Understatement

Regarding tonight's defeat of Cantor, who will not be missed, InstaPundit quotes and comments thus:

He was also free of rancor toward Cantor, whom he judged a good man in a way that appeared authentic. This impressed me even more. Did we have an actual citizen politician here – and, incredibly, an intelligent one? Skeptical old me began to think of Frank Capra movies. Brat even had the diffident, bespectacled look of Jimmy Stewart.

Well, Stewart was actually kind of a tough guy. We’ll see.

Kind of?

Memories

John Derbyshire writes about the problems of memory:

My family moved from cramped rented rooms to a spacious new house a few days before my third birthday. I remember the move in some detail; and I have half a dozen memories of the rented rooms.

At least I think I have. One of Fernyhough’s themes is the unreliability of memory. There are true things we remember; there are stories we were told that somehow end up among our memories; there are dreams and imaginative flights we take for true memories; and there are second-order memories—memories of having remembered one of the preceding.

I am not sure what my earliest memory is, nor even when they came to be, but I do remember things that I can block out as being before five: the horrid shag carpet (of which I have recently discovered photographic evidence), swimming lessons at a very early age in a very public pool, a brown home with a hex sign on it that I was later told was in the old neighborhood.

I have a few early memories, and some later memories, but increasingly I find I have few or no memories at all of my early life. Even as a teenager -- a period I gather imprints carefully on most people -- it's hard for me to recall how things were, except for particular moments that were impressive. Even at the age of twenty, which Derbyshire's piece suggests is all-important, I can't readily remember anything: I'd have to chase it down, map it out, and see if anything occurred based on the data I could pull together.

And yet I have broad stories that aren't really memories, but must have been built out of them at some point: stories about how things were or what they meant.

Theories of Theories

So apparently according to my 20-something associates this article is a huge anti-gay slur, which is surprising because it's an article about how straight women suffer less relationship violence if they engage in stable marriages to men vice a series of boyfriends.

I'm not sure I understand what the connection is supposed to be, really, but apparently it's really offensive. You shouldn't consider it at all, even if you limit marriage to a "straight" context, which obviously would be totally wrong and immoral (you are expected to dispense with essentially all human history here).

So, you know, don't read it. Or if you do, don't think about it.

The Tea Party is de--. . . oh, wait.

Eric Cantor, Republican House majority leader, outspent his little-known opponent in the primary for his Virginia congressional district by 15 or 20 to 1, and lost his race today by about 45%-55%.  Virginia has a "sore loser" law that will prevent Cantor from running against the primary winner, David Brat, as an independent.

Brat is a thorough-going economic conservative of the Cato Institute stripe.  The Republican Party leadership is going bats.

Against Scientism

Apparently this Tyson person is important in some context, because his face has been popping up on my screen a lot. I assume at least some of you know who he is. I gather he is reputed to be an intelligent fool, for reasons this article lays out.

A Reasonable Question

When national security adviser Susan Rice claimed that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction,” members of his unit felt compelled to speak out, because the word “honor” actually means something to them. So did others who joined a dangerous manhunt in a warzone. The rest of us have no reason to prejudge the facts in this case, but those who served with Bergdahl have every right to present their version of events.

The Bergdahl case reveals a disturbing gap between the White House and military culture. After Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers corrected the administration’s false narrative, anonymous White House aides accused them of engaging in “Swift-boating.” Consider that a moment. While the White House (still) claims that Bergdahl served with “honor,” aides now impugn the motives of those who served beside him — and who stayed at their posts. Particularly in a time of war, why are these attacks not a firing offense?

The Jungle

California has adopted what are sometimes called "jungle primaries":  open to all comers of any party, and the top two face off against each other.  Here's a result I wouldn't have expected.  This Brookings article argues that incumbents are far more likely to face a challenge in a jungle primary:

This might be the biggest change we’ve seen so far this year as the result of the top two system.  In a traditional primary system a distant second place finish is an outright loss.  No wonder that the expectation of coming in second in a primary against an incumbent is usually deemed to be not worth the trouble.  Many potential challengers fail to take on incumbents.  But in the new system even a distant second place finisher gets his or her name on the ballot in November which gives them the opportunity to draw votes from an electorate with higher turnout.  This means a primary run is more viable and in the general election the incumbent might be more vulnerable.

