Koyaanisqatsi

A test:

Virtually everything I have read, virtually everyone to whom I have spoken, always describes a teacher in grade 4, 5, or 6 as the formative teacher, the one which made all the difference. It makes me wonder whether these are actually the formative grades, and the lucky students are the ones who get the exceptional teachers at this time. Any earlier, and it blurs into the first socialisation of school. Any later, and thinking habits have already set into their mould.

If you are reading this: did you have a formative teacher? Which grade did he or she teach? What made them so memorable?

And maybe this becomes a secondary test as well: who is willing to stop lurking and post first? *grin* I should know better, I was taught in grad school to never, ever target a question at an individual student and put them on the spot: but how about a general question aimed at a reading audience of those no less qualified to speak than myself?

The first manned mission to land on the moon had an Australian connection. The 64-metre Parkes Radiothermal Telescope, still the largest steerable dish in Australia, had only been in existence for eight years when Apollo 11 was launched. It was one of three tracking antennas to receive the original television signals from the lunar module, the other two being the 64-metre Goldstone antenna in California and the 26-metre Honeysuckle Creek antenna, near Canberra. Parkes' staff fought high winds and the risk of serious personal injury to keep the dish pointed at the moon and deliver the best quality picture of the three. So superior was the Parkes' picture that after the first nine minutes, the remaining hours of the broadcast were sourced through Parkes -- and were subsequently lost by NASA.

No fault should be ascribed to NASA because of this. The original Parkes signal consisted of telemetry data and an SSTV video feed. The SSTV data, in turn, was split into two parts: the first recorded on data tapes, the second converted for broadcast to televisions all over the world -- not electronically, but by pointing a conventional television camera at a monitor displaying the SSTV images. This second version remains as videotape and kinescope; but it has the reduced quality and noise one would expect of a film of a film, not to mention further distortion due to normal analogue transmission over a long transmission path. This was another reason NASA had hoped to use the closer Goldstone station, but those pictures turned out to be extremely poor quality.

On top of all this, archiving standards in 1969 were not what they are now: and 10% loss was considered normal. For all its standards and upgrades, modern archiving does not do much better. With the current amount of previous and constantly added data in the system, we are running into the butterfly effect: where the effect of any errors or other perturbations grows exponentially to the point where the behaviour of this dynamic system begins to appear chaotic. In practical terms, 3-5% of all data in modern archives will be inaccurate. Further, any attempt to fix an inaccuracy will itself induce other inaccuracies.

In a budget-consciousness which modern sensibilities should find familiar, old SSTV tapes -- which were extremely expensive -- were also routinely erased and reused. The original SSTV tapes which had been shipped from Australia to Goddard were no exception -- and after Goddard received the tapes, there was no reason for Australia to hold onto the backup copy. It was the height of the Cold War, and there were other priorities. Anyway, it was obvious now to all involved that it could only be a matter of a few decades now before a permanent manned station would be established on the moon.

On the plus side, at least we know that the old technology can still be read if found. Other telemetry tapes from the same period have been discovered at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, and have been successfully read.

Thanks to NASA's frame by frame restoration of the original video footage, some of which has been in storage since the original moon landing, we also know that modern technology can do an amazing job of restoration of the original video footage.

The Parkes radio telescope continues to be a tracking link for space missions to the present day. Mariner 2, Mariner 4, Voyager, Giotto, Galileo, and Cassini-Huygens are all being tracked in part by Parkes. Other radio telescopes have since been built, some of them arrays of dishes which together are much larger than Parkes; but if another manned mission to the moon once again becomes possible, Parkes will almost certainly have a part in it.

Starbucks has joined the list of large companies that have adopted the corporate version of stealth technology, by renaming one of its Seattle stores "15th Avenue Coffee & Tea" and otherwise giving it the appearance of a neighbourhood pub. It won't be the first large company to have rebranded part or all of its goods and services to create the feeling of an independent, and it won't be the last.

This tactic will cut directly and deliberately into the independent market niche. How can it not? It is the latest in a long line of Starbucks business tactics which happen to target independents disproportionately among its competitors, such as the willingness and deep-pockets ability to operate at a loss until the independent competitor simply runs out of money. Some will call these tactics "anti-competitive". Others will simply label them "good business".

Perhaps it will turn around the staggering profit drops that Starbucks has seen in recent months. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Starbucks profits dropped a staggering 97%. Second quarter profits reported at the end of April 2009 still showed a drop of 77 percent. From a history of growth so meteoric it was parodied repeatedly on The Simpsons, Starbucks is now closing low-performing stores almost as rapidly as it was initially opening them. Ironically, among the stores closed is the fabled one in the Forbidden City. It seems that a significant percentage of the coffee-buying public see Starbucks lattés as an unneeded luxury item.

When we look back at this period of time, will we see the rise, fall, and potentially reinvention of Starbucks as perfectly symbolic of its country of origin, its environment, and its times?

While I am at it, I may as well also address the persistent Internet rumour that alleges that part of Starbucks profits go to fund the Israeli army. Let's start by citing Starbucks' official response:

Starbucks is a nonpolitical organization and does not support political causes. Further, political preferences of a Starbucks partner at any level have absolutely no bearing on Starbucks company policies.

This one is much trickier than it appears on the surface, and even Snopes is reluctant to tackle it fully. Starbucks is a autonomous corporate entity whose profits go toward expansion, market research, and most recently a rebranding testing. As such, none of its profits go directly to any Israeli causes, Zionist or otherwise: although of course the question of influence peddling is always open whenever powerful business meets politics. (Consider the parallel question of big oil money in the United States.)

Yet by definition a part of Starbucks' profits (to the tune of $9,740,471 USD in 2008) do go to its CEO Howard Schultz, who is nearly solely responsible for Starbucks' early success and rapid growth. In 2006, Forbes Magazine ranked Schultz the 354th richest person in the United States with a net worth of $1.1 billion USD (probably a bit lower now, after the Starbucks/stock market fall). Most of this money has originated with Starbucks.

Schultz also happens to be Jewish. Just as every Christian attending church is expected to tithe 10% of their income to church-sponsored activities, so is every self-sufficient Jew expected to donate a minimum of 10% of their income to charity (tzedakah), as well as a minimum of 1/60 to pe'ah, the transparent, open giving from the profit derived from goods which originates in agriculture ("when you reap the harvest, you shall not reap all the way"). The rabbinical teaching is that tzedakah money belongs not to the earner but to the recipient: creating an obligation not only to give, but to give it to appropriate causes that can best use it. Although many Jews in the United States don't give to primarily to Jewish causes, the 1998 Israel 50th Anniversary Tribute Award given to Schultz by Aish HaTorah does suggest that he personally prioritises conservative Jewish causes.

(From a Christian perspective, Aish HaTorah might best be considered an organisation which evangelises Judaism and Torah principles to the Jewish people. As with almost every conservative religious structure, no matter what the religion, it can be considered right-wing. In the case of conservative Jewish values, it is difficult not to have links with Zionism. Some aspects of Zionism such as settlement, in turn, have proven a constant sticking point in any Middle East peace agreement: which indirectly requires a continued high percentage of GDP to support a defensive military. Since Aish HaTorah has also helped establish the media monitoring organisation HonestReporting.com, I must admit that I am curious whether this blog too will soon be dubbed as having an anti-Israel bias, if it has not been already.)

Thus the wording of the Starbucks statement deliberately obscures the intent of the question. Every Starbucks employee is labelled a Starbucks "partner", from lowest barista right up to the CEO: but most Starbucks employees don't have a voice in Starbucks operations and policy. Nor is any Starbucks employee in a position to donate as much to their chosen causes as Schultz, simply because no Starbucks employee earns so much. Practically, this means that a significant percentage of Starbucks gross profit does go, indirectly, to the personal causes espoused by Schultz.

Under the letter of the law, Schultz is separate from the company he has built, and his charitable choices are his own. After all, it is his money, to do with as he wishes. Were the corporate veil not in place, the principal shareholder and the company would be one and the same -- but the corporate veil does exist, the corporation is considered an independent entity: and thereby hangs a technicality.

Isolated into our individual corners of the world, buried under daily concerns: how often can we take the time to look around at the world outside and see what is happening? We catch the headlines of the local newsfeed but rarely even our own weather. I laugh whenever someone in my presence yearns for hot weather, beach weather: "You work in an office, don't you?" Air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned indoor garage and air-conditioned office: who sets foot outside to feel what our new urban environment is really like?

In the heartland of the United States as far west as California, it is typical July warm bordering on hot and dry and stormy, with near-perfect soybean and corn growing conditions (in contrast to last year's Iowa floods) and an unusual clustering of west Pacific hurricanes. Water and power concerns are no less than they were last year, and next year will be more challenging still. The northern New England states remain cold and rainy and more spring-like than summer, but for the most part the freakish weather does not penetrate down to the more populated cities.

In much of south continental Europe, summer began much earlier than usual, with persistent daytime temperatures over 30°C and frequent, unusually severe hailstorms. In northern Europe and nearly all of Canada except the Yukon and the high arctic, summer weather has not yet started: and parts of Newfoundland have experienced frost -- in July. In Peru's southern Andes, it is a bitterly cold winter which comes in with the new El Niño: nearly twelve weeks earlier than usual, in April!

In the east Atlantic, an increased frequency of Saharan dust storms has blanketed the ocean with the Saharan Air Layer (SAL). Until this superheated dry atmospheric inversion disperses, there can be no tropical wave hurricanes: but when it finally does, it is likely they will be all the stronger for the warmer waters. In the meantime, the Sahara desert continues its slow creep south and east, with no signs of stopping.

(The Sahara itself may be the strongest visible evidence that human beings can influence the weather on a global basis for thousands of years, extending thousands of square kilometres beyond the borders of what technically qualifies as 'desert'.)

The Northwest Passage is open for shipping -- geographically, politically remains a matter of dispute. This began in September 14, 2007, for a few short days at the end of that year: but the period of ice-free water has been longer every year. Unlike the regions just south of them, the transpolar arctic regions are experiencing some of their warmest weather ever. Even the North Pole is occasionally ice-free now. For now, Canada is in a solo uphill battle with trying to preserve complete sovereignty over what it calls "Canadian Internal Waters", the waters between what are undisputably only Canadian islands: but northern waters between Danish and Russian islands are opening up too. Let's hope it does not take another Exxon Valdez, this time in fragile arctic waters, to resolve this political dispute.

Thus far, Australia has been spared: in part because it is the winter season and the summer brush fire season has not yet started. But much of the land is already tinder-dry, and the timing of the El Niño droughts will probably strike Australia perfectly in time to disrupt next year's harvests.

Few sources are better than the popular media to express the current acceptabilities of the viewing public. In a bottom-line superficial world, nothing can survive on the airwaves unless it reflects either actuality or hidden desire.

Many years ago, I drew from such an illustrative example while I was discussing the topic of modern marriage with a former professor of mine. I did not then understand his reaction: more a matter of body language and shortened conversation than of anything actually said. It took me years to understand that he had assumed I was pulling from television as a role modelling structure -- which would have come as a sharp surprise to him -- and equally that I watched television the same way as most people, either as passive entertainment or as "educational".

(This last btw is absolutely impossible for me. There is nothing from which we cannot learn. Non-fiction weaves factoids into an information framework of the director's choosing, fiction creates a living context to give them meaning. Neither gives anything near a complete picture. To rely entirely upon one or the other is to cultivate a very distorted view of the world. Not only is a sharp division between passive entertainment and "educational" television alien to me, but to watch/read/listen to something -- anything -- and simply absorb, never once asking questions about what I had just seen, never once thinking about why this was said and not that, never once wondering what lies outside the presented picture ... it is something that would come very close to hell for me.)

Is it from isolated incidents such as these, combined with the firm scientific belief in causality, that the psychology field has come to see television's influence solely as formative? and thus to ask only those questions that can arise from this assumption?

Judging from the enormous number of airline complaints, customer service has not been the top priority for most airlines of late. Indeed, the same could be said for most companies. Whenever the bottom line is being reviewed, customer service is always one of the easiest sectors to cut back. After all, the sale has already been made. As to the classic question of customers going elsewhere: of course they will ... but is "elsewhere" really any different? In the absence of brand loyalty, service industries increasingly rely on a fixed level of need, pinballing among a limited set of options more alike than different.

(I speak not of what could be or should be, but of what is.)

Customer service is the polar opposite to advertising, which is in a constant escalating arms race. The only way the marketing department ever gets chopped is as a result of a particularly disastrous campaign (New Coke!): and even then this actually means that the advertising budget must increase to compensate.

From the corporate pov, the job of the customer service department is not to provide customer service, but to stall the customer into submission without once admitting fault. It sounds like an oxymoron. However, when dealing with customers as a pool rather than as individuals, the customer flow-through pool is best optimised by depersonalising the customer and never once accepting responsibility. For exactly this reason, customer service employees are usually stripped of all real power.

Every so often, someone who has a voice and knows how to use the media strikes back.

The Sons of Maxwell were on a tour of the United States when band member Dave Carroll's beloved Taylor guitar was seriously damaged by United Airlines baggage handlers. For nine months he tried to get compensation, but instead got shuffled from one department to another. Although no one denied the experience occurred, not one person to whom he spoke would admit fault.

He gave up on talking. Instead, he made a video. It went viral -- and suddenly United Airlines was talking, was accepting responsibility, was even apologising:

This has struck a chord w/ us. We have spoken w/ one another to make what happened right. We agree, this should have been fixed much sooner & Dave's excellent video provides us w/ a unique learning opp. that we wud like to use 4 training.

Dave can sing a happy tune. As asked, we made a donation to a charity. In his name, United will donate $3K to the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz, for music ed. for kids. Cant wait 2 make music w/ Dave 2 improve service 4 all. Most important, very sorry.
- uniteditstimetofly

Ten thousand comments later of the kind of publicity no company ever wants to see gathered in one place, United Airlines was apologising; and Dave accepted. Was it a win, or simply the least costly out? Will anything of significance change for other people in future?

I can't speak for the recent state of airlines myself: but then again I have generally managed to avoid customer service desks entirely. For one thing, I don't buy much. For another, I deal primarily with individuals, rather than with businesses per se. I try for a measure of personal contact with the front line people with whom I deal, be it even so little as eye contact and a genuine "thank you". For a third, if I have to point out mistakes, such as those at the cash register, I find a neutral reason for those mistakes, such as a misprogramming in the scanner (which is usually actually the case!). And finally, if I am at fault or asking a great deal, I say so at once. In these cases, my request is a request with understanding for what I am asking, never a demand.

For some reason, I always seem to end up with the people who go beyond their strict job descriptions to help me.

