Caught Our Eye Archives
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents"
It wasn't just that the bachelor was untrustworthy, wrote [George] Ade, he was also a “draft dodger” and a “slacker,” one who had exchanged the traditional male role of provider for that of refusenik. Or, as another wag put it, “The bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.” Until quite recently the office bachelor was seen as a serious liability, and earned considerably less than his married counterpart. Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents," by Christopher Orlet, New English Review, July 2008
"Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013"
The Onion: Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013
"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis"
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
. . .
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
. . .
A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis," by Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2008
More
- EPA's Climate Change Site
- "Don't fight, adapt. We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change." Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, December 12, 2007
- Global Warming: Frequently Asked Questions - from NOAA
- GlobalWarming.org - from the Competitive Enterprise Institute
- Global warming - from Wikipedia
True calling ... and standard of living.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich--which is, after all, what we’re talking about--but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist--that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher--wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers." by William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar, Summer 2008
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Amazon down since Monday? 3-day Amazon outage?
Is it just us or has Amazon.com been down since Monday morning, June 9, 2008?
Since Monday, during the day, we have been able to reach Amazon less than 1 hour each day. We've tried 2 different locations using 2 different access providers, and can't reach Amazon from either.
Anyone else having these problems?
"China’s Cyber-Militia"
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
"China’s Cyber-Militia: Chinese hackers pose a clear and present danger to U.S. government and private-sector computer networks and may be responsible for two major U.S. power blackouts." By Shane Harris, National Journal, May 31, 2008
Hat tip, Slashdot
More
- "Chinese hackers: No site is safe," by John Vause, CNN, March 11, 2008
- "Hackers exploit China earthquake to punt Trojan," by John Leyden, The Register, May 22, 2008
- "Cyber officials: Chinese hackers attack 'anything and everything'," by Josh Rogin, FCW, February 13, 2007
- "Botnets, Cybercrime, and Cyberterrorism: Vulnerabilities and Policy Issues for Congress," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL32114, November 15, 2007 (43-page pdf
)
- "Information Operations, Electronic Warfare, and Cyberwar: Capabilities and Related Policy Issues," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL31787, March 20, 2007 (17-page pdf )
- "Critical Infrastructure: Control Systems and the Terrorist Threat," by Dana Shea, CRS Report for Congress RL31534, January 20, 2004 (22-page pdf )
- "Banking and Financial Infrastructure Continuity," by N. Eric Weiss, CRS Report for Congress RL31873,
January 31, 2008 (24-page pdf )
- "High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) and High Power Microwave (HPM) Devices: Threat Assessments," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL32544, March 26, 2008 (24-page pdf )
Nutella ... and guilt....
See this image from Mr. Toledano.
Mmmmmmmm, Nutella
- Nutella - from Wikipedia
- Super Simple Nutella Ice Cream, Chocolate & Zucchini, February 13, 2008
- What Nutella (and I) Can Teach You About Blog Marketing
And you thought your divorce was acidic....
A biochemist was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for killing her estranged husband by knocking him out and stuffing him into a vat of acid, possibly while he was still alive.
Larissa Schuster was convicted in December of murdering Timothy Schuster with the special circumstance that the murder was committed for financial gain. At the time of his death in July 2003, the Schusters were in the middle of a divorce after nearly 20 years of marriage.
"Chemist gets life for husband's acid vat murder," CNN, May 16, 2008
Football, er, soccer, and promotion
For the promotion-phobics, the Premiership is a gilded fake while the Championship represents authentic football. ‘In my years as a supporter I have seen seven relegations and six promotions’, recounts Watford fan Graham Smith. ‘That is what being a football fan is all about. It is about supporting your team through thick and thin. It is about suffering the bad times and enjoying the good times. That’s why I like being a fan of a team that basically belong in the Football League rather than the Premier League. It is real football.’
"Every team wants to be promoted, right? Wrong," by Duleep Allirajah, Spiked!, May 9, 2008 [emphasis added]
More
- GolTV
- Fox Soccer Channel
- Major League Soccer (MLS)
- NY Red Bulls
- Jersey Sky Blue
- United Soccer Leagues (USL)
- Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA)
- Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS)
- US Youth Soccer
"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn?"
In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.
Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.
Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," by Gary Wolf, Wired, April 21, 2008
More
- SuperMemo - Super Memory: Forget about forgetting
- "SuperMemo Helps You Remember Everything Before You Forget," lifehacker, April 22, 2008
- Introduction to "Memory" Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913), by Robert H. Wozniak
- SuperMemo Library
- SuperMemo and learning English
"How Roses Handle Water"
A team of chemists from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China figured out why tiny water droplets seem to get stuck to petals of red roses. Not unexpectantly, the mechanism, known as the Cassie impregnating wetting state, is a result of nanostructures ("hierarchical micropapillae" and "nanofolds") on the surface of petals.
"How Roses Handle Water," medGadget, April 29, 2008
Reminds us of the invention of Velcro by George de Mestral.
"Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks"
Hillary is minivans and American sedans, Barack is Range Rovers and Hondas. Hillary is cross-trainers with jeans, Barack is Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic. Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks. And their supporters are equally vocal, in different ways.
"Primary concern: Nasty fight between Obama, Clinton could blow it for Democrats," by Lisa van Dusen, Edmonton Sun, April 22, 2008
John McCain is Costco.
"McCain Knows Where to Vote Shop: Costco," Washington Whispers, April 18, 2008
Contemporary China-bashing
Since the military suppression of the anti-China protests in the Tibetan capital Lhasa last month, the focus on China’s treatment of its Tibetan population has intensified. But while it has been the West doing the focusing, the Beijing Olympics has provided the lens. Everything related to the games, as French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent threat to boycott the Olympics opening ceremony shows, has now become an opportunity for moral grandstanding, an opportunity to portray China as everything we in the West are not. The 31-mile journey of the Olympic torch, from Wembley in north-west London to Greenwich in the south-east, was to prove no exception.
Yesterday morning at the British Museum stage of the route -- one of the protest points for the campaign organisation Free Tibet -- the air was already thick with indignation.
"Grown-up politics goes up in flames: Yesterday’s public grappling with the Olympic torch shone a light on the self-satisfied, cartoonish nature of contemporary China-bashing." By Tim Black and Brendan O’Neill, spiked, April 7, 2008
The attacks on China’s boys-in-blue looks like history repeated as farce. In much of the coverage of the torch relay, commentators have talked about the ‘supine’ British government and the ‘cowardly’ Bush administration which are failing to stand up against the brutes from the East, while cheering the French protesters and the Australian government for taking the Chinese on. As in the past, the driving force behind this outbreak of China-bashing is a perception that the West is in political and social decline, and the East might take its opportunity to snuff out ‘our’ civilisation once and for all. That 15 men in tracksuits could give rise to such an hysterical, out-of-control, fin-de-siècle, prejudicial debate reveals so very much more about contemporary Western fear and irrationalism than it does about Chinese wickedness.
"The invasion of the robotic thugs: The attacks on the ‘horrible, ominous, retarded’ Chinese men guarding the Olympic flame are historical prejudice repeated as farce." By Brendan O’Neill, spiked, April 9, 2009
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is apologizing to those who were disappointed when the Olympic torch relay route was changed Wednesday. However, the mayor isn't apologizing for his decision.
Faced with thousands of anti-China protesters, San Francisco authorities pulled a last-minute switch during the torch relay yesterday. The late change rerouted the torch away from thousands who had crowded the city's waterfront to witness the flame's symbolic journey to the Beijing Games.
"San Francisco Officials Defend Torch Decision," KCBS, April 10, 2008
"Ribbon Culture"
In many respects, Ribbon Culture is an analysis of several apparently contradictory aspects of contemporary culture. The ribbon is, explains Moore, ‘both a kitsch fashion accessory, as well as an emblem that expresses empathy; it is a symbol that represents awareness, yet requires no knowledge of a cause; it appears to signal concern for others, but in fact prioritises self-expression’.
. . .
It is the commercialisation of causes, which both empties them of all content and transmits messages that are negative and misleading, that Moore sees as problematic. In seeking to understand why the individuals she interviewed wear the ribbons or wristbands that they do, Moore’s account stands out through her refusal to pander to the rhetoric of ribbon culture, which emphasises ‘awareness’, ‘caring’ and engagement with a cause. In reality, these positive rhetorical sentiments mask an anxious, self-obsessed, depoliticised culture.
