A-B-C...Easy as 1-2-3

Interesting links that I've found when I was supposed to be working here in DC.

As a young, "hip," car-less Metro-loving (except for the fare increases, WMATA!) urbanite, this report on driving from The Atlantic a while ago rings true. "In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver's licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31 percent of 16-year-olds and 49 percent of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998." Other interesting fact about growing up in America: Teen girls are now drinking more than teenage boys.

In Robot News: Creepy stuff from Japan - I guess since none of their citizens are having babies, they need to think outside the box? Actually, with this NYT interview with a robot, maybe we can robots of all ages (and to be honest, the conversation reported sounded a little more interesting than talking to some people...)

A heartwarming obit about a Chicago couple that lived their whole life together. Would that we could all be that lucky...And a more creepy story about cryonics fanatics that will live their lives with their partner - and then some.

More links: How a miracle 3-point-shot saved lives, from Sports Illustrated. Recommended...Stereotyping people by their favorite websites - Funny if you spend a lot of time on the Web.

The rest of the piece is pretty standard, but this paragraph from David Brooks today blew me away:

• "Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined."

And then for anyone who enjoys playing with Google translator as much as I do, this new translator is for you.

Attack of the Lynx! [Part VI]

Some of these are a little older than others, but all caught my interest at some point so you will be interested too :)

• Baby dies because parents are too busy playing video games.
• 6-year-old becomes youngest girl in Oregon history to commit suicide
• Woman sues Canadian company for sending her phone bill...which reveals her secret affair.
• Was the 20th Century the Playboy Century (How Hugh Hefner Changed America)?
• Perhaps related, the lefty Daily Beast gives you 15 ways to predict divorce.
• Trenchant analysis from The Atlantic: What happens when the so-called "Best and Brightest" fail?
• And what does it say about our country when 20 percent of American atheists profess a belief in God?? (Or our polling, as the case may be.)
• And on two lighter notes to end, check out where ND ranks on the most expensive season tickets in college football.
• And how do you see colors? :)

Google is treating me badly so I'm not sure if this got published or not...Apologies if I bore you with my repetition.

Link Dump, Special Health Care Edition

If you don't care about American politics, this post may not contain much valuable information for you. However, if you're reading this blog, you probably should care about American politics, because it almost certainly impacts your life. With that caveat...

First, some explanation/analysis of the health care bill signed into law by President Obama today. David Frum is his usually contrariarian but common-sense-filled self in a nice explanation of what the law will do on CNN.com. "[T]oday's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry." Tyler Cowen predicts the effects of the bill (warning: a little wonky) on the middle class. Nate Silver runs through the math of repeal (not likely.) The editors of National Review offer a conservative call to arms - Some substantive critiques, but I tire of invective rhetoric. And of course, no truly great reform can be enacted without asking that all-important question: How does it affect the Amish?

David Brooks has had some excellent columns lately that I haven't had a chance to post. From Feburary 2: "According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children...In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away."
Then, later in Feburary, he turns his sights on the role of the elite (again): "As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower...The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower."

And have I mentioned that I love Ross Douthat - From February 23, a great post: This isn't the GOP he (or I, if I may humbly associate with the thought) had in mind. "Republicans are well on their way to sounding like Bill Clinton circa 1996 on entitlements, and Jim DeMint on everything else."

And because it wouldn't be a true post without a mention of culture and/or sex, here's an academic article on the shift in teenage sexuality over the past 100 years. From the abstract: "As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture." From the paper: "In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this." Haven't read the whole thing yet, but plan to...

A post for women, to start the New Year off right

Can we finally acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the "glass celing" is becoming a relic of the 20th Century? The Economist reports that "within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce."

In that vein...I had this link saved from last June but forgot about it. Esquire magazine asks: "Where Have All the Loose Women Gone?" "Over the years, as women became educated and gained control over their lives, they wanted more stuff, more choices, more men. If you have a great-grandmother, ask her and she'll tell you: The chance to try people out for a while before you marry them is one of the best things that happened in the twentieth century. But the post-post-feminist maelstrom that is Danica Patrick and the Real Housewives of Wherever and Secretary Clinton versus Beauty Queen Palin means that women can wield real power, but it comes at the cost of confusion — professional, social, and sexual. Sex has become a minefield just too tricky to navigate as they build a career or a family or a reality-TV-show franchise. They go elsewhere. Which is a disaster for men. Until now, feminism has been the best thing that ever happened to us..."

