A modest proposal

Frank Fleming wrestles with the perennial problem of what to do if we ever get a President who isn't perfect.  This problem came up first with George Washington, but the Founding Fathers wisely foresaw that they shouldn't make him emperor even though he'd have been great, because it seemed likely he wouldn't live forever:

[T]ake this power to kill Americans with drones.  No one worries that Obama will abuse such a power — I mean, we’re talking about a man who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just for existing.  It’s not like he’s ever going to use that power to blow us up (though, according to his lawyers, he legally could . . . and if he did, we’d just have to assume he had really, really good reasons).  But just imagine if that power wound up in the hands of a president like George W. Bush.  He’d probably blow up people with the drone all day, thinking he was playing a video game (“I’m gettin’ me a high score!”).  Or worse yet, think of handing Dick Cheney that power.  He’d most likely declare a unilateral war on kittens and puppies, blowing them up from the sky and then collecting the tears of children for some evil Halliburton project. 

. . . 

The obvious solution is to have Obama be president forever, but that’s not practical.  Eventually Obama will get bored and want to be president of a country he likes better than this one. 

. . . 

So the only option left is to consider curtailing a bit of the power we’re allowing Obama, because someday we might have a president who is completely detached from average Americans, doesn’t care about our problems, and ruins everything he touches — someone completely unlike Obama.  I mean, just imagine all that power Obama has in the hands of someone who completely sucks at being president.  The economy would be ruined, we’d have disastrous situations abroad, and our liberties would be threatened.  It would be a lot like now, but instead of it being Bush’s fault, it would be the fault of the current president.  So to keep that from happening, we’ll have to do the hard thing and put more limitations on Obama’s power. I’m sure he’ll understand and not drone-strike us.

An Exciting Step Forward

It's not every day that one sees a genuinely good idea from the political class. If only this solution could be implemented as widely as it deserves to be!

Postal chic

The U.S. Postal Service financial woes are not news.  Most of us probably have been following them in more or less detail as they struggled with the sort of turgid institutional inertia that makes reform difficult even as an obvious disaster looms.  It was not to be expected that they would think outside the box.

And yet they have:

The Postal Service announced Tuesday that it has partnered with a Cleveland-based apparel company to launch a USPS clothing line, set to hit stores in early 2014. . . .   “This agreement will put the Postal Service on the cutting edge of functional fashion,” said Postal Service Corporate Licensing Manager Steven Mills in [a press] release.

Did someone hire a McKinsey consultant? Is there an edgy marketing revolution brewing in the august halls of this ancient American institution?  Are upper-level management meetings now dominated by discussion of hot trends and cross-marketing?  Will we soon see high-concept TV fashion ads featuring mailmen braving the snow, wind, and sleet?  My mind, I say, wanders in these regions, lost.

Playing catchup

I can't remember how I got there, but I've been enjoying a new site today called "Popehat," especially a piece about Alvin Toffler's successive waves of change in human society.  In the original state of human culture, hunter-gatherers bumped up against a limiting condition of enough food.  Utopia was a place where there was plenty to eat.  Next came agriculture, which increased productivity and the food supply.  "Agriculture allowed us to harvest more calories per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was arable land.  This was followed by industrialization, which increased productivity again. "Industry allowed us to harvest more material wealth per hour of labor."  The limiting condition was capital; in Utopia there would enough machinery for everyone.  Finally, in the post-industrial society, "information technology allows us to harvest more informed decisions per hour of labor."   The limiting condition on prosperity has become scarce mental skills.

The author identifies the problem with many political schemes as "retrograde Utopian solutions."  Land redistribution, or socialist redistribution of the means of factory production, he sees as beside the point.  The current approach to a shortage of genius is to tax the highly creative and successful at extremely high rates.  The commenters try to explore a solution that increases cognitive skills via education, to which the author wryly responds, "What mechanism do you think turns cash into geniuses?"   There follows a spirited discussion of education and intelligence (with a long detour into the usual arguments for and against the minimum wage).

Fake explanations

Or, how not to fool ourselves into thinking we have an explanation before we do.  Sometimes "I don't know" is the only reasonable answer.  If your explanation ( e.g., "phlogiston") would have served equally well to explain any other outcome, it's not an explanation.  It hasn't added to your knowledge.

The site describes fallacies in assessing probabilities and risks, too.  Apparently there is a strong human tendency to overestimate a risk stated in whole numbers rather than percentages, so that a disease sounds more dangerous if it kills 1,000 out of each 100,000 affected than if it kills 2%:  those thousand bodies weigh on the hindbrain.  We also have only a limited inborn talent for distinguishing between the risk and reward of a chancy proposition.  The more convinced we are of the benefits of a course of action, the lower our assessment of its risk, even when the two have nothing at all to do with each other.  These are new skills in the evolutionary sense, for which we haven't yet developed much in the way of gut-level shortcuts.

Handwork

A friend sent me these pictures of the recent works of her hand.

Handcraft is central to my life.  This weekend is our annual Oysterfest.  I have three friends coming to stay with me who are something out of the ordinary in the way of handcraft:  everything from spinning to weaving to chair caning to handmade boats.  They're all fine musicians as well.  It's a weekend I look forward to all year.

Respect My Authoritah

That's actually the title of David Foster's funny piece about Nancy Pelosi's demand to monetize her dignity (who knew she was so into the commercial mindset?  Next she'll be defending profit).  But it seemed also to describe this handwringer from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "How Rude!  Reader Comments May Undermine Scientists’ Authority":

Scientists have a hard enough time getting people to understand what they’re talking about. 

Their thoughts can be complicated.  Their sentences can be laden with jargon.  And their conclusions can offend political or religious sensibilities. 

And now, to make things worse, readers have an immediate forum to talk back.  And when some readers post uncivil comments at the bottom of online articles, that alone can raise doubts about the underlying science, a new study has found.  Or at least reinforce those doubts.

What follows is a summary report of a study showing that readers were less swayed by an argument about the risks of nanotechnology when it was followed by rude comments than when it was followed by polite ones.  The article's author described the experiment as having taken care to ensure that the substance of the comments was the same, and all that was varied was their tone.  Hard to say, since the paper was presented at a conference and hasn't been published yet.  It's due to be published soon in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ("CMC," for those in the know).  I found something similar, perhaps, in the current issue, "The Impact of Language Variety and Expertise on Perceptions of Online Political Discussions," which contained this delightful early subsection heading:  "Status Cues and Heuristic Processing in CMC."  So right away we get some clues about the balderdash quotient (BD).  (I'm sorry; I'm afraid that was rude.  But I'm working on a peer-reviewed paper establishing universal units for the Cognitively Heuristic BD (CHBD), and the grant money is just pouring in.)

Is this a new thing, all the concern over whether the public is getting heuristically out of hand and needs better cognitive processing so we technocrats can maintain our authoritah?  Or have I just not been paying enough attention to the hilarious stuff that gets published?  (A classic early example is "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.")

Rudeness is a problem, certainly.  Among its other drawbacks, it heightens emotions, not usually a helpful means of facilitating the exchange of complex ideas.  It also often wrenches the focus of discussion from the relevant to the irrelevant, especially to the personal characteristics and politics of the authors.

But if the motive for censoring rude remarks is to prevent a loss of the readers' confidence in the authority of the beleaguered scientists, then count me unconvinced.  That's just asking for moderators to censor remarks according to their ostensible ability to undercut the argument in the main post.  Even if the moderator is concerned about the unfair tactic of "rudeness," who among us wouldn't be corrupted by that standard?  It will lead to a censorship standard that's weighted by the content of the argument instead of by its style.  As commenter JD Eveland wrote:

Consider, for example, the following range of possible comments: 

(a) "Fantastic!  Amazing!  I'm putting your name into Nobel consideration right away!" 

(b) "Interesting paper.  However, I do have some concerns with how the statistical analysis was conducted." 

(c) "The results are rendered largely uninterpretable due to the investigators' choice of a repeated measures analysis of variance rather than a regression model, as is currently taught in all reasonably respectable doctoral programs." 

(d) "Obviously, the results in this article were scraped off the bottom of a birdcage after the data had been statistically processed by the bird." 

(e) "You're a poopypants, and your data analyst is a stupid f**k!  You obviously learned all you know about statistics off the back of a bag of birdseed!  I'm coming after you, and your little dog too!" 

We'd all probably agree that result (e) would be considered rude, and most of us would also apply that to (d).  On the other hand, (c) could easily be considered rude by some scientists, although it might not have been intended as such by the respondent, since that's just the way he talks to everyone including his students and his wife.  (b) would probably not be considered rude by anyone offering it, although some scientists are sensitive enough to see it as such; indeed, there are even those insecure enough as to see anything short of (a) to be rude.

What I'm describing here is rampant PC culture.  The last thing scientists need is a less hostile working environment for their tender arguments. Sound ideas can stand some rough and tumble.

Rules of thumb

We were discussing below whether it means anything to talk about the scourge of U.C.H.  I am referring, of course, to the unintentionally humorous criticism by Don Kahan of the "unreliable cognitive heuristics" of the unwashed masses.  We just cannot get them to take our word for stuff any more.  They keep relying on their guts to decide whether we're crying wolf and trying to dazzle them with B.S.  Where's the trust?

What's funny is the idea that your average smart Yalie uses something better than rules of thumb to weigh essentially unquantifiable risks for political purposes.  If you're of a rigorous turn of mind, you can get a pretty good handle on risks in repetitive situations that are susceptible to statistical analysis.  You can't get anything like a rigorous handle on risks from models of the behavior of chaotic systems that have never met the gold standard of predictions confirmed by observations (and no fair back-fitting with previously unidentified critical factors).  The best anyone could ever get out of an emerging science of prediction is a gut feel, an instinct for where to focus future research.

Richard Feynman analyzed the failure of the Challenger shuttle.  He found that people were sharpening their pencils to an absurd degree and fooling themselves into thinking they had pinpointed risk out to a number of decimal points.  In fact, they were piling probability assumption on probability assumption, when no single assumption had a solid empirical basis:

It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life.  The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000.  The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.  What are the causes and consequences of this lack of agreement?  Since 1 part in 100,000 would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one, we could properly ask "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in the machinery?" . . .  There is nothing much so wrong with this as believing the answer!  Uncertainties appear everywhere. . . . When using a mathematical model careful attention must be given to uncertainties in the model. . . . 

There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before.  Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case.  A mathematical model was made to calculate erosion.  This was a model based not on physical understanding but on empirical curve fitting."

He concluded with one of my favorite statements, a truly reliable rule of thumb:  "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

University of Colorado Guide for Women Under Attack

The debate about whether students should carry arms on campus is going on here in Georgia as well at it is in Colorado. It's worth remembering that this is the underlying debate to the recent comments by Rep. Salazar. The question at issue is whether students -- and not just female students -- shall be permitted to carry guns on campus, or whether they shall not be.

This is the same student body who reliably gets drunk and wrecks the campus after every winning football game, so I take the issue to be a more serious question than I normally accept gun control arguments to be. This is a group of people who are technically adults, but who are permitted to behave a little less like adults than their cohorts who do not have 'college life' as an excuse. I think we should extend the full rights due to adults to those who prove they will resist that temptation and behave like adults, but the institutions have too long permitted tomfoolery for us to simply assume that everyone will be grown up from now on. Some mechanism needs to be in place to ensure that students who want to bear arms on campus are living up to their responsibilities as adults.

So I'm willing to accept that these students ought to prove themselves to be adults before given the full rights of adults. Nevertheless, the college's actual advice to female students is highly insulting.

1. Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
2. Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
3. Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
4. Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
5. If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
6. Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
7. Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
8. Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
9. Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
10. Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.

Of these all, number seven is the most insulting. Imagine telling a young man of college age, "If someone should attack you, pee on yourself." This is great advice for a puppy who wants to demonstrate submission to an older dog. To a human being, it amounts to "Be prepared to degrade yourself if anyone should attack you."

Most of the rest of the advice amounts to thinking of yourself as a victim, or a prey animal.

Not everyone has it in them to kill their attacker, and that far at least point one is correct. You should look in your heart and decide if you would rather kill, or rather suffer at the mercy of a violent and wicked man. If you would in truth rather suffer, because your moral aversion to violence is so strong, this is a respectable position occupied by Quakers and other religious orders. In this case you are not a victim. You are choosing to accept the suffering that the world sends you for moral reasons of your own. That is honorable, in its way: it is courageous, in its way.

For others, there are other choices. One is to choose companions you trust, on whom you know you can rely. This is the idea, often discussed here at the Hall, of a frith bond: a bond of mutual loyalty, based on an Old English word related to our words "friend" and "free." It is a society of friendship, and it makes you freer than you would be alone. You can travel together in far greater safety, and if attacked, you can help defend each other.

You can learn to fight, and keep yourself ready to do so.

If you are right for it, you can carry arms. A firearm is not the only choice, although it makes particular sense for young women who may be physically weaker than the young men who are most likely to be violent criminals. Learn to use it safely and accurately, and keep it always handy. ("Go not one step out on the road without your weapons of war, for you never know when you may need them." Havamal.)

Under no circumstances degrade yourself. To do so is to invite, rather than to repel, the scornful treatment of the world. To be the sort of person who is prepared to degrade herself to avoid even a serious harm is to be the kind of person the world will not respect. Remember always: Death before dishonor.

The National Interest in Fertility

Hot Air looks at the "fertility panic," which is general in places falling now far below replacement levels.

We talked about this issue recently, thanks to Tex, so I just want to point out a small Obamacare consequence. Health and Human Services has made a move toward mandating free birth control as a part insurance plans. This is supposed to be Constitutional (pending 1st Amendment challenges) on the grounds that it is in the national interest to ensure that women have "access" to this technology, which can only mean that it must be provided to them for free.

So what if a future HHS should decide that it is in the national interest that we should stop using contraception as much as we do? What if they instead altered the picture with a regulation that said that "no one shall" offer any birth control coverage as part of any insurance plan?

The point is that a gate that swings one way can also swing the other. Once anything becomes a matter of public policy, it's no longer a matter that can lay a claim to the privacy of decisions made in the intimate space. But it is just that claim -- that matters of contraception are private, intimate decisions -- that underlies Griswold v. Connecticut.

Obamacare, the Adventure Continues

Finding out what's in the law:  We've been reading lately that companies are avoiding hiring a 50th employee, or cutting hours down to 29 per week, in order to escape Obamacare.  It turns out it's even easier to escape the law, no matter what your size or average hours worked per week:  just self-insure.

It seems Her Dignifiedness, Nancy Pelosi, let the PPACA slip through Congress with a carve-out for self-insured employers.  Some of you may work for self-insured employers without realizing it, because although they serve as their own risk-capital pool for medical claims, they generally use an insurance company to administer the plan, which works much like other group plans at the employee interface.  My old firm did that.  They figured out what kind of reserves they could afford to set aside for the collective medical bills in a reasonably foreseeable year, and used the usual stop-loss insurance company to limit the firm's overall risk in case every single employee came down with cancer in the same year.  As far as I was concerned, it was just Blue Cross until someone told me how it really worked.  In essence, I was relying on the firm's solvency rather than Blue Cross's.

