Iceland rejects debt repayment

Iceland has voted overwhelmingly against a plan to repay some unusual and excessive debts created by its bank. This is great. How can we vote to repudiate debt?

California has a constitution requiring a balanced budget, and yet we have accumulated vast amounts of debt.

I think that we need a new California constitution amendment to limit debt. It should say that no session of the legislature should be obligated to pay a debt burden created by a previous session.

I particularly object to debt created by unbalanced budgets and unfunded pension plans.

Someone might argue that such an amendment would interfere with federal law on the enforcement of contracts, but I don't think so. California would just have to put a clause in its contracts that state obligations are limited by constitutional spending authority. If some state agency signs a contract with a union saying that employees can retire at 95% of full salary with annual increases, then a clause would have to say that the pension payments could be limited by what is in the fund and what some future legislature decides to appropriate. It should be legally impossible for the state to guarantee a pension greater than that.

As it is, we have thousands of state bureaucrats retiring on six-figure pensions, and they are bankrupting the state. The politicians who made these promises are gone and no one is accountable.

Publishers reject cold submissions

The WSJ reports:

In 1991, a book editor at Random House pulled from the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts a novel about a murder that roils a Baltimore suburb. Written by a first-time author and mother named Mary Cahill, "Carpool" was published to fanfare. Ms. Cahill was interviewed on the "Today" show. "Carpool" was a best seller.

That was the last time Random House, the largest publisher in the U.S., remembers publishing anything found in a slush pile. Today, Random House and most of its major counterparts refuse to accept unsolicited material. ...

It used to be that you could bang out a screenplay on your typewriter, then mail it in to a studio with a self-addressed stamped envelope and a prayer. Studios already were reluctant to read because of plagiarism concerns, but they became even more skittish in 1990 when humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount, alleging that the studio stole an idea from him and turned it into the Eddie Murphy vehicle, "Coming to America." (Mr. Buchwald received an undisclosed settlement from Paramount.)

She makes it sound as if Paramount got burned by a chance similarity to an unsolicited manuscript. In fact, Paramount had a signed contract with Buchwald, made the movie with his plot, and cheated him out of his share of the $288M in earnings.

Female US ship captain fired

Time magazine reports:

... booted as captain of a billion-dollar warship for "cruelty and maltreatment" of her 400-member crew. According to the Navy inspector general's report that triggered her removal — and the accounts of officers who served with her — Captain Holly Graf was the closest thing the U.S. Navy had to a female Captain Bligh.

A Navy admiral stripped Graf of her command of the Japan-based guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Cowpens in January. The just-released IG report concludes that Graf "repeatedly verbally abused her crew and committed assault" and accuses her of using her position as commander of the Cowpens "for personal gain." But old Navy hands tell TIME that those charges, substantiated in the IG report, came about because of the poisonous atmosphere she created aboard her ship.

The article goes on to give examples of her using profanity to sailors, including those who had gone to her for personal advice.

I don't doubt that she is incompetent, and was only promoted because of misguided affirmative action policies. But is profanity really that upsetting to today's sailor? And why was anyone asking her for personal advice, if she were really a female Captain Bligh?

The complaints against Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty were things like cruelly flogging sailors for no reason. I don't recall sailors complaining about profanity and hurt feelings. I don't know how we can fight a war unless we have tougher sailors than this.

Counseling for the guilty

From today's Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: I lost my mom to cancer several months ago. She made my sister and me promise not to let her die in a hospital, ... Mom died three hours after we made our decision.

We also promised to bury her because she didn't want cremation. ...

Abby, Mom had two wishes at the end of her life, and I wasn't able to fulfill either one. ...

Now I'm having second thoughts. Was I wrong? Should you grant your parents their final wishes? I'm seeing a counselor about this, but would like your thoughts. ...

DEAR GRIEVING: ... You have done nothing wrong. Talking about this with your therapist is the surest way to work it through.

I am beginning to believe that counseling exists only to excuse bad behavior. The idea is that she will stop feeling guilty if some counselor tells her over and over again that she did nothing wrong.

Crime to find a coin

Apparently it is a crime in the UK to find a coin:

A woman who found a 700-year-old coin in her garden as a child has become the first person to be convicted of failing to hand in suspected treasure.

Kate Harding, 23, was prosecuted under the Treasure Act after she ignored orders to report the rare find to a coroner.

The article is a little misleading because the prosecution was based on the object being not really a coin, but some sort of coin-like metal token of unknown purpose. But still, why should it be a crime to find a piece of metal in your yard? And why tell the coroner? I thought that a coroner was an official who keeps track of dead bodies.

Rules of the playground

This sign shows a long list of playground rules. It is hard to read, but you will get the idea. It is hard for me to imagine how this sign really benefits anyone. I would just remove it, and put in a sign saying, "Have Fun. Use common sense."

Animal Abuse Registry

The NY Times reports:

California may soon place animal abusers on the same level as sex offenders by listing them in an online registry, complete with their home addresses and places of employment.

The proposal, made in a bill introduced Friday by the State Senate’s majority leader, Dean Florez, would be the first of its kind in the country and is just the latest law geared toward animal rights in a state that has recently given new protections to chickens, pigs and cattle.

These lawmakers and animal rights nuts have some really twisted values. I once had a friend tell me that I should not kill the mouse in my house, and I should instead capture it alive and find a good home for it.

At least they are going to pay for it:

Yet there is a "bite" to this bill. The cost for maintaining the Web site would be passed to consumers, specifically to dog and cat owners.

Every sack of dog chow and every morsel of cat food would be slapped with a tax, as much as 3 cents per pound.

From the same paper:

It is the latest weapon in Australia's seemingly endless battle against the cane toad, which was introduced from Hawaii in 1935 in an unsuccessful attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. ...

Early cane toad killing methods included whacking the creatures with golf clubs or cricket bats. ...

Cane toads emit a poison that attacks the heart of would-be predators. ...

Australia's Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said encouraging ants to attack cane toads is inhumane.

Inhumane? These animal rights folks are just too crazy. The study is actually quite careful about the environmental consequences.

Pediatricians want redesigned hot dogs

USA Today reports:

Nutritionists have long warned of the perils of hot dogs: fat, sodium and preservatives to name a few.

Now, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants foods like hot dogs to come with a warning label — not because of their nutritional risks but because they pose a choking hazard to babies and children.

Better yet, the academy would like to see foods such as hot dogs "redesigned" so their size, shape and texture make them less likely to lodge in a youngster's throat.

These pediatricians are making fools of themselves.

Women athletes in Vancouver

The NY Times reports:

Ski jumping and the related sport of Nordic combined are the only events at the Winter Games that bar women from competing. ...

Ski jumpers fly the length of a football field or more at speeds of 50 to 60 miles per hour, and some women, like the American Lindsey Van, perform on par with men.

If she is really on a par with the men, why doesn't she compete against them? I didn't think that there was any rule against women competing against men. The sex tests have been abolished, anyway.

It seems to me that several of the events would be better if they let men and women compete without splitting the sexes anyway. Why are there separate men's and women's curling teams?

I thought this was a typo, but apparently ski jump champ Lindsay Van is no relation of the more famous ski champ Lindsay Vonn.

Duke stripper finally nailed

The NY Daily News reports:

The stripper who falsely cried rape and ruined the reputations of three Duke University lacrosse players was charged with trying to stab her lover, police said Thursday.

Cops responding to a 911 call found an out-of-control Crystal Gail Mangum battling her boyfriend and screaming, "I am going to stab you \[expletive\]."

The 33-year-old woman then tried to burn boyfriend Milton Walker's clothes in a bathtub, a Durham, N.C., police report states.

