Author Archives: Hue White

A DALY is a measurement of the impact of a disease on a human life.  It was developed in the 1990s, but only just recently came to my attention – I’m not sure how (I owe someone a h/t). The World Health Organization goes into more detail:

The YLL basically correspond to the number of deaths multiplied by the standard life expectancy at the age at which death occurs. The basic formula for YLL (without yet including other social preferences discussed below), is the following for a given cause, age and sex:

where:

• N = number of deaths
• L = standard life expectancy at age of death in years

Because YLL measure the incident stream of lost years of life due to deaths, an incidence perspective has also been taken for the calculation of YLD in the original Global Burden of Disease Study for year 1990 and in subsequent WHO updates for years 2000 to 2004.

Seems useful, but the charity research site Give Well has some problems with it:

The DALY metric is used to provide a single number to capture all of the health costs caused by a disease (or averted by an aid program). 1 DALY could represent 1 year of life lost (due to early death), 1.67 years spent with blindness, 5.24 significant malaria episodes, 41.67 years spent with intestinal obstruction due to ascariasis (a parasite), or many possible combinations of these and other symptoms.4 There is no way of knowing, from just how many DALYs a program is said to have averted, whether it has saved lives, prevented large numbers of minor health problems, or some combination thereof.

We feel that this creates a number of problems for donors seeking the charity that best fits their values. More in our blog series on DALYs, available here.

So Give Well would like a dimensional number; this yardstick is a little too simple for them.

I tried to discover if DALYs are used by pharmaceutical corporations to select the next disease to work on, but I found no evidence of such.  I suppose those corporations where the execs are wedded to the notion that they exist to make as much money as possible wouldn’t be interested in the concept; it would take a more idealistic executive team, such as we hear about now and then from the Millenials, to consider using DALYs.  However, in the category of other factors, companies are often driven by inner competencies, rather than external needs, and so targeted diseases are selected by a less fortunate motivation; and if they are screening drugs against a spectrum of illnesses, then it’ll be fortune that selects the disease to treat.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded research to put DALY numbers to a variety of diseases.  The results are provided here by the venerable journal The Lancet, and requires a free registration.

Can they ever make up their minds?  First they expunge our favorite dinosaur from the science books:

But then, in 1903, Elmer Riggs said that classification was wrong. He based his premise on the number of sacrum bones (where the tail attaches to the spinal cord) of each dinosaur, according to Wired magazine. The Apatosaurus sacrum has three bones, while the Brontosaurus had five. Instead of being a different species, Riggs contended the Brontosaurus was a younger version of the Apatosaurus.

… and now they’re dragging the poor guy back from the grave …

Both were long-necked and long-tailed creatures, among the largest to roam the Earth in their time. But now an extensive study published online in the journal PeerJ, finds that there are considerable differences between the two — enough, the researchers say, to conclude that they belong to separate groups.

A team of paleontologists spent five years researching and analyzing hundreds of different physical features of dinosaur specimens. The study’s lead author, Emanuel Tschopp from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal, says, “Generally, the Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide,” according to Scientific American.

Tschopp tells the magazine that while both dinosaurs are massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is “even more extreme than Brontosaurus.”

Yes!  All of us middle-aged dinosaur junkies with our affection for “thunder lizard” may soon rejoice — Brontosaurus may be back!

A whimsical search of the Internet for Surveys for favorite dinosaur yielded tantalizing hints, but results were as hard to come by as some dinosaur species.

The Dinosaur society is here.

A Facebook correspondent, in response to a post concerning an increase in citizens identifying as political independents, requests

Now show a chart that shows people who actually vote.

This leads to this interesting article discussing precisely this subject, also published by the Pew Research Center.

Among Republicans interviewed in October, 17% did not identify as Republicans in November. Among Democrats interviewed in October, 10% no longer identified as Democrats. Of those who declined to identify with a party in October, 18% told us they were either Democrats or Republicans when we interviewed them in November. Overall, 15% of voters gave a different answer in November than they did in October.

We also see party affiliation changing in understandable ways over time, in response to major events and political circumstances. For example, the percentage of registered voters identifying as Republican dropped from 33% to 28% between 2004 and 2007 during a period in which disapproval of President George W. Bush’s job performance was rising and opinions about the GOP were becoming increasingly negative.

Similarly, the percentage of American voters identifying as Democrats dropped from 38% in 2008 – a high point not seen since the 1980s – to 34% in 2011, after their large losses in the 2010 congressional elections.

The Roper Center provides a chart of the information for the 2012 Presidential Election, entitled “How Groups Voted,” which I take to mean exit polls.  I’ve extracted this outtake:

For 2008, Roper provides this information:

In 2004, Roper provides this information:

For 2000, Roper provides this information:

From these few data points it appears the Republicans are suffering as both the Democrats and the Independents gain at their expense.  Of course, as the Pew report points out, loyalties can be variable, depending on the success of the Party, fidelity (or lack thereof) to espoused principles, and even the American belief that the grass is always greener with someone else in charge.  Still, given the aging demographic of the GOP, this trend is not surprising.  The interesting part will be the adjustments the GOP will make in order to stay viable as a national force.  Some have suggested the redrawing of voting districts is one of their early strategies; this can be of limited effectiveness since it’s easily detectable and can be taken to court, as in this Texas example.

The Pew Research Center is out with a poll measuring party membership:

The biggest change in partisan affiliation in recent years is the growing share of Americans who decline to affiliate with either party: 39% call themselves independents, 32% identify as Democrats and 23% as Republicans, based on aggregated data from 2014.

For both parties, youth is the future.

Millennials continue to be the most Democratic age cohort; 51% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, compared with 35% who identify with the GOP or lean Republican. There are only slight differences in partisan affiliation between older and younger millennials. Republicans have a four-point lead among the Silent Generation (47%-43%), the most Republican age cohort.