In the past, self-insurance was popular mostly with very large employers, but stop-loss insurers have been snapping up business from smaller and smaller employers for years now.  The Obama administration is riled up, because self-insured employers can price their insurance on the basis of a small, homogeneous, often rather young labor pool.  What's worse, under Obamacare, they don't even have to worry about what will happen to their employees with pre-existing conditions if they have to give the system up, because all those employees will be guaranteed access from now on if and when they leave the self-insured pool.  Another sore point for the administration is that stop-loss insurers aren't subject to the ban on refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.  They can cherry-pick all they like before agreeing to take on a new employer as a client.

So self-insured employers may become the last corner of the health insurance market that responds to price signals.  What it amounts to is traditional major-medical coverage for a group, at a time when the health czars are trying to get rid of major medical and replace it with first-dollar coverage, a/k/a prepaid healthcare.  The employer can set employee-level deductibles wherever it likes, depending on how much compensation it chooses to pay in the form of insurance.  It also sets stop-loss deductibles wherever it likes, depending on the premium it will have to pay to the re-insurer and the amount of risk it can stomach for a bad health year across its entire labor pool.  This is not what our benevolent overloads had in mind for us at all, but unfortunately they don't have the House any more.

Chalk this up as one more piece of Obamacare that's about to bite them in the behind.  Employers who are being threatened with being run out of business by the cost of healthcare are going to have an alternative.  It may not be as easy as these guys thought it would be to crash the system and replace it with single-payer.

Police state (part 44)

As has become depressingly common, another report of ignorant law enforcement "professionals" harrassing innocent citizens.

So now it's ok to pull over cars based on bumper stickers?

I'm getting dizzy

Dan Kahan of the Cultural Cognitive Project at Yale is getting very meta about the proper evidence-based approach to persuading the public that AGW-ist scientists' conclusions are evidence-based:

Scientists and science communicators have appropriately turned to the science of science communication for guidance in overcoming public conflict over climate change.  The value of the knowledge that this science can impart, however, depends on it being used scientifically.  It is a mistake to believe that either social scientists or science communicators can intuit effective communication strategies by simply consulting compendiums of psychological mechanisms.   Social scientists have used empirical methods to identify which of the myriad mechanisms that could plausibly be responsible for public conflict over climate change actually are.  Science communicators should now use valid empirical methods to identify which plausible real-world strategies for counteracting those mechanisms actually work.  Collaboration between social scientists and communicators on evidence-based field experiments is the best means of using and expanding our knowledge of how to communicate climate science.

Whew.  I can't help thinking if they put that much effort into ensuring that the climate science that is reaching the public is evidence-based, there wouldn't be so much public controversy.  In a related paper, although he makes hard work of it, Kahan admits that empirical data do not support the conclusion that conservatives are less cognitively sophisticated than liberals.  Instead, he makes the interesting finding that high cognitive scores are associated with the fervency of ideological beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum:

Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension.  The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled.  Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk.  A study conducted by the Cultural Cognition Project and published in the Journal Nature Climate Change found no support for this position.  Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change.  Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.

Kahan tries hard to figure out how this could possibly mean that AGW makes the most sense, but can't get there.  He fears that ideologues on both sides of the fence are more concerned with fitting in with their tribes than with arriving at truth; he worries about "the tragedy of the risk-taking commons" and the proper "communication" strategies that must be employed by people who know the real score.  He reluctantly concludes that no amount of "clarification" of the AGW position will bring the public around "so long as the climate-change debate continues to feature cultural meanings that divide citizens of opposing worldviews."  He recommends, therefore, that

communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values.  Effective strategies include use of culturally diverse communicators, whose affinity with different communities enhances their credibility, and information-framing techniques that invest policy solutions with resonances congenial to diverse groups.

And from there he's back to the need for a "new science of science communication."

Myself, I hypothesize that AGW science is too weak to win committed converts except among people with a strong social-justice worldview, who are drawn to the most common AGW amelioration schemes, and whose enthusiasm grows the more familiar they are with the schemes.  The suspicion that AGW is junk science in service of a social-justice political agenda, in turn, tends to turn conservatives more rabidly against the AGW hypothesis the more they investigate it.  It's not necessarily a difference in an approach to pure science at all.  The portion of the public paying the most attention, and best equipped to evaluate the evidence, knows that the science is far from definitive, especially when you consider not only the fact that it is based on predictions generated by emerging models, but also the need to assign definitive blame to human activity and to evaluate a cost-benefit analysis of proposed remediation that itself must be based on highly speculative information.  Given that murky picture, why should it be surprising that the most educated part of the public polarizes primarily around its reaction to the proposed solutions?

Sawing off the limb you're sitting on

A new acquaintance uses "The Ishmael Effect" to describe the phenomenon of self-defeating propositions, such as

‘It is (absolutely) true that truth is relative’; ‘we ought to think that there is no such thing as thought’; and ‘the one immorality is to believe in morality" . . . .

It came to mind when I read James Taranto's report today of the dilemma faced by NARAL:

"One of the nation's most prominent abortion rights groups is working to remake its image in response to concern that it may be overtaken by a growing cadre of young anti-abortion activists," Roll Call reports.  "Its message: This is not your mother's NARAL."

That's undoubtedly true.  If you're under 40, NARAL's efforts make it much likelier that your mother didn't even have children.  There's something both poignant and funny about a group devoted to abortion puzzling over its difficulty in finding young people to support it.

The new hockey stick

H/t Zombie.

Yum

This Emeril recipe is one of the best things I've tasted in a while.  It's called "Oysters, Scallops, and Crawfish Bordelaise in Puff Pastry," but an internet search suggests that it's not really a bordelaise sauce, which classically refers to a sauce based on Bordeaux wine and a meat demi-glace.  Also, it seems to me you could use any seafood, as long as you have some dry white wine and some seafood stock.  Whatever, this Emeril take on the traditional sauce is amazing, either in store-bought frozen puff pastry or (if those aren't handy), just on pasta.  We make fish stock from our fish frames or shrimp heads and/or shells, then freeze it for later use.

First you soften garlic and shallots in a pan, then briefly add the seafood, removing and reserving it in a bowl as soon as it's cooked.  Add wine and a little cognac and cook it down to half its volume.  Add fish stock, salt, and pepper and reduce again to half its volume. Stir in some chopped tomato, then butter, then the final herbs, including tarragon. Finally, add the cooked seafood back in.  The concentrated flavors from those two reductions make it unbelievably good.

Evening up the playing field

Here's one way to ensure that the Second Amendment's purpose of equalizing the power between the government and citizens is not undermined:  Olympic Arms is refusing to do any further business with New York government officials.  If you're a private citizen of New York who tried to order a gun from Olympic Arms, they'll refund your purchase price, ship the guns immediately to an out-of-state location for your pickup, or hold them for six months while you make arrangements to move to a saner state.

Fauxcahontas Makes A Good Point

She may lack personal ethics, but that doesn't mean she can't make it uncomfortable for those who lack professional ethics!

Safety first

From Jim Geraghty:  "Finally. A 14-day waiting period for all assault cabinet nominees."

The sky is falling

A meteor blew up yesterday about 25 miles in the air above a small Russian city about 1,000 miles east of Moscow.  The AP article said it was traveling at supersonic speeds.  I'll say!  About 50 times the speed of sound, from the estimates.  It may have been a few meters wide and weighed in the neighborhood of 11 tons.