Now more stuff from the archives: Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic examines "A Boy's Life" Or is a girl's? Children as young as 5 are now being diagnosed as being transgender, and increasingly turning to medical remedies to their sense of confusion:

• "The change is fueled mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs."
• "Overall, though, Tuerk’s explanation touches on something deeper than latent homophobia: a subconscious strain in American conceptions of childhood. You see it in the hyper- vigilance about “good touch” and “bad touch.” Or in the banishing of Freud to the realm of the perverse. The culture seems invested in an almost Victorian notion of childhood innocence, leaving no room for sexual volition, even in the far future."

Kay S. Hymowitz in the City Journal examines the biological urges that causes the Femina Sapiens to want a career and children -And if they are compatible. "Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear. Hrdy goes so far as to conclude that “the ‘afterglow’ from climax is an ancient ‘maternal’ rather than sexual response.” In females, in other words, the maternal urge shapes the sexual urge." Likewise, Lori Gottlieb wonders "Is it better to be alone, or to settle?" Her advice? "Marry Him!"

• "When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband."
• "Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option."
  

Keeping on the sexual warfare front, Ross Douthat (before he started writing columns for the NYT,) asks the uncomfortable but intriguing and important question: Does looking at pornography make you an adulterer?

• "Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up."
• "If it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn’t the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse?"
• Has the Internet changed the nature of masturbation: Is there a difference between one-way longing for a magazine pinup and reciprocal acts of eroticism online?
• "This isn’t to say the distinction between hiring a prostitute and shelling out for online porn doesn’t matter; in moral issues, every distinction matters. But if you approach infidelity as a continuum of betrayal rather than an either/or proposition, then the Internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit."
• The language used by a man quoted in the article is that "of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse."
  

Finally, a special random bonus: The Danish newspaper Politicken announces that "Obama is Greater Than Jesus." No comment.

Post-Christmas Sale

From The Economist: "In 2008 37% of government workers were unionised, nearly five times the share in the private sector (see chart), and the same share that was unionised 25 years earlier. Over that period, the share of unionised private-sector jobs collapsed from 17% to 8%...As a result, public-sector workers are spoiled rotten."

William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting question: We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all...Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?" The answer is lengthy, but worth reading, if only to open your mind that what we view as "friendship" is fairly modern invention.

From Reuters Japan: A government study researching teen pregnancy says that "Teens who skip breakfast as middle school students tend to have sex at an earlier age than those who start the day with a proper meal."

And Dave Barry's take on 2009 is hysterical, as usual. Love that man.

Some early Christmas presents for you all

A couple thoughts from my First Amendment professor's end-of-semester lecture. Let me know if you find them as thought-provoking as I did:

• How would you change the way you live your life if you knew that you would receive $5,000,000 a year for the rest of your life?
• For the rest of your life, you will never again be as free as you are right now as a college student.
  

I love the way this is described: The Aids Healthcare Foundation is trying to make sure that all films which "demonstrate unprotected exchange of bodily fluids" are required to protect their actors/actresses from AIDS...

This little post at a site called "The League of Ordinary Gentlemen" may describe a little of why I really do enjoy "The Office:"
"Of course, just like most of us don’t have the body types of movie-stars, most of us will also not be millionaires or celebrities. Most of us will only ever achieve moderate financial success. Most of us will only be content with our work. We will dislike many of our bosses and co-workers and will have to learn to live with them as best we can, just like we learn to live with our imperfect families. Are we all just under-achievers then?...Really, all the characters are in one way or another. I think the show is about hope more than it is about despair. It is about how we achieve something good in our lives beyond our work and career."

In this difficult economics times, it's nice to know there's one industry that's still growing: USA Today reports that "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."

I've seen videos like this before, but it never hurts to see it again. The American Museum of National History presents: The Universe, as we know it.

