What Are The Causes of Phonemic Diversity?

Atkinson's Serial Founder Effect Hypothesis

Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has made headlines with his bold assertion that "the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

The Underlying Data

He reaches this conclusion by massaging data from three maps prepared by Ian Maddieson from secondary sources in the World Atlas of Language Structure.  The maps clearly show that phonemic diversity isn't random, but don't necessarily support Atkinson's hypothesis either.

The maps show the number of consonants, with bins of

Small 6-14 (91 languages) 
Moderately small 15-18 (121 languages)
Average 19-25 (182 languages)
Moderately large 26-33 (116 languages)
Large 33+ (53 languages),

vowels, with bins of

Small (2-4) (93 languages)
Average (5-6) (288 languages)
Large (7-14) (183 languages),

and tone systems, with bins of

No tones (307 languages)
Simple tone system (132 languages) 
Complex tone system (88 languages),

in 504 languages around the world.

The Problems With Aktinson's Hypothesis

Atkinson's hypothesizes about the time-depth of these relationships and their mechanism aren't very persuasive. 

Regional Trends Are Present

Clearly, each of these features exhibit strong regional trends. 

The Amazon is vowel rich, consonant poor and often has a tone system.  The Caucasian languages are short on vowels, rich in consonants and usually lack of tone system.  Indigenous Australian languages without exception are vowel poor, lack tone, and have few to a moderately large number of consonants.  Papuan languages tend to be tonal and consonant poor.

Many West African and East African and Southeast Asian languages have complex tone systems, large numbers of vowels, and moderately large inventories of consonants.  Many indigenous languages of the Pacific Coast in the Americas are vowel poor, have simple tone systems and and tend to have high numbers of consonants.

Europe, South Asia, and North Asia tend to lack tone, have moderate numbers of consonants, and have moderate to high numbers of vowels.

The Data Are Too Noisy To Represent A Serial Founder Effect

Gleaning a relatively clear serial founder effect from these relationships seems far fetched.  The data sets are simply too noisy for that.  One can see clusters where the phonemic features seem to coincide.  One can fairly infer that regional clusters of similar phonemic features have a common origin.  One can even fairly infer that some common reason may account for the fact that non-adjacent regional clusters are phonemically similar.

The Data Don't Closely Track Language Families

Certainly it is true that the features don't seem to track language families. 

For example, Uralic Saami language is consonant rich, while the nearby Uralic Finnish language is consonant poor.

The only New World languages definitively tied to the Old World are the Na-Dene languages and the Yenesian Ket language.  Central Siberian Ket is vowel rich, consonant poor, and lacks a tone system; Na-Dene languages tend to be vowel poor and consonant rich, and some of the Na-Dene languages have a tone system.  Whatever the total number of phonemes is in these related languages, the case that Na-Dene's phoneme set arose from phoneme loss from its parent language is implausible.  Its phoneme losses and gains seem to have counterbalanced each other.

Some Niger-Congo languages have complex tone systems, other than no tone systems at all.  Some Niger-Congo languages (particularly toward Nigeria) are consonant rich, others (particularly towards Ivory Coast and Liberia) are consonant poor.

Areal Effects Are Inconsistent

Indeed, a linguistic trait that follows strong regional patterns while not closely tracking language family relationships is pretty much the definition of an areal effect in linguistics. 

But the source of these areal effects is obscure and inconstant.

Sometimes, the areal effects cross immense linguistic relationship divides.  The phoneme set of Basque, which is more distant from the other languages of Europe than any other for many hundreds of miles, is quite similar to that of many nearby Indo-European languages.  Yet, the phoneme set of the Caucasian languages is dramatically different from those of any of its neighbors, although languages of the Caucasus mountains do seem to have phoneme set sizes similar to each other in some cases despite not being very closely related linguistically and together they are very different from that of neighboring languages.

The Data Aren't A Close Fit To Pre-Historic Migration Patterns

The regions of phonemic similarity don't obviously track paths of deep pre-historic migration.  For example, if they did, we would expect continuity of phonemic trends from Africa to South Asia to Southeast Asia reflecting a Southern route migration.  Instead, we see similarities between Africa and Southeast Asia that are interrupted in South Asia.

Most Papuan languages have few consonants, but a couple of them which are not particularly closely related to each other, at odds with very nearby members of their respective language Trans-Papuan language genuses, have large inventories of consonants, and no Trans-Papuan languages have an intermediate number of consonants.  One imagines a scenario here in which one group intentionally develops a different phoneme set from their close linguistic neighbors in Papua New Guinea for no reason other than to make their language harder for their neighbors to acquire, thereby cementing group identity.

The Data Don't, and Shouldn't Reflect Deep Time Depth

Nor do they seem to obviously reflect linguistic time depth on the scale of tens of thousands of years.  All languages of the New World should have similar linguistic time depth, but show very distinct intra-American regional clusters in phonemic diversity.  Papua New Guinea and Australia were settled by modern humans at about the same time, but have dramatically different phonemic profiles. 

Semitic Hebrew is consonant poor, while Ethio-Semitic Tigre is moderately consonant rich, despite the fact that the languages diverged from each other within the last four thousand years.  The Semitic Arabic dialects spoken closest Israel, which are some of the closest linguistic relatives of Hebrew, are in between.

Irish and Hindi have large numbers of consonants and average numbers of vowels, while most Indo-European languages have average numbers of consonants and large numbers of vowels.  Yet, Irish and Hindi each probably branched off the related Indo-European languages with more typical Indo-European phoneme sets within the last four thousand years.  The Indo-European Hittite language had a particularly low number of vowels (just four) despite being attested at about the same time that Hindi and Irish diverged from their most closely related, but phonemically distinct Indo-European languages, possibly as a substrate influence from vowel poor non-Indo-European languages in Anatolia.

The number of phonemes in English has changed between Old English and contemporary spoken English, and isn't the same even for all dialects of American English, which started to diverge from British English and from each other only in the last few hundred years.

Overall, the evidence seems to indicate that phoneme change can take place in time frames of several centuries, while language family relationships can be pretty clear for periods of several millennia, at least.

The Overall Patterns Couldn't Have Been Produced By Serial Founder Effects

Serial founder effects are hard pressed to explain why the Amazon is consonant poor and vowel rich, by the North Pacific Coast of North America has languages that are rich in consonants and short in vowels, while both have a mix of simple tone systems and languages without tone systems.  Both groups of languages, presumably, have similar time depth and derive from populations that would have been close in space to each other and genetically similar about 17,000 years ago.

The trends also have an immense amount of noise in them.  The Tibeto-Burman Naxi language of Southwest China, for example, is consonant rich, vowel rich and has a complex tone system, giving it the greatest amount of phonemic diversity possible in the data set.  So does the Yulu language of Sudan (a Nilo-Saharan language), and the Nilo-Saharan Ngiti language of the Congo.   A serial founder effect shouldn't put any languages with maximal phoneme sets so distant from each other.

Simply put, the cline that Atkinson proposes isn't the kind of cline one would associate with a serial founder effect.  It is a vague general trend with tenuous foundations that is inconsistent with a serial founder effect.   Whatever accounts for variation between languages in phonemic diversity, it is not a serial founder effect.

There Are Patterns To Phonemic Diversity

The problem is a fascinating puzzle, but Atkinson seems to be largely barking up the wrong tree to explain it. 

Climate Zone And Phoneme Mix

For example, without going into the matter with any particular preconceptions, one would notice that tropical areas tend to have high levels of tonality and rich vowel sets, while temperate and desert areas have low levels of tonality.  One might explain that by concluding that tropical areas have a rich array of bird sounds that locals have an evolutionary fitness reason to learn (culturally) or have a genetic ability to distinguish (or both), and that a well developed capacity to distinguish sounds of these kinds for non-linguistic purposes makes it more natural for these societies to use these kinds of sounds linguistically among themselves.  Consonant frequency might be a factor that allows a language to have a sufficient number of words by compensating for a lack of ability to make different tones and vowel sounds.

Is this the correct hypothesis?  I surely don't know.  But, it is a better statistical match to the data than Atkinson's hypothesis and is plausible enough to make sense.

Contact and Isolation

Unusually high phoneme inventories might be a marker of high levels of inter-linguistic contact.  The Nilo-Saharans who have the highest phoneme inventories in Africa are situated betwixt Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo language speakers and may be borrowing phonemes from the areal influences of both.  The Naxi who have the highest phoneme inventories in Asia are situated between Tibeto-Burmese speakers who have one set of phonemes and Southeast Asian language speakers who have another one.  Likewise, the presence of click consonants in some Bantu languages, presumably because the population previously spoke a Khoisan language before shifting to a Bantu superstrate language, reflects the kind of phoneme gain that can take place from linguistic contact.

Unusually low phoneme inventories might be a market of prolonged population isolation with low population densities in places like Australia.  Phoneme inventories can also occur when language learners in a new superstrate language can't accurately reproduce all of the sounds in the superstrate language.  This may be what happened in the case of Hittite and other Indo-European Anatolian languages.  One also sees it when the Japanese borrow words from languages with more phonemes than its own language has into Japanese.

The number of phonemes in a language is really a matrix of a smaller number of options for sound making. One might, for example, appropriately think of tone systems as multipliers of the number of phonemes in a language, rather than mere additional phonemes. Perhaps the appropriate way to count is to look at the number of combined tone-vowel/consonant sounds in a language (also perhaps modulated by rhythm or otherwise), rather than examining phoneme differences in isolation. Perhaps there is a phoneme set size towards which languages trend when not artificially reduced by small isolated populations (Hawaiian is another famous example phoneme loss in addition to Australia, for possibly similar reasons) and when not artificially increased by phoneme sharing at the boundaries of phoneme regions.

