Month: August 2011

David Frum sees through it:

Zac Morgan has aptly termed Perry the “Teastablishment candidate.” Perry’s whole strategy relies systematically on having things both ways. Thus far, Perry has succeeded better at his mission than Romney. But the fact that Perry is better at pandering than Romney should not obscure attention to the fact that he is indeed engaged in pandering at least to one constituency, and more likely to both.

Conor Friedersdorf notes that Perry has abandoned another federalist position and is no longer willing to leave abortion to the states.

James Poulos predicts that "practical libertarianism" will eventually dominate the GOP:

Some fear that libertarianism is too theoretically brittle and politically uncompromising to form the foundation of a new Republican consensus. But whatever your judgment of libertarianism in its ideologically pure form, the triumph of practical libertarianism over the Republican Party is as necessary as it is inevitable.

Sunita Puri speaks with American doctors who have trudged through the ethical minefield of sex selection:

Dr. Daniels, based in Northern California, felt uncomfortable when a middle-aged, white patient of his wanted a daughter "for the pink and the malls," as he told me. "She seemed to think of this kid as a mail-order product." But what if this girl ended up being a tomboy, he wondered—or gay? How would this woman treat her child then?

Other doctors at his practice insisted that he "keep his own beliefs out of it." Daniels ended up referring this case to one of those colleagues and has since stopped offering sex selection services completely. Parents pursuing it may presume a child will turn out a certain way based solely on its gender, with poorly understood consequences for the child, mother, and family if the child doesn't. A shortage of women, Daniels believes, is not the only harm sex selection may cause. It's just what has gotten the most attention.

But in fact, as Hanna Rosin emphasized in her "End of Men" cover story last year, sex selection in the US has trended towards a preference for females:

In the ’90s, when [pioneer biologist Ronald] Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his [sex selection] process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.

Recent Dish coverage of sex selection here, here, here and here.

(Photo from a series by Sacha Goldberger, who captured subjects after and before jogging)

David Gelles investigates the algorithm behind Match.com, which distinguishes "expressed ideals" from "actual desires" to account for human dissonance:

For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says [Amarnath] Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

Reihan observes:

But of course conservatives are more likely to be men than liberals, and men as a general rule will, ahem, entertain the idea of entering into a romantic relationship with a, um, wider range of movement-enabled beings than women.

Translation: If her boobs are big enough, who cares if she's a commie? He also analyzes a paper by Razib Khan that found that "Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males." Another finding:

We also consider the effect of early exposure to other races. We ?nd marginally signi?cant evidence that those subjects that grew up in a ZIP code with a larger fraction of inhabitants of a particular race are less willing to date someone from this racial group. In other words, familiarity can decrease tolerance.

Nick Paumgarten, in his recent article centering on OK Cupid, also explores the algorithms of unstated preferences.

Benjamin H. Friedman finds fewer cuts than meets the eye:

The White House claims that the security caps will generate $350 billion in savings from base (non-war) defense spending over ten years. That number, contained in a White House press release and repeated in countless media reports, is a PR invention.

It replaces the also phony $400 billion in defense cuts that the President recently proposed over twelve years. The administration produced the $350 billion figure, I’m told, by projecting security spending at the capped level across the decade, even after the caps expire, and counting as savings the difference between that spending trajectory and CBO projections, which assume growth above inflation. Then they assigned most of the savings to defense. The total is nonsense because the bill neither holds down security spending after two years nor offers any basis to assign the Pentagon a portion of those imaginary savings.

People pinball:

Alex Massie finds little reason to believe it is:

There does not seem to be much evidence showing that states that use capital punishment have lower murder rates than those that don't. On the contrary, in America states that still execute prisoners tend to have higher murder rates than those that do not. (Evidently this does not suggest that abolishing capital punishment lowers murder either. There seems little causation at play here.) Texas has executed nearly five hundred people since 1976 but its murder rate remains much the same as California's where, despite a large population on death row, few executions have actually been carried out in recent years.)

A reader writes:

You were fighting, until recently, a disease that had a 100% mortality rate.  It was 100% lethal.  Yet you are terrified of this small, insignificant little person.  While I understand your fear of her getting her hands on “the bomb”, or the economy, or any other number of things, she’ll never get that chance.  She’s a grifter, relax. Her mission is to relieve her fellow Americans of their coin. The video above is my re-interpretation of Palin and Newt having dinner …

Grifter or delusional maniac? A bit of both, surely. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we?

A reader writes:

It may be hard to imagine, even as far into the rabbit hole as she's already fallen, but I believe the time will come soon when we hear "Sarah Palin made another controversial statement today" and we say "who?"

She's unavoidable. She's in your face.  She's on everyone's mind. So was Dennis Rodman.

We can dream, can't we? But we'll know soon enough. The minute she says she's not running for president, the spotlight switches off. She becomes a punch-line. Which is why I fear she'll run. That – and her belief that God has called her for "such a time as this."

Node, Wyoming, 7 pm