I always forget how the terms work:  It's a meteoroid if it's a fairly small piece of junk in orbit, a meteor when it's in Earth's atmosphere burning up, and a meteorite if part of it makes it to the surface.  This one may have produced a few fragments on the surface, but mostly the impact took the form of a shock wave that collapsed part of a factory roof.  Five hundred people were injured, 34 of them seriously enough to go to the hospital.  That's a lot for a meteor.

The fear from within

People with damage to the amygdala are strangely unable to feel fear of external threats.  It turns out that they can feel fear generated in another part of brain, in response to internal threats like air hunger.  What's more, they are more prone to panic attacks in that context than people who routinely experience amygdala-mediated fear of external threats.  I wonder if they have less practice mastering fear?

Maybe Matt Ridley was right?

In "The Rational Optimist," Matt Ridley argued that evolutionary pressure operates not only on genes but on cultural innovations; that "ideas have sex."  This article in Nature compares the transmissibility of genes and folktales:

If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion 

These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.”

PC progress

From Moonbattery:


 

Happy Birthday, Georgia

My beloved homeland came into practical reality 240 years ago today, when Sir James Edward Oglethorpe landed on a high bluff and founded the Province of Georgia and its capital city of Savannah. The charter gave him all the land to the Pacific Ocean, but in practical terms at first it was just Yamacraw Bluff and what he could hold with his comrades. Georgia has since existed as a British province, a free and independent state, a state under the Articles of Confederation, a member of the United States of America, a member of the Confederate States of America, and was again brought back under the union. Nations come and go, but Georgia remains.

Oglethorpe founded the colony in part to defend British possessions from the Spanish in Florida, and so once he had established his city and militia, he sought out Scottish Highlanders to hold his southern frontier. These settled at the Altamaha river, under James MacIntosh Mohr (that is, "James MacIntosh the Great"). They fought the Spanish, and they fought the Indians, and they usually won -- especially at the Battle of Bloody Marsh. During one of Oglethorpe's expeditions home to recruit more Rangers, the '45 rising came up, and he had to turn to the business of fighting the Highlanders instead of recruiting them.

He had the same fate with the Americans, whom he had helped to found. After the Revolution, he was at home in Britain and went to visit John Adams, our first ambassador to the British. It's sad to think that our founder, a man of talent, insight and character, did not finally make his home here. We remember him with honor.

Reading list

Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller interviewed Elliott Abrams, former deputy National Security adviser to President George. W. Bush, and asked him what three books most shaped his understanding of the Middle East:

I would note four. Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong,” Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy,” and a somewhat older one: the Hebrew Bible.

The whole interview is interesting.  He asserts, for instance, that Israel's unilateral strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007 avoided war and spurred negotiations.  Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it.  Because the strike made Syria fear the U.S. and Israel, it inspired Assad to come to the bargaining table.  Yes, sometimes that happens for reasons other than that we made someone love us.

Abrams believes it's possible a strike on Iran would have the same result.  I wonder, though, if we aren't dealing with an entirely different class of crazy there.  Though when I think about it -- Syria?  Iran?  Maybe I can't make a principled distinction between them.

Be fruitful and multiply

I've always wondered why God found it necessary to tell us this.  Or, if you're not a believer, why did a culture find it necessary to exhort its own members to reproduce?  Don't we have a biological imperative?  How did we get here otherwise; why did our ancestors survive?  It's strange to observe that one of the most basic human drives is so vulnerable to collapse, especially once birth control comes into the picture.

David Goldman argues that cultural death causes and is revealed by a collapse in reproduction.  His thesis, focusing on Islamic societies, is that some religions cannot survive the transition from traditional society to modernity.  The hallmark of their failure is that their fertility rate collapses as soon as their women acquire an education. In 1979, before the Iranian revolution, the fertility rate was 7 children per female.  That rate abruptly dropped to 1.6 children per female, just above the disastrous European rate, and an unprecedented "snapping shut of the national womb."  This giant vote of no confidence in the future of the culture induces a frightening social dynamic:

[A] society that suddenly stops having children suffers from cultural despair.  The same cultural despair that curtains off the future for families afflicts policymakers.  Cultural pessimism is a great motivation for strategic adventures.  A nation that fears that it may have no future may be willing to risk everything on the roll of a dice.  Iran has one last big generation of military age men, the ones who were born in the early 1980s before the great weapons.  Nothing but the use of force would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with dreadful consequences.  With Iran on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, we have hit crunch-time.  Will the foreign policy establishment connect the dots in time?

This is a sore subject for me, as you can imagine.  I wonder if we've managed the transition well in our own country to a culture in which no one need be fertile unless he or she chooses.  How are the incentives for childbearing different now?  When the choice whether to reproduce or not becomes unconstrained, what makes fathers willing to support their children and their children's mothers?  What makes mothers willing to raise the children?   You'd think it would be obvious, but the demographics tell us it's anything but.  When people acquire choices for the first time, there can be a scary period in which we find out what new motives will operate, and what we have to offer each other to make it all keep working.

Gloria Steinem famously remarked that she had no children because she didn't mate in captivity.  If educating women causes a large fraction of them to adopt this view, what's wrong with the world they've become educated about?  Why should it be necessary to withhold education in order to get them to buy into continuing the race?  We've lost most of our traditional culture and religion.  What is there to replace them with, as a motive for looking to the future in a spirit of sacrifice?

The thinking man's Snopes

I'm enjoying browsing a site called "Skeptics/Stack Exchange," not only because its members try to get a collective handle on interesting disputes of the day, but because they have a filtering system I've never seen used before.  Although newcomers may register freely to use the site, they have to earn "reputation" points before they're allowed to take certain actions.  Apparently anyone may take a stab at posting a question or answering a posted question, and may earn reputation points if the question or answer is admired.  Anyone may also vote on whether a post was helpful, but only people who have accumulated minimum reputation points may vote to approve an answer, or to leave comments addressing whether the question is appropriately stated or the answer is convincing.  (That's a distinction between "helpful" and "substantively appropriate" that I've never seen before.)  There's an elaborate hierarchy of privileges.  It takes a very large number of reputation points to gain the right to close questions.

The effect of linking a good reputation to the right to speak or to control the discussion is to eliminate most flame-throwing and many logical fallacies.  The discussion on climate change managed to include both believers and skeptics in roughly even numbers, with the two sides actually attending somewhat to each others' arguments.  That's a new one for me.

Utah Sheriffs Self-Identify

Their sacrifice will make them easy to round up when the revolution comes, but it does force the Feds to step back and rethink how much they can rely on state and local support if they push too far. The real question, of course, is whether the Feds have any intention of pushing that far.

Pretty strong language in the letter.

Police State (part 43)

Instapundit takes note of this item, from the National Review Online, which encapsulates nicely just what a police state the US is turning into.

There is a Japanese Anime series called "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" that takes place in the usual dystopian future--although the fictional Japan depicted isn't quite as bad as the Lost Angeles of "Blade Runner". But a plot point in the series involves conflict between intergovernmental agencies and their armed SWAT teams. Literally, one group is the "Health Ministry Commandos".

I chuckled at that when I first watched it, but I'm not laughing anymore, because that's pretty much what we got here now, when some farmer gets raided by armed agents for selling unpasteurized milk.

Health Ministry Commandos.

The Pope Resigns

Apparently this is the day that everyone decided to run their pre-written obituaries, rather than wait for the man to die. They read a little strangely, given that his ministry doesn't actually end until the end of the month.

I won't presume to judge a man of such accomplishments, but it is clear that he is doing what he thinks is right. We can only hope the College of Cardinals will choose as well again.

