump.  He's going to shake things up.

2.  Trump's been riling China - congratulations call from Taiwan's president,  Secretary of State nominee Tillerman is challenging China's access to nearby islands.   All this looks aimed at making the US-China relations much more fragile and making China's border with Russia weaker.

3.  Trump supports Erdogan and his strongman ways.

4.  National-Security Republican elite fear they are being kept out of Trump administration.



OK, Trump is anti-establishment and we can expect some of his views to be a big change from the past.  But these all seem to line up in one direction - supportive of Putin's agenda.  They are pretty big deals.

And given the help Russia gave Trump in the campaign, and all the Russia friendly appointments, and the most recent news about Russia's leverage on Trump, I'd say that the evidence is lining up to a very dire conclusion.

It took a lot of [for] people to give up their support of Nixon.  They couldn't believe the president would lie, and it meant a change of their whole way of thinking.  But the Watergate committee in the Senate was made up of Republicans as well as Democrats.  While the Republicans made the Democrats prove things, they weren't in denial, and they didn't stonewall the hearings.  This is going to be 'interesting times.'

Is "Kurd" More Than Just A Word In The News For You? Who Are They?

We'd just gotten back from a Bainbridge library Great Decisions presentation by Dr. Reşat Kasaba, Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington Future of Kurdistan,  when I saw this piece in the Morning Briefings section of the Saturday ADN online. (Here's the longer original AP story.) From the ADN:

TURKEY Kurdish group claims responsibility for Ankara attack ANKARA — 

"A Kurdish militant group on Friday claimed responsibility for a suicide car bomb attack in the Turkish capital Ankara which killed 28 people. In a statement posted on its website, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons said it carried out the attack to avenge Turkish military operations against Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey. The Turkey-based group is considered an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and has carried out several violent attacks in the past. Turkey had blamed a U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia group for the attack, saying they had acted in collaboration with the PKK."

[If you're looking at the picture and wondering about the Bainbridge Island library - well, the talk was held at the Bethany Lutheran Church which has more space than the library.]


Violence by Kurds in Turkey was not addressed, but here are some points Dr. Kasaba made:

• Kurds are the indigenous people who have been in the Middle East longer than anyone else there today, including Arabs.
• They've never had their own autonomous state.
• They are tribal - which he said means family based - and so there are many tribal divisions
• They have a major presence in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and a smaller but more integrated presence in Iran.
• The Kurdish area of northern Iraq is relatively autonomous and doing ok.  The Syrian group, with military support from the US to fight ISIS is relatively ok.
• The Turkish Kurds are having trouble because of the 15 year Islamic government in Turkey.  He pointed out that any government in control that long becomes more autocratic and corrupt.
• Cities with the biggest number of Kurds include Istanbul and Berlin.
• Helping the Turks to treat the Kurds better - recognizing their ethnic and linguistic identity and better integrating them into Turkish society - would go a long way to improving the region.
• The nuclear treaty with Iran isn't a solution, but it gives the US a ten year breather in relations with Iran
• Kurds tend to be more egalitarian and women have much more power than is generally the case in the countries they live
• The 2003 Iraq war set back the US in the Middle East
• Trying to solve the Syrian conflict alone would take hundreds of thousands of US troops and lots of funding and with a person like Asad who is willing to destroy his country rather than lose power, even that would have no guarantees
• Russia is not a strong as people think.  Internally they are suffering due to the drop in oil prices and nationalistic ventures like the Ukraine and Syria are attempts to gain support for Putin

'Major Kurdish populations in the Middle East' from Encyclopedia of the Middle East

When you consider his thoughts, you might want to consider that Dr. Kasaba's undergraduate degree is from Turkey and his graduate degrees are from SUNY Binghamton.  So he has a native's understanding of Turkey and the region, but has been in the US long enough to have a good understanding of us as well.  His webpage at UW says:

"Over the last three decades, my research and publications on the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and Turkey have covered economic history, state-society relations, migration, ethnicity and nationalism, modernity and urban history. Recently, I have started researching the role of education in the formation of modern Turkish identity in the twentieth century."

The Encyclopedia of the Middle East has more on Kurds and the map I'm using comes from their site because the photos I took of Kasaba's maps were awful.   It does say there are 26-36 million Kurds in the world, 10-15 million of whom live in Turkey.

To put that into context, this list of countries ordered from highest to lowest population, would put a country of 30 million at number 39, right after Uganda, in its list which includes 155 nations with a population of over 1 million people (plus more with fewer).

I'd note, it's Sunday and here's another story I saw in the Alaska Dispatch News from the (longer) Washington Post article, that highlights Kasaba's point that coming to terms with its Kurdish population is one of the key issues in the Middle East today.

"A rift with the United States, Turkey’s closest and most vital ally, over the status of the main Syrian Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), has further exposed Turkey’s vulnerability. A demand by President Recep Tayyep Erdogan that Washington choose between NATO ally Turkey and the YPG, its main Syrian ally in the fight against the Islamic State, was rebuffed by the State Department this month, despite Turkish allegations that the YPG had carried out the bombing in Ankara. On Saturday, Turkey dug in, demanding unconditional support from the United States. “The only thing we expect from our U.S. ally is to support Turkey with no ifs or buts,” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told journalists in Ankara."

