Month: September 2011

The perils of exposing Sarah Palin. It's refreshing to hear a foreigner describe the descent of the GOP into anti-Enlightenment post-modern religion.

Julian Sanchez resents the wording in this poll on interracial marriage:

[T]he framing still embeds the assumption that “marriages between blacks and whites,” a term that encompasses about half a million distinct relationships in the United States, constitutes some kind of useful conceptual class, toward which people might coherently be expected to have a gestalt “pro” or “con” attitude. Imagine someone asked you whether you approved or disapproved of marriages between people with surnames whose initial letters fell in different halves of the alphabet. Would you say “approve,” or just give them a funny look? Or, for that matter, suppose you’re asked whether you approve of “relationships,” period. Most of us could only answer: “What do you mean? Which ones?”

I've been fascinated by the stuff ever since I went on testosterone replacement therapy to correct my own HIV-related testosterone plummet. I wrote a long essay, The He Hormone, which was included in that year's anthology of Best American Science Writing. And one of the things you learn about it is not just its strength but its nuance. Clearly, our evolution made testosterone both necessary and dangerous. And so it's not a big surprise that evolution gave an advantage to those who had high testosterone when getting laid or beating back male rivals and low testosterone when taking care of kids. Men are not intrinsically philandering goats (though we can sometimes give that impression). In fact, testosterone interacts with the body and mind just as the body and mind can react back to testosterone. It's a very complicated, subtle and dynamic feedback loop. From a new study:

The study, experts say, suggests that men’s bodies evolved hormonal systems that helped them commit to their families once children were born. It also suggests that men’s behavior can affect hormonal signals their bodies send, not just that hormones influence behavior. And, experts say, it underscores that mothers were meant to have child care help.

“This is part of the guy being invested in the marriage,” said Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who also was not involved in the study. Lower testosterone, she said, is the father’s way of saying, “ ‘I’m here, I’m not looking around, I’m really toning things down so I can have good relationships.’ What’s great about this study is it lays it on the table that more is not always better. Faster, bigger, stronger — no, not always.”

This just in: changing diapers does not make you horny. Marriage with kids, whatever else it's about, is not primarily about sex. A little more candor about that might help deal with delusional expectations.

Something worth noting:

Dr. Jon Koomey and his colleagues recently completed a study showing that energy consumption for computing is improving just as fast as processing power.

Computers will soon be able to do anything using almost no energy.

Jamie Fuller draws the analogy:

The reason Obama beat Clinton in 2008 is because independent and moderate voters — the bread and butter of general elections — are mostly irrelevant in primary elections where passionate partisans drive decision-making. Obama looked like the best candidate to liberal Democrats in 2008—in part because of his long-standing opposition to the Iraq War—and those are the voters who matter most in the primaries for both parties. The same fundamentals are working to push Perry to the forefront now. Tea Partiers —the most vocal contributors in the primaries—find the ‘ponzi scheme’ Perry more attractive than his more moderate rival, just as Clinton couldn’t compete with the passionate rhetoric that liberals craved, and Obama offered, after eight years of Bush.

Douthat instead compares Perry to Howard Dean. Here's hoping.

Suzy Khimm plucks five charts out of today's Census report. She captions:

The average incomes of all income brackets have all sunk over the course of the recession, but the downturn dealt more of a blow to the middle-class and the poor. In 2010, the top 10 percent of wage-earners made as much as they did in 2002. By contrast, the 50th percentile hasn’t earned this little since 1996, and the bottom 10 percent since 1994. The last decade has set everyone back, but the richest Americans have been better protected than others. That being said, don’t blame the recession for the inequality gap itself: that trend started, during the mid- to late-1990s.

"We’re the party of life…We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives," – Rick Perry, on the cheers at letting the uninsured die.

Noah Kristula-Green problematizes the conservative affinity for Chile's free-market approach to social security because "Chile’s privatized social security system makes use of a mandate to purchase private insurance in a regulated market, much like the tyrannical Romneycare and Obamacare": 

[GOP] politicians and activists will be content to hold two completely contradictory ideas in their heads: mandating individuals to purchase private health insurance is an unconstitutional threat to the Republic, while a system that mandates individuals to purchase a plan from a private pension fund is a shining beacon of liberty that we should emulate. 

She enters Jenny McCarthy territory:

Ed Morrissey fights Bachmann's misinformation:

The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix.  Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs.  The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare. The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases.

Weigel:

The fact that it's Bachmann embracing this — Bachmann, who has a habit of endorsing or "just asking questions" about dark theories that she's overheard — is totally unsurprising.

Noah Millman ponders our near fatal national reaction to 9/11:

The great intellectual victors in the immediate post-9-11 period were the people who could imbue it with meaning. To do that required a plausible explanation and the confidence to advance it. Nobody would have that confidence without the explanation being pre-packaged, ready to be deployed in any available circumstances. In other words, the very fact that there was so little we knew, and that what there was to know wasn’t very satisfying in terms of imparting meaning to events, very naturally empowered those whose views didn’t depend on knowledge. That’s how we wound up in Iraq.

The advocates of war did not begin advocating for war on 9-11 – “finishing the job” in Iraq had been on the agenda for the entire decade prior. Nor did they need to prove any connection to the 9-11 attacks. We wound up in war in Iraq, in a very real sense, because “finishing the job” in Iraq imparted an appealing meaning to the terrorist attacks. And opposing the war felt like it tore the meaning off that terrible day, leaving its empty horror naked before us. That’s how it felt to me, at the time, when I think back.

Me too. And the crucial element was the flooding of our frontal cortexes with fear that made prudent close to impossible. And I am ashamed I fell right for it.