A "Plainly True Idea"

I've touched slightly on the term 'Israel-Firster' - a shorthand that has an ugly neo-Nazi provenance, which is why I don't use it - even for those Americans who really do back Netanyahu's policies over Obama's. And we have a rather familiar - and familiarly creepy - attempt to censor, intimidate and generally harrass anyone even faintly connected with someone who used it. But the ever-candid Glenn Greenwald has responded with a simple proposition: do not some American citizens exist for whom Israel is the supreme issue in their politics? He mentions the plain statement of a big Democratic donor, Haim Saban:

I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.

How is this not saying that his entire interest in American politics is on behalf of a foreign country? Here's Goldblog's answer:

I think it is perfectly plausible to believe -- and I've talked to right-wing American Jews who say exactly this -- that pro-Israel Americans, Jewish or otherwise, are motivated to support Israel because they are Americans, and see in Israel a cause worth America's effort. Of course, Israel's self-destructive leadership, through inaction on the occupation, by proposing laws that curtail free speech, by kowtowing to religious extremists, are creating conditions in which it will no longer be easy for Americans -- especially American Jews -- to see in Israel a reflection of American values. But this a subject for a separate post.

I would say this is not a subject for a separate post. Because most of the people targeted by the Greater Israel lobby as anti-Semites or self-haters or "narcissists" who had a "hard time at Hebrew school" are exactly such people, anguished by Israel's open contempt for the US under Netanyahu, obliteration of civilians, including dozens of children, in its bombardment of Gaza, its brutal, unrelenting assault on the Palestinians in the occupied territories, its increasingly fundamentalist public culture, its rogue international assassinations, sometimes stealing the passports of allies to achieve its ends, and its embrace of pre-emptive warfare over America's objections. If Israel no longer represents American values, as Goldblog worries (and has worried for a long time), then there really is a growing conflict between being pro-America and being pro-Israel, is there not?

It's equally valid to argue that Israel's intransigence over its illegal settlements and occupation is against America's broader global interests, and that in the case of any other "ally", pressure would be brought to bear to end this. But pressure to end anything like it would be erased by a future Republican administration - which is now a party whose leaders deny even the existence of Palestinians and celebrate new settlements being built. Much of this comes from end-times Christianist fundamentalism. But not all. In this election campaign, for example, one leading candidate is being funded primarily by one man, Sheldon Adelson, and his wife, Miriam. Greenwald notes the following story about Adelson:

In a talk to an Israeli group in July, 2010, Adelson said he wished he had served in the Israeli Army rather than the U.S. military — and that he hoped his young son will come back to Israel and “be a sniper for the IDF,” a reference to the Israel Defense Forces. (YouTube video of speech)

“I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform.  It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF … our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back– his hobby is shooting — and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF,” Adelson said at the event.

“All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart,” he said toward the end of his talk.

"All we care about is being good citizens of Israel" said this American citizen. He is saying it was "unfortunate" that he wore the uniform of the US. Now imagine an Arab-American saying that about serving, say, in Syria's army rather than America's. Can you imagine the outrage if a leading funder of a Democratic candidate had said that he "unfortunately" once wore the uniform of the US and would rather have worn that of another country?

Here's Caroline Glick on the perfidy of American Jews for believing that their country is the real promised land:

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Why Dogs Come In All Shapes And Sizes

Because dogs are a uniquely malleable species:

[B]ody size, hair length, fur type, nose shape, ear positioning, coat color, and the other traits that together define a breed's appearance are controlled by somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 genetic switches. The difference between floppy and erect ears is determined by a single gene region in canine chromosome 10, or CFA10. The wrinkled skin of a Chinese shar-pei traces to another region, called HAS2. The patch of ridged fur on Rhodesian ridgebacks? That's from a change in CFA18. Flip a few switches, and your dachshund becomes a Doberman, at least in appearance. Flip again, and your Doberman is a Dalmatian.

