Aging Part 2: How People Rust

The more you complain, the longer God lets you live.

     —Old Proverb

This is the middle part of three posts on the science of aging and immortality. Like most middle parts, it's really boring.  If I were you I wouldn’t even waste my time reading it.

Still here?  More fool you.

Back in the early days, about three billion years ago or so, photosynthesis was all the rage.  This is where plant cells would create energy by converting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen.  Oxygen, previously  trace element, started to accumulate up to its present concentration of just under 20%.  So the theory goes anyway.

Now most people get a nice feeling when they think about oxygen, probably in no small part due to the fact that they'd be dead in a few minutes without it.  But oxygen is actually an extremely corrosive substance.  Fire, for example, is simply a runaway oxidation reaction (organic carbon à carbon dioxide).  Rust—estimated to cost the economy US$2.2 trillion or 3% of the global GDP—is also oxidation.  Spoiled food—yup, oxygen.

Vigorous oxidation reaction.

 Eukaryotes (remember, cells with a nucleus are called eukaryotes; and cells without, like bacteria, are prokaryotes) didn't much care for this corrosive substance accumulating in the atmosphere.  So they made a deal with some little bacteria.  The bacteria were like, "Hey dude, let me  live here in your big cozy cell and I'll deal with that oxygen problem you got,  plus I'll pay rent in energy."  And the eukaryote cell was like "Awesome!  Stay as long as you like."  And the bacteria did. For the last few billion years.

Those bacteria, called mitochondria, are still there, in every single cell of the trillions of cells in your body. Not just human bodies, but every cell in a dog's body and every cell in every flea that lives on the dog.  They are not part of "you"; they contain their own DNA.  (Actually, because mitochondria DNA passes on to the child from the mother only, apparently we can trace every human alive back to one woman—the Mitochondrial Eve—who lived about 200,000 years ago.  But that's a blog post for another day.)

The mitochondria are the furnaces of the cell, burning (oxidizing) food to create energy.  But like all furnaces, there's issue with leakage and problems with stuff that doesn’t get completely burned.  Sometimes they form highly reactive chemical intermediaries called free radicals, which, like political radicals, are unstable and wander about basically looking to start trouble.  These radicals can mutate the DNA either the mitochondria or, uncommonly, of the parent cell itself ("your" DNA).  It's believed the DNA mutations caused by this (called oxidative stress) contribute to cell senescence (old age).  In a way, we rust.

Problem is, it doesn't explain why dogs, who basically share 80% of our DNA, burn through seven years for every one we do.  Or why a flea, which still has about 60% shared DNA with humans (scary, isn't it?) die within weeks.  It doesn't make much sense, given the similar cell mechanics and biology, that humans live a hundred times longer than a flea, or thirty times longer than mice, or seven times as long as a dog.  With such similar cell genetic characteristics, why don’t all species have similar wear and tear and therefore similar life spans?

Nobody really knows why as far as I can tell.  A prevailing theory is that, because humans reproduce when we are relatively old compared to, say, fruit flies, and because we spend a long time rearing our young, our cells have developed more complicated mechanisms to prevent or repair cell mutations caused by oxidative stress, ultraviolet light, radiation, viruses and just-plain intracellular cock-ups where one of the proteins screwed up on the Friday afternoon shift and created a mutant. 

Evolution would breed out mutations that kill us before we reproduce (that gene line would abruptly end), but mutations that kill us after we reproduce will not be "bred out" by evolution?  Let's say you're a car.  It's not like your genes are taking it in for preventive maintenance to get a good resale value.  No, if you're a car, your genes are like "Get this thing to Vegas, then who gives a rat's ass what happens to it."

Your body, according to your genes.

When you are young, your cells are good at dealing with mutations.  One protein, for example, p53, is a real Horatius at the Bridge against mutant-causing agents.  If it detects damage to the DNA it slows down the cell cycle until it can be repaired.  If the damage to the DNA is severe, it even initiates cell suicide.  Later in life, as cell mutations accumulate over time, and poor old p53 is a lot busier and starts to build up in the cell, inhibiting the cell cycle and shunting the cell to senescence, or old age.

p53 protein (white), a guardian of the cell, attached to DNA (green and blue)

So the courageous "Thou Shall Not Pass!" p53 protein and others like it, that protect the DNA early on eventually lead to cell senescence and death.  So the theory goes, anyway.

Interestingly, there is one way to lengthen life span significantly—at last in lab animals.  Calorific restriction.  Animals that get all the nutrition they need, but have their calorie intake reduced by about 40% live 50 to 80% longer than normal, and live active lives.  Calorie restricted primates have a slightly lower core temperature than others, leading to speculation that a less active metabolism slows down the bodies aging mechanisms.  So if you eat nothing but a little bit of green beans and tofu every day, you may indeed live significantly longer.  Even if you don't, it'll certainly seem that way.

