'Child Care' is Bad for Your Children

Well, according to this study, at least.

We first confirm earlier findings showing reduced contemporaneous non-cognitive development following the program introduction in Quebec, with little impact on cognitive test scores,” reads the abstract for the study.

“We then show these non-cognitive deficits persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life. The impacts on criminal activity are concentrated in boys.”

I can remember discussing this at the phase in my life when questions of child care were relevant. We thought, in those days, that it was good to send a child to child care for at least a few hours a week. The idea was that it would give them a chance to socialize, to get used to not being the most important person in the world and to taking turns with other children.

That's all quite intuitive, but maybe it's wrong. Intuitions often are. Maybe it's really good to your development to have that time of your life spent in safety and assurance. Maybe that's the ground for developing the kind of personality that can then learn to extend kindness to others -- not because you're made to do so, but because you're confident enough to do so freely.

Another View on the Hiroshima Speech

Richard Fernandez analyzes the speech in a different way from others, but one that I think is insightful.

In his view war is old. It was the Atomic Bomb which was new and therefore destabilizing. Those who brought this unregulated thing into the world thus assumed a huge responsibility. It's an interesting formulation, for at a stroke the great moral issues of World War 2 are reduced to a narrative in which everyone -- including militaristic Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia -- were alike victims of age old human passions enabled by revolutionary weaponry. No one is guilty. We are all just victims. But facts have to be faced Obama argued that since a "moral revolution" cannot be effected the great religions which falsely promise a pathway to love while offering only a license to kill then man is irredeemable without government.

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. ... But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.

Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

So more government we will have up to any extent necessary to make safety mandatory. The moral drama of WW2 vanishes, leaving the Hiroshima speech as an unvarnished plea for an arms-control bureaucracy; the demand for a global safe space; a call for gun control on a planet-wide scale.

It's worth reading in full.

DB: Army Disastrously Tries To Copy "Fleet Week"

An Army attempt to copy the success of the Navy’s Fleet Week has resulted in seven casualties, $82 million in lost business revenue, and a near war with Canada, sources report. The senior service’s first attempt to demonstrate the finest land warfare traditions through patriotic demonstrations such as foot patrols, L-shaped ambushes and artillery barrages, created riots, widespread panic and a short-lived gang coalition.

That reminds me of the time that Irish-American veterans of the US Army invaded Canada.

Someday I May Ask You For A Favor

A small favor, such as good friends might ask of each other. Like maybe millions of dollars.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.” ...

Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”

NPR Talks Range 15

You know you want to hear it.

Friday Night AMV

World turned upside down.

Gamblers Fallacy

If you'd asked me last summer, I'd have said that it was at least even money that Trump was a stalking horse for Clinton. Clearly that gamble would not have paid out:

What, Mr. Green asked, would the party look like in five years? “Love the question,” Mr. Trump replied. “Five, 10 years from now—different party. You’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years.”

My impression on reading this was that Mr. Trump is seeing it as a party of regular people, as the Democratic Party was when I was a child and the Republican Party when I was a young woman.

This is the first thing I’ve seen that suggests Mr. Trump is ideologically conscious of what he’s doing. It’s not just ego and orange hair, he suggests, it’s politically intentional.

Voices in the Echo Chamber Are Particularly Loud...

...when you mute all of your opponents.

Obama Apologizes for Hiroshima

Apologizing for the bomb this close to Memorial Day is roughly equivalent to talking about the Queen again on Independence Day.

Bill Whittle reminds you that we'd have a whole lot more people to remember this Memorial Day if we hadn't used them. Maybe a million more. A lot more Japanese would have died in the event of a conquest of the mainland, too.

Also, that they were warned five days before the bombing. He has the text from the leaflets we dropped warning people to flee, and promising peace if they would remove the military government and pursue peaceful relationship with us.



It takes some gall for a President with as much blood on his hands as this one, through his acts of omission in Iraq and Syria and his acts of commission in Libya, to shame a President who saved as many lives as Truman.

UPDATE: See the comments for a link to the text of a speech, as well as a debate about whether or not this speech constitutes an apology. Our own MikeD rules that it was not, in his opinion.

"The Future of Men is Women"

Well, maybe, if you mean that for most men their future will be most flourishing and excellent if they find a good wife and have a family -- which might include daughters. In that case, yes, a man's future is going to be built around the women in his life. And that's good. It's good for him, and it's good for them, and it's the way things usually ought to be.

But that isn't what you mean at all, is it? Because then we'd have to say that there was something special about marriage -- "traditional" marriage, as opposed to "gay marriage" -- as an ideal for most. And while you mention men becoming better husbands and boyfriends for women, it's sort of by the way.

As a society we need to be more supportive of paternity leave, stay-at-home dads, and men entering traditionally “feminine” careers, such as nursing or teaching. Just as we encourage girls to be strong and confident, to enter STEM careers, and to be anything they want to be, we need to similarly encourage our sons to embrace female-dominated HEAL careers (health, education, administrative, literacy).

Oh, I see. The future of men is becoming women.

Somehow I suspect that this backlash you find so mystifying might be -- just might be -- driven by this very agenda you're promoting. It's as if there were something inside the young men rebelling against these role-models you're trying to set up for them. It's as if they had a nature, in other words, an internal principle of growth and motion that is driving them to be a particular thing and not anything else.

By the way, isn't literacy just a subset of education? You just stuck that in there to come up with a clever acronym, didn't you? Maybe you should have considered a more "masculine" career, like the military. You'd have fit in just fine at the Pentagon doing procurement.

The Stagirite at Rest

Archaeologists say that they are certain they have discovered the tomb of Aristotle.

The Slandering of Sanders Supporters Continues

Look, there's plenty to complain about that is valid.  A lot of these guys (and gals) are Marxists.  That's ample ground right there for conflict.  But the Democratic Party apparently doesn't criticize Marxism anymore, so instead we keep hearing that they are violent and sexist and, now, racist.

I am unpersuaded.  But let's review the evidence.

The Washington Post noted that at one point #MississippiBerning became a hashtag used by Sanders supporters on social media—a witty and clever turn of phrase unless of course you are a black American who hears the words “Mississippi burning” and immediately thinks of church bombings and lynchings....

Black writers and activists who have had the temerity to challenge Sanders’s record have been targeted by his supporters in ways that go against not just civility but even decency.

Follow that link and you will read an article by a writer who asserts that they have received unpleasant language in emails. "We could print the emails. But those of you who sent them know who you are and the horrendous things said."

The rest of the article is about the "MississippiBerning" hashtag. Put in context, it's clearly in very poor taste. But -- and I'm a generation older than most of these Bernie supporters -- I didn't know about the 1988 movie either. I'd only heard the phrase, and wouldn't have known the film had a racial context. I suppose one could say that, given the history, one should always assume that violence in Mississippi has some sort of racial component. But that assumption strikes me as just as much a prejudice as any other.

Let's face it: 1988 was before many of these Bernie supporters were even born. They're a bunch of kids. Marxist kids, but at their age that's the fault of their teachers.

The playbook has to play, I suppose. Opponents of whomever the leading Democrat is have to be motivated by racism, sexism, and hatred for the poor. Well, you can't stick Bernie with that last one, so you just have to double down on the first two.

By the way, as to the alleged violence and sexism that was raised as a charge in Nevada, a photograph of Sen Barbara Boxer 'fleeing in fear of the crowd.'  I'll put it below the fold so that no one is shocked by what they see.

World's Largest Extant Viking Ship Visits Rekjavik

Looks like a good time, although I imagine it's usually easy to find a good time in Iceland.

Always Remember that "Epi-" Is A Handwave

When someone tells you that a phenomenon is "epigenetic" -- or "epi-" anything else -- bear in mind just what "epi-" means.

The prefix epi, or ep if followed by a vowel or the letter "h", is derived from the Greek preposition ἐπί meaning: above, on, over, nearby, upon; outer; besides, in addition to; among; attached to; or toward.

Thus, when someone describes some phenomenon as being caused by "epi-*," it generally means "I am sure the cause is around * somewhere."

When someone tells you that something is "epigenetic," what they mean is, "I'm sure it's something to do with the genes, and while it isn't the genes themselves (or I'd say it was genetic, and be expected to prove I was right about that), I'm sure that the cause has got to be around the genetics somewhere."

 Very often this is a completely unproven assumption. It strikes people as plausible because (a) we don't fully understand how genes work, but (b) we do know that various factors seem to 'turn on' or 'turn off' their functionalities. The implication is meant to be that some factor -- we don't know what or how -- is acting on the genes somehow. But in fact, we often can't really say that the genes have anything to do with it.

With all that said, read this article.

Savchenko Released by Russia

Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko has been released by Russia in a prisoner exchange, though she had been sentenced to 22 years. We talked about her case last in March of this year.