The reason humans are much more uniform:

In nature, a physical trait or disease state is usually the product of a complex interaction of many genes, each one making a fractional contribution. Height in humans, for instance, is determined by the interaction of some 200 gene regions.

Ebooks vs Democracy?

Er, yes, that seems to be the case Jonathan Franzen is making:

"Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring. Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough ... Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change. Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

Of course, an eBook is likely to have a longer virtual shelf-life than a physical book that will eventually decay or fall apart. Hanging out in some iCloud somewhere, the eBook will be eternal. And also more accessible to readers. There will be no more "out of print". You won't have to look for hours in a second hand bookstore to find that obscure tome you really wanted to read (not that that isn't one of life's great pleasures - but it's not Borders, is it?) The very old can be brand new again.

Wieseltierian piffle is what I'd call this if I were being kind. Then this incomprehensible drivel:

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Hollywood's Condescension On Race, Ctd

A reader with ties to the industry writes:

I enjoyed the Beast TV roundtable, thanks for posting. Those conversations are common inside the movie business, but not often aired publicly. Interesting to read those angry and somewhat resentful comments by readers. However, some don’t know as much as they seem to think they do.

Viola Davis has never had a multi-million-dollar role. Even with her role in The Help, I’m guessing she’s far from rich. She’s been a NY-based stage actress; she comes from a poor home; she didn’t make a lot of money young. Her husband is an actor, and not a particularly successful one. They’re raising three children. She has become famous, but I’m guessing her finances are still squarely middle class. Probably upper-middle-class now, after the last couple of movie gigs, but still middle class. Her chance to become financially secure comes if she gets a succession of major parts in well-funded movies, but those roles are scarce for 40-something African-American women. Honestly, if she really wants the nice house and expensive car and other material trappings of success, her best chance is probably to get a long running TV series, not look for movie roles.

Which brings us back to the topic of the roundtable. Viola Davis is beautiful, likable, and incredibly talented. (Disclosure: I’ve interviewed her and we know each other well enough to say hi when we see each other every couple of years. And yes, as Charlize Theron said, Viola is "hot as shit.") Yet the American commercial movie industry, a.k.a. "Hollywood," doesn’t have much use for her, because Hollywood is not in the "good movie" business.

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One War At A Time, Please

Bruce Riedel warns that a war with Iran would make the war in Afghanistan much more difficult:

Shia Iran and the Sunni Taliban are not natural allies, they came close to war in 1998, but they are likely to work together against America if pressed. An American or Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities would facilitate their rapprochement as Tehran seeks vulnerable openings.  Senior Italian officials, with some 4,000 troops on a 300 mile long border frontier with Iran outside Herat, have told me they are horrified at the idea of a war with Iran and would immediately need substantial reinforcement.   

Shhhh! Obama Is Rising

When Rasmussen's tracking poll gives him a net approval, it's worth taking note. Probably a post-SOTU blip, and it's only 51 - 47. But that's pretty good for a white, old, GOP-skewed sample.

The Viagra Candidate

Why the elderly will determine Newt's fate: 

About three-quarters of the Republicans casting ballots in next Tuesday’s primary will have been old enough to have voted for Reagan in 1984. (This estimate is based on the exit polls from the 2008 Florida GOP primary in which 75 percent of Republican voters were over 45 and 44 percent were older than 60). Not even in Iowa, where a significant chunk of GOP caucus-goers seems almost old enough to have posed for Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” is the Republican vote so tilted towards those with long historical memories.Up until now, Gingrich has been especially successful at appealing to the I-remember-the-invasion-of-Grenada voting bloc. In Iowa New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to exit polls, there was a powerful, but little-noticed, straight-line trend—the older the voter, the higher the level of Gingrich support.

As Scott McConnell notes, Gingrich "serves up a politics of rage for the Viagra set."