... but none of this would have saved Carroll's guitar.

Edit: the uniteditstimetofly comment came between 9,700 and 9,900, if anyone wants to track it down exactly. I could not figure out how to link it directly then, and I am having a heck of a time trying to do so now. If you do succeed, a direct link would be appreciated. -T

There is no need to drive with any level of any intoxicating or impairing substance, from alcohol to medications to cellphones. Nothing is that urgent. Our ability to control our vehicles is far from perfect to begin with, but for now that is a risk society as a whole seems willing to accept: so long as the risk is not unnecessarily magnified.

Impaired driving is preventable. You were capable of judgement when you chose to become impaired. When you began drinking or picked up a cellphone, you knew the risks. You may choose to justify them to yourself -- not that drunk, good enough driver to get away with it -- but your self-justification does not make it so. If your judgement does not see why others should not be subjected to increased risk because of your choices, then the law must needs enforce it upon you.

That being said, it ought to make no difference to the law just who was the driver and who was the victim.

What purpose do victim statements really serve? We already know that a death or serious injury leaves a hole that cannot be filled. Are we to think that some lives, some losses, are less important than others? Are we to think that the wishes of a family ought to supercede a neutral law? Should families which practice punitive revenge gain "more" justice than those which practice rehabilitative forgiveness? What becomes then of justice being blind?

What of the hapless person whose drinking and driving happens to kill four elderly ladies who are pillars of their local church? This happened recently in Chatham, Canada, where the driver drank at least one beer and possibly as many as eight beers prior to driving off. Shortly thereafter, his van collided with another car, killing all four people in the other car. Subsequent blood alcohol tests showed a blood alcohol level of three times the legal limit.

What the media immediately seized upon were the identities of those who had been killed.

From that moment forward, it was impossible to pick up a newspaper from the entire region without reading about the four elderly "pie ladies" who always baked pies for their church's functions. They were even headed home from a church supper at the time of the collision. No matter what the story about this collision, it always, invariably, mentioned the "pie ladies".

Will justice be the same for these victims as it would have been had the victims been four unemployed, single men?

Practical jokes usually demonstrate little more than the greater knowledge of one person over another, and a more or less vicious willingness to exploit the other person's ignorance for laughter at their expense. Simple scatalogical jokes are by far the most common, although sometimes there may be a glint of subtlety. Occasionally, however, the joke exposes a deeper truth. All the following jokes were set up and carried out by a professional company.

Joke #1

The first prankster, who has arrived in a van with a 'botanical gardens' logo, points out an unexpected find: a flower marked in her book as extinct is in full bloom on the park lawn. She asks her targets to keep an eye on it until she can get it safely transplanted into the botanical gardens, and goes to her van to get the materials. Almost at once, an uncaring park worker comes through on his heavy duty riding lawnmower, paying more attention to his earphones than his job, and heedlessly mows down the flower. He is, of course, the second prankster.

Some people stand by in clear shock. Some call out to him. Some run up to him and pluck his sleeve, trying to catch his attention: they are the ones who come closest to risking personal injury to save a species. No one automatically dismisses it as a joke. Not one person is indifferent.

Joke #2

A person eating solo is seated in a small, cozy restaurant, the kind that has tablecloths and leather menus but is not pretentious or particularly expensive. The waiter, who is one of the pranksters, hands the customer a menu and indicates the blackboard, where the chicken special of the day is written in chalk. The prank continues where the customer chooses the special. In this case, the waiter leaves for the kitchen, where a tape recording of a panicked chicken is started. Less than a minute later, a live chicken is released to run into the restaurant, chased by a cook wielding a cleaver. He is, of course, the second prankster.

Some look appalled. Some just can't seem to believe it. A few start grinning, often with their hands over their mouths: they look as though they suspect that this can't be real – even though in most parts of the world this is exactly what would happen. As was the reaction in Italy, upon finding out that the terrible derailment in Viareggio was caused by simple neglect: this kind of thing happens elsewhere, not here.

Joke #3

On the grassy banks of a river park, a man, who is the primary prankster, approaches a couple with a box in his hands. Lifting the lid to reveal a cute kitten inside, he asks if they are able to adopt it. They always say no, more or less apologetically. He leaves. A quick, unseen box switch takes place, replacing the kitten with a tape recording. Then, within sight of the original couple, he shrugs and tosses the box into the river.

Every person approached has always been shocked by that twist. One dove into the river to rescue the box.

Joke #4

The prankster is dressed as a homeless man, sleeping on a bench. A $20 bill is stuck to his shoe. Passersby can clearly see it, but he seems utterly unaware of it.

Here, about a third of those spotting the money tried to retrieve it for themselves without waking the man. Nearly all of the others let it be. Curiously, the better dressed the passerby, the more likely they were to try to get the money for themselves. The correlation was not 100%, but it came very close. The great exception was an expensively dressed businessman with a briefcase. He walked up, took the money off the man's shoe, folded it, put it in the man's breast pocket, and left.

Sacha Baron Cohen's style of humour also falls into this category. He chooses an out-of-the-ordinary persona, complete with belief structure and assumptions about life, and in that he stays fixed. Reactions by those who encounter him to his appearance and attitudes lie totally within them. But the film-viewing audience, they have the luxury of sidestepping that initial reaction and only reacting to those who had been put on the spot, usually with laughter.

Unlike the vast majority of simple practical jokes, each of these scenarios has a truth to it. In many cases, they bring into unwanted visibility something that had been occurring all along, with our tacit agreement – so long as we are not faced with it. The joke on us gives us the chance to look just a little more deeply and learn something about ourselves. Do we act according to our self-image? If we don't like what we see, whose fault is that?

For the first time in my life, I am grateful that I have purchased a book on publisher's clearance. I would not have regretted the money paid for the book. I just don't think this author merits a single penny of royalty money for this book.

I picked up Think! by Michael LeGault because, on the surface of it, it would seem to be one of the few books arguing for genuine independence of thought and an increase in willingness to engage that thought critically. It is hard to disagree with assessments such as:

More troubling in the long term, perhaps, is the effect that a decline in critical thinking is apparently having on public debate, discourse, and democracy in this country. The net result is an increasingly radical political partisanship that seems to preclude meaningful discussion and debate from public and private life.

He speaks of his own nation, the United States, but this has been a much broader trend through the past three decades and perhaps longer.

Set aside, for the moment, that LeGault's idea of critical thinking completely negates the value of intuition and emotion except insofar as it is grounded in critical thinking. I personally might have suggested that intuition provides a signpost and a direction, critical thinking some of the tools to get there, and emotion a part of the wisdom which determines in human terms whether this is a path appropriate to take: but independence of thought also allows differences of thought.

But then LeGault offers this interesting example of what is, and is not, critical thinking:

Even in Canada, a country dependent on trade with the United States for 50 percent of its gross domestic product, over two-thirds of the people say the United States is a negative influence in the world. Two-thirds! This is the same nation that has a love affair with Cuba, a country that has not held a democratic election in fifty years. The opinion of Canadians is not based on critical thinking or research, but on myth and balderdash dished out by the country's legions of left-leaning scholars and pundits, as well as, ironically, by Hollywood and the U.S. media.

Note that the internal logic of this passage demands that critical thinking skills cannot have been engaged unless the conclusion reached is the same as the author's. Any other conclusion is clearly the result of a flawed ability to think. By definition, any criticism whatsoever must also be the result of flawed thinking.

The only purpose of critical thinking here is to accept the author's premises and agree with his conclusions.

I wish I could say this was an isolated case born of a single a priori assumption (in which case I could have said fair enough, it ranks among the most difficult things to see one's own country objectively and opinions of precisely the same course of action may well differ), but the truth is that this book abounds in precisely the types of logic holes it rails against -- and each and every time, he holds his own reasoning up as an example of rational thinking. On one page, LeGault writes how it is important in rational thinking to take account of all the evidence: while on another he dismisses a study which contradicts his construct, using an argument which not only does not address either the methodology or the finding of that study but also demonstrates that he also does not understand the human biology grounding the study.

It should come as no surprise that LeGault has no use for emotional intelligence of any kind, since he perceives such things as empathy for others as interfering with clear thinking. (It does interfere, if the purpose of such thinking is not to take account of other human beings in the slightest, excepting only their value as resources.) He cites Leman and Kragh-Muller's (2005) finding that children of permissive parents tended to judge that adults would legitimise judgements, concluding from this that "permissive parenting does not promote moral development." He states this as if it were a paraphrase from this study, which it is not. More interestingly, LeGault defines the three primary types of parenting as follows:

When asked by a child for the reason he or she is being told "no," an authoritarian parent will respond, "Because I said so." An authoritative parent, on the other hand, will emphasize the equality of the moral universe: "You wouldn't like it if I did it to you." A permissive parent will focus on the consequences for others: "It will hurt her."

This is flawed at the core. Nowhere in the literature does it state that the difference between authoritative and permissive parenting is either a concern for consequences for others or an encouragement of empathy for the other person. Rather, permissive parenting holds few behavioural expectations at all for the child, as is illustrated perfectly by Ned Flanders' beatnik parents' ideas on raising a child and teaching him social limits:

He's a real flat tire. I mean a cube, man. He's putting us on the train to Squaresville, baby. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!

Having stated his false premises as if they were those of the researchers, LeGault goes on to demolish his artificial construct:

The reasoning of the permissive parent involves taking the perspective of someone else, a feat usually lost on a five-year-old.

neatly overlooking that the mean age of children in his cited study was 11 years, 5 months. Even assuming that the children in question were five years old, numerous studies have shown that the capacity for empathy and even for taking the perspective of others (not the same thing) begins as early as two years of age (perhaps even earlier), as soon as the child is able to distinguish between self and other: and that the potential for empathy is as hard-wired in the brain as language.

From several case studies of children reared in the wild, however, we know that there are critical ages beyond which, without the exposure to language, the capacity for language is forever crippled. These children themselves never notice that they are crippled compared to their human potential.

This is not an isolated example. LeGault's book is littered with similar sloppy research and thinking, and it is not limited to railing against the concept of emotional intelligence.

(The assumption that five-year-olds are incapable of empathy arises from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, where children up to age 12 are thought to operate within the limits of the concrete operational stage. According to this theory, children under the age of seven are believed incapable of taking the perspective of another. It is only between ages 7-12 that children gradually learn to eliminate egocentrism and see things from the perspective of others, but only if they are given concrete situations to which they can apply simple logic. Thus, according to Piaget's theory, children up to age twelve are believed only to be capable of being taught concrete rules. Lawrence Kohlberg builds on this foundation in his stages of moral development: once again grounded in the assumption that a child's cognitive development is based upon the growth of a cause-effect logic structure. Yet even Piaget himself recognised that his theory could not account for all his own observations. It was simply the best approximation he could make at the time.)

Given LeGault's attitude toward empathy in general, perhaps the reader can think of a different reason for the events in the following anecdote, given that it occurred at someone else's wedding reception:

Increasingly it seems we are sitting in an echo chamber listening to ourselves. Republican? That side. Democrat? Over there. Discussion not allowed. Too "risky." I inadvertently tested the thesis once while sitting with a group of people, none of whom I knew, at a wedding reception. Introductions were made and conversation languished politely on the weather, the state of this year's tomato crop, and dogs. After a while, someone, noting I was an editor for a business magazine, asked me if the economy would hold up. [book copyright 2006 - T] I'm sure I rambled but I certainly meant no ill will in drawing my analysis to a close by noting the obvious, namely, that globalism and the spread of free-market capitalism has been one of the greatest single factors in improving living standards around the world in history. Someone cleared his throat. For a moment I thought the lady beside me, a retired schoolteacher, I believe, might plummet out of her chair onto the hall's linoleum floor. She picked up her napkin and tried to use it like a fan. Others at the table gazed mildly off into space.

An entire chapter on risk and reward is fascinating to me because of its complete failure to understand fear as a survival mechanism, the role of cognitive biases, and the relevance of degree of personal control to managing personal risk. LeGault also displays no understanding of the distinction between probability and randomness, and perceives mathematics as an absolute science. Consequently he is able, within the space of less than a single page, to come up with the following two statements:

The evidence that we find with our senses is indisputable. ...
If there is no consensus, it only proves the limits of human perception.

Nothing written is devoid entirely of merit, and Think! is no exception. There are a few interesting observations in it ... four, I think, besides the awe-inspiring chasm of rational thinking that is the book as a whole. For example, the observation about larger houses offering more places for parents to not be disturbed by their children bears further consideration, and you will see it later in this blog. Similarly, an earlier observation wrt the true role of Ritalin in classrooms reminded me of a pattern I had intended to examine in more depth. Were there only those four observations, I would think the author's royalty well earned, even though I speak daily with people who give me this and more for free. As it stands, however, I feel the book's good is more than balanced out by its potential damage: not least because it sets itself up as example.

This is the reason I have written about it at all. I have never before written such a negative review -- or indeed a negative review at all. I sincerely hope that I shall never have to do so again.

I learned about menorrhagia and other female reproductive oddities and abnormalities in the esoteric world of the fertility clinic. It is a strange environment, staffed by female nurses, counsellors, and secretaries, but headed entirely by male doctors. Mine was not even an exception to the general rule: this pattern remains common among fertility clinics everywhere except the Middle East, where the gender division is of a different kind.

A brief definition. (Don't squirm: it is relevant.) Menorrhagia is defined as regularly having abnormally heavy menstrual periods, with blood loss per cycle of more than 80 mL.

It is the nature of research to reflect its society, and medical research is no exception. Obviously such heavy cycles can be disruptive to a woman's activities. but at the extremes, menorrhagia can also impact severely on many women's health. It can cause anaemia, and itself be a symptom of underlying health problems. Treatment focuses upon reducing flow to a "normal" average, either through pharmacology or what is now day surgery (which most commonly involves some variant of freezing, burning, or otherwise destroying living endometrial tissue).

Yet in all the journals I found myself reading, only one study examined the actual rate of associated anaemia, finding that only 25% of women with menorrhagia also had anaemia. Every other comprehensive survey of menorrhagia was premised entirely upon quality of life issues.

Interestingly, no study I have yet found examines whether a tendency toward menorrhagia might have other advantages. None have looked at such factors as whether (in the absence of other medical conditions, such as fibroids) menorrhagic women are more or less likely to have specific complications in childbirth, birth weight of the neonate, or child development.

In our society, after checking for and treating any underlying medical conditions, women and physicians alike invariably come to a similar conclusion: if a woman presents with menorrhagia and finds it an obstacle in her daily life (presumably beyond the normal obstacle of menstruation, although how exactly would one measure that?), it is desirable to eliminate it. No other factors are relevant.