So, cell senescence may be due to an intracellular "autoimmune response," if you will, as a result of DNA mutations that naturally accumulate over time.  Considering that your average DNA gets hit by mutagens tens of thousands times a day, and multiply that by a hundred trillion cells or so in your body, you can see how they'd add up.  But eventually the mechanism designed to repair such damage shunts the cell to a senescent state.  What if there were a way to fool the cell into thinking it was still young?  What if you could make the cell immortal?

Next up:  The exciting finale—Immortality and Cancer

Sex and Death (and Immortal Jellyfish and Mind Control Parasites)

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.

     —writer William Saroyan's last words

It's my birthday today.  Yay.  I'm 47.  Nothing really special about 47.  It's prime, and I won't be a prime number again until I'm 53.  That's about it.  Now that I'm getting on a bit I've become suddenly intensely interested in aging. 

We all get old.  We all die.  Now dying sucks for two reasons.  First of all, it's painful. And second of all, at least as far as science goes (which isn’t that far),  when you die you never come back again.  The molecules of which you were presently comprised are still lying there, but you, the ghost in the machine, are forever gone from this time and place.

When you examine the biological basis of aging, as we will over the course of  the next blog post or two, one of the things that you will find striking is the close relationship of aging to cancer.  It's in vogue now to be really mad at cancer.   To rail at it.  To hate it.  To treat it as an enemy.  You don't "have" cancer; you "battle" cancer.  You see t-shirts emblazoned with "F%$K CANCER."

You tell 'em, Sarah!

And yet we don't have the same attitude about aging.  Heck, we even tut-tut those who refuse to "grow old gracefully."  Nobody gets mad that they are dying of old age, even though, like cancer, it is slow, painful and undignified; and unlike cancer, it is not survivable. 

Not me.  Getting old pisses me off, frankly. 

Old age has been around a long time.  But not, according to many faiths, forever.  Adam and Eve were immortal until they ate the forbidden fruit.  Then God made them mortal.  Of course, Christians—as well as most religions I can think of actually—believe in the immortality of the soul, but that's another topic. I'm taking strictly about immortality of the flesh here.

A quick review of many faiths reveals that most gods are immortal, and the condition of being human was to be somewhere between the animals and the gods—where the rising ape meets the falling angel, to steal Terry Pratchett's phrase.  Many faiths believed that humans descended from gods and the act of becoming mortal was the act of becoming human.  That is, mortality was the defining feature of humans.

But we'll be discussing it from a Darwinian perspective, because that's the creation myth I happen to understand best, as a scientist. 

We don't have to get old and die, from a physics perspective.  We wouldn't be breaking an laws of conservation or thermodynamics by staying alive.  So why do we age?  Who decided that was a good idea?

Recently there was an interesting article in the Guardian: "Scientists Reverse Aging in Mice."  Actually, the title was  a little deceptive.  (The media? Deceptive?  Noooo.)  It's like a couple of years ago they announced that they had achieved teleportation.  I thought "Wow! That's news."  Except that they'd only teleported a subatomic particle.  Well, that should be useful if I want to send my son a frickin' proton for his birthday.

Anyways, the mice in this case weren't real mice. They were Frankenmice.  They were mice genetically engineered to age quickly, and then they fixed the genes that they had deliberately screwed up to start with.  It was still pretty impressive though.  They didn't just slow down again in old decrepit mice.  They reversed it.  These old fogie mice were growing new neurons, becoming active again and boning like crazy, excuse my French.

In other news, scientists recently discovered something about this unassuming little fellow.

Turritopsis nutricula:  the immortal jellyfish

 It's a jellyfish about as big as the head of a thumbtack.  Intensely uninteresting, you would think.  But here's the thing about Turritopsis nutricula.  It's potentially immortal.

Actually what it can do is revert to a juvenile state in times of stress.  Now when I told my buddy Mike this at the pub his response was "So what?  So can I."  You can't argue with that guy.  When times are tough for this little jellyfish, it can go back to being a polyp again when life was simple and it didn't have a care.   Wow.

Now before we get further into this, we have to make sure you understand how the whole Darwin thing works.  Old people are invisible to evolution.  If you die, before you procreate, your genes die with you and that's the end of that.  But if you manage to procreate, then your genes carry the torch for another round. 

So, if you have a gene in your DNA that creates a protein that convinces your brain that yelling, waving your arms and rolling around in gravy whenever you see a tiger is a good idea, chances are that particular gene—along with the body unfortunate enough to house that gene—is not going to last long.

(Don't laugh.  Turns out that there is a feline intestinal parasite that does just this.  If it finds itself unfortunately crapped out by the cat, it may end up being ingested by, say, a mouse.  The parasite wants to be back in a cat's digestive tract so what does it do?  That's right. It resides in the mouse's brain and convinces the mouse to engage in risky behavior to increase its chances of getting eaten by a cat.  It makes fear sexy for the mouse.  I'm not making this up.  Not only that, but it there is evidence that humans infected with this parasite also "involuntarily" engage in risky behavior.  Note to self:  future blog post on alien mind control.)

Anyways, where was I?  Oh yes, Darwin.  So, any genetic disease that effects you after you've finished all your procreating—like Alzheimer's Disease, for instance— has already been passed on to your progeny.  It will not be weeded out by evolution.  The whole basis of the theory of evolution is that you—the human being reading this—are just a particularly elaborate life support system for you genes.  That's it.  You have no other purpose except to propagate your immortal genes.  The whole thinking, being, feeling, appreciating art, striving for the divine is a side effect. An emergent property of a complex system designed to provide a nice place for your genes to hang out prior to propagation.

For the most part, your body does what it can to stay alive, so that you can procreate.  But after you're done that, and you've adequately cared for juvenile life forms that contain you genes (i.e. children), there's really no reason for your genes to go to all the trouble of keeping you around.  So it's probably no coincidence that aging really sets in with a vengeance as soon as your prime reproductive years are behind. It's also probably not a coincidence that the life spans of various animals correlate with the ages at which they reproduce and the time they spend rearing their young.  If you reproduce young, you die young.  The life spans of fruit flies were significantly extended by creating a colony that reproduced when they were older.  For animals, bivalve molluscs live the longest, flowed by tortoises.  Humans place third and elephants are behind us.

Bacteria are immortal.  Give 'em a nice place to live and they'll go on reproducing forever.  Bacteria reproduce by binary fission.  They basically clone themselves by splitting into two.  Human cells—actually all animal, plant and microorganism cells—are different.  They’re a lot bigger, to start with.  And they have a nucleus, and a double helix DNA.  In scientific terms bacteria are prokaryotes, and cells with a nucleus are eukaryotes.

The paramecium is a eukaryote.  It is a single-celled organism with a nucleus, about a million times bigger than your average bacterium.  The paramecium can reproduce by fission—or it can have sex (or what passes for sex for a paramecium).  

Parameiums getting it on.  Does this count as porn?

What's interesting is that, on the evolutionary ladder, the paramecium is about the earliest life form that (a) has sex, and (b) ages.  It seems that cell senescence (or aging) arrived the same time sex did.  There's strong evidence the two are related.  Indeed, if you are unfortuante enough to be a male praying mantis, the relationship is more than theoretical, since the female tears of the head of the male and eats him after sex.  Not much better if you're a male anglerfish, either.

 

It's interesting: Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit.  After they had eaten the apple, Adam and Eve became ashamed that they were naked, God made them mortal, cast them forth from Eden, and then they begat Cain.  So the idea that sex and death are intimately related and came about at the same time, something we theorized only a few decades ago, is echoed in the oldest writings of humanity.

Next time: Are we programmed to die?

Hitler and Satan: Separated at Birth?

I am part of those forces which ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good.

     -- the Archdemon Mephsitopholes, to Faust

A couple of hot news items on the Evil Personified front this week. 

The first is the impact of the Kony 2012 video.  I haven't seen it myself, as the internet is kind of sketchy over here.  Kony is the head of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army who have been busy killing, raping and pillaging in Central Africa for a good 25 years now.  He's one of your more colorful warlords, given to making children hack their parents to death, and claiming magical powers. 

He's in the Idi Amin school of warlords.  Most ruthless dictators like to maintain a veneer of civility and  moderation--Assad, Mao.  When asked to stop torturing people, the response will be "Me?  Torture people? Noooooo."  But Idi Amin was all "But I like torturing people!  Almost as much as I enjoy eating them. "

Also in the news:  the Norwegian subhuman who killed some 77 kids in cold blood was charged last week.  You may recall that he dressed up as a cop and went to an island filled with kids at some summer camp for liberals and pretty much hunted them all down.  Stupid looking fellow.  Apparently used to protect the weaker kids in his school from bullies.  Go figure.  I expect his last words will be "The horror! The horror!"

I apologize in advance if I am not giving Evil Personified its solemn due.  I really have to learn to be more serious when discussing Evil.  I'm bad for Hitler jokes too.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban were Evil Incarnate.  They liked to kill civilians, enslave women and burn schools.  Still do.  They gave Osama bin Laden a place from which to run his terrorist activities, including launching his horrific attack on civilians in New York.  But we've been in Afghanistan over ten years now.  And Evil continues its relentless march with or without the Taliban.  F-15s do not seem to kill it.

The Taliban here in Afghanistan have not died like Absolute Evil should--that is with a big boom and 10,000 Bonus Points.  They are just lying there. Very still.   Playing possum with us. The West is bored.  Meanwhile there is new and interesting Evil running around in Iran and Uganda.