Classes of Phonemes May Be The Most Suitable Level Of Analysis

Consonant and vowel count may be a poor measure in any case.  Many of the outlier cases in consonant number involve an entire classes of consonants or vowels found in one area, but not another, rather than individual phonemes. 

A lack of frictive consonants is a major factor in the low number of consonants found in Australia, Papuan languages, and low consonant languages of the Americas. 

High consonant count African languages are often notable for including labial-velar consonants (found elsewhere only in a small number of Papuan languages), and high vowel count in African languages are often notable for including a distinction between nasalized and non-nasalized vowels (otherwise found mostly in the Americas and sporadically elsewhere). The high consonant count in the Caucasian languages is largely attributable to the pharyngeal consonants used there, in some Afro-Asiatic languages, and in few other places.  Click consonants are also found only in one small, regional subset of Africans.

In contrast, distribution of the "th" sound is sporadic (and a poor fit for a serial founder effect).

Most of the cases of the losses of click sounds, labial-velar consonants, frictive consonants and perhaps even pharyngeal consonants and nasalized vowels, from parent languages that included them, might very well fit a serial founder effect model, since the distribution of these phonemic divergences are consistent with that model, while the distribution of the presence or absence of a "th" sound, linguistic tone systems and some kinds of vowel number variation may not. 

But, at any rate, the analysis probably needs to be conducted on a class of phoneme by class of phoneme basis, rather than on a total consonant set basis to make much sense as a phylogenetic tree.  Clearly, there were at least as many cases of independent phonemic invention in particular regions as there were cases of independent invention of plant and animal domestication complexes, and some kinds of phonemic invention (and linguistic invention generally) seem more prone to independent invention than others.

Denver Clerk and Recorder Election Just Got Easier

There are four candidates listed by the Denver Clerk and Recorder's office election division as running in Denver's all mail in ballot municipal election in which ballots go out in the mail today and are due back on May 3, 2011. They are: Tom Downey, Sarah McCarthy, Jacob Werther, and Debra Johnson.

I won't be voting for Tom Downey or Jacob Werther for Clerk and Recorder. Why?

Tom Downey is in running on the strength of his ties to Scott Gessler, our current Republican Colorado Secretary of State, who has repeated made negative headlines in his brief tenure of office, and also made headlines during the campaign for his less than stellar work as an election lawyer, as well as his endorsements from other Republicans. Gessler has been a stern advocate for gutting campaign finance laws, disenfranchising voters without a solid factual basis, holding onto excess departmental funds that the rest of the state's budget needs, and not working full time at the job he was elected to carry out. While Mr. Downey was hired by Bernie Buescher and merely retained by his new boss, Scott Gessler (he runs the Business Division), he does not have the political good sense that his position requires. If he doesn't know that Gessler's endorsement is toxic, he deserves to pay for that mistake by losing my vote.

I had already ruled out Jacob Werther on the basis of the criticism that Dan Willis, a reliable straight shooter in this area with personal knowledge of the candidates.  He has identified Werther as a man who comes across as an unbalanced conspiracy theorist, or at the very least, as someone who jumps to suspicions of wrong doing without having facts to back up his suspicions.

This leaves two candidates still in the running for me: Debra Johnson and Sarah McCarthy.

Johnson is the appointed city clerk of Aurora whose only drawback seems to be a complaint filed against her by the Downey campaign related to campaign finance filings that seems to be related to technical problems with Denver's e-filing system  Her experience, character and lack of eagerness to associate herself with people who exemplify everything that is wrong in election administration in Colorado recommend her over either of the two men in the race. The fact that she is supported by Pam Bennett, whom I know from working with her in the Democratic Party of Denver to be a level headed and sensible person also speaks well to her suitability for the office.

I don't yet know much about Sarah McCarthy's qualification for this office, other than what can be found on her campaign webpage, which deserves kudos for being bilingual. She has IT expertise, has been active in civic affairs, and has a background of involvement with the eminently respectable League of Women Voters. She currently leads a small non-profit organization and has a long history of responsible public sector and non-profit experience.

Of the two, Johnson has the more directly relevant government experience and the stronger campaign, so, at least in the first round, I will be voting for her. I believe that voting for Johnson is the best way to increase the likelihood that neither Downey nor Werther get the job. If both Johnson and McCarthy both make it into the final round, I can look more closely at the two to evaluate each of them on the merits, as I believe that either could probably do the job competently. But, for now, the most important priority is to prevent a runoff between Downey and Werther, and I believe that Johnson is more likely to succeed in doing this than McCarthy.

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

Maoism in India Linked To Neo-Feudalism

In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned by individuals, much as it is in most of the United States. In parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned communally by villages in what amounts to a localized form of communism. In yet other parts of India, historically, land has typically been owned the landlords with large land holdings that is worked by landless peasants, in what amounts to a neo-feudal system.

While territorial boundary tensions in the general vicinity of Kashmir, and religous/ethnic conflicts between Hindus and Muslims capture most of the press about political violence in India, a third major source of political violence in India is an ongoing insurgency by Naxalites, who are usually described as Maoist are highly concentrated in parts of India that have historically had neo-feudal land tenure.

Thus, what seems from abroad to be revolution in support of discredited communist ideology, looks locally like an economic struggle that had already been largely resolved in Europe when Adam Smith and Karl Marx were defining the boundaries of the political economy debate there. Maoists in India are addressing legitimate grievances that the developed world is so far removed from that it is has largely forgotten them.

The United States experienced a similar struggle, but we didn't conceptualize it as an issue of land reform. We called the effort to dismantle a system largely build around ownership of large farms worked by landless workers abolition and dealt with it by ending slavery rather than with government sponsored land reform. Emancipation happened; 40 acres and a mule did not. A wave of reconstruction era bank foreclosures did a little to disaggregate plantation land holdings, but mostly the mechanization of agriculture and rise of an industrial economy made land ownership less economically relevant than it had been.

The implication of this fact, of course, is that the solution to the long running Maoist insurgencies in India may be to address the land tenure concerns that a fueling those insurgencies, and for outsider forces in India's policy environment to not so easily conflate an anti-feudal movement with anti-capitalist sentiment. This understanding of the movement helps makes sense of otherwise mysterious phenomena like the large contigent of pro-business Maoists in nearby Nepal's recent democratic elections.

In the words of a 1972 speech by Pope Paul VI, "If you want peace, work for justice."

How Old Are The Indo-European Languages?

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson in their article in Nature in 2003 looked at the amount of lexical differences between the various living and extinct Indo-European languages and concluded that the language family was about 8,000 years old. Robin J. Ryder and Geoff K. Nicholls in an article in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics) for January 2011 reproduced the same result, with similar data and a more refined version of the same model that addressed some of the methodological objections to the Gray and Atkinson study.

These dates are wrong. We can conclude that these dates are wrong because we have more sources of data than the models rely upon that strongly support a contrary result. Their models produce the wrong estimates of the age of the Indo-European language family because the models that they use make simplifying assumptions that have a material effect on the result. This post explains why these two studies (they aren't really independent as the later study uses data and methods that overlap the first) are wrong and why "the Kurgan theory [of Marija Gimbutas] that the spread started between 6000 and 6500BP" is a more accurate estimate.

Both studies use essentially the same inputs - a list of common words for particular things from as many Indo-European languages as possible, living and dead, and some estimates of the time period during which those word lists were valid. They then estimate the rate that languages change their vocabulary based on examples of languages that are known to have changed to certain degrees in known time periods.

The degree of similarity between languages in lexicon produces presumed relationships between the languages that closely mirror what we believe to be true by other means. The branches of the tree are essentially the same.

The number of years before present that any given two languages have a presumed common ancestor in these models is essentially a highly massaged way of describing the degree to which they are lexically similar. The fewer words a pair of languages have in common, the more distant the model presumes their common ancestor to be.

In some circumstances, specifically, when languages are already differentiated from each other and only have neighboring languages influencing their evolution that don't interact heavily and are from related language families, this assumption is reasonable. But, in critical situations it is not. In real life, languages exhibit punctuated evolution. They change rapidly when they first differentiate and when they co-exist with or are in close regular proximity to very different languages, while changing slowly when isolated.

The model is wrong because it fails to account for these facts, both of which produce more rapid language change than would result from the mere prolonged random linguistic drift of a language in isolation or near isolation. Put another way, the age estimates produced by these models is the oldest age that could be expected in an environment in which there is no real linguistic competition from other language families and one starts with a single common language, something that is a good description of the groups of languages used to estimate the rates of language change used in the model. But, there are circumstances in the history of the Indo-European languages whose lexical differences from each other are driving the old estimate for a proto-Indo-European language that would have sped up the rate of language change at critical junctures. Those circumstances, in fact, look quite similar to the circumstances where the model fails to produce accurate age estimates for languages with known ages.

Atkinson recognized this was a problem, and in a 2008 study fit the data to a more complex model that attempted to determine how much language change was attributable to change in the formative period of a language, and how much language change was due to random drift. In the Indo-European languages, Atkinson's effort determined that about 21% of language change was due to language formation effects, a result that neatly produces an estimated age of proto-Indo-European of about 6600 years BP, a match within the margin of error with the most widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis of Indo-European language origins.

What makes the evidence for the Kurgan hypothesis such much more plausible than the estimates produced by the two statistical estimates?