"The relentless rise of the ribbons," by Jennie Bristow, a review of "Ribbon Culture" by Sarah Moore, spiked, March 2008
2008 Congressional Pig Book
The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW's annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2008 Pig Book identified 11,610 projects at a cost of $17.2 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2008. A "pork" project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition.
Citizens Against Government Waste
A pork-barrel project is a line-item in an appropriations or authorization bill that designates funds for a specific purpose in circumvention of the normal procedures for budget review. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition:
- Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
- Not specifically authorized;
- Not competitively awarded;
- Not requested by the President;
- Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
- Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
- Serves only a local or special interest.
The pork label is not a subjective judgment of a project’s merit. Rather, it refers to lapses in the procedures erected by Congress to review and consider the wise expenditure of taxpayer dollars.
"All About Pork: The Abuse of Earmarks and the Needed Reforms," by Tom Finnigan, Citizens Against Government Waste, March 7, 2007
Also see CAGW's blog, The Swine Line.
For links to selected CRS Reports, legislation and articles on earmarks, see TheCapitol.Net's Federal Budget Links and Research Tools. Also see our blog posts about earmarks and OMB's Earmarks database.
Bubbles: Housing and the next bubble
"In the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel."Prediction 16, "The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century," by Scott Adams (1998).
A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression.
. . .
Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion.
. . .
There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom--under the rubric “Web 2.0”--is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.
. . .
The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver “energy security.” When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.
There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded. Wired magazine, returning to its roots in boosterism, put ethanol on the cover of its October 2007 issue, advising its readers to forget oil; NBC had a “Green Week” in November 2007, with themed shows beating away at an ecological message and Al Gore making a guest appearance on the sitcom 30 Rock. Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which assisted at the births of Amazon.com and Google, to oversee the “climate change solutions group,” thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize–winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob. Other ventures--Lazard Capital Markets, Generation Investment Management, Nth Power, EnerTech Capital, and Battery Ventures--are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to “energy management” software, and so on.
"The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash," by Eric Janszen, Harper's, February 2008 (footnotes omitted)
More
- Web 2.0 - wikipedia
- "Oil Price Bubble? Supply is up, demand is down, yet the price is soaring. Here's why." By Ronald Bailey, reasononline, March 12, 2008
- "Those who do not know history..." by Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution, March 11, 2008
- "The Energy Future: Scenarios," by Arnold Kling, TCS Daily, March 6, 2008
- "Was there a Housing Bubble?" by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, February 13, 2008
- "Leaks in the alternative-energy bubble," by Adam Lashinsky, Fortune, January 3, 2008
- "Bubble Energy?" by Mark Mills, Forbes, October 2007
- "Venture Capital Rushes Into Alternative Energy," by Matthew Wald, The New York Times, April 30, 2007
- "The Dot-Com Energy Boost," by Daniel Gross, The Washington Post, July 23, 2006
- "Bubble Schmubble," by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution, June 26, 2005
Posted March 13, 2008 06:37 AM · Permalink
· Caught Our Eye
, Caution
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Night owl or morning person? Can't sleep?
Night owls are more creative, more flexible and more caffeinated, while morning people are healthier, more conscientious and more emotionally stable, studies have found. So, with the help of several experts, our columnist -- and longtime night owl -- has been working to reset her biological clock.
"Learning to Live Like an Early Bird," by Melinda Beck, The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2008
More
- Sleep deprivation - Wikipedia
- National Sleep Foundation
- "Sleep Habits: More Important Than You Think: Chronic Sleep Deprivation May Harm Health," by Michael J. Breus, WebMD
- "How to Become an Early Riser," by Steve Pavlina, May 23, 2005
- "How to Become an Early Riser," from eConsultant
- "How I Became an Early Riser," from zenhabits, January 31, 2007
Chinese Restaurants in America
Chef's Ma Paul Tofu (Wu Liang Ye Restaurant, NYC)
What most Americans know as Chinese food would be more properly termed American Chinese food, a category that includes chop suey and lemon chicken, dishes born in the U.S. Given, as Lee points out, that there are about 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., "more than the number of McDonald's, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined," Chinese food might be our national cuisine. "Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," she writes. "But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?"
Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous, usually taking the form of urban carryout shops and suburban buffets. But how did these restaurants flourish across the American landscape? For the most part they are independently run, so how is it they seem to share similar characteristics, such as gigantic menus filled with egg rolls, garish red sweet and sour sauce, and General Tso's chicken?
Each chapter answers these questions and more, examining soy sauce, the distinctive shape of takeout boxes favored by Chinese restaurants, and fortune cookies, which Lee discovers are Japanese in origin.
"West eats East: A fact-filled look at Chinese food, which just might be America's national cuisine," by Bich Minh Nguyen, ChicagoTribune.com, March 1, 2008
More
- Author's blog: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
- Chinese Restaurants on Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide
- Chinese Restaurants on A Guy in New York
- "Review: 'The Fortune Cookie Chronicles'," by Heller McAlpin, Special to Newsday, March 2, 2008
- "Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie," by Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, January 16, 2008
Posted March 3, 2008 08:47 AM · Permalink
· Caught Our Eye
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, Food Blogs
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Campus rape
The campus rape industry’s central tenet is that one-quarter of all college girls will be raped or be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years (completed rapes outnumbering attempted rapes by a ratio of about three to two). The girls’ assailants are not terrifying strangers grabbing them in dark alleys but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.
. . .
If the one-in-four statistic is correct--it is sometimes modified to “one-in-five to one-in-four”--campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants--a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency--Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely. The nation’s nearly 10 million female undergrads would need to take the most stringent safety precautions. Certainly, they would have to alter their sexual behavior radically to avoid falling prey to the rape epidemic.
. . .
University of Virginia students, for example, have at least three different procedural channels open to them following carnal knowledge: they may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board; they can request a “Structured Meeting” with the Office of the Dean of Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary mediation. The Structured Meetings are presided over by the chair of the Sexual Assault Board, with assistance from another board member or senior staff of the Office of the Dean of Students. The Structured Meeting, according to the university, is an “opportunity for the complainant to confront the accused and communicate their feelings and perceptions regarding the incident, the impact of the incident and their wishes and expectations regarding protection in the future.” Mediation, on the other hand, “allows both you and the accused to discuss your respective understandings of the assault with the guidance of a trained professional,” says the school’s sexual-assault center.
Rarely have primal lust and carousing been more weirdly paired with their opposites. Out in the real world, people who regret a sexual coupling must work it out on their own; no counterpart exists outside academia for this superstructure of hearings, mediations, and negotiated settlements. If you’ve actually been raped, you go to criminal court--but the overwhelming majority of campus “rape” cases that take up administration time and resources would get thrown out of court in a twinkling, which is why they’re almost never prosecuted. Indeed, if the campus rape industry really believes that these hookup encounters are rape, it is unconscionable to leave them to flimsy academic procedures. “Universities are equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors. “Sexual-assault charges, if true, are so serious as to belong only in the criminal system.”
"The Campus Rape Myth: The reality: bogus statistics, feminist victimology, and university-approved sex toys," by Heather MacDonald, City Journal, Winter 2008
See also "How Crime in the United States Is Measured," by Nathan James and Logan Rishard Council, CRS Report for Congress, RL34309, January 3, 2008 (68-page pdf )
The Most Spoiled Girl In The World?
Hmmmmm....
Who will the D & R nominees be?
See intrade for folks betting money on the outcome.
And after the election, for analysis of what it means in Congress, see TheCapitol.Net's Capitol Hill Workshop: 2008 Election.
More
- Campaign Finance Information Center - from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting.
- Campaigns & Elections magazine
- opensecrets.org - show me the money
- CQ Money Line - show me the money
- Iowa Electronic Markets - includes a political section - "real-money futures markets in which contract payoffs depend on economic and political events such as elections. These markets are operated by faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business"
- Politics1
- PollingReport.com
May your worst enemy....
Moral: May your worst enemy have a lawsuit in which he knows he is right.
"The Perfect Case," by Jacob Stein, The Washington Lawyer, February 2008
Legal Spectator & More, by Jacob Stein
Detroit Public Schools Book Depository
Sweet Juniper’s photos show the ruins of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository.