Why Newt Shouldn't Quit After Florida

Only half its delegates will be counted, and the national polls show Newt slightly ahead. Yes, a loss in Florida would be very damaging, if it's big. If it's close, after a 5 - 1 negative media avalanche, Gingrich will be angry and cornered. I also note that the two latest polls in Florida show a tightening again. Not sure if it's a fluke, but this race has had so many ups and downs, and there are still so many undecideds (1 in 4 in the Quinnipiac poll), that I'm leery of assuming anything.

Newt Supported Obamacare

Full stop:

Morgen Richmond, who dug the video up, adds:

Well, here you have it: not only has Gingrich been a long-standing proponent of a federal health insurance mandate, he clearly and unequivocally called for it as part of the White House health reform initiative in May 2009. Mission accomplished then.

Shhhh! Romneycare Is Working

Merrill Goozner explains.

Obama's Long Game, Ctd: The Killing Of Bin Laden

There's been some more pushback from Exum against my claim that Obama - and not Bush - deserves credit for killing bin Laden in such a daring and valuable raid. Andrew argues that Bush's public pronouncements that bin Laden was no longer relevant was psy-ops, trying to fool the enemy, not actual policy. But he cannot argue that Bush didn't allow Osama bin Laden to escape in Tora Bora - one of the biggest mistakes of the entire war. Meanwhile, Dan Froomkin - fired for being critical of the war by the WaPo neocon brigade - showed that Bush's decision to focus elsewhere wasn't merely rhetorical:

For more than three years [after Tora Bora], Bush treated bin Laden a lot like the wizards in the Harry Potter books treat He Who Must Not Be Named. In the summer of 2005, Bush started invoking bin Laden again -- but this time, to win support for his Iraq policy, which was very much on the ropes. "Hear the words of Osama bin Laden," Bush said, "'This Third World War is raging' in Iraq."

By 2006, on the stump for his fellow Republicans, Bush was citing bin Laden extensively. The president cast bin Laden as the oracular leader of a global movement, and warned of the possibility of an Islamic caliphate "stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia" -- an unsubstantiated fantasy with only one thing going for it: It served the political agendas of both men.

Meanwhile, in an Oval Office session that same month, Bush told to a group of conservative columnists that focusing on bin Laden didn’t fit with his military plans. Putting "100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work," he explained.

So he talked up bin Laden for domestic political reasons, while abandoning the hunt in reality. The lack of troops at Tora Bora was an inexcusable failure. Then there was the deeper strategic decision to focus resources on Iraq, not Af-Pak. Bush then bungled putting pressure on the Pakistanis to help get the mass-murderer:

American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the CIA in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the intelligence agency, including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas...In order to keep pressure on the Pakistanis about the tribal areas, officials decided to have Bush raise the issue in personal phone calls with Musharraf.

The conversations backfired. Two former United States government officials say they were surprised and frustrated when instead of demanding action from Musharraf, Bush instead repeatedly thanked him for his contributions to the war on terror. "He never pounded his fist on the table and said, 'Pervez you have to do this,' " said a former senior intelligence official who saw transcripts of the phone conversations. But another senior administration official defended the president, saying that Bush had not gone easy on the Pakistani leader.

In 2006, Bush formally closed down the hunt for bin Laden:

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center...The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Almost immediately upon coming to office, Obama dramatically improved military-intelligence cooperation, focused much more on Af-Pak, and briefed by Panetta in his first months, reversed course on finding and killing OBL:

In June, 2009, [Obama] drafted a memo instructing Panetta to create a “detailed operation plan” for finding the Al Qaeda leader and to “ensure that we have expended every effort.” Most notably, the President intensified the C.I.A.’s classified drone program; there were more missile strikes inside Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office than in George W. Bush’s eight.