Not so good news for the GOP.  If these trends continue … but of course, both parties will adjust to attract new adherents.  The problem for the GOP is that they have become a haven for positions unpopular with the Millenials.  I suspect the first problem will be inflexibility, as the partisan politics practiced by the GOP on the President, even in the foreign policy arena, have been well-publicized by the GOP and its supporters for decades now.  Their raucous approach may now be circling around to bite off their tails.  After that, particular positions will fall: gay marriage, ObamaCare.  However, possibly the most difficult will be ridding themselves of the perception that they do not relate well with reality.  When will they discard their objections to climate change? I know that, prior to the Gingrich era, I had respect for the Republicans – they raised objections, they voted against Democratic bills, but they also understood that governing was an important duty, not a game to be played and won.  They had interesting ideas, and they conducted themselves honorably.  21st century Republicans dig in their heels, refuse to permit judicial appointments on the most slender of grounds, and are profligate with the public purse when they are in control, feeding the special interests supporting them.  Taking the military budget as a proxy for defense industry subsidization, the Council on Foreign Relations provides this chart:

The Democrats, on the other hand, must learn how to better promote their successes.  How many of them ran on the successful passage of ObamaCare?  Not many, especially in heavily contested areas – and they lost the House, and then the Senate.  Of course, they might have anyways, but taking the opportunity of an election to provide further education on ObamaCare would have been the brave and right thing to do.  That, and pull in their own profligacy, are two of the challenges they face.

A former colleague of mine happens to have run for State legislature seats, and has attended caucuses of both Parties.  His observation is that the most extreme attend these meetings: in the Republicans, anti-taxer who won’t hear a word for a tax; in the Democrats, every possible cause you can think of needs government funding, preferably unlimited.

Are the Millenials going to find this appetizing?  Does it even make sense to ask a loosely knit (if at all – the whole “generation” thing has never made much sense to me) group such a question?  The next few years – and their polls – should be quite interesting.  So will the creaking as the Parties try to adjust, against the howls of the old-timers.

I’d never heard of these.  Description here.

Over the last few months the archaeological world has been subjected to the horror of the deliberate destruction of ancient artifacts and even cities by the ISIS terrorist group.  However, it may not be all about the destruction, as Catherine Brahic reports in NewScientist (14 March 2015), “Can we save history from ISIS vandals?” (paywall):

THE Islamic State’s latest propaganda video shows fighters smashing statues and artefacts that are thousands of years old in the Mosul Museum, Iraq. The destruction is shocking, but maybe it is not random.

Archaeologist Katharyn Hanson of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has examined the video and points out that valuable objects are missing. She says that despite what the IS fighters say, they are not destroying everything.

The missing objects will likely be sold for a healthy profit on the black market, using international crime networks. Just how much money ISIS generates for its military campaign from looted art is still debated. Some believe the sale of ancient art is a key revenue stream for the terrorist group. Others, including Hanson, argue that ISIS makes far more money from oil stolen from pipelines and ransoms paid for hostages. Either way, treasures are being lost forever.

Nor is looting confined to ISIS:

“Looting is happening everywhere and anyone with a shovel is doing it,” says Michael Danti, an archaeologist at the University of Boston. “All the jihadi groups are doing it, factions within the Syrian regime are doing it, and there are stories of factions within the Syrian opposition doing it. It’s very tempting, and lucrative. Some people are trying to feed their families, others are buying weapons.”

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the archaeologists, but if this is how you feed a family, it’s even easier to empathize with the desperate citizens of Syria – and far more understandable than the ISIS destruction, which appears to be more about entrenching power and destroying a mythos at odds with their own ambitions.

The Penn Cultural Heritage Center is leading an effort to preserve Syrian archaeological treasures here.

Iran has been a bugbear for successive sessions of Congress ever since the Iranians booted out Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi for (in popular opinion) being the catspaw of the United States, engaging in torture, etc (Feb 1979).  The taking of American hostages in November of the same year was, of course, traumatizing to anyone who loves their fellow countrymen; and for those who believe in America’s Manifest Destiny, exceptionally offensive.  I was just coming of age during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and I do recall the shock of screaming anti-American crowds, the overwhelming of the guards, and then the long crisis, the failed rescue raid, and finally the almost silent release of the prisoners as Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter.

Since then, simply pulling various memories of Iran out of my head, I recall the Iran-Iraq War, including the reports of the horror of gas warfare, the sacrifice of the youth of both nations for the egos of the leaders, and all the other horrors that go along with quasi-religious wars; I remember the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, and the shocking way his death was mourned (for those who are not aware, as I recall the videos, his body was manhandled by mobs who carried it over their heads, before he was finally buried), which really brought home the idea that some people are really different and are truly heartbroken when a leader dies (I was already quite cynical about such matters); the execution of one of the initial leaders of the revoluion, a large jawed chap who had served as a news announcer during the crisis – I regret to say I do not recall his name.

The Iranian nuclear program began in the 1950s during the reign of the aforementioned Shah, went dormant when the Revolution took place, and was quietly revived in the 1990s.  This became public in 2002, and ever since there’s been dispute about the nature of their nuclear program; a short history is here.

Thus, concern about the Iranian nuclear program is understandable, and not entirely unmerited; since Pakistan and India, long term enemies, became nuclear powers and thus able to seriously damage, if not completely obliterate each other, not to mention seriously damage their neighbors, the jitters surrounding any other power regarded with not only suspicion, but outright paranoia, will certainly lead to a certain amount of disturbance.

However, the GOP’s reaction to a deal being assembled by a Democratic Administration can strain credulity to the breaking point.  Here’s a survey of some opinions, minus the well known Bachmann broadside.

Time gives a summary of the deal here.

Iranian President Rouhani:

“Some think we should either fight with the world or surrender to other powers,” he said. “We believe there is a third option. We can coöperate with the world.”

Thomas Friedman at the New York Times reports,

President Obama invited me to the Oval Office Saturday afternoon to lay out exactly how he was trying to balance these risks and opportunities in the framework accord reached with Iran last week in Switzerland. What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-à-vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.

Politico reports Saudi Arabia is giving cautious support.  Peter Beinart at The Atlantic writes in “What’s the Alternative to Obama’s Iran Deal?”

Benjamin Netanyahu insists that opposing Thursday’s framework nuclear deal with Iran doesn’t mean he wants war. “There’s a third alternative,” the Israeli prime minister told CNN on Sunday, “and that is standing firm, ratcheting up the pressure until you get a better deal.”

