???

That's a Lot of Rowing:

Young couples start falling apart after only three years these days, because of 'the stresses of modern life.'

Romance begins to fall flat at this point as couples take each other for granted, argue ever more and lose their sexual appetite, researchers say. Those in three-year plus relationships row for an average of 2.7 hours per week compared with 1.2 hours for those still in the first flushes of love.

I don't sustain three hours a week of "rowing" with everyone I know put together, nor would I wish to do so. That sounds exhausting.

DO ANY OF THESE GENTS LOOK LIKE AN "ALPHA MALE TO YOU?

Really???

I might buy off on Tim Oliphant*** but the traditionalist in me finds the rest of the nominees extremely unsettling.

*** language alert, one word only

Like Sarah

What I've Always Liked about Sarah Palin:

Barbara Kay, toward the end of her piece, hits on exactly why I've always liked Mrs. Palin -- and been glad of her influence in the public space.

Mama Grizzlies [celebrate], rather than repudiate, their biological natures. Mama Grizzlies see men as different but complementary to women, and therefore as collaborators, not adversaries. Sarah Palin’s Down’s Syndrome-afflicted child and military-serving son — whom she speaks about proudly at public events — aren’t an anomaly in this circle of unapologetically maternal women. Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, founder of the House Tea Party caucus, has nurtured 23 foster children over the years.

This principle is also the one I believe in, in the form of chivalry. Chivalry is an ethic of willful service to each other. To frame it in terms of the post just below, it is an ethic of putting the Beautiful ahead of personal interest. It honors the difference, because "to honor" is to sacrifice of yourself for something that matters more than you.

The "Mama Grizzly" ethic is chivalric in this sense. It is willing to endure even severe personal sacrifices in order to honor others: raising a child with disabilities, or taking seriously the duties of wife and mother even when they conflict with personal advancement. It also extends honor to those 'on the other side' of the sex divide who are sacrificing for the mutual good: of husbands, fathers, and sons who serve in our wars.

This is a wholly good and positive development.

Women/Egypt

The Egyptian Situation:

A small group of women activists in Egypt -- 200 or so by their own count -- discovered yesterday that the pro-democracy revolution did not suddenly alter society. Blogger "Texas Sparkle" has an update on the constitutional questions in Egypt.

The all-male legal committee that was convened to amend the country's constitution has drafted an amendment that prohibits a man with a foreign wife from running for president. The amendment's wording makes it clear that a woman running for president isn't even envisaged.

This is a better situation than it looks, though: you don't erect defenses against something you never imagined. Future Egyptian women of courage will not be troubled by an amendment banning them from having a foreign wife if they want to run for President.

There's always a long road in front of any movement that wants to create significant changes in society. Political changes are usually easier to effect, because you need only sway relatively few people -- the right few. A social change requires swaying at least a plurality of the entire population, and a solid majority if it is to be a secure and lasting change.

Different toolsets are involved. People try to change society with laws, but that only leads to culture wars. What really changes society is either personal interest, or aesthetics.

That is, either you convince people that the change you propose will help them; or you convince them that it is a more beautiful and perfect way to live. That takes time, and it takes courage, and it takes conviction. We won't see it quickly in the Middle East, but we didn't see it quickly here either.

There is one further warning. Political change moves fast, but social changes move slowly -- with one exception. There is a switch in the human mind between peace and war: that one flips. The person who wishes to pursue social change must therefore push slowly and constantly, without flipping the "fight" switch. Few changes that have pushed past that point have won their cause, and those only that have had the support of the warrior class: for example, the President's and National Guard's backing of the push to force desegregation here in America. So far the army in Egypt has intervened to stop violence against women in the square at least twice, but it's not clear that they're devoted to the principle, as opposed to having a general (and praiseworthy) desire not to see women brutalized.

Law and Knitting

Law and Knitting

A woman after my own heart. She left a promising mergers & acquisitions career at Dewey Ballantine to open a knitting shop, which did OK for a couple of years, but then decided to return to her M&A practice, where they were happy to welcome her back. At the verge of rejoining Dewey, she found that the partner she worked for was moving to Weil Gotshal, so she went with him. She was 8 weeks pregnant at the time. Last year she had another baby. This year she's making partner at Weil. She says she still knits occasionally when a conference call goes on too long.

Too many lawyers underestimate the appeal of the textile crafts.

The Smartitude of the Noble Elephant

The Unbearable Smartitude of the Noble Elephant

Apropos of Grim's series of posts on thinking horses, allow me to present my favorite animal: the elephant.