The Kurgan hypothesis looks at the earliest known cultures to speak Indo-European languages - the Indo-Aryans of India who composed the Vedic Sanskrit epics from which Hindo and other Indo-Aryan languages are known to descend, the ancient Persian authors of the early Indo-Iranian Avestia, the Mycenians who replaced the Minoans and the Pelagasians who spoke non-Indo-European languages, the Hittites in Anatolia whose language led to the extinction of the Hattic and Hurrian languages there, the Mittani who spoke an Indo-European language with Indo-Aryan affinities, the Tocharians who spoke an Indo-European language in the Tarim basin until well into the 1st millenium CE, the Celts, and the earliest Italic language speakers in Italy. Archaeology and physical anthropology (i.e. similarity of bones) and more recently genetics (of populations and ancient DNA) are then used to identify which archaeological cultures appear to be in continuity with each other, and which appear to represent a break from prior archaeological cultures. Periods in which there is continuity in archaeological culture are presumed to represent periods of relative linguistic continuity. Periods in which there is discontinuity in archaeological culture or a historical record of a language transition are deemed to be periods of relative linguistic change. By this means predecessor cultures are assigned to Indo-European and non-Indo-European categories. Cultural continuity of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages are traced back until a juncture of all of the source in which words that have a common origin in distant branches of the language family were present. The cultures themselves are dated using carbon dating, tree rings, and other methods of dating archaeological strata.

Boundary Dates For Indo-European Cultures

This method provides some minimum ages of Indo-European languages.

Cultural practices like cremation which Vedic epics attest to being adopted around the time that the Indo-Aryans arrive in India appear around 3911 BP. A contemporaneous Akkadian historical record establishes that the Hittites conquered their second city state in 3765 BP and that before that date the Hittites ruled a single city (they would go on to rule almost all of Anatolia and the Northern Levant). Cremation starts to appear on the Pannonian plain and along some locations on the mid-Danube River basin around 4000 BP. From 3561 BCE- 3471 BP a Sanskrit speaking, Indo-Aryan god worshipping elite establishes itself in Mitanni empire in Northeast Mesopotamia.

Tarim basin mummies that remain similar in physical type which is physically and genetically similar to peoples of the same time period on the European steppe start to appear around 3811 BP and continue to have a similar appearance until about 1200 BP. J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair in "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West." (2000), suggest in a step critical to fixing an earliest possible proto-Indo-European date that, as Wikipedia paraphrases them:

[T]he Tocharian languages were introduced to the Tarim and Turpan basins from the Afanasevo culture to their immediate north. The Afanasevo culture (c. 5500–4500 BP) displays cultural and genetic connections with the Indo-European-associated cultures of the Central Asian steppe yet predates the specifically Indo-Iranian-associated Andronovo culture (c. 4000–2900 BP) enough to isolate the Tocharian languages from Indo-Iranian linguistic innovations like satemization.

This provides an archaeologically supported date for a possible split of the Tocharian language from the other Indo-European languages of no earlier than 5500 BP, and supports the Kurgan hypothesis because, per the Wikipedia article on the Afanasevo culture, this is an early and extreme eastern outlier culture whose "burials bear a remarkable resemblance to those much further west in the Yamna culture [5200 BP to 4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], the Sredny Stog culture [6500-5500 BP "just north of the Sea of Azov between the Dnieper and the Don."], the Catacomb culture [4800-4200 BP in the Pontic Steppe], Poltavka culture [4700—4100 BP of the middle Volga River], and the Corded Ware Culture [5000–4350 BP aka the Battle Axe culture or Single Grave culture]."

The oldest Corded Ware sites are in Poland, and it is found in much of Russia and the Baltic sea area. It reaches the "Danubian and Nordic areas of western Germany" around 4400 BP and might be Indo-European or might be one of the last pre-Indo-European layers in part because, "In places a continuity between Funnel Beaker and Corded Ware can be demonstrated, whereas in other areas Corded Ware heralds a new culture and physical type." Also, specific origins much later in time have been identified for the Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic languages. For example, the beginning of late Nordic Bronze Age in Southern Scandinavia around 2110 BP is a moment of major cultural upheaval when cremation begins to appear in Southern Scandinavia, many metal objects related to horses are found and there seems to be a strong coincidence with the appearance of the Germanic languages. The main expansion of the Slavic languages takes place around 1400 BP, after the fall of the Roman empire from the Southwest edge of the Slavic language speaking areas today.

So, if the Corded Ware culture was Indo-European, it may not have left Indo-European linguistic traces in much the same way that Indo-European Celtic languages left very little trace in France, Spain and Portugal were Celtic was replaced by Roman which was replaced by Romance languages.

Given the timing of the Afanasevo culture whose Indo-European identity can be inferred reasonably reliably despite a lack of direct linguistic evidence, the Tocharian branch of Indo-European languages must break off from the Sredny Stog culture, since all of the others are too recent to be a source for it, and the Sredny Stog culture becomes a strong candidate for the proto-Indo-European culture. (Gray estimates this date to be 6900 BP, which is about 1400 years too early.)

There is cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim culture in the Southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan which flourished from roughly 4211 BP and 3611 BP that conducted chariot burials, engaged in copper mining and metallurgy, and was, according to ancient DNA genetically at least 90% West Eurasian on both the maternal and paternal sides in which at least 60% of the individuals overall had light hair and blue or green eyes. There is also cultural continuity between the earliest known speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages and the Andronovo culture which invented the spoke-wheeled chariot which is strongly associated with the Indo-Iranians around 4010 BP. Some genetic traits that are more common in high caste Indo-Aryan language speakers are believed to have West Eurasian origins.

The Urnfield culture emerges around the time of several collapses and upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Levant around the time of the Urnfield origins:

* end of the Mycenean culture with a conventional date of ca. 3200 BP
* destruction of Troy VI ca. 3200 BP
* Battles of Ramses III against the Sea Peoples, 3206-3211 BP
* end of the Hittite empire 3190 BP
* settlement of the Philistines in Palestine ca. 3180 BP

The Urnfield culture is found in Central Europe and Eastern France and Northern Italy and is commonly seen as an Indo-European cultural sucessor to the Bronze Age Indo-European cultures and a cultural predecessor to the Hallstatt culture from the 8th to 6th centuries BC (European Early Iron Age) and followed in much of Central Europe by the La Tène culture associated with the Celts. The late Urnfield culture probably gave rise to the Italic languages, which are closely related to Celtic as well, and may even have also been a source for the Germanic languages. The late Urnfield culture at its greatest extent reached far Northeastern Iberia. (Indo-European) Greek colonies were established in Iberia ca. 2710 BP.

Boundary Dates For Non-Indo-European Cultures

There are also ancient cultures we know did not speak Indo-European languages. Sumerian was a literary non-Indo-European language attested in writing from 5500 BP to 4200 BP in Mesopotamia (Iraq), until about 4015 BP when the Semitic Akkadian language was spoken, after which the Kassite empire from the mountains to the East where a Hurrian language (a non-Indo-European, non-Afro-Asiatic language related to the languages of the North Caucuses) was imposed, until it was defeated in the North by the Mittani and later by the Hittites.

We also have continous literary records of the Egyptians in Coptic from about 5000 BP until well past 3000 BP, at times through the South Levant, and of Semitic languages being spoken in the North Levant prior to their arrival in Sumeria. We also know that the Semitic languages and Coptic are part of the same language family.

Thus, there were no Indo-European languages spoken South of Anatolia prior to the Mittani for a prolonged period of time during which Indo-European languages prior to those first know to the historical record or the cultures that spoke them were in existence. Prior to the arrival of the Mittani, the people of that region in the mountains to the East of Mesopotamia spoke a non-Indo-European language.

We know that from roughly 4110 BP to 3465 BP that Linear A script used by speakers of non-Indo-European Minoan language, which was probably related to the pre-Indo-European Etruscan (Tuscany), Rhaetic (roughly speaking Venice), and Lemnian (a Greek island) languages. We also know that the Pelagasians who inhabited mainland Greece immediately prior to the arrival of the Mycenians (who spoke ancient Greek) spoke a non-Indo-European language.

The non-Indo-European Elamite language is attested in writing in Persia from 3511 BP to 2342 BP, and a system of proto-writing that appears to be in cultural continuity with it was used from 5100 BP or so.

The Hattic language was spoken for an indeterminate period prior to the emergence of the Hittite empire as the predominant language of North Central Anatolia and shows some similarities to the languages of the Caucusas Mountains. The non-Indo-European Kaskians regularly invade Hittite territory from the East coast of the Sea of Maramara and the adjacent Anatolian plains which the Hittites never manage to control ca. 3661 BP until they are defeated by an Assyrian king ca. 3160 BP.

There is cultural continuity between the Harappans of the Indus River Valley and the Sumerians. The Harappans used Sumerian crops very shortly after they were found in Sumeria, engaged in regular trade with Sumeria for thousands of years and had a linguistic minority district in Sumerian port cities, and used a system of symbolic seals similar to those used by the Vinca culture of the Balkans and the Sumerians. The Indus River Valley culture shows remarkable continuity and unity for about 4000 years until its collapse not long before the appearance of the Indo-Aryans ca. 3900 BP.

Since we know very little about what the Harappan language was like, and it was relatively isolated from the rest of the food producing world for so long, it would be possible to see it as the proto-Indo-European homeland rather than Central Asia. But, in that hypothesis it is hard to explain why so many genetic markers typical of Pakistanis (e.g. Y-DNA haplogroup L) are not found in many other Indo-Europeans at any frequency.

Prior to the Urnfield and Greek influences arriving in Iberia it appears that non-Indo-European language speakers, some of whom spoke Vasconic languages related to Basque lived in Iberia. These peoples (or at least some of them) based on place named and archaeological continuity appear to have been part of a common Atlantic megalithic culture that coicided with the Neolithic revolution in the Atlantic region.

Implications

In the period immediately following 4000 BP, which also coincides with the worst short term drought since agriculture was invented in the Middle East that also appears to have extended to the Indus River Valley, Indo-European peoples appear on the scene from Greece to Anatolia to the Balkans to Central Asia to North India to the Tarim Basin. There is rough consensus on the timing, ethnic identity and location of Indo-European language speakers in all periods after then outside of Northern and Eastern Europe where there is some dispute over whether particular cultures were or were not Indo-European language speakers.

