In War and Peace

by Richard Crews

On the battlefield people kill one another legally, they take and hold prisoners without due cause or due process, they confiscate and destroy property without any legal proceedings whatsoever, they interrogate captives with minimal constraints.... Such are the "Laws of War."

But the Laws of War were born and bred in different times from our own--times when uniformed soldiers carried non-concealed weapons into battle--into battles which were easy to distinguish from non-battles.

Now the term "war" has been redefined--not just to include a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" but, equally ambiguously, a "war on terror"--there are no battles that come and go, no uniformed troops, and--most significantly--no distinguishable endpoint.

Soldiers captured in "normal" battle could be held for months--even a year or two--until the war was over. People taken prisoner in the war on terror can, apparently--since there is no endpoint--be held for the rest of their lives. Without due cause. Without due process. They cannot be brought to trial, apparently, because the "evidence" against them was not gathered or held in a responsible way (for example, the people who identified them originally are long gone; their "confessions" were obtained under torture and therefore cannot be considered as legal evidence).

One of the worst failings of the Obama administration is that he has not developed--by Executive orders and Congressional actions--any legal code and procedures for handling the unfortunates caught in this terrible limbo between civil rights and uncivil wrongs.

There is* an Afghan goat herder who prior to his capture (he was pointed out by neighboring villagers who got $50 for "turning him in") had never heard of most of what he has been accused of--what, under torture, he has admitted to. He has been incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay for over seven years, mostly in solitary confinement, often shackled, sleep-deprived, left at times to sit in his own urine and feces. He shall, apparently, spend the rest of his life in prison. Without trial; without charges.

Where are our "American values" in this? Where is "the long arc of history that bends towards justice"?

+++++

* When I say "there is" I mean "there could be"--we do not know for sure. There are quite a few prisoners who could be in (or close to) this category. Isn't that appalling?

Baby Steps in Mandarin and Arabic

by Richard Crews

"The parting with my wife and poor children has often been to me...as pulling the flesh from my bones. Often brought to my mind are the many hardships, miseries, and needs that my poor family were likely to meet with...especially my poor blind child who, I must confess, lay nearer to my heart than all the others. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one might undergo would break my heart to pieces. Poor child, what sorrows are you likely to have for your portion in this world! You must be beaten, must beg, suffer cold, hunger, nakedness, and a thousand calamities though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow upon thee." (John Bunyan, 1666)

Every parent wants the best for their child. We want to start them in life with a strong emotional foundation so that they feel deeply safe and secure no matter what tribulations--even disasters--life may throw at them. We want them to have a healthy body and be armed with knowledge and habits that will assure their physical well-being across decades of development and devolution. And we want them to have the foundational mental skills--in perception, memory, and reasoning--that will enable them to build a complete and functional, pragmatic but inspired personality, character, and world view.

Parenting is one of the most difficult and important challenges that each of us takes on in life, but it is usually done essentially from an "amateur" position. We learned it mostly from our parents and other amateurs, and we never fully confront the intricacies and the breath of the challenges.

There is one area in particular in which most child-rearing "systems" (i.e., the behavioral patterns that govern a particular household) are deficient. That is in the development of language. Every child learns a native language, and also a rich, metaphor- and homonym-ridden para-language--a slang--that goes along with the native language and varies with the particular locale and cultural group of the family home. Since there are more than 5,000 languages spoken in the world today--and many, many more that died out in centuries past--it is clear that the number of different mental-equipment systems a child may inherit from language-cultural roots is truly vast.

There are several aspects of native language that one should note. For one thing, the structure (particularly the grammar) and also the vocabulary (what can and can't be readily symbolized in a language) are very important in the child's developing thought patterns. Furthermore, languages vary widely in the mental tools they bequeath to a child (and therefore to the adult that child becomes). Benjamin Lee Whorf, a leading scholar in the field of linguistics during the first half of the twentieth century, went so far as to say that the world we experience--our reality--varies depending on the native language we learned in our earliest, thought-forming years.

It is easiest to acquire a deep, "native" familiarity with a language during the first few years of life. One can only imagine how important--how powerful--it must be to acquire the mental tools of more than one language during those formative years. Yet very few households are structured to facilitate the young child being submerged in more than one language--of having a growing child's mental possibilities expanded to include those provided by more than one "native" language. For a child who has a safe, loving, perceptually rich home to grow up in, the most important gift a parent can give is to provide the mental tools available from multiple language exposures.