If you haven't been reading Ross Douthat regularly, you should. Here's his take on James Cameron's Avatar.

And this has been making the rounds recently, but if you haven't heard what English sounds like to foreign speakers, it's pretty amusing.

Nazis, Conservatives, and Religious Nut Jobs

I really like the "Letters of Note" blog...Here's a note from Hitler that's a pretty good piece of history.

Frum asks the uncomfortable but prescient question: "Can Conservatives Govern?" The nut graf:

• "One attendee said something very thought-provoking. “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then – because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

  My answer: If your principles don’t allow you to save your country when it needs to be be saved, then there’s something wrong with those principles."

A follow-up on that "Gospel of Prosperity" nonsense: The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin asks: "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?"

Back to School Flurry of Miscellany

Beyond the kind of flippant title, this blog post does have some interesting sociological implications/stuff in it...

As usual, Medved has an insightful take on politics in the near future, although I still think talking about 2010 is very premature.

Two ABCNews.com medical stories: The Girl Who Could Feel No Pain and The Girl Who Was Addicted to Abortion.

This is a fascinating graphic that takes a while to load, showing the amount of time different groups of people spend doing different things during their day. I dare you to spend less than 5 minutes on there (and I bet it's impossible.)

Two pictures that are a little creepy and probably inappropriate but have been used to try to spread positive societal messages (don't click on the links with children around): "AIDS is a Mass Murderer" and "The Media Messes With Our View of What Beauty Is" I'm all for PSAs against AIDS and for accepting yourself, but is this not too much?

Although it's not entirely accurate (and I like Pepsi's taste better,) this graphic was kind of cute:

Hurray for tradition.

Speaking of tradition, here are some Notre Dame related links to warm your heart: The Notre Dame online jigsaw puzzle (also available in real life.) Someone at the ND gameday site has been going crazy with panoramic camera recently, so check that out as well.

Also, we're being reviewed? Goodness GE is getting desperate.

36 hours to Chicago

A last Seattlian flurry of links as I try to clean house before leaving back to school.

Gallup recently released a "State of the States" poll tracking religious identities in the different states. The two graphs I found most interesting:




Dori Monson, a local talk show host of whom I can't say I'm a huge fan, put together a pretty concise take-down of Obama's PR push on HC. He has video and quotes and the whole nine yards, but I liked this contradiction he found: "In fact, in 2003, Obama laid out his plan in a speech to the AFL-CIO: "Single payer health care plan. Universal health care plan. That's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to talk back the Senate and we have to take back the country"...Obama in 2009: "I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter." And don't get me started on the USPS analogy.

But on the flip side, leave it to David Frum to point out some of the truly scary aspects of opponents of the current health care reform bill: "If Barack Obama really were a fascist, really were a Nazi, really did plan death panels to kill the old and infirm, really did contemplate overthrowing the American constitutional republic—if he were those things, somebody should shoot him. But he is not. He is an ambitious, liberal president who is spending too much money and emitting too much debt. His health-care ideas are too ambitious and his climate plans are too interventionist. The president can be met and bested on the field of reason—but only by people who are themselves reasonable."

And that's enough for now.

High Glitz. Lunacy, and Fox News

These photos make you think America is pretty messed up - It's an art gallery casting a spotlight on the truly creepy ways people dress up their kids in the search of fame these days...Like Little Miss Sunshine but real.

David Frum is generally pretty solid, and I like his recent take on the stupid "Obama has no birth certificate" conspiracy people. "So here’s the hypothesis. Barack Obama Sr. has brought his new wife to Kenya. (A journey for which there is precisely zero documentation.) There, she bears him a child. Then — in an era before jet travel and at a time when plane fares cost many, many times more than they do now — she immediately gets on a plane from Mombasa to Nairobi, then another plane from Nairobi to Cairo, then a third from Cairo to London, then from London to Gander, Gander to maybe Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu. Arriving in Honolulu she presents her — what? two-week old infant? — to the authorities and asks for a birth certificate. Oh — and she also retroactively places birth announcements in the local papers." Uh-huh.

