Thursday, May 21, 2009

Bird brains

Interesting follow-on to Sunday’s post about dogs & cognitive/ethical systems: it turns out our feathered friends are also capable of more sophisticated cognition than had been thought.

Mockingbirds mark & remember humans who have menaced their nests. When those humans return to the vicinity of the nest, the birds not only sound a warning, they stage preemptive strikes.

& they don’t attack just everyone who comes near, they go after the proven threats & just keep a wary eye on everyone else. If you’ve messed with the nest, it doesn’t matter if you change your hairstyle or wear different clothes—they’re coming after you like Stukas on a column of retreating French infantry.

So "birdbrain" is apparently as accurate an epithet as "eats like a bird" applies to delicate appetites. (Birds eat huge amounts proportionate to their weight every day in order to have the energy to fly.)

I think the walls are closing in on the humans-are-superior crowd who think animals are here to serve our purposes. The thing that seems to give us the advantage appears to be that opposing thumb—& maybe language. We don’t have a lock on sensibilities & our capacity for evil & cruelty definitely counts against us in the “we’re-godlike” argument.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Order in the House

Another MP has bitten the dust in the imbroglio over Parliamentary expense cheating. Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin has, with great truculence, announced his resignation as Speaker & MP from Glasgow, effective 21 June.

Martin, who waves his working-class origins around like an exhibitionist at a playground, was at the forefront of the attempt to divert public attention from the actual, you know, malfeasance by waxing outraged at the alleged leak of information. This was even as leaders of all three major parties were scrambling to find phrases strong enough to express their utter shock & dismay at how much their colleagues had pilfered from the public.

If it’s true you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind’s blowing, Martin comes up clueless on all counts.

He tried again yesterday to bluster his way through parliamentary questions, but it didn’t fly.

Martin is the first Speaker to be forced out of office since 1695, when Sir John Trevor got bounced for accepting bribes to push through legislation. (If Congressmen were held to that standard we’d have to have a revolving door & a moving walkway to accommodate the turnover of Representatives.) Before Trevor, there were a few instances of Speakers being beheaded for high crimes & misdemeanors, so I guess resignation is a few steps up.

Although having to go back to Glasgow permanently might be perceived as punishment to fit the crime.

It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to play out.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Crash course

Today and tomorrow I’m in an in-house marketing class, taught by professors from the Kellogg School of Business. It’s on value propositions.

Ordinarily I’d be wired at the prospect, but I have to say that, given the way things are run in my department, a “value proposition” is whatever supports the decision that was already made to develop an application, for whatever crack-brained reason senior management or the World's Greatest Expert devised. And whatever best practices I might learn in these two days, I have no expectation that I’ll be able to apply them.

I know this because last fall I took a different two-day course, in empathy-based customer research. It was energizing, really resonated with my experiences. But I realized that not only would these principles and procedures never be put into practice in my business division, they wouldn’t be used in any division.

There was no one among the 40 or so students with a title above manager. If the company were really interested in such things, there's be directors, GMs and other assorted senior management there soaking it up.

Still, it’s good to see how things might be, in hope that I might someday work in a place that values them.

Besides—it gets me out of proximity of the WGE for two days.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Parliament of whores

The story on Members of Parliament fiddling their expense reports and diddling the British ratepayers keeps on coming. And it’s costing MPs more than embarrassment—they’re starting to lose their jobs.

Shahid Malik tried brazening it out by insisting that expensing (among other things) a $3K flat-screen TV is perfectly legit. But by Friday he’d handed in his resignation as junior justice minister. Malik is the first, but probably not the only one headed down that path.

The WSJ comments that this is an aberration from the usual Parliamentary scandal, which has tended to be of a sexual nature. You know—murdering your gay lover, sleeping with call girls who are also servicing the Soviet naval attaché, that sort of peccadillo. Money—just not the done thing, you know…

The pushing of the padding envelope has been going on for many years. But surfacing amidst a serious recession, when Brits have lost their sense of job security and watched banks being nationalized while executive management remained both exempt from accountability and in possession of golden parachutes—well, the electorate is not amused.