Before that point in time, the Indo-Europeans were pretty much confined to the Eastern European and Central Asian steppe where they would have been distinguished by the horse culture and would have been predominantly herders in juxtaposition to their Old European farmer neighbors to the West.

Lexical analysis suggests an age of Proto-Indo-European based on an counterfactual assumption of gradual random linguistic drift of 8000 BP which coincides with the earliest LBK Neolithic expansion into Eastern Europe out of someplace in the vicinity of Anatolia and the Balkans. The Kurgan hypothesis sees cultural connections between the earliest likely Indo-European language speakers and the Early Kurgan (burial mound) culture in Eastern Europe and Central Asia of ca. 6500 to 6000 BCE, while placing the LBK farmers and Cucuteni-Trypillian culture [7500 BP to 4750 BP], of "Old Europe" in cultural continuity with the non-Indo-European language speaking people of pre-Hittite Anatolia and of Sumeria and the Levant. In an Anatolian hypothesis, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture would have to be Indo-European and would have to have somehow extended its influence all of teh way to India with technologies like chariots that it did not possess, and the non-Indo-European language cultures that the Indo-Europeans displaced are hard to explain.

The uniform rate of linguistic change hypothesis would suggest that it took about 4000 years for the Indo-European languages to diversify to the extent observed in 4000 BP. The Kurgan hypothesis suggests that this happened much more rapidly, over about 2000 to 2500 years, probably due to an increased rate of language change as daughter languages distinguished themselves from each other, due to founder effects, and as a result of coming into intimate intense contact with competing non-Indo-European langauges as they expanded.

What a mere statistical model based on word comparisons between languages fails to provide that the Kurgan hypothesis does is to provide a step by step chain of cultures that could bring Indo-European languages to the places that they ultimately end up, and reasons (including domestication of the horse and development of the chariot and in the case of the Hittites, a monopoly on iron production coinciding with climate based weakness in neighboring cultures) that they were able to expand their linguistic reach.

Obama's Deficit Reduction Proposal

President Obama called for cutting the nation’s combined budget deficit by $4 trillion over the next 12 years. . . . The president vowed not to extend tax cuts for the wealthy or to dismantle the government-run health care systems for the elderly and poor. . . . Among his proposals is a “debt fail-safe” mechanism that would force lawmakers into much more severe action if the deficit has not contracted significantly by 2014. The provision would impose across-the-board cuts on most government programs, officials said. . . . there would be $3 in spending cuts and interest savings in the president’s proposals for every $1 that comes from increased tax revenue. . . . "we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again.” He said people like him “don’t need a tax cut,” and added, “Not if we have to pay for it by making seniors pay more for Medicare, or by cutting kids from Head Start, or by taking away college scholarships that I wouldn’t be here without.” . . . Along with allowing the lowered tax rates to expire, Mr. Obama suggested limiting itemized deductions for the top 2 percent of taxpayers. . . . Rather than change Medicare to a voucher program, Mr. Obama proposes broad reforms that he says would save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 12 years and more than $1 trillion in the following decade. In the speech, the president embraced some of the proposals of his own debt commission, including $770 billion worth of cuts in nonsecurity related spending by 2023. Cuts to defense programs would be increased to nearly $400 billion over the next 12 years, officials said. The president stayed away from proposing changes to Social Security, saying that it was not a significant piece of the country’s deficit problem.

From here

A look at the details shows a proposal that allocates deficit reductions by category, is big on cutting "fraud, waste and abuse," and with some notable exceptions, particularly in the area of health care cost reductions, is short on specifics, but big on having a process to get the job done.

The White House offers more details here:

the President is calling for:

•A debt failsafe that will ensure that our nation’s debt is on a declining path as a share of our economy. If by 2014, budget projections do not show that the debt-to-GDP ratio has stabilized and is declining in the second half of the decade, the failsafe will trigger an across the board spending reduction, including on spending through the tax code.
•The trigger will ensure that deficits as a share of the economy average no more than 2.8% of GDP in the second half of the decade.
•Consistent with prior fiscal enforcement mechanisms put in place by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton, the trigger should not apply to Social Security, low-income programs, or benefits for Medicare enrollees.
•The trigger should also include a mechanism to ensure that it does not exacerbate an economic downturn or interfere with our nation’s ability to respond to a national security emergency.

Discretionary non-defense spending would be cut $200 billion over 10 years ($20 billion per year) in addition to $400 billion ($40 billion per year) in the President's budget, and would cut $770 billion over 12 years.

Defense spending would be cut by $400 billion by 2023 ($33.3 billion per year) by "pushing harder to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. . . .(The President will make decisions on specific cuts after working with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on the comprehensive review.) . . . in addition to the savings generated from ramping-down overseas contingency operations."

Health care cost reductions in projected Medicare and Medicaid spending over the next twelve years is to be reduced by $40 billion per year on average ($34 billion per year on average in the first ten years), by a variety of means. A blue ribbon commission would be given the power to implement cost savings proposals when health care cost inflation is above a target unless an alternative is developed by Congress.

•Building on the Affordable Care Act, the President is proposing additional reforms to Medicare and Medicaid designed to strengthen these critical programs by reducing waste, increasing accountability, promoting efficiency, and improving the quality of care, without shifting the cost of care to our seniors or people with disabilities.
• . . . This framework includes . . . an amount sufficient to fully pay to reform the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) physician payment formula while still reducing the deficit.

The President’s framework proposes specific reforms to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid over the long term, including: . . .

The President’s framework would strengthen the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) created by the Affordable Care Act. . . . Under the Affordable Care Act, IPAB analyzes the drivers of excessive and unnecessary Medicare cost growth. When Medicare growth per beneficiary exceeds growth in nominal GDP per capita plus 1 percent, IPAB recommends to Congress policies to reduce the rate of growth to meet that target, while not harming beneficiaries’ access to needed services. Congress must consider IPAB’s recommendations or, if it disagrees, enact policies that achieve equivalent savings. If neither acts, then the Secretary of Health and Human Services would have to develop and implement a proposal to achieve the savings target.
•Set a new target of Medicare growth per beneficiary growing with GDP per capita plus 0.5 percent. This is consistent both with the reductions in projected Medicare spending since the Affordable Care Act was passed and the additional reforms the President is proposing.
•Give IPAB additional tools to improve the quality of care while reducing costs, including allowing it to promote value-based benefit designs that promote proven services like prevention without shifting costs to seniors.
•Give IPAB additional enforcement mechanisms such as an automatic sequester as a backstop for IPAB, Congress, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

. . . Under current law, States face a patchwork of different Federal payment contributions for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The President’s framework would replace the current complicated Federal matching formulas with a single matching rate for all program spending that rewards States for efficiency and automatically increases if a recession forces enrollment and State costs to rise.

. . . The President also supports reform of Medicaid to incentivize more efficient, higher quality, care for high-cost beneficiaries, including those who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare. These nine million beneficiaries comprise 15 percent of Medicaid enrollment but consume nearly 40 percent of total Medicaid spending.

. . . . Together with employers, States, hospitals, physicians and nurses, the Administration has launched a new public-private partnership called Partnership for Patients that will help improve the quality, safety and affordability of health care for all Americans. The two goals of this new Partnership are: preventing patients from getting injured or sicker while they are in the hospital and helping patients heal without complication. Achieving the initiative’s goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients will recover from illness without a preventable complication, reducing costs by up to $50 billion in Medicare and billions more in Medicaid over the next 10 years.

. . .. limit excessive payments for prescription drugs by leveraging Medicare’s purchasing power – similar to what was called for by the bipartisan Fiscal Commission. It would speed up the availability of generic biologics, and prohibit brand-name companies from entering into “pay for delay” agreements with generic companies. And, it would implement Medicaid management of high prescribers and users of prescription drugs.

. . . clamp down on States’ use of provider taxes to lower their own spending while not providing additional health services through Medicaid; recover erroneous payments from Medicare Advantage; establish upper limits on Medicaid payments for durable medical equipment; and take other actions to improve program integrity.

Non-health care mandatory spending would be cut by $360 billion over 12 years ($30 billion per year) through "measures to reform agricultural subsidies, shore up the federal pension insurance system, restore solvency to the federal unemployment insurance trust fund, and enact anti-fraud measures. . . . The Fiscal Commission and other bipartisan efforts have put forward additional proposals that should be considered as part of a comprehensive deficit reduction effort to meet this target. Reforms to mandatory programs should protect and strengthen the safety net for low-income families and other vulnerable Americans."

A key piece of the plan is tax increases:

He also supports efforts to build on the Fiscal Commission’s goal of reducing tax expenditures so that there is enough savings to both lower rates and lower the deficit. Reform should be designed to ask more of those who can afford it while protecting the middle class and promoting economic growth. . . . the President is continuing his effort to reform our outdated corporate tax code to enhance our economic competitiveness and encourage investment in the United States. By eliminating loopholes, reducing distortions and leveling the playing field in our corporate tax code, we can use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years without adding to the deficit.

He does not include Social Security in the package:

The President does not believe that Social Security is a driver of our near-term deficit problems or is currently in crisis. . . . The President in the State of the Union laid out his principles for Social Security reform which he believes should form the basis for bipartisan negotiations that could proceed in parallel to deficit negotiations:

•Strengthen retirement security for the low-income and vulnerable; maintain robust disability and survivors’ benefits.
•No privatization or weakening of the Social Security system; reform must strengthen Social Security and restore long-term solvency.
•No current beneficiary should see the basic benefit reduced; nor will we accept an approach that slashes benefits for future generations.

Analysis

The President is a bit light on taxes to close the deficit gap (a 50-50 split between taxes and spending cuts, rather than a 25-75 split would have been better). The defense cuts are overly modest, because they are arbitrary and don't spell out cost saving changes in the scope of our missions and procurement approaches. The non-discertionary savings cuts seem fairly high given the many rounds of cuts that they have been subjected to already. The "other mandatory spending" cuts seem appropriate.

