Art Link The Dark Side of Redworld An Ocean of Blood A drip of blood from one perspective unless its yours or mine It falls on the ground in the highest places in the villages of Nepal where blood runs cold it trickles down the mountainside through far Kashmir into Afghanistan staining the banks of the streams that carve the hidden valleys and splash into the rivers staining them too with the blood of guilty and the innocent alike ever downward through the desert of Iraq There are other mountains in Bosnia and Kosovo where the blood also spilled running eastward perhaps through the valleys of Chechnya and further on to color red the desert of Uzbekistan Blood also spilled in the jungles of the Congo and Rwanda and the oil plains of Nigeria flowing into the rivers ever onward ’til the rivers ran red Here too the blood eventually sank into the deserts of Eritrea and Darfur and the bazaars of the Sudan and Somalia The desert is stained with blood The bloody fist of oppression squeezes the life out of the jungle of Myanmar and the farms of Zimbabwe The mountains of Peru and Columbia add more than their share The Big Muddy is stained as it passes by what used to be the Big Easy but it’s sure not easy anymore and the rivers run red with blood carrying it to the ocean an ocean of blood bathing our world Our home is built on the blood of others yet still we add more or stand by watching it run Our home is sinking as the blood-tainted ocean rises The blood will consume us all in the end –Robyn Elaine Serven –December 26, 2005

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

I know you have talent.  What sometimes is forgotten is that being practical is a talent.  I have a paucity for that sort of talent in many situations, though it turns out that I’m a pretty darn good cook.  🙂  

Let your talent bloom.  You can share it here.  Encourage others to let it bloom inside them as well.

Won’t you share your words or art, your sounds or visions, your thoughts scientific or philosophic, the comedy or tragedy of your days, the stories of doing and making?  And be excellent to one another!

Sign up for their Newsletter or just save their site as a favorite and visit each week to find just abit of the Real History that helps bring about needed Change and Corrective Direction of a Country, World, and Democracies, forcing Democracies to become so and maintain their Freedoms.

You can find this weeks newsletter here of which I’ve borrowed a few moments of to pass on to you, below.

April 14, 1988

The Soviet Union signed an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan after ten years. The pact, drawn up in negotiations between the United States, the USSR, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was signed at a United Nations ceremony in the Swiss capital of Geneva.

April 15, 1967

Amidst growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, large-scale anti-war protests were held in New York, San Francisco and other cities. In New York, the protest began in Central Park, where over 150 draft cards were burned, and included a march to the United Nations led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

April 16, 1971

Members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) threw medals they had earned in Vietnam on the U.S. Capitol steps in protest of the Vietnam War.

April 17, 1960

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in by four black college students at an all-white lunch counter, nearly 150 black students from nine states formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Ella Baker, James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the founders set SNCC’s initial goals as overturning segregation in the South and giving young blacks a stronger voice in the civil rights movement. By that time, in mid-April 1960, 50,000 or more students had participated in sit-ins over just the previous three months.

At the Raleigh conference Guy Carawan sang a new version of “We Shall Overcome,” an adaptation of an old labor song. This song would become the national anthem of the civil rights movement. People joined hands and gently swayed in time singing “black and white together,” repeating over and over, “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”

History of SNCC*****SNCC website

They have a few Historical events for April 17. The above is one of many events, in the civil rights movement that moved this Country in the Right Direction, but in many ways we haven’t reached the goals We As A Democracy of Freedoms that should be the Natural of our Culture, as we Preach to Others about Democracy and Freedom, and Today We Bomb Others In The Name Of Democracy And Freedom! {Think they’ll accept? Think Again!}

April 18, 1912

Members of the United Mine Workers of America on Paint Creek in Kanawha County, West Virginia, demanded wages equal to those of other area mines. The operators rejected the wage increase and miners walked off the job. Miners along nearby Cabin Creek, having previously lost their union, joined the Paint Creek strikers and demanded:

• the right to organize

• recognition of their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly

• an end to blacklisting union organizers

• alternatives to company stores

• an end to the practice of using mine guards

• prohibition of cribbing

• installation of scales at all mines for accurately weighing coal

• unions be allowed to hire their own checkweighmen to make sure the companies’ checkweighmen were not cheating the miners.

When the strike began, operators brought in mine guards from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to evict miners and their families from company houses. The evicted miners set up tent colonies and lived in other makeshift housing. The mine guards’ primary responsibility was to break the strike by making the lives of the miners as uncomfortable as possible.

Mine workers came along way but also not as far as they should have. We’ve seen what the power of greed and collaboration between mine owners and goverment representatives have brought forth in these last few years, mine collapses with numbers of deaths, mountaintop mining which is destroying this countries natural enviroment and natural beauty doing extreme damage to the surrounding enviroment as well. And it isn’t only in the mining industry, it’s across the board for the once Proud Hard Working middle class Americans, as we’ve rapidly moved towards a slave labor mentality, with the wealthy gaining wealth well beyond any individual need and those who reap that wealth for them sliding backward in wages and benefits!

The Spirit of Solidarity — a $1.3 million granite sculpture, plaza and fountain — sits on the land of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum on the banks of the Grand River near the Indian mounds

April 19, 1911

More than 6,000 Grand Rapids, Michigan, furniture workers – Germans, Dutch, Lithuanians, and Poles – put down their tools and struck 59 factories in what became known as the Great Furniture Strike.

For four months they campaigned and picketed for higher pay, shorter hours, and an end to the piecework pay system that was common in the plants of America’s “Furniture City.” Although the strike ended after four months without a resolution, Gordon Olson, Grand Rapids city historian emeritus, said once employees returned to work most owners did increase pay and reduce hours.

Also on April 19 but in 1971

As a prelude to a massive anti-war protest, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began a five-day demonstration in Washington, D.C. The generally peaceful protest was called Dewey Canyon III in honor of the operation of the same name conducted in Laos. They lobbied their congressmen, laid wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery, and staged mock “search-and-destroy” missions.

Led by Gold Star Mothers (mothers of soldiers killed in war), more than 1,100 veterans marched across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to the Arlington Cemetery gate, just beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A memorial service for their peers was conducted by Reverend Jackson H. Day, who had just a few days earlier resigned his military chaplainship. In addition to his passages of scripture and citations of poetry was a personal statement, including the following:

April 20, 1853

Harriet Tubman began her Underground Railroad, a network of people and places that aided in the escape of slaves to the north.

read a brief biography of Harriet Tubman

Visit the Newsletter site page for more

Bullets aren’t used to Force Others into Democracy and Freedom, the Freedom is within, the Democracy comes from that!

Bullets should Only Be Used as an Absolute Last Resort to Quell Violence and help maintain a Peaceful Order directly after as the people workout their differances, and Wars Of Choice should be Globally Condemned with those forcing others into Brought To Justice as Criminals Against Humankind!!

One would think that a person who has lived through as much history as John McThuselah would know a bit more about it, but as we are all too painfully aware, historical savvy isn’t exactly a wingnut strong suit.  It’s thus sorta-understandable – even as it remains completely unforgivable – that Angry Gramps would be unable to distinguish between Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Persians, or really, anyone east of the Ural Mountains.  To the bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran set, “they” are all the same anyway, so any historical evidence that might indicate an outcome (of say, an invasion) other than their liberators-and-roses predictions can be safely disregarded.

Thankfully, we here in the reality-based community know better.  Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for a look at Iran in the 20th century – and hopefully a slightly better explanation for why the US government is not particularly loved in that part of the world than that old patriotic pabulum, “they hate us for our freedoms.”