I don't really understand the Dark Continent.  I guess I see it as a place of suffering and starvation and plague.  Life consists mostly of trying to get enough to eat and fleeing marauding hordes.  It fills me with a sense of helplessness because it never changes.  One of earliest memories is listening to George Harrison's  1973 Concert for Bangladesh. (Yeah, my parents were big-time hippies.  Had Jesus Christ Superstar racked on the turntable all the time, too.  I still know every word.)  Then there was Bob Geldoff's LiveAid in 1985.  And here we are twenty-five years later.  Having a receptacle in which to put all the Evil of Africa fulfills a need for us, but eliminating Kony will not extinguish evil from Africa.

That's not to say I begrudge the effort.  It would be pretty cynical to ride a guy who wants something done about a sadist who victimizes children with such impunity. 

The only thing that bothers me is that we, by all this attention, exalt Kony to some apotheosis of Evil.  Deify him.  When a wasp stung my daughter a couple of summers ago, I squished it. I didn't torture it, or handcuff it and asked it why it went around stinging cute little girls who never did it any harm.  I just killed it so it wouldn't sting again, and then went back to my book.

Evil is banal. You never learn anything from its perpetrators when you ask them "Why?  Why?  Why?"  They never have an answer.  No insight into the nature of their wickedness.  They seem as perplexed as the one asking the question.  I've always found that quite odd.   And the perpetrators never seem equal to the chaos and misery they've caused.

Voltaire said Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.  "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (Hey, we're bilingual over here at Mindfingers!)  The same, it seems, applies to the devil.  We have a need to personify evil.  The Christians at least admit as much.   All their evil is in one convenient package--Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. 

Secular types talk a big game about moral relativity, but when their moral sensitivities are outraged, they want to package and personify evil too, albeit in human form, instead of divine. 

Take Hitler for instance.

Hitler has become that invented, secular Satan.  it's impolite to even mention his name in civil company.  Express any sympathy with his ideas and you'll wind up in legal hot water--shades of the old blasphemy laws.

But when we vest all the vileness of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler, we forget the true lesson of the Holocaust--that it was brought about by a million smaller evils, from guard at Dachau who was "just following orders" to the woman who quietly closed her blinds when the Gestapo came for her neighbor.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer imprisoned for eight years in  Stalin gulag, knew something about evil.  He said the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan

Well things are pretty torqued up around here, as you can imagine.

First of all, there was the inadvertent burning of some holy Qur'ans a couple of weeks back.  There were, as I'm sure you've heard, a number of protests killing an estimated thirty Afghan civilians, and some reprisal shootings, including the so-called "blue-on-green" attacks where members of the ostensibly allied Afghan national forces turned their guns on ISAF forces.

Then there was the mass murder of a number of civilians, including a number of children, by an American soldier in Kandahar province.  Curiously, the Qur'an incident seems to have sparked more outrage.  Perhaps the Afghans are still digesting the murders, and the fury has yet to come.  Are we wiating fo rthe "other shoe to drop" or was the defilement of the Qur'ans, perhaps, considered the bigger sin?

People back home were probably trying to wrap their heads around the sheer scale and violence of the response to the Qur'an incident.  There was a lot of speculation that this was "trigger event" that tapped into a simmering Afghan discontent with the length of occupation of their country, and the failure of the occupying forces to deliver on prosperity and change.

This may well have some truth to it.  But one thing you learn living here is that first and foremost:  Afghans are a very, very religious people, and they have been for 1200 years.  99% of Afghans are Muslims.  Muslims are famously devout, but even among them it is known that Afghans are particularly pious.  Islam is woven into every aspect of their lives.  We, in the west, have difficulty perceiving this because we've been brought up to separate our religious inclinations from the rest of our lives.  The idea of a separation between Islam and the state is completely alien to a typical Afghan Muslim.  It's not merely that they don't like the idea; they can't even imagine it.

The overall purpose of education is to produce good Muslims. Most Afghans attend a mosque school from when they are four or five years old.  Even the "general education schools" (those which are not mosque schools or madrassas) contain several hours a week of Islamic education.  Everything else is secondary.  To learn to read is to learn to read the Qur'an. 

Seen through this lens, it is understandable that any insult to their religion would cause profound discontent.  Of course, that's not to say that cynical mullahs aren't exploiting the opportunity to cause mischief.

Obama apologized for the incident.  Apparently, it was suspected that the Qur'ans in question were from a detainment facility and were being used to transmit messages between inmates.   But this points out another difference between the Afghanistan and Western mindset.  The fact that this was, by all accounts (even Afghan witnesses) completely inadvertent, does not carry the same weight as it would in Canada or the US.  Intent and motive are key to Western law.  In the US, the difference between murder with intent and inadvertent homicide can be life an death (for the accused, that is; we assume the victim has already gone to his Great Reward).  In practice in Afghanistan, Islamic law does not attach the same significance to intent, at least for certain huddud crimes such as blasphemy and illegal sexual intercourse.  Which is why if you are a girl unfortunate enough to get raped, you may find yourself on trial for adultery or fornication.

Another profound difference in world views is encompassed by the term Inshallah-- "God Willing" or "If God wishes." For instance, yesterday, as part of my work here, I was reading a report by the Civil-MIlitary Fusion Center (warning: pdf) on illness and death due to contaminated water in Afghanistan.  It is likely that thousands of Afghans die prematurely every year due to contaminated water.  

Sediq Azizi, spokesman of the Samangan governor, Khairullah Anush, told IWPR that "every year we present our problems to the ministries in Kabul, but they have not taken any action yet." He concluded, “these deaths are the will of Allah. " 

Inshallah is not intended to be pessimistic or dismissive, but humble and passive.  Muslims submit to the will Allah in a way that we may not comprehend.  Things unfold according to Allah's will. Or, to quote Robert Burns, . 

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:


The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men


Gang aft agley,


An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,


For promis'd joy!

Or maybe I could do just as well to quote the Kansas classic Dust in the Wind:

Same old song

Just a drop of water in an endless sea

All we do

Crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see

Dust in the Wind

All we are is dust in the wind

Inshallah is the antithesis of the American "Can-Do" mindset.  American mythology is replete with figures who, as individuals, triumph over an unjust system.  I mean, will Hollywood movie makers ever tire of the line "I've got a great idea for a movie. It's about a cop who bucks the system and saves the world."

Curiously, the term Inshallah has become quite popular with the military folks over here.

"So, do you think the Afghanistan government will be able to keep the Taliban at bay when we pull out of here in 2014."

"Inshallah."

There is a joke going around that we are pulling out of Afghanistan but driving through Iran on the way home.  Thing is, when you tell that joke, nobody laughs.

The Communist Manifesto and Ron Swanson

One of the things that really frightens me about myself is that, had I been born in 1865 instead of 1965, I may well have been a Communist.  Communism must have really appealed to the scientists and the rationalists of the time.  I mean, all around them were these antiquated kingdoms ruled by incestuous, divinely-appointed, occasionally insane, monarchs, or the predatory robber barons using the poor like cordwood to fire the Industrial revolution. And here's this obviously intelligent fellow, Karl Marx, with this newly devised, perfectly rational form of government where you throw everything into the pot and then divvy it up according to need.  Compared to prostrating myself before Lords or getting black lung at 30 in some Yorkshire coal mine, I would have been all over the Communist thing. 

And that was how it was marketed at the time.  Communism was a new form of government, born out of man's enlightenment, now that societies had cost of the yoke of the church.  It was the next evolutionary step. 

Well it turned out, of course, that the Communists were great at getting everyone to throw everything into the pot, but there was a little bit of a problem with the divvying up part.  Turns out the people doing the divvying had a nasty tendency to deal themselves twice.  Or three times.  Or a hundred times.  And once people got into the higher echelons of the Party, there was no getting rid of them.  Not to mention that the first thing Stalin did was basically shoot all the wooly-headed intellectuals who put him in power.  Revolutionaries are natural shit-disturbers, he figured.  They had served their purpose, and he did not want them stirring up more trouble down the road.

The lesson:  

Luckily, I learned that lesson from history, as opposed to being stood up against some barn wall and summarily shot by Stalin's henchmen, while pleading "But guys, I was on your side." 

Perhaps in response, I've rebounded too far in the other direction.  I am a strong individualist.  I'm suspicious of government.  Although I work for the government.  Go figure.  I'm a bit like Ron Swanson, I guess, from the TV show, Parks and Recreation.  Here he is in all his mustachey glory:

"Aren't you scared to eat here?"

Some Swansonisms:

"I’ve been quite open about this around the office: I don’t want this parks department to build any parks, because I don’t believe in government."

"I work hard to make sure my department is as small and as ineffective as possible."

"My idea of a perfect government is one guy who sits in a small room at a desk, and the only thing he’s allowed to decide is who to nuke. The man is chosen based on some kind of IQ test, and maybe also a physical tournament, like a decathlon. And women are brought to him, maybe ... when he desires them."

So, as an individualist, it goes without saying that I'm not a big fan of the Mommy State.  You know the Nanny state motto:

I just can't keep up with all the bans at the local, provincial and federal levels.  My old East Coast Celtic band, Skystone, used to play at the Atlantic Trap and Gill downtown.  We had to stop playing every time someone started to dance.  Dancing is illegal in restaurants in Vancouver.  At least that "class" of restaurants.   It's also illegal to sing in Stanley Park.  It's illegal, in Vancouver, to give someone  slice of orange in a public area.  You have to give them the whole orange.  You need a permit to play in a park.  If you live on Grand Boulevard in North Vancouver, I have it on reliable authority that you have to ask the government for permission to paint your house.   I think with the smokers, we'll have them caged in Government Smoking Areas and we can all toss rotten fruit at them.

