Liking Mr. Rogers Just The Way He Was

Michael G. Long remarks that when he mentions he’s working on a book about Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, it’s not uncommon for him to be asked about the not-so-macho Rogers’ sexuality. Noting that he had gay friends and people he knew to be gay appeared on his show, Long emphasizes there’s no evidence Rogers had sex with another man – and that either way, such speculation distracts from Rogers’ core message, which was “I like you just the way you are”:

Unconditional acceptance, arguably the most positive and compassionate message that any gay child, youth, or adult could find anywhere on television during Rogers’ tenure. Perhaps it’s this queer- and straight-friendly message that we would do well to recall as we wonder about Rogers’ sexual orientation, revealing so many of our prejudices along the way, deep-seated prejudices about the lives of gays and straights and about our own uneasiness with sexual orientations and behaviors.

At last, perhaps we should turn the camera lens toward ourselves and assure Fred Rogers that we like him just as he was: the opposite of machismo, a loving husband and father, a close friend and employer of gays, a man who grew to support at least one friend’s desire for an openly gay relationship and, above all else, a compassionate human being who assured each of us that, no matter who we are or what we do, we are always and everywhere lovable and capable of loving…

Anyone.

Just as they are.

A Tailor-Made Gift To The World

A.A. Gill hails the modern suit as the greatest invention of the British, claiming that “nothing else that comes from this pathetically stunted island has had anything like the universal acceptance, reach, or influence of the suit”:

The suit is the polite taming, the socializing, the neutering, of riding and military kit. Those EGYPT-POLITICS-VOTE-SISIpointless buttons on the cuff were moved from lateral to vertical. You used to be able to fold the end of your sleeve over and forward and button it like a mitten, for riding in the cold. Incidentally, the buttons on the cuff should correspond to the number of buttons on the front, not for any practical reason, but just because that’s what they should do. The vents at the back are made for sitting on a horse. The slanting pockets are for easy access when mounted. …

There is not a corner of the world where the suit is not the default clobber of power, authority, knowledge, judgement, trust and, most importantly, continuity. The curtained changing rooms of Savile Row welcome the naked knees of the most despotic and murderous, immoral and venal dictators and kleptocrats, who are turned out looking benignly conservative, their sins carefully and expertly hidden, like the little hangman’s loops under their lapels.

(Photo: Egypt’s ex-army chief and leading presidential candidate Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gives his first television interview since announcing his candidacy in Cairo on May 4, 2014. Sisi is expected to win the May 26-27 election easily riding on a wave of popularity after he ousted in July Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president. The 59-year-old retired field marshal, dressed in a suit and appearing composed and often smiling in what was a pre-recorded interview, is seen by supporters as a strong leader who can restore stability, but his opponents fear that might come at the cost of freedoms sought in the pro-democracy uprising three years ago. By STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Face Of The Day

AFGHANISTAN-US-BRITAIN-MILITARY-UNREST

An American Marine, sitting inside the cargo hold of a C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft headed to Kandahar, gestures as British and US forces withdraw from the Camp Bastion-Leatherneck complex at Lashkar Gah in Helmand province on October 27, 2014. British forces on October 26 handed over formal control of their last base in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, ending combat operations in the country after 13 years. The Union Jack was lowered at Camp Bastion in the southern province of Helmand, while the Stars and Stripes came down at the adjacent Camp Leatherneck – the last US Marine base in the country. By Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images.

Outsourcing Memory

Jim Davies looks at research into how cognition is distributed throughout the brain – and throughout some of our devices, too:

Think about how many memory aids we use: We jot down phone numbers, and keep count on our fingers. Cognitive scientists Wayne Gray and Wai-Tat Fu showed that using these aids is not very different to remembering facts and figures ourselves. They gave participants a task which required access to a lot of information while varying the difficulty of retrieving that information from a computer screen. They found that the participants decided between using the screen and their own memories in a way that minimized the effort involved, without privileging one source over the other. This suggested that externalized knowledge is accessed like any other memory, and that we treat “memories” on a computer screen just like memories in our head. Something to keep in mind the next time you wonder whether your phone is making you smarter or stupider.

Meanwhile, Clive Thompson considers how the “elderly have long been masters of devising clever tricks to compensate for mental failings, turning objects all around them into cognitive props”:

Medicine might be left on the kitchen table, its presence there a daily reminder that pills need to be taken. To-do lists on Post-it notes serve as scaffolds for their memory. If you’ve already lost cognitive function, and brain training can only go so far, you find other ways to cope. It might very well be that equally promising technology for our brains will augment rather than improve them. Already technology firms are developing methods to help the elderly by offloading memory and cognition, creating digital tools more sophisticated than oversize purses. The company Vitality, for example, has created GlowCaps, pill bottles that track when they’ve been opened. If users forget to take their pills on time, LEDs in the bottle cap might light up as a reminder; if it goes unopened for hours, the bottle sends an alert by email or text. A 2010 trial found that users of these smart bottles had a 98 percent rate of taking meds on time, compared with 71 percent in a control group.