Historiorant:  When the first edition of this series aired two years ago, there was no Cave of the Moonbat, nor historioranting, nor somewhat-standardized format for what goes on here.  All those things developed while I was cutting my teeth in the commentless void, as witnessed by the slightly-edited intro to the first edition of this diary (pub. Saturday, March 4, 2006), included here both for posterity’s sake and to bring us up to speed on the story thus far:

At the conclusion of our last Moonbatological historant (so much for Tuesday or Wednesday, eh?  Sorry!), we left the emerging modern state of Iran in flux.  The shahs of the Qajar dynasty (est. 1796) had suffered the ignominy of having a constitution foisted upon them, and by late 1906, the Russians and the British were carving Persia up like a roast for a sphere-of-influence banquet to which the doddering Ottomans had not been invited.   Finally, a nascent nationalist movement was working itself into a lather over the occupation of sovereign Persian territory by foreign imperialists and the robe-kissing decadence of their own Qajar government.  Persia’s status as colony-to-be was further cemented by the ascension to the throne in 1909 of the 11-year-old Ahmad Shah, who was (being 11) utterly incapable of dealing with the demands of constitutionalist reformers, nor of resisting the Anglo-Russian alliance that invaded his country for “stabilization” purposes in 1911.

Saved by the guns…sort of

With the monarch in their pocket, the only threat faced by the Russians and British came from the constitutionalists (who tended to be pretty nationalistic) in their stronghold of Tabriz.   The task of taking the city fell to the Tzarist forces, and take it they did – with a bloody vengeance.  The Russians visited horrible atrocities upon the people of that town, with a deliberation and ruthlessness that gives we Western dilettantes in the long, complex history of the Iranian people a laid-bare, sterling example of the kind of event that sears itself into a nation’s memory and is neither forgiven nor forgotten for centuries:

The suppression of the nationalist uprising by Russians was followed by a wholesale massacre of the constitutionalists in Tabriz. Sigat al-Islam, one of the most respected religious pontiffs in Iran, was arrested and ordered to sign a declamatory document that Russian suppression of the constitutionalists was for “stability” and “normalisation” purposes. The pontiff refused to obey and was therefore flogged and finally hanged in the public market square on the most respected and observed religious day in the Iranian calendar, Ashura. This specific Russian savagery aroused anger all over the world among Muslims against the Tzars.

For reference, see Iran September 7, 1917 Chehrenoma March 4, 1912; and E.G. Browne, The Reign Of Terror at Tabriz. London: Taylor, Garnett, Evans and Co. 1912, pp.1-15.

Iran Chamber Society

There was precedent for this sort of behavior; one only had to look at how India had fallen into the Empire’s grasp and how China had been brought to heel.  It seems pretty clear that Persia was on its way to being divided up and annexed outright by the Brits and the Russians (a bipolar alliance if ever there was one).  They probably would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for the distraction-of-epically-massive-proportions that was the 1914 eruption of the Great War, which transpired when the Shah of Persia was 16 (in high school terms, a sophomore or a junior).  Thus, as Russia mobilized on behalf of her erstwhile little brother Serbia, as Rasputin whispered sweet weirdnesses in the Tsarina’s ear, and as the bulk of the British army was being thrown into the carnage of the First Battle of the Marne, Ahmad Shah announced his nation’s neutrality – and his people braced once more to play host to the battlegrounds of superpowers.

The Russians took control of the northern provinces, and on Persian territory fought with the Ottomans.  On the other side of the Zagros, the British South Persia Rifles, commanded by Sir Percy Sikes, occupied the provinces of Isfahan and Shiraz, and there alternated between fending off German and Turkish attacks and helplessly watching their countrymen’s disastrous invasion of Iraq wither away in a siege they were powerless to lift.  All’s well that ends well, though – another Sykes (this one with the first name of Mark) went on to negotiate the British side of the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France in 1916, and effectively was given a free hand in drawing the map of the post-war Middle East, a map only slightly modified for the following year’s Balfour Declaration.

Russia and Great Britain together fended off German and Turkish propaganda campaigns, and Persia was made part of a complex set of power-sharing agreements that were to go into force after the war (Russia gets Constantinople in exchange for accepting British dominance in Teheran, that sort of thing).  That all ended, of course, when Lenin showed up and prodded the Russians to share with one another a little more.

With the rise of the Bolsheviks came a major shift in Russian foreign policy, and to prove the point, they withdrew all Russian troops from Persia in favor of assisting anti-imperialist indigenous forces.  Britain, once a partner, was now an enemy as the Reds called upon Persians to cast off the yoke of colonialism and refashion their country as a worker’s paradise.  The Brits, ever sensitive to vacuums, rushed into the recently-abandoned northern provinces and established bases that were subsequently used by White Russian troops to launch attacks into the Red’s southern flank during the Russian Civil War.  From the British perspective, it made sense to help their former allies kill one another, as it was becoming quite evident to the British that Persia was sitting atop a lot of oil.  

So it was that the British sought to continue playing the 19th-century imperialism game, using the standard mix of thinly-veiled belligerency, sovereignty-sucking economic tendrils, and plain-old self-righteous White Man’s Burdenism.  Under the cagey leadership of England’s foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, the Brits paid off a handful of prominent Iranians (including the prime minister, Vosuq od-Dowleh) to ensure support for the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919.  Some of the provisions it contained sound like they came straight out of a Powell/Rice State Department:

It promises to “supply, at the cost of the Persian government, the services of whatever expert ad­visers may, after consultation between the two governments, be considered necessary for the several departments of the Persian administra­tion. These advisers shall be engaged on con­tracts and endowed with adequate powers, the nature of which shall be the matter of agreement between the Persian government and the advisers.”

“For the purpose of financing the reforms indicated in clauses 2 and 3 of this agreement, the British government offers to provide or arrange a substantial loan for the Persian government, for which adequate security shall be sought by the two governments in consultation in the revenues or the customs or other sources of income at the disposal of the Persian government. Pending the completion of negotiations for such a loan the British government will supply on account of it such funds as may be necessary for initiating the said reforms.”

“The two governments agree to the appointment forthwith of a joint committee of experts, for the examination and revision of the existing customs tariff with a view to its reconstruction on a basis calculated to accord with the legitimate interests of the country and to promote its prosperity.”

ibid.

Had od-Dolweh been the only person the Brits had to please, this odious piece of diplomacy might have become law, and Persia a British protectorate.  Fortunately for the Iranians, they had in place a parliamentary system with the cajones (anybody know the Farsi word for “balls?”) to tell the PM to piss up a rope, and the Majles refused to ratify the Agreement.  The nation remained in a state of political flux until February, 1921, when a dashing Persian Cossack Brigade officer named Reza Khan Pahlavi, with the help of journalist Sayyid Zia ad Din Tabatabai, organized a coup d’etat and seized power in Teheran.

Meet the Pahlavis

Over the next four years, cavalry general-cum-war secretary consolidated his power base and negotiated the removal of foreign troops from Persian soil.  In 1925, the Majles made the deposition of the last Qajar monarch official (the guy was already in exile in Europe anyway), and the newly-appointed leader changed his name to Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The new Shah was a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist, one of a new breed of leaders (which also included Kamal Ataturk and Haile Selasie) that frustrated would-be empire-builders in the West.  He revoked the special privileges enjoyed by foreigners, encouraged domestic production by instituting a protective tariff, and changed the regulations under which oil companies operated so as to secure more of their revenue for his treasury.  He was the driving force behind the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway and over 20,000 km of roads, founded the University of Teheran, and set up programs encouraging college students to attend school in Europe.  Oh, and in 1935 he changed the official name of the country to “Iran,” though it took a few years before the name stuck.

Much like Ataturk in neighboring Turkey, Reza Shah Pahlavi was a secular ruler.  He opened educational institutions (and all public places) to women, strengthened the secular state courts, and reduced the role of religious institutions upon daily life.  He also mandated the wearing of western style attire – though accented with a distinctive peaked cap – for men, and in 1935 required women to discard their veils.

