We're not dead yet

Sarah Hoyt is a Portuguese immigrant science fiction writer whose work I've never read, but she has a good blog.  A post from earlier this week on the sorry state of public education drew an amazing number of comments with even more amazing horror stories.  (A favorite anecdote:  her son once let the cat out of the bag, informing his teachers that his mom used the public school as a babysitter for eight hours every day so she could get some writing done, after which his real education took place at home during the three hours or so after school let out.)

Today's post responds to the depressed nature of many of the comments:

Yes, our education is beyond screwed up.  BUT here’s the thing, fundamentally they’re not transforming anything.  Fundamentally, the US is descended from or populated by people who said “I can’t take this anymore” and moved.  That is a completely different stock from those who stayed. 

Even the Mexican immigrants who are simply walking over the border, are different from the ones who stay.   (In fact, our economy has caused a wave of returning immigrants who ARE fundamentally transforming Mexico – and good for them.) 

I don’t think most Americans – or most colonials in general – FULLY realize how different. The tendency of humans is to clan: to stay near family and childhood friends. It’s also territorial.  You cleave to familiar landscapes.  The only way to get masses of people to move, normally, is famine or war. 

Most of us and most of our ancestors (with exceptions) moved long before it got to that point.  That it wasn’t to that point is attested to by the fact that most of our/our ancestors’ relatives stayed behind.

Well, maybe I'll have to try her science fiction.

Between worlds

An adult who received a cochlear implant at age six reports that the brain interprets any unfamiliar sensation as pain.  He also reflects on the identity issues that have roiled the deaf community in recent decades:

Sometimes, I think back to one of the questions that I asked my mom before I got my [cochlear implant].  I asked her if I would be deaf or hearing.  She told me that I'd be both. I don't think that's true.  I'm neither deaf nor hearing.  I don't sign as often anymore, but I don't speak or hear well enough to be like hearing people.

Oliver Sacks wrote an excellent book about this: "Seeing Voices."  He spent time on an island -- Martha's Vineyard, I think -- with a very high proportion of congenitally deaf residents.  So many were deaf that an unusual number even of hearing people were fluent in ASL.   If he asked someone whether Joe So-and-So was deaf, they would stop and consider.  "Joe? Let me think.  Yes, I think old Joe was deaf."

The click heard round the world

Slate runs an interesting article about lock-picking in 1851 and the first shifting of the ground beneath Victorians' feet.

The bee in James Taranto's bonnet

Much as I like James Taranto on most subjects, I don't understand him at all on gender roles.  He's at it again today, writing about the historical effect on black society of a high ratio of women to men, and extrapolating to society at large:

As this column has repeatedly noted, women are hypergamous, which means that their instinct is to be attracted to men of higher status than themselves.  When the societywide status of women increases relative to men, the effect is to diminish the pool of suitable men for any given woman.  If most women reject most men as not good enough for them, the effect is no different from that of a low sex ratio.

Hmm, always have to wonder about that word "instinct."  Isn't it also possible that the supposed natural attraction of women to higher-status men is an outgrowth of the difficulty of women achieving status of their own, and that it's fading now along with those difficulties?  Hypergamity is nothing I've ever experienced, at any rate, so I'm a little disinclined to accept that it's an instinct.  Why would I look to a man to lend me status?   It's weird.   I want a man to be my partner, not my fairy godmother.  If women are getting used to being able to win their own "status," whatever that is and however important it is to them, maybe we'll see a trend in which they quit chasing a diminishing pool of higher-status men with nicer cars and start choosing mates on the basis of wild ideas like character, grit, good sense, and willingness to be good fathers.

Old Ghosts

David Foster reminds us that it has been a year since Neptunus Lex's sudden death.  Foster remembers him with links to some favorite posts, including this fine one about leadership.

Therapy

What kind of a meanie wouldn't let me bring this cute little fella to class with me?

To tell the truth, if I were put in charge of all the difficult questions over where people should be allowed to take their animals, I'd rubber-stamp 'em all "approved."  But I still shake my head in dismay over a lawsuit brought under federal fair housing laws to require a school to accommodate a "therapy animal" prescribed to a student to supply her with "emotional support and attachment (reducing symptoms of depression), and physiological and psychological benefits."  The school bent over backward to accommodate her, too, insisting only that she couldn't bring her therapy animal into class or into food service areas.  Now they've agreed to pay her $40,000.

Still, I say:  bring all the therapy animals on.  I'm going to enjoy restaurants, doctor's office visits, movie theaters, and even plane rides a lot more if they're chock-full of animals.  I'd like to see a lawsuit over a therapy boa constrictor, or perhaps an elephant.  Elephants are a sure cure for depression and attachment disorders in my book.

Riding Out

Time to go, again.


The Savannah River, below Lake Hartwell
I will be in the Wild for a few days. I'd like to take up Tex's post on Natural Law when I get back. In the meantime you are in the good hands of each other, companions of the Hall.

Stodgy progressives

A couple of old Coyote Blogs from the good old days before Hope and Change.  First, how progressives are conservative:

. . . I must say that on a number of issues, particularly related to civil liberties and social issues, I call progressives my allies.  On social issues, progressives, like I do, generally support an individual's right to make decisions for themselves, as long as those decisions don't harm others. 

However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making.  Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don't trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use.  Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds.  And, Progressives who support the right of third worlders to strap on a backpack of TNT and explode themselves in the public market don't trust these same third worlders to make the right decision in choosing to work in the local Nike shoe plant. 

