Surprisingly, one major cancer risk is your height. In fact, [George] Johnson [author of The Cancer Chronicles] notes, one large study found that “every four inches over 5 feet increased cancer risk by 16 percent.” The likely reason: If you’re tall, you have more cells in your body, and thus more opportunities to get cancer when cell division goes awry. “People who are taller had more cellular divisions to produce the taller body and therefore more chance to accumulate these mutations along the way,” says Johnson. “This is not something you can do anything about.”
Additional intriguing evidence of the height-cancer relationship comes from a group of Ecuadoran villagers who suffer from Laron syndrome, a type of dwarfism. Johnson reports that “because of a mutation involving their growth hormone receptors, the tallest men are four and a half feet and the women are six inches shorter…They hardly ever get cancer or diabetes, even though they are often obese.”
Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone for years has been bemoaning how the Internet is going to separate us and how we’re losing the social fabric of mixing in public. But he’s done recent work that is much, much less discussed, because it’s really uncomfortable. He’s found that when you’re living in a city where you’re a minority, you’re probably going to hunker down. You’re probably not going to mix much with your neighbors. You’re probably going to spend a lot of time watching TV. Confronted with high degrees of cultural diversity, people, for the most part, don’t seem to step up to the challenge and meet their neighbors. In many ways, they hide from them. A lot of cities that have the highest degrees of civic participation are pretty ethnically homogenous.
I would love to be able to say, yes, cities are serendipity engines, and if you just fully embrace the city, and take advantage of all the cultural richness and diversity that’s available there, you’re going to find a way to get as much of that encounter as you get from having the Internet. But there’s no guarantee that you’re going to do it in the city.
Tonight is Britain’s fireworks night, when the original religious terrorist, Guido Fawkes, was foiled in his attempt to blow up Parliament. As a kid, I used to love it, only faintly aware that my peers were burning the effigy of a Catholic terrorist, and sometimes burning effigies of the Pope, even as the fireworks exploded overhead. We sometimes feel as if we in the West are somehow beyond the use of torture and terrorism in religious wars. And we are, thanks to centuries of slowly accumulating liberal values. But we were once beset by the kind of terror that now traumatizes the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East. And such impulses, as we saw under Bush and Cheney, are never banished for ever.
[Christie] certainly sounds like he’s ready to start running, and it’s safe to say the press corps would love it if he did.
That isn’t because they have any particular strong feelings about his politics. It’s because he’s great copy. You think it’d be fun taking a few months of your life to follow Bobby Jindal around Iowa while he plasters on a fake smile and tries to look interested in what farmers have to say? God, no. But with Christie, you never know what he’s going to do. He might swear. He might snap at a schoolteacher (he has a particular contempt for teachers). He might call one of his political opponents “numbnuts.”
All of which is great fun for journalists used to covering the usual walking haircuts who calculate every word that comes out of their mouths to offend the fewest number of people.
Humans burn about one million barrels of oil a day searching for parking spaces, according to Greg Rucks and Laura Guevara-Stone. They propose a new approach:
Smart parking pilot programs are now being deployed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Beijing, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the Netherlands. For example, in Los Angeles, low-power sensors and smart meters track the occupancy of parking spaces throughout the Hollywood district, one of its most congested areas. Users can access that occupancy data to determine the availability of spots and then pay for them with their mobile phones. In addition to lending convenience and environmental benefits, smart parking improves the utilization of existing parking, leading to greater revenue for parking owners. Los Angeles saw a return on its investment in smart parking within three months.
Why the time is right:
The costs of sensors and hardware-based solutions is decreasing drastically, for the first time allowing cities and companies to gather detailed new data on transportation patterns. Furthermore, with smart phones capturing more and more of the global telecommunications market in both developing and developed nations, software entrepreneurs are able to collect and analyze data and deliver insights and information to consumers in brand new ways that do not require installation of new hardware.
For example, Roadify started in 2009 as a free app that helped New York City residents find parking spaces. Users enter the address of a spot that they are about to leave or of an open spot that they happen to walk by, earning points known as Street Carma (users can later cash in that Carma to redeem rewards). Other users nearby will see that spot on the app if they search the area. The app has since expanded to cities nationwide and now provides real-time transit information about schedules, delays, accidents, and more from crowd-sourced commentary about local transit conditions.
Previous Dish on the future of parking here, here, and here.
Drum suspects that Christie’s personality will be a liability:
Something that seems sort of cute when it’s just Jersey—and when it’s something you vaguely hear about third hand—would sink you if you were running for president. I guarantee you that the American public will very quickly become repelled at the sight of a Jersey loudmouth bullying ordinary citizens who have the temerity to disagree with him.