So far, so good – but you’re probably thinking that there had to be downside, right?  Well, there was:

For starters, mandating the rejection of traditional, indigenous dress and proscribing personal expressions of faith may have helped with the whole western-style industrialization thing (or not), but it all sounds a little Carlisle Indian School to this historioranter.  His attempts to re-align the culture of his country sometimes grew violent: in 1936, the Shah’s troops violated the sanctity of the shrine of Imman Reza in Mashad by killing dozens of protesters who had gathered to express dissatisfaction with the latest round of reforms.

The Shah also had a quick-tempered tendency to use his army to pacify, disarm, and resettle rebellious tribes and warlords, which in and of itself isn’t that uncommon, but history (plus, I hope, the last six episodes of this series) pretty clearly shows that those guys – the heirs to the satraps and tribespeople that have vexed every central authority in Iran since the Seleucids – don’t go down easy.  Reza, the son of an officer and a Cossack since the age of 15, was inclined to use force to get his way, which begat more violence from the rebellious tribes, which begat reprisals, which begat more reprisals, and so on and so on.

Beginning in 1933, Iran developed close ties with Nazi Germany, eventually becoming one of the Reich’s largest trading partners.  Though this policy was pursued in part to reduce British influence on Iran’s economy – most of the royalties on the 200,000 or so barrels a day Iran was pumping went to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company – the net result was that Germany was Iran’s largest trade partner in the late 30s.

Historiorant/Please Don’t Gitmo Me Disclaimer:  Not that there’s anything wrong with trading with Nazis, of course – our own history has shown that a US Senator can coddle Hitler and still have both his son and grandson grow up to defile the White House in their own “right”

Much of the wealth generated from all this oil trade went straight into the Shah’s personal accounts regardless of who was doing the buying, and he amassed considerable tracts of land even as conditions among the peasantry worsened.   For all his paternalism, he was a totalitarian dictator; by the late 30s, dissatisfaction with the Shah’s rule was growing – it might have even led to a revolt at some point, had it not been for the Second World War.

Planting a neutral flag on strategic ground

When Hitler shocked and awed Poland in September, 1939, Iran decided to pursue the difficult course of being neutral and strategically important at the same time.  The Shah pissed off the British by not responding to their “reasonable” request to expel all German nationals from Iran, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, things boiled down to ultimatums very quickly.  Churchill demanded that Iran allow the British to move supplies across Iran to assist the Soviets, a move which the Shah regarded as a violation of neutrality, and thus sovereignty.

He would not be told what to do, and he got invaded for it.  On August 26, 1941, the British and the Soviets launched simultaneous troop surges from the Persian Gulf (there’s that old trading colony in Khuzestan again), Iraq, and the northwestern frontier.  Within weeks, Iran had fallen under Allied control, and on September 16, the Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son.  He was brought by the British first to Mauritius, then to South Africa, where he died in 1944.

Mohammad Reza Shah assumed the throne at the age of 22, and in January, 1942, concluded a tripartite treaty with Great Britain and the Soviet Union that extended nonmilitary assistance to the Allies; over the course of the war, more than 5 million tons of US and British war supplies made their way through Iran to an embattled Soviet Union.  In 1943, Iran declared war on Germany (eligibility for UN membership: check!), and later that year played host to Churchill, FDR, and the Man of Steel himself.

These were tumultuous years.  Foreign troops brought out the nationalism in folks, and the Soviet-backed Tudeh party organized workers and agitated for economic reform.  This group would be a driving force behind the failed attempt by the Soviets to create client states out of Iranian territory in the form of an autonomous republic in Azerbaijan, and shortly thereafter, the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in January, 1946.  US, British, and UN pressure led to a withdrawal of Soviet troops from those countries, and later that year, the Shah’s army recaptured them and sent their leaders into exile.  The Soviets lost more ground (in the figurative sense) in 1947, when Iran received a military aid package and advisory group from the United States.

And the Tudeh?  While they did enjoy a brief stint during which the Shah was obligated to have three Tudeh members in his cabinet, this arrangement fell apart over a tribal revolt in the south.  Though they agitated, the Tudeh would never again hold such influence.  In 1949, after a Tudeh member was blamed for an assassination attempt on the Shah, the party was banned and its leaders fled into exile or were arrested.

Looking for support in all the wrong places

The first few postwar years weren’t so great for the new Shah, owing largely to the growing influence of longtime dissident Dr. Mohammad Mosaddeq.  Arrested and imprisoned for thought crimes during the reign of the young leader’s father, Mosaddeq became a member of the Majles in 1941 and quickly gained notoriety for his nationalistic, anti-British-oil-company rants.  The Communists supported him, too, which would eventually draw American suspicion.

By 1951 – when he was named Time’s Man of the Year – Mosaddeq had enough support that the Shah was pressured into making him Prime Minister.  The eccentric, European-educated lawyer quickly set about gathering a power base, and just as promptly pissed off the British by expropriating their oil fields (the Brits responded with a crippling economic and naval blockade).  He went so far as to attempt to wrest control of the army from the Shah in 1952, and when the Shah rejected Mosaddeq’s demands, the minister resigned – only to be reinstated in a wave of populist riots.

It went to his head.  He bypassed the Majles with a public referendum on its dissolution, but still had enough accumulated political capital that when the Shah attempted to dismiss him in August, 1953, his supporters took to the streets.  After negotiating the details of what would become known as Operation AJAX with US operative Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy), the Shah pulled a pre-arranged Darius and fled to Rome, while U.S. and British intelligence agents actively supported the royalists in the street battles.  The coup succeeded when royalist tanks appeared in the capital and shelled the prime minister’s residence.  Mosaddeq surrendered on August 19, 1953, and would spend three years in prison and eleven more under house arrest before his death in 1967.  The Shah returned triumphantly from bravely running away, and once again planted his royal ass upon the Peacock Throne.

Weird Historical Sidenotes:  One version of the AJAX story has the U.S. deploying its newly-minted CIA because the British had fed Ike faulty intelligence regarding the likelihood of Mosaddeq’s shift to a more Kremlin-friendly foreign policy.  Considering current circumstances, there’s a little irony in that.

Also worthy of note is this video, promoting All the Shah’s Men by Steven Kinzer, that made an appearance on Huffpo a couple of months ago:

The Shah we all sort of remember

The Shah had nearly lost control of his country, and he had the US to thank (and thank, and thank) for getting it back.  Still, being seen as a toady of foreigners is a dangerous way to live in that part of the world, and the Shah’s close ties with Washington fueled a smoldering nationalist discontent throughout his nearly 40-year reign.  He also created discontent by bungling a couple of rigged elections and by running through a series of prime ministers (though one stalwart lasted 12 years).  The religious leaders were never too happy with him, either, but they had been pissed at being marginalized since the fall of the Safavids; even the eternal outsider Mosaddeq never felt the need to court them, preferring to rule in a profoundly secular manner.

But the Shah had big ideas, and he did accomplish some pretty impressive things.  With US backing and hardware, he modernized the army that the ayatollahs would eventually take to war against Saddam.  In 1963, he sponsored a broadly popular referendum (even if the vote wasn’t the reported 99% in favor) on land reform, as well as a huge literacy project – even if there had recently been large-scale riots and a general crackdown on opposition parties – as part of his “White Revolution.”  He later extended suffrage to women.

Like so many prior rulers of his land, the Shah began to get Cyrus envy.  In 1967, he angered people at all levels of Iranian society by adopting the titles “King of Kings and Emperor of Iran” and “Light of the Aryans,” while styling his wife, Farah Diba, “Empress.”  It was things like this that allowed the religious leaders (some of whom, like the Ayatollah Khomeini, were in exile) to whip up anti-secular fervor among conservatives, while students began to organize around more nationalist lines.