I guess we've all gotten used to three or more levels of government breathing down our necks.  These things don’t seem to bother anyone but me.  Or maybe not.  There was a popular backlash in BC against the idea of having cameras, instead of cops, issue speeding tickets.  I believe that's how ex-Premier Gordon Campbell got into office the first time--by promising to scrap the program.  Maybe people just got fed up with "experts" in the media telling us that speed cameras were for our own good. 

Maybe we can thank George Orwell for the backlash against speeding cameras.  The 1984 meme used to be so ingrained in our cultural psyche that people just had a visceral negative reaction to the idea of government cameras watching us.  But that idea is quaint these days.  Cameras are everywhere now, not to mention the digital footprint you leave wherever you go, with your credit cards or access cards.  Or even sitting at home surfing the web.  Google and Facebook want to know where you've been and what you’ve been up to.  Not for any nefarious purpose, I'm sure; just because they can make more money that way.

In Canada, the federal government wants to pass legislation to give enforcement agencies the power to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to provide certain information on its subscribers without a warrant under the proposed Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.  It also compels ISPs to install equipment to make it easier to track the movements of web users.  Everyone wants to protect kids from predators, but the mistake the Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews, made was declaring in the House of Commons that folks "either stand with us or with the child pornographers."  Even for laid back Canada, that was a bit much, and there's been a furious response, including poor Mr. Toews rather unsavory divorce proceedings being released by certain unprincipled individuals who may or may not be working for opposition parties.  It's a real bunfight now, with both sides trying to out-outrage each other.

I just don’t think, when all these thousands of laws and regulations are passed, that there is an advocate for your average Joe Blow.  Between the hand-wringing special interest groups and government agencies lined up all the way down the hall with new regulations, where is the voice for the guy who just wants to be left alone? 

I'm not an anarchist or a tea-partier.  Thomas Paine said "The government is best which governs least."  I'm more in line with him and Henry David Thoreau.  Oh, and Ron Swanson.

Up the Irons: A Personal Tribute to Iron Maiden

It was pretty much pre-ordained that I was going to be a rock'n'roller.   When I was just seven a friend of my older brother introduced me to Alice Cooper and "School's Out."  If there is a hard rock song out there accessible to a seven year old, it has to be that one. 

           

            No more teachers, no more books

            No more teachers dirty looks...

            School's been blown to pieces

I could relate, you want I mean?

I don't remember the guy's name, even what he looked like, but I still remember exactly what his room looked like. It was in the basement with not much light and wallpapered with rock posters.  He  had a picture of Donny Osmond on his dart board.  And he had an Alice Cooper poster that probably looked like this:

It was this or Donny Osmond

And I remember the guy telling me that Alice Cooper had a certificate proving he was insane.  It made sense to me--who on Earth would change their name to  girl's name?  Ugh! 

Then, in England, another older friend introduced me to Queen, playing some tracks he liked from Queen II.  This was just before Queen hit superstardom with "Bohemian Rhapsody" and they were still very much an underground band.  Although, at ten, I was too young to really "get" Queen, I had never heard anything like Freddie Mercury's operatic vocals, and, as a student of classical piano, the symphonic sound appealed to me.

Note the lighting effect to hide the fact that they are all butt-ugly.

 Then, as a teenager, I was at a party when someone played a song that started with the immortal Vincent Price intoning "Woe to you, O Earth and Sea, for the Devil sends the Breast with wrath..."  That went into a frenetic, galloping sonic assault called "The Number of the Beast."  Pretty mellow in comparison to later bands like Metallica and Avenged Sevenfold, but by contemporary standards, this was sheer heaviness.   I was hooked right away.  Soon after, they even got radio play (rare for a heavy metal band at the times) with "Run to the Hills."

Where would people get the idea that Iron Maiden was Satanic?

Iron Maiden was one of the earliest concerts I went to.  These guys put everything into their live show and toured relentlessly.  I saw them four times in as many years, I think.  They always had the greatest productions and put 110% into every show.  I was never disappointed. Well except maybe when they hired Twisted Sister to back them up.  Poor Dee Schneider, Twisted Sister's singer, got beaked by a pizza box when he played in Vancouver. No offence, Dee, but that nose of yours was an easy target.

See what I mean, with the schozz?

The lads in concert.