So the question is, can Christie control himself? Or will he lose his temper one too many times during a grueling, sleepless primary campaign? Since “one too many times” is quite possibly “once,” my money says he doesn’t stand much of a chance.
Why do national reporters so often talk about New Jersey as if its electorate consisted entirely of Teresa Giudice and The Situation?
New Jersey is one of the best-educated, highest-income, most upscale states in the country. We don’t associate Greenwich, Conn., with loudmouths; why would we expect them to play especially well in Saddle River, N.J.? Demographically, New Jersey is basically similar to Massachusetts, but with slightly higher incomes and somewhat more racial diversity. Like New Jersey, Massachusetts has townies. But when Massachusetts politicians run for national office, reporters don’t pull out “Good Will Hunting” and fret that the local pols are “too Massachusetts” to sell nationally.
The truth is that Christie’s style is less specific to New Jersey than most people (including Christie) would have you think.
A New Jersey reader responds to our earlier post on Christie:
All of you pundits can love Chris Christie as much as you want and you can push him for president, but just remember, he is running against an absolute nobody, a sacrificial lamb who is not someone for Christie to be worried about. And yet, he started advertising against Barbara Buono the minute she became the nominee. The fact that Obama never came here to campaign for her is telling. Even the emails I get from DNC’s Organizing for America don’t mention her. They only encouraged me to vote for the raise in the minimum wage and vote Democratic down ticket.
Christie knew from the get-go that the campaign had nothing to do with Buono; he wanted to run up the numbers so that he looked better as a potential presidential candidate. But how he portrays himself doesn’t match up with who he is politically; he is anti-abortion; he is against marriage equality (I think that the only reason he is for civil unions is because in this blue state, he HAS to be); and he wants even more tax cuts for the 1% (though he will never say so out loud). My property taxes continue to rise, my homestead rebate has disappeared, the schools have worsened, and while he was great when the shore was first battered by Sandy, he’s been absent until the later days of the campaign.
Christie wants to be president. There is no question about it. And what scares me is that I know zero about his Lieutenant Governor (probably my fault). He will stay here in the Garden State until he has to leave to run. Can he be elected president? I don’t know. He is the first member of the GOP I even considered voting for in forever. But I would never vote for him for president, mostly because of the people (Koch, Ailes, Rove and others) to whom he will be beholden. But he is the closest thing to a viable candidate they have at the moment.
I remember going to Columbia, South Carolina, to give a speech about marriage equality at some point in the late 1990s. I was trepidatious, to say the least, but thrilled to be invited into the lion’s den. At one point, I remember asking one of the organizers for her fax number – yes, I know! – so I could send some materials. She nearly had a conniption. If she got a fax about gay marriage at her company, it would be curtains for her, she said (put that in the pro-ENDA column, if you’re counting). So all the organizing had to be done in secret or in code.
But when I got there, the crowd was huge, and the reception intense. The thing about gays is that we are randomly distributed across the country with each generation. That means there are many, many gays in the South – and they are not isolated from wider cultural trends. They tend to be more conservative, which is why the marriage and military fights brought them more into the fold of the national struggle. So I’m not too surprised by anecdotal evidence of peer-to-peer toleration, even if the public debate at the elite level is still so harsh. But then I think that goes for the whole debate: the political leadership is way behind the popular shift.
Now it’s hard to say what the most conservative state in the country is. Idaho and Wyoming conservatism is different from Deep South conservatism. And earlier this year Nate Silver used various statistical evidence to argue that either Alabama or Mississippi would be the last states to give way on equality. But South Carolina is about as conservative as states come, especially in terms of the fundamentalist bible-drenched brand of conservatism which is the sheet anchor of hardcore opposition to same sex marriage.
And yet even here, likely within a few years, support for same sex marriage will likely be the majority position. That’s great for full civic equality. But it’s perilous for the political fortunes of equality opponents. Remember, just today John Boehner announced that he opposed the ENDA workplace civil rights bill, even though it’s sailing through the Senate. That looks to soon be a minority and just as importantly politically and generationally isolating position.
Greg Sargent makes similar points about ENDA. The bill is cruising through the Senate:
[T]he Senate voted 61 to 30 to advance the legislation. Unexpectedly, seven Republicans voted with the majority, and the number might have been higher had nine members not missed the vote.
In an interesting twist, 30 Republicans backed the filibuster, but not one was willing to deliver remarks against ENDA. The same thing happened in committee, when most of the GOP senators opposed the bill, but none was willing to say a word. It’s a reminder that we’ve reached a fascinating point in the larger debate – Republicans don’t want expand protections against discrimination, but they’re reluctant to defend their position out loud.