But the Shah pressed ahead.  In 1971, he televised worldwide an extravaganza celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great.  Trouble was, the show was mostly for foreign heads of state, and Iranians resented that very few of their countrymen had been in attendance at this self-indulgent lovefest.  The Shah kept running with that theme in 1976, when he decreed the use of a new “imperial” calendar that started with the Achaemenian dynasty.  Since this could pretty easily be interpreted to be anti-Islamic, the Shah was unwittingly empowering his detractors by driving more and more “sensible” folk into their camp.

The loving touch of the iron fist

To maintain order, the Shah became increasingly autocratic.  He utilized his SAVAK secret police to hunt down, interrogate, and otherwise disappear those who spoke out against his rule, and these tactics in turn gave rise to a more organized resistance.  Two main organizations emerged: the Marxist Fadayan and the Islamist Mohajedin.  Both used similar tactics (bombings and assassinations, mostly, with the odd attack on police stations thrown in), but did not present a unified opposition front, as they had vastly different goals for what would come after the Shah.  The Fadayan launched the first guerilla strike against the Shah in February, 1971, with an attack on an Imperial Gendarmerie at the outpost of Siahkal, deep in the forests near the Caspian Sea.  Over the next 8 years, 341 guerillas would die in actions like this or as a result of being captured by the Shah’s forces, while hundreds more were imprisoned for long terms or driven into exile.

Weird Historical Sidenote:  Of course, back in the Shah’s day, the good folks at the top of patriotic outfits like Boston Edison and a coalition of New England Gas and Electric Companies had a slightly different outlook on the splitting of atoms in Iran:

The Shah ran his economy into the ground in the 1970s, squandering the huge oil profits on Western toys of destruction – Nixon once offered the Shah the opportunity to purchase any conventional weapon in the US arsenal “in sufficient quantities to defend Iran.”  To make good by his people, the Shah nationalized all private secondary schools and announced free secondary education for all Iranians.  He nationalized other stuff, too – like unoccupied houses – for the public benefit, and he forced industrialist to sell 49% of the ownership of their companies to their employees.

But a badly implemented program is sometimes worse than none at all, and the Shah’s expensive new entitlements caused significant discontent.  The nationalists pointed out that the Shah had done nothing to address the fact that there were around 60,000 foreigners (45,000 of them American) in Iran by the late 70s, and that decadent Western culture was spreading to the furthest reaches of the country, eroding traditional Iranian values along the way.  Proponents of basic freedoms decried the Shah’s establishment of a single-party state in 1975, and his policies were starting to attract the attention of Amnesty International and other nosey, anti-torture types like that.

Things went from bad to worse for the Shah with the election of Jimmy Carter in the United States.  After taking office in 1977, Carter made an issue of the human rights of the countries with which the US had relations, and there were a lot of skeletons in the Shah’s closet (in this case, a more literal allusion than usual).  The Shah was obliged to release political prisoners, reign in his torture-hounds, and tone down his rhetoric.

The relaxation of oppression allowed anti-royal forces to organize, and political parties were reborn.  Educated professionals wrote open letters to government officials demanding a return to the values of the constitution, and a war of eloquence versus propaganda began in the nation’s media.

Revolution…coming to a teevee near you!

War of the more standard sort broke out at Qom – a profoundly religious city – in January, 1978, in response to a government-inspired article in a popular magazine which suggested that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been verbally sniping at the Shah from exile in Baghdad, was far less pious than he claimed, and possibly a British agent, to boot.  The over-the-top swift-mosquing led to further rioting and reprisal at Tabriz in February; by summer, rioting was widespread.  The Library of Congress says this about the protests of 1977 and 1978:

The cycle of protests that began in Qom and Tabriz differed in nature, composition, and intent from the protests of the preceding year. The 1977 protests were primarily the work of middle-class intellectuals, lawyers, and secular politicians. They took the form of letters, resolutions, and declarations and were aimed at the restoration of constitutional rule. The protests that rocked Iranian cities in the first half of 1978, by contrast, were led by religious elements and were centered on mosques and religious events. They drew on traditional groups in the bazaar and among the urban working class for support. The protesters used a form of calculated violence to achieve their ends, attacking and destroying carefully selected targets that represented objectionable features of the regime: nightclubs and cinemas as symbols of moral corruption and the influence of Western culture; banks as symbols of economic exploitation; Rastakhiz (the party created by the shah in 1975 to run a one-party state) offices; and police stations as symbols of political repression. The protests, moreover, aimed at more fundamental change: in slogans and leaflets, the protesters attacked the shah and demanded his removal, and they depicted Khomeini as their leader and an Islamic state as their ideal. From his exile in Iraq, Khomeini continued to issue statements calling for further demonstrations, rejected any form of compromise with the regime, and called for the overthrow of the shah.

Things were already sucking for the Shah when in August, a fire in a crowded movie theater in Abadan killed 400 people.  Though there is evidence that points to arson on the part of religiously motivated students, the opposition successfully spread a rumor that SAVAK agents had been responsible, and the Shah was obligated to replace his prime minister with someone a bit more conciliatory.  He appeased the religious reformers by shutting down casinos, releasing imprisoned clerics, revoking the silly/insulting imperial calendar, and dismissing followers of the Bahai faith from all judicial and public offices (the ayatollahs have a special hatred for the Bahai, whom they view as heretical for failing to regard Muhammad as the last of the God’s prophets).

It was good ass-kissing, but not good enough.  When Ramadan ended on September 4th, the 100,000 or so people who had turned out for public prayers began to demonstrate.  For two days, the clashes grew more violent and the demands more strident.  On the night of September 7-8, the Shah declared martial law, and the following day, at Teheran’s Jaleh Square, his troops opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators.  The government said 87 were killed, but the number is almost certainly higher.

It was the screw-up that would galvanize his opposition.  After “Black Friday,” even the moderates abandoned the Shah wholesale.  In October, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, President of Iraq (playing the role of Cheney in Bakr’s administration: Saddam Hussein) wearied of Khomeini’s rabble-rousing and booted him out of the country.  With much media fanfare, he established his new base in Paris.

The modern communications system available in Europe, coupled with the West’s open borders and free-flowing information, allowed Khomeini to take a much more hands-on approach than had been possible from Baghdad.  He coordinated things via banks of multi-line telephones, and people that he heretofore hadn’t been able to meet face-to-face were able to visit him at his new headquarters.  Among these was the leader of the powerful National Front party, who agreed to throw his support to Khomeini’s calls for overthrow with the promise that the country that would result would be both “democratic and Islamic.”

Strikes crippled the economy, and the demonstrations grew in intensity.  On November 5th, the Shah addressed the nation, saying he had heard their “revolutionary message” and that he would work to make up for past mistakes – he just needed a little time.  As a show of good faith, he allowed the arrest of 132 officials (including a former SAVAK chief and several cabinet ministers) and released more than 1000 political prisoners.  He also replaced his appeasement-oriented prime minister with the commander of the Imperial Guard.

Sensing blood in the water, Khomeini moved in for the kill, demanding further protests and decrying the Shah’s promises as worthless.  The test came when the Shah chose not to use force to break a strike of government workers, and strikes resumed among emboldened laborers in other industries, bringing the economy to a standstill.  Meanwhile, clashes between police and demonstrators had become a fact of daily life.  Hundreds of thousands of protestors marched in opposition to the Shah’s rule on December 8th to mark the Shi’a month of mourning.