Mangum resisted being arrested and gave cops a false first name, Marella, and age, the report states.

Her three kids - ages 3, 9 and 10 - were in the house at the time but were not injured.

The exotic dancer was charged with attempted first-degree murder, five counts of arson, assault and battery, resisting arrested, child abuse and other offenses.

Whole books have been written on what is wrong with this story, so I have little to add. The biggest culprit was Judge Stephens, and he was never punished.

I named Mangum on this blog about a year before the press did. It seemed to me that there was plenty of evidence for the innocence of the Duke boys -- implausible accusation, airtight alibis, no witness id, negative DNA test, etc.

Bad poll on campaign financing

The Wash Post report:

Poll: Large majority opposes Supreme Court's decision on campaign financing

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court's Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent "strongly" opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits.

The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent).

The results suggest a strong reservoir of bipartisan support on the issue for President Obama and congressional Democrats, who are in the midst of crafting legislation aimed at limiting the impact of the high court's decision.

No, the court did not decide to allow "unfettered corporate political spending". It upheld strict limits on campaign donations, and on foreign money.

The phrase "campaign financing" usually means the money that a candidate raises to spend on his political campaign. The court decision was not about that at all. It was only about money that corporations spend on their own.

The poll questions were:

35. Changing topics, do you support or oppose the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that says corporations and unions can spend as much money as they want to help political candidates win elections? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

36. Would you support or oppose an effort by Congress to reinstate limits on corporate and union spending on election campaigns? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

No, the corporations and unions cannot spend as much money as they want. They cannot spend the money on candidates. These questions do not match either the court opinion, or the story.

It would have been much better to ask a question about what the court actually decided. Eg, it could ask about the showing of an anti-Clinton movie a month before an election.

Political views are innate

Nicholas Kristof writes:

The researchers ... found that those who had a stronger blink reflex at the noise were more likely to take such conservative positions as favoring gun rights, supporting warrantless searches, and opposing foreign aid. ...

They start by exploring data showing a remarkably strong correlation between state attitudes toward spanking children and voting patterns. Essentially, spanking states go Republican, while those with more timeouts go Democratic.

Professors Hetherington and Weiler contend that the differences stem from profound differences in cognitive styles. Spankers tend to see the world in stark, black-and-white terms, perceive the social order as vulnerable or under attack, tend to make strong distinctions between “us” and “them,” and emphasize order and muscular responses to threats. Parents favoring timeouts feel more comfortable with ambiguities, sense less threat, embrace minority groups — and are less prone to disgust when they see a man eating worms.

This analysis has some obvious flaws, but there could be something to it.

Maybe one way to test it would be to look at how political views differ between the hard and soft sciences. Some fields depend on being able to make strong distinctions, and some do not. Maybe those who have difficulty making strong distinction are more likely to have certain political views and to be in the soft sciences.

White workers only 38%

Yesterday's Si Valley newspaper has this top story:

The unique diversity of Silicon Valley is not reflected in the region's tech workplaces — and the disparity is only growing worse.

The story goes on to say that whites are hogging 38% of the computer and mathematical science jobs. The print edition has one of their largest headlines saying, "THE DIVERSITY DECLINE".

What kind of diversity do they want? It seems to me that the whole place has been taken over by non-whites and foreigners.

Regretting spinsterhood

In case you want marriage advice from someone who has never been married, read this:

Gottlieb’s piece, “Marry Him,” in the March Atlantic, makes the “case for settling for Mr. Good Enough.” Directing her message toward single women over the age of 30, she writes, “If you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying.”

Gottlieb, who is 40 and single, regrets not having settled for a decent (albeit imperfect) guy years ago. But back then she subscribed to the “somebody isn’t always better than nobody” theory of marriage.

No, her attitude problem is much worse than that. She had an out-of-wedlock child because she decided that she did not need a husband.

I can't begin to detail the problems here, but this psychiatrist tries.

Supremacist judge rejects math textbook

An education blog reports:

In what seems like an unusual step by the judiciary, a judge in Washington state has ordered the Seattle school board to reconsider its choice of math materials for high schools across the district, reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

"The court finds, based upon a review of the entire administrative record, that there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series," writes Judge Julie Spector from the King County Superior Court in her Feb. 4 decision.

The Seattle newspaper explains that last May, the board implemented a districtwide math curriculum called Discovering Math. Shortly thereafter, two parents and a University of Washington professor went to the King County Superior Court to overturn the board's decision and compel the district to consider other textbook options.

You can get details on the textbooks from the publisher here, and some of the legal documents here.

My initial impression is that these books would probably make for a more interesting class, with a good teacher. But with a lousy teacher, the kids are probably going to do worse on standardized exams.

But this judicial supremacist judge is way out of her league here. Her ruling shows no understanding of the books, except that they are "inquiry-based". There were allegations that they were "mathematically unsound", but she is unable to give an opinion on that. She only says that she finds that, as a matter of law, it was arbitrary and capricious to adopt the textbooks. Or maybe it is a finding of fact, she is not sure.

I guess that what give the court authority to intervene in such a matter is the argument that white kids can learn from an inquiry-based textbook, but that black and non-English-speaking minority kids cannot. Apparently the books are wordier and more colorful than the other books.

Mom thinks snow is dangerous

From Yahoo answers:

How do I convince my kids snow is dangerous?
we are supposed to get record snow where i am. i personally hate it. its cold and wet and cold. i know they are gonna make me play in it. i put them off last snow by telling them they had to clean their room before they could play in it. i dont think thats gonna work this time. how can i make them believe snow shouldnt be played in?

You should tie them to a chair in the basement and bombard them with images of Abominable Snowmen, Avalanches, horrible wipe outs on the bunny hill, etc. Then tell them that all the missing children in the world have gone missing because they played in the snow.....and that the Tooth Fairy, Santa, Easter Bunny and other misc. imaginary characters will never visit them again if they go out there. No kid can defy the laws of the Tooth Fairy. Problem Solved.

That kid is going to learn that "dangerous" is a euphemism for fun.

Guys who love grilled cheese

A burger chain is pushing an option for guys who love grilled cheese, but don't want to order from the kiddie menu:

“The origin of the new Grilled Cheese Bacon Burgers is actually kind of a funny story,” according to Brad Haley, executive VP of marketing at CKE Restaurants (parent company). “We were initially working on menu items we could offer for our vegetarian customers and made a really good grilled cheese sandwich. But, being Carl’s Jr., a chain known for its decadent burgers, someone suggested that we try it with a charbroiled burger patty and bacon for our carnivorous customers and the Grilled Cheese Bacon Burgers were born… It really delivers on the idea of a grilled cheese sandwich combined with a bacon cheeseburger… And we’ll still make a really good grilled cheese sandwich for our vegetarian customers if they want one.”

Sounds delicious!

Meanwhile, the federal food police will soon be bribing your local school:

A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years.

In legislation, soon to be introduced, candy and sugary beverages would be banned and many schools would be required to offer more nutritious fare.

It appears to me that these folks do not even know what the word nutritious means. The most nutritious foods are also the most fattening foods.

But Denise Snow, the school cafeteria manager, said that children can be taught to eat better. “When we went to whole-wheat pizza, the kids fussed for a while and we lost some of them,” Ms. Snow said. “But now they don’t say a thing, and pretty much everyone is back to eating them.”

I would like to see the scientific evidence that eating whole wheat pizza instead of regular pizza has ever made anyone healthier. I think that Ms. Snow is annoying the kids for nothing.