Hugo Chavezitis

Walter Russell Mead pokes some gentle fun at David Rothkopf, who fears that the shale boom will distract the country from its real work, like a shot of morphine that "hides the pain" and "clouds the vision":

America, once doomed because it had no more oil, is now even more doomed because it has too much:

It looks like the United States is showing the early symptoms of a particularly nasty case of the Resource Curse.  The dreaded syndrome, also known as Hugo Chávezitis, tends to strike countries when they tap into large finds of oil, gas, or other valuable natural resources.  Although such bonanzas clearly have their advantages, the influx of new wealth often leads countries to neglect real underlying problems or the requirements of long-term growth simply because they can spend their newfound riches to paper over their troubles.

And what are the "real underlying problems" the country needs to be solving?  The usual: "building human capital and promoting sustainable economic growth." The "other drivers of long-term prosperity, such as education and infrastructure."  (Ah, infrastructure:  code for "turn over all your money for boondoggles and pork.")  What's more, although it will be wonderful to convert oil- and coal-burning plants to clean shale gas, that will only make people lose interest in climate change without eliminating enough CO2 to save the world.

The dire warning about Chavez should make the reader stop and consider how our two countries might approach a resource boom differently.  Chavez, no doubt, would love to blather about"building human capital" and promoting "sustainable economic growth," while driving long-term prosperity with "education" and "infrastructure," if only he could commandeer the proceeds of the boom and administer it all through a tight clique of central planners who know best.  Here in the benighted old U.S.A., we haven't quite reached the point where our wise leaders will have the sole power to direct the use of the new resources.   It is to be hoped, therefore, that the private sector will put a lot of them to use driving long-term prosperity with old-fashioned things like widely dispersed business and jobs.

We've got some Hugo Chavezitis going on here, that's for sure, but it doesn't take the form of a shale boom.  It's personified in President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, and its primary symptom is the belief that confiscation is a substitute for production, as long as you have progressive ideas for how to spend the loot.

"Because we can, OK?"

Love this very short video, from House of Eratosthenes.  Our curious monkey brain.

Part Time DMV

We knew that corporations would do this -- probably almost all of them, and to the greatest degree they possibly can -- but apparently state governments can also stop employing people full-time to avoid Obamacare.

I remember when the French started cutting to a 35 hour workweek in the hope of creating more jobs. At the time we mocked them, but we've apparently found a way to create a 29 hour limit.

According to My Back of the Envelope Calculation...

A friend of mine with environmentalist leanings directed me to this site tonight. It's opposed to Palm Oil manufacture. It begins:

Borneo and Sumatra are two of the most bio-diverse regions of the world, yet they have the longest list of endangered species.

"Yet"? That's just what you'd expect, isn't it?

A Brilliant Idea

The garish similarities between Look’s 1960 piece and Esquire’s 2013 profile reveal a disheartening lack of progress in between. Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. Until they learn (or at least try to learn) how to write about female subjects in a way that does not purposefully weave paternalistic generalizations into every paragraph, I propose a moratorium on this stagnant approach to literary writing. Let’s allow women to write about women for a little while. Maybe then we can swap the prevalent illusions of femininity for realistic portraits of women as complex human characters.

I hadn't realized there was a ban on women writing about women. I assume the suggestion is really that only women should write about women. (Especially when a magazine's readership is as obviously interested in complex human portraits as that of Esquire!)

Since we wouldn't want to put male writers out of work, I presume this means that an equal number of women writers for women's magazines will swap jobs with them. I can't wait for the next issue of Cosmopolitan. "Remember all those articles about sex positions we broadcast to everyone in line at the grocery store? Starting this issue, those articles are all written by men. Time to find out what they really want!"

Why, the idea is so brilliant I can't imagine why the magazine publishers haven't adopted it already. Think how much happier their customers will be when we give them what we think they need, instead of what they want.

Of course, it's possible consumers might react badly to being told they have to behave. No problem -- we have a mechanism for forcing good behavior now. We'll just have HHS issue a memo that requires your employer to make sure you are provided with complex human portraits, at absolutely no charge.

Seriously: the people who write articles like the one being complained about are dogs. I get it. Women should be treated with respect, even those disadvantaged by celebrity or tremendous wealth. I agree. This is why I do not read Esquire. Also, though, I think all the celebrity profiles the author cites as shining examples of how women do it better are still a complete waste of your time and energy. Instead of having women write more of them, why not stop writing them entirely?

Never read about a celebrity ever again. Read about math, or history, or musical theory, or astronomy, or something else that interests you. Read the journals of thought, or the great literature of old.

If you do that, you'll be a complex human character. If anyone ever decides to write about you, they'll find they have something to say.

Now I See Why They Translated These Into Chinese

A collection of Firefly Chinese curses, along with partial pronunciation guides. (I say partial because they don't give you the tones, which is a critical part of Mandarin pronunciation.) These are rather colorful!

Pornography Changes People

I have long suspected a link of this type, given how quickly social attitudes have been changing on this point. The authors of the study clearly approve of this trend, given their explanation:

"Our study suggests that the more heterosexual men, especially less educated heterosexual men, watch pornography, the more supportive they become of same-sex marriage," Indiana University Assistant Professor Paul Wright told Secrets.

Explaining the findings of the analysis published in the authoritative Communication Research journal, Wright said, "Pornography adopts an individualistic, nonjudgmental stance on all kinds of nontraditional sexual behaviors and same-sex marriage attitudes are strongly linked to attitudes about same-sex sex. If people think individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex."

On this argument, then, rampant use of pornography = increasing social justice. One can, of course, frame the same facts about how pornography is changing our society in a rather different light -- but that would be "judgmental," I suppose.

(By the way, did you hear about Hitler? I wonder why that report was kept covered up -- it's the sort of thing you'd have thought American propagandists would have been only too delighted to put out after the war. Maybe they thought the Germans had suffered enough.)

Government Can Do Everything (Except What It Should)!

One thing that isn't clear to me is why progressives are eager to have the government assume more responsibility for our lives. We should increase Social Security payments by 20%, but we can't pay to fix the roads. We should make states take on new health care exchange bureaucracies, but they can't afford to test prisoners for STDs before releasing them into the prison's general population. I thought prevention was supposed to be cheaper than treatment, but apparently we've decided to subject our prisoners not only to rape but to resulting serious illness. (Influential nongovernmental organizations are somewhat out to sea on this issue as well. Human Rights Watch has done good work in pressuring the government to address prison rape, but for some reason is celebrating a ruling that it is wrongful to quarantine -- they use the word "segregate" -- people with HIV from the rest of the prison population.)

In addition to being broke, which is a practical objection to increasing the size and scope of government, there are reasons to question the competence of the government to execute its basic functions. Foreign policy and budgetary policy are the two most obvious. We have F-16s to sell to the Egyptian government now that they are no longer an ally, but not to Taiwan, which really is one. We can't pass a budget, and hearings suggest the President is not leading even times of national emergency.

I would like to see basic competence from the government at its existing tasks before we talk about expanding its reach.

UPDATE: By the way, haven't you noticed lately that your groceries aren't nearly expensive enough? The government is here to help!

If It's Going to be a Police State...

...At least it could be a competent police state. And as Glenn Reynolds notes:
"An armed civilian who made this mistake would be tried for every possible crime a prosecutor could imagine. How likely do you think that is here?"

Not very likely. 

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it

Bookworm Room has an entertaining post about how differently the Reformation, and everything else in Western History, might have turned out if Richard III had defeated Henry Tudor at Bosworth.

Sentences we never finished reading

WordRake generates an entertaining periodic email warning against legalese tomfoolery.  Today's contribution:

Two Ways to Tell a Judge You Have No Case: 

First, ask for an extension, the more pages the better. . . .  