There are three problems with this argument. The first is that even some of Netanyahu’s own ideological allies don’t buy it. …

The second problem with Netanyahu’s argument is that it’s based on bizarre assumptions about Iranian politics. According to Netanyahu, if the United States walks away from the current deal, Iran’s desperation to end global sanctions will lead it to scrap its nuclear program almost entirely. But Iran’s nuclear program is decades old and enjoys broad public support. Even Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the reformist Green Movement, declared in 2009 that if elected, “we will not abandon the great achievements of Iranian scientists. I too will not suspend uranium enrichment.” … Rouhani’s hardline opponents, who benefit politically and economically from the sanctions, fiercely oppose such a deal. Netanyahu thinks a more aggressive American posture, coupled with a demand for near-complete Iranian capitulation, will make Tehran accept terms that today not even Iranian doves accept.

Finally, there’s a third, less well-appreciated flaw in Netanyahu’s argument. He assumes that after walking away from the current deal, the United States can “ratchet up the pressure on Iran.” In fact, the pressure will likely go down.

Yes, Congress can pass additional sanctions. But more American sanctions alone won’t have much effect. After all, the United States began seriously sanctioning Iran in the mid-1990s. Yet for a decade and a half, those sanctions had no major impact on Iran’s nuclear program. That’s largely because foreign companies ignored American pleas to stop doing business with the Islamic Republic.

Assuming the facts are as presented, this refutes Netanyahu without addressing the virtues of the deal itself.

Ben Caspit, an Israeli columnist, comments for the AL Monitor:

On the evening of April 2, when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and the European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini faced the press, Jerusalem was shocked into silence.

First, the very fact that a framework agreement had been reached ran counter to all Israeli assessments, according to which the deadline would be postponed once again to the end of June (the original deadline). Second, the principles of the agreement surprised Israeli officials and especially the political echelon. No, there isn’t a single person around Netanyahu or Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon who will concede that the agreement is a good one, but several of its elements make it anything but the “bad agreement” that Israel has insisted all along would be produced.

AL Monitor talks to Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Yadlin, formerly the head of Israeli military intelligence:

“It depends on how you look at it,” he said. “If we aspire to an ideal world and dream of having all of Israel’s justified demands fulfilled, then of course the agreement does not deliver. It grants Iran legitimacy as a nuclear threshold state and potential to eventually achieve nuclearization. It leaves Iran more or less one year away from a nuclear weapon, and Israel will clearly not like all of this.

“But there’s another way to look at it that examines the current situation and the alternatives. In this other view, considering that Iran now has 19,000 centrifuges, the agreement provides quite a good package. One has to think what might have happened if, as aspired to by Netanyahu and Steinitz, negotiations had collapsed. Had that happened, Iran could have decided on a breakout, ignored the international community, refused to respond to questions about its arsenal, continued to quickly enrich and put together a bomb before anyone could have had time to react. And therefore, with this in mind, it’s not a bad agreement.”

The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, remains unhappy, however.

Over at The American Conservative, W. James Antle III opines

How do you say trust but verify in Persian? For the truth is, the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran is only partly about the technical details. It is also a matter of trust.

Assuming a final agreement really resembles what the State Department outlined publicly, it will have its weaknesses. Iran will remain a nuclear threshold state. The Islamic republic will be allowed to maintain a vast nuclear infrastructure, and the deal’s success depends on the ”P5+1″ group’s ability to detect and penalize Iranian cheating in a timely fashion. …

The deal has to be evaluated against plausible alternatives, not an ideal outcome. It was in the absence of any deal that Iran went from having a little over 16o [sic] centrifuges in 2003 to 3,000 in 2005, 8,000 by the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency and 22,000 by 2013.

This seems fairly reasonable to me, acknowledge there are problems, but this is progress and we should appreciate it.  He goes on to comment on the alternative,

Critics of the deal don’t like it when it is suggested that the failure of diplomacy makes war more likely. They borrow one of Obama’s favorite catchphrases and call it a “false choice.”

This would be more convincing if leading Iran hawks weren’t already calling for bombing Iran or saying war is our best option.

But …

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been quoted as saying, “If you think the war in Iraq was hard, an attack on Iran would, in my opinion, be a catastrophe.”

CNBC is not happy:

The agreement significantly reduces the number of Iranian centrifuges and other nuclear infrastructure, but only limits Tehran’s ability to quickly “break out” from these restrictions and accumulate enough fissionable material to create a nuclear weapon in less than one year. Theoretically, we are told that is enough time for the West to detect Iranian violations and respond — but it is not.

The National Interest’s Zalmay Khalilzad is not happy.

… there are four reasons why this agreement is flawed and poses significant risks:

First, using the so-called fatwa by Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei as an indicator of Iran’s true intentions— present and future—is a mistake.

Second, even if President Obama is correct that the agreement puts Iran one year away from producing enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon, it entails substantial risks.

Third, the president is counting on the efficacy of inspections—believing that Iranian efforts to cheat or deceive will be discovered and exposed in a timely manner, allowing the United States and its partners to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Fourth, the framework agreement assumes that if Iran violates the deal, the sanctions that were lifted can be re-imposed—or can snap back into place.

Mr. Khalilzad has some significant experience with Middle East affairs, having been Ambassador to Iraq, and should perhaps be taken a trifle more seriously.

The Washington Free Beacon, relying mostly on unnamed arms control experts, believes the deal is unsustainable:

Despite promises by President Obama that Iranian cheating on a new treaty will be detected, verifying Tehran’s compliance with a future nuclear accord will be very difficult if not impossible, arms experts say.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be effectively verifiable,” said Paula DeSutter, assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation from 2002 to 2009.