Saudis Condemn Charlie Hebdo Killings While They Flog Blogger Raif Badawi

The world is complex and we face plenty of challenges.  Unless we're willing to stop accepting simplistic (and often nationalistic) explanations of what's happening, things won't get better.  This post reflects a bit of that complexity by following a few threads from the coverage of the Paris killings at Charlie Hebdo.

From the Guardian:

Arab governments and Muslim leaders and organisations across the world have condemned the deadly attack in Paris, but it was praised by jihadi sympathisers who hailed it as “revenge” against those who had “insulted” the prophet Muhammad.
Saudi Arabia called it a “cowardly terrorist attack that was rejected by the true Islamic religion”. The Arab League and Egypt’s al-Azhar university – the leading theological institution in the Sunni Muslim world – also denounced the incident in which masked gunmen shouted “Allahu Akbar” – “god is great ” in Arabic.

Screenshot from Australian News  with text added

Meanwhile, a Saudi blogger is being flogged as part of his sentence.  His crime?  News.com.au reports (part of Murdoch's News Corp):

His brutal punishment follows his arrest in 2012 after he created an online forum that his wife insists was meant to encourage discussion about faith. Following his arrest, his wife and children Najwa, Tirad and Myriyam left the kingdom for Canada.
Last year, Badawi was initially sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in relation to the charges. But after an appeal, the judge stiffened the punishment.
The charges related to articles he wrote criticising religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, as well as pieces written by others that were published on his website.
According to Amnesty International, the prosecution had called for him to be tried for ‘apostasy’ (when a person abandons their religion), which carries the death sentence. As well as the weekly flogging, the 31-year-old’s sentence also includes a 10-year travel ban, and a ban on appearing on media outlets.

Here's a video that purports to be of the first public flogging of Badawi.  It's apparently done with a cellphone and I would imagine that the person who filmed it took considerable risk.




It's not easy to see what is happening.  At the end, it appeared to me that the strokes were more symbolic than serious.  But I don't have any personal experience with flogging.  I do know that sometimes what appears to be a slight impact can do serious damage.  But I looked up about how much damage flogging can cause.

 From a 2007 ABC News report:

". . . Floggings in Saudi Arabia typically take place Thursday nights outside of prisons or marketplaces. The accused is shackled and sometimes permitted to wear a single layer of clothing, like the popular Saudi tunic or dishdash.

This flogging clearly didn't take place at night, nor on Thursday.

Screenshots from YouTube video

A police officer administers the lashes with a bamboo whip about 7 feet long. Under his arm, the officer will typically hold a copy of the Koran in order to regulate the power with which he can whip the accused.

It's hard to know whether this is bamboo or something else.  It's clearly not 7 feet long and it appears the flogger does not have a Quran under his arm.  Here are some screenshots from the video.  I tried to get shots that would show the Koran if he had one.  The bottom picture shows his arm out from his body so that a book would have dropped.  I did talk to an official for an Islamic country who has spent time in Saudi Arabia and he said he'd never heard of the Quran being used this way.

"In the sentence a judge will specify three things: One, the amount of lashes; two, whether the flogging will be held in the prison or publicly; and third, what portions are to be administered at one time," Wilcke said. "No more than 60 to 70 lashes are administered at any one time with usually one to two weeks between floggings. Women will get 10 to 30 lashings a week; a man might get 50 to 60 per week."
If a complete sentence was administered at once, the accused could potentially die. Doctors in Saudi Arabia examine prisoners before each flogging to determine if they are healthy enough to withstand the lashes."

It's not at all clear that the person who wrote this description of the rules was accurate or that if he is, where the rules apply, or who enforces them.  I include them and this caveat to remind people that things are more complicated than we assume at first blush, and that we can't rely on the information.

I would note that I began this post yesterday (Thursday) and today it is reported that the sentence  has been referred to the Saudi Supreme Court and this week's flogging was postponed for medical reasons.

The Bigger Context

This situation raises all sorts of ethical conflicts.  We understand that the Saudis are fighting ISIS so their condemnation of the shootings makes sense on that level.  This punishment falls short of a death penalty (though his wife fears the cumulative floggings could kill him).

Meanwhile the US has condemned Badawi's sentencing and punishment  but shortly after that the State Department, according to Amnesty International's Steve Hawkins,  was praising Secretary of State Kerry's relationship with King Abdullah (about 1:30 into audio.)


Our media has framed the Paris attacks as extremist terrorists attacking freedom of speech.  But others see it in a much larger context.  People like Chris Hedges speak bluntly about this:

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

These are fighting words to the 1% and those who swallow their propaganda.  Notice he didn't say 'capitalism' but rather 'predatory capitalism.'  If the media pays any attention at all to Hedges it mostly will be to label him (not what he says)  disloyal, communistic, anti-American, or traitorous.  If we start to seriously discuss Hedges' arguments (and Hedges is a former Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times  reporter who has spent years reporting from the Middle East, Central America, and the Balkans), lots of corporate friendly versions of the how the world works will start to unravel.