Second, write something snide, hyperbolic, condescending, or obsequious.   Or all four  . . . .

[This case] is the stuff of which Turow best sellers and other works of "legal fiction" are made, and by which no jurist, either de jure or de facto, would wish to be remembered, but as to which the current chapter is about to be written by the august members of this select Panel -- albeit in a strangly oxymoronic, yet altogether predictable, "unpublished" fashion the very nature of which . . . ." Castillo v. Koppes-Conway, 148 P. 3d 298 (2006).

You get the point.

Joseph Schumpeter Is Looking At You, Atrios

For those of you who may have followed our recent debate on economics all the way to the end, here is a Ph.D. in economics whose plan to save retirement is to raise Social Security benefits, while taxing existing retirement savings in 401ks. There's kind of an interesting logic here.

First, the problem:

Let me be alarmist for a moment, because the fact is the numbers are truly alarming. We should be worried that large numbers of people nearing retirement will be unable to keep their homes or continue to pay their rent.

So obviously the solution is that government must give these people enough money that this does not happen. However:

There are good proposals out there for improving the private aspect of our retirement system.... [b]ut none of these ideas will help people who are nearing retirement. Only the possibility of several decades of compound returns make the personal financing of retirement a realistic idea for most people....

Even if we do find ways to improve the framework for self-funding retirement, how, exactly, do we expect younger workers, who might benefit from these improvements, to start saving significantly for their retirement? Soaring tuition and fees at universities, combined with the associated soaring student loan borrowing, have led many people to start their working lives already deeply in debt.

So, we have a huge government benefit, Social Security, that -- in spite of being one of the largest expenditures of the United States already -- isn't capable of meeting the minimum standard that Dr. Black would set for it (i.e., no one loses their home). The solution is to increase spending by 20%. However, no one can pay for this spending! The about-to-retire can't do it because they already don't have enough money. The not-quite-about-to-retire need to be saving like bandits to avoid being in this trap themselves. And the young can't do it because the cost of a college education is through the roof, and so they are starting their lives in a hole. They'll have to work twice as hard to get out of the hole, and then have to save for this burden we call retirement.

Now, Social Security is a kind of generational insurance program (or, if you like, Ponzi scheme). The idea is that the current retirees draw benefits paid for by younger generations, in return for the promise (or, if you like, forlorn hope) that similar benefits will be paid to them in their turn.

We have just learned that this program fails the current generation about to retire, but increases cannot be supported by the next generation in line, nor the younger generation either.

I would take this as an argument that Social Security has failed, and needs to be replaced. Dr. Black takes it for an argument for its expansion.

This is why our system is dying. Black isn't a bad guy. He has charitable interests at heart. He's very well educated, and even in the subject matter under discussion. Joseph Schumpeter was exactly right about him.


(A further critique is here.)

Bettis Rifles

In the War of the Rebellion, better but erroneously known as the Civil War, Confederate forces famously had less access to industrial goods. This is one reason that Confederate model firearms often feature brass where Union ones use steel, creating a highly attractive design out of what was really a necessity.

In addition, though, they could tap local gunsmiths who had long been supplying local hunters and farmers with hand-made rifles. The local newspaper where I grew up has a story about one such individual in the paper this week.

According to Bettis, his ancestor’s production operation likely was the first manufacturing facility in the county, although a far cry from what modern Americans think of when they hear the term.

The process consisted of just Bettis, a forge, handheld tools and perhaps some of his five children helping him.... Bettis rifles always also feature a silver sight, created from a coin cut in half.

I have a hand-made musket from around this period that belonged to my great-great grandfather. It's from the highlands of Appalachia, big-bore and smooth barrel. It's a percussion cap like these, but sadly it did not come to me in as well-preserved a condition.

Cuteness-Recognizing is Predatory Behavior

For a while now, I've had a theory that cross-species emotional bonds somehow relates to predatory instincts in mammals. We bond with cats, dogs, and horses. Of the three, cats and dogs are predators; horses really aren't, but over our thousands of years together they have begun to be able to learn to actualize predatory behavior. A cutting horse, for example, is doing something that is more properly predatory than would be natural to a wild horse. It may be that in training them to think like a predator, we've been teaching them to relate emotionally across species.

Popular Science has a story about "Why do we want to squeeze cute things?" that demonstrates something like a predatory connection to cuteness:

But for the sake of thoroughness, researchers did a second experiment to test whether the aggression was simply verbal, or whether people really did want to act out in response to wide-eyed kittens and cherubic babies. Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted.

When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively.

(H/t: InstaPundit.)

Now they posit a couple of theories about this that point in other directions. Still, I think I'm right: there is something about the kind of mind you need as a mammalian predator, as a predator who hunts by thought rather than by pure instinct, that gives rise to this.

Consider further anecdotal evidence:





Now why is that, I wonder? But I think it is.

So What?

The New York Times reports that boys get worse grades exclusively because teachers are prejudiced against troublemakers.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

I suppose one could make an argument that there's a problem here. Teachers of primary and secondary schools are almost exclusively female, after all; perhaps there's some sexist preference for well-comported girls over unruly boys. However, my guess would be that male teachers mostly like well-behaved students also.

Rather, we have a kind of sorting going on whereby people who are good at sitting still and learning to speak (and think) in an approved way go into certain kinds of jobs, and people who are uncomfortable with that find other ways to make a living. In terms of the long-term happiness of everyone involved, that's a good thing.

It happens to be true that one class of such jobs pays better than the other class, but that's an artifact of the present moment. As the article itself points out, it didn't used to be true: and as technology continues to change, more and more options open up for people who just aren't very well adjusted to the 'sit-still, be-quiet, watch-what-you-say' environment that predominates in the schoolhouse and the New Model Office. It's a pretty oppressive and unpleasant environment, as unpleasant as any factory to those who chafe at it.

So yes: boys are more unruly. It's very important to try to teach them to obey the rules and show respect. But on the final analysis, their happiness as adults doesn't depend on learning to sit down and only say things considered polite. It depends more on them finding a way of life that comports with who they are. The economy won't stay like it is forever, and the office won't be the dominant mode of economic life forever.

Besides, if you're really unruly you can go into politics. We need a whole new political class anyway.

Personality Is Destiny

All of you know my opinion of psychology, and thus must be girding yourselves up for the mockery I am likely to bestow on this article by Penelope Trunk on the subject of qualities to look for in a woman if you want to have children.  (Via Instapundit:  it's actually the follow-up to an article she wrote for women seeking husbands for the same purpose.)

Indeed I might be so inclined, since she so readily divides up humanity into nifty categories and tells them -- based on the results of a pen-and-paper test you might take in a few minutes -- the possible ways in which they can structure their lives if they don't want divorce and failure.  If psychology could really do this, they would deserve the massive consulting fees that they con out of corporations who want so much to believe they can do it.

(You can imagine how nice it would be for them if people were so easy to categorize.  Think of how nice it would be never to hire someone who proved not to be right for the job!  "Mr. Smith, it has come to my attention that you hired someone other than an ENTJ for an executive track position.  I might have let it go if they were at least a close ESTJ, but this person is an 'I'!  I'm afraid you'll have to clean out your desk -- and that's the last time I hire a 'perceiver' instead of a 'judger' for human resources.")

However, I'm going to go easy on her and discuss her opinion on the four types of wives to avoid.

Women who are most likely to be tortured that they are not climbing the ladder: ENFJ.

Women who are most likely to change their mind and not want to go back to work after the baby: ISFJ.