But David Corn at MotherJones has the temerity to roundup a number of named experts who think this is sustainable:

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former national security aide to Sen. John McCain, and a former director of intelligence assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense: “[T]he proposed parameters and framework in the Proposed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has the potential to meet every test in creating a valid agreement over time…It can block both an Iranian nuclear threat and a nuclear arms race in the region, and it is a powerful beginning to creating a full agreement, and creating the prospect for broader stability in other areas. Verification will take at least several years, but some form of trust may come with time. This proposal should not be a subject for partisan wrangling or outside political exploitation. It should be the subject of objective analysis of the agreement, our intelligence and future capabilities to detect Iran’s actions, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) capabilities to verify, and enforcement provisions if Iran should cheat. No perfect agreement was ever possible and it is hard to believe a better option was negotiable. In fact, it may be a real victory for all sides: A better future for Iran, and greater security for the United States, its Arab partners, Israel, and all its other allies.”

Kori Schake at FP writes an article entitled “I’m a Republican and I Support the Iran Nuclear Deal”:

1. The inspection provisions are solid. According to the details of the agreement that have been released so far, the deal provides for continuous inspection of all of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. It also challenges inspections of any suspect facilities, and calls on Iran to sign up for the IAEA Additional Protocol, which increases short-notice inspections and IAEA access to establish greater confidence in an absence of cheating. If these are all carried out, they would amount to a robust verification regime. The inspection provisions would dramatically increase the United States’ ability to know what is happening in Iran’s nuclear programs, to judge the extent of their militarization efforts, and to anticipate “breakout” toward a nuclear weapons.

William Kristol at the conservative The Weekly Standard writes an editorial, “Kill the Deal“:

But it’s important not to lose sight of the whole, even as one goes after its most vulnerable parts. The whole of the deal is a set of concessions to an aggressive regime with a history of cheating that will now be enabled to stand one unverifiable cheat away from nuclear weapons. In making these concessions, the U.S, and its partners are ignoring that regime’s past and present actions, strengthening that regime, and sending the message that there is no price to be paid for a regime’s lying and cheating and terror and aggression. …

It is now up to the members of Congress to do their duty, on this delicate and momentous occasion. It is up to members of Congress to refuse to accede to this set of concessions made by our current executive magistrate, concessions that would put one of the world’s most dangerous regimes further along the road to acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons.

Fox News publishes “What Saddam Hussein tells us about the Iran nuclear deal“:

President Barack Obama correctly has pointed out that the impending Iran nuclear deal depends for success upon United Nations inspections.  He also said, incorrectly, that “…Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.”

The President seems not to remember the inspection regime for Iraq following the 1991 Kuwait war.  And that inspection regime did not work, for reasons that included both Saddam’s behavior and that of the U.N. Security Council.

It’s not entirely clear to me how the one paragraph relates to the other; I also recall the Iraq War, and the belated discovery that Iraq indeed did NOT possess Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite the assurances that he did — all over the repeated assertions of UN inspectors that he did not.  So if the deal is even more robust than the Iraq deal, I find it hard to get upset.

Finally, the indictment of Democratic Senator Menendez, a critic of the deal, has drawn some conspiracy theories out of the woodwork like salt draws water out of beef, this one from conservative Breitbart.com:

“If you had written this in a ‘House of Cards’ script, it would have been thrown out. The idea that the president’s most powerful democratic critic of the Iran deal goes down, indicted just before the deal is announced, nobody is suggesting a connection, but it sure does have an impact and it will it will be harder for Republicans to get a veto-proof majority to challenge the deal.”

The above quote from Jon Karl.

And, as an addendum, Egberto Willies at the Daily Kos chimes in with a quote from Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson:

I am not one to go immediately to war. I would go to some sort of containment policy. And try to do something about it through that policy rather than going to war. But I know what my political party wants. My political party, at least some of them—the 47 for example who signed the letter to the Ayatollah—they want war.

I have been unable to find a second source for the above quote, but it does fit the pattern of the good Republican Colonel speaking his mind, not his ideology.

That’s a more interesting survey result.  By measuring the more extreme candidates of both parties, we get a measure of how extreme each party may really be.  This is important in an era where party zealots – those most likely to be extreme – control the parties.

We’ve redesigned the layout of the blog based on initial experience and visual appeal – that is, how it appeals to our sensibilities.  It’s not entirely how I’d like it – the author line appears to have a hideous “blavatar”, and I don’t care about categories.  On the other hand, the block quote area is much improved and Deb’s aesthetic judgments have resulted in a vast improvement in the blog.

Please let us know if there is something else we can fix.

Michael Bond at NewScientist (14 March 2015)  reports (paywall) on the numerical models used by the UK Meteorology Office via an interview with head of the Numerical Methods division, Ken Mylne.  I found this part of the Q&A interesting for reasons having nothing to do with the weather:

From 2011, the Met Office started presenting rain forecasts using probabilities. Was that controversial?
We’d been debating it for a long time. The Americans have been putting out probability of precipitation forecasts for many years, and it’s quite accepted there. The argument in favour is that often you cannot – for good scientific reasons – say definitely that it will or will not be raining. So you are giving people much better information if you tell them the probability of rainfall. While we recognise that some people find probabilities difficult to understand, lots of people do understand them and make better decisions as a result.

I’m located in Minnesota and have been for a long time, and I cannot remember when the local weather stations did not offer probabilities of precipitation in their forecasts.  Mr. Mylne suggests that a portion of the population may not understand probabilities, and therefore they had not offered those estimates in the interests of not confusing the audience.

My thought is this: if your expectations of an audience is low, that’s where they’ll perform.  If you want to see improvement, expectations must be set higher.  Any teacher, I’m sure, will tell you that.  Statistics and probability can certainly become frustrating subjects once you get beyond the basics, but basics is really all we present for the weather forecasts – so present it and let the audience know they can learn the basics if they are interested.

Nowadays, you can get in as deep as you like in any subject, as the Web lets experts freely share their knowledge with anyone.  Ever wonder why?  They often have problems of their own that they hope someone else may have an answer.

Tim McDonnell at Mother Jones has a must-read article illustrating the efficacy of a carbon tax on the output of CO₂, a critical greenhouse gas:

Now, new data from the Australian Department of the Environment reveal that whether or not you liked the carbon tax, it absolutely worked to slash carbon emissions. And in the first quarter without the tax, emissions jumped for the first time since prior to the global financial crisis.