No matter which economics analysis I read, the consensus is the same: the economy has mostly bottomed out, and by the end of the next two quarters, we should start seeing a turnaround. It is a very solid consensus. That six-month just-beyond-the-horizon has held firm through the past two years.

Sometimes it seems almost as though there are two different recessions: the one measured by the economists, and the one experienced by the majority of people. Job figures stubbornly continue to refuse to do what they are supposed to do. California continues to pay its government workers in state scrip: which has immediately created a new form of underground economy on E-Bay. The official jobless rate in the United States is some 9-odd percent, but if you count in the workers forced to part-time hours and status who specifically want a full-time job, it jumps to over 20% -- and no one knows just how many are no longer even counted, who have fallen between the cracks entirely. Statistics are a strange species of beast.

I find it particularly darkly amusing that so many economists are pointing to the rising price of oil as an indicator that the current economic depression is coming to an end. Exxon, of course, has never ceased making profits throughout.

There is a very deep belief among economists that in a mature marketplace, basic consumption patterns don't change. At most, the rate of consumption only swings back and forth within those patterns. Within this belief structure, any lull in spending is only a marker of pent-up demand waiting to burst forth the moment the price drops to the appropriate level. Even Barack Obama has stated as fact that there had been 15 million cars sold annually in the United States before, and in time there would be again.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected during the Great Depression, he immediately began pumping stimulus money into the economy. Within two years, the economy was showing weak signs of recovery, so -- operating within exactly the same belief -- the stimulus money was withdrawn. As it turned out, those weak signs had been almost entirely due to federal stimulus money. When it was removed, the economy collapsed anew, even worse than before. It took a world war to bring us out of that one.

But what if demand for non-necessary goods is not an absolute?

When Seoul mayor (now president) Lee Myung-bak decided to tear up its city-centre elevated highway, a 1976 model of "successful industrialisation and modernisation," to uncover and restore Cheonggyecheon as a viable city-centre river, there was an immediate outcry that the remaining traffic system would no longer be able to handle the volume of Seoul traffic. To everyone's surprise, what ended up happening was that the downtown traffic volume actually decreased by 2.3%. It is not that fewer people are going downtown: the use of subways increased by 4.3%. Lee speculates that traffic is like a gas, expanding to fill the available space. When the space is less, the traffic is also less.

(The analogy does not allow for Boyle's relationship between volume, pressure, and temperature, although it works well enough if the vessel is not assumed to be closed with a fixed amount of gas ... which, come to think of it, is also appropriate for the marketplace. The credit-based economic system is anything but a closed system. As a further real-world ironic comment on the ideal gas law, areas surrounding the stream are also cooler than other parts of Seoul by an average of 3.6°C.)

Instead of the "modern" city-centre elevated highway, Seoul now has a natural river-park environment running through the centre of the city, used by thousands of people every day. As eco-projects go, it doesn't have all that much of an impact on Seoul's environmental imprint as a whole, not by itself. However, it is a start ... and in the meantime, it has brought back into the open another layer of Seoul's soul.

Caught without child care, Australian senator Sarah Hanson-Young took her two-year-old daughter Kora to work with her on Thursday. She stayed with her daughter just outside the legislative chambers until the bells rang for a vote, at which point she brought her inside. Kora continued to play quietly until Senate president John Hogg ordered Hanson-Young to take the toddler outside.

We cannot allow children to be in here for a division.
- Australian Senate president John Hogg

This would have made her miss the vote on the bill introduced by her own leader, Bob Brown. Not surprisingly, Brown countermanded the order, suggesting that Hogg provide the necessary child minder. Hogg declined. A staff member from Brown's office arrived to take Kora out of the chamber -- at which point Kora started screaming.

Whether or not this turns out to be a publicity stunt -- as were so many of the early suffragette demonstrations -- it still illustrates a few interesting points.

In this episode of the continuing debate over whether the work and domestic spheres can continue to be rigidly divided, commentary ranges from the outraged (that there is no provision for breastfeeding mothers in Senate) to the differently outraged (that left-wing/Green mothers should expect the rules to change for them, or at all). While the first argument draws entirely upon demographics, the second pulls from a combination of occupational and even recreational "parallels" and slippery slope extrapolation. Leaving out all the "I don't have that so why should she?" taxpayer, and ad hominem comments, this is a representative sample:

• I don't take my kids into casinos and I dont think this senator should have taken her child into parliament.
• [quoted from previous comment]The whole idea of representative democracy is that a small proportion of the population is delegated to represent the remainder.[/quote] Yes, that is part of it. The other part of it is that those elected to represent us set aside and sacrifice THEIR OWN INTERESTS in order to represent us. If they must continue to persue their own interests in parliment, they represent themselves, not their constituents. If a mother needs to be able to bring a child into parliment in order to represent her constituents, would a butcher need to bring in slabs of meat? If you cannot set aside your own interests, whatever they are, you have no right to represent people in parliment.
• By your very arguement, as the vast majoriy of the populance are not politicians, and all of those who represent us are, then none of us are represented as there is not a single non politician in politics.
• What's next? Are the Greens going to demand that soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan should have "Child Care" or maybe coal miners deep below the earth?
• Sorry, it is not appropriate to have children in the workplace. Not having time for the kids is the price we must pay for the affluence/greed of dual-income families.
• Neither the Senate nor the House of Reps are places in which children should be placed. Both Houses need a degree of dignity and parking one's child there, and/or breastfeeding are inappropriate.
• Being a parent is a full time job (with overtime+++). Being in full time employment is a full time job. It is unprofessional to mix the two, as well as being unfair to your employer, your client and your child.
• You cannot have it all. ... If your number one priority is your children so be it. Someone needs to stay at home to look after the children, this should not be done at work for all the obvious reasons.
• I think a lot of women believe the lie that you 'can have it all'. Well no you can't. If you want to spend time with your children stay at home and be a mother. If you want a career do not expect everyone else to compromise so you can bring your child to work.

Comments against Hanson-Young's action outnumbered comments supporting her by nearly 3:1. Although more women than men supported Hanson-Young, the last two comments were very typical of many female commentators, some of whom self-identified as feminists. Yet I do wonder whether there is a point that is being missed by both sides.

Never mind whether or not there is actually any rule about children in the Australian chamber, as will be challenged on Monday. Never mind that the Australian parliament does have a crèche, but that the spaces are already full. Never mind even that strong adult involvement in a young child's development has been strongly linked to a higher intelligence quotient. These are questions that will be pursued by those researching factors deterring young female politicians -- at age 27, Hanson-Young remains the youngest person ever elected to the Australian Senate -- yet in all that research they will miss the essential point that the whole child care / flexible workplace issue is actually secondary: related, but a consequence rather than a cause.

What I find most ironic in all this is that not one politician and not one major news source suggested that in the absence of available child care, the father could equally well have been left in charge of the child. (He serves on the City of Mitcham council, and also ran for federal office in 2004 and 2006.) Yet at the same time, by emphasising so strongly the importance of her job while never mentioning his, all those involved imply just as strongly that his job is less important. Child care or no child care, the attitude remains that regardless of the job split, the primary responsibility for the child is naturally and self-evidently the mother's.

As in so many cases, the real story lies in what is not said.

The commentary suggests a deep parallel assumption that it is the mother's choice whether or not to have and prioritise children. If she chooses to have children and also to prioritise those children, then obviously she won't give her full attention to any high responsibility job: so it is inappropriate for her to seek one. At the same time, the male corollary always assumes that a young child is distracting at work: so others should deal with it.

Taken all together, precisely because in most cases the primary responsibility to deal somehow (regardless of the manner of that dealing) stubbornly refuses to latch to the father, this leaves a woman precisely four options.

1. She can choose to stay at home with her child, while her husband represents her financial interests at the workplace.
2. She can choose a low-intensity job where hours will never be unpredictable. These jobs are also low earning, low power, and low promotion.
3. She can choose not to have children until she is established in her work. However, delaying children can result in not having children at all (due to sharply decreased fertility with age) -- not to mention that the risk of birth defects radically increases with age.
4. She can choose not to have children at all.

If we truly are to be the equal opportunity society we imagine ourselves to be, perhaps there ought to be a few other options in there?

The results of Iran's presidential election are in. Mir Hossein Mousavi is claiming ballot fraud and wants an investigation. If that doesn't work, he's planning on making a documentary about global warming.
- Jimmy Fallon

Demonstrations in the streets are a curious thing, especially when they appear to be in favour of a media-popular goal. We never can resist an underdog story where the right person wins in the end, especially when that end comes within a month (or before the next media event). For some odd reason, no matter who wins, elections themselves increasingly seem to elect the wrong person.

On June 12, Iran's populace went to the polls. According to the polling records, 85 percent of eligible voters voted. At the end of it, a victory that seemed neck and neck going into the polls was given clearly to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with 62 percent of the vote. The protests started within hours, and grew into street demonstrations within days. In those early days, the most common clips on the western media were variations of, "Well, no one I know voted for him."

With the exception of a few televised pictures, most of what we have heard since then has come from those Iranian commentators who speak English and live in the west. By way of comparison, speaking English in Iran would be roughly as common, among the same demographics, as non-Hispanics who speak Spanish in the United States. These, now, are speaking for their entire country. Most are speaking as though their own personal interest in returning Iran to westernised ways were representative of the whole. From every single one of them, we have heard that the recent demonstrations represent the popular will of the people.

Yet demonstrations, like anecdotal evidence, are not in themselves representative of the popular will. They are, however, representative of a significant contingent which is powerful enough to pull together a group with a common voice, which governments would be wise to take into account in their future choices.

As travel and communications become faster and easier, demonstrations have increasingly become a visual tool designed to manipulate the mass media and consequently world opinion. Again and again, reporters have discovered that demonstrations seem to arise magically the moment their cameras come out, to evaporate as quickly afterward. In the meantime, our television screens show us only the demonstration. Normal street activity just does not draw the same ratings.

Every demonstration, from the simplest group protest at city hall to a new grassroots political party to the kinds of demonstrations that brought Islamic Iran into being, requires a fair bit of background organisation from cellular leadership structures. Depending on the targeted medium, the targeted demographics, the means of accessible communication, and the era, the word may be passed through letters, tavern gossip, telegrams, small-scale home gatherings, e-mail, newspapers, licensed and unlicensed radio stations, or even a paper message passed hand to hand. Larger local mass media won't usually get involved unless they find a reason to support the cause: usually only after a tipping point has been reached.

Those in a position of established power value demonstrations only insofar as they bring previously hidden sentiments into the open, where they can be dealt with. Even in so-called free speech societies, opposition to policy is limited by access to government or private mass media outlets, by policies designed to result in disproportionate population representation (eg. district redrawing), by the implicit threat of lost income, or even by social shunning when not toeing the government line. In more repressive societies, it is quite common to crack down with riot gear, tear gas, and even bullets on demonstrations and other acts of rebellion, or even to preempt them entirely through government-sponsored home invasion and arrests which don't follow due process.

As stated by the losing candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the premise of the current demonstration in Iran is that the official result of the election is a "dangerous charade". His newspaper, Kalameh Sabz, reports that personal identification numbers were missing from more than 10 million votes, making the votes untraceable. This is an interesting claim, considering that detailed voting statistical information of this sort could not be available yet. In fact, other protesters have objected to the election results on the basis that detailed election data has not yet been made available.

Kalameh Sabz also reports that some polling stations closed prematurely: which happens in every single election in every part of the world, not exempting the United States. For that matter, in every single election, some polling stations open late, or fumble electoral procedure. No perfect system exists. If an electoral loser seeks grounds for an appeal, they will always be available to be found.

Another basis for protest is that the results of this election came out within hours, despite having to count 39.2 million handwritten ballots. Iran's previous election results had taken longer. In and of itself, this seems odd: and yet other countries do manage full election results within a couple of hours. In particular, Canada offers a quirky example of what can happen when national results come out too quickly. A large majority of Canada's population lies within its two easternmost time zones. As the only fully federalist country which spans four (and 1/2) time zones, the results of federal elections were often clear well before west coast ballot boxes closed ... with every single one of the ballots having been handwritten and handcounted.

Some election results are said to have been called in without having been properly monitored. Again, this does often happen in some election districts. However, it would be appropriate for any investigation to determine how closely the questioned districts match those areas which seem to have vote discrepancies.

The next step is to look at the results themselves.

For a country with an established democratic process, the voting percentage seems very high. Even when significant change appears possible, as when Barack Obama was elected, only 63 percent of eligible voters turned up to vote (and that was the highest since 1960). Although regional results over 80 percent are typical primarily of small conservative communities which, by their nature, have a high vested interest in voting, broad results over 80 percent are usually typical only of brand-new democracies. Whatever Iran is, it is not a new democracy.

In Iran, as for that matter in the United States, rural communities are generally much more conservative than urban communities: which often develops into a deep rural-urban social schism. Friday's results show homogeneity across both rural and urban areas. This result bears looking into.

We can't take the previous polls as any kind of objective evidence. Even discounting vested interests, there are just too many other biasing factors.

We must also not forget our history. Ironically (but not at all illogically) for a rebel who had been arrested by the former shah, the Iranian government led by Mousavi was known for tolerating no dissent. We must not forget that Mousavi became a wealthy man under the existing Iranian establishment, that he had been political secretary of the Islamic Republican Party and chief editor of its official newspaper even before he was appointed prime minister, and that he never lost the full backing of Ruhollah Khomeini, the only supreme leader Iran as a whole has ever acknowledged. Mousavi's green is no less an Islamic colour than Ahmadinejad's black.

Make no mistake: this is not a democratic voice of freedom, but a power bid.

The net result seems to be that there may have been election irregularities beyond the usual human factor, and they may have been on both sides.The why is obvious, as is the how. What remains to be determined is the extent, the overall effect, and how strongly Iran's population feels about that effect. Of course, it is entirely possible that by then, the demonstrations will have preempted true analysis in favour of paradigm.

Are we willing to look into this glass and recognise a mirror?

Even among an audience used to laughing at Fallon's jokes, this one did not go over well. Audiences at such talk shows are prepared to be entertained and tend to be very vocal in their reactions: but this bit of political satire was greeted with something between an awkward silence, a collective hissing intake of breath, and a low mutter. I don't think I have ever heard such a reaction before on a late night show. In general, laughter greets jokes which are agreed with, boos those found inappropriate by the audience. But for this one, the implications are just too uncomfortable.

Comedians make inappropriate jokes all the time. This time, it was David Letterman who overstepped when his Top Ten list mocked Sarah Palin's family situation. Possibly due to a misunderstanding over which of Palin's daughters was at a particular baseball game, the 14-year-old or the 18-year-old, Letterman ended up using terminology which implies rape (due to sex with a minor, who cannot legally give consent).