Elephants recently aced a test of their intelligence and ability to cooperate, with two of them even figuring out ways that the researchers hadn't previously considered to obtain food rewards.

The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights not only the intelligence of individual elephants, but also the ability of these animals to cooperate and understand the value of teamwork.

Scientists now believe elephants are in league with chimpanzees and dolphins as being among the world's most cognitively advanced animals.

... The researchers positioned a sliding table, holding enticing red bowls full of yummy corn, some distance away from a volleyball net. A rope was tied around the table such that the table would only move if two elephants working together pulled on the dangling rope ends. If just one elephant pulled, the rope would unravel. To get to the front of the volleyball net, the elephants had to walk down two separate, roped-off lanes.

A total of 12 male and female elephants from the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang, Thailand, participated. It's estimated that fewer than 2,500 of these animals are left in the Thai jungle, so conservation efforts now are critical.

After quickly learning that the corn-on-the-table task could not be successfully completed solo, elephants would wait up to 45 seconds for the second "partner" elephant to show up. If the researchers did not release this second elephant, the first one basically looked around as if to say: "You've got to be kidding. It takes two to do this." In most cases, the elephants got the corn.

Two elephants, named Neua Un and JoJo, even figured out how to outwit the researchers.

"We were pleasantly surprised to see the youngest elephant, Neua Un, use her foot to hold the rope so that her partner had to do all the work," Plotnik said. "I hadn't thought about this beforehand, and Neua Un seemed to figure it out by chance, but it speaks volumes to the flexibility of elephant behavior that she was able to figure this out and stick to it."

The other "cheater," JoJo, didn't even bother to walk up to the volleyball net unless his partner, Wanalee, was released.

"Perhaps he had learned that if he approached the rope without her, he'd fail," Plotnik said, adding that such advanced learning, problem-solving, and cooperation are rare in the animal kingdom. Other animals clearly engage in teamwork, but he thinks they are "pre-programmed for it," unlike elephants that seem to understand the full process.

The study interested me because of the fairly widespread tendency to use "science" to excuse selfish, self interested, or outright amoral behavior on the rather shaky grounds that such behaviors are "natural". I've never been sure who these folks are arguing with (their own consciences, perhaps?) - spend a few moments watching small children and it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we humans, left to ourselves, can be real pips.

Instinct doesn't - and can't - explain the complex behaviors of either animals or humans. And in the case of humans, we can study something more relevant than the mating rituals of lemurs: we have recorded history. Human civilization is based on the observed truth that we can and do rise above our instincts all the time. But for those determined to ignore more pertinent comparisons, there is plentiful evidence in the animal kingdom that qualities like altruism, cooperation, and even the willingness to sacrifice for others have tremendous adaptive value. Just watch these elephants cooperating to achieve something neither of them would be able to do on their own.
I really enjoy reading studies, but tend to have far more faith in them when the results surprise the researchers (or contradict the hypothesis being tested) than when the study conveniently proves a scientist right.

Or maybe I just really like elephants :p

Discussion question for the day: do female elephants wear makeup for other female elephants, or is this evidence of lingering patriarchal oppression and objectification by the male of the species? Inquiring minds want to know.

Elko!

Elko!

Apparently Senate Majority Leader Reid believes that the Elko Cowboy Poetry Festival is dependent on government handouts.

“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

I'm sure they get grants -- that's what these grants are for -- but I wonder how much they depend on grants. The reason I ask is that the recording they put out one year -- Elko! A Cowboy's Gathering -- features an opening monologue by Baxter Black that asserts the gathering had proven that poetry could be profitable. It's probably not worth $0.99 to listen to three minutes of boosterism about the festival, but the clear impression is that it's doing just fine.

(On the other hand, the track called "Silver Spurs" certainly is worth the price, as are several tracks from the two-volume set.)

It looks like National Review was curious too, and report on the relatively modest grants.

So what is the upshot here? Is Elko doomed, or will it do just fine -- perhaps scale back a little, at most? Usually festivals are fundraisers, even little county or state fairs.

The money at issue hardly matters; we're not going to get to solvency in ten- or fifty-thousand dollar cuts. It's entitlements that must be addressed, especially Medicare, Medicaid and government pensions. Maybe there's a principle that matters, and maybe not: I can see reasons to argue that at least the initial $50,000 grant was money-well-spent, and similar cultural startups might be worth supporting as well.

Still, it seems like Elko might be able to sit deep, and ride this one out.

Hai-yi-yi-ku, yay!

Hai-yi-yi-ku, yay!