Australia’s Liberal Party has a trouble relationship with climate change science, much like the United States’ GOP, and NewScientist has been covering this little science drama.  (Confusingly, NewScientist sometimes refers to the Liberal Party as the Conservative Party; NewScientist articles are paywalled).  In their 09 August 2011 issue Clive Hamilton observed:

THE battle over global warming, reaching fever pitch in Australia amid plans to introduce a carbon tax, is part of a long-running and bitter culture war between conservatives and liberals dating from the 1960s. …

There, climate scientists report death threats, figures on the right of the conservative opposition party mutter about excessive United Nations power, and protesters wave placards calling Prime Minister Julia Gillard “Bob Brown’s Bitch” – a reference to the leader of the Australian Greens party, who holds the balance of power in the upper house of the nation’s parliament. …

Leader of the Conservative opposition, Tony Abbott, is vigorously stoking the fire with his trademark blend of alpha-male swagger and hyperbolic claims about the ruinous effects of the carbon tax. On paper, the opposition party has committed Australia to the same emission cuts as the government – a 5 per cent reduction on 2000 levels by 2020. Against the advice of economists and the Federal Treasury, Abbott insists the target can be reached more cheaply by “direct action”, such as paying farmers to enhance carbon sequestration in soil.

And on the corporate side:

Behind it all has been perhaps the most potent force in the nation, the mining industry. Miners have always been powerful, but the China-driven minerals boom of the last few years has created a cadre of militant rich with an enormous sense of entitlement and a willingness to fight “government interference”. A dispute in 2010, which was sparked by a proposed mining super-profits tax, was a defining moment.

The similarities to the United States situation is unmistakeable.  Mr. Abbot had led the Liberal Party in a coalition with other parties during the 2010 elections, which resulted in a hung Parliament until the Labor Party made common cause with a Green MP and two independent MPs.

Meanwhile the Australian climate worsened, as reported by Andy Coghlan (07 January 2013):

Australia is baking in a record-breaking “dome of heat“, threatening to unleash the worst firestorms since those that claimed hundreds of lives in 2009. Temperatures reached almost 48 °C on Monday at the Oodnadatta airport in South Australia, and 43 °C on Tuesday in Sydney. The typical January high is 37.7 °C at Oodnadatta. The average across the country is tipped to break the previous record of 40.17 °C in 1976. …

Lack of rainfall in recent months has left soils completely dry and unable to release moisture that would take up heat from the air through evaporation. At the same time, vegetation across the continent that had been revived by rains over the past two years is now completely dried out. “Much of this grass is fully dried and is ready to burn,” says Gary Morgan of the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne.

But it wasn’t all about drought, as was reported just a week later by Michael Slezak:

The east coast of Australia has been drenched by floods and torrential rains, even as recent bush fires affecting much of the country continued to burn. Four people are known to have died as Australians get a further taste of extreme weather that is predicted to become more common as the planet warms.

Mr. Abbot gained the position of prime minister in September of that year, as covered by Mr. Slezak:

AUSTRALIA’S landslide election result seems to be bad news for the climate. The new conservative government, headed by prime minister elect Tony Abbott, says it will axe the country’s carbon tax, disband a climate advisory body and institute a carbon reduction policy that climate scientists say will fail to meet even its meagre targets.

It will also scale back plans for a national broadband network and direct funding away from research it deems “ridiculous”.

And, in a petulant gesture of denial, the new Australian government rid themselves of that troublesome pest, science, that proxy for reality:

The government clashed with scientists almost immediately, when it dramatically switched strategy on climate change, including by dumping the nation’s emissions trading scheme. Now the prime minister, Tony Abbot, has cut the science minister post, saying education and industry can pick up the slack.

Projections are not rosy for Australia, Catherine Brahic reports:

Australia is drying out, and it’s largely our fault. The south-west of the country can expect to see average annual rainfall drop by 40 per cent compared with the mid-20th century, and a new model suggests that the main cause is human greenhouse gas emissions.

Water from the skies is the stuff of life but the expectation is that many parts of the world will see less of it with climate change. But predicting how much rain will fall where is devilishly difficult.

It is an important question, because it affects water supplies. Since 2000, the average annual amount of water flowing into reservoirs in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, has dropped to less than a quarter of the yearly average between 1911 and 1974, says David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, citing national figures. As a whole, the south-west of Australia has seen a 20 per cent decline in winter rain since the 1960s, says Nerilie Abram of the Australian National University in Canberra.

Mr. Abbot may have sensed he had gone too far, for NewScientist reports in October 2014 a small gesture to science:

A YEAR after his government was criticised for failing to appoint a science minister for the first time in decades, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has announced he will be chairing a Commonwealth Science Council. Its aim is to “improve the focus on science” and be “the pre-eminent body for advice on science and technology in Australia”.

The budget is paltry, however.

Finally, Australia experienced an unique event: a double cyclone.  Michael Slezak reported in 23 February 2015:

It was a shocking double blow. Australia is picking itself back up after being battered simultaneously by two severe tropical cyclones last week, in what meteorologists are saying is a first for the country. One of these appears to be the southern-most cyclone of such a strong intensity to make landfall, giving Australians a taste of what climate change is expected to bring.

Tropical cyclone Marcia was categorised in the highest possible category – category five – when it made landfall in Queensland on Friday and brought wind gusts of up to 285 kilometres per hour. On the same day, cyclone Lam, a category four cyclone, made landfall in the Northern Territory, knocking out a wind station with gusts up to 260 kilometres per hour.

Australia may be a continent, but it’s a small continent.  Mr. Slezak continues:

Climate change is expected to make tropical cyclones less frequent but more severe on average. But global warming is also expected to bring them further south as warmer conditions move tropical weather further from the equator. And cyclone Marcia appears to fit that trend.

Which brings us back to Mr. Abbott and Tim McDonnell’s article, which reports Mr. Abbott

… declared that his government is committed to signing on to the next major international climate accord, set to be hammered out in Paris later this year.

It certainly appears Mr. Abbott may be changing his tune on climate change science; perhaps reinstating the carbon tax should be the next step, regardless of the outcry from corporations and citizens.

