Month: November 2011

Douthat wants specifics:

[F]or a Republican Party that’s still trying to rebuild credibility after the profound repudiation it received in 2006 and 2008, campaigning on platitudes and ideological cliches is ultimately more dangerous than taking the plunge into substance. If you don’t tell your primary voters what you really hope to do, you risk laying the groundwork for cries of 'betrayal' and intra-party civil wars once you start to govern. At the same time, if you don’t present general election voters with an agenda that actually addresses their concerns, you risk never getting the chance to govern at all.

Ross goes a little overboard in discerning real ferment among the conservative policy class – did he read Arthur Brooks' latest? – but that's understandable credentializing before telling the truth. And the truth on offer from today's GOP candidates, as gleaned from the debates, can sadly be reduced to this:

Romney has halfway embraced a plausible blueprint for Medicare reform; Jon Huntsman’s proposal for shrinking too-big-too-fail banks deserves some notice; and Rick Santorum has at least been willing to acknowledge that America might have a social mobility problem.

Given the tectonic shifts in the world this last decade, this is meager gruel.

Thomas Foster recounts the history of "In God We Trust":

Only the motto "E Pluribus Unum" ("from many, one") survived the committee in which Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin had served. All had agreed on that motto from the beginning. The current motto, "In God We Trust," was developed by a later generation. It was used on some coinage at the height of religious fervor during the upheaval of the Civil War. It was made the official national motto in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, to signal opposition to the feared secularizing ideology of communism.

In other words, "In God We Trust" is a legacy of founders, but not the founders of the nation. As the official national motto, it is a legacy of the founders of modern American conservatism—a legacy reaffirmed by the current Congress.

Dishheads already know, but confirmation of our pooled resources is always helpful. Barry Ritholtz has a beaut. Among the more salient pushbacks against Mayor Bloomberg's blatant lie that government forced banks to loan to risky clients, the following:

A also cause a boom in Spain, Ireland and Australia? How can we explain the boom occurring in countries that do not have a tax deduction for mortgage interest or government-sponsored enterprises? And why, after nearly a century of mortgage interest deduction in the United States, did it suddenly cause a crisis?

These questions show why proximity and statistical validity are so important. Let’s get more specific.The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is a favorite boogeyman for some, despite the numbers that so easily disprove it as a cause.It is a statistical invalid argument, as the data show.

For example, if the CRA was to blame, the housing boom would have been in CRA regions; it would have made places such as Harlem and South Philly and Compton and inner Washington the primary locales of the run up and collapse. Further, the default rates in these areas should have been worse than other regions.

What occurred was the exact opposite: The suburbs boomed and busted and went into foreclosure in much greater numbers than inner cities. The tiny suburbs and exurbs of South Florida and California and Las Vegas and Arizona were the big boomtowns, not the low-income regions. The redlined areas the CRA address missed much of the boom; places that busted had nothing to do with the CRA.

Just trying to keep it real here.

Andrew Ferguson contemplates George Harrison's spirituality in the context of his "heroic capacity for cocaine, brandy, and adultery":

Along with the humility, his unapologetic religious faith made him the most unlikely rock star in history. It wasn’t the faith of his fathers, of course. His mother dragged him to Mass as a boy. “They tried to raise me a Catholic,” he says in Living in the Material World, but he stopped going to church before he was a teenager. Whatever chance he had to become an orthodox believer was snuffed out by the drab and airless Catholicism on offer in the decades leading up to Vatican II. He preferred to lose himself in the teeming pantheism and exotic mysticism of India.

So why, one wonders, the explicitly Christian – and ecumenical – lyrics of the song? I have been able to relate to this song both when I was far more tradition-bound in my faith and since. Harrison may not have been an "orthodox" believer – but neither was Jesus. And then there's the sense of humor – also not usually associated with orthodoxy – but deeply connected to the religious experience of life, its absurdities and its occasional, unsought-for graces and serendipities. Yes, Harrison was able to send up his own faith, as above. Very giggly Maharishi, no?