Nice Bit from McSweeny's

A set of statements that are made by both the most and least privileged people in the world.

Speaking of voting, which they do in passing, Georgia had its non-Presidential primary yesterday. For reasons I have yet to see discussed anywhere, but that I imagine have something to do with a desire to keep turnout low, Georgia held its primary for everything except the Presidential election approximately three months after the Super Tuesday primary. Since many of the elections in Georgia are merely endorsements of the Republican candidate, in many ways yesterday was the most important election day of the year. Incumbents had a very good day, for whatever that's worth in measuring the mood of the extremely small part of the electorate that participated.

I myself even voted for two incumbents, although I otherwise voted only for insurgent candidates. In the Mighty 9th Congressional District, I voted to keep Doug Collins as our representative. Paul Broun's district was combined with the 9th, which meant that he was also running in this district this year. Broun is the 'evolution is a lie from the pit of hell' guy.



Georgia will not be returning him to Congress next year. Doug Collins, who was endorsed by Zell Miller in spite of being a Republican, will be our Congressman instead.

I also voted to retain our current sheriff, who pleases me consistently by not patrolling the Western end of the county where I live. I go months without seeing anyone trying to give me a speeding ticket or otherwise interfere with my day. That election resulted in a runoff, so I shall have to arrange to vote again in July.

DB: Obama Ends Vietnam Tour With Ceremonial Rooftop Helicopter Evacuation

According to Obama, the evacuation ends what had become his 48 hour-long “national nightmare,” although some Vietnamese officials have privately said Obama was politely asked to leave after he and Secretary of State John Kerry had proceeded to raze their hotel room in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.

"Jenjis Khan," even.

The Weekly Standard on Vince Foster

I'm not sure I agree with their analysis that Trump's play here is inferior to what a "a more responsible opponent" could do. A more responsible opponent could raise the question the Standard wants to discuss, which is whether or not the Clintons behaved improperly in the wake of the death of a friend. There is a classic Clinton two-step dance around such a question: (1) That's a private matter, and (2) "Politics of personal destruction." By election day all anyone would remember is that the responsible opponent made a boorish attack. Trump, on the other hand, will have people remembering that they thought they heard Hillary had somebody killed, but if they think to check the record they'll find that Trump technically said that while it was fishy, it wasn't fair game and he wouldn't raise it as an issue.

All the same, the Standard does bring up an interesting fact I did not know:

As if that wasn't bad enough, in 1995 the New York Times reported an aide, Sylvia Matthews, was dispatched to go through Vince Foster's trash:

The committee also focused today on Mr. Foster's office trash. Members questioned Sylvia Mathews, a former White House aide, in laborious detail about what she had found in Mr. Foster's garbage on the night he died. Other than a few routine documents, the garbage contained nothing that shed light on Mr. Foster's thinking, said Ms. Mathews, who is now chief of staff at the Treasury Department.

Miss Matthews is now Mrs. Burwell. That's right: Sylvia Burwell, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services who is now busy sorting out Obamacare's refuse, is the same aide that went through Foster's trash the day he died. Loyalty to the Clintons has a generous rewards program, as the quasi nationalization of health care means that Burwell is now pulling the strings on a sixth of the national economy. And whatever lobbying gig is sure to follow will no doubt be extremely lucrative.

Makes that $75,000 in Justice Department investments seem like a wise use of one's money, if one was a ranking government bureaucrat.

And that's really the point: it's why Washington loves her and why Wall Street loves her. She makes the money flow, from the People to the people. From the taxpayer people, that is, to the loyal people. The ones who belong to the club.

The ones who do what they're told.

Putting Down a Marker

Here's an opportunity to apply a partial test to the idea -- very common on both Right and Left -- that corporations and big banks own the political system. A new poll by the Financial Times shows that these firms have a very clear favorite to win the Presidency: Hillary Clinton.

Now, if she gets elected, that doesn't prove that the banks and corporations own the political system.

If she loses, however, with these figures? We'll have to put aside the notion that banks and corporations are all that influential. 71% of these corporations prefer her on immigration, compared with zero percent preferring Donald Trump. 63% prefer her on trade, compared with zero percent on Trump. And 25% of them prefer her on taxes, the only category she (narrowly) loses to Trump.

She is clearly the candidate of the corporate establishment, as she is the candidate of the political establishment. If she loses, we'll have to accept that Americans are still in charge of our own destiny.

This Seems To Be A Worthy Experiment

An ordinary day in a suit of armor.