Beutler puts the GOP House’s opposition to ENDA in context:
[T]he political logic of leaning on the House is solid, even if it doesn’t result in substantive accomplishments. It clarifies who the villain is. Like a game of Clue, but with a single culprit, crime scene and weapon. The GOP, in the House, with the speaker’s gavel. … Big Senate bills in and of themselves won’t shake House Republicans out of their paralysis. It’s unrealistic to expect the House will address all of these issues and it’s possible they won’t address any of them. But the constituent groups to whom these issues matter — Latinos, the LGBT community, women, African-Americans and young people — won’t be confused about who killed them.
If the GOP doesn’t adjust, it’s doomed. Even at some point, in the South.
Big-ticket donors to the Democrats, like their conservative analogues the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, have begun to embrace PAC-giving with a true vengeance. Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg (neither a traditional Democrat, but mostly left-leaning) have each started their own. Bloomberg’s PAC, targeting gun issues, will spend $3 million in Virginia alone by election day, while hedge funder Tom Stayer’s group, NextGen Climate Action, has also been a significant force in the raise on McAuliffe’s behalf.
Democrats have argued that their billionaire PAC-givers stand to benefit less directly from the candidates’ victories than do donors like the pragmatic Kochs, and while that’s certainly true for something like Bloomberg’s gun efforts, it’s less true for Zuckerberg’s immigration-reform push, and probably for Stayer’s interest in a certain kind of green-tech governor. There are new ways of giving money in politics, but very few new motivations for doing so. As Cucinelli reminded the Times, McAuliffe once gleefully wrote in his memoir that it was easy to fundraise for gubernatorial races, because there were just so many meaningful favors a governor can hand out.
In the critical final month of the race, McAuliffe’s financial edge grew wider and wider. Take the week of October 21 as an example. McAuliffe was running nearly 3,000 TV ads while Cuccinelli was on air with less than 1,500 ads. Compare that to the ad spending in the 2009 race over the final weeks when McDonnell running ad circles around Deeds. There will be lots and lots of after-action analysis about what a McAuliffe victory — if it happens — means for the two parties’ national prospects. And, there are no doubt lessons to be learned. But the key lesson is that the candidate with the most money usually wins.
In an update to our earlier post, a Virginia reader attested to the Clintonite’s microtargeting advantage.
It’s his father, Rafael Cruz. One of Rafael’s many insane rants, which David Corn reported on last week:
A Ted Cruz spokesman claims that these “selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of Pastor Cruz’s message.” Corn thinks that response isn’t going to cut it:
Does Ted Cruz believe it’s a joke to accuse the president of trying to destroy God? Or that his father was kidding when he suggested Obama is “wicked,” asserted that the president is attempting to “destroy American exceptionalism,” said he wants government to be God, and insisted that “social justice is a cancer”? As for attacking the son with the father’s statements, the senator did not explain why it’s unfair to hold him accountable for remarks made by a person Cruz’s campaign routinely deployed as an official surrogate. According to campaign disclosure records, Cruz’s Senate campaign paid Rafael Cruz about $10,000 in traveling expenses in 2012 and 2013. And in August the conservative National Review noted that the father-son duo had forged a “political partnership,” reporting: “Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick.” Put it this way: Rafael Cruz is far closer to Ted Cruz and his political endeavors than Jeremiah Wright was to Obama and his campaigns.
What I find fascinating about the Cruzes is that they really do have a unified Christianist-Tea-Party worldview.
Rafael Cruz is a Dominionist, who believes that America is a Christian (not a Judeo-Christian) nation, and that its laws should be a version of Christian sharia, not secular arrangements for a diverse society. Ted Cruz, for his part, wants to shred the post-FDR safety net, balance the budget now, even during a lingering depression, and return to a bare-bones federal government that he believes was the intent of the Founders. Both are fundamentalists with fundamentalist texts: the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and the Constitution as viewed by Americans more than two centuries ago. Both these belief-systems are responses, it seems to me, to the bewildering complexity of modern life, the globalized economy, and resentment of the claims of the poor and sick and needy. And for these very reasons, they are absolute and rigid. In a time of widespread economic distress, they are also very potent populist appeals to an imagined past that was once simple, Christian and just.
They are best seen, to my mind, as prophets, not pols. Only a prophet would risk throwing the entire world economy into a second Great Depression, shutting down the federal government, and wrecking the credit of the United States in order to protest a duly enacted law. But prophets are dangerous in politics – and Cruz is a very gifted demagogue. He was, after all, brought up by one.
The Dish 