House of Eratosthenes

You have to have been around Rick’s place for awhile and seen Zossima in action to understand how this ball got slammed over the net. Apparently, in the world occupied by some among us, being an ass is something of a noble virtue — provided you cling to an appropriate ideology.

It brings to mind a certain David Horowitz quote Phil dug up last week.

Talking about Leftists in general - a culture he himself was once immersed and saturated in - David Horowitz used this description:

It’s a kind of religion … they get intoxicated with their own virtue … so I was always preaching. I never listened.

Intoxicated with their own virtue - the very thing they claim to hate about the religious right.

The thing of it is, though, President Bush wasn’t an ass the same way Zossima and others on the left so rigorously pursue their asshattery. He didn’t make up some conspiracy theory on the spot about the Jews blowing up the World Trade Center with C4, or about the U.S. Government manufacturing the AIDS virus to keep black people in line. He saw an airhead reporter was building a nonsensical cock-and-bull argument that he was contradicting himself, by a deceptive use of ten-second sound bites, and he steamrolled right over her to get his message out the way he intended.

He went over her head and talked directly with the American people.

But the point is, once you’re intoxicated with your own virtue the way our leftists are — and I doubt any one among them even remembers what, exactly, is so noble about their fight — it’s quite natural to claim an exclusive license to being an ass. And to start exercising it.

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Buck’s New Shirt
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Nobody reads this blog, and he seems to think nobody reads his either. But blogger friend Buck has managed to have an effect on the tee shirt culture, if none other…

Well played, sir.

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Don’t Fail Me Again…Admiral
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Dani Kanaan, on husband Tony’s qualification behind Danica Patrick.

During the qualifying rounds of last season’s Mid-Ohio race, Danica finished 2nd while Kanaan placed 3rd. When Dani heard the news, she had a simple request for her Tony:

“Could you do me a favor? In our motor home, in the bedroom, go to my closet. All the way in the back of the closet, there’s a blue dress. Maybe you should wear it next time you qualify!”

Ouch.

A little bit of pressure from home.

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If Women Ran The World
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Kate says,

If women ran the world, we would not have the jet engine. It has nothing to do with intellect. It just isn’t in our nature to want one.

And as of this writing, there are 114 comments under it. Hmmm.

I have to take some issue with this. Nowadays, it is outside of the nature of a lot of men to want a jet engine. Or to confront historically masculine challenges of a far less ambitious nature…like, dropping a loogie on a leaf floating in the creek from a really high bridge, just to see if you can hit it.

In my time, the little girls had no idea what the fuss was about. Now nobody does. Call it inferential thinking…versus procedural. As time goes on, more and more of us want to engage in procedural thinking, and they want everyone else to think that way too. Step one, step two, step three — and forget all about the if-this-then-that stuff.

Good thing we have the jet engine already. Because we sure as hell wouldn’t be getting one from here on out, if we didn’t already have it.

Update 4/30/08: The linked article by Christina Hoff Sommers makes it clear, to me anyway, that the underlying trouble and confusion comes from a conflict between the inferentialists and the proceduralists. The subject under discussion is the Title IX “Hammer” getting ready to bang away at our nation’s science and technology departments. Science is inferential thinking wrapped up in procedural thinking — you do things a certain way, but at some point you use your individual intellect to figure out something that would otherwise elude you. If you don’t get that far in your efforts, they’re kind of pointless.

Regulating such a discipline into oblivion, on the other hand, is procedural thinking because it involves blowing the whistle on things that aren’t being done a certain way. As is the case with all step-1 step-2 step-3 things in life, there is no way to do it with excellence.

That’s why people who engage in procedural activities, see the world in pass-fail terms. And they want everyone else to engage in procedural activities too. They end up stamping out inferential thinking, and all the gifts we enjoy thanks to someone who once upon a time pursued it — without even realizing that is what they’re doing.