Haiti tries to starve the men

AP reports:

Aid groups offer special shelters for women and provide women-only food distribution points to deter men from bullying them. But challenges are rife more than three weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left as many as 3 million in need of food, shelter and medicine.

Women who lined up for food before dawn Saturday said they were attacked by knife-wielding men who stole their coupons.

No, they are not deterring the men. By depriving the men of food, they encouraging this so-called bullying.

"We've targeted the women because we think it's the best way to get to families," said Jacques Montouroy, a Catholic Relief Services worker helping out Saturday. "In other distributions when we've opened it up to men, we found that only half of the men would do what they were supposed to with the food."

Huhh? What are the men supposed to be doing with the food? Is the food getting eaten or not?

"It's discrimination!" said Thomas Louis, 40. "We've all lost mothers, sisters, wives. Without women we can't get coupons. They're treating men like we are animals."

No, animals get fed. The men are treated worse.

This is all unnecessary, as I've noted below. It appears that the relief efforts are more interested in maintaining their crazy rationing schemes than to actually prevent starvation.

Watching White House BMI

Michele Obama is giving advice on getting fat:

The first lady made the issue of healthy eating personal last week at an event in Alexandria, Va., where she kicked off a campaign addressing the issue of childhood obesity. ...

Obama said the doctor suggested she first look at her daughters' body mass index (BMI). The minor changes she subsequently made in their daily habits, Obama said, made all the difference.

Some charge that Obama's comments may be perceived as a focus on weight and dieting, which sends the wrong message to the public. The first lady should be discussing behavioral change, not weight loss, said Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh, an eating disorder activist and executive director of Families Empowered and Supporting Treatment of Disorder (F.E.A.S.T.).

"We've confused health and weight in a way that's very confusing for children and very confusing for parents," Lyster-Mensh said. "When we speak publicly about putting our children on a diet, we start to get into weight stigma and confusing the message to families."

The focus on obesity, Lyster-Mensh said, turns this into an issue of appearances, which does not bode well for children, especially girls.

"There is simply no reason to be pushing children into weight reduction diets and that's the message parents out there get," Lyster-Mensh said. "Dieting is a gateway drug to eating disorders for those with a biological predisposition to eating disorders."

Michelle Obama's Comments Stir Debate

President Obama is also guilty of talking about his daughters' weight. In an interview with Parents magazine in November 2008, the president said, "A couple of years ago -- you'd never know it by looking at her now -- Malia was getting a little chubby."

I am not sure what is more ridiculous here. The First Lady has to ask a physician to measure BMI in order to determine whether her daughter is fat? The President is not allowed to say that his kid is getting chubby? And an "eating disorder activist" says that telling a fat kid to lose weight is confusing?

BMI is useless on kids. Kids get fat because of irresponsible parents who listen to stupid eating disorder activists.

Leftists like Apple iphones

California leftist love the Toyota Prius:

A Toyota representative said 22 percent of all U.S. Prius sales in 2009 were in California, slightly down from 25 percent in 2008.

Presumably they like to make a statement about saving the Earth. Or maybe they just like to drive solo in the carpool lane, as California used to give special carpool privilege stickers to Prius owners.

There are less obvious
political divisions in cell phone users:

A statewide survey of 600 likely voters ...

* One in 7 voters (16 percent) owns an iPhone, and by a wide margin (57 percent to 31 percent), they favor Jerry Brown, the unannounced Democratic front-runner, over Republican Meg Whitman in the race for governor.

* One in 5 voters (21 percent) owns a BlackBerry or other smartphone, and they prefer Whitman for governor (47 percent to 38 percent over Brown). BlackBerry owners skew significantly more Republican (40 percent to 25 percent) than iPhone users (53 percent Democratic). Surrendering to AT&T's dodgy 3G network apparently is a reliable predictor that voters lean to the left — possibly while trying to get better reception.

This makes sense to me. Leftists are happy to pay more taxes for govt-rationed health care, even if it limits their medical options. The super-rich leftist figure that they will always be able to buy what they want anyway. For example, rich Canadians get US health care:

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland — The premier of Canada’s east coast province is undergoing heart surgery in the United States ...

Williams, 60, is an independently wealthy former lawyer and businessman who donates his premier’s salary to charity.

With a Blackberry, you can choose your service carrier, your phone, and your apps to run on the phone. It is not artificially crippled like the Apple iphone. Right wingers want to freedom to do what they want, and leftists will pay to have their options limited.

Trend towards round number pricing

A new book, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It), claims to explain why stores and restaurants use prices like $9.95. It tricks you into thinking that you are getting a better deal.

It seems likely that he is correct, but there are currently several big food advertising campaigns with round number pricing. Pizza Hut is selling pizza for $10, Subway is selling foot-long sandwiches for $5, Burger King is selling cheeseburgers for $1, and Boston Market is pushing sides for $1. No 99 cents. These campaigns seem to be extremely successful.

College is for girls

In case anyone still thinks that girls have more limited educational opportunities, they have taken over the colleges:

At age 22, ... 12.8% of women had earned a bachelor's degree, compared with 6.9% of men.

Feminists have moved on to complaining about the orgasm gap:

Women are shattering political glass ceilings, surpassing men in the workforce, and even winning Indy-car races. But there’s one area where the gender gap has proved particularly stubborn.

“The orgasm gap is an inequity that’s as serious as the pay gap, and it’s producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry,” says Paula England, a professor of sociology at Stanford University.

I don't think that this is a joke.

Update: The NY Times reports on the college boy shortage:

Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, ...

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Faculty members and administrators are well aware of the situation.

Cell phone laws failed

The NY Times reports:

Laws banning cellphone use while driving apparently haven’t reduced crashes, according to a study released on Friday that compared the number of total crashes before the ban with the number after. The study found virtually no difference in the numbers, a finding that had the researchers scratching their heads.

I am not surprised. There was never any good data supporting these laws. The laws seem to be driven more by politics than by safety concerns.

Food for women only

AP reports:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Relief workers began handing out women-only food coupons, launching a new phase ...

In other developments:

• Ten Americans were detained by Haitian police on Saturday as they tried to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic, allegedly without proper documents. The Baptist church members from Idaho called it a "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" to save abandoned children in the disaster zone.

Only women get food? Haiti wants the church members to be criminally prosecuted in the USA. There are some very strange priorities in Haiti.

This is Pres. Obama's Katrina. It would be more efficient to airdrop the food, as has been done in the past.

False Rape Claim Over Bad Sex

From a police report yesterday:

Two Tennessee women who accused a man of rape have admitted to cops that they had consensually agreed to sex with him in exchange for a pack of cigarettes. One woman told investigators that the duo filed a phony police report because they "didn't enjoy the sex," according to cops. Jessica Kathleen Alexander, 18, and Tammy Nicole Ortega, 29, were arrested today for filing a false police report. ... Police have not identified the accused man, who still could be charged with solicitation in connection with the sex-for-cigarettes arrangement.

The report has pictures. My guess is that they will still charge the man, if they can trick him into admitting the bad sex.

Confusing zero with infinity

You would not think that anyone would confuse zero with infinity, but people do all the time. For example, an astronomer writes:

If there is a finite probability of something happening (ie. a planet forming around a star, or a galaxy forming), then in an infinite universe there will be an infinite number of that thing.

In this sentence, the word "finite" has to be read as "non-zero" to make any sense. Finite means not infinite. He is confusing zero with infinite.

Likewise, the term "finite chance" is always misused. The terms "slim chance" and "fat chance" are also confusing. You would think that these terms would be opposites.

The Simpsons porn lands man on sex offender list

Australia news:

An Ipswich man has only narrowly avoided jail for downloading graphic cartoon porn images featuring child characters from The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls television shows.