There are some further advantages. It is clearly advantageous to a young adult to be fluent in one or more foreign languages; it expands social possibilities, as well as opportunities for travel and cross-cultural experiences. Moreover, any person who has native-level fluency in more than one language, can rely on that as a vocational, economic asset throughout life. When jobs are hard to come by, they are much more readily available to someone who is fluent in multiple languages.

In addition, further foreign languages are easier to learn if they are related to a language one already knows. For example, someone who knows English, already knows a lot about the grammatical structure and vocabulary of any other Indo-European language such as German, French, Russian, Italian, one of the Scandinavian languages, etc.

The question arises what particular languages one might best expose a young child to. English is an obvious choice: it is more widely spoken either as native language or as a second language than any other language in the world. There are about 350 million native speakers of English, but there are at least two billion more who know English in addition to their native language. It is, more than any other, the international language of commerce, science, and intercultural relations. It has a fairly complete Indo-European grammar, and an extensive vocabulary from which cognates in other Indo-European languages may be drawn.

Mandarin (specifically, "Standard Mandarin" or "Standard Chinese")is the second language of choice. It is of the Sino-Tibetan language family--very different from Indo-European--and is spoken natively by over one billion people throughout the world. This is more than any other language and, although it is predominantly found in Asia, especially China, it is also widely dispersed geographically.

The third choice is Arabic (specifically, "Modern Standard Arabic"), a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic family--very different from an Indo-European or a Sino-Tibetan language. It is spoken natively by over 400 million people, predominantly in the Middle-East but also widely throughout the world.

So there you have it in broad strokes. The best upbringing advantages you can give your baby, in addition to providing a safe, loving, perceptually stimulating home, is to expose a child--from about six months of age at least to age 8 or 10 years--to native speakers of Mandarin and Arabic, as nannies or baby sitters, as household friends, and through travel and exposure to foreign-language TV, movies, voice recordings, language training, and other programs. You will not only, thereby, expand your child's mental tools and social possibilities, you will be providing a rich aesthetic and vocational resource that will continue to serve throughout life. Moreover, you will be making it easier for the child (and adult) to learn additional languages later on.

Obama Update

by Richard Crews

It has been 214 days since Obama's inauguration. How's he doing?

The financial meltdown seems to have been averted; the Second Great Depression seems to have bottomed out. Moreover, he used those economic crises to launch revolutionary initiatives in infrastructure repair, green energy, and revitalized education. He has reintroduced international diplomacy and initiated a rebirth of civil rights and of scientism and intelligent, open discourse in public affairs.

Some libertarians object that he has moved too slowly on restoring civil liberties.

Some naturalists object that he has moved too slowly on green matters--on counteracting pollution and on restoring the protection of our parks and wild places, and of endangered species.

His most aggressive and impressive initiative has been toward cleaning up and rebuilding our health-care system.

His most striking failure has been in the lack of bipartisan cooperation. The Republican (conservative) philosophy has some potentially useful perspectives: that changes should be careful and gradual, and spending should be limited. Unfortunately no sensible Republican leadership has emerged (please, if you know of any, name them); moreover the catastrophic effects of deregulation and the historical failure of trickle-down economic stimulation have become evident. The Republicans have reduced themselves to obstructionism--including distortion and deceit. They have simply read themselves out of the governing equation.

I believe Obama has gotten off to a strong start on--
(1) building his team(s) based on brains and pragmatism
(2) initial rescue from inherited economic and diplomatic debacles
(3) laying foundations for infrastructure and education reconstruction
(4) expending his honeymoon gloss to break the health-care log jam

I believe he has honed his Washington political-manipulation skills (having carefully studied Lincoln's, Teddy Roosevelt's, FDR's, Reagan's, and Clinton's strengths and errors). He has added to his community-organizing and rhetorical skills--plus his experience as a Constitutional scholar and then a struggling worker-bee-drone in the Senate--toward development of a Washington leadership style--
(1) get the best academic and scientific advice available
(2) make a show of consulting all stake-holding power brokers--early and loudly
(3) but--and he has only just learned this through getting burned a bit on the health-care thing--design and shepherd specific legislative initiatives through Congress (almost LBJ-like, but hopefully never that savage)

The philosophic visions that have become evident are wonderful--
(1) grabbing the technology tiger by the tail (Twitter- and nano-power)
(2) rebuilding social conscience--widespread (though we see it mainly domestically) and popular (though we see it initially in the bourgeoisie)
(3) green-ness, wisely tempered by scientism and political pragmatism
(4) Constitutional and civil-libertarian values
(5) good, old fashioned international diplomacy, frustrating and reptilian as it may be

And his sense of pace is inspiring--
(1) economic salvage work must be done immediately, but developing effective re-regulation of the financial industries will take years
(2) one can chip away at wealth redistribution--taxes on the superwealthy, curbing exorbitant pay and bonuses, etc.--but this, too, is a change in the social structure that must evolve over many years
(3) reconstruction of infrastructure, education, energy, internationalism (political and economic), green-ness, etc. will take decades, but one must get the first shovel into the ground.

