Month: April 2011

A reader writes:

Kay Steiger seems to have forgotten, or not known, about the film The Miracle Worker, based on an award winning play based on Helen Keller's memoirs. It was released in 1962 and starred Patty Duke as Keller, Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan, and was directed by Arthur Penn. It was nominated for several Oscars and won best supporting actress for Duke and actress for Bancroft. A very mainstream Hollywood movie.

Another adds:

The Miracle Worker was remade for TV in 1979. There was also a made-for-TV sequel called The Miracle Continues, which was released in 1984, about Keller's college years and early adult life. In 2000, Disney produced yet another re-make. And last year the story was revived on Broadway.

Another:

Apparently Kay Steiger forgot about The Miracle Worker, Johnny Belinda, Nell, Children of A Lesser God, In the Company of Men (kind of), Benny and Joon, Frances, Frida, Girl Interrupted, and many others. I'm all for equality in film, but claiming discrimination where none exists is just silly.

Catherine Rampell notes a Gallup poll that found only 6 percent of households making over $250,000 think their taxes are too low but 30 percent of that same group thinks "upper-income" people pay too little in taxes. She blames "this disconnect on the fact that upper-income people don’t realize they’re upper income." Andrew Gelman agrees:

There's lots of evidence that people don't have a good feeling for population statistics–one of my favorite examples is a Washington Post survey from 1995 that found that "Most whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans said the black population, which is about 12 percent, was twice that size." They similarly way overestimated the percentage of Hispanics and Asians in the country. Whites overestimated the proportion of minorities, and minorities overestimated the proportion of minorities too. Given that people haven't even learned these simple percentages, it's not shocking that they can't come to grips with something more complicated such as an income distribution.

Passengers sit on a bus at a bus terminal in Quezon City, east of Manila on April 20, 2011. Many Filipinos spend the Holy Week leading up to Easter in their respective home provinces. The Philippines is Asia's bastion of Catholicism and will observe the Holy Week traditions in the run up to Easter, events including gruesome mock-crucifixions where participants are really nailed to the cross to recall Jesus' sufferings. By Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

I am a short guy myself, but I can't say it's ever been an issue for me. I grew up in France, where arguably people are somewhat shorter on average than in America.  However, this being the US of A, there is a medical diagnosis and a prescription drug for short people. I encountered that when talking to my toddler son's pediatrician. The doctor noticed that my son was comfortably sitting at the bottom of the growth chart and that he would most likely end up a measly 5'5'' (a little more than my wife and myself). He went on to say that this could qualify as "idiopathic short stature syndrom." And that we could potentially get our son on HGH (actually, it's called rGH I think – see here) if we felt that his projected short height could affect his self-confidence and ultimately, his mental health.

The doctor kindly added that from an evolutionary point of view, the premium was on brains anyway, so we shouldn't really consider treating our son's ISS condition unless he felt strongly about it. (The little guy is not even three, by the way.) My own experience and my upbringing led me to dismiss the doctor's suggestion as well as the medicalization of something that is, after all, a part of who I am.

On the other hand, I realized that back when I was 13 or 14, I would have jumped at the opportunity to hack my heredity and sneak in an additional 2-3 inches. The fact that I wasn't miserable or didn't feel the sting of not being of average height was more a result of my own social strategies and overall good nature. I can't be sure that my son will be as oblivious or as full of himself as I ever was. So if I can help remove some of the awkwardness …

I'm actually considering the growth hormone treatment for him, at some point later in his life. It is a heavy regimen, involving daily subcutaneous injections, a bit like shooting insulin everyday. While my wife is appalled, I tend to take a more benign view of the whole thing. If you can treat it, why not do it? I guess I've become completely American in that respect.

Another writes:

There are a plethora of topics you cover that I enjoy following and occasionally contributing to (one of these days I'll submit my own Cannabis Closet piece), but the bias against short men is one that hits home for me. On a good day I stand 5'2". I was treated with steroids as a child because I was "abnormal". It didn't seem to matter that my parents were both short, that my mother stood 5" even; there was a sense of urgency about getting me to a more normal height. At one point, my father even explored a suit against the U.S. government for exposure to Agent Orange during his time refueling helicopters in Vietnam, trying to claim my height resulted from exposure. I haven't grown more than 2" since I was twelve years old and I blame the steroids.