At a recent House hearing on “Women in Academic Science and Engineering” Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington State, asked a room full of activist women how best to bring American scientists into line: “What kind of hammer should we use?” The weapon of choice is the well-known federal anti-discrimination law “Title IX,” which prohibits sex discrimination in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Title IX has never been rigorously applied to academic science. That is now about to change. In the past few months both the Department of Education and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have begun looking at candidates for Title IX-enforcement positions.
:
Although Title IX has contributed to the progress of women’s athletics, it has done serious harm to men’s sports. Over the years, judges, federal officials, and college administrators have interpreted it to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female — even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportions of women as men. So, to avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, educational institutions have eliminated men’s teams — in effect, reducing men’s participation to the level of women’s interest. That kind of regulatory calibration — call it reductio ad feminem — would wreak havoc in fields that drive the economy such as math, physics, and computer science.

Don’t blame the gals, I say. Blame the procedural thinkers, the step-1 step-2 step-3 people; some of them are female, probably most are, but not all of them are. The inferential thinkers don’t care how others think, but the procedural thinkers want everything done their way.

And…a society that does everything by steps & numbers, doesn’t build anything. It can’t. That’s just about where we’re headed now.

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Huffington…
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

…in the words of Karol, is the Paris Hilton of political commentary.

Heh.

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Voter ID Laws: Constitutional
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Sister Toldjah links to the decisions.

See ya, wouldn’t wanna be-ya.

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Clown Car
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Money quote:

A routine traffic stop turned into a search that included K9 units and a helicopter after nine suspected illegal immigrants fled from a passenger car police pulled over near Riggs Road and Arizona Avenue Monday night.

Det. David Ramer, a Chandler police spokesman, said police were able to catch eight of the nine men. Ramer said police did not know if the men were part of a human smuggling operation.

You know an invasion when you see one?

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Belly Facials
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Money quote:

Before the crying, diaper changes and sleepless nights set in, a growing number of moms-to-be are spending their pregnancies in the lap of luxury. From belly “facials” to in-home massage therapy and private yoga sessions, women are indulging like it might be their last chance.

“There are so many luxury services available to pregnant women these days,” says Hilary Zalon, founder of TheCradle.com, a Web site focused on pregnancy and parenting.
:
Say you’re eight months pregnant, your husband is away on business, and you find yourself with an intense craving for won ton soup — at midnight. You could pray that your favorite Chinese restaurant is still open for deliveries, or you could call your personal pregnancy concierge.

These services, which have begun to appear in larger cities in the past couple years, specialize in helping expectant mothers have stress-free pregnancies. For an hourly fee of $100 or more, some companies will spoon-feed you Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or slather cocoa butter on your belly; others provide more traditional services.
:
Fresh Dining, which delivers in Los Angeles and San Diego, offers a service called “Fresh Mommy” — tailored to the specific nutritional needs of pregnant women and new mothers — that delivers a cooler of five fresh (not frozen) meals to clients’ doorsteps for about $65 a day.

Couples are splurging on pre-baby vacations, too. Nearly 60 percent of couples surveyed go on a “babymoon” before becoming parents, according to a 2005 online poll sponsored by Liberty Travel and BabyCenter.com. The survey, conducted by novaQuant Inc., received responses from 798 BabyCenter.com users.

Babymoon.

Feh. Some things are just plain wrong.

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America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s Degree
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Money quote:

Colleges should be held at least as accountable as tire companies are. When some Firestone tires were believed to be defective, government investigations, combined with news-media scrutiny, led to higher tire-safety standards. Yet year after year, colleges and universities turn out millions of defective products: students who drop out or graduate with far too little benefit for the time and money spent. Not only do colleges escape punishment, but they are rewarded with taxpayer-financed student grants and loans, which allow them to raise their tuitions even more.

I understand it’s overly-simplistic to focus on one bad guy, and having not been to college, I realize this is a little bit out of my league.

But I’ve held a lot of jobs in which you’re supposed to have a college degree, without actually having one. And I’ve met a lot of frustrated college graduates who are not enjoying much of a career boost, or are enjoying one far too late in life.

I don’t have to go swimming in poop, to know it isn’t my thing. And I can tell a busted situation when I see one. Something’s busted here.