In related news, Gawker put together an interesting little cross-section of the approval/TV ratings of Fox News Channel and the Republican Party:

And speaking of lunacy, this pretty much qualifies: "Call these unpaid internships that you pay for...A company called the University of Dreams, the largest and most visible player in an industry that has boomed in recent years as internship experience has become a near-necessity on any competitive entry-level résumé...says it saw a spike in interest this year due to the downturn, as the number of applicants surged above 9,000."

Junk from the week ending August 7, 2009

Ramesh Ponnuru has some trenchant thoughts on the Obama HC push in Time: The lead is priceless:

• "There are two basic points about health-care reform that President Obama wants to convey. The first is that, as he put it in an ABC special in June, "the status quo is untenable." Our health-care system is rife with "skewed incentives." It gives us "a whole bunch of care" that "may not be making us healthier." It generates too many specialists and not enough primary-care physicians. It is "bankrupting families," "bankrupting businesses" and "bankrupting our government at the state and federal level. So we know things are going to have to change." Obama's second major point is that--to quote from the same broadcast--"if you are happy with your plan and you are happy with your doctor, then we don't want you to have to change ... So what we're saying is, If you are happy with your plan and your doctor, you stick with it." So the system is an unsustainable disaster, but you can keep your piece of it if you want. And the Democrats wonder why selling health-care reform to the public has been so hard?

In other health reform news, Jim Capretta points to a recent CBO letter that should put whatever proof any who needs still needs convincing past the standard of "reasonable doubt" that this is going to be pricey: "The net cost of the coverage provisions would be growing at a rate of more than 8 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019...Revenue from the surcharge on high-income individuals would be growing at about 5 percent per year in nominal terms between 2017 and 2019; that component would continue to grow at a slower rate than the cost of the coverage expansion in the following decade. In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits [pdf] during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window."

Culturally, Mark Regnerus in Christianity Today makes "The Case for Early Marriage:"

• "I am suggesting that when people wait until their mid-to-late 20s to marry, it is unreasonable to expect them to refrain from sex. It's battling our Creator's reproductive designs. The data don't lie. Our sexual behavior patterns—the kind I documented in 2007 in Forbidden Fruit—give us away. Very few wait long for sex. Meanwhile, women's fertility is more or less fixed, yet Americans are increasingly ignoring it during their 20s, only to beg and pray to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s.
• "I know, I know: God has someone in mind for [young women,] and it's just a matter of time before they meet. God does work miracles. But the fact remains that there just aren't as many serious Christian young men as there are women, and the men know it. Men get the idea that they can indeed find the ideal woman if they are patient enough. Life expectancies nearing 80 years prompt many to dabble with relationships in their 20s rather than commit to a life of "the same thing" for such a long time. Men have few compelling reasons to mature quickly. Marriage seems an unnecessary risk to many of them, even Christians. Sex seldom requires such a steep commitment. As a result, many men postpone growing up.
• "The abstinence industry perpetuates a blissful myth; too much is made of the explosively rewarding marital sex life awaiting abstainers. The fact is that God makes no promises of great sex to those who wait. Some experience difficult marriages. Spouses wander. Others cannot conceive children. In reality, spouses learn marriage, just like they learn communication, child-rearing, or making love...In sum, Christians need to get real about marriage: it's a covenant helpmate thing that suffers from too much idealism and too little realism. Weddings may be beautiful, but marriages become beautiful."

Seven pages, with some dryer sections, but recommended for all who might consider becoming married someday.

Lastly, The Economist has a report on an issue near and dear to my heart: "A generation ago, home-schooling was rare and, in many states, illegal. Now, according to the Department of Education, there are roughly 1.5m home-schooled students in America, a number that has doubled in a decade. That is about 3% of the school-age population. The National Home Education Research Institute puts the number even higher, at between 1.8m and 2.5m."

Attack of the Lynx! [Part V]

The Economist has a cleverly-written while fairly pedestrian look at the first half-year of the Obama administration. Some choice quotes:

• "An impression is being formed in Washington of a presidency that is far too ready to hand over the direction of domestic policy to Congress; that is drifting either deliberately or lethargically leftwards; and that is more comfortable with lofty visions than details."
• "He has been curiously ill-served by a press short of useful criticism, with liberal America prepared only to debate what sort of water he walks on best, while conservative radio hosts argue over when exactly he became a communist."
• "What should Mr Obama do? He must come down from his cloud and start leading. The House Democrats could be usefully reminded that their present 78-seat margin owes everything to the president’s coat-tails; they are endangering his popularity."