So, it's easy to criticize the Saudi royals, but as I recall, Saudi royals have a special relationship with the Bush family. They were the only people allowed to fly in the US immediately after the World Trade Center attacks.  Which links fairly smoothly to asking what exactly is the Saudi role in the plummeting price of oil?  Merco Press, with a general link to oilprice.com, speculates that the US and the Saudis are in this together to put pressure on Iran, Syria, and Russia.  Arthur Berman, in an interview at oilprce.com doesn't dismiss the political factors, but claims income is the basic Saudi driver.

I don't claim any inside information, except I do know that the world is more complicated than our media present it.  And that Americans (and probably many others) are content with simplistic explanations - so long as they imply, "So go on and don't change anything."  And coverage and reactions are selective.  Why so much more reaction to Charlie Hebdo where 12 were killed, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, are being killed by Boko Haram in Nigeria?   But with climate change and with growing economic inequality both inside the US and globally, those answers won't work for too long.

Missing Malaysia Flight 370

I haven't commented on this because everyone else has and because I have nothing to add.  But as I listen to all the speculation, I do have some thoughts on what might have happened.   Some of the key factors would seem to be:

• Intentional or Unintentional?
• Who?
• Why?

The chart starts to outline those choices:

The Why?

If it's intentional the two basic motives (I'm sure there must be more) that I can think of are personal and political/terror.

Personal could be any situation where someone wants revenge or to collect insurance or ??? - possibly in a way that can't be traced.  A business feud, a family feud, or any of the many different reasons people get very angry at each other.

Political/terror would be a situation where some group with relatively little legitimate power is using terror to make their statement.

That brings us back to Who?  There are the usual suspects

• Al Qaeda and various offshoots.  
• But this plane was headed to China and had lots of Chinese passengers.  And just on March 1, there was a terrorist attack in Kunming which the Chinese government tells us was mounted by Uighurs during the China's National People's Congress. So there's a possibility there too.
• Some organization that's either under the radar or not previously connected with terror attacks.

What?

If it was unintentional, something mechanical happened in the plane and it just went down.  But how do you account for the change in flight direction?  Were the pilots trying to go back after there were mechanical problems but the problems were too much?  Why no messages to aviation controllers?  Lots of questions here.

But if it was intentional, there are different options.

Personal

•  I'm not quite sure what would be required to bring down a plane while one passenger attempted to kill another.  I suspect a gun wouldn't be enough. 
• If someone loaded explosives into someone's luggage, this could have done the trick.
• And someone on the ground attacking with missiles seems a stretch, especially since they were flying at such a high altitude.  

And none of these scenarios is consistent with the plane making a radical course change and continuing to ping for so long


Political/Terror

Petronas Towers from What Do I Know?

Kidnapping - Uighurs possibly thought they could kidnap a plane full of Chinese hostages and negotiate with the Chinese government for concessions.  But given the other Uighur attack with knives in a train station, this seems like a pretty sophisticated plot.  And there is little likelihood the Chinese government would honor any promises that were made to save hostages.  More likely there would be harsh reprisals.

Suicide attack - The last major successful airplane suicide attack was 9/11.  Could plotters have tried to duplicate that effort by attacking the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur?  They were, for a while, the tallest buildings in the world.  What if they tried to take over the plane, but somehow the attempt was thwarted like the third plane in the 9/11 attacks and the plane went down? 


Obviously there are many possible scenarios.  I have no crystal ball, but I suspect that the eventual story, if we ever learn it, will fall within these options. 

Whatever the final story, one can't help but feel great sympathy for the passengers and for their families and friends as the agony of waiting drags on. 

What Countries Border Syria?

Syria's been in the headlines about two years now, but where is it?  How many of you have pulled out a map and studied this country so that when they say Allepo, you know where it is?  If you've already done this, then hit next blog.  If not, I'm here to remedy that deficit, to help you do what you know you should have done already.

----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- -----------------

cut here

Cyprus	B
Turkey
Israel
Lebanon
Egypt
Jordan
Iraq
Syria
Saudi Arabia

----------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- -----------------

cut here

You know if I just gave you a map with the country names, you wouldn't look at it.  But if you take a screen shot from the first cut here line to the next, print it out, and then fill out the table, you'll get this forever.  Below is another map with the names.

From Blog28

And so you can follow the news about what's happening inside Syria, here's a political map with the names of main cities.

This political map comes from a site called World Shia Forum, which has an array of maps showing religious, ethnic, linguistic, population and other characteristics.  The writer of this post proposes dividing up the country on ethnic lines. 


 -

Shell Could Learn From This Kulik - Four Russians Make It Around the World In Inflatable Catamaran

While Shell Oil has had a lot of trouble with its oil rig the Kulluk, four Russians on the Kulik expedition have managed to navigate around the world an inflatable craft of their own design.