While Jay Leno hosted The Tonight Show, the jokes were in line with the comfort level of a middle class who leaned toward right-wing policies, while carefully avoiding uncomfortable extremes. Watching Leno, one could understand entirely how California, a seemingly left-wing state, could vote down gay marriage, why indeed rejection was inevitable. Leno's take brought the primary night talk show choice to either middle class, soft right wing (with appeal to each coast), or working class right wing (with appeal to the midwest).

However, with Conan O'Brien's promotion to The Tonight Show, the after-11 viewing audience in the United States is now divided almost perfectly among gender and party lines. Republicans and older persons tend to be uncomfortable with Conan's style of humour. Especially by contrast, Letterman comes across as a comfortably edgier Mr. Rogers -- who has now overstepped the acceptable limits of that edginess.

Despite Letterman's apology and Palin's acceptance of that apology, many continue to protest his show on the basis of that joke. Many continue to demand that Letterman be fired. Such is the vehemence of the reaction that the Wikipedia page dealing with Letterman is currently under an almost unheard of full editing block.

Letterman's current contract is on its final months. Before this whole thing blew up in his face, he had been expected to sign an extension this month which would last until 2012. Now -- firing probably is not a financially reasonable decision, and unless advertisers are pulling out, it seems unlikely that it would be. What I do know is that the resolution of this issue, say, a few months down the road, will demonstrate the current level of real power of the Republican hard right.

As soon as the media released the detail that David Carradine was found hanging naked in a closet, I knew what had happened. Like masturbation itself, it is one of those sexual practices which is far, far more common than most people believe: mostly because so many of us learn sexuality in secret, and in the determined quest for childhood innocence most parents are determined to keep it so, struggling against frankness in all sexual talk, be it at school or at home.

It begins with the choking game, which children practice secretly at school and in their bedrooms. Beginning around the age of 10, this game of inducing unconsciousness in oneself or in another has become as much a part of childhood oral lore as how to play tag. It goes under many names which are also indications of the reasons for doing it: Natural High, Space Monkey, Rocket Ride, Trip to Heaven.

As with anything which cuts off oxygen supply to the brain, brain damage or death are possible outcomes. Accidental deaths as a result of the choking game seem to peak around age 13; however, deaths officially classified as suicide due to hanging or suffocation continue to rise through age 19, even in environments where guns (for boys) and pills (for girls) are much more common means of attempting suicide. Over 80% of those known to have died from the choking game were male. Over 90% of their families never knew their children were playing the "game".

In adulthood, the choking game becomes autoerotic asphyxiation, its purpose now clearly sexual. The aim is to induce erotic stimulation and finally orgasm through oxygen depletion. It is well known that oxygen deprivation does lead to a drug-like effect. Either this, or the associated masochistic bondage, may act as arousal stimuli in some people. However, oxygen deprivation in itself, without the learned association with either a hypoxic state of altered consciousness (asphyxiophilia) or bondage, has no erotic effect.

Autoerotic asphyxiation is not a modern phenomenon. The first recorded case is that of the composer Frantisek Kotzwara, in 1791. Not coincidentally, the 18th century was also when public hangings started to predominate over other forms of public execution (and would continue to do so until 1865, when public hangings were discontinued); and thus when the public started to notice that many who had been hanged also had erections. Some had even ejaculated. So common is this phenomenon that most professional hangmen would note its presence or absence in their records.

As opposed to the medieval short drop, which usually caused death by suffocation, the standard drop was much more likely to break the neck. This made death from hanging much more rapid. It is the rapidity of death which is associated with the death erection.

Technically this erection is a priapism, and has nothing to do with sexuality. The existence of a priapism tells forensic investigators that death was sudden and probably violent. It is thought that damage to the spinal cord may be linked to the effect, since spinal cord injuries are also associated with priapisms.

However, what was absorbed by the popular lore was that oxygen deprivation was clearly linked with erotic sensation.

Obviously these practices are most dangerous when done alone. Very few injuries are reported when performing even the most extreme acts of RACK edgeplay with a partner familiar with safety practices and safe words. Performed alone, the chance of something going wrong goes up exponentially. After all, the aim is to cut off oxygen to the point of inducing unconsciousness.

Too many of us never discover the existence of either the choking game or autoerotic asphyxia until it claims the life of someone dear to us. Will the media be able to convey the educational message without descending into sensationalism?

So pervasive is the current trend toward labelling any unwanted behaviour as deviant and then finding a drug to "fix" it, one has no fears for the future of pharmacology.

This is not a new thing. Without going into a whole history of mankind, one needs only look to the Victorian age and what was labelled hysteria, as well as some of the treatments prescribed for hysteria before Sigmund Freud's relatively gentle psychoanalysis.

Today, virtually every behaviour that does not fit into quiet acceptance is suspect. Too rambunctious is labelled attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Too teary, depression. Too energetic, mania. Too rebellious, oppositional defiant disorder. Attention ought to be paid to context for diagnosis, but the DSM-IV makes no mention of context, only of approximate frequency of specific types of behaviour with the proviso that it be "detrimental" to a person's social, physical, or academic development.

(Nothing said, here, about what exactly "detrimental" means. After all, "detrimental" can as easily refer to a teacher's frustration as to a student's disability. Does the rumbunctiousness actually get in the way of learning? or is it that the student is bored? or that the teacher prefers not to expend the extra effort?)

Few physicians and fewer patients even pay that much attention. If it gets in the way, medicate it.

Methylphenidate (Ritalin) is the most commonly prescribed psychostimulant, used most often but not exclusively to treat ADD and ADHD. Its pharmacological effects are very similar to those of cocaine, and several different research approaches suggest that long term use of Ritalin may include a heightened susceptibility to amphetamines such as cocaine. Whether former Ritalin users are also more likely to be smokers has not yet been studied, but a very high percentage of cocaine addicts were formerly on Ritalin and also smoked.

How many diseases are slanted so strongly toward a single country? Numbers are difficult to obtain, but some studies estimate that 8 million American adults have ADHD. Similarly, between 3-5% of children globally are estimated to have ADHD, but the diagnosis in most European countries is 1% or less; and in most other parts of the world the percentage is even lower. Until 2000, nearly 90% of Ritalin was used in the United States; even today the percentage is still over 80%. Most of those diagnoses and prescriptions were based almost entirely upon the testimony of teachers. Only 20% of children diagnosed with ADHD show any signs of hyperactive behaviour in the physician's office. Some United States schools even receive extra funding for every child diagnosed with ADHD.

How many of those diagnosed with ADD are perfectly capable of spending non-medicated hours at a videogame? One adult I knew who was considered disabled with ADD for government purposes ran a small gaming business on the side, and had no trouble participating in table games that lasted for hours at a time. Back when I was GM to a tabletop roleplaying group, two teens in my group had been diagnosed with ADD, and in one it was strong enough to be very noticeable. Yet as soon as I was able to catch his attention enough for him to start caring, he could maintain complete focus, again for hours. What made the difference was not a pharmaceutical addition, but an attitude shift: what I had to offer was interesting. Full behaviour shifts were beyond me: I was not his parent, after all.

My experience is not alone. Several studies have found that over periods of three years or more, behavioural modification is just as effective a treatment for ADHD as medication, with none of the side effects. Most interestingly, a 2008 review of Ritalin found that while teachers and parents reported improved behaviour, the children's academic performance was absolutely unchanged. Whatever it is that Ritalin is changing, it apparently is not something that was "detrimental" to academic performance.

So many artists find that, once they were diagnosed for depression and medicated, some essential spark is missing. Maybe there was a reason so many artists suffered from depression or bipolar syndrome (and so many fought with their parents besides). Maybe art requires plumbing the depths as well as the heights. Powerful art speaks in emotion, of emotion, to emotion. Medication erodes emotion.

Antidepressants were the most frequently prescribed medication in N. America, and there much more frequently than anywhere else in the world, even before the current economic crisis. Now, I suspect that new prescriptions are going through the roof. But -- it is normal to feel depressed when your job or your house are at risk. If you have spent the past several years in job turmoil with absolutely no job security, a few "unexplained" tears are normal. Until recently, many jobs were assumed to be secure. How can you not grieve for their loss?

Grieving is not a process that ends overnight, or is expected to. Long illnesses turn families upside down. Why would we expect anything different during long periods of job insecurity or loss? Our jobs define us. Without the once-secure job we used to have, who are we? How can anyone expect to rediscover themself in a mere matter of days?

It is admittedly much easier to medicate, much more difficult to learn and apply coping techniques and alter behaviour. It does not get easier as one grows older. Consider, however, that the trade-off for the extra effort is your own independence: of body, of thought, of spirit. What is it worth to you?

I try to be careful in my statistics. It is so very easy to pull numbers out of the air and make them sound official, but I am trying to learn, not to argue one side of an issue: so what would be the point? Whenever possible, I try to go back to the original study. Where there is none, I try at least to verify from two or three distinct sources. There is no such thing as truly objective -- everything has a frame -- so I try at least for opposite biases which are willing to take enough of a step back to analytically consider the same material.

For too many things, this is becoming nearly impossible.

Check any ten sources, and odds are good that they will quote each other verbatim or even be absolutely identical. Read a hundred competing newspapers, and nearly all pull from one or another of the major news agencies such as AP or Reuters. For the current project, I just finished searching through over a thousand different Internet sites, looking for a single statistic I loosely remembered from nine years ago. Virtually every site that was on-topic had exactly the same information, word for word: while also glossing over the specific point for which I was seeking.

The choice increasingly seems to be only which content to carry. If a story is not selected, it does not run. If a story is selected, it runs in exactly the same manner regardless of the specific medium. One version of the story will sweep the conservative blogosphere, another the liberal blogosphere: but in each sphere the stories will be essentially the same, as will the counterarguments.

If a statistic or other fact is originally cited incorrectly, it is repeated so often that its original form becomes part of the common knowledge long before the mistake is caught, let alone apologised for and corrected. Thereafter that same inaccuracy will continue to rear its head again and again. Each and every time, the very fact that it was repeated by someone accepted as authority will be held as proof of its truth.

What is happening to our ability to analyse for ourselves? Are we become nothing more than parrots?

I hope it has to do with your talent and the performance that you give and the package that you have. It's not about religion and all that kind of stuff. It's about music. That's really important to keep in mind.
- Adam Lambert

I suppose I anticipated the American Idol upset yesterday, when I wrote about how a tie in the judge's scores unveiled a percentage of the American voting public which votes by image and associations, completely independent of talent. Never having seen the show, I can't speak to the relative talent of Kris Allen and Adam Lambert in American Idol. However, the image each projects ties directly into the patterns identified in the previous post, complete with the elimination of one contestant whose votes were much more likely to go to one finalist over the other for reasons that have nothing to do with talent.

In dancing, image -- but not candidate association outside the performance -- is part of the talent package. In music, however: if it were only about the music, why focus so much on the presentation?

Many years ago when I was still in university, I first discovered strategy games. I already knew how to play chess, I have known how since around the same time I discovered how to read, which places it before true memory: and so I took to the new discovery like a duck to water.

It took me somewhat longer to discover that my gaming group had a three-person in-group, a few hangers-on (number dependent on the particular night), and me. Over time, it became very clear to me that I would never be part of the in-group. That was a shrug, even then.

More interestingly, I also slowly discovered that I also was not counted among the hangers-on. Unlike them, I had an aptitude with strategy games from the beginning: enough to make me a threat. Again and again and again, the in-group united as a bloc against me. Most players will not take positions that individually leave them open to attack: but when you can be certain your back is covered, you can take risks no individual player can. In games such as Diplomacy and Machiavelli, everything hangs on the alliances you can make, alliances which shift at a moment's notice with self interest. Long before I did, the hangers-on noticed that at least one alliance always quickly formed and never broke: and that I was always the primary target of that alliance, excepting only incidental targets of convenience.

The in-group never noticed. By the time our time together was drawing to an end, a few of the hangers-on decided to bring it into the open. One and all, the in-group was completely surprised and could not believe it. They pointed out that they went after each other in the games with absolutely no holds barred. And so they did: after I was eliminated and no other threats existed. But this was something they would never be able to see.

By the time I really noticed, I was also winning more than half our games. Somewhere along the way, my skills had improved to meet the increased challenge and balance out the bias.

So what is in a game?

Another season of Dancing With The Stars has come to an end. I agree with the judges -- and the studio audience -- that this has easily been the most stunningly jaw-dropping season I have yet seen. Every single participant had gone into the challenge willing to try the new thing to the limits of their ability. Every single participant's ability had increased exponentially as a result. (Yes, even Steve Wozniak's!) When the final three danced their last dances this night, every one of them earned perfect 30s, and deserved them fully. There were no losers in this season of Dancing With The Stars.

Still, people vote, numbers are tabulated, contestants are dropped every week. It is the formula for this kind of show. I am starting to see the particular focus each individual judge brings to this show, to the point where I can see their scoring as objective. I have not their years of trained observation, but I can see what Len Goodman means by footwork, or Carrie Ann Inaba by emotive quality, or Bruno Tonioli by intensity. And because I have learned to see it through their eyes, more often than not I can anticipate each judge's score.

More interestingly, I think I am starting to understand the public's voting patterns.

There were no losers, I wrote and still believe. I would not take anything away from any one of them. And yet this post will: not through my own doing, but by bringing something which usually remains hidden into the open.

It is the surprises which draw what is hidden into the light. The surprise elimination of Lil' Kim in favour of Ty Murray tells us something that has nothing to do with talent, should we wish to see it. The surprise win of Shawn Johnson over Gilles Marini, by less than 1% (all of it from the voting audience), tells us exactly the same thing.

To see it, we must first appreciate the importance of one factor: relative to mainstream America, both Lil' Kim and Gilles are outsiders -- and not just outsiders, but outsiders who happen to be representative of a fear and a threat. Lil' Kim is a rapper who has been to prison. Gilles ... is French. Unabashedly French. Suavely French. Sexily French, in a way that suggests the possibility even though he is already married with a family and should be unavailable.

Both are the kinds of people parents might think twice about before letting their children date them. Both are the kinds of people who would attract those children. And both also happen to be extremely gifted dancers (who are also extremely hard workers, but that element tends to get lost in this equation).

At the same time, both Ty and Shawn are as representative of core American values as it gets. Shawn is the 17-year-old girl next door who has done her country proud, managing to earn Olympic gymnastics gold in spite of everything China could do: another Jesse Owens moment. Ty is all-American gumption and heartland patriotic, the dogged underdog who has never hesitated to display his flag and who has negotiated dance choreography to end with small romantic gestures to his wife Jewel. Neither is a naturally gifted dancer, each struggles with elements of competitive dancing which are alien to their natural gifts, but both understand the value of hard work.