"Abandoned hope," Joanne Jacobs, January 21, 2008
"It will rise from the ashes," Sweet Juniper! November 26, 2007
"Rotting textbook warehouse in Detroit," boingboing, January 19, 2007
flickr photos: sweet juniper, flickr search
"Humanity, thou art sick"
"In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill."
So writes the Chicago-based research professor, Christopher Lane, in his fascinating new book Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness. ‘Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’, Lane continues.
Lane has taken shyness as a test case to show how society is being overdiagnosed and overmedicated. He has charted - in intricate detail - the route by which the psychiatric profession came to give credence to the labelling of everyday emotions as ‘disorders’, a situation that has resulted in more and more people being deemed to be mentally ill.
"Humanity, thou art sick: Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?" a review by Helene Guldberg of "Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness," by Christopher Lane, in spiked, December 2007
"People are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them"
In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can't undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn't undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds.
Now up until this point I had always believed that love causes marriage. But these experiments suggested to me that marriage could also cause love. If you take data seriously you act on it, so when these results came in I went home and proposed to the woman I was living with. She said yes, and it turned out that the data were right: I love my wife more than I loved my girlfriend.
"The Benefit of Being Able to Change My Mind," by Daniel Gilbert, Edge World Question Center, 2008
Who Pays Federal Taxes?
Source: Marginal Revolution, December 18, 2007; "Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005," CBO, December 2007 (8-page pdf
)CRS Reports
- "Real Earnings and the Distribution of Earnings, 1995-2005," RL33835, January 24, 2007
- "Income Inequality and the U.S. Tax System," RL34155, September 04, 2007
- "Major Tax Issues in the 110th Congress," RL33768, January 10, 2007
- "The Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007: An Overview," RL34249, November 13, 2007
- "Corporate Tax Reform: Issues for Congress," RL34229, October 31, 2007
- "Tax Gap and Tax Enforcement," RL33882, February 16, 2007
- "Modifying the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT): Revenue Costs and Potential Revenue Offsets," RL33899, March 06, 2007
- "Estate and Gift Tax Revenues: Past and Projected," RL34142, August 24, 2007
- "Tax Benefits for Health Insurance and Expenses: Overview of Current Law and Legislation," RL33505, July 20, 2007
- "Estate Taxes and Family Businesses: Economic Issues," RL33070, January 26, 2007
- "Federal Income Taxation of Indian Tribes and Members," RL34220, October 26, 2007
When your Karate instructor gets beat up by an interior decorator....
I'm not in the least bit shocked that the CIA would try to destroy the tapes of an interrogation. It's a spy agency for God's sake, not an accounting firm. The whole foundation of the CIA is based on secrecy and covert operations, not transparency and accountability. Yet I too have to confess to being shocked by this revelation. Why? Well, apparently our top spy agency is too inept to handle even a simple cover up operation. This is a very despairing revelation.
It's sort of like finding out that your Karate instructor was beaten up by an interior decorator.
"What is the CIA doing?" Ernie the Attorney, December 7, 2007
China
It is Hong Kong’s good fortune to possess, in addition to its corporatist elite, a vibrant civil society, the rule of law, and a free press; China has no such safety valves for the discontent of its people, no resilience in its politics. The echo chamber of today’s Chinese regime--with its slogans and show trials, its claims of expertise and openness, its pretense of oversight and accountability--cannot do the work of pluralist democracy. As James Madison knew, an extended republic, even a “people’s” republic, requires institutional checks and balances if it is not to devolve into a tyranny--or to remain one.
"My Short March Through China," by Gary Rosen, Commentary, December 2007
"Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea"
Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years--conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers--when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.
. . .
The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place--its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully neutered, its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only the transmissions of the North Korean state. There is no access to the Internet except for a tiny, select few. Cell phones are confiscated from visitors upon arrival, though the very senior elite are believed to possess and use them. The newspapers are comically constipated accounts of speeches by the Dear Leader, long-ago angling contests, and uninteresting visits by junior dignitaries from countries ruled by dubious governments, which you would struggle to find on a map.
It may well be even worse than it looks. Pyongyang is a show city, inhabited by a favored layer of privileged and chosen people, who know that misbehavior of any kind could lead to exile to places we cannot even imagine. I have seen the miserable coal towns of China, which are open to visit