The cuts to health care are about right in magnitude but assume cuts are possible in spending without really demonstrating that it is possible to sensibly bend the curve on health care cost inflation, leaving that problem to experts who may have little more of an idea about how to do it than the politicians do.

Thumbs up:
* Repeal of Bush Tax Cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year.
* Reducing tax expenditures.
* "reform agricultural subsidies, shore up the federal pension insurance system, restore solvency to the federal unemployment insurance trust fund, and enact anti-fraud measures."
* "clamp down on States’ use of provider taxes to lower their own spending while not providing additional health services through Medicaid; recover erroneous payments from Medicare Advantage"
* "limit excessive payments for prescription drugs by leveraging Medicare’s purchasing power. . . speed up the availability of generic biologics, and prohibit brand-name companies from entering into “pay for delay” agreements with generic companies. And, it would implement Medicaid management of high prescribers and users of prescription drugs."
* Defense spending cuts.

Neither Here Nor There:
* "incentivize more efficient, higher quality, care for high-cost beneficiaries, including those who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare." But how?
* "launched a new public-private partnership called Partnership for Patients that will help improve the quality, safety and affordability of health care for all Americans." How will this happen?
* "IPAB recommends to Congress policies to reduce the rate of growth to meet that target, while not harming beneficiaries’ access to needed services." What can they recommend that would meet that standard?
* Discretionary non-defense spending cuts. Where?

Thumbs down:
* Lowering corporate income tax rates.
* Limiting itemized deductions based on AGI.

FTC Regulations On Blogging Clarified

On December 1, 2009, Fair Trade Commission regulations concerning product endorsements in blogs took effect. A clarification of those regulations was issued in June 2010 by the FTC.

The regulations most notably say:

"I’ve read that bloggers who don’t comply with the Guides can be fined $11,000? Is that true?

No. The press reports that said that were wrong. There is no fine for not complying with an FTC guide."

I find that statement itself to be a bit deceptive, because there is certainly some penalty for someone for engaging in deceptive advertising, failure to comply with the guideline when it applies put someone at great risk of being deemed to have engaged in deceptive advertising, and it is not at all obvious when you are considered to be the "advertiser" who can be fined for engaging in deceptive advertising, and when you are not.

Libya As A Blood Sport

Gaddafi and the rebels are gladiators in a blood contest confined to a Libyan arena whose terms are controlled by the international community. In this contest Gaddafi has already received the thumbs down from a modern Casear.

Four months ago, Gaddafi was the unquestioned absolute ruler of his country, as he had been for forty years, and there was not even an organized political opposition. Now, the writing is on the wall.

With that kind of reality to face, perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the assertions that Gaddafi's regime have been lies so bald faced that they appear delusional.

The inevitabilty of the outcome boils down to one key fact: Libya is not a viable autarky.

Libya runs on oil wealth (with imports make up more than 28% of its domestic consumption) and without export revenues, mostly oil, it would swiftly collapse. It is not food self-sufficient. It does not have a significant domestic arms industry. It can't make its own cars or medicines, and certainly can't do so with domestic materials. It can only use its $60 billion in international financial reserves and 4.62 million troy ounces of gold reserves if the international financial community recognizes the authority of someone to use those resources, which Gaddafi's regime is not at the moment. A brief NATO intervention has already rendered its air force, its navy, its tanks and its heavy artillery useless.

Until now, the international community has respect Gaddafi's legitimacy and Libya's sovereignty, allowing the nation to keep oil wealth that the outside world was perfectly capable of taking by force. With international recognition of his legitimate authority as head of state lost, his days are numbered.

Libya has already lost the support of the international community. The UN authorized international coalitions to impose a no-fly zone, embargo it from arms, and freeze the nations assets (and the assets of Gaddafi and his inner circle). New regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are no longer allies. Convoys of resources brought across the Sahara from Algeria, Niger, Chad or Sudan would be obvious to spy satellites and reconnaisance aircraft, and could be stopped by NATO airplanes if they wished.

Chad is not friend, it had to drive out Libya forces in an international war that just ended in 1987. Italy, whose prime minister Berlusconi had pleaded $5 billion in aid a reparations for Italy's 32 years of colonial rule in 2008 is not going to honor its promise through a Gaddafi lead regime. Sudan has its own discontented masses, international sanctions (including a war crimes indictment for its sitting head of state), the loss of its Southern provinces in an independence referrendum, and ongoing insurgency in Darfur, and more to worry about. Niger's totalitarian dictator has to worry about escaping the North African revolutionary trend, is one of the poorest nations in the world, and has a Tuareg insurgency (one that probably draws considerable succor from Libyan benefactors as Saharan tribal groups are at the heart of the Libyan state apparatus) to try to keep from reinvigorating itself. Gaddafi has always bought himself friends in the past, but the only country still willing to stick its neck out for him now is Uganda, which is ill suited to be a capable ally. Moreover, strong reliance on predominantly Christian Ugandan support would turn Islamist forces against Gaddafi in a way that might impair his own coalition.

Most of Libya's oil comes from oil fields in the East and leaves via ports near rebel controlled Benghazi, and the international community has a special military interest in preventing Gaddafi from gaining control of those resources.

International forces aren't getting their hands dirty by putting troops on the ground in Libya, where rebels and forces loyal to Gaddafi fight each other. But, Libya is so dependent upon resources that they control and is so weak itself, that NATO can control the terms of the battle. If NATO decides that it is unhappy with the way that the battle is playing out in this arena, it has the power to change the rules.

Realistically, there is no easy to visualize face saving way that the international community could restore access to the resources they control to Gaddafi in the absence of a treaty concluded with the rebels. Gaddafi direct role in the Locherbie, Scotland aircraft bombing has been established by defectors. He will likely be linked to other terorist acts against Western interests by defectors. His conduct of the civil war and his delusional statements during it have forever proven him to be a violent madman. If he managed to crush the rebels militarily, despite NATO involvement, he would be viewed in the international community as an illegitimate butcher and denied access to international trade, military resources and the country's foreign assets apart from some sort of oil for food arrangement.

Without a treaty and if he fails to crush the rebel regime based in Benghazi, the rebels will probably be granted exclusive use of the oil resources they control and Libya's sovereign wealth, the arms embargo and no-fly zone and NATO coalition efforts to stop the use of heavy weapons by Gaddafi will continue, foreign oil companies will not send workers back to Gaddafi controlled oil fields and pipelines, rebels will manage to destroy the pipelines necessary to bring that oil to market, and Libya-Tripoli will lose a war of attrition. The mercenaries loyal to Gaddafi critical to keeping him in power will mutiny sooner or later when it becomes clear that they will not be paid. The standard of living will collapse. The oasis farmers and herders who are loyal to Gaddafi won't be able to produce enough food to feed the Eastern part of the country without outside support. Western rebels, even if forced to go underground, will fester as a resistance force striking whenever the Gaddafi regime can't catch them. Gaddafi has lost the option of transitioning to a constitutional regime that democratizes and liberalizes while leaving him a role as head of state in some capacity.

The exact way that the end game will play out isn't clear, so the spectators can still watch with baited breath. Will the rebels rally and seize the rest of the country? Will international forces increase their involvement and end it? Will covert CIA and other international covert assistance give the rebels a decisive edge? Will Egypt or Tunisia or France intervene more directly to topple Gaddafi? Will Gaddafi's mercenaries, loyal military officers and inner circle stage a coup or defect? Will a stable stalemate be reached and produce a treaty or armistice or enduring cease fire that splits Libya into two or three different countries? Will Gaddafi be killed or die or flee leaving his forces leaderless to surrender? Will Gaddafi crush the rebels and control the entire country, but hold onto only an internationally isolated shambles of a nation until he dies in a prolonged seige? Will pretenders to a monarchy mobilize the rebels with the promise of a constitutional monarchy regime?

In an age where targeted killing is U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the global war on terror, can we doubt that CIA operatives in Libya are authorized to assassinate Gaddafi and his top aides?

The civil war in Libya is still young. The ability of internationally supported forces in Ivory Coast to forcibly remove the incumbent president who lost the Presidential election with French military support offers hope that this struggle need not be a long one. Libya is not a huge country. Gaddafi controls no more than 4 million or so of the country's 6.3 million people, and only a fraction of the 76,000 soldiers the nation had before the civil war began. While Libya's territory is vast, almost of the people the combatants are fighting for control over live close to the coast. There isn't any obvious way that the Gaddafi regime will be decisively ended, but there is no obvious way that it can restore its prior tranquility, wealth and international stature either.

The lesson of post-Cold War conflicts in Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbajain, Bahrain, Bosnia, Georgia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Moldova, and now Libya has been that in a post-Cold War world, international powers often can and will intervene decisively to determine the outcome of military conflicts according to their interests and international norms, and that Third World dictators can't count on not facing consequences for their actions. A new generation of leaders watched Star War I and decided that real world Naboos don't deserve to suffer in the face of international indifference. The world order that the League of Nations tried to bring into being after World War I, and that the United Nations tried to bring into being after World War II has finally arrived.

We aren't all of the way there yet. Letting local forces engage in blood sports to determine who will win control while providing decisively outside influence, as the United States did when it intervened on behalf of the Northern Coalition that was losing a war for control of Afghanistan with the Taliban in 2001 has become a model, while the model of the Iraq War, in which foreign forces occupy and rule a country with their own troops to effect regime change, viewed through the lens of previous failure in Vietnam, has been determined in hindsight to be a model not to be repeated if at all possible. Decisive large scale military intervention not limited in scope would probably end the fighting sooner, but the widespread fear is that local forces who aren't capable of securing territory on the ground by themselves won't be capable of holding onto it either. So, the international community has decided that it can manage to set the rules of engagement, but not to fight the battles within the arena itself.