At lower levels, it never shows. The standard deviation around average has a broad base. Some days the coin toss goes to one side of average, some days the other. Against that built-in randomness, who can spot a tiny percentage shift that has other sources?

At the highest levels, it is a different story.

If you are not part of the in-group and you want to remain in competition, you must do it better than adequate, better even than good. You must come as close to perfect as humanly possible, and you must do it again and again and again. Slip even once, as Lil' Kim slipped that one week, and at once you will discover that a crucial percentage of the voting public has no forgiveness for you.

This final of Dancing With The Stars painted it even more starkly. Gilles and Shawn went into the voting absolutely tied in the judge's scores -- but only because Gilles did not fully live up to his potential in the free dance. Such is his talent that the judges have started measuring his performances against a professional yardstick: which gave him a crucial 28/30 in the free dance and brought him closer to Shawn's level, even though he still was the only one of the contestants to score perfect marks in the group paso doble. At the same time, Shawn has been doing better and better in the past three weeks, as she started to understand how what competitive dancing expects is different from what competitive gymnastics expects. At the end of it, she did exceptionally well in her free dance, earning the 30/30 that brought her completely to Gilles' level in raw judges' scores, even though her group paso doble was only 28/30.

Because of the tie, any deviation has to come from the voting public. If they voted parallel to the judges, it would still be a dead tie -- but it was not. By a difference of nearly 1%, the voting public opted for Shawn over Gilles, even though Gilles has repeatedly and consistently been the bettter dancer. The single slip cost him the title.

Go one step further, and consider the four semifinalists before this final vote. Every voter is given a certain number of votes they can enter from telephone and email. While this number can obviously be manipulated, there is no reason to believe that the total numbers from any such manipulation would be particularly greater during the final than throughout most of the show. Whatever the manipulation, the numbers of potential votes are constant. When each candidate is eliminated, those votes are freed up to go elsewhere during the next vote, should the voter wish to cast their ballots anew.

The votes Ty had drawn were freed with his elimination. From one icon of Americana, many of them went straight to the other icon of Americana. Some might have gone to Melissa Rycroft: but Melissa had already had her second chance, that week when the judges' scores had to be lower, scoring her on her dress rehearsal because of her cracked rib. Her, the voting public could forgive for having slipped through a fault entirely not her own, and that voting public was determined to give her a second chance. This time, going into the final vote, Melissa was a crucial two points behind the two leaders.

It might not have mattered, Ty has overcome greater barriers, but Melissa is not strongly symbolic of either extreme. This particular polemic contrasts innocence and patriotism with an exotic foreign sensuality. (In fact, Gilles was scored down by the judges in part because his free dance did not draw on that known strength, instead focusing on the "Wind Beneath My Wings" supporting strength.) Unfortunately for her, Melissa has elements of both. The early sympathy factor was obviously no longer needed, she can dance well on her own merits: but removing the sympathy factor also lays bare all the other things that The Bachelor represents. Call it the third party dilemma in a system accustomed to being given two valid choices, and figure voting pattern accordingly.

Few of Ty's freed votes, if any, would have gone to the Frenchman Gilles. It has nothing to do with talent or ability. After all, those same votes had already brought Ty into the semifinals at the expense of the far better dancer Lil' Kim.

I would not take anything away from any one of the finalists, but a percentage of the voting public already has.

Now that you know, can you ever look again at winning without wondering: did I truly win this entirely on my own merits and my own skills? Did I win this on a level playing field? Could I win this on a level playing field?

Now that you know: will it matter to you? Or will you follow the comfortable road, choosing to dismiss all that I have just written as anti-Americanism, choosing to forget all else against the dazzling light of the winner's trophy?

There once lived a young king who was beloved by his subjects for his dedication, his care, and his wisdom. He valued knowledge, but it seemed sad to him that all the discovered truths of previous ages should be inaccessible to all but a few erudite students. So he directed that texts should be gathered together from all the corners of the earth, to be housed in a great library. From these texts, he hoped to create a compilation which would be accessible to the least of his subjects, and which would also show him how to become a good ruler of his people. He knew his own skills and time were inadequate to the task, so he also brought together the learned people of his kingdom to take charge of the precious manuscripts, to arrange them in orderly fashion, and to fashion from them a history of man.

Obediently the scholars set out on the task. After ten years of intense labour, they had brought together all the known works in the world. After another ten, they had managed to sort and filtre all those works to what could be transported by a caravan. Another ten years, and they had succeeded finally in condensing the substance of the great library to what could be carried on the back of a single camel.

But time had not forgotten the king, who had not been young now for some years. His eyesight had started to fail, and even a single camel load of books was now beyond him. There would be others in his kingdom too, for whom the task of reading even so few books would be impossible. So he handsomely rewarded the men of learning who had given their lives to the task and set them as advisors to the new generation of scholars, whose job it would be to reduce all that had gone before into a single volume.

They managed it. But by the time they finally succeeded, 20 years later, the king had become very old, and now he could barely walk. He passed his ancient hands over the slim volume, but they lacked the strength to hold it. "Please," he whispered, his voice cracking with age, "Tell me what is in it."

The leader of the scholars bent down over the bed and said quietly, "Man is born, he suffers, and he dies."

And with a smile on his face, the king breathed his last.

Mrs. Higgins: You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll.
- Pygmalion

It is sometimes said that a storyteller only ever has one great story of his own to tell, and that all his creations reach toward that single goal.

Joss Whedon's creative independence began with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the story of a girl who exists to protect humanity against the forces of evil. To have family and friends at all is to expose them to the same danger she faces every day. Her own death is the greatest gift she can give those friends: and even then there can be no guarantees. There never are. Could she be granted but a single wish for her life, it would be that she might have the freedom to live.

In her constant, lonely fight, she is guided and supported by a British Watcher, representative of an organisation that has protected and preserved knowledge toward the saving of the world. He is the one person she must trust, and through him the authority he represents. Yet that authority betrays her again and again, as will later societal authorities: her teachers, the city, the military, the federal government. At the same time, others she has defended have abandoned all social responsibility in the pursuit of comfort and personal entertainment, which in a few becomes a world-killing despair.

It is not power itself which corrupts, but power without greater purpose or empathy. Shortcuts pursue only personal convenience, always at the expense of others: which is why Whedon distrusts the easy solutions. The price of liberty is constant vigilance: but the greatest threat to liberty are the very institutions we trust to protect us, and the apathy which allows hidden cancers to grow.

With the social changes after 9/11, telling this story became more urgent. The second year of Angel became correspondingly darker, and toward the end of it more desperate. No longer is Angel content to fight the good fight just one person at a time. As he gradually abandons those whose own empathy cannot accept his own abandonment of individual persons, including the one sent to him to be his guide, Angel increasingly seeks the shortcuts, the easy solutions, the power of the large organisations which he allows himself to become seduced into believing can still have individual and societal good as their primary objective. In the end, this fallen Angel signs away his own hope for the future, abandoning a difficult path with a too-distant promise in order to tear down his enemies here and now, though it mean tearing down the world as well and opening the gates into hell:

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

Yet even as Whedon increasingly set aside light humour as being obviously inadequate to bring his points across, the greater part of his audience also ceased to find his work lightly entertaining and escapist, and many even found it uncomfortable and disturbing. Some found no redeeming societal value whatsoever, and even some fans wondered whether Whedon had simply lost interest. The excuse was found. The network cancelled.

In the new and 'unrelated' series Firefly, once again the large majority of Whedon fans sought and thought they had found simply light entertainment and escapism. Clear now of Buffy and Angel, the new series did seem on the surface to return to the lightness of early Buffy which some reviewers were able to compare to such shows as Pushing Daisies and Reaper, simply by overlooking everything except that surface, even to look so far as human motivation.

But how long could its viewers continue to delude themselves that this was all Firefly was? Once again we find the lonely defender, this time already forged in the crucible and having come to a personal peace with himself that will not permit his becoming part of something uncaring of the individual. Once again we find personal judgement as the last vigilant bulwark against the greater institution which fought and won the right to define shelter for its citizens at the expense of their liberty, and sometimes to betray and even to sacrifice some of those citizens toward what it called the greater good. Once again, the human bait of convenience and an easy life had been seen for what they really are. Once again, the choices and actions of a single, fallible, vulnerable human being had been lifted to the level of myth.

And once again, some of Serenity's reviewers were unable to see anything but the stereotype; while others, uncomfortable or suspecting a subversive message they could not fully read, deliberately sabotaged it.

It took three years before Whedon was able to return to the small screen. We will probably never entirely know the true reasons: although public release of the new Dollhouse coincides almost exactly with a change in the American administration, even as the growing darkness of Angel and Buffy coincided with key choices by a different administration.

Both Buffy and Angel had been set in the here and now, with a fantastical twist. For Firefly, Whedon harkened back to the analogy of the American War between the States: which also just happened to be the catalyst consolidating modern corporate entities from the great railroad empires to Eli Lilly. For Dollhouse, Whedon looked to a not too distant future and built it solidly upon that paeon to the sunset of British empire, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, later remade into the musical My Fair Lady. Once again, the almost-now is grounded firmly in the tradition of the Pinkertons, the great railroad empires, a careless and childish technology wielding an even more careless power over being itself, and a corporate power hand-in-glove with the government.

(Recent economic events have revived the spectre of eminent domain and loss of individual freedoms by raising a curious question: in a state where some corporations cannot be allowed to fail, is there any essential difference from corporate fascism?)

Eliza Dushku was always planned to be the primary character for this project, a 'doll' whose name was once Caroline but who now goes by Echo, a letter of the phonetic alphabet. Not coincidentally, she shares a name with the flower girl being sculpted, Liza Doolittle, which My Fair Lady alters to 'Eliza'. The sculptor himself, Professor Henry Higgins, is an authority on another type of phonetic alphabet, one which charts those it targets so precisely that their past is completely laid open to him the moment they open their mouths.

The life given to the dolls between their assignments is in its essence both a wageslave ideal and a corporate ideal. Given that some kind of work must exist for those who are not part of the idle rich, indenturing people into dolls with an on/off switch is the ultimate shortcut; and at the same time, for the organisation, it is the ultimate convenience. There is work: and then there is nothing but relaxation in a completely stress-free environment. As valuable resources, the dolls are protected from all stress and all danger to the greatest ability of the organisation. At the same time, when not working, there is absolutely no requirement for the dolls to have to think. Is that not what our actions suggest we desire?

Higgins: Why have you begun going on like this? May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?
Liza: No.
Higgins: Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs. Pearce? Any of the servants?
Liza: No.
Higgins: I presume you don't pretend that I have treated you badly.
Liza: No.
Higgins: I am glad to hear it. Perhaps you're tired after the strain of the day. Will you have a glass of champagne?
Liza: No. ... Thank you.
Higgins: This has been coming on you for some days. I suppose it was natural for you to be anxious about the garden party. But that's all over now. There's nothing more to worry about.
Liza: No. Nothing more for you to worry about. ... Oh God! I wish I was dead.

The doll has come alive and awake: but why should she have any reason to object to her treatment? She has been given dresses, tutorage, comforts, worlds she would never have known had it not been for her agreement with Higgins. Before, she had been common as dirt, scrabbling for the necessities of life at the feet of rich folk. Now, she interacts with them as easily as breathing -- but what is left of her? and where does she go from here? And what of a structure, corporate or societal, which can do this to people so uncaringly?

Higgins: You might marry, you know. Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils!); and you're not bad-looking; it's quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes -- not now, of course, because you're crying and looking as ugly as the very devil; but when you're all right and quite yourself, you're what I should call attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you won't feel so cheap. [as a genial afterthought] I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well --
Liza: We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.
Higgins: What do you mean?
Liza: I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me.
Higgins: Tosh, Eliza. Don't you insult human relations by dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it.

Where empathy is forgotten, all that can remain is the resource value of the human being. Whether it be the marriage bond, slavery, a human resources slot or Echo's own indenture, drain away the empathy and all that remains is a corporate monetary interaction.

So loyal is this nod to My Fair Lady that even the essential layout of Higgins' house is preserved in the dollhouse, excepting only the library of books which could evoke an unwanted urge to think. (For the purpose of this post, I leave aside the even more obvious nod and grounding in Ibsen's A Doll's House.)

But it is the modern fashion to dismiss as trivia anything which does not fit exactly within the existing preconceived image, to limit one's gaze carefully only to what clearly lies on the surface of a narrow specialised interest, and to never once look at the things which maybe should be there, but are not. Dollhouse has been marketed as a science fiction drama thriller, and so a science fiction drama thriller it must remain. Does it really make such a difference if that determined blinkered focus happens to be marketing, or manga, or the science of personality, or all things phonetic? Are we all so determined to become otaku in all aspects of our lives?

Dollhouses notwithstanding, life cannot be compartmentalised out of all contextuality, nor does it come with annotations. In sharp contrast to the helpfully annotated Lost (lest we accidentally come to the wrong conclusions), Whedon has always written for an audience which understands this. And so it should come as no surprise that from the beginning Dollhouse has constantly received mediocre reviews, and is now on the brink of cancellation.

How dare we have the hubris to complain about the quality of our television viewing: when the networks have only ever given us exactly what we want?

Warning! Independent thought alarm!

The true independents of society are few and far between. It takes a certain callousness to be able to weigh what is seen without automatically fitting it into prior constraints, be they of societal norms or of how we wish to be seen in the eyes of others or even of self-image.

Hardest of all, that last. Once we have come to see in a certain way, we will bend reality around that way of seeing rather than accept any other possibility. For those in a position of authority it is even harder: for others will be all too willing to reinforce our image of ourselves and consequently of reality. There is something deeply engrained in the human psyche which begs others to make sense of the world for them.

Considering how very much we want not to have to think, we work amazingly hard to keep fitting new evidence into existing pigeonholes.

When we most believe we are rationally considering an issue, what we are usually doing instead is either identifying how it fits into our self-perception or explaining it away. Often this will require repackaging what is actually seen into something completely different, something that can safely be accepted or rejected based on what we have defined it to be, rather than on any objective analysis of what it actually is. If we view ourselves as patient, it is much easier to explain away the thing that persistently does not fit as being unreasonable and not amenable to reason, than to consider that perhaps the reason we are patient is because whenever an alien piece of evidence might threaten our serenity, we simply don't let ourselves think about it. In this way, we never permit our worldview to be truly challenged, and so we never grow as individuals.