Iron Maiden's musical style again appealed to my classical sensibilities from all those years of piano.  (By now I'd switched to guitar, much to my mom's chagrin, but bless her soul, she went out an bought me an electric guitar.)  Most of the heavy rock'n'roll up to that time--Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Aerosmith--was based on the pentatonic, or five-note, scale that gave it that blues-oriented feel.  Iron Maiden guitarists Adrian Smith and Dave Murray used the classical seven-note scale, primarily in the minor keys, combined with complex guitar harmonies.  The rhythm section--Steve Harris on bass and Nicko McBrain on drums--were fast and incredibly tight.  And Bruce Dickinson, the singer, had incredible range and power and leaned into every syllable.  He also had a great sense of dynamics building from a baritone growl to a gut-wrenching scream.

Steve Harris, the bass player, was also the band's primary songwriter.  They got into a lot of trouble with "Number of the Beast" as  a band of Satanists, and their records were promptly burned in some areas of the southern US.  But (unlike, say, Alice Cooper) their entire stage presence and songwriting wasn't exclusively dedicated to evil.  Even if you listen to their "horror" songs, lyrically they are more akin to, say, an Edgar Allen Poe story than "Let's all go get bent and worship the devil." 

Many of their best songs were actually about wars.  The Trooper is based on the Charge of the Light Brigade, an epic poem about the Crimean War. Aces High is about World War II flying aces.  And Run to the Hills is about the war between the North American Indians and white settlers from Europe.  They’ve also done heavy metal versions of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the old British TV classic The Prisoner.  Quite eclectic.

Iron Maiden went out with the 80s.  A new age of metal heralded by Slayer, Pantera and especially Metallica, with a more raw, heavier sound and without the spandex.  Iron Maiden suffered from association with the 80s hair bands, which was unfortunate.  Iron Maiden pushed musical boundaries and were one of the hardest working acts in rock'n'roll.  They deservedly enjoyed a resurgence in the early 2000s, selling out stadiums again world-wide.  Sure there were more beer guts and balding pates in the crowd, and their sound was now decidedly "retro," but good music never dies.  And Iron Maiden was, in my opinion anyway, a bright spot in the cultural dead zone that was the music of the 80s.

While other rock stars were busy picking up various drug addictions, Bruce Dickinson was busy becoming an internationally competitive fencer and a jumbo jet pilot.  In 2006, Dickinson flew in a Boeing 757 and rescued about 200 stranded British citizens caught in Lebanon during the Israel/Hezbollah crisis.  

Flight 666.  

My son watched the Iron Maiden documentary Flight 666 about five times on a flight from Vancouver to Cape Breton, and was quite enamored with Bruce Dickinson.  So as for Oscar having a role model who's a rock, star, swordfighter and heroic pilot--I'm OK with that.

Have a listen to Maiden playing "Run to the Hills" at Rock in Rio" in 2001.  To a crowd of 350,000.  Incredible energy.   Up the Irons!

The Myth of the Mainstream Media Bias

One of the prevailing myths on the political right these days is the liberal Mainstream Media (MSM).  That is the notion that most mass media disproportionately represent a liberal viewpoint.  The further one goes right from the centre, the more fervently this belief is held.

This idea is not peculiar to the right-wing.  There's examples of similar accusations of systemic media bias from the left too; the idea that the media represent corporate or political interests.  But most of the noise, at least right now, is coming from the political right.

As President of the (then infamous) University of British Columbia Engineers student body back in the mid-fourteenth century, I had some regrettable dealings with UBC's student newspaper, the Ubyssey.  I don't think I've ever run into a pack of misanthropic leftists since.  The student Engineers--brash, male-dominated, headed for prosperous careers building weapons and destroying the environment-- represented everything to be loathed by those folks, I suppose.  Not that the Engineers of UBC were angels; I and we did plenty to deserve some (but not all) of the bad press we got.  The gentle reporters at the Ubyssey may have espoused grand egalitarian ideas, but on a personal level they were just mean.  They would spend their evenings redacting the "Engineers" jacket logo from old university file photos.  Their explanation was they wanted everyone to look "representative"; the same.   Meanwhile they've got rings through their noses and their hair dyed pink.  I think the irony was lost on them.

Here's an old newspaper picture of me, as President of the UBC Enigneers,
returning the Rose Bowl we allegedly borrowed from the '92-93 Washington Hsukies.

Anyways, all that to say, if anyone should be predisposed to the idea of a liberal media, it would be me after that experience.  But I'm not convinced.

If the MSM are liberal, then why is FOX news the top-rated cable news network in the US?   Why do right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Charles Adler rule the radio ratings?   Why did virtually every major newspaper in Canada endorse the Conservatives in the last election?  It's not obvious to me that the MSM are liberal, though I'm a liberal myself, so I may not be seeing things with an unjaundiced eye.

So, I do what all good science-types do.  I went out to examine any academic studies on the subject.  Turns out there's loads. 