It was enough to compel the Shah to explore his options with the other side, and he tried and failed to cut a deal with the most prominent National Front leader, the one who’d visited Khomeini.  At the end of December, he did manage to convince another National Front leader, Shapour Bakhtiar, to form a government, but only on the condition that the Shah leave the country.  Bakhtiar won a vote of confidence in both houses of the Majles on January 3rd, 1979; two weeks later, on January 16th, the Shah announced that he would be taking a short trip overseas.  

The Peacock Throne, and the 2500-year tradition of Persian royalty, had come to an end.

Historiorant:  

…As must this diary, I’m afraid.  It’s getting a little long, and there’s still another government to topple, hostages to take, a theocratic state to establish, a war to fight, and a new world order with which to tangle.  Guess I’ll have to bow to the inevitable, and with apologies to those who value brevity in their drive-by histories, announce that I’ll be serving up History for Kossacks: The Ayatollahs, next week.

In other Cave news, be sure’n tune in two weeks from tonight (same bat-time, same bat-channel) for an important – to me, anyway 😉 – announcement regarding the series that followed the Persia one back in the earliest days of my DKos writing career.  Here’s a hint: The Crusaders are coming!  The Crusaders are coming!

Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.

For the sixth year in a row, the percentage of uninsured Americans is on the rise. Just in 2006, 2.2 million Americans joined the ranks of the uninsured. Back in 2002, The Institute of Medicine released its second installment of a six part report on what happens to thousands of Americans who lack health care coverage in America. The result was shocking, 18,000 Americans die every year because they lack health care coverage.  

The study did not even include the 10 million uninsured children or the elderly on Medicare at the time. The group researched 30 million uninsured Americans, roughly one in seven in our country who did not have coverage. Consumer health expert Ray Werntz had this to say about the findings:

“The report documents the immense consequence of having 40 million uninsured people out there,” says Ray Werntz, a consumer health expert with the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “We need to elevate the problem in the national conscience.”

Calculating the cost in human suffering, he says, “is one way to get there.”

That was six years ago. Tens of thousands of Americans have since died and nothing has been done.

Back in 2002, it sure wasn’t the time to be talking about health care reform. 9/11 happened and the Bush Administration was pounding the war drum. I doubt many in the media even covered the report. Heck, the media won’t even cover the health crisis when the polls show health care is the top concern of Americans. The 2nd report issued by the Institute of Medicine researched over 130 studies on the uninsured in America. They analyzed what factors contributed to the likelihood of a person being uninsured. It’s quite simple folks. If you’re poor, you’re less likely to have insurance. However, what’s really disturbing about the numbers of the uninsured, is that the majority of these people are employed and cannot afford treatment. I found this report interesting because it didn’t just focus on the fact that the poor are more likely to be uninsured. It also examined how 70% of the uninsured come from households that have one or more full time worker. I know this isn’t rocket science folks, but we have to realize how wrong it is that full time workers can’t afford coverage in America. Here are a few more of the findings reported by USA Today:

* Uninsured people with colon or breast cancer face a 50% higher risk of death.

* Uninsured trauma victims are less likely to be admitted to the hospital, receive the full range of needed services, and are 37% more likely to die of their injuries.

* About 25% of adult diabetics without insurance for a year or more went without a checkup for two years. That boosts their risk of death, blindness and amputations resulting from poor circulation.

This is unacceptable. When Americans don’t have access to preventative care services, they don’t catch diseases like cancer early enough to have a good shot at beating them. Treatable injuries end up being fatal for some Americans because they don’t have access to treatment. Every American should have access to every tool available to battle diseases. Every American should be treated if they’re injured even if they’re too poor to pay. If America wants to be a just nation than we have to value all of our citizens equally, no matter their economic status. Letting these people die when they could be saved because they’re poor, is the ultimate shame of our nation.

What are we going to do about it?

Last week at Daily Kos, we spent a lot of time arguing about mandates and which proposal put forth by the candidates is the right one. Many of us agreed that the best option is single payer health care. We posted hundreds of comments arguing with each other, some got nasty, some got defensive (myself included) yet we didn’t even address how we’re going to achieve our goal. No matter our disagreements, we’re in this together. We need to figure out how to mobilize and put out the best message, which candidates we should support, and how to best prepare to battle the biggest PR fight of the decade.

Organizing One Voice

We’ve seen results when we band together. The truth is, we don’t want to have to fight for their lives one by one. We want every single American to receive the best treatment available, and that’s why we need mobilize like we’ve never done before. If we elect a Democratic President, we have to join with every union, progressive organization, human rights organization, the doctors, nurses and health care workers in the fight to get UHC for all Americans. When a good UHC bill heads into committee, we need to back it with everything we’ve got together. I know we’ll email and phone our Reps and Senators until they can’t stand us, but we need go much further than that. We need to organize days where we all hit the streets to pass out fliers and properly inform Americans about the bill pending in Congress. We need to write letters to the editors of our local newspapers and email every local and national news organization possible. We need to organize protests and marches to our state capitols demanding that our state legislators support the legislation. We need to put pressure on our Governors to come out in favor of the reform. If you’re in college or high school, try to organize students to help inform the fellow student body by passing out fliers etc. These are just a couple things we as citizens can do to try and win the upcoming battle. I know it may sound overly dramatic to call it a battle, but folks this is a battle for survival for thousands every year.

Supporting H.R. 676

How many times have you seen someone say, “H.R. 676 is the really the best plan?” H.R. 676 was introduced by John Conyers back in 2005 and is slowly gaining co-sponsors. There are now 88 co-sponsors and hopefully some of our incoming freshmen Democrats will sign on to the bill as well. The United States National Health Care Act introduced by Conyers is a single payer health care system that abolishes the for profit system we currently have. It operates on a sliding scale so those with less money can afford and receive the same care as the wealthy. The national health insurance will cover prescriptions, preventative care, substance abuse counseling, mental health counseling, dental & vision care, in patient and outpatient care, emergency care and longterm care. The system will be paid for by raising taxes on the top 5% of wage earners, using existing health care revenues, instituting a small tax hike on payroll taxes, self employment taxes and stock and bond transactions. To read the text of the bill go here. If your representative is not on this list, you should contact them and encourage them to support H.R. 676.

Supporting Candidates who Support H.R. 676

There are a ton of progressive candidates who support UHC, but there are some who are specifically pushing for single payer health care. Our very own fightin’ progressive and EENR endorsed candidate Barry Welsh hoping to unseat Mike Pence IN-6 supports single payer. Rick Vilello running for PA-5 c.d. recently came in out in support of single payer. Fellow Kossack and EENR endorsed candidate Jerry Northington aka Possum also supports a national health care system. Ethan Strimling and Chellie Pingree competing for the open seat in Maine’s 1st c.d. both support single payer. I’m sure there are plenty more candidates out there who support a single payer system, please chime in on the thread and let us know about any other candidates you know of supporting single payer health care.

When it Comes to Health Care for All We Cannot be Divided

Whether you agree or disagree with Elizabeth Edwards about her support of mandated health care coverage, there’s one thing you should agree with her on. The effects of a health crisis destroys American families. We need a country that supports Americans when they are the most vulnerable. Here’s a snippet from an interview with the Harvard Crimson:

THC: Why has health care been such an important issue for you?

EE: It’s not just my personal condition. This was something that was of great concern to me before I realized that I either had breast cancer or that the breast cancer returned. Partly because everybody knows that if you have a health problem, it is like you don’t have any other problems. Basically, health care issues can take over your life. It’s something we all share universally, both fear of health care issues and the very high probability that all of us are going to face some health care issue in our lives.

We progressives are in this together. We owe it to ourselves, our families and our fellow citizens to fight with everything we’ve got to pass single payer or some other form of UHC. We need to remind Americans that the politicians who fight against health care for all do not represent this country honorably. They let Americans die because they’re poor. They allow insurance companies to decide whether people live or die. They sit by and do nothing to save thousands of American lives when they could make a difference.