Western powers aren't the only superpowers in these cases. Bahrain has established that small Arab monarchies can't survive an uprising without ceding power to the masses or relying on Saudi Arabian military support. The Saudi military could put up a fight with the military resources that the United States has provided it for year after year in the arrangements designed to earn Arab acceptance of Israel reached in the Camp David Accords, but Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman would be finished without Saudi Arabian support in the face of foreign or domestic military opposition. Yemen, which as a no monarchy has ceded Saudi backing has proved that to be the case. Morocco and Jordan, while still absolute monarchies, have learned that they must heed public opinion if their regimes wants to remain in power. The King of Swaziland must know that a serious offense to either South Africa or other international parties that make his regime possible could snuff out his regime in a matter of days without serious repurcussions if a genuine domestic uprising took hold. Lesotho's regime is similarly situated.

150 Years Ago Today Traitors Started The Civil War

at Fort Sumter, so that they could continue to maintain their system of slavery.

The Case For D.C. Statehood

There are two ways that the residents of the District of Columbia are disadvantaged in our political system relative to other states. First, they lack a representative of Congress or Senators of their own (although they do get electoral voters as if they did in Presidential elections). Second, the Congress in which they lack voting representation messes around with how they run their local affairs on a routine basis.

District of Columbia officials expressed outrage on Saturday about two provisions of the budget deal between Democrats and Republicans, saying they dictate how the capital should spend money. One bans it from using its own locally raised funds to pay for abortions for poor women. The second is a federally financed school voucher program, which city officials said was unnecessary because 40 percent of students already go to public charter schools.

There are upsides, of course, as well. The District of Columbia has far more revenues than it would as a state with mostly less affluent residents and a very large share of the District's tax base in the form of tax exempt governmental and non-profit enterprises.

There are also legitimate concerns that the District of Columbia, as a mere part of a larger metropolitan area, doesn't have a "complete" enough economy to be an economically viable entity, and that an independent District of Columbia, through its local control of the place where the nation makes its laws, could have undue influence on the legislative process.

Some alternatives that have been suggested to statehood for the District of Columbia (or all of it except a small federal district), which could be accomplished with a vote of Congress alone, would be the retrocession of the territory of the District to Maryland with Maryland's consent as well as that of Congress. This would follow the precedent of the retrocession the territory of the District that came from Virginia, called the County of Alexandria, in 1846 which allowed it to retain its slave trade. The slave trade, although not slavery, were banned in the District in 1850.

A retrocession of territory to Maryland would probably give Maryland an additional safe Democratic seat in Congress and would make some Senators accountable to D.C. residents, but would not tip the balance in the Senate any further towards Democrats, would actually slightly reduce the power of D.C. in the Presidential election (assuming that rump D.C. loses its electoral votes via constitutional amendment), would make already Democratic party leaning Maryland more safe politically at the state level, would provide greater local control, and would alleviate any doubts about economic viability. On the other hand, it would also suddenly impose upon the residents of D.C. a great many unfamiliar Maryland laws, in lieu of the laws that residents had crafted themselves in the District.

Prenatal Environmental Exposures Produce Mental Health Harms

Researchers found that within a sample of 215 children monitored from birth, those children with high levels of a pollution exposure marker in their cord blood had more symptoms of attention problems and anxiety/depression at ages 5 and 7 than did children with lower exposure.

The researchers measured a biologic marker or "fingerprint" of exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and other combustion-related pollutants in newborns' cord blood. When inhaled by the mother during pregnancy, these pollutants can be transferred across the placenta and bind to the DNA of the fetus, forming "adducts" in blood and other tissues and providing a biologic measure of pollutant exposure. Mothers completed a detailed assessment of their child's behavior.

In urban air, traffic emissions are a dominant source of the pollutants measured in the study. The authors accounted for other sources such as environmental tobacco smoke and diet in their analyses. None of the mothers in the study were smokers.

From here citing Frederica P. Perera, Shuang Wang, Julia Vishnevetsky, Bingzhi Zhang, Kathleen J. Cole, Deliang Tang, Virginia Rauh, David H. Phillips. PAH/Aromatic DNA Adducts in Cord Blood and Behavior Scores in New York City Children. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2011; DOI: 10.1289/ehp.1002705.

Denver Fires Bad Cops

The City of Denver has taken the encouraging move of firing two more bad cops who lied to investigators about using excessive force, despite videotape to the contrary.

Manager of Safety Charles Garcia has terminated two officers, Kevin Devine and Ricky Nixon, for lying about details in an excessive force case.

The two were accused of excessive force during an incident caught on camera outside the Denver Diner in 2009. The videotape shows an officer with a club pushing several women to the ground. A second officer is seen spraying mace into the face of a woman who is kneeling after being brought to the pavement by the first cop.

The two officers are the third and fourth terminated by Garcia, who took office last month. He fired Officers Devin Sparks and Randy Murr for "deceptive acts" in the case of Michael DeHerrera, who Sparks threw to the ground as he talked on a cell phone in LoDo.

The long overdue trend in still very welcome.

Interim Mayor Bill Vidal has also recommended the removal of a step in the process of disciplining police officers that has become redundant, delays the process and has favored unreasonably mild discipline for bad cops. Most Mayoral candidates in the current Denver Mayor's race favor the change.

Bainbridge: Jesus Hates The Welfare State

Professor Bainbridge is the leading academic apologist for director supremacy vis-a-vis shareholders in public corporations.

Lately, he has also taken another extreme position, that government assistance to the poor is unchristian and bad policy.

No person with decent human feelings can be unmoved by the plight of those who suffer. Yet, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Christ did not tell us to invoke the coercive power of the state to help the victim, he told us to do it ourselves. When one considers the track record of the welfare state, that advice seems well taken. It's been 17 years since Marvin Olasky published The Tragedy of American Compassion, but I see little evidence that would change his basic conclusion that the welfare state makes a mockery of compassion and, for the most part, perpetuates poverty and suffering.

Maybe we need to start requiring future law professors and economists to have more background in history than Bainbridge apparently does, because the pre-welfare state days were undeniably miserable and the claim that private giving and an end to the welfare state could end poverty or suffering is absurd. While the existing arrangements may need improvement, simply letting the poor starve and die unless private individuals feel charitable is not the solution.

Scott Adams On College Curriculums

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

From here, by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame.

FWIW, business majors at Miami University of Oxford, Ohio have to take a semester of calculus, or at least they did when I was a part-time student there, and I had something of Adams' view of that requirement for them.

The theory was that calculus was necessary for them to understand economics, but, in practice, it was simply a hurdle to keep out lots of people who probably could have been very successful in business but were weak in high level quantitative skills, or simply intimidated by the requirement.

The reality is that nobody in the business world ever does calculus (or for that matter trig, which is often considered a pre-requisite for calculus), and that even key calculus concepts in economics, which can be taught in a non-mathematical way, aren't used outside a very narrow group of people who also need advanced economics, in the business world. Plenty of business lawyers have trouble doing compound interest calculations (although they sometimes resort to algebra), and tend to get uncomfortable when non-linear equations come into play.

Also, FWIW, my cats always filed their tax returns when required to do so as a result of their taxable income (which just happened to be never).

Kudos To Calculated Risk

Calculated Risk, in the sidebar, recounts the high praise that it has received as a leading econ blog from the mainstream media. Regular readers of this blog will know that I cite to it frequently.

A bit like How Appealing (also in the sidebar) in the legal area, it is mostly an information aggregating blog with some fairly basic analysis, rather than a place for long form analysis in depth, or economic theory, or anything more than the most narrow forms of political economy (mostly related to the effectiveness of various specific financial crisis responses). Like other good information aggregating blogs, there are usually several new posts every day. It monitors the key economic indicators, with a focus on housing, the bond markets and unemployment (I presume the author is a debt security or housing industry financial analyst of some type), with enough massaging to capture what is meaningful about them, and a sidebar that includes headlines from most of the leading econ blogs in the blogosphere.

The comment to the posts are numerous but worthless. The original posts, however, offer the fact you need to understand, in an evidence based way from credible sources, what is going on in the macroeconomy.

The Sociology of Brain Disorder Treatment

There are two medical specialties that deal with brain disorders and conditions. One is neurology. The other is psychiatry. Where does one draw the line between the two?

Neuroskeptic compares the number of articles on particular conditions in leading academic journals for each specialty (Neurology and the American Journal of Psychiatry), to look empirically at how the line has been drawn within the medical profession.

The division doesn't seem to be very strongly linked to the extent that a condition is biologicallly based. As he notes:

Schizophrenia, which is probably considered "the most neurological" psychiatric disorder, is in fact the least talked about in Neurology.

Both mental retardation and autism are middle ground between the two specialties, with mental retardation leaning towards neurology, and autism leaning towards psychiatry.

Eyeballing the data, one way to think of the way that the conditions have been allocated is that psychiatrist deal with conditions that influence your personality and social interactions, other than pure cognition, while neurologists deal with other conditions and conditions that impact pure cognition.

This explains the mental retardation v. autism divide, for example. While both have a cognitive function element, explaining the neurological interest in both conditions, what distinguishes an autism diagnosis from a mental retardation diagnosis that is not autism is the diagnostic and treatment focus on how autism affects personality, social interaction and empathy, particularly in the case of autism spectrum disorders like Asperger's, where IQ is often in the normal range.

The gray area for ADHD, likewise, can be explained as a product of the lingering ambiguity over whether to think of the condition as a personality disorder that is a cogential part of who someone is, or as a developmental disorder of something large is part of a larger cognition process.

