The third octopus

Elle Hunt, in The Guardian 29 March 2017 has written an inspiring review of a book by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds, a reflection on the intelligence of cephalopods: the squids, cuttlefish, octopuses etc.

She reports:

Charming anecdotes ... abound in Godfrey-Smith’s book, particularly about captive octopuses frustrating scientists’ attempts at observation. 

A 1959 paper detailed an attempt at the Naples Zoological Station to teach three octopuses to pull and release a lever in exchange for food. Albert and Bertram performed in a “reasonably consistent” manner, but one named Charles tried to drag a light suspended above the water into the tank; squirted water at anyone who approached; and prematurely ended the experiment when he broke the lever.

Without wanting to get above my station, I claim connection to that third octopus. I have never been a successful joiner of a movement, or mob leader in rebellion, but I tend not to fit. I have never met a multiple choice test in which there were answers I felt happy to tick. Charles is a wonderful model independent thinker, a cephalophoric cephalopod, breaking moulds of thought and discipline, reluctant to fit for fools. I cannot match his vigour, but then he (she?) had so much brain in limbs. And thus far I have not been kept under lights in a rectangular tank. I do not regard this state (at least for me, I hesitate to speak for the Neapolitan Charles) as a conscious choice matter. My mind has over time increasingly found itself unable to be herded.

I am reminded in this moment of the first time I sought to drive a small flock of goats, imagining them sheep. You gently come behind the goats and with sweet words encourage them forward. Then in a moment there you are, alone, just a hillside in front of you. You turn around and the staring gathered goats say: "Yes?"

Here is Elle Hunt, hand in glove with a cephalopod.

To Moss Vale

A journey into innocence, away from meaty rumination...

We went on Monday up the hills from here to the 'Southern Highlands', a regional fancy area which has entered the ranks of unaffordable. though a couple of towns remain not-quite-swallowed by gentrification. One of these is Moss Vale. Here are some photo impressions.





































Set in this surrounding landscape...



with a splendid recycling centre to please the artist-scrounger



... and the reader ...



On the way home, at the National Parks centre at Fitzroy Falls, I found this poster on a wall.

Tillerson: should I revise my 'no war this year'?

A few days ago I wrote this on Korea:

There isn’t going to be a real war this year: I have revised my perspective away from anticipation of war in preparing this note.

Should I revise that in the light of remarks by the US Secretary of State in Seoul yesterday?

I don't think so.

US Secretary of State Tillerson has been widely reported thus on 17 March:

Seoul (CNN)The US would consider military action against North Korea if it was provoked, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Friday.

Speaking in Seoul at a joint press conference with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, Tillerson said Washington's policy of "strategic patience" had ended.

"Certainly, we do not want things to get to a military conflict ... but obviously, if North Korea takes actions that threatens the South Korean forces or our own forces, then that would be met with an appropriate response," he said, in response to a question from CNN.

"If they elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe that requires action, that option is on the table," Tillerson added.

But think about it:

• This is a Secretary of State who thus far has been largely excluded from the major discussions about international strategic issues and from Trump's meetings with foreign leaders.
• He did however participate in a discussion with the clique at the White House, about his current trip to Asia.
• He is an ordinary Secretary of State in carrying with him a 'brief' for discussions.
• He is a low-level Secretary of State inasmuch as one cannot imagine him departing from his brief at all. 
• We can presume he has articulated the brief well.

And then from the back room, this yap:

Later Friday morning, President Donald Trump denounced North Korea, tweeting, "North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been 'playing' the United States for years. China has done little to help!"

... A spine stiffener for the brief for the China visit too.
———————

And back there in the dark swamp — taking the 'charm' out of 'charm offensive'.

It's possible that someone in the White House looked up Merkel in Wikipedia and said "boss, boss, they actually moved from West Germany to East Germany and she was head of agit-prop in her local German communist youth organisation." No wonder no hand-shaking. Someone also may have discovered that Germany is next to Switzerland where current (and recently deceased) generation North Korean Kims went to school. So let's not just imagine it's a distaste for her modesty, education, intelligence, humanitarian perspective, global vision or such muck. It's the back story, surely!

Plus ça change

Consider this in thinking about how we worry now.



