Month: March 2012

What’s Your Sign?

Scott Adams thinks it's important:

My hypothesis is that the month you conceive is the most important factor in a child's success. And no, I don't mean horoscopes are important. What matters most is how old a kid is for the class he is placed in. 

Macolm Gladwell described in his book Outliers how the older kids in a class are identified as gifted athletes, when in fact they are simply older. Coaches give more attention, training and resources to develop the perceived talents of older kids, thus widening the gap over their younger classmates. 

When I first heard about the birth month advantage, I assumed it didn't matter much for ordinary kids who had no plans to be professional athletes. But consider any kids you know, and how much they change, mentally, emotionally, and physically in the course of one year. The youngest kids in a given class are at a huge intellectual disadvantage compared to the oldest. 

I was always the youngest – born in August, and put into elementary school a year early because my mother was hospitalized for depression. I kinda liked the challenge of competing with older kids.

Obama At AIPAC

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The bottom line:

Iran's leaders should know that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon …. Already, there is too much loose talk of war. Over the last few weeks, such talk has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil, which they depend upon to fund their nuclear program. For the sake of Israel's security, America's security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built. Now is the time to heed that timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt: speak softly, but carry a big stick.

I agree with Ackerman that Obama basically repeated his Goldberg assurance, reminded the Bomb-Iran-Now crowd of how substantively pro-Israel is administration has been, and refused to take the Israeli/Greater Israel lobby bait:

Israel wanted Obama to give Iran a red line not to cross. I would argue he did. “I made a commitment to the American people, and said that we would use all elements of American power to pressure Iran and prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” That isn’t what Netanyahu wants to hear. As Noah Pollak incisively tweeted — yes, yes, snicker to yourselves, but he’s right — the Israelis want Iran not to be able to produce a nuclear weapon. Obama did not liquidate the disagreement.

Basically, Obama has refused to have the Greater Israel Lobby move the red lines to rendering Iran incapable of producing a nuclear weapon, rather than deciding to make one or actually making one. And this will be where the Greater Israel lobby shifts its support to the Christianist GOP, already committed to the Netanyahu-Lieberman position on Iran and the settlements, and now financed by Greater Israel fanatics, like Sheldon Adelson. (Here's a response to the Atlantic interview in an Adelson newspaper in Israel.) So no surprise to hear Liz Cheney was on a panel with this kind of reception:

Among the speakers was Liz Cheney, a former State Department official and daughter of George W. Bush's vice president. There was widespread applause for her attacks on Barack Obama including when she said the president is more interested in "containing Israel" by discouraging it from attacking Iran than blocking Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb. There was also applause when she said there was no president who had done more to "undermine and delegitimise" Israel. There were loud cheers when she predicted that the next Aipac conference will be held under a new US president.

For the worldview of Cheney and Netanyahu to prevail, Obama must be defeated. That is clearly the agenda of the current Israeli government, and what the NYT delicately but accurately calls "Israel's backers" in the US.

My worry is that once the Likudniks begin to realize Obama may not be defeated by the GOP at home, the current Israeli government would launch a war without warning to create a crisis to humiliate the president, rally end-times evangelicals to vote, send oil prices soaring, and force the US president to coopt a war he does not want and does not yet believe is necessary. If that helps the GOP nominee, so much the better. Every GOP candidate is now committed to the most extreme positions of the Likudnik Israeli right – and are to the bellicose right of most Israelis.

I hope that the Israeli government is not that reckless or extreme. But ask yourself when thinking about Netanyahu: what would Cheney do? These individuals are radicals. They turned the US into a torturing nation and regarded that decision as a "no-brainer." A "wag-the-dog" scenario in which Netanyahu creates a war to wound and weaken a US president before an election is, sadly, not unthinkable. And he will have the GOP as his critical back-up.

(Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty.)

The Politicization Of Catholicism

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The legacy of Pope John Paul II and the current pontiff is increasingly felt. In rejecting the separation of church and state, and by focusing primarily on sexual issues, the hierarchy in many countries is beginning to fuse with parties of the social right. And the politics is now Santorum-esque. Listen to Cardinal Dolan of New York embracing the culture war:

“We are called to be very active, very informed and very involved in politics."

There's more:

“It is a freedom of religion battle,” he said. “It is not about contraception. It is not about women’s health.” He added: “We’re talking about an unwarranted, unprecedented, radical intrusion” into “a church’s ability to teach, serve and sanctify on its own.”

The cardinal mocked a secular culture that “seems to discover new rights every day.” “I don’t recall a right to marriage,” he said, describing marriage, instead, as a “call.”

“Now we hear there’s a right to sterilization, abortion and chemical contraceptives. I suppose there might be a doctor who would say to a man who’s suffering some type of sexual dysfunction, ‘You ought to visit a prostitute to help you.’ ”

The rhetoric is creeping toward Limbaughism. The Second Council's notion that all Catholics are the church is dismissed:

At a news conference after Saturday’s speech, Cardinal Dolan said, “We kind of got our Irish up when leaders in government seemed to be assigning an authoritative voice to Catholic groups that are not the bishops.” He added: “If you want an authoritative voice, go to the bishops. They’re the ones that speak for the truths of the faith.”

Yes, they did a great job ensuring that thousands of children were left at the mercies of child predators for decades, didn't they? Just trust them. Don't listen to the majority of Catholics who dissent, or those brave souls who exposed the network of pedophiles and pederasts. Then the leader of an institution which refuses to allow women equality, boasts of using women as p.r. elements of a political campaign:

He told a story about bishops hiring an “attractive, articulate, intelligent” laywoman to speak against abortion and said it was “the best thing we ever did.”

And in Britain, Cardinal Keith O'Brien has now likened allowing gay citizens to have civil marriage to "madness" and the legalization of slavery:

Disingenuously, the Government has suggested that same-sex marriage wouldn’t be compulsory and churches could choose to opt out. This is staggeringly arrogant. No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage. Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that “no one will be forced to keep a slave”.

It's in this context that you have to understand the recent cruel withholding of communion to a lesbian daughter at her mother's funeral, or the abrupt firing of a gifted music teacher because he sought to marry the man he loves. As modern society shifts, and as its own flock shifts with it, the Church hierarchy has decided to double-down on its sexual absolutism. The cruelty comes with it.

Is War Innate?

John Horgan argues it's not:

The oldest evidence of deadly group violence by humans — a mass grave in the Nile Valley — is about 13,000 years old, and even that is an outlier. The vast bulk of evidence dates from 10,000 years ago or less, leading scholars such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Doug Fry, Jonathan Haas and Erik Trinhaus to conclude that war is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, associated often — but not always! — with agriculture and permanent settlements. … [S]ome skeptics say, Well, we don’t have good evidence of any human behaviors more than 10,000 years ago. Actually, we have evidence of many complex cultural behaviors — tool-making, hunting, cooking, art, music, religion — emerging far back in the Paleolithic era, but not war. The evidence is clear: war is a recent cultural phenomenon that culture can help us transcend.

A Poem For Sunday

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“MCMXIV" by Philip Larkin:

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

The poem in its entirety is here. Francis-Noël Thomas remembers the poet and his work:

Whatever Larkin’s personal faults may have been, they do not compromise a poem like “MCMXIV” in the least. We may recall a line from Auden’s elegy for William Butler Yeats: “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.”

(Photo by Phillip Capper)

Should We Be More Scared Of Pandemics?

Maybe:

“Worst case for a severe pandemic would certainly be in the millions [of deaths] in the U.S. alone,” says John Barry. He has advised the last two U.S. presidents on the flu virus and wrote The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. … When the so-called Spanish flu struck in 1918, it resulted in 500 million infections and 50 million to 100 million deaths, in a world with a population of about 1.8 billion people. That’s equivalent to around 385 million deaths—only a little less than the current population of South America—if extrapolated out to today’s population. “Because of the mildness of the 2009 pandemic, I would say most people underestimate the threat,” says Barry.

On a related note, Jeff Jarvis reminds us of the role data might play in preventing the next pandemic:

Google’s founders have urged government regulators not to require them to quickly delete searches because, in their patterns and anomalies, they have found the ability to track the outbreak of the flu before health officials could and they believe that by similarly tracking a pandemic, millions of lives could be saved. Demonizing data, big or small, is demonizing knowledge and that is never wise.

Is The Work-Home Separation Good?

Walter Russell Mead isn't so sure:

In 19th century America, production and consumption were typically interrelated. The family on its farm was a production team as well as a consumption unit. They didn’t just play together and watch TV together; they worked together to feed and clothe themselves. … [In the 20th century] the family became a kind of retreat from the cares and troubles of the workaday work: it was a place you went to get away from it all, rather than the place where everything happened.

If we wonder why marriage isn’t as healthy today in many cases, one reason is surely that the increasing separation of the family from the vital currents of economic and social life dramatically reduces the importance of the bond to both spouses – and to the kids.