Month: November 2012

This gay:

@jpodhoretz First you came out for ssm, now this…

— Umar.(@umarjones) November 13, 2012

The militarization of the CIA.

It’s from Michael Gerson:

Petraeus is a generator of national confidence.

The more colloquial version of that is “con-man.” And since Gerson just backed another one for president, one should perhaps forgive his blind spot.

Sooner than you might think:

Immigration from Mexico only partly accounts for the change [to a non-white majority state]. More than a million Americans have moved to Texas in the past decade, many from traditionally Democratic states. More than three hundred and fifty thousand Californians have arrived in the past five years; since 2005, over a hundred thousand Louisianans permanently relocated to Texas, mostly in Houston, after Hurricane Katrina. The population is also skewing younger, which means more Democratic.

But [Steve Munisteri, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas,] is more preoccupied by the racial and ethnic changes.

He turned to a chart showing Texas’s population by ethnic group over the next few decades. A red line, representing the white population, plunged from almost fifty-five per cent, in 2000, to almost twenty-five per cent, in 2040; a blue line, the Hispanic population, climbed from thirty-two per cent to almost sixty per cent during the same period. He pointed to the spot where the two lines crossed, as if it augured a potential apocalypse. "This shows when Hispanics will become the largest group in the state," he said. "That’s somewhere in 2014. We’re almost at 2013!" He added, "You cannot have a situation with the Hispanic community that we’ve had for forty years with the African-American community, where it’s a bloc of votes that you almost write off. You can’t do that with a group of citizens that are going to compose a majority of this state by 2020, and which will be a plurality of this state in about a year and a half."

(Map: a cartogram of the US and its 2012 red and blue counties by population. By Mark Newman of the University of Michigan. You will notice that Florida has not been circumcized in this rendition.)

Yes, we are still unable to process new videos because of the damage done to the IAC building by Super Storm Sandy, which is particularly saddening given all the great footage we have of Bill McKibben, who couldn't have been more relevant in the wake of the storm. But here is another video from the archive, originally aired on October 24, 2011:

But speaking of McKibben, here is the latest pressure he's putting on Obama to act on climate change:

Maybe the president was being serious when he promised in his victory speech, to one of the loudest cheers, an “America not threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” Maybe he understands that we’re ready for action — exit polling showed that 42percent of Americans said the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was an important factor in their choice. If so — if he really gets that this is the legacy issue of all legacy issues, one that stretches out into geologic time — then he’ll listen to the scientists and not the lobbyists.

Nate Cohn notes that the GOP has problems with swing-state white voters:

[T]he Republicans shouldn't let their national standing among white voters obscure their real challenges with white voters outside of the South. It’s not useful for Republican strategists to take solace in Obama's 39 percent showing among white voters if Obama still managed to do much better than Kerry or Gore in states like Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Minnesota. In the Electoral College system, turning "lean Republican" states like Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri into "solid Republican" states just doesn't matter.

It's pretty simple. The South is a very powerful influence on any party – it defined the Democrats for a very, very long time, but the Dems also had a strong Northeastern and MidWest reach to balance it out. The GOP's current no pre-nup marriage to Dixie, rooted this time in fundamentalist religion and racial and cultural panic, has no such counter-balance. They used to have the libertarian West, but that is simply incompatible with a religious party bent on suppressing "sin" through political power. It is a region that has been culturally and politically hijacked by fundamentalist charlatans. They cannot adjust their policies on the evil of gay relationships or abortion or, increasingly, contraception. They answer to God, not focus groups.

It's also a culture almost defined against the "other" from the get-go – and getting most Southern populist Republicans to find common ground with Latinos, as Krauthammer, in an almost self-parody of denial and certitude, now swiftly recommends, is, well, unlikely absent a truly gifted pol. Maybe that is Ted Cruz. But he, like Rubio, was grown in a hydroponic right-wing pol factory.

A new device tracks the use of personal inhalers:

[David Van Sickle, founder and CEO of Asthmapolis] says the project grew out of his work at the CDC, investigating outbreaks of respiratory illness, and then again working in clinical practice. "There’s a ton of variability of asthma within micro-environments," he says. This means that it’s crucial to get precise information about where and how often they need their puffer. This data is very hard to collect.

"Historically in asthma we haven’t done much except provide patients with a rationale for keeping pen and paper and encouraging them to bring them to their next visit," says Van Sickle. The problem is that no one likes doing this; it’s just one more burden that comes with the disease. So people forget, or procrastinate, or try to guess. "We know those diaries are often inaccurate," he says, "They’re generally fabricated."

Hugh Sinclair, author of Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic, chastises the microlending industry for interest rates that often exceed 100%:

Microfinance has been overhyped as a miracle cure [for poverty] and has managed to attract money in vast sums. Currently the private microfinance capital invested is about $70 billion. The problem is that when you’ve got a $70 billion sector you’ve also got something on the order of $30 billion a year being paid in interest. This is money that is being taken out of poor communities. People talk about the positive impacts but don’t talk about the negative impacts — the hidden side of microfinance. …

In practice, it’s not actually clear that the money is being used for any entrepreneurial activity whatsoever.

John Hatch, the founder of FINCA, a very large microfinance network, estimated in the Harvard Business Review that 90% of microfinance capital is used for consumption — that is, used for buying a TV or clothes — and that very little gets to any entrepreneurial activity. The head of the Zambian Central Bank came up with the same estimate recently. No one knows exactly, because it is hard to measure the proportion of loans spent on consumption or used to pay off other loans, but what is interesting is that no one wants to discuss this.

In his new book, The Wisdom Of Psychopaths, Kevin Dutton describes the misconceptions of psychopathy and why it's far more prevalent than most people realize. Last year he ran a survey in the UK:

The results made very interesting reading, especially if you’re partial to a sermon or two on a Sunday, because the clergy cropped up there at number eight. You had the usual suspects at the top; you had your CEOs, lawyers, media—TV and radio. Journalists were a bit down the list. We also had civil servants. There were several police officers, actually, so as opposed to being criminals, some psychopaths are actually out there locking other people up. Any situation where you’ve a got a power structure, a hierarchy, the ability to manipulate or wield control over people, you get psychopaths doing very well. 

Buddhist monks also rank high:

Like psychopaths, monks are often calm and decisive in the face of stress; free of anxiety, even in the face of death; and able to read others’ expressions accurately. The big difference, Dutton said, is that monks are motivated by compassion for others, whereas psychopaths seek only their own pleasure.

Though not a psychopath himself, Dutton recently underwent an experiment to temporarily make his brain activity resemble a psychopath's:

The effects aren't entirely dissimilar [to getting "a buzz out of a beer"]. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s—, anyway?

There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That's the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it's on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel's. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it's been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.

So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.

Are you a psychopath? Take a short quiz here.