Your faithful Heritage automaton brings you this public service announcement: "One Pill, Two Pill, Red Pill, Blue Pill: Top 10 Reasons Obamacare Is Wrong for America." But seriously, please do read it, even if you disagree with all 10, I think it's really important. It is 1/6 of the American economy, after all, and we all come into contact with it at some point.

In related news, from Rasmussen via Sullivan:


Enough politics.

I found this article from October 2008 in the NYT that raises some interesting questions about both infidelity and social science research: "Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men...data show that in any given year, about 10 percent of married people — 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women — say they have had sex outside their marriage."

I've always been a little skeptical of the mega-church crowd (Osteen, Warren, et al) and this Slate piece by Clint Rainey raises some interesting points - "God wants to give you your own home." Sorry, I missed that in my Bible. ("It's not my job to try to straighten everybody out," Osteen famously told Larry King in 2005, adding, "My message is a message of hope.")

St. Paul was awesome and this is kind of even more awesome. "Benedict said archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of St. Paul."

"The girls—all white and middle class—started budding breasts a full year earlier than their counterparts just 15 years ago (the age of menstruation had advanced about four months). While that’s a stunner in itself, the real head-scratcher was that the change in girls’ body weight was minimal and couldn’t account for the difference. Nearly all the girls in both groups were relatively thin...So if fat isn’t resetting the puberty clock, what is?" Two theories are divorce and the media, according to the Double X blog.

Political Mumbo-Jumbo for 7/29

If you haven't kept tabs on the "birther" conspiracy theories, this video shows a pretty public demonstration at a town hall meeting in Delaware with Rep. Mike Castle. It's kind of culty. (And total nonsense.)



Sullivan at The Atlantic links to this chart quite visibly demonstrating the housing bubble. How did your hometown do?



And a note from the home front: "Wednesday will likely be the hottest day in the history of Seattle with high temperatures breaking the 100-degree mark in parts of Western Washington." 102 as I write this.

Book: "The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart," Bill Bishop

• “In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.”
• “The Big Sort, then, is not simply about political partisanship, about how Americans vote every couple of years. It is a division in what they value, in how they worship, and in what they expect out of life.”
• “The old systems of order – around land, family, class, tradition, and religious denomination – gave way. They were replaced over the next thirty years with a new order based on individual choice. Today we seek our own kind in like-minded churches, like-minded neighborhoods, and like-minded sources of news and entertainment.”
• “Unsurpassed prosperity had set people free – free to think, speak, move, and drift. Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans – and it had loosened long-established social moorings.”
• “The more educated American become – and the richer – the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view, [Diana] Mutz wrote [in “Hearing the Other Side.”]
• “We have migrated into ever-narrower communities and churches and political groups…We have replaced a belief in a nation with a trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings…In thts time, we have reshaped our economies, transformed our businesses, both created and decimated our cities, and altered institutions of faith and fellowship that have withstood centuries. Now more isolated than ever in our private lives cocooned with our fellows, we approach public life the sensibility of customers who are always right. “Tailor-made” has worked so well for industry and social networking sites, for subdivisions and churches, we expect it from our government too. But democracy doesn’t seem to work that way.”
• “In 1976, the average winning margin in the 50 states and Washington, DC, was 10 percentage points…In 2008, the average winning margin…was 17.4 percentage points.”