Psychaitry is concerned with "who you are" while neurology is concerned with "what you are" even though there isn't obviously any fundamental difference between the kind of brain functions that lead to schizophrenia and those that lead to congential epilepsy. The looming question behind Neuroskeptic's post is whether the divide says more about perhaps unfounded biases about mental health that pervade even the supposedly enlightened medical profession, than it does about science.

There are other ways to see the distinction, of course. One is that neurologists deal with issues that are believed to be exclusively "hardware" issues, while a core issue for psychiatrists is to parse "hardware" from "software" issues and address each appropriately. Some conditions may not neatly fit that divide today simply because historical ambiguity led a condition to be assigned to one category or the other, and given that all of the physicians involved have a similar allopathic medical background and training, there is no compelling reason to upset the apple cart of institutional and funding and bureaucratic arrangements based on the distinction at this point, even if it isn't terribly logical.

In the same way, no one is urgently pushing to have responsibility for counterfeiting enforcement removed from the duties of the United States Secret Service even though this doesn't logically have much to do with is primary responsibility to provide bodyguard protection to the President and other senior federal officials and candidates, because the skill set for the two tasks is similar.

Still, the divide has a strong impact on treatment modality. Neurologists use drugs and sometimes surgery, while seeing little place for therapy. Psychiatrists, while also prescribing drug treatments, recognize the value of psychological talk therapies as a complementary treatment modality to a much greater extent.

A footnote to the post in the study is also interesting:

"Gathering" this data took me 15 minutes. 20 years ago, it would have taken... well, you'd have had to read and manually categorize 30,000 abstracts. Even at 2 minutes per abstract (bare minimum) that's, er, 1000 man-hours of work.

Compromise Happened

Somehow, despite divided control of both the Colorado General Assembly and Congress, both Colorado and the Congress managed to approve budgets this month. This is what usually happens, even in times of divided government. It doesn't happen without fail. There have been a number of government shutdowns, although the longest one at the federal government level was twenty days, and most haven't been longer than a day or two.

The process does nothing to guarantee that a compromise is reached. No majority can single handedly impose its will. But, time and time again, deals are struck. Much of the time, government is not divided and the deals aren't so difficult to secure. But, even in the time periods when government is divided, there is usually a deal.

Most business deals work on the same basis as budget deals. Everything is decided on a quite short scale, or nothing is decided. Juries likewise resolve disagreements by consensus. Miraculously, when the choice is no deal, no budget, no verdict . . . most of the time deals are secured. There are frequently compromises, but deals are secured.

Courts determine the status quo in the absence of a deal. Most of the time, there is a sensible or at least workable alternative if a deal on legislation falls apart. If there is a deadlock in a redistricting matter, usually courts will intervene and draw a map themselves. But, this rarely happens with the budget. If no deal is reached, the money will not be spent. The budget is "must pass" legislation. Sometimes there are compromises for "essential services" if the rest of the government is shut down. But, those are usually handled outside the courts.

A functioning government that spends money on government services, when push comes to shove, is a better outcome than one that does not function.

Federalism lowers the stakes. One of the key benefits of federalism is that even in a system that sometimes produces government shutdowns from political impasses, the entire government isn't affected at once. Only a few states in any given year will reach an impass on their budgets, and they won't do so all at once. Local governments are not directly shut down by impasses at the state level. Federal government shutdowns still leave the state and local governments that employ the vast majority of government employees, any agencies whose appropriations bills managed to pass before there was an impass, and self-funding agencies like the postal service in business.

I'm a pessimist on this score. I worry about system failure. I worry about a prolonged failure to the political system to meet its basic responsibilities. We haven't had serious steps across that line in the United States. But, in other countries there have been long periods, many months or even years, of deadlock. The labor-management equivalent - a long strike or lockout due to failure to reach a deal - used to be much more common. Usually, those dire worst case scenarios don't happen. But, it takes more than Civics 101 and Constitutional law to explain what goes on when these miraculous agreements happen. A shallow analysis of the rules of our political system can't easily explain why negotiations break down so much less often than one might expect that they would, what is different about the times when they do break down, why the breakdowns are more or less intractable in different situations, and as a result, also can't explain how fundamentally stable our system of government that depends upon partisans who disagree compromisings in unspecified ways is within a coherent theoretical context. We have a good track record of compromise so far, but why?

Financial Risk and Insecurity

A few stray thoughts on risk.

1. One of the core organizing principles of bankruptcy law, securities law, the policy analysis of appropriate debt-equity levels in corporations, the regulation of gambling, Social Security policy, mandatory insurance regimes and more is the notion that generally speaking, people should only be putting at risk money that they can afford to lose.

For example, SEC private offering rules limit allow only "accredited investors" to invest significant sums of money in investments that are not subject to the disclosure regimes that applies to publicly held companies. Generally, qualification for this class of investments is some combination of wealth and sophitication, and criticism of the rules often argue that they are insufficient because they don't adequately protect the unsophisticated wealthy. But, part of the reason for a purely wealth based restriction on investments that pose potentially higher risks than the ordinary investment is the notion that the wealthy can afford to lose the money and go on in life, while widows, orphans and middle class families cannot.

2. One of the common ways to define the line between the rich and the merely upper middle class is that the rich don't have to work to meet their needs, and instead, can rely on their wealth to support themselves.

One can imagine a similar tack in defining other social classes. The poor are those who cannot support themselves from either their property or their labor. The working and middle and upper middle classes, together, can support themselves through their labor but need to work to support themselves, with the differences between those classes being mostly the level of comfort that they can afford themselves and the kind of work thath they do.

But, another way of thinking about social class in the middle range is in terms of security. How secure is one's job? Do you have adequate life insurance if you died? Do you have adequate disability insurance if you were disabled on a temporary or permanent basis? Do you have health insurance to allow you to receive medical treatment if you are sick or injured? Do you have adequate insurance to deal with a serious casualty to a car or a home or a tort lawsuit against you? Do you have adequate insurance to avoid ruin if you were sued for professional malpractice? Do you have sufficient savings or access to credit to defend yourself or a family member adequately in the event of a criminal prosecution? Could you take advantage of an opportunity to send a child to a good quality, expensive private school or college? How long could you afford to be unemployed before your life would fall apart? Could you economically weather a drug addition for you or your family and pay for treatment?

One of the reasons that the financial crisis crept up on us is that while a lot of people were able to maintain their lifestyles on a day to day basis, that the insecurity and fragility of their lifes increased.

There are a lot of people who are on the brink of disaster. A money without income would cause them to default on their credit cards, their lack of health insurance or inadequate health insurance means that they could afford to pay for the medical bills in a major illness or injury, they have no savings to prevent even a small financial misstep in revenue or expenses from leading to the loss of a home to foreclosure, eviction from a rental home, or repossession of a car.

A large share of these individuals get lucky and manage. They do get in enough money to pay the bills by happenstance and good luck and clever financial juggling. They don't get sick when they don't have health insurance. The avoid criminal prosecutions. They find a job swiftly after losing their old one before it all falls apart.

One can have a modest income and not be insecure. A lot of low ranking civil servants (e.g. postal workers, school janitors, parking enforcement agents, pre-school teachers, and library assistants), enlisted soldiers, military veterans, union employees (e.g. many grocery workers), clergy and simply thrifty prudent people who have never had very high incomes fit in this category, for example. This class of the low income but not insecure also includes a lot of bohemian trust funders often toiling away in "glamorous" but low paying positions - as ballet dancers, artists, poets, performance artists, non-profit professionals, eternal graduate students and post-docs, and lower tier politicians.

There are also reasonably high income earners who are fairly insecure. Many athletes and entertainers can be expected to have brief careers that produce high but intermittent incomes. Properous prostitutes and drug dealers are in much the same situation. Some farmers and fishers and foresters and miners make good incomes when commodity prices are high and yields are good, but have the thin safety net of the self-employed and if they have significant leverage may risk losing it all in less good times. Personal injury lawyers can make a lot of money in one case and then have long dry spells. Also prone to bursts of wealth between slow periods are commission salespeople and employees of high end establishments who are compensated mostly with tips. There is a significant shift from having enterprises meet their needs from employees to having them meet their needs from a disorganized safety-net free class of one job at a time independent contractors that has increasingly moved up their income ladder.

A step down from those on the brink of disaster is the growing class of people who aren't entirely destitute but also can no longer afford to "play by the rules." They are in default on one or more debts. They didn't pay their car registration or the taxes they owed. Their mortgage is upside down in a recourse mortgage state and they have no realistic hope of selling their home in anything other than a short sale for the foreseeable future. They are missing tuition payments at private schools or colleges. The numbers over at Calculated Risk every month suggest that the percentage of people in this situation is soaring. Rather than being chronically poor, they are the formerly middle class and working class but are in the midst of the long fall without a safety net that American society makes possible

There has always been a class of people who are prone to intermittent unemployment, but this class of people has grown, and the class of people who are intermittently underemployed has has grown invisibly but dramatically: skilled tradesmen who become day laborers in bad times; teachers who become substitute teachers and retail workers in bad times; farmers who do handyman work when crop revenues are modest and more skilled construction work isn't available in the off season; construction business owners and engineers who do ordinary construction work rather than managing others when the industry is weak; CPAs who do simple book keeping when more sophisticated employment is not available.

Public policy has a few nods to these classes of people - the right to cure a mortgage or rent payment that is in default, the Chapter 13 bankruptcy, COBRA, the right to emergency stabilizing treatment at emergency rooms, credit counseling agencies, offers in compromise and installment payment tax plans, personal recognizance bonds and probation sentences for criminal defendants, and unemployment insurance, for example, but the effort isn't very comprehensive or thoughtful.

Suthers Indicts Doug Bruce For Failing To File Taxes

Colorado's best known anti-tax activist, Doug Bruce, has been indicted for failing to file taxes by the state attorney general's office. Colorado's attorney general, John Suthers, is a Republican.