Thanks for coming by and I look forward to fighting alongside all of you in this upcoming battle.

(“Can we spray material stronger than steel out our rear ends? No.” – promoted by pfiore8)

“What are you writing about, Honey?”

“I’m writing about what separates man from beast.”

“Really? Well… I’m going out to feed our live horses while you beat that dead one.”

She has a point.

Just as I once learned that I was not, in fact, the inventor of the ham and cheese sandwich, I find once again that I am late to the party. The search for profound and essential differences between man and beast is not new.

Should that stop me from flailing about? Should that stop me from flopping around in the mud, gasping for air like a dying guppy? Where some see a dead horse, I see a piñata.

If you want, grab a stick, step around the dead horse, and we’ll see if we can’t whack a little candy loose.

This subject has been a nightmare to write about. When searching the Web, the question, “what separates man from beast,” will take you down endless philosophic avenues, mostly in the ghettos. I say that because the question has not been unambiguously answered, so the philosophy tends toward the mystical.

The question has range, but the answer has to be satisfying, right? Well, you have be the judge of that. The answer can’t be blurted out without an explanation of how it was derived; no answer should ever be taken without an explanation.

It’s only fair to you that I write this out in a linear fashion… but it’s tough. There are so many things that want to be explored in depth, but then it would turn into a manuscript that would probably die a digital death. For this reason, many things that deserve better are not going to get it. The beauty of the interconnected tubes is that you can always ask for more info, right?

So, here it goes…

As best as I can tell, the main differentiating feature between man and beast is that we wipe our asses. We need accessories. We are higher maintenance, and therefore less pet-worthy.

The plain and simple fact is, attempting to identify an overarching, somehow profound feature the separates man and beast is folly. It’s not the right question to ask; I could have just as well asked what the overarching differentiator between dogs and cats is. The right question to ask is why we hold cell phones, while chimps hold bananas.

If you started by listing the differences in natural abilities between man and beast, things will get out of hand very quick:

Can we fly? No.

Can we stick to walls and ceilings? No.

Can we live in a liquid water environment? No.

Can we discharge 500-volt pulses of electricity? No.

Can we spray material stronger than steel out our rear ends? No.

Can we rapidly burrow underground? No.

Can we rapidly change our coloring to become nearly invisible? No.

Can we consume objects twice the diameter of our heads? No.

Can we regenerate severed limbs? No.

Can we live inside a host? No.

Can we use sonar to locate moving objects? No.

…

So maybe the first question actually is why are there so many different types of animal life? Why are there so many species?

What’s that? You don’t think I’m being fair to us people?

Well, OK; let’s pick something else. We can’t compare features because we get trounced there. Does the Blue whale really need an 18-foot penis?

How about differences in complex behavior and expression?

Only man cries? No.

Only man rages? No.

Only man plays? No.

Mourns death? No.

Prepares for death? No.

Teaches others? No.

Kills for sport? No.

Raises armies? No.

Gets jealous? No.

Builds cities? No.

Cares for the sick? No.

Shares information? No.

Lives in communities? No.

Creates social castes? No.

…

I’m not being fair. We are but one species, so the above list can be viewed once again in the context of why so many species? With so many diverse species, many of our traits are bound to show up somewhere else. It’s one of the fundamental problems in looking for differentiators between man and beast because there is almost always some counter-example.

Let’s attack this from a different angle and come back to the species question later.

So much for linear progression.

Maybe we should be asking what man and beast have in common?

Hmm. Right now my mind is wandering among some irrelevant but interesting thoughts: lobsters are known to be cannibalistic. They have also been known to willfully give up a limb to a predator in the hope that the rest of itself will get away. Has there ever been a lobster that was too lazy to forage for food and just decided to shed a limb and eat it? What would that be called? Would it be auto-cannibalism?

To see what we have in common, I think we are going to have to get real small. We can zoom right past carbon, and even past amino acids, but what about DNA?

Even if you are a bacterium, we are all made up of the same DNA stuff, it’s just arranged differently. Even there, we share many of the same proteins such as the AAA+ class of proteins that initiate cell division. The entire biosphere shares the same DNA structure.

If you are a chimp, then you share about 95% of the same DNA sequence you have with a human’s DNA sequence. My guess is that quite a bit of that 5% difference can be accounted for in the physical differences between chimps and humans, and also in the meta-coding such as sperm and egg.

If you are thinking of trying genetic engineering at home, then please don’t use what I say here, because I am about to take giant shortcuts to find out how big a 5% difference in DNA is. It goes something like this:

A strand of human DNA is about 3 billion nucleotides long. Pretending that it all transcribes to proteins (via RNA transcription), then the 3 billion nucleotides will triple up to form 1 billion codons, each coding for an amino acid used in a protein. If we pretend that instead of 20, there are only 10 types of amino acids that are used in proteins, then the 1-billion-long train of codons can be thought of as a 1-billion-digit number of the kind of numbers we are used to dealing with (base 10). Man and chimp are both coded for using a 1-billion-digit number with only 50 million digits being different between them. 50 million digits is a large number when you consider the number of atoms in the universe only takes 80 digits to write out, and 10 universes takes 81 digits.

If you squint real hard, you can almost see how DNA looks like a computer language – a computer language that emits a standard instruction set for all species. We will have to come back to that too, but for our purposes here, we already knew there would be differences in the genetic code between man and beast, so we really haven’t learned anything. We are slicing it too fine. Even if there were only a one-digit difference between man and chimp, it really wouldn’t explain what that digit does.

Let’s try it the other way for just a second and use a very coarse approach. We’ll throw caution to the wind and speculate that the big difference between man and beast has something to do with our brains. Then the question becomes, so what? We just add it to the list; not only don’t we have eight arms or shoot ink out our asses, but our brains are different too. It doesn’t explain why the cell phone.

It can’t be that our brain is larger than the rest of the animals, because it is not. If the difference were a function of brain size, then why isn’t a big dog with a big head much smarter than a little wiener dog with a little wiener head?

It would be nice if I could say right here, that the difference between brains is that the human brain has a neurodiscombobulator, where animals don’t, then I could actually live with that answer, even though it still wouldn’t explain why the cell phone.

The fact is, it doesn’t have anything that is identifiable as uniquely human. We have failed to identify any quantitative difference that might explain the cell phone-banana gap. It must be a qualitative difference somewhere.

I always like stripping away assumptions when attacking the unknown. We come with a huge amount of default assumptions that we are not even aware of most of the time. This, by and large, is a good thing because our day would go nowhere if we had to make sure the ceiling wasn’t going to fall on our heads before we entered a room, and then check that the chair we want to sit in will support our weight, and then pause to feel our heartbeat to make sure the ticker is still working. It’s nice to keep moving forward toward a goal. There are times, though, that our default assumptions completely blind us to possibilities.

I’ve seen very intelligent people who gave up on the following riddle:

A father and his son were driving together in a car and got into a terrible crash. The father died on the spot, and the son was rushed to the hospital for immediate life-saving surgery. The surgeon came bursting through the doors of the operating room, took one look at the patient, and said, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son!”

If you’ve heard this before, then maybe you remember possibly struggling with this riddle. If you’ve never heard it, and can’t figure out how the doctor’s statement can be true, don’t feel bad. Your subconscious brain is feeding you the expected (default), but wrong answer. Just as with an optical illusion, or even gaps in memory, the subconscious brain tries to serve up sensible data without you even being aware.

Some people actually get mad when they are told the doctor is the boy’s mother, and I suspect that is because they are mad at themselves for tricking themselves.

Instead of looking just at the brain for qualitative differences, let’s start with the assumption that our brains are being supplied with better data and start our qualitative search there.