(If we are patient with others, what feeds our patience? Are we patient out of charity, or empathy, or apathy? Is our patience born of power or powerlessness? Does our patience come out of the security of knowing we will have the last word? Are we able to be patient while hearing and thinking about what the other is saying, or is the nature of our patience simply tuning them out to preserve our Zen? Can we be patient only so long as those in our inner circle support us? Will our patience hold if we find ourselves alone against the world? Are we willing to let others take all the time in the world to agree with us, knowing all along that we can cut them off at any moment if they prove intractable? And if once we know the reason in one case, does it follow that the same reason holds true in another?)

If we are willing to risk seeing ourselves clearly in the mirror, our own actions can show us patterns of behaviour where we have stopped thinking for ourselves and substituted mental algorithms instead. Reactions to change or proposed change are particularly telling, as are reactions strong in one case but not in others which seem on the surface similar, because difference always requires us to make an effort, whether to embrace or resist, while to continue as we are is effortless. The more personally threatening the change, the more likely we are to reject it, even if such rejection requires us to redefine the proposed change into terms we can feel comfortable with rejecting. At the extreme, we will shut down any external sensory stimulus that refuses to be redefined – and if that does not work, we will shut our eyes and ears instead.

If we find that we consistently shut down a particular type of change, no matter how or where it is encountered: our personal judgement can no longer be considered reliable with respect to that type of change. What is more: we will be absolutely convinced, each and every time, that we have given rational arguments against that type of change ... right up until we take a hard look at the pattern of our actions and discover that no argument, no evidence, could ever convince us differently. Once we start substituting mental algorithms for our own judgement in some things, it becomes increasingly easy to substitute related mental shortcuts in other things, until we cease to have free will in any meaningful way.

Of course, all of this only matters if independent thought is considered of value. If it is more important that thought fit easily into an existing belief structure, all of this is moot.

According to Christian teachings, Christ is male, and His Church, female. Priests are the worldly representatives of that divine marriage: representatives of the church.

Once priests were also forbidden to marry: what kind of culture did they think this was going to create?

O Zeno, what a pretty kettle of fish your arrow has opened!

The thought experiment is deceptively simple. Shoot an arrow at a target. Now stop it, mentally, in mid-air. Don't interrupt its flight, just imagine that split second when the arrow is exactly here and nowhere else.

Now take another arrow, completely motionless. Set it into exactly the same surroundings and in the same attitude: but this arrow is going nowhere. It is just going to stay exactly where you placed it.

In that split instant between moments, is there any difference whatsoever between the two arrows? And if you said that one arrow is in flight while the other is static: in that split second of time, how does it 'know' that?

Does one arrow 'know' it is actually travelling, just not in each individual split second? Does the other 'know' it is standing still?

Einstein said no, it all depends on the frame of reference. (Which, if you think about it, is a very odd conclusion for someone so spiritual.) Quantum physics said yes, an object's behaviour depends on anticipating what it will find and how it has previously been linked to other objects -- and Einstein fought it, body and soul.

The Large Hadron Collider will be firing up again soon. Maybe 90% of physicists who have expressed an opinion are supporting it unequivocably, telling us that there is "no basis for any conceivable threat." Oh, it could definitely create a tiny black hole or two -- yes, the CERN scientists themselves acknowledge this -- but Hawking radiation means it would evaporate almost at once. Of course, new findings are challenging whether Hawking radiation actually exists, but again, that is what the LHC is there to find out. And the odds of anything really bad happening are so small, just a calculated 50 million to one.

Do you play the lottery? Those are not ^15+ quantum odds or the necessary statistical 'out', those are better than real life odds of 'winning' the jackpot.

But -- no danger. Nothing bad could ever happen from those odds. So sayeth the canon of physicists, most of whom also firmly hold to the theory of evolution ... which absolutely requires a long series of events at much smaller odds, individually and collectively, to result in -- us. Most of these same physicists would rather believe in these short odds of blind evolution than even consider intelligent design. This, they consider rational.

At the same time, for some reason the same blind chance somehow does not apply where the LHC is concerned. The CERN physicists are perfectly willing to bet, not only their own lives, but the whole earth on it.

And if that is not blind faith, I do not know what is.

Our reason tells us that our fellow human beings make most of their decisions out of mental processes most would not consider either objective or critically thought out. They act out of emotion, or loyalty, or friendship, or heritage.

(But we ourselves are always rational. Of course!)

Reason ought to tell us democracy could never work. To come to the opposite conclusion would require an utterly unreasonable faith in humankind.

Is nostalgia really the wish for all that came with bygone days? Or is the world changing too quickly for many of us to cope: so that what we are really seeking is a time, a place, when the world moved to a slower pace, and change came at the speed of lifetimes?

What do we do when the world around us changes too quickly, and therefore necessarily in ways we cannot like? Freeze this single moment then, cry out: "Thou art beautiful!"

Embrace those who agree. They will join us in the kingdom of heaven. And damn the rest of the world, if it cannot accept this single, solitary, isolated vision of perfection. What matter the cost to others? to those who are perpetually trying to build back paradise?

What are you boys laughing at? And if you say Jimmy Fallon, I'll know you're lying!
- Homer Simpson, Home Away From Homer, first aired May 2005

... which btw is a vastly underrated episode. Broad satire and stereotype is largely replaced by irony and a deeper examination of human nature, so it is criticised for slowness and lack of humour. Even the pseudo-"porn" scene is criticised for, well, not being more pornographic ... on a prime time show aired without parental warnings!

Because the objection to Ned's moustache has no grounds beyond "hippie lip" it is seen as pointless and humourless, when in fact the humour lies in its being one of many equally pointless social taboos, in real life as throughout the Simpsons canon. (Remember Don Mattingly's sideburns in the Simpsons softball episode?) This time, it happens to be perfect Ned who runs afoul of it ... for no reason whatsoever.

Reasons are easy ways out, which allow us to laugh and point at communities whose reasons we don't share and therefore find absurd, without ever having to question our own a prioris. The Simpsons chooses the more challenging road, not once, but repeatedly.

Of course, if you take that line of thinking just a little bit further, the point hits very hard: why should some social taboos be proper and others be pointless?

Another common objection is continuity: why should Ned object to shaving his moustache off in Humbletown, when he did not object to shaving it off over a deal with Homer? But ... a deal he made of his own free will, as opposed to a policy socially forced upon him. Should that make a difference?

Why this particular straw that broke the camel's back? Surely Homer has done worse things to Flanders, repeatedly? The proverb itself calls it a "straw", something of negligible weight that makes no difference by itself, but all the difference when added to the rest. Nor is this particular straw such a negligible one: not when, for the first time, Ned realises that the entire community shares Homer's values more than his, and that Ned himself is so far outside them as to be a common target of mockery. No longer is it simply Homer who takes advantage of him. In one step, he has gone from simply Homer's dupe to utterly alone in the entire community -- and at that point, what remains to anchor him to it?

Having decided to leave, having joined a community that he discovers too late shares all his values but a single key one (and which chooses to ostracise him for it), Ned now faces a new choice: to stay in a place where everyone else looks down on him, or to return to a place where, even being alone, he can claim the moral high ground over everyone else? Lisa has also faced a variant of this choice when she was jumped to third grade, and quickly found that she was no longer at the top of her class. Would she choose to stay in third grade?

Principal Skinner: And Lisa, you have a choice. You may continue to be challenged in third grade, or return to second grade and be merely a big fish in a little pond.
Lisa: Big fish! Big fish!

Why do we want to be spoon-fed everything? Why do we come to the television determined to turn our brains off? It is not as though most of us worked all that hard during the workday. Eight hours a day of desk work? and over a quarter of that spent slacking on the Internet? Talk to me after you spend dawn to dusk for even one harvest week working in agriculture.

But Fallon's humour ... sorry, I don't see it. Even when you tell exactly the same types of jokes as those which had been written for Conan O'Brien, you manage to wring all the laughter out of it, mostly because you laugh so hard at them yourself. Your Saturday Night Live co-actors did not care for this habit either. Do you intend to keep being the guy next to the water cooler whom everyone avoids because he keeps laughing uproariously at his own weak jokes?

To you, o Roots, you are not legendary. Max is legendary, he worked with Bruce Springsteen as part of the E Street Band long before he ever set foot on Late Night With Conan O'Brian -- and he was wise enough to understand that "legendary" is never something you call yourself, only something you can earn. You have not earned it. Maybe someday you will, but that day is not today.

There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poictiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.
— John Calvin, Traité Des Reliques

To which Rohault de Fleury replied by making detailed measurements of all known fragments of the True Cross in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion. He assumed pinewood for density -- others identified olivewood instead -- and worked out an original total weight of around 75 kilograms and original volume of 0.178 cubic metres. The total volume of all his catalogued framents only came out to 0.004 cubic metres.

But set this aside for the moment. Set aside also the many questions of "whether". Assume, for the sake of argument, that what is venerated as the True Cross is everything it is claimed to be, a piece of wood literally baptised in the blood of the Lamb.

Assume even that everything Calvin says about the total number of fragments is true also.

Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the miraculous signs he had performed on the sick. Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Feast was near.

When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

Philip answered him, "Eight months' wages would not buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!"

Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, "Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?"

Jesus said, "Have the people sit down." There was plenty of grass in that place, and the men sat down, about five thousand of them. Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.

When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
- John 6:1-13

Do you still refuse to understand?

Half a year after its release, I have finally seen Religulous. I knew Bill Maher is a skeptic, I had heard he might be a seeker, I know he has a sense of humour, and so I had come into the seeing with hopes. Nearly my first thought upon seeing what he was doing with his chosen subject matter was, ah, Karash Nekroden.

(Only you, Karash, did it much, much better. Ever though Maher had complete control of his medium and his editing -- if not of his interview subjects -- he came across much more weakly than you ever did.)

The song introducing the documentary is particularly ironic. There are agnostics who truly are seekers, but Bill Maher is not one of them. He prides himself in his doubt, in not knowing for sure – and yet there is one absolute certainty in his life: there is no God. This is not the sign of a doubter. His faith in rationality and atheism is every bit as strong – and as irrational – as the faith in God of those to whom he speaks.

Whether or not he realises it, he has come into his "seeking" with two a priori assumptions:

1. If a thing can be explained rationally, it does not require God.
2. If God is part of the explanation, it cannot be rational.

The net effect is perfectly circular. No one will ever be able to prove a God to Maher's satisfaction, because he has set up his criteria to exclude every possibility. Even were circumstance to jolt him outside the constraints of his rationality, he would probably dismiss anything observed at that time since he, the observer, would not be in a rational state of mind at the time of observation.

We all work from exactly the same base evidence. Beyond that, it is a matter of which "best" explanation you wish to put on it. In his documentary, Maher proved exactly one thing: that no matter what evidence were placed right in front of him, he would always find a way of explaining it that required no God. He would rather believe in blind chance and coincidence. In this, he believes, lies mankind's true salvation.

But we have already discovered what happens when the world around us is emptied of religious meaning. It has already happened once before, in the late 19th century. As faith in God ceased to have meaning, it was replaced by faith in nationalism. We know the outcome of that.

In our time, we have arrived at a three-way division. Some believe within a societally sanctioned structure. Some refuse to believe, with the fervency of true belief. While the basis of belief may pass unquestioned, the quality of belief for these two groups is constantly tested.

The third group seek or practice belief in their own fashion, with or without having tested the structure upon which they build all other aspects of their lives. Many among this group cherry-pick among the various choices. Some may choose to follow all aspects of bushido except obedience ... without which the entire structure of bushido collapses. Others pick and choose among structured and unstructured belief structures, finding those pieces that most appeal and rejecting those that don't, which are also often those which require the greatest personal effort.

To achieve what is worth achieving, be it mundane or a matter of faith, can be gained only by assaying the path of thorns: but every instinct in us cries out against any real challenge. We may claim to seek, but if it does not come easily and fit perfectly into what we already know, most of us quickly lose interest at best, attack at worst. It can be inviting guests into the controlled environment of The O'Reilly Factor, and cutting off the microphone of anyone who disagrees and can't be shouted down. It can even be as simple a thing as wondering why one-time friends, whether in person or on the Internet, have gone their own way: never once realising that the only time we sought their company was at our own convenience. If we don't make any kind of effort, in time their interests and convenience will diverge from ours. How can they not? Conveniences come with editing and an off switch. True friendships don't.

Writers too are susceptible, as are all storytellers. With total control over characters and plot, what more natural thing than to maneouvre each so that things work out as we think they should work?

But this tendency is not limited to fiction. Non-fiction is not an absolute. Like a pure letter, it means nothing without other letters. When telling the story of a 1930s social advocate, do we mention that he believed in eugenics, that most educated people of the time believed in eugenics, that he stopped believing in eugenics when he visited Nazi Germany, or omit the point altogether? Do we enter the discussion of eugenics more generally, and start questioning not only the morality of it, but also who will take the responsibility for paying for the children of those incapable of doing so themselves? (So many values erode instantly upon being confronted with the bill.)

Ultimately, every debater, every advocate, every lawyer, every documentary maker is a storyteller. We choose which facts to tell and how to present them. Exactly the same point can seem its own polar opposite when framed appropriately.

Yet one of the primary assumptions of rational thought is that facts are objective things which can stand on their own. If we are completely unaware -- or refuse to believe -- otherwise, then presentation takes on the quality of objective fact, and all observed things which differ from previous assumptions become absolute questions of truth or lie. Once established, so strong is this need for an absolute that if even a single piece of the core structure is found failing, we will reject the whole and swing, even more strongly, onto the opposite branch. Atheists become the deepest believers, and former believers the strongest atheists. Few reject smokers as strongly as the former smoker. Few are so biased as those who have been prejudiced against -- and few will see it less.

Brush all that aside, and cling unquestioningly to the primacy of rational thought. In the end, how can it not lead us to something like Religulous?

I want to believe.

For most of my life, I have lived under the governance of those whose beliefs were firmly anchored in Max Weber's divinely-sanctioned meritocracy, conveniently justifying their own current power and any actions undertaken to retain that power. For most of my life, I have lived under the governance of those who believed, consciously or subconsciously, in trickle-down economics: since what had maximally benefitted their own success must, of necessity, benefit all. I have watched again and again as the rules of the game are subtly co-opted to shift outcomes and reinforce those beliefs.

I have watched how the media, mass or blogosphere, shapes attitudes and then is shaped by those attitudes in turn -- but only by that part of attitude which improves profit, be it bottom-line corporate profit or ideological profit. When uncomfortable truths raised their heads above the water, I have watched as the denial machine spun into action, claiming to empower people and the individual free will to make an educated choice for oneself at the same time as it undermined the educational tools to make that educated choice.