The one most often cited by proponents of the "liberal MSM" is a 1986 book called The Media Elite in which the authors--political science academics-- surveyed journalists and found that they tended to be more liberal, on average, than the general population.  I'm not surprised by that, actually.  I imagine a similar study conducted for, say, bank managers would find that they tend to be more fiscally conservative than the general population.  Engineers, also, are apparently given to have more conservative viewpoints.  Or so I've been told.

Let's assume that the study in The Media Elite was conducted impartially. So, even accepting that journalists tend to be liberal, does it necessarily follow that the MSM will necessarily be biased left?  I think that's speculation.  After all,   journalists don't decide what goes in a newspaper or on the air.  The owner ultimately gets to  decide that.  And media magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black don't strike me as the most liberal guys. 

It's also worth noting that the book was written before the advent of the internet, the blogosphere and cable news outlets such as CNN and FOX.  Viewers now have coverage of news 24/7 and access to thousands upon thousands of news sources from which to choose, each applying its own angle.  Consequently, I would argue, the line between news and opinion has become more blurred than ever.  And scandals by various "respectable" news outlet mean that not even the staid old giants such as the national newspapers have the appeal to authority that they used to.

The right-wing is not alone in their accusations of bias.  Noam Chomsky, in his highly cited work, Manufacturing Consent, established and tested his theory of a the Propaganda Model and concluded that the media were essentially acting as an arm of established political and economic (e.g. advertising) interests.   He measures "column inches" of coverage of various issues and finds that "deserving victims" (those portrayed as victims by the US government, such as people in Communist regimes) got more press than "undeserving victims" (such as victims of US-supported right-wing dictators in South America).  I read that book but I never found his argument that convincing.  While reading his book, I could think of several counter-examples to his model.

Chomsky's book had the same fatal flaw I find with just about every study I've seen on media impartiality.  When these studies are conducted by those with a conservative ethos, they see the media as having a liberal slant, and vice versa.  It's just another form of advocacy science that is slowly subsuming science and the quaint idea of intellectual honesty and objectivity these days.

One problem I noted is that the studies almost always concern contemporary US politics . There is no historical or geopolitical context.  Is the media biased in other countries?  Has the US media always been biased liberal?  What about government-owned news outlets such as the CBC in Canada?  Or the Xinhua news agency in China?  Is the Chinese media liberal?  Does the term "liberal" even make any sense in that context?  To me this lack of any context is an indication that most of these so-called scholarly inquiries are political in nature

Another problem with almost all most of the studies is that --surprise, surprise--that so-called scholarly inquiries into media bias tended to confirm preconceived biases of those undertaking the study.  Studies by conservative think tanks concluded that the MSM were liberal, and studies by liberal think tanks found the news slanted to the right.   

Yes, we're introducing an old nemesis of this blog: advocacy science.  And the fundamental theorem of advocacy science:  Torture the data long enough and it will confess to anything.   (No that's not my line, but I wish it were!) 

I also checked Wikipedia, more for a laugh than anything.  Sure enough, their article on media bias is quite a hodgepodge, and a visit over the "talk" page for the article shows why.  It's full of people decrying the article in particular and Wikipedia in general as having a liberal or conservative bias.

And let's say that a Perfectly Objective Observer managed to conduct a Perfectly Objective study that determined irrefutably that, yes indeed, the MSM were liberal, or that the MSM were conservative.  What then?  Pass a law?  You do not want to go there.  Shame them?  If the media had a conscience there wouldn't be paparazzi.  Or start your own media enterprise--which is exactly what has happened with the blogosphere.

The fact is that if you are right-wing you will see a Perfectly Objective news item (if there were such a thing) as slanted left.  The further right you are, the more slanted it will seem.  If you fail to account for the fact that you are a biased viewer, if you assume that you are a Perfectly Objective Observer, then you will likely draw a false conclusion.  It's the Theory of Relativity applied to politics.

There's a political motivation as well.  Complain about a liberal bias, or a conservative bias, loud and long enough and maybe people will start to believe you, and maybe you can create the perception of bias even where none exists.   Maybe, if you can get enough followers or if you can get folks like Sarah Palin to run with the baton, you can even get media outlets to consciously swing their news to your political viewpoint, to counter the perception of bias.  So part of the "liberal MSM" movement is probably aimed at trying to move the "centre" towards the right.

Newspapers and networks are highly competitive enterprises.  Taking political viewpoints as a typical bell curve, the most profit is to be made by appealing to the centre. You can create niche markets to the left and right of centre, but that gets more difficult as you approach the fringes.  People who own media companies are interested in making lots of money--no surprise there.  You don't make lots of money by appealing to the fringes of the bell curve. You make lots of money by printing a paper that appeals to preconceived beliefs.  A buxom beauty on Page 3 doesn't hurt either.