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Memo For File LIX
Sunday, April 27th, 2008

What is sillier than pretending to care about the environment, but in reality, just waggling our fingers in each others’ faces with pretentious and hypocritical instructions about how to live our lives?

You got it: Waggling our fingers in each others’ faces to waggle each others’ fingers in the faces of yet others…while pretending to act in response to “facts” and “evidence” about our modern day environmental boogeyman, global warming.

It’s getting hot
By Al Meyerhoff
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Story appeared in FORUM section, Page E1

Al Gore is spending $300 million for a publicity campaign to convince the American public the climate is changing and it is a crisis. That’s like sponsoring an ad campaign to convince the world that the planet is not really flat.

It’s not all his money, of course. Most of it is from the film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Inconvenient indeed. But that this campaign is necessary at all speaks volumes about the failure of environmentalists to persuade our citizenry that the climate threat is both real and immediate, overcoming not just skepticism but national torpor and attention deficit disorder as well. When there is a polar bear on my front lawn, call.

With a touch of jingoism (including Americans landing on Omaha Beach and the moon) Gore’s “we can solve the climate crisis” campaign urges that good old-fashioned American know-how can prevent climate change – and without waiting for others to help. That’s another odd approach, since actually the problem to date has been precisely the opposite.

In the second section, Meyerhoff finally gets to the “science” — the one and only splotch in the entire essay that has anything to do with why we know what we think we know, about what it is we need to do next.

He gets it wrong. How sad.

Global warming is not rocket science. It is caused by carbon emissions and can only be contained by reducing them. Action by those responsible will not come from 30-second commercial spots, moral suasion or “continued scientific assessment, development of cost- effective options, public debate and consensus building,” as urged recently by the U.N. International Chamber of Commerce delegate. [emphasis mine]

“Global warming” and it’s sister synonym, “climate change,” don’t describe phenomena. They describe a single doctrine. Those in favor of the doctrine have simplified it, to thwart off attack…to make any “skeptics” or “denialists” look like dopes. To treat it respectfully, you have to leave it splintered up into it’s component four parts.

The four parts to the doctrine are:

1. Since the industrial age, something called the “mean earth temperature” has been increasing. This is what you’re being taught about when you are told “The Science Is Settled.” They’ve collected some more data, and the data seem to agree that 1998 was a warm year.

This is true, but problematic. I’ll discuss in greater detail below.

2. The rise of the mean earth temperature is due to carbon dioxide. There is some firm science behind this, since the “greenhouse effect” is indeed a more-or-less “settled” part of science.

But it is also problematic. Carbon dioxide is portrayed as a menacing ingredient, simply because it is the one most closely related to technology and industry. That it has some potential as a greenhouse gas, today, doesn’t mean it has any potential at all tomorrow. After all, the science is equally settled that carbon dioxide is part of a cycle involving our oceans, our air, and our vegetation. Oh, and one other thing: Unlike the related gas carbon MONoxide, it’s non-toxic. You breathe it. That’s a little detail a lot of people are forgetting…and our climate-change enthusiasts are doing nothing at all to remind them, because why should they?

3. We are reaching a point of no return with the saturation of carbon dioxide, as well as with the rise of the mean temperature. The doctrine of global warming rests, completely, on this; yet nobody anywhere with a reputation worth defending, is articulating it outright for if they were to do so, they’d be telling a fib.

Instead, it is left up to people to presume it. Which they do. But it just isn’t so and there’s no evidence to even suggest it might be so.

4. By reigning in our carbon dioxide emissions, we can take some incremental steps toward heading off or avoiding a climate change crisis.

The truism of this, is established by truism #3…which is so fragile nobody’s putting their name next to it. And yet they put their names next to this one simply because it has become popular, in a kind of a rock-star sort of a way, to back it up.

Sorry. There’s not a scintilla of evidence anywhere to indicate it might be so.

Quite to the contrary, according to an editorial Dr. Robert Carter wrote up a year and a half ago…

There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998
By Bob Carter
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/04/2006

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This is part of an, ahem, unsettled branch of climate science. What have those temperature readings been doing over the last ten years?