Margaret Mead, Culture and Commitment, a Study of the Generation Gap, London 1970.
—Found at the recycling centre at the Moss Vale rubbish dump, see 19 March blog entry 'Moss Vale'.

rebirth of blog, of ideas, of planet?

I was pleased to read that James Fallows has taken a break from blogging. At different times his wisdom has had its impact on me.

In part I am jogged back into blog by the internal need to write and attendance last weekend at the local gathering of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

There is so much to write about and ideally with visual component. I have photos from a local journey Monday to blog soon, photos and aesthetic and social context. We have quickly filled the time allotted to be in Italy with valuable activity nearer home... though including too many medical appointments.

There are also the very large questions in the world which require reflection. One must read the daily news but with distance glasses, to note with sympathy the frenetic pace of journalism (a rise in proof errors evident in the most noble media) and the difficulties of the practitioners in getting out of warring trenches.

source

Politico proves perhaps the most valuable insight into American (thus global) affairs, especially for its daily US and EU 'playbooks' which for a mind of anthropologist bent is wondrously detailed with all the tiny things happening, without gloss—link after link after link of course. Also for reflective items, including this yesterday on the Jekyll and Hyde in Trump and his administration.

Back in October 2016 Fallows drew attention to this little movie clip below in which Trump is introspective (well Fallows used the word 'introspective' but in application to this narcissist it probably needs special definition). It has a different significance now (as has so much) compared with last October. Trump is now in residence at Citizen Kane's castle, somewhat isolated. In the clip Trump focuses on Kane's loneliness at peak of empty achievement, with isolation from spouse (Mrs Trump still living in New York with young son).  We need to know where the mind in this film clip from years back is now. We need to think about that away from the yapping of daily media, either side.

Directed by Errol Mark Morris. From one of Morris's "aborted projects"

Morris known best for his film with Robert McNamara, which all these current leaders should watch

and which can sometimes be found at YouTube or Vimeo, eg here..

In November 2016 Foreign Policy wrote comparing the Trumps with the Borgias.  My comment at the time was here.

The comparison with the Borgias is relevant in wide context of the way Italy in 1500 or so was not a place of landed gentry but of power and status coming from the ferocious contest of warrior businessmen, businessmen for the most part obsessed with local, with trade as maximising the out, minimizing the in. Political violence of selfish nature, even in Florence where the gangster-businessmen amassed knowledge over hundreds of years that produced a renaissance.

That is pretty close to the actuality of current 'American democracy'. 

We lack a Florence now. But maybe it was hard to see Florence then as we see it now. 

There was a information renaissance 500 years ago in Italy and elsewhere as printing presses proliferated and the control of the Roman church over language and entitlement to information and expression–the control of a 'deep state'–was under siege. 

We have now an information renaissance in the literal sense of 'rebirth' and in the historical sense of altered entitlement to knowing, to communicating, to use of language of choice, not language of the 'deep state', deliberate rejection of the deep state. Of disobedience. 

We will have to work hard to get the new knowledge system of now, as in social media, able and willing to look beyond virtual-local and tabloid things. Has the moment passed for educators to realise their job is less to impart knowledge, more to offer advice on good research and open-mindedness in assessing the now-everywhere sea of knowledge? 

We can compare with 500 years ago and say there is much more danger now, the weapons are such, the world is so jammed up. However, we can also consider that back 500 years for most people the world was as large as feet and eye could carry in a day, unless dragged to war, and life involved fear of disease, fear though teaching of horror dogmas, sudden entanglements with 'history' by pillage, sacking and rape: a generally more precarious place than our present, though with familiar themes. 

Community, respect, diversity and change

Australia, indelibly my country, frets more often than it fixes problems. 

It is difficult to reconcile our general apprehension with our continued second place ranking by the UNDP on its Human Development Index.

My personal experience with local community organisation and motivation in regional Australia in the past 15 years has been the increasing difficulty in getting people engaged except when there is something that irritates them personally or threatens real estate. My speculations as to why have covered generational change, Howard-and-since encouragement of personal focus and distrust and the arrival of the flat screen TV and its outpourings.