But it’s impossible not to ask what magnitude of weather related natural catastrophe will be necessary for the GOP to begin to understand that an adherence to ideology over reality will cost more in the long run?  Sure, a carbon tax will result in higher energy costs – that’s the point.  For those US citizens who cannot afford such costs, we can certainly provide help, as we already do – a simple expansion of current programs may be all that’s necessary.  In the corporate sector, some companies already exist to help other companies optimize their energy use (full disclosure: I have investments in this area).

A carbon tax fits nicely into our economic system: recognizing an externality and putting a price on it is not unusual, as seen in pollution regulation; it is, in fact, simple justice to adjust the economic system to reflect the true costs of corporate operations.  And some even see it as a matter of national security, as retired General and former Democratic Presidential hopeful Wesley Clark asserts in an interview with The Oregonian’s Oregon Live operation.

But it makes sense.  Aviva Rutkin at NewScientist (14 March 2015) (paywall) reports on a new way for trial lawyers to run test trials:

I HAVE only a few pages of evidence with which to decide the fate of a maintenance man from Texas. While at work trying to untangle a spool of wire on a crane, his right hand was caught and severed when the line pulled taut. He sued for negligence, and I am leafing through his lawyer’s court strategy trying to decide who is to blame and what damages are due.

This is the work of an online juror. For 20 minutes to an hour of work and up to $1 per minute in pay, ordinary people can offer their opinions on real cases to the attorneys who are working on them. These amateur assessments, crowdsourced and interpreted by online services, give lawyers insight into how an actual jury might rule long before anyone steps into the courtroom.

Mock juries are nothing new, but they are typically performed in person. Lawyers often bring volunteers into a courtroom to observe a fake trial and reach a verdict. But these run-throughs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, all for a single jury’s opinion. Adrienne LeFevre of the service OnlineVerdict, based in Chicago, says online mock trials allow attorneys to pick the brains of dozens or even hundreds of mock jurors.

Another provider is eJury. But not everyone thinks this will work out:

Rich Matthews, a trial consultant in San Francisco, is sceptical that these sites can replace traditional mock jury research. By soliciting opinions virtually, he says, all of the subtle non-verbal cues that go into a real trial are lost. The jurors miss out on the dynamic experience of deliberating with one another, and the lawyers do not pick up on the intensity or the tone of the jurors’ opinions.

Having sat on a trial many years ago, I think Mr. Matthews’ argument has some merit.  On the other hand, the jury room can be quite dynamic, and if one or two jurors, having come to an improper conclusion, assert themselves, they could easily sway a jury in a case if the balance of the jury is not strong-minded, or, more importantly, if either side was not clear in its delivery; thus, having the evidence in written form without someone hanging over you is appealing, at least to this engineer – I would not have to separate facts from emotion.  And then there may be the back and forth with the judge concerning various matters – but that would not occur in a traditional mock trial, either.

Update on the current project: I’ve finished the entry of the compilation and encountered two or three places where recursion occurs; as noted earlier, they result in code that is not BNF-like.  That’s reality.

I’ve decided to attack the semantics problem in a consistent manner.  For each production BNF, I will append a processing parser.  A recursive descent parser consists of multiple parsers strung together using currying; about half of them consume input, the rest check whether the consumers are happy with the inputs.  These processing parsers will evaluate the results of the parsing in the production, which will be stored during the parsing, and take appropriate actions.  So, for example, Production 5, which in pure BNF form is

Name ::= NameStartChar (NameChar)*

and in Mythryl is currently

name = name_start_char & <name_char> ;

will become

name = name_start_char & <name_char> & five_p;

Some processors will place results in a result parameter before calling the next parser, while others will collate results and invoke callback functions.  five_p will be of the former sort.

The Passover story … told by a superior race.

(h/t Sydney Sweitzer)

David Gagne delivers a report on homicide rates in the Americas, south of the American border.  The highest?

El Salvador:El Salvador tallied 3,942 murders in 2014, according to the country’s forensic unit Medicina Legal, a 57 percent increase from the previous year. While El Salvador‘s forensic unit states that the country’s homicide rate is 68.6 per 100,000, if that figure is calculated using the World Bank’s 2013 estimated population for the country, it would be around 61.7 per 100,000.

The disintegration of the 2012 gang truce between the country’s most powerful street gangs, Barrio 18 and MS13, was widely considered the principal reason for El Salvador‘s elevated homicide rate in 2014. The failed truce was also credited with having reduced the country’s murder rate from 70 per 100,000 in 2011 to around 40 per 100,000 in 2012 and 2013.

The lowest?

Chile: Chile registered 550 murders in 2012 for a homicide rate of 3.1 per 100,000, according to statistics (pdf) from the UNODC. Chile is widely considered the least violent country in Latin America.

Here’s a lovely map:

David omits the smaller countries, such as (randomly selected) Guyana, so I did some research and discovered the website for the “Department of State – Bureau of Diplomatic Security“.  With regards to Guyana,

The most recent information from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime lists Guyana’s 2010 homicide rate as 18.4 per 100,000 people — the fourth highest murder rate in South America behind Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. Guyana’s murder rate is three times higher than the United States’.

No mention of the top of David’s list, El Salvador, but it’s not clear which year is referenced in the Diplomatic Security’s report, while El Salvador’s report is for 2014 and is stated as having doubled.  This site claims the United States murder rate (2011) is 4.7 per 100,000 people.  While using the homicide rate as a proxy for violent crime is not a good idea, it’s still interesting that our country, often touted as being terribly violent, is actually rather peaceful.  Particular chilling is another report, also by David Gagne, on Brazil’s police violence:

A new report by a citizen security body in Brazil says that police have killed more than 11,000 civilians in the past five years — while the number of police killed during the same period nearly doubled — suggesting strategies aimed at lowering police brutality have not had the intended effect.

The report (pdf) published by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security — a body comprised of security officials, research centers, and NGOs — counted 11,197 citizen deaths perpetrated by both on and off-duty police in the country from 2009 to 2013, representing an average of 2,239 people killed by police per year over that period (see graph).