Book: "American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile," Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

• “[T]he Catholic Church is not above the fray, but neither is she captive to the fray. Her chief political contribution is to provide a transcendent horizon for our civil arguments, to temper the passionate confusions of the political penultimate with the theological ultimate, and to insist that our common humanity and gift of reason are capable of deliberating how we ought to order our life together."
• “In the view of [Alasdair] MacIntyre and other, the Enlightenment project has failed on its own terms…[I]t failed to produce an ethics to which any rational person, acting rationally, must give assent. Society was for a time able to live off the capital of earlier traditions of virtue, but now that capital has been depleted, the failure of the Enlightenment project has been widely advertised, and the time has come round at last for the triumph of nihilism.”
• “The new barbarians are not barbarians because they are unsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removed themselves from what I have called the civilizational circle of moral conversation. In simpler terms, we may speak of “traditional values.” The barbarians refuse to be limited by what we know, by the wisdom we have received, about good and evil, right and wrong. From them, the past is merely prelude.”
• “It is true that the Constitution establishes a secular order of government…To say that this government is secular is to say that it is for the present time; it is a temporal order. It is for the city of man, not the City of God. The American founders did not establish this constitutional order to be a church, although for some secularists it may be the closest thing they have to a church.”
• “There is considerable truth in the observation that politics is primarily a function of culture, that at the heart of culture is morality, and that at the heart of morality are those commanding truths typically associated with religion…Unless tempered by the virtue of civility, the metaphor of “culture wars,” in which commanding truths are pitted against each other, can easily lead to a circumstance in which politics degenerates into warfare that is not merely metaphorical…which in America means not warfare between religions but between opposing visions of the common good prosecuted with religious fervor, with one side unfurling its battle banners against ‘theocracy,’ and the other against ‘the dictatorship of relativism.’”
• “It would seem obvious that the human good is served by respect for human dignity. But this obviously is not obvious to all. The argument is sharpened if we speak not of human dignity but of the dignity of the human person. The phrase human dignity may suggest the human collective and include efforts such as taking technological charge of the evolution of the human species. The dignity of the human person places the accent on the individual – although, to be sure, the individual situated in society, and one hopes, in society that aspires to being community.”
• Re: Human Dignity. “In a world indelibly marked and marred by the Holocaust, the Gulag Archipelago, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and myriad other crimes against humanity, a political consensus as a placeholder against great veils, no matter how intellectually rickety its structure, is not to be scorned."
• “In a world that continues to be dominated by libido dominandi – the unbridled lust for power and glory – politics is an instrument for the restrain of great evil.”
• “A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, with reason and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected defended and indeed revered.”
• “Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see. Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don't want to see. Hope is only hope when it is hope with eyes wide open to all that challenges hope."
• “Despite all, we cling to the belief that we are unique persons, acting and hoping and aspiring in ways that have consequence, maybe even eternal consequence. That belief is mocked by the elemental forces of determinism, and mocked unanswerably, or so it seems to many, by the reality of death. Posited against death’s edict of ultimate meaninglessness, we unfurl the banner of hope for “eternal life”…Eternal life is not this life continuing without end. Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true and beautiful in this life.”
• “We must not think that the totalitarian catastrophes of that unhappy century are safely consigned to the past. The utopian impulse is deeply embedded in the human heart, and we can be sure that there is today a counterpart to Karl Marx working away in the British Library, or, more likely, in some biotech laboratory, contriving a plan for the reaction of a home in history that will satisfy our longing for home.”
• “As Christians and as Americans, in this our awkward duality of citizenship, we seek to be faithful in a time not of our choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place. It is a time of many times: a time for dancing, even if to the songs of Zion in a foreign land; a time for walking together, unintimidated when we seem to be a small and beleaguered band; a time for rejoicing in momentary triumphs, and for defiance in momentary defeat; a time for persistence in reasoned argument, never tiring in proposing to the world a more excellent way; a time for generosity toward those who would make us their enemy; and, finally, a time for happy surrender to brother death – but not before, through our laughter and tears, we see and hail from afar the New Jerusalem and know that it is all time toward home.”
  

Attack of the Linx! [Part IV]

Did you know you can make a gift to the Federal government? "This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States." Joe Biden was right.

As Sports Illustrated would say, This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse is: Charlie Weis has a twitter account.

This was one of the most amazing inside-the-Beltway stories I have ever read. Keith Olberman did a funny interpretation of it, if you search for it, but above all, DON'T CALL HER LIZ!

Go Britain Go..."More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today [In Dec 2006.] It shows that an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension - greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good...A clear majority, 63%, say that they are not religious - including more than half of those who describe themselves as Christian."

An article about gender bias in theatre in the NYT comes to some interesting conclusions - "Ms. Sands sent identical scripts to artistic directors and literary managers around the country. The only difference was that half named a man as the writer (for example, Michael Walker), while half named a woman (i.e., Mary Walker). It turned out that Mary’s scripts received significantly worse ratings in terms of quality, economic prospects and audience response than Michael’s. The biggest surprise? “These results are driven exclusively by the responses of female artistic directors and literary managers,” Ms. Sands said. Amid the gasps from the audience, an incredulous voice called out, “Say that again?” Ms. Sands put it another way: “Men rate men and women playwrights exactly the same.”" Take that chauvinist misogyny!

Book: "The Post-American World," Fareed Zakaria

• “Hyperinflation is the worst economic malady that can befall a nation…It was no the Great Depression that brought the Nazis to power in Germany but rather hyperinflation, which destroyed the middle class by making its savings worthless.”
• “In Washington [D.C.,] new thinking about a new world is sorely lacking…both parties continue to speak in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else. American politicians constantly and promiscuously demand, label, santion,and condemn whole countries for myriad failings…We are the only country in the world to issue annual report cards on every other country’s behavior. Washington, D.C., has become a bubble, smug and out of touch with the world outside.”
• “Between 1350 and 1950 – six hundred years – GDP per capita remained roughly constant in China and India (hovering around $600 for China and $550 for India.) In the same period, Western European GDP per capita went from $662 to $4,594, a 594 percent increase.” (emphasis his)
• “The world we’re entering will look like Bollywood. It will be thoroughly modern – and thus powerfully shaped by the West – but it will also retain important elements of local culture…The real effect of globalization has been an efflorescence of the local and modern.”
• “Immigration also gives America a quality rare for a rich country – hunger and energy…[I]mmigrants have gone on to become the backbone of the American working class, and their children or grandchildren have entered the American mainstream. America has been able to tap this energy, manage diversity, assimilate newcomers, and move ahead economically. Ultimately, this is what sets the country apart from the experience of Britain and all other historical examples of great economic powers that grow fat and lazy and slip behind as they face the rise of leaner, hungrier nations.”
• “America is the only country in the world, other than Liberia and Myanmar, that is not on the metric system…The entire British government works aggressively to make London a global hub. Washington, by contrast, spends its time and energy thinking of ways to tax New York, so that it can send its revenues to the rest of the country.”
• “For most of the world, the Iraq War was not about Iraq. ‘What does Mexico or Chile care about who rules in Baghdad?’ Jorge Castaneda, the former foreign minister of Mexico, told me. ‘It was about how the world’s superpower wields its power. That’s something we all care deeply about.”
• “Some 13 percent of U.S. Muslims believe that suicide bombings can be justified. Too high, for sure, but the figure compares with 42 percent for French Muslims and 88 percent for Jordanians.”

Book: “How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse"

Quotes that struck me from "How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse,” by David Frum, resident scholar at AEI and former Bush43 speechwriter.