The Phuket News reports they arrived back in Phuket after five years.

The team, under skipper Anatoly Kulik,59, left Phuket in February 2008. They sailed some 60,000 kilometres, made landfall in 38 countries and spent a total of 13 months at sea.

Kulik himself, a master of boat-borne water sports, a “Distinguished Traveler of Russia” (an award from the Russian Sports Federation), and a member of the Russian Geographical Society (RGS). Responsibilities on the expedition: team leader, ship’s captain and cook;

Evgeny Kovalevsky, 56, twice Russian champion and silver prize-winner in boat-borne water sports, also a Distinguished Travelerand member of the RGS, the crew’s “chief diplomat” (responsible for establishing rapport with local authorities and the community), interpreter, videographer and photographer;

Evgeny Tashkin, another champion in boat-borne water sports, acting as video and camera operator, chronicler of the voyage and in charge of Internet connectivity; and

Stanislav Beryozkin, Russian champion in long-distance sailing, the expedition’s navigator and communications chief. . .

Stanislav Beryozkin, Russian champion in long-distance sailing, the expedition’s navigator and communications chief.
- See more at: http://www.thephuketnews.com/foursome-back-in-phuket-after-record-odyssey-38258.php#sthash.suilP5S1.dpuf

Comfort was never at a premium. Accommodation was in a 12-square-metre tent-like structure erected above the hulls, which also served as a miniature kitchen, and a warehouse for boxes of supplies, drinking water tanks, communication equipment and everything necessary for a long voyage.

Read the whole article here.

The video is short and in Russian, but some things transcend language. 

More Than Babysitting - Egypt, Trees, and Birds

Besides babysitting, we did get to stop at the library Saturday morning for a Great Decisions film and speakers on modern Egypt.  A former State Department official moderated and two Egyptian speakers - Marwa Maziad, an Egyptian journalist and fellow at the Middle East Center of the U.W. Jackson School of International Studies.

Marwa Maziad and Tarek Dawoud

Tarek Dawoud is a graduate of Cairo University Computer Engineering department, Tarek came to the United States from Egypt in early 2001 to work in the Software industry.  Tarek currently serves as the president of the Washington state chapter of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and  as a board member of the Islamic School of Seattle as well as a member of the Interfaith and Outreach Committee at Masjid Ar-Rahmah in Redmond.

Larry Kerr, the moderator,  was a Career Member of the Senior Foreign Service for over 25 years after leaving the US military.

Essentially, Marwa and Tarek  both felt that the video made the Mursi government seem much more stable, moderate, and capable than it is.  Both see lots of issues today, but were hopeful for five years from now.


The room was packed - about 60 people [It turns out there were 75 according to Kathleen Thorne who runs the program and supplied me the names and background information on Tarek and James.]  I don’t think there more than a handful (excluding the speakers) under 40.  I’m not sure what that means - I suspect that it has more to do with their time schedules and young families than their interest in the topic. 

We also drove out to Port Gamble.  A town whose architecture was copied from Maine where the settlers came from.  While it had a saw mill once, it seems to be mostly a tourist spot today.  Everything was labeled like this tree. But I see it's still hard to read, so here's what it says:

"It was in 1640 that the "Earl of Camperdown" in Dundee Scotland growing on the floor of his elm forest.  He grafted it to a Scotch Elm and it took hold producing the first Camperdown Elm.  The Scotch Elm is the  only root mass the Camperdown Elm will grow on.  The tree is a mutant and cannot self produce. Every Camperdown Elm tree in the world is part of the original and they must be grafted onto a Scotch Elm tree to get started.  When the graft starts to grow, the Scotch Elm branches are cut off leaving only Camperdown Elm.  This magnificent tree depends on humankind to keep it alive as a species."

A Tree A Day suggests it wasn't the Earl himself who is responsible:

"An astute head-gardener grafted it onto a Wych elm, or Ulmus glabra (there is some controversy involving Ulmus hollandica). What was produced was a sprawling canopy that gave rise to this cultivar's other name, the Umbrella elm."

We've also been seeing some birds we only see in the summer in Anchorage.  A few worth mentioning -  buffleheads,  American widgeons, and one of my favorites, the varied thrush.

Why Are Some People Successful and Others Not?

How much of success is nature?  How much is nurture?  Is it your talent?  Hard work?  Or good luck and helping hands?

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers:  The Story of Success offers a challenge to the belief that all you need are talent and hard work.  It offers a mental challenge   for  those who are successful and take all the credit for themselves.  Or aren't and take all the blame.

When Obama said recently "If you’ve got a successful business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen" he was echoing the sentiment of the book, though that single sentence, out of context, certainly gave the Romney team lots to work with.  He should have added "all by yourself" and left off the 'somebody else made that happen.'  But if you heard the whole piece, you know he meant it right. 