OK, now those Republican budget-cutting fanatics have gone too far. Harry Reid to the rescue, pointing out that:

“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1, eliminates National Public Broadcasting,” said Reid in a floor speech. “It eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts. These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival."

Ace and his band of commenters are on the job, as usual, filling the gap with non-federally funded, all-volunteer cowboy poetry, though I had to scroll through quite a few before I could find one suitable for quoting here even in redacted form:

For Harry

Your politics are pure Communist red,
My poems are faded cowboy denim blue.
Stop wasting our money you stupid corrupt evil b****rd.

It's Not Our Fault!

Senate Democratic Slogans:

The Politico reports that the Senate Democrats are looking for a 2012 slogan. They have a few suggestions. The early favorites (apparently actual?):

"We've Got Your Back, Barack";

"Repeal Republicans in 2012"

"Had Enough Tea?"

"Brick by Brick, We're Building a Firewall"

"Hey GOP? You're Firewalled!"

Firewall? Really? Wouldn't the President's veto be the firewall against Republican madness -- or are you already writing him off?

Politico also had some suggestions:

"Because Harry Reid really likes his nice Majority Leader office";

"Please, please, please vote for us in 2012!"

"Why not?";

"Will the last Senate Democrat in office please turn out the lights?"

How about:

"It's not our fault!"

"You know the Republicans are just as bad."

Guitar as Percussion

Guitar as Percussion:

Working the strings way up the neck, too. Now that's a man who can fight his rifle -- so to speak. It's not a combat art at all, but I admire a master of any instrument.

Plausibility

Plausibility:

George Will says there are five plausible candidates for the GOP nomination; plus President Obama, that makes six people to focus your eyes on, if he is right. He states:

[S]ensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.

The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee....

Ah, wait no! That wasn't the line I meant to quote. (Did George Will really just call...? Nevermind.) Here we are:

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon - Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

John Podhoretz disagrees, and names a few more:

It could be Chris Christie. It could be Paul Ryan. It could be Marco Rubio. It could be Bobby Jindal.

And there is what Hot Air is calling a "scrimmage" in Iowa.

Pawlenty, Gingrich, Santorum, Herman Cain, and Buddy Roemer(?), only one of whom stands a shot at winning the nomination.

The one they mean is Pawlenty.

So, here is the "plausible" candidate list for 2012 according to the leading conservative commentators:

1) President Barack Obama
2) Governor Mitch Daniels
3) Governor Haley Barbour
4) Former Governor and Ambassador John Huntsman
5) Former Governor Mitt Romney
6) Former Governor Tim Pawlenty
7) Governor Bobby Jindal
8) Governor Chris Christie
9) Representative Paul Ryan
10) Senator Marco Rubio

For the sake of argument, let's consider this list. Of these, who is your favorite and why? Are there any that are entirely unacceptable to you? (We will take it as read that conservatives will consider the current President unacceptable; that doesn't need further explanation on this occasion. Any conservatives who intend to vote for him, though, are encouraged to say why -- as are any liberals who favor, say, Haley Barbour.)

Incunables

Incunables:

Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum (plural incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe. "Incunable" is the anglicised singular form of "incunabula", Latin for "swaddling clothes" or "cradle" which can refer to "the earliest stages or first traces in the development of anything." ...

There are two types of incunabula in printing: the Block book printed from a single carved or sculpted wooden block for each page, by the same process as the woodcut in art (these may be called xylographic), and the typographic book, made with individual pieces of cast metal movable type on a printing press, in the technology made famous by Johann Gutenberg.

The Center for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care has recently digitized 57 of these early texts, including an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'arthur. You can read this, with a little effort, even though it is in middle English and in a "typeface" that is quite unfamiliar.

Take a look at the column on the top right. It may take a moment to make out what it says: but after you start to read it, you'll find that you can do so with relative ease. By the time you get to "a grymme hooste of an hondred thousande men" you should be able to make out large sections. In Middle English, if you find that you hit a word you don't recognize, sound it out. Very often you'll recognize the word -- or a cognate with a modern English word that will let you grasp the meaning -- once you hear it out loud. If you're accustomed to reading Shakespeare, you'll already know some of the archaic language; and once you can do this, you can read Chaucer and many surviving poets in the original.

If you don't want to squint at the typeface, you can find the same text on page 845 of this electronic edition.

Financial Problems

Financial Problems:

Today I'd like to talk about two significant financial issues for the average American, one private and one public. They share two common threads.

