Apparently the study was so flawed that only a man could fix it.
Just ’cause, you know, it isn’t science without at least a trace amount of testosterone spilled on it.
Or — and this seems more likely to me — the editor is himself hard up for papers with his name on them, and desperately hopes that he’ll be the man they chose for co-author.
Gov. Huckabee is entirely correct: SCOTUS cannot overrule God. The justices can’t make a gay marriage sanctified. But then, they can’t make a straight marriage sanctified either. It’s really quite simple: To the extend that marriage is a sacrament, the government cannot have an opinion, and the marriage-equality suits do not speak to this. To the extent that marriage is a social contract for the transmission of and management of property — i.e., its historical role in society — then the government can regulate and must ensure equality. Anything else is sophistry.
That means I happen to agree with the loons in Oklahoma and elsewhere, though I disavow their motives: Get the state out of marriage entirely. Enact universal civil union laws that any pair of consenting adults may enter into, and leave the sacraments to the churches.
From Talking Points Memo:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R), no stranger to mixing religion and politics, might have outdone himself on Wednesday night when he greeted the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.”I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish. But I do speak a common language: I speak Jesus,” he said, according to CNN.
Full article: Huckabee: The Supreme Court ‘Cannot Overrule God’ On Gay Marriage
On this day one hundred fifty years ago, a scruffy, scrappy, but determined general accepted the surrender of his well-born, well-dressed, and traitorous counterpart, effectively ending a vast sedition launched in the name of slavery, orchestrated by cowardly politicians, and fought — like most wars are — by poor men dying at the behest of rich men. There was no nobility in the losing side; there was no honor; there was only the proposition that one man might justly hold another as property, and that in support of that one twisted principle, oaths may be broken, loyalty suborned, and a great democracy threatened with sectarian dissolution.
Stragglers of the Confederate army fought on for a few more weeks. Their descendants, stragglers of history, fight on today. Their cause is equally dishonorable, equally seditious, and, thankfully, equally ultimately futile.
![By Godot13 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Gruuthuse_Museum_Tower_%28Bruges%2C_2009%29.jpg)
I actually agree with most of what Fareed Zakaria writes in his Washington Post op-ed “Why America’s Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous“. We need balanced, robust, well-rounded education, not narrow business-driven training. It will take many different vantages points to see solutions to the problems we face in this hardest century of human history. Students of mine often express shock (and perhaps a little betrayal) when they complain about, say, their history teacher and ask me “Don’t you think it’s just a waste of time?” only for me to reply that it is one of my favorite subjects. As a physics guy, I obviously think we need more and better science teaching, but I also think we need more and better teaching in the humanities and the arts.
Having said that… boy, does this one sentence put me in a slow burn:
No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write.
It angers me that Farakaria, with a vast platform, falls into the stereotypical thinking that these skills — learning, writing, thinking — are somehow not part of the math/science pool. In actuality, of course, scientists, engineers, and coders practice those skills constantly. While there are surely scientists who cannot write, there are English majors with the same problem. STEM thinking isn’t the only kind of thinking we need, but it is thinking. It is both disingenuous and insulting for him to imply otherwise.
I know it’s a small piece of a larger argument, but it still rankled me.
Vox has an article purporting to explore “The real reason research blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”. And it’s fine so far as it goes, but it still dances around the reality.
Why has “blaming black poverty on black culture has fallen out of favor”? Because the same dire straits and dead-end traits show up among the non-college-educated White population: increased parental absenteeism, increased substance abuse, socioeconomic lock. Since it would obviously be crazy to deduce that these problems are intrinsic to White culture, it’s no longer fashionable to assign a genetic driver to them. In reality of course, the actual lesson is: Take away good-paying jobs and educational opportunity, and — shocker! — families and communities feel stressed, leading to more disorder.
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/26/8253495/moynihan-report-liberal-backlash
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?” There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it.
It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until you realize how strenuously parents resist any change that means their kids aren’t learning it the way they did. If education “looks different”, it is distrusted and undervalued. (Witness the growing backlash over Common Core.)
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet.
Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just reached majority age. Nearly everyone looks back on their twenties as the halcyon days. It’s the moment you first achieve independence from your parents, when you come into your own agency, and when you (most likely) start paying attention to the world around you as if you were a part of you. That is, how the world is becomes your frame of reference for how the world should be. But really that’s just the drug of nostalgia, and it’s no different than Homer Simpson declaring that “rock attained perfection in 1974 — it’s a scientific fact”
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Buchanan then pivots to alerting us to the existential threat to America poised by unaccompanied children fleeing violence. He of course invokes sainted Ronald Reagan of blessed memory: “For, as Ronald Reagan said, a nation that cannot control its borders isn’t really a nation anymore.” I’m not exactly sure how he squares that with the open borders of the Roman Empire, or the British one, or indeed, most of US history. But whatever.
Buchanan also invokes the Federalist papers and John Jay’s comment that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people – a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs. … ” This might have made good propaganda, but I’m fairly sure that Jay’s words would have irked the already-numerous German, Scottish, Irish, Danish immigrants who had fought in the Revolutionary War to help establish this nation.
Buchanan asserts “We were not a nation of immigrants in 1789″, which is just laughable. Heck, Andrew Hamilton — another of the authors of the Federalist Papers — was an immigrant to these shores. While many of the colonists were born in America, many had travelled here. And above all of that, you might want to ask a Native American, who might remind you that all the White guys were immigrants or recent descendants of immigrants.
Buchanan also says “The republic of the founders for whom Jay spoke did not give a fig for diversity. They cherished our unity, commonality and sameness of ancestry, culture, faith and traditions.” This certainly makes one wonder about the long, drawn-out, sometimes-vicious fights in the Continental Congress between (usually) the New England and the Deep South contingents. Oh, also all that time and effort spent trying to square the circle on the South’s “peculiar institution”.
This brings up the largest hole in Buchanan’s argument. We used to be all one happy, unified, uniform family? What drugs is he on? Look at the treatment of any minority population in the US (and, hey, we do actually have some and always had): the Native Americans, the Blacks, the Chinese. Heck, look at how the Irish were treated. It’s a little hard to swallow that we were a unified culture. Instead, we had the in-power culture (more or less the WASPs), who then simply declared that other cultures were backward, uncivilized, and plain old irrelevant. Buchanan’s reasoning boils down to “There was only one culture — as long as you ignore all the other ones.”
It is nice that Buchanan admits, obliquely, that maybe not everything was rainbows and unicorns: “And though the civil rights movement had just begun, nowhere did black peoples enjoy the freedom and prosperity of African-Americans.” That’s right, in the magic year of 1960, White culture finally started to grudgingly offer some semblance of fairness to the Black population, a mere century after the bloodiest war in American history and the abolition of outright slavery.
Quibbling with Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion that America is “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years ago,” Buchanan laments that nonetheless “We are no longer one unique people ‘descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion’.” But the fact of the matter is, we never were. You can only pretend that we were by ignoring the reality, twisting the history, and unlearning the lessons. You can only pretend we were when you define “real America” as “exactly and only the small patch of ground I grew up on”.
As evidence of how far we’ve fallen, Buchanan lists a bunch of things:
We are from every continent and country. Nearly 4 in 10 Americans trace their ancestry to Asia, Africa and Latin America. We are a multiracial, multilingual, multicultural society in a world where countless countries are being torn apart over race, religion and roots.
We no longer speak the same language, worship the same God, honor the same heroes or share the same holidays.
But he says these like they’re bad things, whereas I think they speak to the enduring strength of this nation, to adapt, persevere, and improve itself — to strive always to become a “more perfect Union”. For someone who sings of “American exceptionalism”, Buchanan misses what makes us exceptional: Not the fortuitous vast natural resources, or the particular spot of earth on which we stand, or the world’s oldest free trade zone or the world’s oldest constitutional republic, not a fictitious single language or single culture. We are a nation of peoples, a weird and wonderful dream bringing together cultures, and languages, and experiences, and hopes and aspirations from all that humanity has to offer. America the nation is an idea, not a place or a people. And that is largely unprecedented and ambitious.