California’s Prisons Are Maxed Out

Reason spotlights the issue:

Last week, Vauhini Vara covered Prop 47, an attempt to solve these problems:

Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 47, an initiative led by the San Francisco district attorney and a former San Diego police chief, which would try to reach the 137.5 per cent overcapacity threshold by changing certain crimes from felonies, which often result in sentences served in state prisons, into misdemeanors, for which county jail time, county supervision, a fine, or some combination of the three is more common. The crimes covered by Prop. 47 include petty theft, receiving stolen property, writing or forging bad checks, and drug possession, though the reduction wouldn’t apply to those who have previously been convicted of certain serious crimes or are registered sex offenders.

Egg Freezing On The Company Dime, Ctd

Like a reader over the weekend, Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos casts doubt on the efficacy of egg-freezing:

Lost in all the cheerleading about empowerment and liberating women from their biological clocks is a more buzz-killing, underreported set of facts, which women and families would benefit tremendously in understanding. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) do not endorse the use of egg freezing to defer childbearing. The ASRM’s decision to lift the ‘experimental’ label from this still young procedure in 2012 only applied to medically indicated needs, such as women with cancer.

Moreover, there is no long-term data tracking the health risks of women who inject hormones and undergo egg retrieval, and no one knows how much of the chemicals used in the freezing process are absorbed by eggs, and whether they are toxic to cell development. Furthermore, even with the new flash freezing process, the most comprehensive data available reveals a 77 percent failure rate of frozen eggs resulting in a live birth in women aged 30, and a 91 percent failure rate in women aged 40.

Meanwhile, The Economist flags a new IVF innovation that is “simpler for the patient” and “obviously cheaper than the established way of doing things.” In other assisted-reproduction news, Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart urges her fellow lesbians to take a less superficial approach at the sperm bank:

For lesbian couples, there’s no getting around the fact that children aren’t the offspring of both parents, so closely matching physical characteristics has little relevance. Instead, lesbians ought to seek a fuller picture of the donor while ignoring irrelevancies that could prejudice them. Personal essays would be a great alternative starting place for women who think there’s more to a man than how tall he is and whether he squeaked out a BA in communications.

While exact numbers are hard to come by, it’s clear that lesbians make up a huge portion of the market for donor sperm. A representative from one large, mainstream tissue bank told me that 40 percent of its clients are lesbian, and at least one sperm bank has made helping lesbian families conceive its primary mission. At Pacific Reproductive Services, which proudly advertises its lesbian ownership, the preferences of lesbian clients have already had an impact on the way donors are chosen. Since lesbians tend to be upfront about their children’s origins, they’re more open to the possibility that the kids might one day wish to contact their genetic fathers. This has led PRS to better serve its client base by focusing on recruiting as many “willing to be known” donors as possible—that is, men who have declared their willingness to be contacted by adult children. Founder Sherron Mills also told me that the geneticist at PRS had convinced her that diversity in ethnic background can make for healthier children. “Mix up your child!” she said, “When you dilute those genes, you have a healthier child.” …

Relying heavily on superficial appearance may have made sense for heterosexual couples seeking donated sperm three decades ago. For modern lesbian parents, those physical descriptions come with a lot of unnecessary baggage.

The rest of the egg-freezing thread can be read here.

The Lone Wolf Era?

To Jacob Siegel, last week’s attacks in Canada and New York are examples of the new model for terrorist violence in the West:

In recent years, terrorist networks have become more connected to a Western audience at the same time that they have become more physically cut off from the West. Effective counterterrorist measures have disrupted the planning that groups like al Qaeda use to coordinate large attacks, making it harder for them to communicate directly with cells inside Western countries. But with the Internet’s instantaneous web of connections, it’s become easier to reach individual Westerners who can be coaxed or coached into conducting their own attacks. The result is the lone wolves or stray dogs who may lack connections and experience but need only an Internet connection to find inspiration.

Clint Watts, a counterterrorism expert and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, says the current trend started almost a decade ago. The 9/11 model, where terrorist groups would “plan and train together before going to carry out an attack, became defunct around 2005 because counterterrorism pressure picked up so much in the West,” he said.

But David Gomez observes that the Ottawa shooter, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, didn’t exactly fit the “lone wolf” profile:

His life was a train wreck of drugs and mental illness with little or no evidence of organization. While all current evidence points to the fact that Zehaf-Bibeau was most-likely acting alone and without direction, he does not appear to be a classic organized lone wolf. Rather he more closely resembles a spree killer who acts spontaneously, without a plan, attempting to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. Zehaf-Bibeau was on a suicide mission with no expectation of survival, therefore no plan for escape. And as far as we know, he left no manifesto or explanation of his actions. In short, Zehaf-Bibeau was a disorganized murderer, acting out his fantasies.