Healthcare--Some Ideas

by Richard Crews

The U.S. healthcare system is a vast and complicated patchwork of ideas and principles; of individual careers and social patterns; of clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, educational programs, service and philanthropic groups--of schemes and dreams--that has grown up over many decades. It is expansive and expensive--it involves nearly one-sixth of the national economy. It is painfully personal and epically tragic--it interacts with our deepest emotional aches and existential fears.

And it is not particularly efficient nor effective. Several First-World countries provide their citizens better healthcare--by every measure from longevity and chronic disease statistics to waiting-room annoyances--than the U.S. does, and with less cost and social discontent.

Some say the U.S. healthcare system is in need of reform because of this fragmentation, socio-cultural dissonance, and disparity with other First-World systems. Alternatively, some say we need to fix it because science and medicine are progressing so fast that--like Lewis Carrol's famous metaphor--we have to run as hard as we can just to stay in the same place. But all knowledgeable analysts agree that healthcare costs are increasing, over a period of years and decades, faster than inflation and the growth of the U.S. economy (of GDP); in other words, if we do nothing but sit back and watch, healthcare costs will bankrupt our country--and hence our civilization and our way of life--over the next couple of decades.

That being said, we can set aside the political dilemma that has paralyzed healthcare reform up to now. Yes, there are entrenched interests--resistances from big business, from religion, from social and political powers. Yes, there is tremendous inertia--the healthcare system has been pieced together from bits and pieces that worked and didn't work over many decades. Yes, there is a disparity of views--for every good idea about what should be done, there are strong, reasonable counter-views as to why that particular idea should not be implemented. But we can set all this aside in our considerations, not because it is easy to overcome, but because--given the economic and historic handwriting on the wall--it MUST be overcome.

So here are some ideas--some of them "good ideas"--about what can, and must, be done in overhauling the U.S. healthcare system. (I plan to expand, with specifics, each of these broad "idea" areas.)

(1) Waste, inefficiencies, and economic inequities must be weeded out of the system.

(2) Greed and absurd proprietary profits must yield to proper competition and regulation.

(3) A strong thrust of education, disease prevention, and personal responsibility for health must be built into our lifestyle patterns.

(4) And perhaps most difficult and subtle, yet most important--religious views and idealized human rights notwithstanding--a shift to a sort of cultural realism regarding healing, maturation, aging, and death must find its way into and throughout our national self-image and cultural expectations.

Goat's Milk vs. Cow's Milk

by Richard Crews, M.D.

There are two significant nutritional differences between goat's milk and cow's milk: (1) goat's milk tends to be less allergenic than cow's milk (discussed below), and (2) goat's milk is less generative of atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure) than cow's milk (also discussed below).

There are two false problems that worry some people: (3) goat's milk tends to be more expensive commercially than cow's milk (discussed below), and (4) goat's milk may have a bad taste compared with cow's milk (also discussed below).

In general, milk from goats is very similar to milk from cows. Culturally, goat's milk is used more widely around the world than cow's milk; and historically, goat's milk has been used many centuries longer and in more widely diverse environmental settings than cow's milk.

The high protein content and excellent nutritional value of goat's milk is closely comparable to cow's milk. They have similar caloric loads (which means the number of calories that must be ingested to get comparable protein, vitamin, and mineral nutritional value). Unfortunately, they also both have the milk-sugar "lactose" to which some people are intolerant (and get digestive upsets from).

(1) As to how and why goat's milk tends to be hypoallergenic (it almost never causes allergic reactions), there has been considerable scientific exploration and speculation about this phenomenon, but the final answer is not entirely understood. Apparently it is because the proteins of the two kinds of milk are different and the protein fragments of goat's milk after digestion seem to trigger human allergic reactions much less frequently than cow's milk. In a cultural setting where drinking cow's milk is the norm, goat's milk can provide a valuable, nutritionally equivalent alternative for people who develop an allergic reaction to cow's milk.