" If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, wow, it must be because I’m so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than anybody else.  Let me tell you something.  There are a lot of hardworking people out there.  If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody worked to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Someone invested in roads and bridges.  If you’ve got a successful business, you didn’t build that, somebody else made that happen." [For the video click here.]

 Now that my book club's discussion of Outliers is over let's see if I can give a more thorough look at the book than I did in the previous post that highlighted just one section.


First, the basic argument of Outliers is simple, but not quite straightforward.
Second, and more problematic, is that the proof he offers is a series of case studies.  The cases support his argument, but don't prove it.

Some of the cases are strong and well supported by data - like the hockey players' birthdates.  Others are incomplete (though detailed) and vague, thus open to other interpretations. 

So let me first try to offer the basic argument and then go through the some of case studies.  Even if they aren't clear proof, they are all interesting and raise interesting questions.

The Basic Argument (as I see it)

• Among the United States' most fundamental beliefs are  
• the self-made man.  If you are smart and/or talented and work hard, you can succeed.  
• people who achieve amazing feats - star athletes, star entrepreneurs, star musicians - are 'outliers'.  That is they fall statistically on the far end of the bell curve.  They are exceptions.  (Which somewhat contradicts the idea that anyone can succeed.)
• These are myths, at least to some extent.
• achieving recognized greatness depends on
•  having 10,000 hours of experience, not just innate genius or talent
•  being at the right place at the right time
•  cultural background which prepares individuals and/or privileges them

Basically, he's saying that while talent and hard work certainly help people succeed, individuals aren't necessarily responsible for their success or failure.  Other factors - beyond hard work and ability - play an important role: particularly being at the right place at the right time and your cultural background which does or doesn't prepare you to succeed in a particular environment.

Support 

Now let's look at the cases that most strongly support his argument.

1.  10,000 hours  - this was the subject of my previous post on this, you can get more details there.   He basically takes a study of musicians that says 10,000 hours of serious practice is the threshold separating those who succeed big and those who don't.   It's not special genius, it's the work.  He gives the example of the Beatles working 8 hours a day, seven days a week playing in Hamburg strip clubs that gave them the 10,000 hours that pushed them beyond the average band.  He cites Bill Gates getting access to a time-share computer in high school at a time when most colleges were still using punch cards as an example of someone who got his 10,000 hours in before anyone else and thus was ready to excel in the new world of ubiquitous computers.

He's not saying talent doesn't help, but the real demarcation between those who become great is the 10,000 hours.  And, those 10,000 hours include hard work.  But that's not enough.  Gladwell cites K. Anders Ericsson on the 10,000 hours rule for developing expertise and then extrapolates that to other areas. 

2.  Being at the right place at the right time.  His best example here is Canadian hockey players.  The best are overwhelmingly those who were born in January, February, March, and April, because January 1 is the cut off for each year's new kids in school hockey.  And for the 9 and 10 year olds, a year's difference is a lot in terms of size and ability.  So the oldest kids, those born in the first three months, start out better, so they get more game time, more positive attention from the coaches, and generally more help and recognition  that they are 'better.'  This extra attention, Gladwell writes, actually makes them better in a few years.  They are the ones who get their 10,000 hours.  Since there should be a more equal annual distribution of hockey skill, this argument is pretty persuasive and got most media attention when the book came out in 2008.  I covered this in more detail in the previous post too.

3.  Culture.  The example that seemed to have the most objective basis was Korean Airlines pilots.  After a series of crashes,  KAL had to examine why its pilots were crashing planes more than other airlines' pilots.  It turned out that Korean culture is one of the most hierarchically deferential.  Co-pilots were never able to directly confront the captain when they thought the captain was making an error.  They made very indirect hints.  With retraining led by Delta Airlines' David Greenberg, the pilots learned to overcome their culturally induced hierarchical deference so that co-pilots could confront captains in the cockpit.  A particularly telling comment (it's hard to find the data behind the comments because the notes in the back are sparse and there's no bibliography) is that most plane crashes occur when the captain is flying the plane (the piloting and co-piloting duties, Gladwell says, are split 50-50 between the captain and co-pilot).  The explanation is that the captain, when acting as the co-pilot, is much more assertive telling the pilot to make corrections. 

A second cultural example, Asian dominance in international math exams, is interesting, but the cause and effect relationship is harder to prove. (At least with the KAL example the explanation was tested through the retraining.)  He's arguing on two levels:

• Growing rice establishes a culture of hard work and perseverance that causes Asian students to spend more time on their math homework
• Chinese (and other Asian) words for numbers better express their numerical value and thus Chinese kids learn them faster and learn to do arithmetic faster 

Gladwell cites a Chinese proverb "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."  (So, does that mean working hard is all you need and not good timing and culture?  Or is growing up in a Chinese rice farming area the culture?  Are all Chinese rice farmers who often get up early successful? What about all the years of starvation in China's history?)  He goes into detail about what's required to plant rice and how that's a great education.  It's meaningful work he claims because:

• of the relationship between how hard you work and the reward
• it's complex - effectively running a small business, juggling a family workforce, selecting the right seeds, building a sophisticated irrigation system, etc.
• it's autonomous - here he says the landlords, by the 14th or 15th Century practiced a hands-off relationship and merely collected a set rent and gave the tenant farmers autonomy

He compared the Chinese proverb above to a more fatalistic Russian proverb:  "If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it."  (Why not say it's the belief in God that's the problem?)