Aussies to the rescue

Antipodean trends:  Australia seeks global allies to combat President Obama carbon-tax initiative:

[Australian Prime Minister Tony] Abbott’s conservative Liberal-National coalition won a landslide victory in Australia's elections last year, on a limited government platform that included repealing the country’s carbon tax and cutting green energy and global warming spending.

Abbott’s government is set to slash global warming spending by 90 percent over the next four years. Efforts to repeal the country’s carbon tax have also moved forward as Labor Party Senators have begun to buckle under pressure to get rid of the tax.

“The carbon tax is an act of economic vandalism,” Abbott said in March. “You can’t trust [Labor] anywhere near an economy.”

A study from last year by Dr. Alex Robson, an economist at Griffith University found that after just one year, the carbon tax increased taxes on 2.2 million Australians while doing nothing to decrease the country’s carbon emissions.

Robson’s study also found the carbon tax raised electricity prices 15 percent while the country’s unemployment rate shot up by 10 percent after the carbon tax was implemented.

"The day I left my son in the car"

Like many Americans my age, I read this story with a sense of awe at the difference between my own childhood and the norm today.  Are things really more dangerous now?  Neighborhoods are more anonymous, for the most part, but then statistics say the real danger is from family and friends rather than from strangers.  One thing of which there can be little doubt is that our culture feels more entitled to intervene in decisions between parents and children.

I'm curious whether the parents in the Hall will think the mother was in the wrong.  The comments in Salon are a tall drink of crazy.  "So what if your child isn't suffocated or abducted!  He could be maimed by the power window mechanism!"  What do I know?  I'm over-anxious even about my dogs.  Who am I to think I'd have been brave about children?  Still, I'm glad I grew up when kids were still allowed to go into the woods alone.

Balance of power

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany abandoned most of its nuclear power generation.  At the same time, the U.S. ramped up its natural gas production from the shale revolution.  Now German plants find themselves at a disadvantage in competing against U.S. manufacture.

Thanks in large part to Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power and push into green energy, companies there now pay some of the highest prices in the world for power.  On average, German industrial companies with large power appetites paid about 0.15 euros ($0.21) per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity last year, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency.

In the United States, electricity prices are falling thanks to natural gas derived from fracking - the hydraulic fracturing of rock.  Louisiana now boasts industrial electricity prices of just $0.055 per kWh, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

German companies are responding by shifting production to the U.S.  It seems unfair, but with any luck the new U.S. energy policies will fix all that.

An Interview with M. Le Pen

SPIEGEL: Do you want to destroy Europe?

Le Pen: I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don't want this European Soviet Union.

SPIEGEL: The EU is a vast project for peace. It has helped ensure 70 years without war on the Continent.

Le Pen: No. Europe is war. Economic war. It is the increase of hostilities between the countries. Germans are denigrated as being cruel, the Greeks as fraudsters, the French as lazy. Ms. Merkel can't travel to any European country without being protected by hundreds of police. That is not brotherhood.

SPIEGEL: You now intend to head to Brussels only to fight the system.

Le Pen: And why not?

She is the daughter of the more famous (at least in America) Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Pentecost

You will of course hear from Acts 2 today, as is proper.

But for me, I always think of Sir Thomas Malory's work this day.

“The king stablished all his knights, and gave them that were of lands not rich, he gave them lands, and charged them never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason; also, by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship and lordship of King Arthur for evermore; and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succor upon pain of death. Also, that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no law, ne for no world’s goods. Unto this were all the knights sworn of the Table Round, both old and young. And every year were they sworn at the high feast of Pentecost.” (Le Morte d'Arthur, pp 115-116)

Great moments in marketing

Chobani yogurt's ingredients list includes "evaporated cane juice."  (So does my sugar bowl.)

Tunnel vision

Martin Bromiley's wife went into the hospital for minor surgery, but suffered catastrophic brain damage from being deprived of oxygen.  The surgical team experienced difficulty in ventilating the anesthetized patient, then in intubating her.  Instead of shifting focus to an emergency tracheotomy--a priority so obvious that even Bromiley immediately wondered why it had been overlooked--they seemingly lost track of time and spent 25 minutes intensely focused on repeating a failed procedure.

