Month: April 2009

Something my husband might relate to:

(Hat tip: Neato.)

This has to be one of the weirdest and least defensible policy changes imaginable. Mein Kampf is fine. Jackie Collins is fine. But books about gay subjects are now "adult" on Amazon and so not included on best seller lists or rankings. Sure enough, "Virtually Normal" and "Love Undetectable" have been de-listed and stripped of customer sales rankings. Jackie Collins' "Married Lovers" hasn't. My books contain discussions of Aquinas and Freud and Foucault and Burke. I'm puzzled as to why those authors are more "adult" than Collins' adulterous couplings.

Britain's Kew Gardens are saving as many of the world's endangered seeds as possible – that's a fireweed above. They now have 30,000 species, ten percent of the total. A stunning slide-show is here. Happy Easter one more time.

Here's one first-hand account one such happening:

For some it was wildly excessive and confusing tax laws. Others were there out of concern for their children and grandchildren. Some were there because they’re maddened that the same glorious policies that have made Detroit look like Bangladesh after a garbage haulers strike are being introduced on a national level, a few were upset because the same people who created these massive problems are charged with fixing them, others don’t want their country sold out to some global entity, and one man I saw had a sign that said “‘Government job’ is a contradiction in terms.” Many were there for the reason of “all of the above.”

This is, of course, a dog's breakfast. And it does indeed recall the loony left marches and protests of the recent past. End the War! But which one? And how? I guess one theme is that government should have no proactive role in a recession like the one we're grappling with. But as those governors trying to refuse stimulus money will attest, this is not exactly a popular meme right now.

Here's a suggestion that will fall on ears with hands clasped tightly around them: why not just make them tax simplification rallies?

That's something that appeals beyond a Palin base; most of us feel angry about it at this time of year; it can rail against the rich and the special interests for carving out privileges that hurt everyone else; and it's a dagger at the heart of the lobbying industry.

No takers? One senses that this is essentially a counter-cultural protest event – against the result of the last election (with some muted disgruntlement with the eight years that preceded it). And it suggests that the right is returning to its 1950s roots – kooks, cranks, disaffected and paranoid gun-nuts, born-again culture-warriors, Birchers, book-burners, and black helicpoter worriers.

Oh, well. I told you it would get worse before it gets better.

Unquestionably great news, with a few pirates dead to boot. But it does seem important to me that we not go overboard, so to speak, in hyping these incidents. In the grand scheme of things, this is not the most pressing national security issue, and the hyper-ventilating about it is a form of adolescent posturing. Somalia's chaotic state means more of these incidents will happen; and we need to get a grip when they do.

This is a little to close to reality:

Scott Sumner wants one:

We need a subsidized prediction market in futures contracts based on global average temperatures and atmospheric CO2-equivalent levels—with contracts having 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 year maturities.  (Aaron Jackson and I did a paper on this.)

The paper Sumner appears to be talking about, "Using Prediction Markets to Guide Global Warming Policy," can be downloaded from Aaron Jackson's website. The authors address an obvious problem with the idea:

One obvious concern is that powerful special interests that have an economic exposure to climate policy might try to corner the market, by buying or selling massive quantities of global temperature futures, as a way of affecting the equilibrium price of these contracts.  Evidence from the field, and from experiments by Hanson (2006b) and Hanson, Oprea, and Porter (2006), suggest manipulation in prediction markets is difficult at best. Even so, policymakers may still find it desirable to limit trading by companies with an obvious financial stake in global warming policy, and also limit the exposure of any individual trader.

From his interview with uber-Republican Christianist Hugh Hewitt:

Right now, we are in a stage here in America where we’re going to decide a number of major factors. One of them is will America return to the historic roots, Christian roots, that are foundational for every one of our institutions. Or will we go the way of Europe, and go secular. The bottom line is that secularism doesn’t last, because no faith will always be filled by something else, and so that’s why Islam is making strong inroads into Europe, because faith of any kind will always beat no faith.

But the Christianists are pissed that he isn't publicly attacking marriage equality with more force. I note merely Warren's observation about the new atheists:

Well, first place, they’re making a ton of money, okay?

Deirdre Fernand tries to understand why we enjoy extreme sports:

Social anthropologists tend to see extreme sports as rites of passage. As Mark van Vuyt, professor of psychology at the University of Kent, says: “In evolutionary terms it pays for young males to compete in excessive risk-taking. If they thought something was too risky and didn’t do it, they wouldn’t distinguish themselves and wouldn’t get female attention.”

In some societies, young men are sent off to kill a lion or spend weeks alone in the desert as an initiation rite. In the 1950s, David Attenborough brought back footage of the land divers of Vanuatu, who jump from tall wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles to prove their manhood: bungee jumpers, essentially.

So much for young men. But where are the women? Playing it relatively safe, psychometric testing has shown. “Though individuals vary, few women seek out risks,” Mark van Vuyt says. “Their role has been to protect children and they err on the side of caution.” Perhaps risk-taking really is all about testosterone and atavism. As the science writer William Allman once wrote: “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”

Happy Easter: