Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public’s delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public’s unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.
I’m not sure this is a new development, but it is significant.
The source of America’s cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn’t) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn’t) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity.
But with reelection rates as high as they are, voters forget all about integrity in the ballot box.
Before about 1980, just 4% of families were choosing cremation over burial. Now, 39% select cremation, and in the next 15 years, the percentage is expected to approach 60%, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The increase is being driven in part by cremation’s cheaper cost, and in part by the fact that fewer extended families are rooted in one specific place anymore—which means they don’t live close enough to visit a loved one’s gravesite.
You’ve stumbled upon a group of beings. For all you can tell, these beings are self-aware, intelligent, have emotions, solve complex problems, and call each other by name. They have thoughts and feelings and probably experience life in a way that is very similar to your own. Are they persons? And do you have moral obligations towards them?
Thomas White, Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has made news claiming that we have found such a group of beings. In fact, we’ve been living alongside them for a while now. They’re dolphins, and they’re people too. At an upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, White will be arguing that dolphins deserve the status of “nonhuman persons”. The research in marine science now overwhelmingly shows that dolphins have a highly sophisticated type of consciousness and inner world – and their cognitive capacity is second only to humans (yes, they beat chimps). With such high intellectual and emotional abilities, White claims they are entitled to special moral status and protections. The implications for current practices involving dolphins (in the context of fishing, entertainment, research and the military) are serious, since they would be considered chillingly unethical if they involved human persons.
Lets leave to one side, for the duration of this blog post, the question of whether it is wise for our society to spend colossal sums of money replacing an existing technology [the book] that is durable, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing. (I will let slip this much: No, I do not care how many trees die. They should be so lucky as to be reincarnated as, say, the poems of Surrey. Ents, do your worst!)
If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
As the article points out, he doesn’t list accomplishments at all… only what he can do for the potential employer. Fascinating.
A gripping account of hypothermia’s affects on the body in Outside:
But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.
From the Economist on growing state influence worldwide:
The public sector is subjected to all sorts of perverse incentives. Politicians use public money to “buy” votes. America is littered with white elephants such as the John Murtha airport in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars but serves only a handful of passengers, including Mr Murtha, who happens to be chairman of a powerful congressional committee. Interest groups spend hugely to try to affect political decisions: there are 1,800 registered lobbyists in the European Union, 5,000 in Canada and no fewer than 15,000 in America. Mr Bush’s energy bill was so influenced by lobbyists that John McCain dubbed it the “No Lobbyist Left Behind” act.
Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.
Google Maps Navigation continues to be the killer app of any Android phone. It’s an true marvel and ably demonstrates why putting all of the world’s public and personal data in the hands of a huge, unstoppable corporation sometimes is a pretty awesomely-good idea.
This makes sense, and explains why I love classical and despise most rap; one keeps things interesting with theme and variation, the other samples the same beats over and over:
The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.
The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance.
In the Pew polls, Obama suffered a drastic drop in support in the $30,000-$75,000 income group, from 63 percent to 17 percent approval in February 2009, to 53 percent to 35 percent disapproval in the January 14 poll. Among respondents over sixty-five years old, he went from 60 percent to 17 percent approval to 54 percent to 31 percent disapproval. In its January 2010 poll, Pew has a breakdown by race that is even more disturbing. Whites with some or no college–a rough designation for working-class whites–disapprove of Obama’s presidency by 54 percent to 36 percent.
The paper, released last week in the journal Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Assn., found that every hour spent watching television was associated with an 18% greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, an 11% greater risk of all causes of death, and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer. The link between TV watching and death from cardiovascular disease existed not just among the overweight and obese, but also among people who exercised and were at at healthy weight.
“They [Rousseau's reflections on what he'd learned of ethics] have taught me one great maxim of morality, the only perhaps which is of practical use: to avoid situations which place our duties in opposition to our interests, and show us where another man’s loss spells profit to us. For I am sure that, in such situations, however sincere and virtuous the motives we start with, sooner or later and unconsciously we weaken, and become wicked and unjust in practice, though still remaining good and just in our hearts.”
How true. I think this applies to government more than anywhere else.
In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County—which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper—79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children.
I want a car. I want one badly. It’s a modern convenience that seems so… necessary. To move freely at whim, to break the bonds of place; there’s something very American about this impulse.
But I can’t justify buying one because I don’t need it. I don’t go many places these days as a grad student, and the bus system in Providence works, if only just barely. I’m within walking distance to my world (and it’s a world with precious few parking spots, too) and there are Zipcars for the world outside.
I’ll get one eventually, of course, in a few years when I leave this sheltered cove of books and seminars. That’s fine.
But that feeling of need. The dark side is that I had convinced myself I really did need it. I wanted the possession for the sake of possessing, little more. Have I become so attached to things that I’m weak in the face of being able to gloriously go without?
There’s a pride hidden in asceticism-especially given the trendiness of thrift these days-and it’s one in which I’d like to indulge, but by the light of history I live as a king. To be an American ascetic is to exist without a car, a TV. (I could become even more so without a computer or phone, but then I’m not a sadist. These are professional and personal necessities.)
This year I’ll turn 25, entering those halcyon days of vast prospects and lower insurance premiums. With each year, simplicity becomes the ever-dearer possession.
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