But when Bromiley was given the terrible news, his internal response was not furious rejection but recognition.  An airline pilot, he was reminded of United Airlines Flight 173, whose pilots ran it out of gas and crashed while fixating on a malfunctioning landing gear light.

Perhaps because of Bromiley's deep empathy for the surgical team's shocking and deadly error, he found a way not only to spur a useful investigation of his wife's death but to put the experience to good use in the medical field.  Medical workers respond well to his parallel experience with error fixation and other human foibles common to highly trained professional teams that face life-or-death emergencies.  Teams of this kind need charismatic, self-confident leaders, but they also need trusting communication and a disaster routine that kicks in when priorities get lost, the brain fixates, and the internal time clock stops working:  "Get that blood oxygenated one way or another within ten minutes" or "Fly the plane."

The hammock begins

The 7/32-inch rope arrived yesterday afternoon.  I spent most of the evening cutting it into 50-foot lengths, hooking them onto a dowel in doubled lengths of 25 feet, and tying up the long ends into bobbins.  Now I've tied knots in the first foot or so.  The triangle pattern is a little subtle.  I hope I was right about multiplying the feeder cord by three to get the finished length, because I seem to be using up the bobbins alarmingly fast.  I may have to bone up on those splicing techniques.

Having discovered how to make my laptop read aloud to me, I've spent the day so far knotting while listening to the articles I'd otherwise have sat and read.  Unfortunately, the program can't read a Kindle download, because I can't highlight the text in that format.  The artificial voice is mildly annoying but comprehensible.  You have to make allowances for its inability to distinguish between noun/verb pairs like PRO-ject and pro-JECT.  If it gets too confused by a name, it reverts to spelling.

Rightward shift

If you want to sneak up on someone who's getting drowsy, approach him from the left.  Even if he hears you, his brain may interpret the sound as coming from the right.

I'm sure this should help us win elections, too.

CWCID:  As always, when I start talking this way on a Saturday, I'm responding to a variety of excellent links from Not Exactly Rocket Science.  Some weeks, it's unremitting PC nonsense, but the pickings are good this week.

Scientific corruption

It looks a lot like corruption everywhere else.  The danger signs are almost always pretty much the same, the biggest red flag being a hostile and defensive response to questions.  When you get that creepy feeling, it's time to check your parachute or gird for total war:

The day to day operation of the lab was conducted under a severe information embargo. . . . Information flowed one way, which was up, and conversation between working groups was generally discouraged and often forbidden.

Raw data left one’s hands, went to the immediate superior (one of the three named above) and the next time it was seen would be in a manuscript or grant.  What happened to that data in the intervening period is unclear.

. . . [T]here was a pervasive feeling of fear in the laboratory.  Although individually-tailored stated and unstated threats were present for lab members, the plight of many of us who were international fellows was especially harrowing.  Many were technically and educationally underqualified compared to what might be considered average research fellows in the United States. . . .

This combination of being undesirable to many other labs should they leave their position due to lack of experience/training, dependent upon employment for U.S. visa status, and under constant threat of career suicide in your home country should you leave, was enough to make many people play along.

Even so, I witnessed several people question the findings during their time in the lab.  These people and working groups were subsequently fired or resigned.  I would like to note that this lab is not unique in this type of exploitative practice, but that does not make it ethically sound and certainly does not create an environment for creative, collaborative, or honest science.

Core nuttiness

Reading a series of articles trying to explain the controversy over Common Core leaves me feeling like a math-challenged second-grader trying to understand an opaque lesson on long division. This shouldn't be a complicated question: does a national standard for achievement give schools an accurate benchmark from which to judge the progress of each grade level and, if so, is that helpful? But then one reads the articles and falls immediately into a pit of murk. The whole concept of testing is flawed because it ignores the wonder of the educational accomplishments of each special snowflake. All academic standards are tools of the patriarchy. A rigid, uniform federal standard squelches individual state innovation and improvement. Tests are unfair, because teachers of poorly testing students are penalized for the crimes of parents or society. Curricula imposed from on high invariably lose sight of their educational purpose in favor of institutionalizing propaganda. Teachers will "teach to the test" instead of developing critical thinking skills in their students. The only way to develop critical thinking skills is to switch from a traditional set of standards or tests to Common Core. Common Core is a benign set of national standards based on an enlightened preference for critical thinking over rote memorization. Common Core is a cookie-cutter set of lesson plans that stifle creativity and prevent teachers from focussing on the needs of real students. Common Core saves money; Common Core imposes unfair costs on cash-strapped budgets. Only a Tea Partier would hate Common Core. Only a corrupt teacher's union would hate it. Parents hate Common Core because it removes control over their children's education to a more and more remote central authority. Parents hate Common Core because it exposes their children's so-called educational attainments to the harsh light of reality.