A final comment: One of the things that so disturbs Buchanan is that “Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are out of the pantheon”. And I say, Yea! to this, and good riddance. The triumph of the American spirit is that we can finally reject these traitorous and seditious, fundamentally dishonorable men who abandoned the United States and its Constitution, not to mention their own sworn oaths, in a parochial construction of duty to defend a heinous state founded on the noxious principle that some humans have, as a divine right, the right and even obligation to own other human beings. (If you’re one of the revisionists who want to argue that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery”, I suggest you read the ordinances of secession, or indeed, the Constitution of the Confederate States. See also an analysis of slavery in the Confederate constitution, or a similar analysis.)
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have a communal responsibility to each other. They are also the explicit recognition that no one is in this alone, that no one is solely responsible for his or her own success, and that we are, to some measure, dependent on each other.
Yes, I inveigle against waste and fraud, just like everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because they are a violation of this trust, that the communal burden be fairly borne and communally valuable — that no individual benefit unduly. But the current fetish on minimizing taxes (even at the cost of undermining society) boggles my mind. It reeks of hubris and solipsism.
Taxes are a burden but not all burdens are bad. Jingoists like to lecture us “Freedom isn’t free” — and indeed, it isn’t. Part of the cost — not the lion’s share, but not a negligible one — is directly an economic one: The taxes we pay. You cannot defend a nation, or provide speedy justice, or protect the innocent, for free. You cannot offer hope and opportunity, or discover new cures, or build a better future, for free. The American project, whatever that turns out to be, is bigger than any one person or any one group. Taxes are part of the sinew that binds us into one nation.
Taxes help make clear: We are all in this together.
So again, I say, Happy Tax Day!
(For your amusement, here’s a link to the original income tax forms.)
So Elon Musk has revealed his great new intercity transit idea, the HyperLoop. It would seem the emphasis should be on the first syllable — to wit, HYPE — but I’ll leave engineering analyses to those far more qualified than I. My impression is that Musk offers vaporware that over-promises and under-delivers, that will never be implemented and would fail if it were. (See here for one take-down.) I’m more interested in how he generated all this buzz and why the media fell all over itself to hype it.
A good starting point is simply that it’s August and the news is slow. There haven’t been any recurrences of the 2010 summer of rage to capture the media’s attention. So a guy who’s always been good at self-promotion and who has a flair for the cool can definitely garner a few minutes air time. But I think there’s more.
First, as a society, we fetishize monetary success and idolatrize those who achieve it. We assume that anyone who’s made a bunch of money must be intrinsically smart, clever, or wise, and that this means he — and it is almost always a “he” — will magically have expertise in areas far removed from the one in which he made his fortune. (Not to double-link, but this point really is made nicely at the article above.) This impulse is particularly virulent in an age when the captains of industry must desperately justify their outsized share of the economy to the plebes whom they stand upon, and since media empires are one of the trappings of those captains, the popular media go along. We must worship success and idolatrize financial achievers, because otherwise the grueling inequality of our system would make us monsters.
Second, and not unrelated, we live in an age that builds up the private enterprise but denigrates the public work. An entrepreneur is to be hailed and held up; a privately-funded superssytem is admirable. But a public/private partnership that slogs through all the legwork of providing a high-speed rail system? That must be torn down. It is considered prima facie susceptible to corruption, of course, but it’s even worse if it succeeds. A successful HSR project would not only pump money into the economy; it would be evidence that government can succeed, and our current political atmosphere cannot sustain that sort of heresy. (There are definite shades of Atlas Shrugged here, which probably also help explain the positive reception of a subset of the media.)
Third, the HyperLoop idea plays into a creeping anti-professionalism in American culture. We are more and more convinced that “expertise” doesn’t exist. Anyone with a big idea can succeed! Details are for wimps! This myth comforts those at the top of the pyramid, of course, because it can post facto justify their position and tells them it’s OK to leave the hard work of, say, designing things to others. (I submit it’s one reason for the idolization of Steve Jobs, whom many have distorted into just an idea guy. I don’t think Jobs himself fell victim to this; he insisted on solid work and good design.) The Big Idea myth, ironically, also comforts those not at the top. They can imagine that, someday, their own Big Idea will come and they will catapult into the stratosphere of the 1%. They don’t have to work, or save, or plan; they just have to wait for inspiration. (A twisted version of this is peddled to our youth, who see their way out of the morass in athletic or musical stardom — and again, the assumption is that talent trumps training.)