The 28-year-old former security guard was handed a 12-month suspended prison sentence and is now a registered sex offender after pleading guilty in Ipswich District Court to having the bizarre images on his computer.

Police went to Kurt James Milner’s Leichhardt home on January 24, 2008 after receiving an anonymous tip-off about the disturbing material.

Officers took his home computer, which would no longer turn on, but a year later police forensic experts recovered 64 images of cartoon child exploitation material in the machine’s recycle bin.

This is crazy. First, these were not pictures. No child was exploited. They were just humorous cartoons.

Second, the cops spent a year searching his home computer based on an anonymous tip? Do you really want a society where people are jailed for home viewing of cartoons based on anonymous tips?

Another crippled Apple product

In case you have been sucked in by Apple hype Apple Ipad was announced today. It costs about $800, plus $30 per month, depending on options.

It is crippled as usual. It has no keyboard, no memory slot, no telephone, no removable battery, very limited battery life, no camera, no GPS, and no multi-tasking. There is no ability to run any apps, except those that have been approved by Apple. Web pages that use Flash, Java, ActiveX, or Silverlight will not work.

It is the modern equivalent of a dumb terminal. I think that this product will be a dud. Serious computer users will have no interest in it.

A lot of people think that Apple can do no wrong, after its success with the Apple ipod. But that product only became successful when Apple persuaded the big music labels to put their music exclusively on the Apple itunes store, with digital rights management to prevent you from listening to the music on other devices. But now there are much better music players, and you can buy unencumbered music from Amazon and other places.

Update: Also, it won't work on the T-Mobile wireless network, and it has no USB port. I do not expect to buy any computer without a USB port for the foreseeable future.

Women hate DNA tests

From an advice column today:

Dear Annie: ... However, I am not entirely certain that my second daughter is my biological child. Around the time she was conceived, my wife had an affair with my brother-in-law. ... Is there any way I could secretly obtain a DNA specimen from her to do a test? ...

Dear Tennessee: ... The only valid reason for doing a DNA test is to provide your daughter with an accurate medical history, but if you don't plan to inform her, this doesn't apply.

Yes, the columnists are women. No amount of feminist propaganda will change the basic fact that a man will want to know if his daughter is really his daughter, and the daughter will want to know whether her father is really her father.

Feminists have long said that men have no valid reason to have any say about a woman getting an abortion. Now these columnists say a man has no valid reason to find out who inseminated his wife. This attitude will soon force all men to get DNA tests on every child.

The Trauma Myth

The NY Times reports:

For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.

Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. ...

First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.

Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety ...

I guess that means that it is difficult to get scientific data on this subject. People will spread false myths, and the scientists will not have the guts to correct them. I think that there are a bunch of areas where science has been corrupted by political correctness.

Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers

AP reports:

Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago.

Makes sense to me. My local elementary school only hires female teachers, and only the sort who hate math.

Russian ice dance offensive to aborigines

Yahoo sports reports:

Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin, the favorites for ice-dancing gold in Vancouver, wowed the crowds with their routine at the European Championships. They sit in the lead after their original dance, a tribute to Australian Aborigines.

Except, Aboriginal leaders don't see it as a tribute. They don't really see how it has anything to do with their culture at all.

Ice dancing doesn't have anything to do with anybody's culture. It doesn't have much to do with sport either, as the votes from the judges is always extremely close to what has been decided as the pre-competition favorites. The competitors are not even allowed to do dance moves that are difficult. But their costume looks great!

NY man accused of beheading

AP reports:

The founder of an Islam-oriented television station who is accused of beheading his wife was abused by her for years, according to his lawyer, who said Friday he will pursue a defense combining that justification as well as psychiatric claims.

Defense attorneys' claims that Muzzammil Hassan was victimized by his wife drew a blunt response from District Attorney Frank Sedita after a hearing Friday.

"He chopped her head off," Sedita said. "He chopped her head off. That's all I have to say about Mr. Hassan's apparent defense that he was a battered spouse."

Chopping her head off would be enough evidence for me, but maybe not for a conviction. In California, we have a special law that allows a defense like this. In 2002, a woman who murdered her husband was released under the law.

I'm not sure who is worse, the feminists or the Mohammedans.

Schools stop teaching foreign languages

The NY Times reports:

Thousands of public schools stopped teaching foreign languages in the past decade, according to a government-financed survey — dismal news for a nation that needs more linguists to conduct its global business and diplomacy.

Dismal? This is great news. The USA has too many people speaking foreign languages already. We just don't need very many diplomats. Most diplomacy is in English anyway.

But another contrary trend has educators and policymakers abuzz: a rush by schools in all parts of America to offer instruction in Chinese.

Chinese? That is really a step backwards. Phonetic languages were invented about 5000 years ago, but it is just now getting to China. The Chinese language does not even computerize very well.

Story claims wives make more money

AP reports:

Report: More men get economic boost from marriage

NEW YORK — Historically, marriage was the surest route to financial security for women. Nowadays, it's men who are increasingly getting the biggest economic boost from tying the knot, according to a new analysis of census data.

The changes, summarized in a Pew Research Center report being released today, reflect the proliferation of working wives over the past 40 years — a period in which American women outpaced men in both education and earnings growth. A larger share of today's men, compared with their 1970 counterparts, are married to women whose education and income exceed their own, and a larger share of women are married to men with less education and income.

After you thru all that, it says that only 22% of wives out-earn their husbands. Some of that could be from husbands who are temporarily out of work, and may not reflect income at the time of marriage.

Update: A reader has another criticism below of the study. The NY Times article on the study included this:

Kristen W. Springer, a sociologist at Rutgers, has found that among men in their 50s, having a wife who earns more money is associated with poorer health. Among the highest earning couples in her study, a husband who earns less than his wife is 60 percent less likely to be in good health compared with men who earn more than their wives.

By phrasing it this way, the article makes it sound like the wife's high salary is causing bad health to the husband. But the wife's salary probably has nothing to do with it. People in poor health earn less money, for obvious reasons. So the healthy men in their 50s make more money than the unhealthy men in their 50s, and are therefore more likely to earn more than their wives.

Mom defends soldier accused of having child porn

Chicago news:

An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him.

Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness.

The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing a wading pool and sitting on a truck.

Wow. Do not send pictures to a soldier. It is way too dangerous.

New spanking research

The NY Daily News reports:

Spanking makes kids perform better in school, helps them become more successful: study

A study, which found that young children whose parents spank them perform better at school later on, isn’t winning high marks with child development experts.

Po Bronson writes in Newsweek:

For decades, research on spanking was challenged by the lack of a control group to compare against - almost all kids (90+%) had been spanked at least once, at some time in their early lives. New research shows that now up to 25% of kids are never spanked, so it's a fair question: How are they turning out? Are they turning out better? Surprisingly, they're not.

In NurtureShock, we described some extensive cross-ethnic and international research on spanking by Drs. Jennifer Lansford and Ken Dodge.
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Their data suggested that if a culture views spanking as the normal consequence for bad behavior, kids aren’t damaged by its occasional use.

To explain this shocker, the scholars suggested that in cultures or communities where spanking is common, parents are less agitated when administering spankings. Spanking almost never -- when combined with losing your temper -- can be worse than spanking frequently.

This is not the last word on the subject. I am sure that people will disagree for decades to come. But don't believe anyone who tells you that science has proved spanking to be ineffective or harmful. Spanking is just as good as the other methods in the studies, and maybe better.

Crazy people need certificates to spend money

From another trial day:

SAN FRANCISCO — With the historic trial of a challenge to California's gay marriage ban nearing the end of its first week, two more experts testified Thursday on the negative fallout of denying same-sex couples the right to wed.