In a 2008 local government electoral campaign in a 'city' of fifty towns and villages over a hundred kilometres of coast, I was conscious that some towns, on the Australian Bureau of Statistic's Index of Socioeconomic Disadvantage, ranked 'very comfortable', over 1100, while at the core, the biggest town, ranked troublingly disadvantaged at 820. The comfy big-number people were largely immune to or annoyed by any suggestion of shared interest in addressing the problems at the low score end. 

My experience in building, managing and shutting down a brain tumour support group over that period was of building something strong and happy with over 300 emails a month at times and wonderful mutual support... then evaporation of membership and of contributions with the arrival of social media. 

http://dinuovoinitalia.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/mantova-according-to-edith-part-2-plus.html

The current information revolution is comparable to the turmoil of the renaissance 500 years ago in which the distribution of printing presses (see some context here) altered entitlement to knowledge, distribution of ideas, challenges to established correctness and empowerment of local languages. With a difference from now in the extent to which new knowledge seemed 500 years ago to be sought everywhere possible, led by the merchant barons of Florence, while the puddles of information and the frissons of communication among the wider population now seem to grow smaller and murkier.

Source here. Being maintained by Canadian architects now.

 Experience in the last decade or so encouraging local empowerment and planning by communities in Africa, via the internet, (here for example) has been with people who may write to say "sorry I've been out of touch, it was the malaria again" and when one writes with concern about Ebola over the border, the reply is that "I hope it does not come here, we have plague in the next village now". 

My impression is that such people, minimally resourced and up against big problems daily, have far more strength for adaptation to change and use intelligence for that, than we do in comfortable Australia. 

They also have as asset real community and place in community, which is sometimes irksome, but is powerful. 

It was pleasing to be asked by Lucinda Marshall to find an African contribution to a feminist magazine's issue on peace and for this, called "Women, the Mother of Peace" to be written and published. 

My brief experiences in remote Aboriginal communities are also of powerful community. Government campaigns for indigenous literacy are not going to work if they cannot begin to comprehend and respect that that small girl over there, just starting school, whose kinship system says she is my mother or my aunty or my grandchild, arrives at school with probably three languages and a universe of special knowledge and understanding of the world. 

Diversity depends on respect. Respect is not just a polite utterance, it is a key to community building.

Technological dependency varies inversely with interest in local community; 

economic disparity inhibits meeting and communication and, 

this year, apprehension that "that person may be a Trump supporter" makes conversation harder to start.

Korea: Trump back in the bottle; too much in the bottle but no war this year.

I drafted this text below on 9 March 2017 for another blog but was asked to rewrite it because it contained too many links for a blog. I declined to rewrite. In the era of Trump it is essential that we maximise links, not just assert from whatever claimed status.

Since I wrote this the impeachment of the President of the Republic of Korea has been confirmed by the court. A presidential election must now be held by 9 May 2017. There is a possibility that a new president may be more open to the DPRK. The consequences for relations with the USA are not clear. That's a new subject for separate treatment.

SKIP TO THE END IF YOU JUST WANT CONCLUSIONS



images can be enlarged by clicking on the image

from googlemaps

In January 2016, candidate Trump argued that South Korea was going to have to do more to defend itself. In March 2016 Trump argued that South Korea and Japan should pay their share of defence and consider developing their own nuclear weapons.


That was at the same time as annual exercises between US and ROK forces involved a much larger than before number of US and south Korean troops and astonishing 'platforms'.


This report in The Guardian emphasises the expanded character of the 2016 exercises and reports that the DPRK believes the drills reportedly now include training designed to prepare troops for the invasion of the North’s capital and “decapitation strikes” aimed at killing top leadership.


The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the 2017 exercises thus.



The numbers involved in the 2017 exercises, begun on 1 March do not appear to be published but are likely to match last year’s.



As business as usual, the US Eighth Army continues to advertise a posting to Korea as a great opportunity.


The US Republican Party’s foreign policy platform – “America Resurgent” – put Korea up front in Asia, desiring, in particular, that “China … recognize the inevitability of change in the Kim family’s slave state”.