Finally, and not unrelatedly at all, the HyperLoop ties into the strain of romanticism that infest American pop culture. We celebrate the dashing hero, the incorruptible outsider, the lone genius. Our central myth is the rugged individualist. Of course, our understanding of how the West was won is little more than myth. Consistent and continual community-building made this country, not loners standing in wastelands. Our films reinforce this, even in our science fiction, with The Professor the common archetype for the “good” scientist (and the evil genius his dark counterpart): A man (and again, it’s almost always a man) who stands outside the scientific consensus, sees things no one else can imagine, and single-handedly fashions exotic new technologies and whole worlds from the fruits of his solitary mind. This is the exact opposite of science, of course, with its community of learners and its painstaking assembly of new knowledge from the pieces contributed by hundreds of peers. But The Hero is sexier than the team, and so we celebrate that. We find irresistible the idea that the one guy — a genius or a billionaire — could sweep past the hundreds of researchers, activists, and experts patiently slogging away. (Any consideration of this fight would be remiss without pointing toward David Brin’s brilliant analysis of Star Wars versus Star Trek and what each says about our values.)
We live in a complex and scary world, with intimidating and complicated problems. It’s a dangerous conceit to believe that there are simple and clear answers that, somehow, no one’s thought of. It happens from time to time, of course, but so do lightning strikes. The human mind amplifies the impact of rare events and accords them a too-great weight in how we plan things. The solution to high-speed intercity transit is unlikely to come out of the blue from a guy who’d hardly thought about the problem before.
Some people have made dark rumblings that Musk — a man who’s trying to sell cars and thus has a motive to sabotage trains — might just be committing an underhanded intellectual fraud in pursuit of profit. I don’t think that’s true. I think he’s deluded by his impression of his own genius, and his delusions neatly plug into our societal ones.
Nothing.
We know nothing of import yet, and won’t for several hours, if not an entire day. That is the way of these things, and the truth of them.
Nonetheless, the circus has begun. Each network has already offered its own (or its several own) opinions on who caused the bombing, who planted the bombs, and why. They’ve thrown up experts onto the screen, some with actual expertise but none with actual knowledge. How do I know? Because anyone who does actually know something is busy right now, with, you know, the investigating and the saving lives and stuff. People who know are too busy contributing for them to waste time satisfying our ghoulish need for details.
The terror of actions like this, for me, does not lie in the risks we face or the suddenly-heightened sense of my own mortality. The terror lies in the amazing speed with which this sort of event divides us, inflames us, sets us against each other. It did not take long for World Net Daily to come up with its list of suspect ideologies to be blamed. It didn’t take long for CNN. It didn’t take long for me — and that’s what scares me. I have to keep reminding myself that we don’t know anything. We don’t know if this is the work of a terrorist group (foreign or domestic), or a lone madman, or someone with a grudge or a defective sense of grandeur or an aching consuming need to grab our attention.
It is so easy to take such an event and slot it into our comfortable pre-existing narratives. We spend our time imagining the worst of our opponents, so when the awful happens, we say “I can see how [group X] might be behind this sort of thing”, and then we seamlessly convince ourselves that they are behind it, and eventually we forget that we’re just speculating.
There is a nebulous, magical radius around the site of a catastrophe. Within that distance, we find the extraordinary ordinary people, the ones who run into fire and smoke and fear, who reach across the yawning divide and yank people back, the ones who won’t give up and won’t let go and who unthinkingly do the right thing. But beyond that special radius, it seems we fall prey to the worse angels of our nature: We accuse and tar and disdain; we assume the worst; we fall upon each other in anger and accusation.
So, tonight, let us remember this: We don’t know anything yet. The who and the how and the why will come out, will be known, will be important, but not tonight. We don’t know anything tonight. How this happened and how it could have been avoided and how it might happen again — these are questions of weight, but not right now. We don’t know anything — except that some have died, many are injured, and many more are grieving.
Tonight, that is our truth.
[Note: This post has been edited for spelling and grammar.]