Jennifer Marohasy addressed this directly on her own blog after coming under attack by a “Gore disciple”:

Peter Boyer is apparently a disciple of Al Gore – one of the many who has been trained to give that famous slide show about the imminent climate crisis. Anyway, he is also a columnist for The Mercury – Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in Tasmania. Today, in a piece entitled ‘Misleading opinion fed by misunderstood data’ he writes:

Jennifer Marohasy told ABC Counterpoint listeners that NASA data showed Earth’s surface temperature was trending down from a high in 1998, revealing serious flaws in greenhouse theory.

If confidence and clear expression were all that counted in the climate debate, Dr Marohasy would be a winner. Listeners unfamiliar with the data she talked about may have felt she was right.

But alas, the evidence says otherwise.

Present and past global average surface temperatures are derived from painstaking assessment of countless readings all over the planet, on land and sea, together with satellite observations, corrected for local aberrations such as the urban heat island effect.

Accompanied by a graph showing the last 120 years temperature trend Mr Boyer went on to suggest that the world is still warming.

Of course the world has been mostly warming over the last 120 years, but over the last 10 years global temperatures have not been trending up, as predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite a continual increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

What are these four pillars of the global warming doctrine? They support something that is among the most fragile among all the articles of what is known: Axioms, paradigms, theories and mindsets that fall apart most quickly, when simply taken seriously.

Let us presume for the moment that the world is still heating up as a direct result of industrial carbon emission, and that those who are pointing it out to us are simply trying to get us to contribute incrementally toward the continuing survival of our planet.

Should this open question about the rise of the “mean temperature” since 1998 — during which time, it is uncontested that carbon saturation has been increasing — be settled first?

After all, if we’re going to sacrifice to incrementally fix the climate change problem, and it actually WORKS, it is going to work through the depletion of carbon in the atmosphere. What does that do, exactly? Shouldn’t we be wanting to know that?

We’re currently at 380 parts per million, give or take. What happens if that goes down to 250? Our climate change disciples tell us that will bring things under control…unless it doesn’t…in which case, I guess we need to bring it down to 150 parts per million or something. Some of our skeptics seem to have some pretty impressive credentials, and they point out that the carbon/temperature connection has some problems.

You say they’re “dirty,” that they all work for the oil companies. Maybe that’s true. But what of the carbon/temperature connection? Does it suffer from problems or does it not? Shouldn’t somebody, somewhere, be wanting to know?

I don’t have any formal training in any of this. But I’m ready to call shenanigans on the whole thing. Those who insist on the greenhouse-gas qualities of carbon dioxide, concede that methane is much worse. Where’s the attack on methane? Answer: Such a campaign wouldn’t serve the interest of the attention whores, who in that circumstance would only have something to say to those among us who own cattle, insisting that we slaughter some of them. Very few of us have anything to do with cattle…but a whole lot of us have something to do with cars.

The “Morgan Rule” of environmental activism is that it has to do with getting attention, and not an awful lot to do with saving or helping the environment. According to that, then, we must pay more attention to carbon dioxide even though it’s a non-toxic, less-than-effective greenhouse gas agent…one which our plant life needs to consume in order to survive. And so the “Morgan Rule” triumphs. We are to sacrifice to reign in our carbon emissions…and just let our methane emissions go out of control.

It doesn’t have to do with “truth” — it has to do with “inconvenience.”

I entered this in response to Mr. Meyerhoff’s editorial, which runs so short on real science and so long on instructions about what we should be telling each other to do:

What is this evidence I keep hearing about? What I see for myself, is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is, has been, and is projected to continue to be, insignificant. Three 100’s of a percent. Let’s double that. Let’s cut it in half. What’s that do to the global temperature? Is there “evidence” that there’s a correlation? There is much evidence that there is not. CO2 rises…temp tapers off.

The evidence also indicates that environmental activism is all about getting attention, and has little to do with helping the environment. Gore, whose house uses much more power than the average, is spending 300 large to get the word out. Anyone making a profit off that? Anybody beginning to suggest that isn’t the case? No. It is, after all, a money grab.

And, the evidence indicates that it IS a scam. As they say: I’m much more worried about the intellectual climate.

Update 4/28/08: Fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm finds something else that perhaps should be getting some of our attention…one wonders what Mr. Meyerhoff would think about it.

You had to go ahead and do it anyway, and only now, when things are getting serious, are you figuring it out yourself. These are words parents say to teenagers, and conservatives say to liberals. In teenage land, you end up with pregnancies, STDs, and substance abuse. In liberal land, you end up with increased greenhouse gases and world starvation:

The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly “bioplastics” made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.

The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.

Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption.

The market for bioplastics, which are made from maize, sugarcane, wheat and other crops, is growing by 20-30% a year.

Most damning of all:

How do the enviro-goonies answer charges like these? That we’re just falling for a big scam, we’re contributing to the world’s hunger and poverty problems, we’re not making the environment any cleaner, in fact, we might even be creating a greenhouse gas problem where there previously wasn’t one?

If you read Mr. Meyerhoff’s piece, you already know. By ridiculing anyone skeptical, and embracing the pain involved in whatever sacrifices we might be called to make. By calling for everyone to make them together.

Reminds me of a joke we used to have at one of the places I used to work. The argument was that a particular product line wasn’t making us a profit, in fact, was costing the company money…the rejoinder was “yeah, but we make up for it in volume.”

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Are Kids Coddled?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008

MSN, which is convinced I’m female — regularly plying me with such delightful tomes as “Make Him Commit” and “Slim Down for Bathing Suit Season” — today, parades before my eyeballs, a subject on which I am uniquely qualified to comment.

Would you let your fourth-grader ride public transportation without an adult? Probably not. Still, when Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, wrote about letting her son take the subway alone to get back to her Manhattan home from a department store on the Upper East Side, she didn’t expect to get hit with a tsunami of criticism from readers.

“Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence,” Skenazy wrote on April 4 in the New York Sun. “Long story longer: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating—for us and for them.”

Lenore’s interior plumbing notwithstanding, there is a clean and tidy demarcation between the hens and the roosters on this issue: The mother attends to the child’s daily needs, making sure he is safe, happy and whole, while the father has a stronger tendency to plan for his own demise, to make sure the next generation can get along without him.

Each of these gender roles reaches across the divide from time to time. But not much.

As our son’s face loses it’s spherical shape and becomes elongated with looming adolescence, this has become more of a thorny issue between “Kidzmom” and me. The cosmetic presentation is that, as his parents, we both have the same interests at heart. I want him to live to see another day just as much as she does; she wants him to grow up to be an independent man just as much as I do. But that is packaging. That’s not substance. The wiring that was put in place by thousands of years of evolution, is gender-based, and you really don’t have to listen to us go back and forth about it for too long before it becomes not only obvious, but undeniable.

I remember once, in exasperation at her latest umpty-fratz protest that he can’t cross a street by himself because he’ll get hit by a car, I yelled back “then the human race would be better off overall, if he’s such a weakling that he can’t manage that at his age” or something. I think she knew I was kidding about that. But there’s a point to it: We, as parents, don’t get to decide that our children are disposable chaff. Nor do we get to decide they are not. The world will make up it’s own mind on that question, based on what the specimens can and can’t do.

The other recent event to make this a more prickly issue, is her relocation. She’s not twenty minutes up the road anymore; she’s eight hours away. So instead of handing him off back-and-forth throughout the week, we hand him off back-and-forth throughout seasons. I think, overall, that’s a good thing. He’s shown signs of understanding that the “packaging” of his parents’ arguments, does a poor job of reflecting truth — different things are expected of him in different households. Better to shake the soda can once every couple of months, than twice a week.

But are kids coddled? Oh, absolutely yes. I remember that dirt field down the street; the one my brother and I explored, in our bare feet, sometimes with each other and sometimes alone. Where the hell was it? How am I supposed to know…we left that neighborhood right after I turned SIX.