Since there is no evidence that we can influence, or are even aware of individual cells in our body, we’ll exclude basic cellular metabolism from our consideration of what data the brain receives. The first layer to consider may even be below the limbic system, and that would be the involuntary regulating processes. Most of these processes are governed by a type of feedback known as hysteresis, whose action is to keep some term in a system orbiting a desired value. Sweating to lower body temperature (through evaporation) and shivering to raise it are examples of hysteretic regulation. Our rate of breathing changes in accordance with the body’s need for oxygen.

Again, there doesn’t appear to be much difference between man and beast here, but it is worth mentioning that people sometimes exploit, for their side effects, the automatic responses of their regulatory systems. Some people use rigorous exercise to lose weight, but there is a secret that the marketer’s of diet plans don’t want you to know: you can lose weight by drinking ice water. The body burns fuel to compensate for the temperature loss due to consuming ice water. You can eat pizza, which contains all the food groups and tastes great, and as long as you drank enough ice water, you are on a diet and will lose weight.

So score one for people! Humans’ rock!

Now consider this: nature has created an automaton specifically designed, as best as I can tell, to bug the hell out of us. It runs on shit and garbage, moves rapidly in all 3 spatial dimensions, can rest on the ceiling, identify faces, evade hostile actions, and self-replicate on a large scale. Its offspring are little fucking maggots. Its efficiency is off the scale when compared to anything man has created. The instructions for its replication and autonomous existence are stored in a double-helix molecule that is so cleverly arranged, that it would be like reading every other word in this essay and having it be a completely different essay – times ten. I just wanted to say that in case you think I’m biased against the rest of the animals.

…

Pain is a very effective form of hysteretic feedback designed to get us to stop doing whatever it is that we are doing. Nerve endings are the sensors that sound the pain alarm and they are concentrated most heavily in the skin. Our skin is really an environmental suit that alerts the brain to the fact that the body has sprung a leak or is undergoing rapid compression or some other thing judged to harm the machine. Our skin doesn’t participate in a corrective course of action; it just provides the feedback that some action is necessary to prevent damage. Maybe with the exception of bacteria, all animals sense pain and will react to it in some way that is highly reflexive. If you are the source of the pain some animal is experiencing, you may in turn experience the effects of a different reflex, and that is the fight reflex. Bite, sting, stink, scratch, scream, stab, or stern lectures are some of the things you may experience, depending on the species you are tormenting. The fight reflex is necessary because the flinch or flight reflex doesn’t always work against things that are intent on doing harm. You can flinch away from a flame, but not a shark.

Collectively, all our sensors… I mean senses, provide us with the necessary feedback to interface with the external world to the best of our abilities. Natural selection is greatly influenced by sensory phenomena, and species whose abilities were enhanced by better senses gained selective advantage. Sensory organs also provide some of the most convincing evidence of evolution: there are caves in which virtually the entire animal population shows evidence of once having useful eyes. It also shows the fine grain roll that efficiency plays in natural selection.  Would it really kill to leave the eyes alone? Maybe it would, if the energy required to grow them and service them is better spent elsewhere. Also, damage to the eyes from bumping into things may have been a source of infection, and that could easily guide selection.

Still, all in all, it does not appear there is a qualitative difference in the senses of man and beast. Quantitatively, our senses might actually be inferior to many mammals. From here on, though, we will start to see greater and greater separation as we ascend the hierarchy of how sensory data is processed.

There is a noticeable correlation in how we classify species to the level of data processing they perform. The lower species are great at surviving by thriving and dying. Their niche in the ecology usually has plenty of food readily available and an environment that ranges very little. When food doesn’t basically fly into their mouths, or the weather becomes too hot/cold/dry/wet, those species will hibernate until conditions are right again or just lay eggs and die. They can get by just fine with their senses and reflexes.

At some point during evolution, some species were given a great and powerful feature to augment their senses, and that feature was memory. Memory literally adds the dimension of time to existence. With memory, sensory input can be retained as experience and later, rendered as knowledge. This held tremendous advantage for animals as they could recreate successful activities. When a decision is required in any goal-oriented activity, experience greatly increases the chance of a better choice being made. Experience leads to predictability, and predictability is king.

Experience is a funny thing unto itself. When we mention experience we are usually referring to first hand, or direct experience. There is another phenomenon that substitutes for experience; it’s not experience-helper, but actual, honest faux experience. Can you guess what it is? Does anything instinctively come to mind? It’s instinct!

Instinct is a real bastard to research. 97% of what you will find off Google is very superficial, and the other 4% is indecipherable neurobabble. Because of this, I am just going to make shit up here.

Instinct has to be one of the weirdest phenomena there is in biology. Since it is inherited, it must be coded for in DNA. It makes sense, right? But then I get confused, because I can’t find anything in any literature that hints of the possibility that there is a DNA “recorder”.

It seems highly unlikely that a complex behavior is something that gets randomly mutated. That would sort of imply that frogs could potentially develop a tries-to-fly-south-for-the-winter disorder. Some instincts are so specific and complex, that it is hard to reconcile them as something other than a learned and etched behavior. I can understand the maternal instinct, which many species possess; I can see that as being selected for very early in evolution. What I have a hard time with is the fact that a salmon goes through hell to somehow find its way back home to spawn, or that the Arctic tern migrates across the planet. Selection is a very slow process, and continents move, and rivers come and go. Somehow a mapping of the external, physical world, yes, an atlas, has made its way into DNA.

I told you I was just making shit up; I’m ready for the real info whenever you tell me what it is. For now, let’s just call instinct preconfigured behavior and be done with it.

With memory, we are starting to get some separation in the species.  Imprinting sensory experience to memory might be learning, but it is not knowledge. I think it is only knowledge when it is recalled and used in an action. A rat first learns a maze, and then runs a maze.

Many of the higher species actively teach their offspring by introducing them to essential experience. Additionally, these species often play as adolescents. Playing is practice, and practice is needed to strengthen the neural pathways in the brain. It would be nice to skip beginner and go straight to expert, but it doesn’t work that way. Much of the brain is a substrate on which learned behavior is formed. With the exception of instinct, it does not come with behavior preconfigured, and this is a great thing for adaptability. Most of the higher species exist at a place in the ecology where food does not just fly into their mouths, and where they themselves are considered food. As always, there are exceptions to this. In general, though, members of the higher species are much more active than other species. They exist year round, and this often requires great adaptability and cleverness in seeking food and shelter. Sensory data is processed in much more complicated ways.

A more passive method of learning than direct experience is observation. Careful observation can substitute for direct experience but does not guarantee knowledge. A dog can watch another dog get hit by a car and then step in front of one itself. Somehow it failed to map what it saw to self. Focused attention seems to be an important part of passive learning, and that usually requires a goal. Treats are commonly used to get a person’s attention.

People are easily trained by cats. Anyone who owns a cat has been trained by the cat to accommodate its needs. I don’t think cats purposefully employ discomfort as a means to train us but discomfort, our discomfort, is ultimately what they found to work. Causes of discomfort include loud, persistent meowing, scratching the furniture, darting in front of us as we walk, knocking shit off the shelves, and lying down on the exact spot where we are reading. To avoid these discomforts we actually learn the early signals that a cat sends out to get our attention and we then make an educated guess as to its needs. If they rub up against our leg then maybe they want to be stroked. If they move toward their dish when we move then they might be hungry. If we respond correctly they will leave us alone, otherwise they will escalate from a gentle gesture to persistent and overt obnoxiousness. One question that bugs me is why do my cats first rub against my leg instead of going straight to obnoxious?

Why didn’t Pavlov’s dogs just ring the bell themselves?