If convicted of the charges, Bruce could face up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Colorado Springs police officers arrested Bruce Friday at a post office in Colorado Springs. He was booked on a $10,000 bond into the El Paso County Jail, where he remains.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving defendant. Some of the evidence regarding his tax fraud was developed in connection with his failure to comply with subpeonas regarding a ballot initiative (taht were ultimately defeated) which he supported in contributions that were not reported on campaign finance form in 2010. He filed a false tax return alleging that he had zero income in 2005 and filed no return despite earning considerable income that was funnelled into a non-profit organization that he used for his personal benefit in 2006 and 2007. The amount of income not reported was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Doug Bruce is famous for getting TABOR (the taxpayer' bill of rights) into the state constitution, leading to serious problems with the fiscal viability of the State of Colorado during recesions.

Mississippi Republicans Still Racist

Public Policy Polling surveyed 400 usual Mississippi Republican primary voters from March 24th to 27th [2011]. The survey’s margin of error is +/-4.9%. Other factors, such as refusal to be interviewed and weighting, may introduce additional error that is more difficult to quantify.

[They asked and were told:]

Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?

Legal............................................................... 40%

Illegal .............................................................. 46%

Not sure .......................................................... 14%

From here.

Keep in mind that this is not some highly technical question about which ordinary, well socialized, non-racist people would have to contemplate a "not sure" answer.  Also, keep in mind that this sample excludes not only Democrats and people with no political affiliation, but also Republicans who are not "usual primary voters."  Primary voters typically make up something on the order of half of all voters and tend to be more extreme in their political beliefs than general election voters or politically affiliated non-voters.

As Razib notes, this is not implausible.  I agree with Razib that the poll is not as far from expectations as one might think.

Nationally, according to the General Social Survey, about 37% of people favored banning interracial marriage in 1972, a few years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this was not constitutional in Loving v. Virginia. By 2002 the percentage favoring a ban on interracial marriage nationally had dropped to 10%. But, Republicans from the region that includes Mississippi were the strongest supporters of prohibiting interracial marriage.

Presumably, the Republicans who want to ban interracial marriage are also the ones who are birthers, favor secession, think President Obama is a Muslim, are young earth creationists, and generally have beliefs that embarrass everyone else in the country, even serious mainstream Republicans.

Clearly, some subcultures manage to very completely insulate themselves from the overall social and intellectual trends of the nation. The hard questions are how one can break through that bubble, and failing that, how one can reduce their disproportionate political influence.

What Is Mind Control And Why Should We Care?

The blog "Science Not Fiction" has an interesting post on whether mood influencing drugs are a form of mind control.  The original post argues that they are not.  In a length comment, I argue that the distinction is not as clear as the author of the post suggests.

Drugs can influence decision making to the same extent as variety of other factors from money to threats of violence.

The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate ways of influencing someone's decision making is one that is relevant to a wide array of legal issues because voluntariness in decision making is a key legal issue in wide variety of legal contexts from substantive criminal law issues like consent as a defense to rape charges, to the criminal procedure issue of the admissibility of a confession or validity of a plea bargin, to trusts and estates law, to health care law, to contract law, and more.

In these bodies of law, some kinds of decision influencing factors are considered to be legitimate, while others are seen as making consent ineffectual and amounting to duress or undue influence or fraud.

Rather than asking whether drugs constitute mind control, we should instead ask "when is it legitimate to use drugs to influence a person's decision making process?"

CDF Cries New Physics, It Isn't Impossible That They're Right

The CDF experiment at Fermilab has found a 3 sigma anomaly in its proton-antiproton collision data that could be a new boson of about 144 GeV mass (range 120-160 GeV/c^2) (reporting on this paper).  The "hypothetical new particle bizarrely produces a W-boson (decaying leptonically) and two "jets"."

This is just barely likely enough and theoretically well motivated enough to have some credibility, but seems to solve problems that is isn't clear that we had in the first place.  I'm skeptical, as are most physics bloggers looking at the announcement.  Like Motl, I just don't see where the theoretical motivation for a fifth force comes from unless you have something like composite quarks or leptons out there that need to be held together and sometimes decay in high energy environments.

While cynical, it is also appropriate to note that these are the final data being released from an experiement that is about to lose federal funding and be shut down, so the incentive to keep the experiment going based on temptations to make major new discoveries, by spinning the news with less than conservative intepretations of not very high sigma anomalies with little theoretic justification for being real, is greater than usual.  In the biz these are called "fundinos."  The final announcement would be due miraculously just as funding for the experiement is about to end in the fall of 2011.  Of course, if the boson is real, LHC is going to see it anyway sooner rather than later, so the extra funding would mostly influence which country's experiment gets bragging rights for discovering it, rather than delaying the progress of science for more than two or three years.

The conventional wisdom in the field is that despite the theoretical meaning, a three sigma event really means about a 50-50 chance of being real: "a "3-sigma" signal is an evidence for a new effect, but might be produced by background fluctuations a few times in a thousand. A "5-sigma" effect is instead enough to grant the right of claiming the "observation" of the new effect."

One interpretation calls it a light Z' boson that is leptophobic (posted March 31, revised April 1):

New gauge bosons with Standard Model-like couplings to leptons are constrained by collider searches to be heavier than approximately ~1 TeV. A Z' boson with suppressed couplings to leptons, however, could be much lighter and possess substantial couplings to Standard Model quarks. In this article, we consider a new leptophobic Z' gauge boson as a simple and well motivated extension of the Standard Model, and discuss several of its possible signatures at the Tevatron. We find that three of the recent anomalies reported from the Tevatron - in particular the top-quark forward-backward asymmetry and excesses in the 3b and W + 2 jets final states - could be explained by a new Z' with a mass of approximately 150 GeV, relatively large couplings to quarks, and suppressed couplings to electrons and muons. Moreover, we find that such a particle could also mediate the interactions of dark matter, leading to potentially interesting implications for direct detection experiments.

A new boson (an integer spin fundamental particle) would seem to imply a new fundamental force, as all other bosons have fundamental forces associated with them if they have spin one, and this boson isn't acting as we would expect a hypothetical spin zero scalar field Higgs boson to behave, or as we would expect a hypothetical spin two graviton to behave.  This force would presumably be a short range force (since the carriier boson is massive), would quite likely not be CP symmetry conserving (for the reasons I've suggested about massive v. non-massive bosons in relation to CP symmetry), and would, by hypothesis, exist primarily between quarks rather than between leptons (i.e. electrons, neurinos and higher flavor cousins of them).

Lubos Motl (whose physics is much  more credible than his poiltical and climate change postings) counts noses: Enthusiasts include Lisa Randall and Neal Weiner; more skeptical are Nima Arkani-Hamed and Tommaso Dorigo ("I do not particularly like to play the die-hard sceptic -this is after all a paper I myself reviewed and signed!- but I believe this is nothing but the umpteenth would-be new physics signal, destined to be buried by the analysis of further data, by the crafting of more precise simulations, or by the better understanding of Standard Model sources. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting to see this paper coming out now. Both DZERO, and the LHC experiments ATLAS and CMS, have now a lead to investigate their own data! If they were to see a 3-sigma effect in the same mass range and in the same kind of events, it would be already time to put the champagne in the fridge....").  Woit doubts it too.

Motl notes:

While a "splicing dicing artifact" is a likely option, I am not going to claim that it is impossible for a new Z' boson to be this light and have the required properties. If such a new particle exists, however, it will be another stunning example of "Who ordered that?". . . .

The real question is: Why? There's no excessively good reason for the Z' boson to exist and no reason for it to not exist. We just usually prefer to believe in the non-existence unless we have a reason to do otherwise - unless we see a role that such a new particle could play. We don't know of such a role.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the particle can't exist. It surely means that such a new fifth force would remain a fifth wheel for some time. Imagine - people would say that there are five basic forces. One of them holds galaxies together and keeps us on the Earth; the other is responsible for all of chemistry, biology, and material science, not to speak about electromagnetic communication; the third force keeps atomic nuclei together; the fourth force causes some nuclei to beta-decay; and the fifth force adds 100 bizarre events at the Tevatron. ;-)

I am exaggerating and oversimplifying a bit. As Paul Langacker argues, Z' bosons could be good for an extended Higgs sector, which may be desired for various reasons; they could solve the mu problem in supersymmetric model building; mediate SUSY breaking; and add interesting yet dangerous predictions of flavor changing processes and new interactions with dark matter. The string-derived (beyond ordinary GUT) Z' bosons have also been claimed to be essential for light neutrino masses and proton stability.

See generally here.

In other words, they could make lots of details of exotic phenomena predicted by theories that have no empirical support yet work better.  We already have a force that interacts with just quarks and the associated bosons (the strong force mediated by gluons).  We already have a force that interacts with just charged particles (the electro-magnetic force mediated by photons) - i.e. not neutrinos.  We already have a force that interacts with just left parity fermions (the weak force mediated by the W and the Z).  As the name implies, the assumption is that this force would be weak force-ish.

Résonaances is also on the beat and skeptical:

It is well known that sigmas come in varieties: there or more significant 3 sigmas, less significant 3 sigmas, and astrophysical 3 sigmas. To my taste the latest CDF claim belongs to the 2nd category. We are dealing with a small hump on top of a huge background, and a small systematic error in its modeling could easily show up as a false peak. Furthermore, D0 does not see anything, they actually have a small deficit near 150 GeV. Last not least, recent experience with papers submitted simultaneously to ArXiv and BBC or New York Times is not encouraging ;-) . . .

What could it be? It is not a Higgs; anything Higgsish with 150 GeV mass would prefer decaying to a pair of W bosons rather than to 2 light jets. The simplest explanation, proposed in this April Fools' paper [linked above] involves a 150 GeV Z' boson.