• “The social transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent. It left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant; less deferential, less self-confident, less united; more socially-equal, less economically equal; more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual; less literate, less polite, less reticent.”
• “37 million American – meaning one household out of four – had suffered a rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny or auto theft in 1973. In cities of more than 100,000 population, the victimization rate was one household out of every three.”
• [Eisenstadt v. Baird] “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For the 20th-century Americans it was sexual freedom.”
• “The 1879 Connecticut statue overturned by Griswold had not been enforced in decades. The birth-control pill appeared on the market in 1961, a decade before the birth rate plunged. It was women’s preferences, not contraceptive techniques, that changed in the 1970s. The women of the 1970s wanted small families – often, they wanted no family at all.”
• “The dumbing down of the curriculum was encouraged by changes within the teaching progression. The 1970s were the decade in which teaching was transformed from a low-paying, relatively prestigious profession to a relatively well-paid, unprestigious occupation.”
• “What divides left-wing social activism from traditionalist is the locus of the sin to be stamped out. The left has usually been drawn to collective problem (segregation, poverty, sexism, the war in Vietnam); the traditionalists, to individual vices and weakness (drunkenness, drug addiction, abortion.)”
• “More than two-thirds of the women who turned eighteen between the end of the Korean War and the Kennedy inauguration acknowledged sleeping with only one man as of their thirtieth birthday – their fiancé or husband, presumably. Only 2 percent of the women who turned eighteen between 1971 and 1980 could say the same thing on their thirtieth birthdays.”
• “If nonmarital sex between consenting adults was okay, as a majority of American was coming to believe, how did it become wrong if those adults happened both to be women or both to be men?”
• “It is telling that of the thirty-five states that ultimately ratified the ERA, twenty-two did so in the ten months before Roe v. Wade, and only thirteen in the ten years after.”
• “Between 1972 and 1980, the proportion of Americans who…paid attention to public affairs “most of the time” dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent…But was it really so surprising? For a decade, power had been massively and systematically transferred from the elective branches of government, where it could be controlled, to no-elective branches, where it could not…Was it surprising that a country whose government had decided to treat its people like subjects should find that those same people no longer felt themselves to be citizens?”
• “In 1980, there were 27 million poor people in America, or about 12.4 percent of the population, approximately the same proportion as in 1965. The level of poverty [after LBJ’s “Great Society” efforts] in the United States had not much changed over those fifteen years, but its character had. Poverty, before 1960 mostly rural and white, became urban and nonwhite. Almost 70 percent of America’s poor lived in metropolitan areas in 1980.”
• “[After the 70s,] Americans were not retuning to the era of laissez faire. Rugged individualism no longer swayed them, Neither, however, did the social-democratic ethos of the middle years of the century. Americans were moving on to something new, a creed that blended the antique ideal of self-reliance with a soft sense of entitlement for those who made some minimal effort on their own behalf,. It was a fuzzy political idea – perfect for the fuzzy era to come – and the struggle to imbue it with meaning would define the politics of the post-Cold War era.”
• “The parents’ myth [of the “Greatest Generation”] is much more appealing than the other: Who would not be prouder of having fought through he mud of Guadalcanal than having fornicated in the mud at Woodstock? But…it is as foolish to idealize the past as to condescend to it…Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, ever had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the county been more economically equal, never had it bee more ethically homogenous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering.”
• “The Vietnam war did not merely discredit the government that chose to wage it; it discredited the habits of mind that made the war possible; it discredited the very style and sensibility of mid-century America, from Bob Hope’s entertainment of the troops to the coats and ties in college dining lounges. It taught an entire generation the oppositional style that to this day so often substitutes for real politics.

Two Pictures

From Gallup/538, about party ID (Red is if the President was a Republican at the time the respondant turned 18, Blue had a Dem Pres at age 18, Green line shows strength of Democratic party (Dem Party ID minus GOP Party ID) - It's fascinating how it tracks pretty darn well: Dem Pres=More Republicans, generally, Bad GOP=More Dems (although LBJ, Reagan, and Eisenhower seem to buck the trend a tiny bit.) Sorry, this description is confusing. But I know what it's saying so, ha.















Today's amusement:

People.

This sounds like it can be filed in the "Scientific Discoveries that Could Very Well Cause Ethical Headaches Down the Line" category: "Scientists have produced strong new evidence challenging one of the most fundamental assumptions in biology: that female mammals, including women, are born with all the eggs they will ever have...Although much more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the work raises the tantalizing possibility that it could someday lead to new ways to fight a woman's biological clock, perhaps by stockpiling her egg-producing cells or by stimulating them to make eggs again."

In other reproductive news, it doesn't get any easier for mothers in China after they do get pregnant - "These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say...“If you have only girls, you don’t feel right inside,” said Ms. Zhen, who has one child, an 11-year-old son. “You feel your status is lower than everyone else.”"

From the Sunday Times: I'm not a big fan of Frank Rich, but I can agree with him in this respect - If there is any good that could come out of this recession, it will be the death, or at least injury, of what he calls the "Money is King" narrative.

Lastly, a few weeks back I brought you the "discrete affair" service. Now you can just drop all pretense with "Seeking Arrangement," a new site for all you sugar daddies/mommies/babies out there.