(2) With regard to goat's milk being less conducive than cow's milk to the absorption of cholesterol (which causes hardening of the arteries and high blood pressure), this has been well established. It is because the fats of goat's milk are significantly different from those of cow's milk. Basic biological fats are called "triglycerides"; they consist of long-chain carbon compounds (chemically, in the form of "fatty acids") attached to the three hydroxyl groups of glycerol (or "glycerin"). But with cow's milk, these tend to be longer carbon chains, especially myristic acid (14 carbons long), palmitic acid (16 carbons long) and stearic acid (18 carbons long). The dominant fatty acids of goat's milk are caproic acid (6 carbons long), capryllic acid (8 carbons long), and capric acid (10 carbons long). (It is interesting to notice that the three words "caproic," "capryllic," and "capric" are all derived from the Latin word "caper" meaning "goat.") Longer fatty acids facilitate the absorption and metabolic integration of cholesterol more than shorter fatty acids do. Cow's milk therefore contributes significantly more than goat's milk to the formation of cholesterol-based atherosclerotic plaques in arteries and, therefore, to high blood pressure.

The shorter fatty acids of goat's milk have another interesting effect: they make the fats of goat's milk mix more easily with the water phase of the milk. This is why goat's milk tends to be naturally "homogenized" and not require special processing to keep the fats (that is, the cream) from separating.

(3) The reason goat's milk tends to be more expensive than cow's milk is that commercial production of cow's milk is routinely done in a factory-like way with cows held by the hundreds in tiny stalls, unable to move about, standing throughout their lives in their own manure, fed grains and cheap bulk foods at one end and drained of milk at the other end. Goats simply will not tolerate this kind of inhumane treatment--they rebel, they have aberrant behavioral outbursts, and they die. They are more intelligent and emotionally sensitive than cows and cannot be "factory-ized." Hence they are more expensive to tend, to feed, and to milk.

In recent years as factory-like handling of cow-milk production has become the commercial norm, the term "organic" has come to apply to cows that are treated humanely--they are allowed to range around a bit, to graze, and generally to live more normal cow-like lives. They are also not loaded with antibiotics to counteract the infections that run rampant in crowded, manure-contaminated cage quarters; such infections do not occur much in a freer range environment, and when they do, they are handled by the animal's normal immune system. Furthermore, the milk production of "organic" cows is not boosted artificially by hormone injections as is done routinely with factory-handled cows. Both antibiotics and hormones can be carried through as contaminants in non-organic cow's milk.

(4) As to the reputation that goat's milk has that is tastes bad, this is due to two factors. First, although goats are fastidious and picky in what they are willing to eat, their digestive systems are more hardy and versitile than cows; goats can digest a wide variety of food sources, both fresh and foul. If goats are hungry, they can and will eat garbage, and the bad tastes and smells of the garbage they eat can be carried through to the milk they produce. Second, male goats (called "billies") emit a pungent, musty, goaty smell. If the males and females are allowed to hang around together (other than for a week or two once or twice a year so they can mate), the pungent, musty, goaty smell is carried through to the milk. To prevent this, billy goats are commonly kept in separate pastures and allowed access to the females only for mating purposes.

In summary, goat's milk is a healthy, delicious, hypoallergenic, non-atherosclerosis producing alternative to cow's milk. It is commonly more expensive than cow's milk because of the streamlined but inhumane, factory-style production methods to which cows are subjected, but since it has significant nutritional advantages to cow's milk, perhaps this is a price premium we should be willing to pay.

Obamania--The Metamorphosis of Social Conscience

by Richard Crews

When I first happened to see Barack Obama in 2004 (when he delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention), I was thunderstruck. I have long held Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as the most perfect piece of English language rhetoric I knew. I used it in classes; I analyzed it in gross and in detail, hungry for insight and instruction into the deepest currents and manipulations of the language. I recited it--sometimes even to myself--desperately trying to parse how it could possibly exist--so perfect from its broadest vision to its smallest details--how any human mind could have gathered it together just so.

I have looked through the utterances of such great rhetoricians as Kennedy, Roosevelt, Churchill, Disraeli, and Macaulay for such perfection. The closest I have come is in some of the fugues of Bach and some of the poetry of Robinson, Yeats, and Pope. (There are a few other stretches of prose by Lincoln that reach this level--such as the Bixby letter.) My quest has born little fruit. Then suddenly here was a man, confident and calm, marching syllable by syllable through perfectly sculpted metaphors, perfectly framed and tinted images, to a consummate purpose and resolution. Without rancor, without the slightest taint of prejudice; with firm and sturdy intellect; with comfortable vocabulary and unflinching grammar. I was thunderstruck.

When I was recently asked on a meaningless questionnaire to state my political affiliation, I wrote "Obamania." That moment in 2004 was when--although I did not know it at the time--my Obamania was conceived. It gestated over several years as I became aware how perfectly his thoughts were organized--how unfailingly his words fell into line with what words ought to say.