The experts cited the mental health toll on gays and lesbians across the state, and they said the ban costs a local government such as San Francisco's millions of dollars a year. ...

Thursday, Ilan Meyer, a Columbia University professor, testified on his research into the mental health damage caused to gays and lesbians by discrimination and the denial of marriage rights. ...

Edmund Egan, the city and county of San Francisco's chief economist, testified it costs the local government's coffers as much as $35 million a year in lost revenue from weddings, hotels and related expenses by denying same-sex couples the right to marry in the city.

I think that Olson and Boies are trying to sabotage the case. These are really bad arguments. If these are really valid arguments that the law is unconstitutional, then I would think that the cell phone driving law and a lot of other laws would also be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, DC is not allowed to vote:

Thirty-one states have held referendums on whether or not to ban gay marriage, but a Washington, D.C., judge ruled Thursday that such a vote would violate the District’s Human Rights Act.

I just want my rights

I thought that the California same-sex trial was going to present evidence that sexual preference was immutable, but the first day gave us this:

Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier will put their love life on trial today when they take the stand in a federal courtroom in San Francisco. ...

Stier, 47, is a tech-support manager for Alameda County, and the two are raising four boys, ages 15 to 21. Two of the boys are from Perry's previous relationship with a woman and two are from Stier's previous relationship with a man.

So apparently she can have a sexual relationship with a man. It appears that this case is more about cutting fathers off from their sons. She wants same-sex marriage so that it will be respectable for women to ditch their husbands, take the kids, live with another woman, and force the kids to grow up without a father.

They live in Berkeley. I thought lesbianism was already respectable in Berkeley!

It appears that this couple never really wanted to get married. They had a chance to in 2008, but they became domestic partners instead.

The lesbian plaintiff gave this explanation:

"I feel like a tiny person in this huge country, and I just want my rights," testified Sandy Stier, a Berkeley woman and one of the gay plaintiffs seeking the right to marry. "I'm just trying to get the rights the Constitution says I have."

If that is all she wants, then she should read what the Constitution says about lesbianism. The case should be dismissed, unless she can prove that she has been damaged somehow.

German trials may be in English

German news:

Courts in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia have offered to handle business cases in English for a pilot project under keen observation by other courts, which could soon follow their example.

The initiative was launched after it was noted that the most lucrative cases – for both state coffers and lawyers – were being conducted outside of Germany because international businesses did not want to handle legal matters in German.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paper reported at the weekend that justice ministers of North Rhine-Westphalia and Hamburg, Roswitha Müller-Piepenkötter and Till Steffen respectively, aimed to change the law governing the German courts so that cases could be conducted in English.

This makes sense to me. Hardly anyone speaks German, except for Germans.

Appalled by food

Today's advice column:

DEAR ABBY: Many people in the world appear indifferent to human suffering and the serious problems our planet is facing.

I am appalled when I see TV shows about food contests in which mounds of food are piled in front of each contender, who then wolfs down enough to feed five or six people.

Evidently the audience enjoys the spectacle. They cheer and applaud the winner as if he was a hero. Do they never think about the millions of people who are starving? I would appreciate your comments. -- PRAGMATIST IN N.Y.

DEAR PRAGMATIST: No, I doubt they consider that while they are stuffing themselves, others are literally starving, nor have I heard that the sponsors have donated a portion of the proceeds to feed the hungry.

She seems to have a conceptual misunderstanding about food. Eating more slowly will not solve the planet's problems. Obesity is a bigger problem than starvation.

The fat people are the ones who eat excessive amounts of food, not the competitive eaters. Gurgitators do not necessarily eat more than anyone else. They just eat more quickly.

Trial may make science argument

Ted Olson is suing for same-sex marriage in California, and wrote a Newsweek article on The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage. I did not see any conservative arguments in the article, but he does claim to make a scientific argument:

My answer to this seeming conundrum rests on a lifetime of exposure to persons of different backgrounds, histories, viewpoints, and intrinsic characteristics, ...

Science has taught us, even if history has not, that gays and lesbians do not choose to be homosexual any more than the rest of us choose to be heterosexual. To a very large extent, these characteristics are immutable, like being left-handed.

No, there is no gay gene or any such scientific proof.

His same-sex marriage trial will soon be broadcast on YouTube. Perhaps he will present the scientific evidence and explain its legal significance.

If there really is scientific evidence, then it should tell us what age sexual orientation is determined. It would not say "to a large extent", but give us numbers. And we have all sort of other laws and policies that favor some people based on characteristics that may be largely immutable, so I don't see why that would be unconstitutional.

So there are now three classes of Californians: heterosexual couples who can get married, divorced, and remarried, if they wish; same-sex couples who cannot get married but can live together in domestic partnerships; and same-sex couples who are now married but who, if they divorce, cannot remarry. This is an irrational system, it is discriminatory, and it cannot stand.

It was the Calif. supreme court that created that third category. Maybe Olson should have tried to get the US supreme court to overturn that, if he feels so strongly about it.

However bad that decision may have been, how are Olson's clients harmed by it? He does not explain in his article.

Daughter is embarrassed

From today's advice column:

DEAR ABBY: I'm a 15-year-old girl whose parents treat me like an 8-year-old. They not only refuse to let me see any movie that isn't G-rated, but they still cut my meat for me! Once a week we go to the park, and they still push me on the swings.

I don't want to tell them it's embarrassing because I'm afraid I'll hurt their feelings. Please tell me how to convey to my parents that I'm not a child anymore. -- OLD ENOUGH IN VIRGINIA

She is 15 and she is not yet able to express embarrassment to her parents? No wonder they treat her like an 8-year-old.

Search censorship

PZ Myers reports that Google censors certain searches involving Islam and Mohammedans. Yahoo search does not have this problem.

Update: This story has been picked up by Fox News:

A Google spokesman explained that the weird absence of results is just a software problem: "This is in fact a bug and we're working to fix it as quickly as we can." But the company would not respond to requests for clarification.

An intriguing corollary: Google offers search suggestions for future tense queries as well. Ask "Christianity will" and Google suggests "Christianity will end, it will disappear," and "Christianity will end." Ask the same about Islam and Google notes that "Islam will dominate the world" and "Islam will destroy Europe."

Google likes to trick people into thinking that these things are unforeseeable algorithm quirks. Don't believe it. Results like this are caused by human hand-tuning. Google employs 1000s of engineers to hand-tune searches.

Study on math gender gap

A SciAm podcast says:

Else-Quest notes that there is some association between the status of women in each country and their ability to do mathematics.

“The percentage of women in parliament was moderately associated with the size of the gender gap in math such that in countries where there were fewer women in parliament males tended to do better in math than girls by a larger extent than in countries in which there was better representation by women in parliament.”

That connection would seem to imply that achievement levels are not innate and fixed.

I don't know anything about this research, and it is not online, but the conclusion does not follow. This supposed correlation has nothing to do with whether achievement is innate.

Maybe the girls are innately smarter in some countries, and as a result they do better on tests and get elected to political office more.

Counseling undermines marriage

Today's Dear Abby says:

DEAR ABBY: I just started counseling for postpartum depression. My husband keeps asking me what we talked about. During the counseling sessions I discuss all aspects of my life -- including my husband. How can I let him know that what I discuss with my therapist is none of his business? -- NEW MAMA IN ARIZONA

DEAR NEW MAMA: Your husband's curiosity is natural, particularly if he has never had any counseling.