I recently finished reading Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got That Way." She examines schools in the U.S., South Korea, Finland, and Poland, as judged by the standards imposed by the International Baccalaureate Program, and concludes that a few straightforward reforms can make a huge difference in a nation's schools over a surprisingly short period. First, choose your teachers from the top 1/3 or 1/4 of their graduating classes, then give them the pay that's required to attract such a cohort. Second, combine rigorous standards for achievement with a wide latitude in methods. These two approaches are intimately linked, in that academically excellent teachers can be afforded the professional courtesy of autonomy, as long as you check frequently to ensure that the kids really are learning the curriculum. Finland converted itself from an educational backwater to the world's highest-performing system in just a few years with these limited techniques.

Common Core apparently is a bundled deal; if you want the rigorous, uniform standards, you have to accept a loss of autonomy and innovation, not to mention a hefty dose of propaganda and unintelligible nattering about "critical thinking skills" (however those are defined, they seem to be completely absent from Common Core's promotional materials as well as from most of the debate). We already have a pretty good set of tests in the International Baccalaureate system--why not use those, let teachers make up their own lesson plans, and let principals hire or fire them according to whether they make any useful progress with the kids?

Suddenly It All Makes Sense

Been mystified about the bone-headed decisions that have been rolling off the administration's foreign policy efforts these last few years? Turns out there's a good reason Team Obama has gotten worse rather than improving with experience.

...the [National Security Council] has been by procedure and fierce tradition a rare apolitical forum, a place for the president to hear hard reality. NSC staff are foreign-policy grownups, and its meetings are barred to political henchmen.

Or that was the case, until the Obama White House. By early March 2009, two months into this presidency, the New York Times had run a profile of David Axelrod, noting that Mr. Obama's top campaign guru and "political protector" was now "often" to be found "in the late afternoons" walking "to the Situation Room to attend some meetings of the National Security Council." President Obama's first national security adviser, former Marine General and NATO Commander Jim Jones, left after only two years following clashes with Mr. Obama's inner circle.

He was replaced by Democratic political operative and former Fannie Mae lobbyist Tom Donilon. Mr. Donilon joined Ben Rhodes, the Obama campaign speechwriter, who in 2009 had been elevated to deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Also present was Tommy Vietor, whose entire career prior to NSC spokesman was as an Obama spinmeister—as a press aide in the 2004 Senate run, and campaign flack for the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and assistant White House press secretary. In fairness, his credentials also included getting caught on camera in 2010 pounding beers, shirtless, at a Georgetown bar. America's foreign-policy experts at work.

Well, now, shirtless beer drinking after work is not to be held against a man! Being a successful press aide might be; it's not a career often distinguished by men or women of high honor and personal integrity. There are exceptions who are worthy individuals, to be sure.

In any case, Americans are WEIRD. It's strange to find a foreign policy team that is built around those who have learned how to do American politics for American audiences. You shouldn't expect that to work out well; and, indeed, it hasn't.

Thanks to Ms. Strassel for an interesting report.

Cure it or kill it?

Old and busted: repealing and/or replacing Obamacare. New hotness: "fixing" it . . . by repealing it and maybe replacing it with stuff. As Ramesh Ponnuru argues at Bloomberg View, Obamacare was an attempt to solve the terrible problems caused by forcing insurers not to take the riskiness of their new customers into account. Ordinarily, such a policy would cause healthy people to delay paying for expensive insurance until they got sick. Solution: force everyone to buy expensive insurance right now, a/k/a the individual mandate. Get rid of the individual mandate, and you score lots of points with voters, but then what do you do about the fact that you've just destroyed the insurance market? It's nice to call a repeal of the individual mandate a "fix," but it doesn't fix much unless we kill the whole bill.