Women most likely to be disappointed that there is so little combined earning power in this arrangement: ESFP.

Women who are most likely to be dissatisfied in life no matter what choices they make: INFP.

Two things really strike me as interesting about this list. They are both people who, if you take the model seriously, are doomed by their biology.

The first is the ENFJ, the "women most likely to be tortured that they are not climbing the ladder." Yet we learn here and in the earlier article that this personality type is doomed not to be able to climb the ladder successfully. All the top executives are ENTJs, with a handful of ESTJs. "Sometimes an ENFJ slips in, but they are tortured and don’t last. The F kills them. They feel bad that they are not fulfilling their duty as parents. It’s not peer pressure, it’s internal pressure. It’s how an ENFJ is wired." This is described in terms of personality type, but it appears in both places targeted at women particularly. They will hate climbing the ladder because they aren't right for it, but they'll be tortured if they don't try.

Similarly, the INFP: "Women who are most likely to be dissatisfied in life no matter what choices they make." I assume these are the women who keep writing the "Why can't women have it all?" articles.

Anyway, apparently these two types of women are screwed. No matter what they do, they're going to be miserable. Best to avoid them if you're wife-hunting!


(Fair play: I've been exposed to this test several times, and I come out at the very border of INTJ and INTP -- usually around a 1% preference on the P/J split. The only thing the article says about me is that, insofar as I can be a "J," I'm in the second-most-likely-to-be-a-high-earner category. I'd have thought other factors were more important, like intelligence or education, but apparently personality is what it all comes down to. INTPs don't get mentioned in either article.)

Glorious junk

I understand there was a Mongolian herder once, a century or two ago, who was less interested in football than myself, but otherwise I think I take the crown.  Still, that doesn't mean that I don't take the food rituals associated with Superbowl Sunday very seriously indeed.  On the way home from church, I picked up a dozen frozen, uncooked eggrolls from the Vietnamese shrimp market, then braved the completely insane HEB for every kind of frivolous foodstuffs I could think of:  chicken wings, salted nuts, chips, makings for chili-cheese dip and onion dip, and a key lime pie.  We're going to fix the wings with Woody's Cook-in Sauce doctored with some vinegar and pepper.  Then we'll fry up the eggrolls and serve them with lettuce, shredded carrots and daikon radish, cilantro, and mint.  We may even have guests over.

If you've never tried Woody's, you're missing out.  It can be got by mail order via Amazon if your store doesn't carry it.  Can't beat it for a fast treatment for beef or chicken that's going on the grill or under the broiler.  It's not a sauce for dipping but for roasting:  not at all sweet.

Blunt those knives or someone may get hurt

Leon Panetta complains that the "political knives" are out to discredit Chuck Hagel as nominee for Secretary of Defense.  He would prefer the hearing to have focused on what Mr. Hagel thinks about issues he may face in his new post, instead of getting bogged down in what Mr. Hagel has said about foreign policy in the past.  For instance, his interrogators spent time on his statements in a 2009 Al Jazeera interview (I'm queasy already) that the U.S. was "the world's bully," as well as opposition to crack down on state sponsors of terrorism, his advocacy of negotiations without sanctions with Iran and terrorist groups, and his description of Israel’s 2006 military campaign against Lebanon (provoked by the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers) as “sickening slaughter.”  And standing up to the Jewish lobby, and so on.

I suppose there were other hot topics Mr. Hagel might have been examined on, but once his audience learned that he was going to disavow all his prior statements, why would they be interested in his new, spontaneous, unverifiable opinions now that he's facing a confirmation battle?  Who listens to someone who claims he's undergone an eve-of-confirmation conversion?  "Some of my Senate colleagues," wrote Ted Cruz, "may be satisfied that the pledges he has made in recent days are more meaningful than his policy record compiled over the past fifteen years.  I am not."  That's the problem with disavowing yourself:  if your audience is paying attention, they quit listening to anything new you might want to say.   You may as well cut out your own tongue.

Even Salon, which dismisses the problem as a Tea Party attack, wishes Hagel had upped his game to Clintonian levels:

Although the Texas freshman’s hit man performance was laughable, it must be said that Hagel seemed poorly prepared for his predictably rough handling.  His inability to offer the shrill Lindsey Graham a single person or policy that might have been overly influenced or intimidated by “the Israel lobby,” in his controversial words, made him look dodgy.  He might have presented a defense of his opposition to the 2007 Iraq surge when pushed by an ornery John McCain, but he didn’t. 

I understand that he couldn’t be outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, hitting silly Republicans with her best shots and having a hell of a good time doing it.  But he lost Republican votes anyway even with his non-confrontational performance, and he left an overall impression of being not quite ready for the spotlight.  That doesn’t mean he’s not ready for the job, but his enemies will frame it that way.

It does seem unfair, doesn't it, to expect the nation's top diplomat to be ready for the spotlight, or to keep his story straight on issues of foreign policy.  But not even Carl Levin could bail him out of his spectacular faceplant on our policy regarding Iran:

Hagel also stumbled in replying to a question on Iran by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R–GA):  “I support the President’s strong position on containment, as I have said.”  Later, though, he was passed a note from an aide and offered a correction:  “I misspoke and said I supported the President’s position on containment.  If I said that, I meant to say we don’t have a position on containment.”  Senator Carl Levin (D–MI) corrected him, saying, “We do have a position on containment, and that is we do not favor containment.”  Levin added: “I just wanted to clarify the clarify.”

Well, that's diplomatic.

The First Americans

Assistant Village Idiot posted a link to this very interesting interactive map and timeline of human worldwide migration as suggested by mitochondrial DNA evidence.  Most of it was what I'd generally gathered from reading over the years, but there were two discontinuities that were new to me.  First, the Mt. Toba volcanic catastrophe of about 74,000 years ago cut off a lot of people who had managed to migrate east through South Asia to Indonesia.  After that, they radiated into Southeast Asia and Australia, but also back the way they came, all the way to Europe, reversing the direction of the pre-Toba migration.

Second, the East Asians made it up to the Bering Strait and crossed into North America between 25,000 and 22,000 years ago, including a significant group that arrived on the mid-Atlantic coast.  Between 22,000 and 15,000 years ago, however, an ice age wiped out nearly all settlements and movement north of the 55th Parallel, cutting off the New World from Asia.  When things warmed up, there was a whole new migration from Asia, this time mostly hugging the west coast of the Americas and spreading all the way down into the southern hemisphere.  In the meantime, the old settlements on the mid-Atlantic coast also spread down into South America, but mostly hugging the east coast.

I thought of the map today because of a Maggie's Farm link to a Smithsonian article about the long-simmering debate over whether the Clovis culture represented the first arrival of people in North America about 13,500 years ago.  The "science was settled" for quite some time, but more recent archaeology has led many to open their minds to the possibility of pre-Clovis cultures.  There may have been two major migrations, widely separated in time and geography.

Hey, That's Funny, Because Usually Only States Have 'Regulations' Against Murder...

“In providing mail service across the country, the Postal Service attempts to work within local and state laws and regulations, when feasible,” wrote Breslin, after reminding “To Whom It May Concern” that postal workers promptly deliver over 200 billion pieces of mail annually.

“However, as you are probably aware, the Postal Service enjoys federal immunity from state and local regulation,” she continued.

Police State (part 42)

Instapundit points to this item out of New York. An application of the new gun control law just recently passed. 

Keep telling yourself it's not a police state. 

The wages of consent

Grim has been arguing with me lately about how wages work, what they reflect, and how they should be set.  We even discussed the possibility of selling freedom, in effect:  commanding a higher or more secure wage by bartering away long-term freedom, as in an indenture.  These proposals, like thought experiments about selling organs, were mostly ways to explore why neither of us could tolerate the idea.