Now, the defenses of Bush. Exum:

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Better Ideas Through Angry Birds

Jonah Lehrer examines the research behind creativity. I'm biased since I have become an Angry Birds addict. And I sometimes wonder - as I'm in mid-blog and take a break - if my web-addled brain is self-medicating. Maybe it is. One study had two groups brainstorm solutions to simple problems. The group that played a silly video game for two minutes came up with their most innovative ideas about 55% of the time - more than double the other group's 20%:

How can the rest of us get better at identifiying our best ideas? One key lesson from this research is that distraction and dilettantism come with real benefits, as they give the unconscious a chance to assess its new ideas. This reminds me of a wise piece of advice from Zadie Smith, which she dished out to aspiring novelists:

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Paul Quietly Advances

John Hudson tracks waning mainstream media coverage of Paul: 

[M]edia coverage of GOP candidate Ron Paul is back to nearly nothing, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. This week, less than 5 percent of all campaign stories focused on Paul, the lowest point since Dec. 11. when strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire helped stoke some interest. Over the same period, Paul's performance in the polls has only improved, going from the single digits to 12.7 percent, putting him nearly even with Rick Santorum, in the current RealClearPolitics average.

Grace Wyler explains why Paul is effectively skipping Florida: 

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5 - 1

That's the degree of Romney's media domination over Gingrich in Florida, according to TPM:

According to my Democratic source, the total ad spending through Tuesday in Florida by the Romney campaign and its allied super PAC, Restore Our Future, is $15,340,000. The total spending for Gingrich’s campaign and his super PAC, Winning Our Future, is $3,390,000.

Newt has been getting bigger crowds. What he really needs are more billionaire Greater Israel fanatics.

Correction Of The Day

"An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from "The Shining." The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat," - the NYT.

A reader sends the above image and writes:

Of course, the correction refers to the attached blowjob scene.

Does Newt Know How To Quit?

The Daily Caller obtained a Gingrich memo mapping out the campaign's strategy through Super Tuesday. John Heilemann suspects that Gingrich is "mad and mental enough to fight on long after Florida":

Pledges to continue the fight unabated in the face of harsh and/or humiliating outcomes are staples of presidential campaigns. And they are also patently meaningless. (Please recall Jon Huntsman's feigned brio on the night of the New Hampshire primary — and his departure from the race a few days later.) But in Gingrich's case, he might be serious, so much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny.

Kevin Drum seconds him. I guess I'm biased as I really enjoy a good political bloodbath. And during this campaign, I've come to loathe Romney almost as much as his Republican peers do.

Quote For The Day

“Vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal," - Sarah Palin.

Annoy a liberal? I have a feeling most would be thrilled if Newt won tomorrow.

How Many Jobs Did Romney Create At Bain?

Steve Kaplan tries to do the math:

Among Bain Capital’s investments under Romney, the large job creators are clearly Staples and Sports Authority. Both of these were small, young companies when Bain Capital invested in them. Bain invested in Staples when it had only one store, so there were likely fewer than 200 employees at the time. Bain appears to have invested in the Sports Authority when it had fewer than ten stores. Unfortunately, there are no public data to say how many people were employed at that time. At the end of 1998, Staples had more than 42,000 employees, Sports Authority had almost 14,000, Gartner Group had almost 3,000, and Steel Dynamics had over 500. So at the beginning of 1999, when Romney left Bain Capital, these four companies alone employed almost 60,000 total employees. While some of the job growth at Sports Authority came from acquisitions, there is no doubt that these four companies created tens of thousands of jobs over the period.

Here's the problem with that calculation:

Romney is effectively taking credit for every job Staples has ever created ... even though Bain provided just 10 percent of the seed money for the company.

Here's how Jonathan Last put it in his recent article:

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Dreaming Of An Innovation Nation

Alex Tabarrok wants to increase innovation spending:

We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century we need to increase the rate of innovation and to do that we need to put innovation at the center of our national vision. Innovation, however, is not a priority of our massive federal government. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. federal budget, $2.2 trillion annually, is spent on just the four biggest warfare and welfare programs, Medicaid, Medicare, Defense and Social Security. In contrast the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, spends $31 billion annually, and the National Science Foundation spends just $7 billion.

(Chart from Marginal Revolution)

How The Web Watches TV

Pivoting off Tristan Louis' list of the top television shows and whether they're available to stream online, Tim Carmody draws a distinction:

With live television, we flip; with video on demand, we binge. This means that shows have to catch and hold our attention in very different ways — not just over the commercial, but from episode to episode, season to season, and from television to videogames, Facebook, or whatever else might capture our attention on a web-connected device.

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The Economics Of Snow

Emily Badger researched how various cities determine how many snow plows they need:

Here is the challenge: People in Nashville freak out when there are two inches of snow. People in Buffalo freak out when there are two feet. Washington, D.C. gets about 16 inches a year on average, but once every seven years or so, something really wild happens. Seattle averages only about 7 inches, but Spokane – at the same longitude but on the other side of the mountains – gets nearly 50.

Weather is unpredictable, and so is how people react to it. A public works official steps into this world and has to weigh the factors that are unknowable (freak storms) against the ones that are (city budgets) and then hope for the best.

On a related note, Stephen Gandel reports on the bizarre history of weather derivatives and how the lack of snow this year could provide a windfall for financial firms:

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The Definition Of Job Security

Charles Nevin runs some numbers on the Queen of England:

She has made over 300 state visits abroad, some 25,000 visits around Britain to greet, meet, open and tour, hosted more than 100 state banquets for foreign heads of state, including Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu, conferred 400,000 honours, dealt with around 150 prime ministers in Britain and the Commonwealth, received 3.5m pieces of correspondence and attended to daily red boxes containing various matters of state, cabinet minutes, appointments, legislation. According to a new biography, “Our Queen” by Robert Hardman, she has fallen asleep at work once, very briefly, in 2004, during a lecture on new insights into biology and medicine with the use of magnets at the Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf.

At The Dog Park

From the pooch's perspective:

Does Age Make Us More Conservative?

Perhaps not:

Overall, what's happening in society at large as people come of age seems to matter most in determining the starting point for their core beliefs, said Karl Pillemer, a sociologist and gerontologist at Cornell University, who conducted more than 1,000 in-depth interviews with seniors for his book, "30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans." ... Late in life, his research shows, people often become more open, more tolerant, and more appreciative of compassion. Even if they started out conservative, they may become less extreme in their conservatism.

Cool Ad Watch

NBC co-opts the "Shit __ Says" meme for Liz Lemon:

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What Caused The Salem Witch Trials?

Ben Shattuck investigates various theories, including that the girls ate hallucinogens:

The take-home from the trials shouldn’t be that poisonous plants can make you hallucinate, but that a perfectly capable, religious, and law-abiding community that laid the roots for American justice legally and conscientiously executed 20 of its own innocent citizens; that over 150 people in Salem that year who were charged as having consorted with the Devil. In [the jimsonweed] theory, the girls went crazy. In [historian Mary Beth Norton]’s, the town went crazy.

Still Holding Out For A Brokered Convention?

Ed Morrissey dismisses the Republican dream: 

[L]et’s say for the sake of argument that no one candidate has a majority of the delegates, and none manages to wangle a majority on the first ballot at the convention.  How does this benefit conservatives, who have fought the "establishment" that has pushed Romney for the nomination?  The nominating process will then fall into the hands of the Republican National Committee, comprised of state party chairs and other power brokers, where the Tea Party has little or no influence. The fantasy in this case will be that the assembled party bosses and delegates, many of whom are part of state-party establishments, will crown a completely new candidate. ... [C]onsider the hole from which this nominee would start. Ten weeks from the election, the party would have a nominee for which no one had cast a ballot in a primary, who has raised no money, who has built no organization, and who has articulated no platform before getting drafted at the convention.  

Matt Lewis has more. Earlier Dish speculation here.

(Image via politicalbetting.com)

Romney's Envy "Rosebud"

Noam Scheiber contrasts Mitt with his father George:

“I was kicked out of Mexico when I was five years old, because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people, who, when they went down there, were just as poor as the Mexicans, ... became prosperous,”[George Romney]  said in a speech in 1961. “The Mexicans thought, if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn’t work that way, of course.” ...

[T]he elder Romney’s response to this slightly stunted analysis was admirably progressive. It was one of the reasons he favored foreign aid, an end to discrimination, and subsidized preschool and summer school. He was the model of a ’60s-era, liberal Republican. Romney fils, on the other hand, has responded to the same analysis in a strikingly different way. Like his father, Mitt Romney worries about those who would demonize wealth and success. But, whereas George sought to ease their plight, Mitt seeks to demonize the demonizers. It’s as though Mitt inherited all of his father’s noblesse, but none of the oblige.

Reihan makes an important distinction:

The political tendency Romney is criticizing is not a “politics of envy” driven by “the frustrations of the down-and-out.” Rather, he is, I suspect, criticizing a “politics of envy” driven by relatively privileged people who tend to be more concerned about the competition for positional goods in dense metropolitan areas than about chronic unemployment and underemployment in marginalized communities.

Florida Looks Done. Sigh.

Newt's mystifyingly bad debate performance seems to have sealed his fate in the state. But he is still in the lead nationally, and Shelly looks set to keep financing him. Nate Silver has a good guide to what will then be a long month without binding primaries. It's striking that Romney's leads in heavily Mormon Arizona and his home state of Michigan are rather shallow.

Here's the weird thing. I find myself rooting for Gingrich now, one of the most repulsive, nasty and delusional men in American public life. This primary season - when it hasn't eaten deep into my soul - has driven me to all sorts of strange emotions. There were a few nanoseconds when I even wanted Santorum to rally after Iowa. That's a horse race for you, I guess.

"The Moral Scandal Of American Life"

That's Adam Gopnik's view of mass incarceration in the US:

Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

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Dogs Against Romney

I guess it was inevitable.

Appraising Your Values

New research illuminates how the brain grapples with sacred beliefs and indecent proposals:

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," [lead author Gregory] Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Put another way:

In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” [neuroscientist Greg Berns] said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”

Faces Of The Day

Wendy Campbell explains Takahiro Kimura's "Broken Face" collages:

Since 1991, Kimura has been creating own unique style of collages (with a focus on faces) that depicts the complicated nature of the human spirit through peculiar physical distortions.

Lomography has more:

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The Power Of Introverts

Susan Cain praises introverts in her new book:

It’s never a good idea to organize society in a way that depletes the energy of half the population. We discovered this with women decades ago, and now it’s time to realize it with introverts.

This also leads to a lot of wrongheaded notions that affect introverts and extroverts alike. Here’s just one example: Most schools and workplaces now organize workers and students into groups, believing that creativity and productivity comes from a gregarious place. This is nonsense, of course. From Darwin to Picasso to Dr. Seuss, our greatest thinkers have often worked in solitude, and in my book I examine lots of research on the pitfalls of groupwork. 

Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?

I'll own that headline for this one. The total invention of Barack X as opposed to Barack Obama is getting worse, not better, as Bill Maher explains in this instant classic:

First off, the head of the RNC, Reince Priebus, just said this about the bitter GOP death-match now in full flood:

In a few months, this is all going to be ancient history and we're going to talk about our own little Captain Schettino, which is President Obama who's abandoning the ship here in the United States and is more interested in campaigning than doing his job as president.

So the man handed an economy contracting by an annualized rate of 9 percent, and two failed wars, is now the man who is abandoning ship. Next up:

Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal is under fire after asking Republican House members to pray for President Barack Obama’s death. O’Neal made the request via an email he forwarded to GOP colleagues in the House. In an email sent in December, O’Neal asked his fellow Republicans to pray Psalm 109, which contains the following lines:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

The Secret Service needs to give that man a call. Then he should resign. No public official anywhere should be calling for the death of the first black president.

Do You Have A True Self?

Julian Baggini thinks not. But he doesn't believe that the self is an illusion:

Sam McNerney pushes back:

He invites the audience to consider the metaphor of a waterfall. In many ways a waterfall is like the illusion of the self: is it not permanent, it is always changing and it is different at every single instance. But this doesn’t mean that a waterfall is an illusion or that it is not real. What it means is that we have to understand it as a history, as having certain things that are the same and as a process.

Baggini is trying to save the self from neuroscience, which is admirable considering that neuroscience continues to show how convoluted our brains are. I am not sure if he is successful – argument by metaphor can only go so far, empirical data wins at the end of the day – but I like the idea that personal and neurological change and inconsistency does imply an illusion of identity. In this age of cognitive science it’s easy to subscribe to Whitman’s doctrine – that we are constituted by multitudes; it takes a brave intellect, on the other hand, to hang on to what Freud called our “naïve self-love.”

What's An Apology Worth?

A recent study put the question to German eBay customers who had offered a neutral or negative evaluation of a transaction:

One-third of the unhappy customers received a message that included the sentence: “I would like to apologize and ask whether you might withdraw your evaluation.” The others were offered, in place of expression of regret, either 2.5 or 5 euros “as a goodwill gesture.” Writing in the journal Economics Letters, the researchers report nearly 45 percent of those given the apology withdrew their evaluation, compared to only 21 percent of those offered cash. A direct apology: priceless.

Mental Health Break

Yosemite at its most beautiful:

The War On Vitamins

Dr. David Agus wages it in his new book The End of Illness. Brian Bethune summarizes:

Vitamin supplements would be bad enough if they were merely useless, he says. The money Americans spend yearly on vitamins—some $25 billion—is sorely needed elsewhere in the medical system. They aren’t getting much for their money now. Consider claims that vitamin D significantly cuts cancer risks and that three-quarters of the U.S. population had insufficient levels of it. For Agus, these results are found in not very high-grade studies; for one thing, he’s at a loss to understand how anyone can claim to have established the correct dose for appropriate D levels. The bone disease rickets is long gone and age-related fractures are not on the rise, meaning that by the only indications we have, the population has quite enough vitamin D. 

Gregory Ferenstein details Agus' other prescriptions:

[W]e combat weight loss by driving to the gym to walk on a treadmill--and then return to hunch over laptops for hours on end. "Sitting at your desk is akin to smoking a cigarette," he says. Prolonged sitting, independent of physical exercise, he writes, "has been shown to have significant metabolic consequences," influencing everything from cholesterol levels to blood sugar.

A Poem For Sunday

From "The Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The poem continues. Amit Majmudar analyzes the work of T.S. and Kay Ryan as the two major philosophical poets.

(Image by Markus Reugels)

Eating In Israel

Annalise Koltun shares his experiences with kosher and non-kosher Israeli cuisine. An aside on Israeli agriculture:

For most of its history, Israel’s produce was watered, weeded, and picked by Palestinian workers who crossed over each day from the West Bank or Gaza. Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, however, Israeli has closed its borders to most of these workers. And since few or no Israelis are willing to work in the hot sun for minimum wage, Israel now imports workers from Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. There are hundreds of thousands of these foreigners in Israel; in 2010, the first victim of a Hamas rocket attack after the previous year’s Gaza War was a man named Manee Singueanphon, not Moshe Cohen.

Why Would Robots Be Evil?

Alyssa Rosenberg applauds the above short film for debunking the fears of the privileged class:

The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

E.D. Kain nods:

One reasons Blade Runner was so interesting and complex was the very reason Alyssa enjoyed the above short: it turned the fear of the powerful robot Other on its head, and granted them their humanity and their frailty, and ours.

(Video: No Robots from YungHan Chang)

Why Discourage Bilingualism?

Julie Sedivy reiterates the cognitive benefits of knowing two languages:

[A]n intriguing Israeli study led by Esther Adi-Japha found that the drawings of bilingual kindergarten-age kids were different from their monolingual peers. When asked to draw a picture of a flower that does not exist, monolingual children were fairly unadventurous, drawing perhaps a flower that was missing its leaves, or a flower with only one petal. Bilingual children, on the other hand, incorporated elements from completely different objects—producing for instance, a flower with a tail, or a flower with teeth. This kind of cross-category mixing in children’s drawings tends not to occur until kids are about eight years old, putting the bilingual kids on an accelerated timeline for this particular skill.

Heaven For The 1%

Mormons believe in three heavens and one hell. The celestial kingdom is the most desirable:

There are also different sub-degrees of glory within the celestial kingdom, and the highest degree can be reached only by couples who are married together in the temple, and in which the husband has joined what Mormons call the “Melchizedek priesthood." (Pretty much every devout male Mormon joins the priesthood by the time he’s married.) Those who attain the highest degree become gods in the afterlife, meaning that they can bear new children in heaven, and may even have their own planets.

(Artist Rendering of Eternal Progression via the Utah Lighthouse Ministry)

When We Can't Forgive

When Greg Bottoms' older brother was 25, he tried to burn down his family's house when his family was inside. After fifteen years in a prison psychiatric treatment facility, the brother tried to contact the family:

I told the social worker I could not speak to him, nor could my mother, who is in her 60s now, living a peaceful life after many years of a damn difficult one. Call me cold, but our problem—his problem, but ours by extension—is intractable. I wish I could offer some kind of easy prescription here—something to do with politics and policy, with therapeutic philosophies or biochemical treatment protocols. But the mystery of mental anguish, of the mind on the outs with itself, of a version of hell made manifest in a suburban living room, is the one thing in my life that has brought me to the point where my only option seemed to be to pray. To reengage my brother would be suicidal. What choice do I have? The past comes flooding back. I cut him loose to survive.

The View From Your Window

Vatican City, 8 am

The Theology Of Star Wars

Liel Leibovitz critiques it:

We revere Star Wars because to our minds—modern machines that equate religion with superstition and are willing to disregard imperfections in science but never in dogma—the movies represent transcendentalist humanism at its best, a perfect manifestation of that noxious label, “spiritual,” that people use to describe themselves when they’re too dull to believe in religion and too dim to understand science. This is why the Force has become the organizing metaphor of our time; there’s no better one for those who believe that if we only open our hearts and understand people are all the same and all good we’d be enlightened enough to lift rocks with a tilt of our heads.

Should Atheists Build Their Own Temple?

Alain de Botton believes so:

You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good. That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land? It's time atheists had their own versions of the great churches and cathedrals. A beautiful building is an indispensable part of getting your message across. Books alone won't do it.

His design:

Read On »

How Did The Inquisition Happen?

Cullen Murphy traces how intolerance and persecution took on an institutional life:

The inquisitors shared an outlook of moral certainty. In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible. The sanctity of private conscience is no longer deemed inviolate. ... It all sounds very medieval. But it’s not merely medieval. Scholars may debate whether there truly is such a thing as a “totalitarian” state, and what its characteristics are, but the desire to control the thoughts and behaviour of others – joined to a belief that God or history will render an approving judgement – underlies much of the sad narrative of the past hundred years: the police states, the dirty wars, the ethnic cleansing, the internments, the renditions, the Red Scares, the fatwas, the special prosecutors, the electronic surveillance, the encroachments accomplished in name of national security.

More on the Inquisition as predecessor to today's acceptance of torture here.

"Jesus > Religion"

Over the past few weeks, this pro-Jesus anti-religion video by Jefferson Bethke has racked up more than 17 million views:

Lisa Fullam captions:

I post this here because I suspect he represents a very widely held set of notions among Millennials. These are the young folks who not only don’t darken the doors of churches, but don’t see any reason for doing so. As they see it, the Christian churches’ concerns simply don’t mesh with their concerns. 

CBS interviewed Bethke earlier this week. Another young Christian created a response video defending the Catholic Church:

Read On »