What does that mean? Do counselor explain, on the first day of counseling, to keep secrets from your spouse? There is something sick about a counselor who tries to convince a wife that she has greater loyalties to the counselor than to her husband.

Why is this woman even writing to Dear Abby if she already has a counselor?

I think that this couple is headed for divorce. If the wife has problems bad enough to need counseling, then she should be willing to tell her husband. The counselor is actively working to undermine the marriage. Yes, the husband has good reason to try to terminate the counseling.

Married women get fatter

The NY Times reports:

It is widely known that women tend to gain weight after giving birth, but now a large study has found evidence that even among childless women, those who live with a mate put on more pounds than those who live without one.

The differences, the scientists found, were stark. ...

“It’s interesting and brings out some important points,” said Maureen A. Murtaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah who has published widely on weight gain in women. Perhaps, she suggested, a more active social life may help explain why women with partners gain more weight.

“Think of going to a restaurant,” Dr. Murtaugh said. “They serve a 6-foot man the same amount as they serve me, even though I’m 5 feet 5 inches and 60 pounds lighter.”

She is published widely on the subject, and that is the best theory that she can come up with? Come on, that is ridiculous.

I have a simpler theory. All women get fat unless they are trying to attract a man. A married woman can usually get fat and keep her husband, as long as she cooks his favorite food and gets him fat also. If she manages to stay thin, then she can usually divorce her husband and have that more active social life.

The lost genius tribe

Did you know that there was once a race of humans in Africa, called the Boskops, with an average IQ of 150? The current Discover magazine says so. If you read the online article, you'll find a helpful link to a real anthropologist debunks the whole article.

Are people born criminals?

Today's Si Valley paper reports:

Research: Criminal behavior may be hard-wired

Increasing evidence from neuroscience suggests that many aspects of antisocial behavior can be traced to dysfunctional brains. For instance, brain scans of prisoners suggest the circuitry involved in fear conditioning has gone awry in criminal minds. Deformities of certain parts of the brain that may contribute to antisocial and psychopathic behavior have also been linked to a greater risk of arrests and convictions. ...

In the early 1970s, they traveled to the island nation of Mauritius, off the eastern coast of Africa. ...

The test involved a series of 12 tones. Some of them were pleasant. Others were higher-pitched and were followed by a jarring sound produced by "jangling metal objects," according to a report in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

The children were hooked up to a polygraph to measure their reactions to the noises. The high-pitched tones were supposed to make them sweat in anticipation of the unpleasant sound, while the pleasant tones weren't supposed to elicit much response.

Twenty years later, the researchers scoured court records to see whether any of their subjects had committed crimes involving violence, drugs, property or serious driving offenses. ...

The results suggest that criminal behavior may be hard-wired — to some degree — in children as young as 3 and could be the result of a malfunctioning amygdala, the researchers wrote. If they're not afraid that their criminal behavior will land them in jail, what else will deter them? The result, they wrote, is "a lack of conscience."

The web site dates this story Jan. 1, but also has the same story dated 11/25/2009. The source is a November 17, 2009 LA Times story.

It's okay, I missed this story the first couple of times. I missed it in the 1970s also. The story is a little fishy, tho. Why did they have to goto Mauritius? If this was such great 1970s research, has it been replicated? I don't know anything about Mauritius. Are babies baptized there? Are they taught right from wrong?

The decline of the American novel

NYU prof Katie Roiphe reviews sex scenes in recent novels, and writes:

But our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. Prototypical is a scene in Dave Eggers’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm”; or the relationship in Benjamin Kunkel’s “Indecision”: “We were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex.” ...

Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing. ...

The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward.

I did not know that the men in modern novels had gotten so wimpy. My guess is that real men don't read these books anyway. They are consumed by postfeminists who require their porn to match their politics.

Officer fired for joining the KKK

AP reports from Florida:

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – An Alachua County Sheriff's Office corrections officer who acknowledged being a member of the Ku Klux Klan has been fired for belonging to a subversive or terrorist organization, a violation of the agency's code of ethics.

Wayne Kerschner was fired Tuesday following a 10-month internal investigation.

Is this particular KKK organization subversive or terrorist? I am guessing that they are not terrorists, because the article says that they do criminal background checks on all members. The organization mainly operates a web site and has some secret handshakes.

I am just wondering if they also fire officers who belong to Communist or Mohammedan jihadist organizations.

And if it took 10 months for the investigators to figure out that this was a subversive organization, then how was this officer supposed to know?

In the 1950s, many prominent American leftists argued that they had a free speech right to join Communist and other subversive organizations. Where are they now?

Here are more goofy Florida stories.

Here is another racially inflammatory free speech story:

Letter may be hate crime

If caught, the poster of an anonymous, racist letter on the Mid-Atlantic Christian University campus could be charged with a hate crime.

District Attorney Frank Parrish said this week if the author or authors of the letter violated the state’s ethnic intimidation statute, they’ll face Class 1 misdemeanors.

“If the evidence of the crime is there, and the alleged offenders are there, we will prosecute them,” Parrish said Wednesday.

Although Parrish hadn’t read the letter, he said its contents led him to believe it was written with the intent to intimidate persons on the basis of their race.

“It sounds to me in a general way like threatening language,” Parrish said.

So the DA has not even read the letter, and yet he wants to prosecute someone for some publicly posted opinions.

Misuse of donated money

The NY Times ethicist fields this question:

I am an avid public-radio listener and donate regularly to my local station. It recently became known that its chief executive is the highest-paid in public broadcasting, earning nearly $500,000 a year. Many of my friends see this as a misuse of donated money and now refuse to support the station. I feel that if you listen, you must pay your share. Who’s right?

Huhh? Your tax money already supports public radio. So do commercials, even tho they broadcast on non-commercial frequencies. Their news stories are filled with leftist propaganda. And yet somehow liberal guilt gets people to donate money to support outrageous salaries. Go figure.

TSA harasses bloggers

I am puzzled by this story. The NY Times reports:

Agency Drops Bloggers’ Subpoenas

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Transportation Security Administration on Thursday dropped the subpoenas it had issued to two Internet writers in its effort to learn who leaked an airline security directive.

The agency said the investigation was “nearing a successful conclusion, and the subpoenas are no longer in effect.” ...

One subpoena went to an Internet travel writer, Chris Elliott of Winter Springs, Fla., who did not immediately comply. ...

The other blogger, Steven Frischling of Connecticut, said he had been forced to hand over his computer to agents.

It appears that the TSA got what it wanted. The story says the agency "dropped the subpoenas", as if it backed down in the face of Free Speech challenges. But the rest of the story says the opposite, and suggests that the bloggers were forced to give up the info.

First number patent

I discovered this entry in a book called Famous First Facts:

6765. Patent on a number was granted by the Patent Office to mathematician Roger Schlafly of Real Software, Soquel, CA, in 1995. The number was nearly 150 digits long. It was useful in speeding up mathematical calculations performed within the Diffie-Hellman public-key data encryption system.

Unamerican movie

Sailer writes:

Am I going deaf?
Or was much of Robert Downey's English-accented dialogue in Sherlock Holmes close to inaudible? I started to understand more of what the star was saying after about an hour. I think I could follow the diction of Jude Law's Dr. Watson a little better. ...

In contrast, Englishman Hugh Laurie has been doing Holmes with an American accent to perfection on House on TV for most of the decade.

I don't even watch these movies in phony British accents. If the producers wanted to make a movie for the American market, then it should hire actors who can speak American.

Yes, I know that American English was derived from British English, and this movie character was derived from British fictional books. But that was long ago. This particular movie does not resemble any of those books, and nobody knows what a fictional character ought to sound like anyway. So why give him the silly accent?