That is a curious phrase, "what words ought to say." It depends on a perfect alignment of brilliant intellect, a vast expanse and deeply informed fund of knowledge, and careful and conscientious consideration of social (and philosophical, even spiritual) issues. Every other business, religious, and political leader I know slips up somewhere in bringing that amazing constellation of personal attributes together.

I could rhapsodize about how Obama favors pragmatism (but, that is ETHICAL pragmatism) over ideology; about how he is willing to bring together the most brilliant minds and able to bring out their disparate ideas, and to use all their considerations to congeal a strategy and decide on a plan of action--healing all their hurt passions to his final view--and then to move on. I could enthuse about his organizational and leadership skills. I could admit my admiration for his endless calm and unruffled poise, his balance of humility with willingness to lead, his artful negotiation skills.

But those are not my primary aim in writing this. Rather, I want to understand and to convey his impact on me and in addition, finally, the implications of that for the evolution of our broader social conscience.

As I listened to Obama through his presidential campaign, I came to realize that he never slipped. And I came to believe that his "performance" had (or could have) two implications for me personally. One was that he thought through thoroughly his philosophical and spiritual foundation--again and again and again. In other words, he seemed to have practiced and learned an approach--a set of mental mechanisms (as I had found in Lincoln)--for seeking out, over and over again, the deepest implications of whatever problem he was attacking, whatever topic he was addressing. I saw this strikingly, for example, in his "race speech" but, in truth, again and again, whenever he spoke.

The second was that he never let himself descend from his rooftop rhetoric, even while always keeping in mind his foundation and relating what he was saying to his spiritual and philosophical roots. He never let himself be glib or frivolous, never even hurried--certainly never inconsiderate.

Seeing, again and again, his mastery of those abilities, I have felt inspired to work harder on them for myself.

Moreover, I believe I have seen many other people--both in the U.S. and around the world--similarly inspired. I do not think that many people understand or experience it the same way I do, but I do believe that Obama's coming on the world stage--and so frequently on our TVs--with his endlessly calm, considered sensibleness has caused--and will increasingly cause--a metamorphosis in many individuals and, in fact, in our collective social conscience.

Future Earth

by Richard Crews

Here is my picture of future Earth and future human habitation, evolving gradually over the time period of 50 to 500 years from now.

The coastlines shift quite a bit as the oceans rise a couple of feet, and the temperate agricultural zones migrate away from the equator, closer to the poles. But after a century or so global warming has been halted and turned back as emission of greenhouse gases has been curtailed and the shifting albedo (reflectivity) of the diminishing polar regions has been managed through global ecological engineering. The human population stabilizes at around 10 to 12 billion with almost all people living in urban centers--I would call them "cities" except that they are very different from our present concept of "cities": they are green, open places with airy buildings a mile and more high, layered with living, working, manufacturing, trading, and recreational spaces, and surrounded by miles and miles of park-like fields and forests.

Also, billions of people live in floating "Aquarian" ocean colonies. These are spawned from a few dozen equatorial shoreline sites suitable for ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC). Each floating colony grows from a single OTEC with associated mariculture and a few hundred acres of fields and forests, orchards and parks around a central city hub which grows more upward (and with its manufacturing and industrial sections growing downward below the surface of the ocean) than outward. Each starts as a colony, culturally and industrially related to a nearby city or mature ocean colony, growing over a century or more from as few as 25,000 people up to 100 million or more before branching off colonies of its own; each starting with a single OTEC and gradually adding several more, along with the development of solar, wind, tidal, and nuclear energy; and each with extensive agricultural resources (farmed with a production density of 50- to 100-times present-day norms), and with extensive maricultural farms nourished by the waters raised from the deep for the OTECs.

The principle large construction materials are plasticized concretes made from mariculture products reinforced by magnesium alloys extracted from ingredients in sea water.

The fundamental social-political organization is democratic socialism (made functionally transparent by evolved information technology), but the cultural personalities of different colony-cities vary widely, as do their patterns of predominant industry, art, recreation, entertainment, etc. There is, of course, a rich flow of trade among the city-colonies and also of migration as people seek out colony cultural personalities that suit them.

The larger, more developed city-colonies also initiate and service space stations, at first in orbit around the Earth but later including bases on the Moon, asteroids, and Mars. These outposts also grow in size and self-reliance, and spawn further space city-colonies, ultimately including massive, continent-size space "ships" (constructed largely from asteroids) that head off, out of the Solar System, to colonize nearby stars.