Internet porn still has some competition:

[O]ver the past 13 years, a little-known Philadelphia company called PrimeTel Communications has quietly gained control over nearly a quarter of all the 1-800 numbers in the U.S. and Canada, often by grabbing them the moment they are relinquished by previous users. As of March, it administered more 800 numbers that any other company, including Verizon and AT&T. And many, if not most, of those 1.7 million numbers appear to be used for one thing: redirecting callers to a phone-sex service.

“I guess enough people go for it that it makes business sense,” said Aelea Christofferson, president of ATL Communications, another company that specializes in toll-free services. Capturing callers who have reached the wrong number — whether because they punched an incorrect digit or dialed a number without realizing it had changed hands — is a “big new industry,” she said.

Unlike Conor and Dish readers, Josh Green isn’t a coffee-shop writer:

In my early freelance days, I tended bar with an aspiring screenwriter who’d been counseled by an actual, successful screenwriter to force himself to write in a noisy bar–because if you can train yourself to write with loud music and drunk people around, you can write anywhere.

That struck me, at the time, as a brilliant insight. We worked in a loud, cheesy college bar, and as bars go, the noise/commotion level doesn’t get any higher than at cheesy college bars. So this briefly struck me an added advantage, a stroke of good fortune. Guess what? It didn’t work. I mostly sat there like a moron with laptop and developed a pounding headache. The noise made it impossible to concentrate. So did the drunk people who stumbled up and asked, not unreasonably, what the hell I was doing. I stuck it out for an hour the first night. The second night, I lasted five minutes and quit. I don’t recommend it.

He recommends various ear-plug strategies. My ex, a cognitive psychologist, once told me of a something called the “cocktail party” effect. Those most likely to overhear their name in a cluster of people adjacent to the cluster they were talking to revealed lower levels of intelligence. The ability to block out surrounding noise when you need to concentrate is highly correlated with “g”.

Make of that what you will.

Here's their explanation for refusing to run his latest column:

"We did pass on a submission by Geoffrey Dunn about Trig, as it ran counter to our policy against conspiracy theories," Huffington Post spokesman Mario Ruiz confirmed in an email.

But the column says that Palin's version is more damning than any possible conspiracy theory. In fact, that's the column's point. And no conspiracy theory is proposed by the column – just a factual account of how the author's attempts to debunk such theories kept running aground. But even this cannot get past the HuffPo thought-police.

Now I finally know where the HuffPo ends and the Internet begins. Meanwhile Ben Smith argues against Palin's release of a birth certificate because he knows in advance that this would not stop the conspiracy theorists.

For the record, I have simply asked for some medical records establishing maternity since the day I found out about the weirdnesses of the story. If provided, I would regard the question as closed as the Obama birther certificate question. I tried to clear this up privately with the McCain campaign, but they had no clue either. The difference between the two cases, as Ben acknowledges, is that one public figure has provided easily available definitive evidence to end the debate; the other says she has – but hasn't.

And the MSM, including the HuffPo, takes the position that such evidence need not be provided and shouldn't be asked for. The media's job is to accept at face value the stories public figures tell about their lives. Anything else is impertinence.

Megan makes an argument about what that would likely mean by 2021, if we are to stabilize and begin reducing the debt: an increase in most people's income tax of around a third. I notice that, according to Goldman Sachs' analysis, none of the current debt-reduction plans do as well as Bowles-Simpson:

Joel Wing puts the report in context:

A new article in the Independent about British energy companies lobbying Tony Blair’s government to allow them access to Iraq’s petroleum after the invasion only added to this popular idea. What’s not asked is what actually happened in Iraq after the invasion to see whether foreign companies snatched up the country’s resources or not. In fact, eight years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, petroleum remains a state-run rather than private business. …Baghdad did not sign a foreign oil deal until 2008. That and the following ones offered in 2009 greatly favored the government rather than the companies, and all of the deals were joint ventures. 

Igor Volsky filed this report from a Tax Day Tea Party in New Hampshire:

I asked attendees how the state’s 2009 same-sex marriage law has affected the state or their private lives. New Hampshire Republicans have promised to repeal the law next year and conservatives in the state have promised to turn the marriage issue into a litmus test for potential 2012 presidential contenders. But at Friday’s event, not a single Tea Party activist told me that expanding marriage to gays and lesbians has undermined their relationships or in any way changed the state.

In Iowa? That doesn't matter so much.