If the avatars on the 3-D blue planets can speak American English, then surely Sherlock could also. (I am assuming that the avatars do; I haven't seen that movie yet. I don't think that they would spend $300M on a movie and then screw it up with British accents.)

Other threats to marriage

A Si Valley newspaper letter reads:

With some unfortunate events in the news recently, I'm still waiting with bated breath for the politicians who oppose same-sex marriage to issue the following statement (or words to that effect): Other threats to the sanctity of marriage include married (heterosexual) men having affairs with other women and heterosexual women who have affairs with married men (and vice versa).

Siva Kumar
Sunnyvale

Huhh? Yes, those who oppose same-sex marriage nearly always oppose adultery also. Just ask the Catholic Church or the Mormon Church. They are far more concerned about adultery. No politician defends adultery.

This letter seems like a joke. The same-sex marriage arguments are extremely silly.

Toddlers can be taught to count

The NY Times reports:

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 — much later than many have assumed.

Is this a joke? Doesn't every parent and preschool teacher know this stuff? How is it possible that all the educators could be so wrong about something so obvious?

Sentence in balloon boy hoax

The E network reports:

The couple who wanted America to believe that their 6-year-old son, Falcon, was adrift in a runaway balloon both were sentenced to jail time for crafting a hoax that first captivated then horrified the nation. ...

He was also slapped with four years of probation, during which time he is not allowed to profit in any way for his ill-intentioned scheme, meaning no book deals or media interviews. He must perform 100 hours of community service a year for the duration of his term, write a letter of apology to community and public agencies and submit to random drug and alcohol testing.

Finally, he must pay full restitution for the state and federal forces marshalled in the rescue effort that wasn't. That amount still needs needs to be determined.

Prosecutors estimate the fee at $47k. Also reported:

To enforce that ruling, Schapanski ordered the couple to submit quarterly financial disclosures for the duration of their probation.

This is unamerican. Americans ought to have an inalienable right to make money off of publicity stunts. Cash-starved publicity seekers made America great.

The only expense this couple caused was maybe the price of binoculars to see what was going on. That should have been enough to see that there was no boy in the balloon. Heene sought his publicity by calling the local TV station, not 911.

This couple had to make a plea bargain because the wife was threatened with deportation and the kids were threatened with foster care. So they pled guilty. I think that someone should give them a medal for entertaining the country.

All Americans have a fundamental right to write a book and tell their story. All except the Heenes and a few murderers.

Silly law prof gives football opinions

Ever wonder how lawyers could produce such a screwed-up court system? Read this article for how a law professor wants to screw up football refereeing. His basic idea is to rely more heavily on instant replays by ignoring the referee's call on the field when the instant replay is ambiguous.

His next bad idea is to abolish innocence until proven guilty. He wants criminal verdicts to be either innocent, not proved guilty, and guilty.

Update: There are more lawyer comments here. The Slate article claims to be giving the arguments in favor of some deference to the referee on the field, but omits the most obvious ones. He doesn't mention that the fans don't like plays to be reversed well after the fact, and only tolerate it if the original call was embarrassingly bad.

Avoiding goofy character sets

The NY Times reports:

The most widely trafficked search engine in Russia, Yandex, estimated that fewer than 10 percent of the country’s Internet users would favor Cyrillic addresses in the near future. Livejournal, the busiest blogging platform in Russia, said it would not employ Cyrillic domains.

“I really do not see Cyrillic domains being popular,” said Dmitri N. Peskov, a prominent computer consultant who organizes Internet conferences in Russia. “People just do not see the point in having them.” ...

The most widely trafficked search engine in Russia, Yandex, estimated that fewer than 10 percent of the country’s Internet users would favor Cyrillic addresses in the near future. Livejournal, the busiest blogging platform in Russia, said it would not employ Cyrillic domains.

“I really do not see Cyrillic domains being popular,” said Dmitri N. Peskov, a prominent computer consultant who organizes Internet conferences in Russia. “People just do not see the point in having them.”

This is one of those internationalism bad ideas that no one opposes, but no one wants either.

Why would anyone want domain names in Cyrillic or any other goofy foreign alphabet? I hope that I will be able to confure my browser to ignore such domains.

People use the internet as a universal communication tool. English is the universal language. Maybe Russian farmers talk to each other in something other than English, but there is no reason for educated people to use anything but English.

Using a Cyrillic character set for domain names is like using Roman numerals for telephone numbers.

Medieval superstitious nimrods

The Onion's top stories include Four Or Five Guys Pretty Much Carry Whole Renaissance:

"Our research indicates that da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Galileo basically hoisted the entire intellectual transformation of mankind onto their shoulders while everyone else just sat around being superstitious nimrods," said Sue Viero of the Correr Museum of Art in Venice, Italy. ...

According to modern thought on the era, contributors to the Renaissance can be broken into two distinct groups: the brilliant few who, day in and day out, were thrusting society out of the depths of darkness and into the light of learning; and the rest of the so-called artists, mathematicians, and scientists, who were mostly all phoning it in.

Funny. Another top story is Woman Domesticated in around 3000 BC.

Geeks Drive Girls Out of Computer Science

LiveScience reports:

The stereotype of computer scientists as geeks who memorize Star Trek lines and never leave the lab may be driving women away from the field, a new study suggests.

And women can be turned off by just the physical environment, say, of a computer-science classroom or office that's strewn with objects considered "masculine geeky," such as video games and science-fiction stuff. ...

Not only are women missing out on some of the "best career opportunities, but computer science is missing out on female perspectives," Cheryan and her colleagues wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Why stop there? They should try filling up the classrooms and offices with girly stuff. They could use pink-colored textbooks and giving assignments to write programs to compute baby feeding schedules.

Where I live, most of the computer science students are foreigners. So maybe we need to encourage Americans by hanging American flags in the classroom. We could have some white pride posters, as there are not many white students.

The rest of the university is 60% female, so maybe we should have computer games and junk food in the English and Sociology classrooms.

News media create and destroy

The AP reports:

Can companies afford the risk of signing multimillion-dollar contracts with celebrity endorsers? The self-destruction of Tiger Inc. has some saying the billion-dollar athlete may be a thing of the past.

Celebrity endorsers can help boost both the sale of products and their maker's image. But Woods' hasty and stunning downfall shows how quickly things can sour when a superstar athlete's life choices are exposed in a negative light by today's real-time tabloid news culture.

No, Tiger Woods did not self-destruct. The news media built him up and then took him down. They have known for years that his private life did not match the public image that they were creating for him. And now they are piling on with unverified gossip and innuendo.

Whenever the news media destroy someone, defensive reporters deny any responsibility for what they have done. They claim that their victim self-destructed.

Women not wanting drugs

The NY Times has this story, puzzling about women who don't like drugs:

“I even went so far as to get the prescription” for tamoxifen, she said. “But then I started reading more and decided this isn’t the way I’m going to go. I don’t like to take drugs.”

Such decisions have become a topic of growing concern among doctors and researchers, who are increasingly focused on treatments to prevent cancer in high-risk patients. ...

It is true that tamoxifen can have side effects, some of them serious. Among 1,000 similar 52-year-old women, the drug would be expected to cause 21 additional cases of endometrial cancer, a cancer of the uterine lining that is typically treatable when caught early. An additional 21 would develop blood clots, 31 would develop cataracts and 12 would develop sexual problems. And while more than half of the 1,000 women would naturally develop hormonal symptoms like hot flashes, changes in vaginal discharge or irregular periods, tamoxifen would cause those symptoms in about an additional 120 women.

While these risks are not to be taken lightly, neither are the risks of failing to use tamoxifen; its benefits for breast and bone are substantial. Yet virtually every woman in the study said she would be unlikely to take the drug.

I don't know anything about these drugs, but just two days earlier the newspaper had a story about 10,000 lawsuits over menopausal hormone drugs. It seems that there is a long history of experts telling women that they need to be on drugs to control their hormones, and then the science was later shown to be bad. It should not be surprising that some women are leery of these drugs, even if some of them appear effective.

Mammogram Math

Mathematician John Allen Paulos explains:

As we now know, the panel of scientists advised that routine screening for asymptomatic women in their 40s was not warranted and that mammograms for women 50 ...

The exact weight the panel gave to these considerations is unclear, but one factor that was clearly relevant was the problem of frequent false positives when testing for a relatively rare condition. ...

Cognitive biases also make it difficult to see the competing desiderata the panel was charged with balancing. ...

Whatever the role of these biases, the bottom line is that the new recommendations are evidence-based.

Huhh? It is difficult to see the panel's reasoning because the panel did not tell us!

Paulos admits that it is "unclear" how the panel made its decision, and then he just makes up his own reasons. I can do that too.

Let's say 100k women get screened at a cost of $200 each. 2k test positive, and they all get $2k in additional tests. 500 test positive, requiring $20k in treatments. Total expense = $20M + 4M + 10M = $34M.

Now suppose the insurance companies want to save money, and cancel all the screening. The 500 women with cancer eventually come in for an inoperable cancer, and treatment is only $6k each. Total expense = $3M. The insurance company just saved $31M by canceling the screening.

Yes, we can that the authorities were looking at evidence, but were they more interested in saving money or saving lives? Unless they detail the exact weight to all their considerations, we don't know who benefits from these recommendations. It does not help for a mathematician to invent possible reasoning. We need to know what the reasoning really was.

This is the future of health-care in America, I am afraid. Bureaucrats in secret meetings will make decisions to ration health care, and they won't document their rationale.

Drugging kids is big business

Here are some more facts about how kids are being put on psychiatric drugs:

Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.

On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.

In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion off antidepressants, $11.3 billion from antiseizure drugs and $4.8 billion in sales of ADHD drugs, for a grand total of $40.3 billion.

The path to child drugging in the US started with providing adolescents with stimulants for ADHD in the early 80s. That was followed by Prozac in the late 80s, and in the mid-90s drug companies started claiming that ADHD kids really had bipolar disorder, coinciding with the marketing of epilepsy drugs as "mood stablizers" and the arrival of the new atypical antipsychotics.

Parents can now have their kids declared disabled due to mental illness and receive Social Security disability payments and free medical care, and schools can get more money for disabled kids.

There is very little evidence that these drugs are doing any good.

Vote for the good-looking man

Volokh's blog reports on beauty research:

Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, ... Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1½ – 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. ...

Lastly, we present some suggestive evidence on the question of whether the effect of beauty represents productivity or discrimination. In electorates where a higher share of voters say that they do not care who wins, that they are not interested in politics, and that they are not interested in the election, the marginal effect of beauty is larger. On the assumption that apathetic voters are more likely to discriminate, and engaged voters are more likely to choose based upon productive characteristics, this suggests that the effect of beauty on voteshare is more likely to reflect discrimination than returns to productivity.

I think that this last paragraph is incorrect, because "productivity or discrimination" is a false dichotomy. All voting is discriminatory.

If beauty is correlated with productivity for politicians, then the voters may be rational. It seems plausible to me that a good-looking man will be a whole lot more likely to develop political skills that make his a more effective politician. The same might not be true for women because pretty girls can often get ahead with poor political skills.

There could also be a genetic element. Other research has shown:

A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that men's cardiovascular fitness at the age of 18 is a marker for later academic achievement.

Other research has shown that all sorts of seemingly unrelated talents are actually correlated.

Federal workers get rich

USA Today reports:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules. ...

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

Wow. We should stop using the term "public servant".

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

The NY Times reports:

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Some people will read this as saying that poor kids get better medical care than rich kids.

The article suggests that some kids are getting unneeded treatments, but that is usually a sign of wealth. Rich people get unneeded treatments all the time.

A holy war can be a just war

Pres. Barack Obama said, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture:

And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith. Such a warped view of religion ...

This is offensive. Obama believes in a just war, as he just ordered the escalation of the Afghanistan war.

The concept of a just war was invented by Christians, and it does not mean indiscriminate killing. Obama seems to be saying that a Christian belief in a just war must necessarily be wrong.

Christians and Mohammedans have fought wars for causes they believe in throughout history, but there is no moral equivalence. Only the Mohammedans kill pregnant mothers and Red Cross workers in the name of God, not Christians. Christians do have causes that they believe in and are willing to fight for, but they are not the same causes as the Mohammedans.

Obama is reciting a liberal mantra that all religions are the same. They are not. If he were a real Christian, he would not say such nonsense.

Phony study on phony web sites

The Si Valley paper reports:

With a little sleight of hand, con artists can dupe them into giving top billing to fraudulent Web sites that prey on consumers, making unwitting accomplices of companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. ...

Stickley created a Web site purporting to belong to the Credit Union of Southern California, a real business that agreed to be part of the experiment. He then used his knowledge of how search engines rank Web sites to achieve something that shocked him: His phony site got a No. 2 ranking on Yahoo's search engine and landed in the top slot on Microsoft's Bing, ahead of even the credit union's real site.

Con artists can show up in searches, but this does not prove it. The researcher created an authorized site that directed customers to what they wanted. It was not a fraudulent site. So why should a search engine block it?

Crime to kill a rat

The Canadian news reports:

Two reality stars from the British program I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! have been charged with animal cruelty.

Italian chef Gino D'Acampo, who won the competitive series, and actor Stuart Manning face the charge for allegedly killing and cooking a rat during the show's filming in Australia.

Animal welfare activists in Australia lodged an official complaint and state police in New South Wales have confirmed two men have been charged with animal cruelty in connection with the program. ...

The pair have been issued a summons to appear in court to face the charge on Feb. 3. The maximum penalty is three years in prison. ...

During the three-week show, which ended on Friday, D'Acampo was forced to eat rotten egg, cockroaches, a crocodile's tongue and rhino beetles in order to win a dinner for his fellow campers.

This is so ridiculous that I don't know what to say. Humans have to eat animal meat (or artificial substitutes) in order to be healthy. Rats are vermin. The TV show was educational. Everyone benefited. What kind of kook would think that this deserves three years in prison?

Silly Title IX claims

The NY Times reports on a busybody who goes around filing complaints against high school athletic programs:

Soon, parents at other schools enlisted his help, and Landau continued to spot unfair treatment.

Girls typically played basketball in the afternoons, and the boys in the evenings. Cheerleaders performed only at boys’ games. Boys played their title games at arenas like the Palestra at the University of Pennsylvania, and girls were relegated to school gyms. His complainted have helped eliminate those inequities.

So the law requires cheerleaders at girls' games? This is ridiculous.

An adult conversation with a kid

Dear Abby advises:

DEAR ABBY: My 8-year-old granddaughter has posed a question that stumped me, and I hope you can help with an answer: Why be neat and well-groomed?

She doesn't care what people think of how she looks. She sees no problem wearing clothes that are torn, etc. ... I am challenged by her question. How can I answer her?

DEAR LOST FOR WORDS: Please stop trying to have an adult conversation with an 8-year-old. ...

Dear Abby considers this an "adult conversation"? Perhaps this explains why she give such bad advice.

No, grandma was trying to have an 8yo conversation with an 8yo. Kids need explanations for stuff like this.