That’s unthinkable now. When’s the last time you heard a mother bitching away that her kid(s) failed to turn up by dinner time? Or, in exasperation, sending a brother/sister out to collect them? It’s been awhile for me. And now, we have a childhood obesity epidemic:

The prevalence of overweight children tripled from 6.5 percent in the mid-1970s to 18.8 percent today for children between 6-11 years old, and 5 to 17.4 percent for those 12–19, according to a survey by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

There is more evidence. Men don’t have gab-fests like women do, usually; but there was one that came to mind after one of the more talkative fellows in our office announced his plans to acquire a sidecar for his newly-restored motorcycle, for the benefit of his eight-year-old daughter. One Monday morning he reported on his weekend long-distance argument with his ex-wife, about the safety merits or lack thereof. Enter that male-female divide. Look, it’s not like I’m going to do something to her that will make it likely she’ll get hurt — she’s my daughter, too! Exactly.

It’s those two things: They’re our kids too, and we’re not going to put them in situations involving certain doom. And — Ms. Skenazy’s point — if the kids aren’t ever challenged in anything, they’ll grow up being able to do exactly nothing.

Sorry, gals. I know when you act all funny, it usually means I’m the one missing out on this-or-that critical point. But on those two items above…looks to me like the fairer sex hasn’t quite yet thought things out. Not, I hasten to add, that they have a monopoly on this.

If you think this is going to turn into a bitch-pitch about video games, you’re right. My kid’s got it pretty bad. I blame myself, and Columbine. Back when he was about to turn two, the Columbine school got shot up, and the big controversy was about whether kids could play violent video games and still have respect for human life afterwards. I was distracted by this, looking back on it. The evidence clearly indicated our son remained concerned about the health and well-being of his playmates, even after hours spent shooting at zombies with shotguns. And so, I insisted, a mentally healthy child will be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Well, I was right on that. But I lost my sense of perspective on the other issue…a good old-fashioned addiction. He’d form bad habits, we’d take away the video games, he’d do things right and then get his video game back. Then he’d go back to being weird.

I think we’ve got a handle on it now. Once he got a little bit older, we’d discuss this with him at a higher level. It started with Pokemon. He’d ask why I don’t like it, and I started to explain it doesn’t have anything to do with personal tastes: Frankly, after you’ve been playing/watching Pokemon for awhile, you start to act like a helpless whelp and I get tired of watching that.

Pokemon, if you’re not familiar with it, is a series of cartoons and games in which these kids mouth off at each other and challenge each other to fights, and then get these adorable creatures to do all their fighting for them. The kids only do one thing to alter the outcome of the fight toward their favor: They whine. All the work is left up to these imaginary creatures.

It got worse before it got better. Pokemon became the “Forbidden Fruit.” But, sooner than I thought, he outgrew Pokemon. He won’t admit it, but I think he began to see it my way. The kids talk smack to each other, and then pull out their adorable creatures and explain to said creatures, “Okay I just got us embroiled in a fight with this mouthy kid, now you have to do the dirty work.” If the boy has any streak of independence whatsoever, he’s going to get tired of it. Really, I never understood the appeal of it in the first place.

Pokemon is both a symptom and a cause, the way I see it. A generation ago, it would not have had appeal. It’s going to be fun to imagine yourself as the cockfighter — er, I mean, the mouthy kid — if you imagine yourself winning all the time. Permit an old man his own generational turn to utter the timeless words “back in my day” — in my time, we got our butts beat constantly. We were forced to learn to cope. We lost at baseball. We lost at football. We lost races. We lost Capture The Flag. We learned to imagine ourselves losing, because we had no choice but to so imagine.

To the best I can perceive it, Pokemon’s allure depends on never imagining yourself losing. Yes, on the TV show it happens pretty regularly, about a third of the way through. There really aren’t too many things the protagonist can do. You’ve never seen anything more pathetic. There are no skills to be sharpened, there are no post-mortems to be conducted on the match-up that was just lost…just whining. “Awww, Pikachu, why didn’t you listen to me?”