Private:

Turns out Citibank, which had been collecting hundreds of dollars a month from us to pay the insurer, hadn’t made the payments. It was, I later learned, one of the usual tricks mortgage servicers use to squeeze more cash out of their customers. About a month later, I learned of another trick: Citibank informed us that it was increasing our monthly payment by nearly $300....

My wife and I are reasonably savvy consumers – she has a brand-name MBA, and I began my career as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal – but we were no match for a bungling bank. After five months of trying, we still haven’t been able to resolve all of Citibank’s mistakes – nearly all of them, curiously, in the bank’s favor [...]

FDL points out, quite rightly it seems to me, that the "shared experience" of having been ripped off by the bank is what woke up this Washington insider to a wicked reality.

Public:

We are fooling ourselves most of all. United States government debt in public hands is now more than $9 trillion, but most people still don’t realize what it will take to pay that off.

Here’s an example: Say that you have $20,000 in Treasury bills. You probably believe that you own $20,000 in wealth. This will encourage you to spend and come up with ambitious plans. Yet someone — quite possibly you — will be taxed in the future to pay off the government debt. The $20,000 may be needed in order to do that.

These cases are alike in that average Americans are involved in supposedly safe, bedrock investments -- mortgages and Treasury bonds -- with pillars of the community. That they are being misled or outright ripped off by these pillars is a moral outrage.

They are alike in another way too. If "we" need your $20,000 investment returned to "us" in taxes, it is partially because "we" spent a boatload of cash to bail out banks and major corporations who made bad investments. In other words, we are making your investment a bad investment so as to prevent them from suffering the costs of their bad investments. Why did these banks and corporations get bailed out? Because they were politically connected.

Why are the bank's errors so often -- "curiously" -- in their favor? Put another way, if it's their error, why aren't they the ones responsible for fixing it at whatever expense? Because that's the way the law is written. Why is the law written that way? Because...

Right.

Sexual Political, Part Deux

Sexual Politics, Part Deux

Is it a violation of the Sabbath to try to stir up trouble on this stuff today? This article claims that research shows a strong correlation between intelligence in men and their tendency to place a high value on sexual fidelity. In women, however, there is a strong prejudice in favor of sexual fidelity regardless of intelligence. Does this mean women are simply capable of understanding the obvious, regardless of their brains? Do men have to reason something out that women grasp by some kind of mysterious intuition (always a popular theory)? Or is this just another of those studies where someone manages to link intelligence to a pet theory for the purpose of shedding approval of the pet theory? Another possibility, I suppose, is that the advantages of sexual fidelity are considerable more obvious even to the dimmer members of a sex that can get pregnant. The flip side would be that only the more intelligent men were likely to look beyond immediate selfish advantage.

The article makes no attempt to distinguish between male and female fidelity, and in this it echoes the problem I find with most discussions on the subject.

Women and World War

Women and World War

Kathleen Parker writes this week about why women should take advantage of their special strengths rather than try to become men -- nothing very new there. She did get my attention with the following two assertions:

Research shows that companies with more female employees make more money. And recent history makes clear that nations that oppress women are dangerous nations.

I'm not sure what "research" it is that shows that companies with more women make more money; that would be interesting to find out more about. (Unfortunately Ms. Parker provides no sources.)

The other claim is one I've heard before, but as attractive as it is to my own sensibilities, I have to wonder about it, too. Is it really true that a culture that oppresses women is necessarily more dangerous to its neighbors? Why would that be? Certainly we have some glaring examples of oppressive cultures that recently have been giving the whole world a hard time, but I'm not sure we can show causation and not mere correlation there. No doubt a fundamentalist Moslem would argue that the U.S., with its perverted sexual mores, is the worst offender among the nations of the world. Admittedly, it's easier for countries with gender-equality traditions to get along with each other than with countries who loathe this kind of thing. What do you think?

Tammany Hall

Tammany Hall:

Since we were just talking about the period yesterday, let me draw your attention to Greyhawk's piece on how the issues of racism and secession played out in New York City during 1860.

Alien Life

Alien Life:

The Journal of Cosmology has published a piece that claims it may be proven.

Official Statement from Dr. Rudy Schild,
Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian,
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Cosmology.

We believe Dr. Hoover's careful analysis provides definitive evidence of ancient microbial life on astral bodies some of which may predate the origin of Earth and this solar system.

This is not shocking if you have been following the debate about life forming under pressure.