Besides instinct, there is another built-in feature that brains come equipped with, and that is pattern recognition. It is believed that all animals with sight, including insects, have the ability to recognize faces from any species that does not try to disguise its face. Pattern recognition is something brains are good at. A bee has a brain the size of a speck but it not only controls 3D flight and all the social functions, but it also can recognize a variety of flowers from any angle.

Pattern matching maps sensory input to a symbol in the brain. Some patterns, such as the face pattern, seem to be hard-wired in the brain. Other patterns get laid in down in memory in some sort of hierarchical fashion as we learn. When we think of a tree, we use the default symbol for a tree. When we think of palm tree, we now use a more specific symbol that sort of inherits the attributes we associate with the generic symbol and augment it with more specific attributes – it becomes much clearer in our head. Some symbols, such as the one for Mom, are extremely specific and may even hold emotions among its attributes.

There were two things I said I would get back to: the question of species proliferation, and the observation that all species share the same DNA structure. I usually get a little squeamish when I am asked to look at something holistically. I get into high alert mode and will bail at the first sign that the term holistic is being used as a substitute for faith. I don’t mean religious faith necessarily, but any kind of dogmatic belief. I mention this, I think, for myself to make sure I’m not doing the same to you when I ask you to consider some curious observations about the biosphere. The biosphere is big and we are a part of it, so the expression ‘can’t see the forest through the trees’ might be applicable here. A holistic view of the biosphere would have to include the dimension of time, and given the subject matter, the amount of time really spans back to the very beginning.

First, was there a single mother species that all life can trace back to? The assumption is yes, and this assumption is used to help locate a new species onto the taxonomy by checking the location of specific DNA markers. Its ancestor is the species with the least differences in these marker locations.

I mentioned earlier that there are 20 amino acids used in the metabolism among all species, and this is true, but it glosses over a few things. Each nucleotide can be one of four different chemicals, abbreviated A, C, G, and T. Since nucleotides group into 3’s to form a codon, that means there are 43 = 64 possible states, or values a codon can assume. This discrepancy is reconciled by allowing several states to code for the same amino acid; 61 states code for 20 amino acids, and the other 3 states code for a special condition that tells a ribosome to stop chaining amino acids and cut the now-completed protein free. Some of the amino acids are mapped to only one codon state, while 1 amino acid is coded for by 6 different states. Most amino acids are coded for by at least 2 states.

There is nothing chemically that would favor one mapping over the other. Each of the 20 amino acids could just as easily been mapped to only one state and just leave the other states unused. It is speculated that the redundant coding is a way to reduce the odds of a harmful mutation. In fact, upon close examination, what has happened is the coding scheme has been arranged so that really only 2 of the nucleotide positions are important, and the third is very tolerant of a mutation. I want to know how, out of all the different ways the mapping could have been arranged, the initial species – the progenitor of life, managed to hit upon this most efficient mapping scheme to guard against an amino acid-changing mutation. It implies that, against fantastic odds, a molecule that was complex enough to protect and maintain itself, and replicate, finally happened… only to die off because it independently was created elsewhere with a more favorable mapping and was pressured out of existence. Because of the large number of possible mappings, this may have happened over and over, and mind you, for one to win out over the other, at least two competing mappings had to exist at the same time. Something smells very fishy – especially when you consider that a worst-case 33% increased chance of a mutation happening really shouldn’t be all that bad since there are now 10 MILLION SPECIES! It would seem that the most is made from mutations.

Speaking of which, given this propensity to create huge numbers of species sporting a fantastic array of flamboyant characteristics, you would think that at some point it would have hit upon a very hardy combination of species that would be nearly impossible to pressure out of existence. Let’s see if I can think of such a combination: hmmm… how about a beetle that eats dung and a dung-producing dung-beetle-eating something else. They could be made hardy and could cover the earth. How’s that for efficiency? Why the variety? (There’s a very interesting answer to that which takes another 2000 words)

But some aspects of the whole efficiency gig are a lie, right? I mean, why nature would make a species such as the salmon that has to go through living hell just to make it one more generation, is beyond me. Why not let them deposit their eggs like other fish? Or, how about the poor penguin: I watched March of the Penguins and I felt guilty just for being alive. To stand on an egg for 7 months without food, in sub-zero temperatures at the bottom of the world might make me contemplate extinction. They seem to do just fine in warm environments; the penguins in the New England Aquirium thrive, and it’s hotter than hell in there.

The point is, the biosphere is a highly complex system at every level. It’s so complex that we run into any number of questions that have a definite answer. In addition, it exists on a time scale outside the range of meaningful statistical sampling that we can employ from direct observation. There may be patterns that won’t cycle for another 700,000 years. It’s complex through and through. It’s comparable to the complexity of the human brain.

Which brings this to a point: there may be an identifiable, qualitative difference in man’s brain which indeed may explain how he came to be holding a cell phone. The problem is, this same quality may also be responsible for why it is so miserably difficult for us to crawl out of the holes we dig for ourselves. The reason I dragged up the issue of the holistic biosphere, is it would be nice to have a datum where we can gauge whether or not we are pressuring ourselves out of existence. By all appearances, the biosphere is experiencing an infection. We may in fact be a blight in the biosphere, and since it is so good at long term survival, we might consider looking over our shoulders and we might consider being a little less blighty.

There is a fractal nature to the biosphere. Life is made from building blocks that are adaptable over long periods of time. It has a tendency to fill up every nook and cranny by trying new or better ways to survive. It is not planned: it is a continuous game of craps being carried out by the mechanical process of DNA mutation. It is opportunistic. It has produced a wide assortment of life exhibiting a variety of characteristics. The goal of gain is a necessary feature that is common in all life. It too is opportunistic, at least until man came along. Our species has been endowed with a characteristic that moves gain from opportunistic to a directed, mechanical process, and it may not be any more controllable than the DNA mutation strategy is.

What would the earth look like if humans never developed to more than a 3rd grade level, say the mentality of a normal 9-year-old? I don’t mean reverted to that, I mean they never did. How much different would we be than the apes? Would a 9-year-old have the ability to develop a written language or systematize learning in general? What would shelter look like? What would it all look like?

The reason I ask is because a qualitative difference in the human brain that could lead to our current state would not have an instant benefit that could be utilized from birth. Nature, in all its flamboyance, may simply have produced a species with superior pattern matching abilities. The pattern matching is carried out in a mechanical process over time.

Here is how things might progress:

A baby human would take in sensory data much as the other higher mammals do. It would explore its surrounds and it would be nudged by nurturing parents much as the other mammals do. Because it had superior pattern matching abilities, it might “notice” that this thing called self can affect change in its surroundings. It can shout out loud and the symbols called mother and father would react in pleasing and rewarding ways. It would begin to notice patterns to the noises made by mother and father, especially when they repeat the noises. It would notice that it could modulate its own noises to mimic the patterns of mother and father noises. It would begin to annoy mother and father for attention because self was being assigned a greater and greater value and becoming very important.

They would begin to notice patterns of patterns, and abstraction would begin its self-reinforcing ascent. Knowledge from experience and learning would be multiplied by the ability to abstract. The terms of a remembered experience would get substituted by analogy and abstraction, and the experience would get simulated over and over with different values. Reality would leap from what was, to what could be, and a new, more gainful course would be set.

Gain.

Gain is the bane that makes my brain scream in pain.

The narcotic effects of rewarding our pleasure center through gain have led man to create 10 million species of ideas to satisfy that itch. The urge is so powerful that, left unchecked, it would make civilization nearly impossible. Justice is the mechanism that keeps our endeavors on a zero-sum footing. It is a social compact we must buy into, and the compact must apply equally to all. The people of Iraq are learning first-hand what happens when that compact is broken.

Part 2 of this will examine the flaws in the mechanical process of pattern matching and ponder about our ability to recognize and overcome these flaws.