In the second part of the Chinese cultural example - the impact of language on how we know the world (a topic dear to my heart) - Gladwell argues that Chinese words for numbers make it easier to learn math.

• all the numbers can be said faster than, say English numbers, and the shorter time needed to say the numbers, the more numbers in a list you can remember. 
• the structure of the number words is different in Asian languages
• in Chinese 
• the teens are ten-one (eleven); ten-two, ten-three, etc. and 
• the twenties are two-ten-one; two-ten-two, etc.
• one hundred (bai) and one thousand and ten thousand are all a one syllable words, thus:
• yi-bai-yi (one hundred and one)

So not only are the numbers faster to say, but they include a numeric structure that helps to learn mathematics.  Gladwell writes:

"Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22).  Only then can she do the math:  2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59.  Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there.  No number translation is necessary:  It's five-tens-nine."  [The literal translation is three-ten-seven, not 'tens']

The language makes doing math much easier than in Western languages.  The words for numbers fit the numerical structures and computational functions  better.  His backup on this is the fact that international tests of school children have Asian kids way out on top, every year.

"On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile.  The United States, France, England, Germany, and other Western industrialized nations cluster at somewhere between the twenty-six and thirty-six percentile.  That's a big difference."

Well, I looked at the TIMSS scores.  Here's part of one chart.

Chart from National Center for Educational Statistics - Supplementary Tables PDF link

[They seem to give the tests every four years and the 2011 scores aren't online yet.  China's not on the list because they do not take the exams.  They seem to be in numerical order for 2007, and so the 1995 list is somewhat out of order.  To make it large enough, I cut off the screenshot leaving out nine other countries.]

OK, the five top countries are Asian: three Chinese speaking countries and South Korea and Japan.  Both Japanese and  Korean numbers share the Chinese structure for teens, decades, and hundreds.  But the Japanese numbers are not all single syllable words.  Maybe that's why they are the last of the top Asian countries.

But I would point out that the language of Thailand, which is also a rice producing country - though the paddies aren't as intricate as he describes the terraced Chinese ones - also shares the linguistic numerical advantages of Chinese and Korean and Japanese, yet it is significantly lower on the list than the European countries and the United States.

Ropi, is there something about Hungarians that puts you just below the Asians?  Though there is a big gap.

I would also note that such comparative test scores are misleading, because other nations track their students out of the academic tracks at different stages.  The lower grades may be more comparable, but by the higher grades, the non-academic tracked students are in vocational schools and don't take the exams.  Also, in the US a wider range of students with disabilities often take these sorts of tests (I don't know about the TIMSS though) which can make the US look much worse than it actually is since a different set of kids is tested in different countries.  Also, Gladwell uses percentiles whereas the charts I found had raw scores and this way the gap didn't look as large. 



If there really is a linguistic advantage for math in Asian languages, that totally changes how we think about the meaning of the test scores and perhaps how we teach math.  This argument is more persuasive for me than the rice farming one, though I understand that Gladwell is saying that people in these cultures have a tradition for harder work.  But so does every generation of immigrants to the United States and that drive lessens, it seems to me, with each generation.  I suspect the story is much more complex than Gladwell portrays it.

There are a number of other interesting cases, but this is long enough. I'll try to do a couple more of his cases in another post.  Especially his discussion of cultures of honor and how that explains some Southern behavior.  

Basically, Gladwell's book is consistent with Obama's point that successful people are successful because of a combination of things.  Obama's blunt "you didn't build that, somebody else did" isn't quite the right message though.  And just as Obama supporters use every Romney gaffe, I'm sure the Romney folks enjoyed this one from Obama.  But the context of the statement shows he's really saying that no one does it alone.  The fact that there are more small business successes in the US than most other countries, for example, makes the point - our system is more supportive of that kind of success.

But I suspect many would disagree with Obama even if his wording were perfect.  The Ayn Rand contingent believe the individual is successful on his or her own without help from others. (If that were actually true, then Ayn Rand could have stayed in Soviet Russia and succeeded.  They'd say the freedom of the US fosters individual freedom.  And I'd say that was what Obama was saying.)

An example of someone who apparently believes that the individual deserves all the credit  is described in a Gladwell chapter note about Jeb Bush from S.V. Dáte's Jeb:  America's Next Bush:

"In both his 1994 and 1998 runs, Jeb made it clear:  not only was he not apologizing for his background, he was proud of where he was financially, and certain that it was the result of his own pluck and work ethic.  'I've worked real hard for what I've achieved and I'm quite proud of it, ' he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993.  'I have no sense of guilt, no sense of wrongdoing.'
The attitude was much the same as he had expressed on CNN's Larry King Live in 1992:  'I think, overall, it's a disadvantage,' he said of being the president's son when it came to his business opportunities. 'Because you're restricted in what you can do.'
This thinking cannot be described as anything other than delusional."