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism.   Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being "dynamic," the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them.  Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty.  They want to lock things down the way they are.  They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount.  That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

Second, why the labor theory of value is lunacy.

People going "poof"

From House of Eratosthenes:

Liberalism is all about wishing things out to the cornfield. 

Which raises the question of:  What is the cornfield? This is the scary part: They don’t know.  They really don’t know.  Not even a little, tiny bit.  They are not like the semiconductor manufacturer working to make sure anything that might be a contaminant is kept outside of the million-dollar “clean room,” or the bartender telling the argumentative customers to “take it outside,” or the TSA checkpoint that keeps you from going into a secure area until you have been “cleared.”  Those agents possess a good, developed understanding of 1) criteria applied, and 2) where things should go when they fail to meet the criteria.  Liberals only understand the criteria.  It comes easily to them to say things like “There is no use discussing [blank] with someone like you, who can’t see [blank].”  You, then, are supposed to go away — but to where?  It’s completely obvious you aren’t supposed to take your money with you as you leave.  They’re building a society that “works for everyone” and you’re part of the “everyone,” at least when it comes time to pay taxes, regulatory fees and union dues.  How do you exclude the undesirables from an all-inclusive society that refuses to recognize undesirables?  This is the puzzle they’ve never managed to solve.

This rings true to me, but whenever the argument takes the form of "Liberals always. . .," I like to do the thought experiment of replacing "Liberals" with "Conservatives."  I suppose we all do our share of wishing people out to the cornfield.  On the other hand, I'm not sure conservatives expect liberals to leave their wallets behind when they go "poof."

Causation is hard

Fun with correlation-vs.-causation:  Why do climate activists hate longer lifespans?

H/t CoyoteBlog.

"Personnel and whatnot"

Screenshot of redacted EPA email produced in response to a FOIA request.  The message was sent under former Director Lisa Jackson's alternative identity "Richard Windsor," which she allegedly used to circumvent FOIA obligations.

H/t GlobalWarming.org

Related:  activists try to FOIA the FOIA process.

Fighting fire with fire

Combatting leukemia with disabled HIV.



H/t OpenMarket.org

Anti-mnemonics

“ROLLERBLADING MEN INVITED VITRIOL UNTIL X GAMES.”  That's how you can remember the waves on the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma), in case you ever need to.  But then you'll need a mnemonic for the not-so-memorable mnemonic.

Y'all come on down

One more reason to move to Texas:   The Sunset Commission, which has led to the abolition of 78 state agencies and saved nearly a billion dollars in the 29 years since it was established.

If we turn out to miss one that we abolished, it's only too easy to bring it back.

Thanks to Bookworm Room for this video:



Which elicited this comment on YouTube:  ✬ ;`*❊ *`;✬ Ⓢ Ⓤ Ⓟ Ⓔ Ⓡ ✬;`*❊*`; ✬

More from McSweeneys

We can say we love each other all we want, but I just can’t trust it without the data. See also "Hello, and welcome to the interactive call center for my girlfriend."

Russian Driving

You know, I've occasionally suspected that our brothers at BSBFBs might be cherry-picking their Russian driver videos.

Not so, it turns out!

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More here:
I apologize that the thought ever crossed my mind, gentlemen.

Magic scissors

A tangled web indeed.  First a CDC politico tries to explain why $30 million in sequester cuts to a vaccination program would have killed the children while the President's magic powers could cut $60 million from the same program without hurting anyone.  My favorite part is at the end, addressing the White House's new program to "re-calibrate" its sequester message in the wake of a pile of Pinocchios awarded by those conservative troglodytes at the Washington Post:  The White House plans to "de-emphasize the veracity of its previous statements."

Speaking of…Science

I was walking with my wife in this morning's frigid sucker hole in the weather when I flashed on a solution to both of our age's major questions: where are the other intelligent life forms, and where is the universe's missing mass?

The answer is breathtakingly simple, and it solves both mysteries. 

The missing intelligences have been present all along, and they're still here.  They've just placed themselves inside Dyson shells.  We can't detect the intelligences because of the lack of emissions, other than gravity, escaping the shells.

The gravity part is key to the other solution.  The so-called missing mass currently is considered to be composed of "dark matter" that doesn't interact with the composition of our universe, except…gravitationally.  How convenient a set of characteristics.

The missing mass, clearly, is ordinary matter; it's just contained within all of those Dyson shells.  After all, there are a double potful of LGMs and BEMs, and they've all built these spheres.

Why would a species do such a thing rather than getting out and about, or at least shouting out their existence to the universe around them?  Speculating on the motives of an alien mindset—that really would be magical thinking.

I’m ready for my NSF and NASA grants, which I promise only to use for good.

Eric Hines

Comet alert

We may get a glimpse of a comet just after sunset for the next few days.  Comet Pan-STARRS came within about 100 million miles of Earth a few days ago and now is going to come within about 45 million miles of the Sun.  That will make it bright, but unfortunately it also means we'll only get a glimpse right after sunset.  It's worth a try tonight, though viewing may be better for the next couple of days after.  We're nearly at dark of the moon; that will not only help with viewing but possibly give us a dramatic contrast in a couple of days, when the new crescent moon will be just above the horizon near the comet right after sunset.

I got a pretty good look at a comet -- was it Hale-Bopp? -- in the mid-90s from the window of a commercial airliner.