One of the more novel suggestions comes from American chemist and biologist Stanley Miller (of the famed Miller-Urey experiment in the 50s, which created amino acids by exposing inorganic chemicals to UV radiation), who claims that life was not the result of heat, as many think, but rather ice. In 1997, Miller began defrosting a 25-year-old ammonia and cyanide-filled vial that had been kept at a temperature matching that of Jupiter's moon Europa. Amazingly, and contrary to all assumptions, Miller discovered that the concoction in the vial now contained the familiar signs of complex polymers made up of organic molecules. Since then, further evidence supporting Miller's on-the-rocks hypothesis has come to light.

If life generates naturally when the right pressure and chemical balance is made, it's not surprising to find it on meteorites. If this kind of life is broadly similar to ours -- carbon based, amino acids -- we may be able to extend our thoughts on the Order of Reason much more broadly than to horses or higher animals.

That, of course, remains to be seen: there may be truly "alien" kinds of life as well! As an initial sketch, though, the idea that the universe has life as well as reason embedded in it is well-traveled ground: contemporary philosophers will think at once of Hegel, but I think the neoplatonic picture is stronger. Either model gives adequate theoretical support for it (as might some other models); but it would tend to undermine moral relativists of the stronger type (i.e., those who believe that all morality, as opposed to some morality, is culturally relative).

UPDATE: Dr. Schild's website lists a number of his papers, with abstracts. Cassandra's point about 'confirmation bias' may be relevant here, as he's written several things predicting a universe full of life: naturally, then, he'd be a good person to go to if you wanted a big-name, Harvard astrophysicist likely to be open to the idea.

He's also arguing for a different kind of object similar in many respects to black holes, called a MECO (massive eternally collapsing object).

This MECO is also a collapsed object with 3 billion suns mass, but unlike a black hole it is surrounded by a strong magnetic field anchored to the rotating core, and is a solution of the General Relativistic Einstein-Maxwell equations in which Quantum Electrodynamic and Dark Energy forces prevent the formation of a true event horizon.

The illustration answers the long-standing puzzle: if Black Holes have an Event Horizon beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape, how can it be that they are the most luminous objects in the universe at optical, X-ray, and radio wavelengths? My telescopic studies of these objects at centers of gravitationally lensed quasars have shown thet the strong emissions are caused by the sweeping magnetic fields acting on infalling matter to produce the structure shown.

It's a good question, and a puzzling one. You can read about x-ray emissions from what may be the best known 'black hole' candidate here. There is still quite a lot we don't understand about what is going on out there.

Film School

Film School:

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating article on film school in Baghdad, Dubai and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The Independent Film & Television College" featured in Baghdad Film School opened in 2004, closing in 2006 when a car bomb exploded in front of the school, but reopening, as the documentary shows, in 2009—with the faculty wearing bulletproof vests. The instructor Maysoon Pachachi explains, "We wanted to set up the first independent film school in a country where independent thinking had been banned for a long time. In a country like Iraq, which has been traumatized for millennia by occupations and invasions and so forth, the only thing that has stood in front of that is creative articulation, ... the making of something when the world is being unmade all around you."

Its students are simply amazing, inspirational in their determination. Though some of their work isn't much more sophisticated than a cellphone video, still they have faith that they are entering into the profession of cinematography. "I want an Oscar, now or later," says one student. Most live in the "no go" areas of the city, where active militias and kidnappings are common. As they discuss film locations, they must grapple with the logistical dangers of war and the challenges of merely getting to class. "It's clear that our movements in this chaotic place are very limited," Pachachi says. "If we go out in the streets to film, we not only endanger ourselves but also the lives of other people."

The teachers ask the students to document their lives. "Every Iraqi has a story," a student says. "You could make a film about everyone." For these students and their teachers, filmmaking is a way to stay sane, to stay alive, though bombs intrude pervasively; throughout the semester, their friends and members of their families are killed.

That's an alarming portrait; if it is accurate, Baghdad's security situation has degraded from when I was there last (which would have been about the time this school re-opened, in mid-2009). Nevertheless, the story is also a reason to be hopeful. True art, pointed at the Beautiful, has a transcendent power. It cannot end war, but it can help to forge a peace once the shooting has stopped.

Spring Break

Spring Break!

Spring break is almost here. Let's go to Mexico!



...or possibly Savannah. My .50 cal is in the shop.

H/t: Dad29.

Ha!

Hah!

Commenting on this story about handgun carry on college campuses, InstaPundit says:

Is it just me, or is the notion that guns are especially dangerous on university campuses because they’re lawless and full of alcohol and drugs one of those arguments that “proves too much?”

I don't think I've ever been on a college campus that was really all that bad. Still, assuming the argument were valid on the facts, it would be odd to hear a college administration saying, 'Guns would be too dangerous here given our irresponsible leadership.'