 I don't think anyone needs to apologize for their family background, but one should be able to acknowledge that being the son of a US Senator/ Vice President/President of the United States might have offered some contacts and access to resources that most people don't have.  It's this blindness to one's privileges compared to others that allows rich people to say that the poor are all lazy shirkers.  If they weren't they'd all be rich, right? 

Gladwell isn't saying special talent and hard work aren't important.  He's saying that lots of people have talent and work hard.  But it takes more than that.  It also takes luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right individual and cultural skills for the times.  That makes sense to me.

Here are the other two posts on Outliers:

• 10,000 Hours - Gladwell's Outliers Part 
• Does Culture of Honor Explain Southern Murder Style - More From Outliers

Do Americans Know More About Lohan than Pakistan?

Map from Lonely Planet

[The Lohan-Pakistan comparison is at the end.]

Declan Walsh is a Guardian reporter who's been in Pakistan for the last seven years.  Here are a couple paragraphs from an overview article he wrote for the Guardian on what's happening in the country December's Atlantic calls "The Ally from Hell."

But Pakistan is Afghanistan's neighbor as well as Iran's, India's, and China's. We need to know.  And reading a few articles like this will at least get you to know more than 90% of Americans. 

So I offer these excerpts of the article - emailed to me by a Pakistani friend - in hopes that you might be tempted to read the whole article. which is headlined:

Pakistan: bombs, spies and wild parties

After seven tumultuous years reporting from Pakistan, Guardian correspondent Declan Walsh reflects on the inspiring figures, the jaw-dropping landscapes, the deep corruption – and the day the Taliban came to town . . .

. . . Pakistanis swerve into heavy traffic without looking, don't stick to their lane or indicate, which makes it hard to predict where they are coming from or going to. Social graces are rare – horns honk, headlights are impatiently flashed – but social hierarchy is observed: hulking four-wheel drives (increasingly armour-plated) barge through the swarms of matchbox cars. Off to the side, the police are taking bribes.

But pull off the road and everything changes. Pakistanis are welcoming, generous and voluble. They insist you stay for tea, or the night. They love to gab, often with glorious indiscretion – national politics and local tattle, cricket scandals, movie stars and conspiracy theories. This is fun, and good for the business of journalism.

While Islam is technically the glue of society, you learn, the real bonds are forged around clans, tribes, personal contacts. To get anything done, the official route is often pointless – the key is sifarish, the reference of an influential friend. Journalists use sifarish a lot; occasionally they are called on to dispense it too. . .

and further down

When I arrived in 2004, Islamabad was a somnolent, reliably dull city. By night, the sons of the rich drag-raced their daddies' cars along deserted streets, swerving to avoid wild boar ambling from the bushes. Foreigners mocked the capital for its provincial feel. "Islamabad – half the size of a New York graveyard but twice as dead" went the diplomats' tired gag as white-gloved waiters served gin and tonic on manicured lawns.

Then the Taliban came to town. It started with the bloody siege of the Red mosque complex in July 2007, just before Pakistan's 60th birthday. Bullets zipped through the leafy streets; I dusted off my flak jacket. Then came the bombs: at markets, checkposts, the Naval headquarters, UN offices, the five-star Marriott hotel. Up the street from my house, Benazir Bhutto gave speeches from behind barbed wire, during a brief-lived house arrest. Weeks later she drove out to Rawalpindi, where she was assassinated.

Today the blasts have stopped, mostly, but the city is cloistered in concrete. Fortified walls rise over the streets, vehicles slalom through elaborate checkposts, hotel entrances resemble prisons with gold-buttoned guards. Embassies are retreating into a sandbagged, Green Zone-style enclave; the presidency and even ISI headquarters are similarly isolated.

I suspect people are more inclined to check out rock stars than Pakistan.   I did check Google Trends to see how many average hits Pakistan gets compared to Lohan.  It's not a pretty picture.

Click to enlarge and see clearly
 

Note that the scales for the two graphs are different.  I had to raise Lohan's graph so the level 2 on each would match.  Also note that Lohan goes up to 6 and Pakistan only goes up to 3.

We just got the last troops out of Iraq (or so they say.)  From Fort Bragg via a South African television website (for a different set of reader comments):

The war killed 4 500 US troops and at least 60 000 Iraqis. Obama said on Tuesday the war would cost more than $1 trillion all told.

 Those are the costs we know now.  How will having Mom or Dad gone for long periods affect their kids long term?  What about all the medical costs for the veterans?  And the costs for the families of the 60,000 dead Iraqis? 

We went into that war, in part, because people knew more about 'personalities' like Lohan than they knew about Iraq.  Pakistan isn't going away.  It behooves us to know more about it than we do, so we aren't cowed by DC experts with classified proof of the need to go to war. 