In thinking about the apparent assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother Kim Jong-nam  in Kuala Lumpur with VX applied to the skin, there is context of that Republican Party platform advocacy of regime change, of DPRK apprehensions about the changing nature of US-ROK exercises to include preemptive decapitation of the leadership in Pyongyang ... AND ALSO the ruckus attending the 2014 US comedy The Interview about assassination Kim Jong-un, including reprisal against Sony but where the fictional CIA plan was to assassinate with Ricin. Compare VX and Ricin here. Underscore this: the ruthless, cutthroat, authoritarian dynasty in the DPRK is currently ruled by a less senior family member, Kim Jong-un, than the reluctant prince, his half brother, now assassinated, perpetrators not legally determined. The more senior, playboy Kim Jong-nam, had been living mainly inside the Peoples Republic of China. Both, as is the pattern of their family for male descendants, Swiss educated. Edward VIII, say hello to Stalin. Kim Jong-nam say hello in heaven or hell to Lin Biao. Deng Xiaoping, which of these four will you exclude from a bridge game? (Someone of more classical education might name the relevant Shakespeare.)



from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38850995

The new US Defense Secretary James Mattis went swiftly to Seoul and Tokyo to give assurances on 2 February of continued stable support and spoke with the ROK Defence Minister on the first day of the current exercises, including expressing appreciation of acquisition of a golf course by the ROK government for location of the THAAD missile system. The long-anticipated deployment of THAAD was announced on 6 March, the day after the firing of four missiles by the DPRK into the Sea of Japan. The missiles were nothing new (nor was the attendant media hysteria) and their firing undoubtedly enabled all sides to test reaction and counter-reaction to such event, when everyone was on alert with the current exercises. See these links at allthingsnuclear and 38North.


38North is a coherent advocate for negotiation by the US with the DPRK, but such does not seem feasible in the current situation in Washington, probably also Pyongyang (we have knowns about the US, mainly unknowns about the DPRK).


Some excited reports said missiles had fallen within Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Here is a paper published in the journal of the US Naval War College on the legality of military activities in other people’s EEZs.


In February the DPRK scheduled a missile launch to coincide with the visit to the US of Japanese Prime Minister Abe, exposing to the world some shonky processes of national security deliberation, surely now tightened up ... and leading to a cautious response by the White House.


There has been no formal end to the Korean War (1950-53). Every day, year by year, a pantomime of hostility and balance and occasional incident is played out in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone, dead centre of this extraordinary continuing gamesmanship. Book a visit.

Sound familiar? Source
The point is not what he had in mind, but how he was perceived.

There was subsequent quibbling, some indignant, about the defensive line drawn in East Asia by Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State in a speech to the Washington Press Club in January 1950 — a defensive line drawn from north of Japan, including Japan, the Ryukyu Archipelago (which includes Okinawa) and the Philippines... but not the Korean peninsula.

Whatever later quibbling, Acheson made the speech and it was open to interpretation at the time that US support for South Korea was less than firm. North Korea launched a full attack on the south on 25 June 1950. It is reasonable to consider that the DPRK this year considered it appropriate to test the resolve of Trump... unless you consider the North Koreans simply mad, in which case please also consider Trump simply mad. Neither is true, though each side bewildering from time to time. Trump says he seeks to bewilder, so I think does the DPRK.



---o---

So where is the balance this month?


·     •  Trump has been put back in the bottle of established US security policy and machinery on Northeast Asia. US military posture is sharper.



·     • THAAD is in place in South Korea, with a little action by the DPRK to make it easy, much to the fury of China.



·      • China is a major target in US high policy focus on Korea, as it was in 1950. There are nuclear weapons on the table.



·      • If China ever had any notion that Kim Jong-nam could be a replacement for Kim Jong-un, that game is over. We have a neglected/ignored/avoided framework of DPRK apprehensions in which to find understanding of the murder of Kim Jong-nam.


·      • There isn’t going to be a real war this year: I have revised my perspective away from anticipation of war in preparing this note.

·      • We need to watch the election campaign in the ROK. The doorway to not-war is via the relationship between Seoul and Pyongyang, not the big powers around them.


PS: for another perspective see Geoff Miller Too Nuclear to Fail?

---ooOoo--

Dennis Argall has been an observer of north Asian affairs since 1970 
and was Australian Ambassador to China in the 1980s.