Presuming Brazil’s population to be 199,321,000, I calculate a police homicide rate to be .9 per 100,000 persons.  The highly respected FiveThirtyEight website states that it’s difficult to get comparable statistics for the United States, as the FBI doesn’t collect them. I’m appalled, although I could see an argument that the FBI collecting such statistics would be a fox and hen house scenario.  FiveThiryEight and The Daily Kos reference the Killed By Police website, which reports, from news reports, 111 people killed by police in March 2015.

I was a horrid public speaker before.  Now this from NewScientist (paywall) (14 March 2015):

WATCH what you say, or rather, how you say it. People judge whether you believe in what you say after just 0.2 seconds.

A specific type of brain activity that relates to increased processing of information appeared 200 milliseconds after the start of the clip, whatever its confidence level. However, more confident speech produced higher activity than unconfident speech.

Now I’m more nervous.

NewScientist‘s (14 March 2015) Michael Slezak reports:

The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium – which is liquid at just under 30 °C – with some indium and tin mixed in. When placed in a solution of sodium hydroxide, or even brine, and kept in contact with a flake of aluminium for “fuel”, it moves around for about an hour. It can travel in a straight line, run around the outside of a circular dish, or squeeze through complex shapes.

“The soft machine looks rather intelligent and [can] deform itself according to the space it voyages in, just like [the] Terminator does from the science-fiction film,” says Jing Liu from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “These unusual behaviours perfectly resemble the living organisms in nature,” he says, adding that they raise questions about the definition of life.

Hmmmmm.  I don’t get excited about definitions of life until we see some reproductive capacity.

More here.

(h/t Amanda at LifeBuzz, via Arts Editor Deb White)

Warmer than here in Minnesota?  Natonal Geographic is monitoring it:

Scientists have measured what is likely the highest temperature ever on Antarctica: 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 Celsius).

The measurements were made last Tuesday at Argentina’s Esperanza Base, on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to the meteorological website Weather Underground. The previous hottest known temperature on the continent was 62.8°F (17.1°C), recorded at Esperanza Base on April 24, 1961.

Some raw information on Antarctica temperatures and the general problem of gathering data in such an extreme place is available from Oak Ridge National Lab:

Recording Antarctic station data is particularly prone to errors. This is mostly due to climatic extremes, the nature of Antarctic science, and the variability of meteorological staff at Antarctic stations (high turnover and sometimes untrained meteorological staff).

Result summary?

The annual series shows a warming over the past 40 years but most of this warming occurred before 1970. Table 1 lists the warming trends and their significance based on the t-test for each month of the year. Table 2 lists the anomaly series for 1957-1999. An increase in the annual surface temperatures is shown over this period (1.53C per century), with the largest trend apparent in the winter months, as found for northern hemisphere polar regions (Weller, 1998). This can be compared with the Jacka and Budd (1998) finding of a continent-wide warming of 1.2C per century. The greater variability in the winter season is indicative of a lower significance of the change than in the other seasons. A decrease in Antarctic surface temperatures is found for some months (April and May).

Surface temperature trends are seen to rise quite steadily up until 1991. In that year Mount Pinatubo (Philippines) and Mount Hudson (Chile) erupted, and it has been suggested (Jacka & Budd, 1998) that these eruptions have had a major influence on the general lowering of temperatures after that year.

A complex and difficult undertaking.

On a less sober note, over at the Daily Kos Pakalolo contrasts the report with the Senate GOP.  This reminds me of the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News as he denied his party had lost – ideology over reality.  Andrew Sullivan was on the case back in 2012:

This looks like it was scripted by Ricky Gervais. I watched with my jaw slowly dropping lower and lower (which was hard since I was smiling so widely as well). James Poniewozik calls it “one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen on cable news”

Having just typed “2012”, I’m a little dismayed as the GOP categorization of ideology over reality started at least with Rep Newt Gingrich, who served as House Speaker 1995 – 1999, resigning abruptly after losing five seats in the midterm elections – a collision with reality.  So this is wenty years of something I would categorize as near-insanity.  It’s certainly been entertaining (which I appreciate – really!), but at some point you have to wish there’d be a little maturity, a little understanding that your refusal to accept reality could result in a lot of people getting hurt.  It’s quite one thing for former Rep Bachmann to compare Obama to the Germanwings suicide, because, offensive as it is, few take her seriously, and the details of the Iranian deal need deliberate analysis by foreign policy experts – not the cacklings of someone whose claim to fame is founding a caucus and precious little otherwise.  But when a sitting Senator writes a book denouncing the findings of honest (but who needs to add that they’re honest?) climate change scientists as a mass conspiracy and hoax, well, now you have a problem because if the good Senator is wrong, every moment spent being obstructive rather than working on the problem may cost lives; wait long enough, and there will be substantial change to our lifestyles, our life expectancies – even our national security.

And that’s not the conservative thing to do.  Not that I labor under the delusion that the GOP is ‘conservative’.  They are reactionaries, but that’s not the same thing as being conservative.

… think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  At least in the sense of memory manipulation.  Jessica Hamzelou in NewScientist (14 March 2015) reports scientists can implant false memories in mice.

[Karim] Benchenane’s team used electrodes to monitor the activity of mice’s place cells [neurons that fire in response to being in or thinking about a specific place] as the animals explored an enclosed arena, and in each mouse they identified a cell that fired only in a certain arena location. Later, when the mice were sleeping, the researchers monitored the animals’ brain activity as they replayed the day’s experiences. A computer recognised when the specific place cell fired; each time it did, a separate electrode would stimulate brain areas associated with reward.

When the mice awoke, they made a beeline for the location represented by the place cell that had been linked to a rewarding feeling in their sleep. A brand new memory – linking a place with reward – had been formed.

It seems so reasonable, but assuming this can be scaled up to human memory, it’s a trifle unsettling, especially if an electrode could be replaced with an electric cap.

Or a remote device.

I suppose I could talk about how memories are notoriously unreliable; pictures and videos are much  more trustworthy.  But then think about how they can be modified.

Reality is becoming far too plastic for my tastes.