Of course I don't need to worry about regular readers at this blog.   But for those who got here accidentally to learn about Lohan's trip to Pakistan, please try to read the whole Guardian article before you read your Facebook wall.   And maybe the Atlantic article too.  Then link to them on Facebook. 

Theory U and Other Textbooks For Rent

 I'm trying to catch up with older unfinished posts. This one's from the George Washington University bookstore in DC from our Labor Day visit for a post-wedding reception for B&J's DC friends and relatives.

University bookstores are always interesting and in the short time I was let off the leash, I perused a couple of shelves.

Maybe most noteworthy is that students can rent their books these days. The rental price wasn't a whole lot different from the used prices, but I guess it saves the hassle of trying to sell it back. And, of course, there are also digital books available online.

Here are a few that were on the shelves.  Note, I'm not recommending any of these because I haven't read them.  I'm just throwing you some brain candy.

"The Theory U (also called "U" methodology) is a change management method targeting leadership as process of inner knowing and social innovation developed by Otto Scharmer and originally based on a process known as the U-process or U-procedure (also called 'bath tub' and 'U Way') developed by Dr Friedrich Glasl and Dirk Lemson of the NPI (Netherlands Pedagogical Institute) in 1968 (Bos, 1974 and Friedrich Glasl & Leo de la Houssaye, 1975) and presented systematically from the 1980s. It has been a valuable tool in organisation development and social development since that time (Allison, 2008, GOSH Trust, Büchele, U). Recently it has been elaborated as Theory U by Otto Scharmer.

"The initial method developed by Glasl and Lemson involved a social process involving a few or many co-workers, managers and/or policymakers proceeding from diagnosis of the present state of the organisation plans for the future. They described a process in a U formation consisting of three levels (technical and instrumental subsystem, social subsystem and cultural subsystem) and seven stages beginning with the observation of organisational phenomena, workflows, resources etc., and concluding with specific decisions about desired future processes and phenomena. The method draws on the Goethean techniques described by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, transforming observations into intuitions and judgements about the present state of the organisation and decisions about the future."  (From Wikipedia)

Barnett (2001) in his theory-laden book The Meaning of Environmental Security, looks at the increasingly global recognition of environmental problems by examining what he calls the “collision of environment and security.” He places the concept in the realm of politics, though embedded in an increasing awareness of the interconnectedness of modern problems. The traditional approach, which Barnett calls a view of environment and security, is that the state is the object to be secured, and this view is consistent with strategic concerns about warfare and territorial defense and is influenced by political and international relations theory.

The alternative approach of including the environment as a dimension of security advocates the security of the biosphere and its ecosystems as a means of protecting the habitat of all life on Earth, emphasizing that it is the eco-systems and ecological processes that must be secured (that is, their health, integrity, and functioning maintained). By shifting the focus to the ecosystem, the concept of ecological security concerns the overall welfare of the planet. (From Haven D. Cook, "Transboundary Natural Area Protection: Broadening the Definition of National Security")

Just Give Money to the Poor:

Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely – to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families. (from Kumarian Press)

The publisher of Irony has this quote from Barack Obama on its website:

“[Niebuhr] is one of my favorite philosophers. I take away [from his works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard.”—President Barack Obama

 From The Irony of American History which was first published in 1952:

 Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning. Our own nation, always a vivid symbol of the most characteristic attitudes of a bourgeois culture, is less potent to do what it wants in the hour of its greatest strength than it was in the days of its infancy. The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world. The pattern of the historical drama grows more quickly than the strength of even the most powerful man or nation.  [Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 1–11 of The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©1952 by the Estate of Reinhold Niebuhr. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press. (Footnotes and other references included in the book may have been removed from this online version of the text.)]

And here's where they'll gladly take your money.

Blind Spot in the Progressive Vision in Afghanistan

In a post last Friday about the resignation letter of an American State Department  employee in Afghanistan, I listed helping Afghan women as one of the goals of our presence in Afghanistan. 

In a piece in Countercurrents, Cage Wagenvoort  looks at American policy in Afghanistan and challenges that reason for being there.  He argues that we in the West have regularly gone into other cultures under the banner of noble ideals.  Unfortunately, he writes,

Ideals have the habit of coalescing into absolutes, and absolutes have a habit of shedding blood when one nation attempts to impose them on another. . .

We now see this same missionary zeal at work in Afghanistan where we are told that ours is an effort to liberate Afghan women from the yoke of oppression that has been placed on their shoulders by a misogynist regime. It has appeal because in truth, women in that country are treated as if they’re chattel.

The paradox, here, is that women’s rights will never ride into Afghanistan astride a drone. In Vietnam we destroyed villages to save them; in Afghanistan, we destroy wedding parties to free them.

You can read the whole piece here.  (The "blind spot in the progressive vision" in the title of this post comes from the last sentence of Wagenvoord's piece.)

How is it that Americans feel outraged when non-Americans tell us what to do (remember how French fries and toast were banned after 9/11?), or tell us what is right and wrong, yet we can't understand why other cultures respond the same way when we tell them how to live?