It occurs to me now that we were missing something that's not merely a thought experiment or even a cautionary tale, but a real live, functioning economic system:



A welfare state threatens to become a system in which the most valuable service some voters can offer the market is to elect a politician who will drain resources from those who didn't elect him.  The politician pays for this service by routing a fraction of the loot back to his loyal voters.  The welfare state differs from our earliest attempts at state-administered charity in that the politician no longer is commandeering and redistributing only a small fraction of the nation's wealth to a small number of the most desperately needy.  Now he's commandeering from 49% of voters and redistributing to 51%.  Once the politician realizes that that's the path to staying in office (where he makes a handy living by skimming off the top of the redistributed funds), we are well on our way back to a command economy, one in which a centralized power directs where most of the resources shall be routed.  That way lies poverty for everyone.

How do we stop a pernicious system of votes for hire?  Honestly, I don't know.  On my darkest days I think the franchise should be weighted by the amount of taxes one pays.  Obviously that system would create its own problems.  I'm tempted to say that, once the wheels come off the cart in this particularly way, it can't be fixed.  And yet many countries that suffered behind the Iron Curtain have turned their kleptocracies around and begun to increase their prosperity again, so it's clearly not impossible.  Is it like drunks, who have to hit a hard, hard, rock bottom before change can come?

Well, That May In Some Sense Be True, But...

Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responds to criticism on Benghazi.

There are some people in politics and in the press who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world. And that's regrettable.

Yeah, funny thing about that: some of us would really like to base our criticism on Benghazi on solid evidence. For example, an investigation that was actually allowed access to the site would have been very desirable.

How about declassifying relevant documents so we can criticize you based on the evidence? Apparently Congress isn't up to the task, and most of the media hasn't exactly pulled out the stops either. For example, this interview appeared not to involve a great deal of pressure on her claims here. 'Secretary Clinton, let me ask you about Benghazi.' 'Well, my opponents are a regrettable and disappointing lot who don't know what they're talking about.' 'I see, thank you. We'll rush that right to press!'

Illumination

Mr. Mom

Ann Althouse links to last week's WSJ article about the different parenting style of a stay-at-home dad: less process, more results.  Less empathy and sharing, more self-control and perseverance.  I liked this Althouse commenter's impression of Dad's first question to Junior in the morning:

"You wanna beer?" 

"It's 7 o'clock in the morning!" 

". . . Scotch?"

Strategery

From the comments to a RedState article about immigration:

My question is why did the GOP pick up the amnesty flag at all?  This was a priority? 

The GOP "reasoning" seems to be this . . . 

Budget, nah, can't be bothered. 

Exploding Deficit, just doesn't seem important. 

Runaway Government both in size and power grab, not really worth addressing. 

Amnesty, that’s the ticket, it wrecks the budget, explodes the deficit, increases the runaway government and best of all it peeves our base!  One other benefit, it increases the Democrats base.  Wow, why didn't we think of this before!

Tax relief

No comparison of Perry's brains to those of Ted Cruz should be taken as a criticism.  Perry stumbles now and then, and he may not be the world's most articulate spokesman of conservative principles under fire, but his instincts are often right on target.  One of his newest initiatives is a website to collect comments on the best way to refund $1.8 billion dollars of what is now a $12 billion Texas state budget surplus.  (The rest will remain in the state's rainy-day fund.)

Sticker shock

As my husband noted in forwarding this link to me, the first step in controlling costs is finding out what they are.  Employees of large companies are just now receiving their first W-2's revealing the cost of the health-benefit portion of their compensation.

Voter suppression

I don't find this argument persuasive.  David Fredoso, author of “Spin Masters: How the Media Ignored the Real News and Helped Reelect Barack Obama,” maintains that Chris Matthews engaged in a voter-suppression campaign by calling Republicans racist.  However stupid or partisan Matthews's remarks may have been, I think we go off the rails if we equate unfair or irrational criticism of political parties with voter suppression.  Is Matthews supposed to have scared potentially conservative voters away from the polls by lying about the Republican leadership?  Persuading voters away from the polls is not the same as bullying them, even if the persuasion is mistaken or dishonest.  Would we be in patience with liberal complaints that Republicans suppress votes by criticizing the incumbent Democratic president?

There can be only one

AVI offers a more tasteful look at race relations than MSNBC.

Don't you hate hate?

MSNBC network contributor and former DNC communications director Karen Finney deplores the tone in the immigration debate:

Even Republicans in the Republican Party who were Latino [were] just disgusted with the tone.  Those crazy crackers on the right — if they start with their very hateful language — that is going to kill them . . . .

Die Like A Man

A post from the new site Helen's Page explores how cancer is like America:

On January 16, my father and I learned that he has terminal cancer. He's eighty-four. Yesterday I discovered that he's known about his soft-tissue pelvic sarcoma for almost two years but did nothing about it. My father is terrified of cancer, so he denied that he had it. He pretended it didn't exist.... My father has lived in a state of blissful denial his entire life. He used to smoke five packs of cigarettes a day, and until he was seventy he drank a quart of scotch a day. His diet consists of steak, salami, potatoes, bread, cheese, mayonnaise, ice cream, and pie....

He told me recently that until he was eighty, he honestly thought he'd live forever. I didn't say, "Really? You thought you'd live in your house here in Los Angeles for trillions and trillions and trillions of years, making your wooden toys, watching Bill O'Reilly... for all eternity?"...

My father's mother died of heart disease and diabetes. She screamed and cried and begged God for more time, over a three-week period. It was very traumatic for my father. My grandmother was seventy-eight and had never once changed her diet after her diagnosis of diabetes. She gorged on cookies, cake, and pie and then screamed for more life. Her death was unfair, she cried.

The other day I was cutting down a tree with my chainsaw, and I took a moment before making the final cut to prepare for death. It's not a difficult process. I said the usual prayer, accepted that in a moment I might be dead, and then felled the tree. Sure enough it didn't fall just as I wanted.  Nevertheless, as I took the alternate escape route, I experienced no fear.  Perhaps this is because my studies in metaphysics have led me to believe that death is a small thing; perhaps it is simply because I am practiced in facing death.  Aristotle held that any human virtue was likely to be the result of good practice.

You know you're going to die. It could be today. The good life ideally includes a good death. Why not practice for the great challenge you know is going to come?

Your Kitty, Like Your Host...

OK, sure. They're cold-blooded killers. But so are we. Farming is nothing but killing once you've planted the seeds. Ants, voles, field mice, crows, invasive species, they're all the enemy of the one particular thing you wanted to grow.

Nature doesn't care, but kitty does. So do we. It's why we have them. The dogs are to ride herd on them because unlike dogs, cats can't be trusted.

Come on down

Ted Cruz applies a market approach to Second Amendment freedoms, in light of Chicago Mayor Emmanuel's attempt to bully banks into refusing to loan to gun manufacturers.  To the banks, he suggests moving to Texas, where they can loan to anyone they like.  To the gun manufacturers, he suggests moving to Texas, where we have lots of banks who would be happy to lend to them.  To the Mayor, he notes that the city recently wasted over $1 million in legal fees in an unsuccessful assault on the Second Amendment.

Regardless, directing your attacks at legitimate gun manufacturers undermines the Second Amendment rights of millions of Texans.  In the future, I would ask that you might keep your efforts to diminish the Bill of Rights north of the Red River.

I'm going to like this guy:  Rick Perry with twice the brains.  I really can't say how tickled I am that he replaced Kay Bailey Hutchison.