No, Rumi was not a thirteenth century gangsta. I was only kidding. But the poem about the penis-shortening device to allow the well endowed to have sex without endangering their partners is worth reprinting … all the way to its excruciating end:

The Importance of Gourd Crafting

 

There was a maidservant

who had cleverly trained a donkey

to perform the services of a man.

 

From a gourd,

she had carved a flanged device

to fit on the donkey’s penis,

to keep him from going too far into her.

 

She had fashioned it just to the point

of her pleasure, and she greatly enjoyed

the arrangement, as often as she could!

 

She thrived, but the donkey was getting

a little thin and tired looking.

 

The mistress began to investigate.

One day she peeked through a crack in the door

and saw the animal’s marvelous member

and the delight of the girl

stretched under the donkey.

 

She said nothing. Later, she knocked on the door

and called the maid out on an errand,

a long and complicated errand.

I won’t go into details.

 

The servant knew what was happening, though.

“Ah, my mistress,” she thought to herself,

“you should not send away the expert.

When you begin to work without full knowledge,

you risk your life. Your shame keeps you

from asking me about the gourd, but you must

have that to join with this donkey.

There’s a trick you don’t know!”

But the woman was too fascinated with her idea

to consider any danger. She led the donkey in

and closed the door, thinking, “With no one around

I can shout in my pleasure.”

 

She was dizzy

with anticipation, her vagina glowing

and singing like a nightingale.

 

She arranged the chair under the donkey,

as she had seen the girl do. She raised her legs

and pulled him into her.

 

Her fire kindled more,

and the donkey politely pushed as she urged him to,

pushed through and into her intestines,

and, without a word, she died.

 

The chair fell one way,

and she the other.

 

The room was smeared with blood.

 

Reader,

have you ever seen anyone martyred

for a donkey? Remember what the Qur’an

says about the torment of disgracing yourself.

 

Don’t sacrifice your life to your animal-soul!

 

If you die of what that leads you to do,

you are just like this woman on the floor.

She is an image of immoderation.

 

Remember her,

and keep your balance.

 

The maidservant returns and says, “Yes, you saw

my pleasure, but you didn’t see the gourd

that put a limit on it. You opened

your shop before a master

taught you the craft.”

Carl Zimmer surmises that sharing knowledge is what makes us human:

It’s certainly true that teaching comes naturally to us humans. There’s no culture on Earth without teachers. But just because something’s easy doesn’t mean it’s not special. And in the animal kingdom, teaching is exceedingly rare. In fact, it’s not clear whether any other animal can teach.

I know this may come as a surprise, but it does so because we tend to mix up teaching and learning. A young chimpanzee can learn how to smash nuts on a rock by watching an older chimpanzee in action. And when she grows up, her own children can learn by watching her. But in these situations, the students are on their own. They have to watch an action and try to tease apart the underlying rules. 

Marina Adshade celebrates it: 

[One explanation for why easier access to divorce has not increased divorce rates], which also explains the fall in domestic violence and suicide in states that support unilateral divorce, is just knowing that your spouse can divorce you without your consent encourages married individuals to treat each other better. So no-fault divorce laws have the power to increase the quality of marriages, even if they don’t increase the number of marriages. 

Robin Ince embraces the idea:

Bryan Appleyard makes a distinction between science and subjective experience:

[L]look at the two headlines on these two Andrew pieces – Can Science Explain Beauty? and Does Neuroscience Kill Free Will? Yes, we may retrofit a Darwinian account of beauty and we may show the brain making decisions before we do, but, apart from the gaping holes in the logic of the such findings that would have to be filled, why would this explain or kill anything? Explaining beauty does not mean explaining the experience of beauty – how could it? – and showing I have no free will does not remove my overwhelming impression that I have.

All these things arise from the misapplication of reductionism. Of course, we can explain things downwards, that is how science works, but we cannot explain things upwards.

The latest installment of the Symphony of Science, starring particle physicist Brian Cox, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and planetary scientist Carolyn Porco: