Month: December 2011

A reader writes:

While I agree with what the kid said to Michele Bachmann, the way the mother went about it was inappropriate. I say the mother, because I doubt the kid really understood what he was doing and was simply following directions.  I honestly thought it was just as wrong as using – yes, using – the kids in the [above video].

Dan Savage, a gay parent, agrees. I felt queasy about it myself. Another reader:

I realize you didn't provide any editorial commentary to the link to this video, so I'm not sure I'm disagreeing with you here, but that video kind of makes me queasy. You have frequently lambasted Sarah Palin for using her kids as props in her political campaign; how is this any different?

Another reader contrasts the Bachmann video with one we ran yesterday of the 19-year-old Iowan:

As much as I support gay marriage and applauded and cried when Zach Wahls spoke up about being raised by two moms, it is unconscionable to manipulate a child into confronting a politician while being filmed.  And the boy was clearly uncomfortable. Rather than being an example of Michele Bachmann refusing to enter into a dialogue with people who think differently, this is an example of parents having lost perspective in the belief that making a politician look bad is worth embarrassing your child.

I'm sure I'm not the only one responding to this post.  This does a disservice to the cause.  And to her credit, Bachmann did the right thing by not getting into it with a kid.

Another:

Hard to out-creep Bachmann, but apparently doable.

The Sandusky details continue to get more horrifying.

Martin Robbins proposes a thought experiment:

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning to find yourself tied to your bed and rendered mute, your naked genitals exposed to the harsh glare of hospital lights. Your parents have decided that some skin should be hacked from your penis; perhaps so you can be forced into their religion, perhaps because they don't trust you to clean yourself in the shower, or perhaps simply because they think your penis should look more like your father's.

If you don't like the thought of this happening to you, if this offends your belief in self-determination or the rights you have over what happens to your body, then how can you justify this practice being inflicted on infants?

Via Dan:

Never gets old.

International investors prefer the US next year to even Brazil and China. The mood has changed quite swiftly this fall.

That's Glenn Reynolds' proposal: 

[T]he solution is more value for less money. Student loans, if they are to continue, should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy after five years — but with the school that received the money on the hook for all or part of the unpaid balance. … Make defaults expensive to colleges, and they'll become much more careful about how much they lend and what kinds of programs they offer. China, which has already faced its own higher education bubble, is simply shutting down programs that produce too many unemployable graduates.

Allahpundit is intrigued: 

As our Republican frontrunner once famously said, this smacks of right-wing social engineering. And I love it. Or rather, I love the basic idea: Colleges can either pare down their curricula to majors that impart actual marketable skills or continue to push crapola on their own dime. 

In order to shatter it, Donna McAleer wants women to be allowed to serve in combat:

While the US Army has its first female 4-star general, women comprise less than 6 percent of that service's senior leadership, despite constituting more than 17 percent of the Army's active duty officer corps. Including women at the senior most strategic leadership and decision-making levels is an issue of national security. No women are eligible to serve at the top ranks within the military itself.

United States would be well served by increasing the number of sharp minds at the planning and negotiating tables. To do this, the ground combat exclusion policy must be abolished to grant women the opportunity to gain the same experience as their male counterparts. If abolished, it will take a generation, at least 30 years, for military women to gain the appropriate tactical, operation and strategic experience.

Highlights from an earlier thread debating whether women should serve in combat here, here and here.

(Photo: General Ann Dunwoody, commander of the Army Materiel Command, is sworn in during her promotion ceremony to the rank of four-star general at the Pentagon November 14, 2008 in Arlington, Virginia. With her promotion, Dunwoody became the nation's first female four-star general. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

There's another important angle to this topic: basic sanitation.  I can't tell you how many times I have seen a naked old man sitting his bare ass on a locker room bench – no towel between bench and ass. There is both a personal and a social problem with this.  Doesn't the old man worry about what was on that bench before he sat his bare ass down?  And does he even consider the people who will use that bench after him?  Even if the next person uses a towel, or just puts his bag on the bench, now he has old-man-ass-and-balls all over his stuff!

Another also mentions sanitation:

I was a competitive swimmer growing up, and I always heard that men used to work out nude, since pools were gender segregated.  I'd never thought much of it, but your thread has inspired me to look into this a bit. Wikipedia's entry on "Nude Swimming" verifies what I'd heard:

Before the YMCA began to admit females in the early 1960s, swimming trunks were not even allowed in the pools,^[5] and high school swimming classes for boys sometimes had similar policies, citing the impracticality of providing and maintaining sanitary swimming gear and clogging swimming pools' filtration systems with lint fibers from the swimsuits.

A far more dangerous threat:

Since I have an occupational hazard of working in a hospital,  I just recently read a really interesting book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (by Maryn McKenna), and it had a chapter on how the "modesty" effect, even among high school athletes, means that hardly ANYONE is using the shower facilities at school. The kids are (hopefully) taking a shower at home, but sometimes much later after their workouts/training/games. This delay has contributed to bacteria staying on the skin longer and having the opportunity to infect even very minor skin abrasions. In some rare cases this can lead to death. (And lack of "practice" showering in high school carries over to college and professional teams that have had MRSA outbreaks)

I hated showering after gym class, but in the '80s, most of us still HAD TO take a quick bird bath. Now, students don't use the showers at all, even on the football and wrestling teams. So relatively minor changes in cultural norms for teenage "modesty" can have unintended consequences later, leading to even healthy kids getting community-acquired staph bacteria resistant to most antibiotics. (MRSA kills more people than AIDS in the US.) So there is every good reason to hit the showers!

Damien Ma reviews a new documentary that tells three stories of Chinese enterprise in Zambia: 

[ Zambian Trade Minister Felix] Mutati's fondness for the "Chinese way" is perhaps a result of Zambia being the first African country to establish formal relations with China and the site of Africa's first Chinese special economic zone. But it is also an elliptical political jab at the "West" for a lot of thunder and little rain — that is, the Westerners show and tell, the Chinese do. Beneath the "win-win" slogans, however, lies an unarticulated uneasiness.

The Chinese way is not universally adored in Zambia, and the country has become publicly skeptical of China's role. Yet even as President Sata's anti-Chinese rhetoric made headlines, he heaped on praise for Mr. Li and his road. But as funding dries up, the road remains unfinished, much like the China-Africa story. It chugs along, driven by the accumulated efforts of the Lis and Lius building, investing, learning and punctuated by unavoidable politics. 

A reader writes:

This has been an issue in the civil aviation industry for decades. There's an old joke, "Future planes will have two pilots: a human and a Doberman. The dog's job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything."

And to some extent that is becoming true. Every airline has standards about how much of a given flight can be flown by the pilot in command; some allow for more "hand flying" than others. But mostly, aside from some takeoffs and most Category 3 (virtually zero visibility) landings, the automation does most of the work. The crew just sets the avionics to comply with a preset flight path, and modifies or hand flies any changes if required by air traffic controllers.

But the flight crew's job is still essential to manage it. Someone needs to be at the helm if the computers get it wrong, and sometimes they do. ATP-rated flight crews are tortured every six months in simulator sessions where the instructor sits behind a console and throws multiple failures at them intending to overwhelm the pilots. Most of the notable aviation disasters were caused my multiple equipment failures.

Can you really develop software that can deal with things it isn't wasn't programmed to? Not yet. But the human mind can, thanks to intuition, experience, recurrent training for worst case scenarios, and as you alluded to, the first person to arrive at a crash site is the flight crew.

As for Philip Ross's article, he has something of a clue. But in a touchy situation, like a Cat 3 landing, where the only criteria for the pilots is to make sure that they can see a runway 'environment' before the plane touches down. Their hands are hovering over the flight controls and computer disable switch, in case it gets it wrong. It is FAR from a passive experience for the pilots.

To quote Ross, "Even Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who deftly ditched his Airbus 320 airliner in New York City's Hudson River after its jet engines swallowed some geese, owed much to his onboard software—among other things, it managed the plane's angle of descent so as to avoid a stall." Great, the avionics had electrical power so wisely, he used it, to ease his enormous load. But what if the avionics failed?

As an aside, the LGA to Hudson River scenario is a global standard and frequently used scenario in simulations and for good reason. It's often clogged with boats and very large pieces of ice in the late winter and spring. Can software account for all that? That was an extraordinarily lucky save – very light traffic on the river and no floating ice. Also, the plane malfunctioned when it hit the river, a very under-reported story. Both engines are designed to sheer off in a water landing but only one did, that's why it twisted on contact and one side started sinking. The real miracle of that water landing is that the design failure didn't rip the aircraft apart immediately.