Jeet Heer has additional thoughts on the attacks:

It’s natural to see terrorism and counter-terrorism as a drama of violence and retribution played out on the international stage. Both Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau certainly seem to have seen themselves as part of a similarly apocalyptic saga—Zehaf-Bibeau, in particular, was said by people at the shelter where he was staying in Ottawa to have spoken in his last days about the end of the world. But it’s worth remembering that Zehaf-Bibeau talked not just about an external battle but an internal struggle with demons, spiritual beings he felt had a real existence. That was a battle he was fighting in his own mind, which may have been the ultimate source of the violence that he inflicted on the world.

Even if Zehaf-Bibeau was more an unstable nut job than a jihadist ideologue, Ben Makuch observes that this hasn’t stopped Canadian jihadists on Twitter from claiming him as one of their own:

One Canadian ISIS militant who identifies himself as Muthanna al-Kanadi online, suspected to be Ahmed Waseem of Windsor, justified Zehaf-Bibeau’s alleged attacks by citing the newest Canadian war in Iraq as reason alone to expect retaliation. “What did Canada expect? they are a nation at war with Islam & is about to kill/bomb more Muslims,” he said in a recent tweet. “What did you want in return Hugs and Kisses?” The fighter, who appears to have been injured in recent engagements in Iraq fighting anti-ISIS forces, said the attack was evidence of a growing trend of domestic terrorism.  “I did say before that the Jihad of Yesterday was across the valley but the Jihad of Today is across your doorstep. #OttawaShooting #ISIS,” he said.

In any case, Stephen Walt hopes that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t make good on his promise of a macho response:

Whenever there is some kind of terrorist incident (including failed plots), politicians seem compelled to enact more extensive surveillance regimes and promise more assertive efforts to go after the bad guys, in order to show that they can’t be cowed. But unlike security measures enacted during conventional wars, which are normally lifted once the war is over, the various measures imposed since 9/11 remain firmly in place, even after years go by without another incident. Over time, these measures keep ratcheting up, because every now and then another incident will occur and whoever is then in power will feel they have to “do something,” too. It also reinforces the rhetoric of terrorism that increasingly dominates our public discourse and makes it harder to develop a coherent set of strategic priorities.

The Euro Zone Is Not Well

The Economist warns:

Now that German growth has stumbled, the euro area is on the verge of tipping into its third recession in six years. Its leaders have squandered two years of respite, granted by the pledge of Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s president, to do “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. The French and the Italians have dodged structural reforms, while the Germans have insisted on too much austerity. Prices are falling in eight European countries. The zone’s overall inflation rate has slipped to 0.3% and may well go into outright decline next year. A region that makes up almost a fifth of world output is marching towards stagnation and deflation.

Matt O’Brien suspects “there will probably be another grand bargain”:

The first one said that, if need be, the ECB would buy a country’s bonds in unlimited amounts to keep their borrowing costs low, as long as they did austerity. That last part is what got the Germans to support it, and they could try the same trick again. This time, they could say the ECB will buy each country’s bonds, in proportion to their economy’s size, as long as they make structural reforms. This is a catch-all phrase that basically means making it easier to fire people. When it’s too hard to do so, as it is in southern Europe, companies are wary about adding full-time workers and only hire young people for part-time ones instead. Germany attributes its own economic success, which is actually pretty overrated, to pushing through these kinds of unpopular changes a decade ago, and it’s obsessed with making the rest of Europe do the same. Maybe so much that it’d be enough for them to let the ECB save the euro again.

But there’s a less sanguine possibility. The ECB could keep not doing enough, Germany could keep blocking them from doing more, and Europe could keep stagnating. It’s their choice.

Did Non-US Citizens Elect Al Franken?

Jesse Richman and David Earnest used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to estimate how many non-citizens may have voted in the 2008 and 2010 elections. Their findings suggest that these ineligible voters turned out in numbers large enough to swing some close races:

More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.

The authors acknowledge that the CCES’s samples of non-citizen respondents are quite small (339 in 2008 and 489 in 2010) and that their extrapolated guesses are not exact. They express more confidence, however, in their claim that Franken was elected with illegal votes. Interestingly, they also find evidence that voter ID laws would not have prevented all of these non-citizens from voting, as “[n]early three quarters of the non-citizens who indicated they were asked to provide photo identification at the polls claimed to have subsequently voted”. Still, this will be enough for champions of voter ID laws on the right to claim that they told you so, as Allahpundit does here:

Obama winning a state illegally in a presidential election is bad but will be dismissed on grounds that it didn’t affect the overall result. Flip North Carolina to McCain’s column and it’s still a giant blowout. Franken winning a Minnesota seat illegally is a different ballgame. He was the 60th vote for ObamaCare. Replace him in the Senate with Norm Coleman and the law probably never passes. The authors are arguing overtly that health-care reform was made possible only by illegal votes. There are a bunch of races this year that could end up with whisper-thin margins of victory as well — Perdue versus Nunn in Georgia, Cassidy versus Landrieu in Louisiana, Tillis versus Hagan in North Carolina, even Gardner versus Udall in Colorado. If Democrats eke out victories in a few of those by a few thousand or even a few hundred votes, why would you believe after reading this study that those victories were fairly earned? And remember, as a Twitter pal points out, the numbers in the study are based on non-citizens who admitted to voting when asked. How many voted and were smart enough not to cop to it?

But Michael Tesler takes issue with the data in question: 

[S]ome respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error). For, as Richman et al. state in their Electoral Studies article, “If most or all of the ‘non-citizens’ who indicated that they voted were in fact citizens who accidentally misstated their citizenship status, then the data would have nothing to contribute concerning the frequency of non-citizen voting.” In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.

It turns out that such response error was common for self-reported non-citizens in the 2010-2012 CCES Panel Study … To be sure, my quick analysis does not at all disprove Richman et al’s conclusion that a large enough number of non-citizens are voting in elections to tip the balance for Democrats in very close races. It does, however, suggest that the CCES is probably not an appropriate data source for testing such claims.

Meanwhile, Rich Lowry defends voter ID laws by turning to a GAO report suggesting “that the number of voters getting locked out by voter ID laws is diminishingly small”:

According to the GAO, in Kansas in 2012, 1,115,281 ballots were cast. There were 38,865 provisional ballots, and of these, 838 were cast for voter ID reasons. In Tennessee, 2,480,182 ballots were cast. There were 7,089 provisional ballots and of these, 673 were cast for voter ID reasons. In both states, about 30 percent of these voter ID-related provisional ballots were ultimately accepted. That means in Kansas and Tennessee, altogether about 1,000 ballots weren’t counted (and perhaps many of them for good reason), out of roughly 3.5 million cast. There you have it ladies and gentlemen, voter suppression! It is of such stuff that Jim Crow was made.

Chait dismantles this argument:

The GAO also studied the impact of vote restrictions in Kansas and Tennessee and found significant reductions in the African-American vote. Lowry says that the Republicans in those states “dispute the methodology,” and takes their side. What the dispute over methodology really shows is that the impact of one change in voting laws is extremely hard to prove. A natural response would be to fall back on the intuitive premise that raising the cost of voting reduces voting. But conservatives seem reluctant to apply their normal beliefs in markets to this question. …

Is it possible that some of the prospective voters who lacked the requisite identification did not show up at the polls at all? Lowry does not consider the possibility.

Emily Badger takes on another aspect of Lowry’s reasoning:

What stands out about this argument is the idea that any disenfranchisement would be OK, when a central rationale for voter ID laws in the first place is that any voter fraud is not. Researchers have repeatedly documented that voter fraud — especially of the kind that might be caught by ID laws — is exceptionally rare. The supporters of ID laws don’t always dispute this. But they often say, as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker does here, that the scale of fraudulent voting is irrelevant[.] … If you’re absolutist about elections and feel that a single case of voter fraud averted by ID laws justifies their existence, then it doesn’t add up to also argue that any number of people disenfranchised by the creation of those laws is just the cost of protecting democracy.

Dahlia Lithwick sees a similar error at work in the way conservative judges have decided recent cases concerning Texas’s voter ID and abortion laws:

The 5th Circuit evinced a kind of Marie Antoinette approach to individual justice in these cases. When it shut down access to both voting and abortion in Texas, it indicated without precisely saying so that as long as citizens have fast cars and flexible work schedules, they are not burdened by Texas’ regulations. And seemingly there are no Texans without fast cars and vacation time in their view. At oral argument in the case about the shutdown of 20 Texas clinics, Judge Edith Brown of the 5th Circuit heard that abortion clinic closures would leave the Rio Grande area without any providers, forcing women who live there to drive 300 miles round trip to Corpus Christi. The judge sniffed, “Do you know how long that takes in Texas at 75 miles an hour? … This is a peculiarly flat and not congested highway.” …

It’s utterly baffling, this new math. Math that holds that seven incidents of vote fraud should push hundreds and thousands of voters off the rolls. Or that hundreds of thousands of women can be denied access to safe abortion clinics, supposedly to prevent vanishingly small rates of complications. I don’t know how we have arrived at the point where members of the judicial branch—the branch trusted to vindicate the rights of the poorest and most powerless—don’t even see the poor and powerless, much less count them as fully realized humans.