For those of us who live on the instant, here’s a recent measure of Obama’s approval:

The fascinating question, for me, is what will be the long term analysis?  In twenty years, scraping away the barnacles of the petty partisan politics of today should give a much clearer view of whether continuing the Bush-era policies of bailing out the financial industry, stopping wars, starting wars, and transforming healthcare were negatives or positives.  And, of course, coming to a tentative deal with Iran regarding its nuclear ambitions.

But who can resist a chart of a snapshot?  Here we see Obama’s recent run at getting his head above water in the approval ratings game has come to nought.  With the tentative Iranian deal now publicized, I expect it’ll get worse on the next poll as the GOP’s superior PR game will, at least temporarily, persuade a portion of the electorate that we are now doomed (here’s the preemptive shot over the bow by former Rep. Bachmann).

The Iraqis win back Tikrit, home town of Saddam Hussein, with a little help from some allies:

The push into Tikrit came days after U.S.-led airstrikes targeted ISIS bases around the city. Al-Abadi said those tactics would now be replicated in other areas.

Brett McGurk, the U.S. deputy special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, tweeted that the coalition’s airstrikes had destroyed numerous ISIS shelters.

“We will continue to support courageous Iraqi forces operating under Iraqi command as they work to reclaim their territory from #ISIL,” McGurk tweeted.

The key to victory in Tikrit this time, the Prime Minister said, was surprise. But help from the coalition of Shiite militiamen and volunteers also played a part.

The militia members, estimated to number around 20,000, are backed by Iran. The offensive marked the first open participation of Iranian advisers on the front lines in Iraq.

The Iraqis of Tikrit are Sunnis Muslims, as is ISIS; the government forces are, for the most part, Shiite, as is Iran; some reports suggest the inhabitants of Tikrit may suffer for it, especially as they are a minority within Iraq.

But the ability to work with Iran against  a common foe shows that America and Iran are not irreconcilable, despite the apparent wishes of the GOP.  I haven’t noticed a great deal of publicity concerning this temporary alliance in the United States, and I’m guessing that Iran will not emphasize it, either, as it won’t serve their purposes.  Time will tell.

Governor Jerry Brown of California calls for mandatory water cutbacks of 25% in comparison to a baseline of 2013 usage:

With new measurements showing the state’s mountain snowpack at a record low, officials said California’s drought is entering uncharted territory and certain to extend into a fourth straight year. As a result, Brown issued sweeping new directives to reduce water consumption by state residents, including a mandatory 25 percent cut in urban water use.

On Wednesday, Brown attended a routine snow survey at 6,800 feet in the Sierra Nevada, near Echo Summit on Highway 50 along the road to Lake Tahoe. The April 1 survey is an annual ritual, marking the end of the winter season, in which automated sensors and technicians in the field strive to measure how much water the state’s farms and cities will receive from snowmelt.

The measurements showed the snowpack at just 5 percent of average for April 1, well below the previous record low of 25 percent, which was reached last year and in 1977.

California’s mountain snowpack is crucial to determining summer supplies, normally accounting for at least 30 percent of total fresh water available statewide. The poor snowpack means California reservoirs likely already have reached peak storage and will receive little additional runoff from snowmelt, an unusual situation.

Snowpack 5% of normal may be indicative of climate change, rather than chance deviation.  Brown certainly seems to think so:

“I would hope that we don’t see this in some punitive way, but that we see the challenge,” Brown said. “(The) reality is that the climate is getting warmer, the weather is getting more extreme and unpredictable, and we have to become more resilient, more efficient and more innovative. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

California residents curious about water resources may use the Water Education Foundation website to learn more.

Of interest is the Colorado River:

California is entitled to 4.4 million acre-feet of water annually from river. Most of that water irrigates crops in the Palo Verde, Imperial and Coachella valleys, located in the southeastern corner of the state, but the Colorado also is a vital source of water for urban southern California.

And water stored in aquifers:

About 30 percent of California’s total annual water supply comes from groundwater in normal years, and up to 60 percent in drought years.

Aquifers do not necessarily recharge quickly, so they cannot be regarded as eternal.  They can also become contaminated by pollution and other sources, although I do not know whether California supplies are vulnerable.

Water is also transported within the state to supply population centers.  Given the large population, the drop off in usable precipitation (that which runs off into the ocean may not be usable) and recent inclination towards drought, and the State is looking at quite the challenge.  The Colorado River usage itself may not be sustainable, as suggested by a recent government study:

It is widely known that the Colorado River, based on the inflows observed over the last century, is over-allocated and supply and demand imbalances are likely to occur in the
future. Up to this point, this imbalance has been managed, and demands have largely been met as a result of the considerable amount of reservoir storage capacity in the system, the fact that the Upper Basin States are still developing into their apportionments, and efforts the Basin States have made to reduce their demand for Colorado River water.

Concerns regarding the reliability of the Colorado River system to meet future needs are even more apparent today. The Basin States include some of the fastest growing urban and industrial areas in the United States. At the same time, the effects of climate change and variability on the Basin water supply has been the focus of many scientific studies which project a decline in the future yield of the Colorado River. Increasing demand, coupled with decreasing supplies, will certainly exacerbate imbalances throughout the Basin.

This is an interesting insight into Iraqi psychology, insomuch as such a thing can exist in such a fragmented country:

Ghayyath al-Kateb, a writer and social researcher, sees the Abu Azrael phenomenon in the context of Iraqi mythology. “This extraordinary and legendary hero is a product of Iraqi thought throughout the ages. Iraqi mythology, across multiple eras, has seen the emergence of many superheroes, the most prominent of which was Gilgamesh, who appears in the epic tale named after him,” he said.

Before Abu Azrael,​ Adnan al-Kaissie was a popular hero among Iraqis in the 1970s. Pictures of the professional wrestler, a media favorite, filled Iraqi homes and streets. Everybody wanted to be like Adnan.

According to Kateb, it is the nature of Arabs, and Iraqis in particular, to create legendary men who accomplish great things. Because of this tendency, political parties in Iraq have tried to exploit the Abu Azrael phenomenon. A number of government ministers and officials have met with him. The local media reported that Transport Minister Bayan Jabr received him March 16.

This probably explains Saddam Hussein’s survival at the top – a willingness to believe in the importance of the role of the strongman, which he certainly fulfilled.