So I think the latest generation does have a problem, and I think the problem begins there. Not with Pokemon, quite so much…but with reckoning with the potential of defeat. And that is why it’s scary, lately, to let them do simple things like cross the street. Peripheral vision, taking the initiative to look both directions, etc., these are all secondary. The primary skill is understanding the potential of failure. If he has mastered all the skills of crossing the street, but doesn’t understand that the possibility exists of his getting killed, then the skills aren’t going to very much matter and he’ll probably end up getting killed.

Oh, how’d we solve the video game problem? I’m knocking on wood, imagining the worst is behind us. Now that Pokemon isn’t cool anymore, that’s probably a safe bet. We began a “minute for minute” program. You do an hour of playing outside doing dangerous things, playing ball, riding something with wheels — doing something in which it’s possible to get physically hurt — you get an hour with the damn game. It’s barely better-than-nothing…but it works. I think it addresses what’s really busted.

Parents have to be conscious, not so much of what their kids are doing one hour to the next, but what kind of world it is in which they are living. And not so much what is in that world, but what is missing from it. The irony is, that without that potential for defeat, the child won’t comprehend a potential for victory either because the whole concept of competition will be foreign to him. And so confidence won’t germinate and grow until some losing has been goin’-on.

What’s written above is fairly obvious. The real puzzle is, how come we have this new generation of parents, that needs to have it pointed out to them. Perhaps it’s our fault; the problem began with us. This spirit of “If I do not play, then I cannot lose.” Insisting on more safety, and more, and more, and more until life itself is no longer being lived.

That really is the crux of the whole problem, isn’t it?

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A Poll I’d Like To See III
Saturday, April 26th, 2008

I wonder how many check marks those last two boxes would get.

Judging by the news coverage, I’d guess they’d get all of them. But I doubt it…I really, really doubt it.

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Decoding the Brain Fart
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Interesting. And the older I get, the more relevant to my daily existence this kind of research becomes…

It turns out the root of these brain farts may be a special kind of abnormal brain activity that begins up to 30 seconds before a mistake even happens.
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When people blunder after performing the same task over and over, scientists had suspected that such lapses were due to momentary hiccups in concentration. Still, little was known about what the brain was actually doing before such errors.

To investigate further, the brains of volunteers were scanned as they performed a monotonous task — repetitively pushing buttons that matched images flashed at them.
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One set of brain regions that is normally active only when a person is awake and relaxed began firing up — in other words, it’s as if the brain started resting. At the same time, another group of brain regions that is usually lively when a person is sustaining effort on a task began toning down. After people made and detected any mistakes, the abnormal behavior went away.

H/T: FARK

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Stuck in Elevator for Forty-One Hours
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

It could happen to you, you know.

“After a certain period of time I knew that I was in pretty big trouble because it was the weekend,” Nicholas White said Monday on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America.”
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White sued the managers of the midtown skycraper and the elevator maintenance company and won an undisclosed settlement.

He was a production manager for Business Week when he left his office about 11 p.m. Friday for a cigarette break. According to the article, it was never determined exactly why the elevator stalled though there was talk of a voltage dip.

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Best Sentence XXVIII
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately award (BSIHORL) is inspired by events related to Earth Day, and ends up being a two-way tie. It will have to be shared by Debbie Schlussel, who managed to nail down concisely and elegantly exactly how we conduct our observances…

Wealthy celebs who waste energy ad nauseam tell us not to.

Pretty much. This thing we nowadays call “environmentalism” seems to have more to do with maintaining a social-strata lifestyle gap — promoted by those who present themselves as champions of the exact opposite — than anything that tangibly would help what we usually call the “environment.”

It will have to be shared with commenter “Georgia” over at Michelle Malkin’s place, who made her own observations known about Earth Day (commenter #11)…

Moonbat logic: Burn our food and let our fuel sit in the Earth.

Has there ever been a more potent weapon to use against poor hungry people than environmentalism?

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Two Nasty Old Hags
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

And I’m not the one who made them that way, I’m not even the one who wants you to know about ‘em either. It’s them. They’re very anxious to let the world know how much they despise men.