The rules that enabled all the fiddling were enacted to basically increase MPs’ compensation without passing a raise in salaries, which was unpopular to the point of being a serious career-limiting move. Salaries remained static, but Members could expense all sorts of things—without having to justify individual purchases to their constituency. They were permitted allowances, and the total expenditures might be made public, but not that they were for flat-screen TVs, horse manure or multiple-residences.

(The WSJ has helpfully compiled a list of who’s charged the taxpayers for what. Talk about ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.)

By contrast, in the US, Congressional money scandals usually revolve around accepting freebies and quid-pro-quos from lobbyists. That’s because their allowed expenses are carefully circumscribed, and they by law must reveal all their outgoings. Having the same sense of grandiose entitlement as their British confrères, they make up the “difference” between what they get and what they think they deserve by cozying up with special interests.

What’s interesting to me is that in the midst of swirling revelations of venality both large and small, Parliament expressed its own outrage. Not that they were revealed as emulating small-time pickpockets, or that their injured self-justifications didn’t wash with the British public.

No, the real crime in their view wasn’t that they were screwing their constituents. It was that the story got leaked to said constituents. They were outraged—utterly outraged—that their privacy was compromised in this fashion, and have called on the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) to investigate and prosecute the true criminals to the fullest extent.

That’s pretty much a pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtains ploy to divert the public's attention from the fact that they’ve been picking up the tab for MPs’ dog food, home renovations, phantom mortgage interest payments and bankrolling their sibs for years.

I’ve got to say, it makes a nice change from our domestic venality, but it is nonetheless discouraging to find that, no matter how much you pay pols, it’s never enough to salve their egos.


Sunday, May 17, 2009

Dog is my co-pilot

The Denver Post reports a story that will come as a surprise to no one who’s shared his/her life with a four-foot companion: dogs have souls.

Well, duh.

Dogs are full of natural goodness and have rich emotional lives, according to an animal behaviorist at the University of Colorado. Marc Bekoff encapsulates his findings, “[W]e’re not alone in having a nuanced moral system.” They know their lives are interrelated with their humans’ and they focus on us to make that relationship work.

There’s more: empathy and morality aren’t uniquely human characteristics.

(Actually, there are times when I think morality is distinctly not a human trait. But that’s a different post.)

Bekoff reports that animals can and do distinguish between right and wrong. Dogs have rules of play and cheats find themselves ostracized.

Findings such as Bekoff’s, and investigations at Harvard’s Canine Cognition Laboratory are stimulating new discussions among theologians. In the world of western religion, it’s long been the accepted “knowledge” that animals don’t have the requisite capabilities of belief and rationalization to possess human-like souls.

(Assumption being that humanlike souls are the gold standard.)

Bekoff has found that dogs have a sense of fair play; they make friends; they modify their behavior to meet the needs of their friends. They recognize unfairness, and it makes them unhappy. They grieve and they hope.

What they don’t do is scheme, torture, backstab or abandon their young.

What’s not to admire in these characteristics? Why would the Supreme Being not have endowed these creatures with souls?

Tom Ricks, who covered the military for the WSJ and the Washington Post for many years and is now senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, asks the real question. Do dogs think people have souls?

Now, all this hoo-hah is about dogs, but that’s because they’re easiest to observe—they’re around us. I myself have witnessed affection, play, concern, sullenness, guilt—in short, a whole range of emotions and behaviors—in cats who’ve graciously deigned to allow me to minister to them.

Whether I had them for 53 days or 17 years, every one had something to teach me. Don’t take things personally. Try everything once. A cuddle and a purr can make most things better. You have the right to be loved for what you are, not what you do. Sevruga caviare isn’t just for humans and if you snake one paw up from under the coffee table you might not be noticed snatching the Scottish smoked salmon. Be persistent. Don’t be in the moment—own it.

Sadly, there are way too many people in this world who think animals are here for their amusement and to be objects of their cruelty. I confess that every time I see one of those Sarah McLachlan SPCA commercials I can barely manage to look and I want nothing so much as a high-powered M40A3 with a really good scope and a crate of .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges. Ditto those commercials for the Humane Society.

You can’t tell me that creatures that would inflict such suffering on other living beings have souls.

Regardless of which species are stamped with the soul-of-approval, if you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, do one more thing: go to the Animal Rescue site and click on the button to donate food to shelters. Your click will give sustenance to one of those incarcerated critters waiting to share morality and cognition with a human.