Rachel Lucas tripped across this sniveling screed mashed together by Leslie Bennetts, one of those “Everybody Loves Raymond” types…you know. The oh-so-intelligent but perpetually-peeved frazzled wifey juggling all the tasks that have to be done, and her husband is just another one of the kids, just a complete bumbling dope who lucked out the day he met her.

From the beginning of our relationship, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be any husband’s unpaid servant. If Jeremy wanted to be—and stay—married to me, let alone have kids, he couldn’t stick me with all the boring, mundane stuff nobody wants to do. We were going to share the work, or we were going to forget the whole deal…

That was 17 years ago, and while we haven’t exactly achieved equity, we’ve come a lot closer to it than most of our peers, judging by all the dreary surveys proving that men are slugs and their wives are superwomen. So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.
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When my husband has lingered too long over the sports section and I’m feeling overwhelmed by the number of errands that must be run, I hand him a list.

“This is what I need you to do today,” I say in a tone of voice that brooks no equivocation. He may moan and groan, but the jobs get done. And while I still have to mastermind the operation — somehow he is never the one who remembers that our son needs new mosquito netting, baseball cleats, and basketball shoes for sleepaway camp — I’m not the only one schlepping around town checking items off the To Do list.

Dream come true, eh? I don’t want to read too much into this, but it would seem some of that mirror finish has been worn off the knight’s shining armor.

But if you think that’s a domestic nightmare — just wait until you get a load of what Nora Ephron jotted down.

Today, Nora Ephron has an essay on the Huffington Post titled: “White Men.” In it, we learn a lot of things about these elusive, mysterious creatures that we didn’t know before. Ephron, after all, is an expert in white men — her movies Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and When Harry Met Sally were all about how wonderful they are to date and marry (after a brief variety of adorably neurotic hurdles). But it turns out Nora doesn’t think all white men are as dreamy as Tom Hanks. In fact, some are downright nefarious!

That’s putting it mildly. Flipping open this latest entry, we find:

To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday’s primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them. And McCain is a compelling candidate, particularly because of the Torture Thing. As for the Democratic hope that McCain’s temper will be a problem, don’t bet on it. A lot of white men have terrible tempers, and what’s more, they think it’s normal.

Aside from brazenly showcasing her hatred, Ms. Ephron is falling into the trap set for the weak-minded. Women and blacks can vote against a white guy without hating him, but white guys can’t vote against women and blacks without hating them. Odd, because I can tell you right now if someone demands I come up with a specimen of raw seething hatred I’ve encountered in the last two hours or two weeks or two months…I’m going to make a bee-line straight for Ms. Ephron’s essay on the evils and vices of white men.

Cassy did a great job of pointing this out, I thought.

And I hate to break it to you, but white men are not the only ones with awful tempers. In fact, I’d argue that women are w

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Being an AssWednesday, April 30th, 2008

Buck’s New ShirtWednesday, April 30th, 2008

Don’t Fail Me Again…AdmiralWednesday, April 30th, 2008

If Women Ran The WorldTuesday, April 29th, 2008

Huffington…Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Voter ID Laws: ConstitutionalTuesday, April 29th, 2008

Clown CarTuesday, April 29th, 2008

Belly FacialsTuesday, April 29th, 2008

America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s DegreeTuesday, April 29th, 2008

Memo For File LIXSunday, April 27th, 2008

Are Kids Coddled?Sunday, April 27th, 2008

A Poll I’d Like To See IIISaturday, April 26th, 2008

Decoding the Brain FartWednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Stuck in Elevator for Forty-One HoursWednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Best Sentence XXVIIIWednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Two Nasty Old HagsTuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Being an Ass
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Buck’s New Shirt
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Don’t Fail Me Again…Admiral
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

If Women Ran The World
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Huffington…
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Voter ID Laws: Constitutional
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Clown Car
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Belly Facials
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

America’s Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor’s Degree
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Memo For File LIX
Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Are Kids Coddled?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008

A Poll I’d Like To See III
Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Decoding the Brain Fart
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Stuck in Elevator for Forty-One Hours
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Best Sentence XXVIII
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Two Nasty Old Hags
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008