I have watched as a thousand and then a thousand thousand voices muddied the waters, no longer skeptical analysis or even a will to truly understand but the determination either to reject blindly or support equally blindly, based on whichever authority is to be trusted without understanding or question, and to drown out all opposition through repetition and repetition and repetition again. I have watched those ripples surface in television show and videogame consumed casually and without thought. Especially I have seen them surface in the increased focus on staying on message, be it the soundbytes of a political platform or the determination of customer service to answer only the existing FAQs, regardless of what question had actually been asked. And to further fog out the relevant details, I have seen how investigative reporting increasingly shifted toward celebrity non-news, amid a popular determination to drown out reality in personal entertainment and a personally customised environment.

(But I cannot seek comfort in escapism. How would that improve in any way the things I see?)

Most recently, I watched as the political machine of what is still arguably the most powerful representative democratic government in the world finally reacted against the legacy of the past two terms, a squandered good will born of tragedy, and a growing economic crisis that could no longer be completely irrelevant to the powers of the world. I watched as the political net fished up two candidates who, each in their own way, were reactory expressions of the popular will against the looming shadow on the horizon. And because I guessed wrong by a year on the exact timing of that crisis, thinking it would come fully to light only after the greater part of the campaign had already ended and the opposing ideologies had already folded in their loyal supporters, I guessed completely wrong as to who those two candidates would be.

I say what I see -- and then, since I will engage neither in manipulatory tactics nor in preaching to the choir (and thereby engaging that vast potential of reification through repetition), I mostly keep silence. I talk to the people I talk to. I don't use their agreement or non-agreement to make my points to the audience instead. Without intending it, in doing so I have chased away more than one reader of this blog, who had sought Wisdom and had looked here for Answers.

I have observations, and thoughts, and speculations only. I try to see things as they are, and not as I would have them be. I am as ruthless toward myself as toward any other, more so: and the closer a person comes to me, the more I expect of them and the less gently I treat them. Sometimes, what I see suggests a course of action which might resolve one or another particular issue -- but I don't wrap either the problem or the solution in tissue paper. And because I see things without a comfortable fuzzy lining, I often dearly want to discover I am wrong.

But, I want to believe.

I have seen a campaign based on the vision of change, of Yes We Can: but that was only words, and words are cheap.

I have heard so much genuine cheering in the course of that campaign and afterward, but the cheers are ringed with desperation.

But now I see a president who has gone beyond words into action so immediate that it still continues to startle the pundits, never mind that the situation is such that immediate action is needed. I don't agree with all the positions he holds or actions he has already taken -- although a part of one of those actions might simply be to lay the groundwork for the freedom of action he will need in future -- but how long has it been since a newly elected politician has hit the ground running?

Above all, I see a president who seems to have opted out of the three great mythos of our time: that there is a natural ruling class whose fortunes are purely deserved, that our destinies and our fortunes can be built solely upon our own individual actions, and that if someone falls into poverty, it is always their own fault.

Maybe it is only from outside that such an opting out is even possible. I abhor the self-illusion which allowed the earlier self-congratulation -- but maybe the racial barrier could only have been broken with someone from outside the existing black culture. Those in a position of authority within it have already expressed their resentment of him, when they thought the microphone was off. I think that resentment is still very close to the surface. I want to believe that people might still be willing to accept that solutions to problems which have been generations in the making will not be painless -- yet at the same time I know that most people naturally don't want to feel pain, even the pain of a potential healing.

How long has it been since economic policy has been based on a belief that the wealth of a society can only ever trickle up? How long has it been since there has been a president who has remembered that a country is built on responsibility not only for self but within the context of community, and that community is built upon every one of its families, not only those who fit an "ideal" mould? How long has it been since there has been a president who invoked the blessing of God not only on an abstract nation ideal, but upon its people?

I want to believe ... but with the growing sense of possibility comes also a growing fear. One reason I never take political platforms at face value, even those which seem genuine, is that I know the extent of the established governmental, partisan, and corporate infrastructure; and I know too that changing the status quo which has raised it to such power is never in its interest.

Above all, perhaps: I know at what cost people will cling to their illusions.

Remarks by the president on the home mortgage crisis
Dobson High School, Mesa, Arizona


Thank you very much. Please, everybody have a seat. Thank you. Well, it is good to be back in Arizona. Thank you. Are you excited? Thank you, thank you. And thank you for arranging for such a beautiful day. I want to stick around, but I got to go back to work. But it is wonderful to be here. And to all of you, I know that attending these kinds of events, oftentimes you have to wait in line and there's all kinds of stuff going on. But I appreciate you being here very much. And to all the officials here at the school, the principal and the student body, everybody who helped make this possible, thank you so much to all of you.

I'm here today to talk about a crisis unlike we've ever known -- but one that you know very well here in Mesa, and throughout the Valley. In Phoenix and its surrounding suburbs, the American Dream is being tested by a home mortgage crisis that not only threatens the stability of our economy, but also the stability of families and neighborhoods. It's a crisis that strikes at the heart of the middle class: the homes in which we invest our savings and build our lives, raise our families and plant roots in our communities.

So many Americans have shared with me their personal experiences of this crisis. Many have written letters or emails or shared their stories with me at rallies and along rope lines. Their hardship and heartbreak are a reminder that while this crisis is vast, it begins just one house -- and one family -- at a time.

It begins with a young family -- maybe in Mesa, or Glendale, or Tempe -- or just as likely in a suburban area of Las Vegas, or Cleveland, or Miami. They save up. They search. They choose a home that feels like the perfect place to start a life. They secure a fixed-rate mortgage at a reasonable rate, and they make a down payment, and they make their mortgage payments each month. They are as responsible as anyone could ask them to be.

But then they learn that acting responsibly often isn't enough to escape this crisis. Perhaps somebody loses a job in the latest round of layoffs, one of more than 3.5 million jobs lost since this recession began -- or maybe a child gets sick, or a spouse has his or her hours cut.

In the past, if you found yourself in a situation like this, you could have sold your home and bought a smaller one with more affordable payments, or you could have refinanced your home at a lower rate. But today, home values have fallen so sharply that even if you make a large down payment, the current value of your mortgage may still be higher than the current value of your house. So no bank will return your calls, and no sale will return your investment.

You can't afford to leave, you can't afford to stay. So you start cutting back on luxuries. Then you start cutting back on necessities. You spend down your savings to keep up with your payments. Then you open the retirement fund. Then you use the credit cards. And when you've gone through everything you have, and done everything you can, you have no choice but to default on your loan. And so your home joins the nearly 6 million others in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure across the country, including roughly 150,000 right here in Arizona.

But the foreclosures which are uprooting families and upending lives across America are only part of the housing crisis. For while there are millions of families who face foreclosure, there are millions more who are in no danger of losing their homes, but who have still seen their dreams endangered. They're the families who see the "For Sale" signs lining the streets; who see neighbors leave, and homes standing vacant, and lawns slowly turning brown. They see their own homes -- their single largest asset -- plummeting in value. One study in Chicago found that a foreclosed home reduces the price of nearby homes by as much as 9 percent. Home prices in cities across the country have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2006. And in Phoenix, they've fallen by 43 percent.

Even if your neighborhood hasn't been hit by foreclosures, you're likely feeling the effects of this crisis in other ways. Companies in your community that depend on the housing market -- construction companies and home furnishing stores and painters and landscapers -- they're all cutting back and laying people off. The number of residential construction jobs has fallen by more than a quarter million since mid-2006. As businesses lose revenue and people lose income, the tax base shrinks, which means less money for schools and police and fire departments. And on top of this, the costs to local government associated with a single foreclosure can be as high as $20,000.

So the effects of this crisis have also reverberated across the financial markets. When the housing market collapsed, so did the availability of credit on which our economy depends. And as that credit has dried up, it's been harder for families to find affordable loans to purchase a car or pay tuition, and harder for businesses to secure the capital they need to expand and create jobs.

In the end, all of us are paying a price for this home mortgage crisis. And all of us will pay an even steeper price if we allow this crisis to continue to deepen -- a crisis which is unraveling home ownership, the middle class, and the American Dream itself. But if we act boldly and swiftly to arrest this downward spiral, then every American will benefit. And that's what I want to talk about today.

The plan I'm announcing focuses on rescuing families who've played by the rules and acted responsibly, by refinancing loans for millions of families in traditional mortgages who are underwater or close to it, by modifying loans for families stuck in sub-prime mortgages they can't afford as a result of skyrocketing interest rates or personal misfortune, and by taking broader steps to keep mortgage rates low so that families can secure loans with affordable monthly payments.

At the same time, this plan must be viewed in a larger context. A lost home often begins with a lost job. Many businesses have laid off workers for a lack of revenue and available capital. Credit has become scarce as markets have been overwhelmed by the collapse of security backed -- securities backed by failing mortgages. In the end, the home mortgage crisis, the financial crisis, and this broader economic crisis are all interconnected, and we can't successfully address any one of them without addressing them all.

So yesterday, in Denver, I signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which will create or save -- The act will create or save 3.5 million jobs over the next two years -- including 70,000 right here in Arizona, right here -- doing the work America needs done. And we're also going to work to stabilize, repair and reform our financial system to get credit flowing again to families and businesses.

And we will pursue the housing plan I'm outlining today. And through this plan, we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford -- avoid foreclosure. And we're not just helping homeowners at risk of falling over the edge; we're preventing their neighbors from being pulled over that edge, too -- as defaults and foreclosures contribute to sinking home values, and failing local businesses, and lost jobs.

But I want to be very clear about what this plan will not do: It will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans. It will not help speculators -- it will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell. It will not help dishonest lenders who acted irresponsibly, distorting the facts -- distorting the facts and dismissing the fine print at the expense of buyers who didn't know better. And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford. So I just want to make this clear: This plan will not save every home.

But it will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild. It will prevent the worst consequences of this crisis from wreaking even greater havoc on the economy. And by bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help to shore up housing prices for everybody. According to estimates by the Treasury Department, this plan could stop the slide in home prices due to neighboring foreclosures by up to $6,000 per home.

So here's how my plan works: First, we will make it possible for an estimated 4 to 5 million currently ineligible homeowners who receive their mortgages through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to refinance their mortgages at a lower rate.

Today, as a result of declining home values, millions of families are what's called "underwater," which simply means that they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are currently worth. These families are unable to sell their homes, but they're also unable to refinance them. So in the event of a job loss or another emergency, their options are limited.

Also right now, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the institutions that guarantee home loans for millions of middle-class families -- are generally not permitted to guarantee refinancing for mortgages valued at more than 80 percent of the home's worth. So families who are underwater or close to being underwater can't turn to these lending institutions for help.

My plan changes that by removing this restriction on Fannie and Freddie so that they can refinance mortgages they already own or guarantee.

And what this will do is it will allow millions of families stuck with loans at a higher rate to refinance. And the estimated cost to taxpayers would be roughly zero. While Fannie and Freddie would receive less money in payments, this would be balanced out by a reduction in defaults and foreclosures.

I also want to point out that millions of other households could benefit from historically low interest rates if they refinance, though many don't know that this opportunity is available to them -- meaning some of you -- an opportunity that could save your families hundreds of dollars each month. And the efforts we are taking to stabilize mortgage markets will help you, borrowers, secure more affordable terms, too.

A second thing we're going to do under this plan is we will create new incentives so that lenders work with borrowers to modify the terms of sub-prime loans at risk of default and foreclosure.

Sub-prime loans -- loans with high rates and complex terms that often conceal their costs -- make up only 12 percent of all mortgages, but account for roughly half of all foreclosures. Right now, when families with these mortgages seek to modify a loan to avoid this fate, they often find themselves navigating a maze of rules and regulations, but they’re rarely finding answers. Some sub-prime lenders are willing to renegotiate; but many aren't. And your ability to restructure your loan depends on where you live, the company that owns or manages your loan, or even the agent who happens to answer the phone on the day that you call.

So here's what my plan does: establishes clear guidelines for the entire mortgage industry that will encourage lenders to modify mortgages on primary residences. Any institution that wishes to receive financial assistance from the government, from taxpayers, and to modify home mortgages, will have to do so according to these guidelines -- which will be in place two weeks from today.

Here's what this means: If lenders and home buyers work together, and the lender agrees to offer rates that the borrower can afford, then we'll make up part of the gap between what the old payments were and what the new payments will be. Under this plan, lenders who participate will be required to reduce those payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower's income. And this will enable as many as 3 to 4 million homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure.

So this part of the plan will require both buyers and lenders to step up and do their part, to take on some responsibility. Lenders will need to lower interest rates and share in the costs of reducing monthly payments in order to prevent another wave of foreclosures. Borrowers will be required to make payments on time in return for this opportunity to reduce those payments.

And I also want to be clear that there will be a cost associated with this plan. But by making these investments in foreclosure prevention today, we will save ourselves the costs of foreclosure tomorrow -- costs that are borne not just by families with troubled loans, but by their neighbors and communities and by our economy as a whole. Given the magnitude of these crises, it is a price well worth paying.

There's a third part of the plan: We will take major steps to keep mortgage rates low for millions of middle-class families looking to secure new mortgages.

Today, most new home loans are backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guarantee loans and set standards to keep mortgage rates low and to keep mortgage financing available and predictable for middle-class families. Now, this function is profoundly important, especially now as we grapple with a crisis that would only worsen if we were to allow further disruptions in our mortgage markets.

Therefore, using the funds already approved by Congress for this purpose, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities so that there is stability and liquidity in the marketplace. Through its existing authority, Treasury will provide up to $200 billion in capital to ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can continue to stabilize markets and hold mortgage rates down.

And we're also going to work with Fannie and Freddie on other strategies to bolster the mortgage markets, like working with state housing finance agencies to increase their liquidity. And as we seek to ensure that these institutions continue to perform what is a vital function on behalf of middle-class families, we also need to maintain transparency and strong oversight so that they do so in responsible and effective ways.

Fourth, we will pursue a wide range of reforms designed to help families stay in their homes and avoid foreclosures.

And my administration will continue to support reforming our bankruptcy rules so that we allow judges to reduce home mortgages on primary residences to their fair market value -- as long as borrowers pay their debts under court-ordered plans. I just want everybody to understand, that's the rule for investors who own two, three, and four homes. So it should be the rule for folks who just own one home -- as an alternative to foreclosure.

In addition, as part of the recovery plan I signed into law yesterday, we are going to award $2 billion in competitive grants to communities that are bringing together stakeholders and testing new and innovative ways to limit the effects of foreclosures. Communities have shown a lot of initiative, taking responsibility for this crisis when many others have not. And supporting these neighborhood efforts is exactly what we should be doing.

So taken together, the provisions of this plan will help us end this crisis and preserve for millions of families their stake in the American Dream. But we also have to acknowledge the limits of this plan.

Our housing crisis was born of eroding home values, but it was also an erosion of our common values, and in some case, common sense. It was brought about by big banks that traded in risky mortgages in return for profits that were literally too good to be true; by lenders who knowingly took advantage of homebuyers; by homebuyers who knowingly borrowed too much from lenders; by speculators who gambled on ever-rising prices; and by leaders in our nation's capital who failed to act amidst a deepening crisis.

So solving this crisis will require more than resources; it will require all of us to step back and take responsibility. Government has to take responsibility for setting rules of the road that are fair and fairly enforced. Banks and lenders must be held accountable for ending the practices that got us into this crisis in the first place. And each of us, as individuals, have to take responsibility for their own actions. That means all of us have to learn to live within our means again and not assume that -- and not assume that housing prices are going to go up 20, 30, 40 percent every year.

Those core values of common sense and responsibility, those are the values that have defined this nation. Those are the values that have given substance to our faith in the American Dream. Those are the values we have to restore now at this defining moment.

It will not be easy. But if we move forward with purpose and resolve -- with a deepened appreciation of how fundamental the American Dream is and how fragile it can be when we fail to live up to our collective responsibilities, if we go back to our roots, our core values, I am absolutely confident we will overcome this crisis and once again secure that dream not just for ourselves but for generations to come.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless the United States of America.

Unseasonable weather across the globe, windstorms, tornadoes in the Plains states and Hawai'i, a heavy and highly unusual snowstorm stranding travellers in Great Britain and western Europe, wildfires and an ever deepening drought in Australia, ever worse unemployment figures (again, globally), a satellite crash in space (not for the first time in history, although the first time that it has resulted in destruction of both satellites): it has been an uneasy couple of weeks.

Amid all this, two very small, but curious, stories of customer service.

For the first, a dining-entertainment business had run a pre-Christmas advertising campaign which promised a 20% gift certificate bonus to a cash card of three-digit value, those gift certificates to be valid only during the month of January. Turns out those gift certificates were also to be interpreted as discount, not as equivalent-to-cash (for the purpose of purchase only) -- although nothing of this was mentioned in the original advertisement. It is the only dining establishment in the entire area to have offered a seasonal promotion for purchasing a high-value cash card, then built in a dodge. (Its required pre-purchase to be eligible for the bonus was also the highest in the area.)

For the second, in a huge grocery chain which sees itself also as department store and bank, a discounted product had mis-scanned as full price. Upon my pointing it out, the cashier checked with her manager what to do, and the manager told it to her correctly, per store policy: give the mis-scanned product for free. But then the supervisor turned up after she had laid down the telephone and overruled the manager, insisting on charging the full price. "You could have swapped the tags," he said, and even the customer in line behind me laughed when I said simply, "Try it." He did. He could not, not without ripping them -- but he did not back down either.

So I let the price stand for then and went to the customer service desk instead: and there the supervisor and then another manager insisted that the full price must be right. As it happened there was an identical product on the shelf, and it too showed the discounted price -- which was the only reason my word that the marked price was the correct one ended up being accepted at all. And even then, while I was standing in front of where the store policy had been glued to the counter, the manager chose to ignore it even after it was pointed out to her, not by me, but by a different customer. It was too surreal, so at that point I let it be.

In the first case, the difference would have been equivalent to $5; in the second, it came out to less than $1.25 when I dropped it.

In a time when one would think every retail business would be trying to hang onto every one of its customers with care, it seems some still prefer to hang onto every dime ... whatever the cost.

I must wonder at anyone in the business of economic forecasting who still retains the ability to be shocked by the latest numbers. At this point in time, having access to presumably better financial data than I, the only surprise ought to be if numbers are somehow significantly better than forecast: since it would indicate that the credit-consumer confidence-unemployment feedback cycle has finally spiralled to a new point of balance, and thus that the depression is coming close to an end.

To think that such bottoming out is already close to happening speaks to me more of wishful thinking than of any objective observation. Me, I don't think we are even close, not yet, not for another five years -- although for the last year or two, we might start to even out.

(If you think this painful, consider that a very real alternative to economic depression, here and now, had been hyperinflation. We were drifting very close to it for a time. Why do we assume we are somehow immune to the economic and societal extremes?)

It is ironic that we would recognise this pattern at once in another's dating behaviour. We even have a formal psychological term for it, "avoidant attachment style", where attitudes toward social relationship (and thus outcomes of attempted social relationships) are characterised by a lack of trust. We know, in the abstract and in other people from whom we can detach emotionally, that such lack of trust is one of the hardest handicaps to overcome. Yet, as in so many other things, we seem unable to see exactly the same patterns when they are our own.

(Most of the things I write about have formal psychological terms attached to them, along with a great deal of experimental support linked to those terms. Yet were I to use them with any more frequency than I already do, this blog would become only so much more psychobabble cluttering up the Internet -- and what is the point of that?)

There is a survival mechanism in our personal psychology that usually requires us to see the world as more favourable to us than it really is. I sometimes think I have spent the better part of my life learning how to see things as they are without sinking into that depression, working on the premise that nothing is perfect, that non zero sum improvement is always a desirable thing, and that we can't improve what we refuse to see. I know it can be done, if there is a will.

(Psychology has not found it yet, but I suspect that a solid test for clinical depression will eventually come out of the gap between overall accuracy in self-assessment and accuracy only in assessing those situations which are not under the individual's total control -- and in the inverse of that same gap, perhaps, resides the conundrum of the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

Yet when I speak what I see and it is not unequivocably positive, I am still met with a vehement resistance that shouts of defensiveness and of a hidden fear that must not be faced. It seems that to be acceptable to others I must speak only positive or not at all: and lately even that the acceptability of others within the in-group is measured against their willingness to hear and rebut what I have to say. I even know of one promotion at least partly on that basis: and that is all I can say about it without jeopardising the person's self-image and opening up a new and truly nasty can of worms. The mechanics of it are not dissimilar to those of affirmative action, along with all the associated baggage were it to be seen too clearly.

And yet there has never been any shortage of yes-sayers, so "Yes" is seen quite clearly enough without my adding to it and thereby adding to the illusion of absolute, unquestioning consensus. It is amazing, the amount of energy and time and logical fallacies people are willing to invest in calling the current state of things the best of all possible outcomes.

Which leads to interesting questions about the nature of happiness.

We use the term so very loosely, I should first make some kind of distinction between different types of what is called happiness. The first, call it a radiant joy, is often relegated to the realms of first loves, profound spiritual experiences, and other overwhelmingly positive emotional experiences. It is a rare and beautiful thing, which perhaps adds to its wonder and its specialness. Once experienced, it colours one's life forever. But it is also an overwhelmingly personal thing, and so it is almost never considered when attempting to measure the relative happiness of different people and different societies.

"Happiness" is also used as synonymous with contentment, the degree to which we are at peace with ourselves. This is sometimes assumed to be the same as being equally at peace with the current state of our social and physical environments: which leads to the secondary assumption that contentment cannot co-exist with a drive for improvement. In those studies where happiness quotients are corrected for consumer wealth and where Buddhist monks seem continually to come out on top, I suspect it is this kind of happiness which is being measured.

The third emotion which we often name "happiness" is the filling of various needs and wants. This one perhaps is the most ephemeral of all. It stops in briefly when a want or need has been satisfied, and then flees almost at once as the next want or need is identified. When we learn to measure in this way, we will also find that there will always be another want or need -- manufactured, if so many of our existing needs and wants have already been filled that we cannot quickly enough think of another for ourselves. In those studies where consumer societies are identified as measuring highest on happiness indices, I suspect it is this kind of happiness which is being measured.

(Once we become dependant on wants that have been manufactured for us -- which happens very quickly, we are very lazy thinkers and even more reluctant to examine our own motives too closely -- it is a very small step to constantly feeling out of sorts with the world, feeling that somewhere out there is the answer to all our unhappiness, did we but know what it was. ... And now you might begin to guess my true reasons, having nothing to do with conservative protection of the free market or liberal seeking of accountability or socialist desire to bring under government control or libertarian desire to eradicate all governmental restrictions, for opposing corporate subsidy where there can be no corresponding corporate societal responsibility, only fiscal responsibility to stockholders.)

This last kind of happiness is sometimes confused with contentment, in that we think ourselves content when all our needs and wants have been filled: but contentment actually stands entirely apart from the need/want hamster wheel and focuses only on self-discrepancy.

To constantly yea-say, to constantly seek acceptance through consensus, to constantly deny that things could stand improvement, are all aspects of seeking contentment by deliberately closing one's eyes to those things which don't fit, and quickly hammering them down when they so rudely force themselves upon awareness. To borrow a phrase from the 1990's: "Dude, you are interrupting my Zen."

Yet in this day and age, it seems almost criminal to me that we might choose to pursue our own happiness at the expense of others. We can only get away with it at all by clinging to a firm belief that things should be different, and above all by avoiding thinking of those others as real people. I could never be content, knowing I had stood by and watched in silence while my lack of speaking supported a narrow frame of want-fulfillment built on a foundation which takes away from others.

Because I speak, seeing just as readily from the perspective of those others as from that of what people assume to be my in-group, many look at my actions and think that I must be a deeply unhappy person: because why else wouldn't I want to accept the tightly localised positives as they are and leave it there?

Why, indeed?

Wife Swap is a reality show where the wives of two families change places and lifestyles for two weeks. During the first week, the newly arrived wife tries to follow the rules of the household ... or not. During the second week, she gets to rewrite those rules as she sees fit ... and the various members of the household may or may not abide by the revisions. At the end of the experiment, the husbands and wives meet and discuss the week. Sometimes they find common ground. Sometimes "discuss" is an overly polite word. And sometimes it becomes blazingly clear that it is only one member of the couple who is completely behind a family policy, sometimes even of ostricism of one of its children: and I wonder whether this moment of clarity will once again be covered over, whether a new family equilibrium can be evolved, or whether a divorce is in the near future.

In general, I avoid reality shows, from Survivor to Big Brother to others I don't know exist. What I know of them is mostly what has drifted into the common currency: which means that I can usually tell you the premise and maybe some of the tactics of the major ones, but I usually have no clue who participated or what interesting water-cooler moment happened last week, and the names of the winners mean nothing to me. My interest is in human interaction and human reaction, and I tend to find viewer reaction to shows such as Survivor of far more interest than whatever happened on the show itself.

Like most reality shows, Wife Swap draws from the extremes in the interest of entertainment, and expands on that voyeuresque entertainment by clashing opposing lifestyles. In these stressed cross-sections of humanity, I find a fascinating window opened on that place where ideology is expressed in its most basic building block: the nuclear family.

This goes far beyond lifestyle, into an entire life view that colours all else. Part of the success of Wife Swap is in having identified a few core polarities, which find many different ways to express themselves and which almost immediately evoke defensive reactions upon being challenged. Oddly enough, differences of religion are only superficially polarising, and then only among those who absolutely cannot abide the existence of another religious belief within their world space: not really all that common in the environments which have given birth to Wife Swap. The much sharper religious polemic is between a deep religious belief and observance contrasted against lack of any religious core, or even against an equally faith-based atheism. Other core polarities include:

• Structure vs. lack of structure, especially wrt the children's education
• Education vs. lack of education, but only where both are identity-values
• Conformity vs. lack of conformity, but only where both are identity-values
  
• My country right or wrong vs. any questioning whatsoever, sometimes expressed as pro-/anti-military, pro-/anti-party politics, even pro-/anti consumerism, and once as vs. country only as an accident of birth; this could also be expressed as what, if anything, constitutes duty/responsibility to the country of birth
• The purpose of money
• The value of monetary/job security. (Ah, Rhui, you and I have had our debates on this one ourselves in the past.)
• Any threat to a father's ability to do as he has always done, sometimes expressed through a threat to a pet project (such as the book which has taken three years of research but never seems to get any closer to solidity)


• How to deal with "free" time.

(This last one ties into a curious observation in myself. I rarely have "free" time as others understand it, and for a very long time now I have not had anything resembling a need or a desire to "kill" time. However, I also discovered that there was a time when I was participating in so many activities and reading voraciously, which kept me comfortably from thinking about what I was reading, or indeed about anything. It makes an interesting side note that this did not negatively affect my grades -- quite the opposite.)

I myself hold an ideology that almost certainly colours my view, of this and other things. I firmly believe that no one knows everything, and that there is always something that can be learned. In this, perhaps, lies the core of my fascination with Wife Swap, for the most extreme of the polarities are invariably marked by one common element: one or both spouses so firmly believe in their way of life that they can't conceive of there being anything worth learning from something different (except, of course, the error of the other's ways).

Perhaps the most ironic example of this came up in the swap between the intellectual and the (below?) average Joe. As usual, each was convinced of the absolute rightness of their way of life: but since it was upon their intelligence that the intellectual couple based their superiority, every failure to use that intelligence for anything more than abstract superiority games stood in particularly stark relief.

The wife did try to compromise, a little and clearly painfully. She, at least, did not use her vocabulary as a weapon. Yet for all her intelligence, she was incapable of anticipating that some tastes might be acquired ones.

As so often happens on this show, the husband was by far the more defensive of the two, although I doubt he saw it as such. His defensiveness took the form of such vicious mocking that he reduced the guest wife to tears -- yet at the end of it, she was able to see herself the higher for it: "I learned something from all this. I came through this, I can survive anything."

He, on the other hand, actively refused to learn anything from her: although he said it again and again as an apparently objective observation, that there was nothing to be learned from her. In this manner, by the end of the first day, he had utterly closed himself off to anything she might have to say, let alone any potential value it might have. Such conviction did he have in the inherent superiority of his tested intelligence score that he considered himself above any ability to learn from others whom he did not consider to be his equal. He must have mentioned his percentile on the graduate studies admission test at least half a dozen times: and since I myself have scored similar percentiles, I know exactly what they do and do not mean.

(Apparently the ability to regurgitate facts and demonstrate some abstract problem-solving skills does not translate into the ability to see that another family's demeaning label of "skirt work" is really not all that different than hiring a cleaning lady -- and it was never questioned that it was "lady", not even "cleaning person".)

Yet who could blame him for his self-assessment? Every aspect of the society in which he chose to participate continually reinforced his own perception of himself, from grades to salary. Quite possibly participating in this show was the first time his assumptions of self and appropriate measuring stick had ever been challenged -- and like so many others of us, he accepted as valid only those measurements which supported his self-assessment, and rejected those which did not.

Perhaps the final measure of his intelligence must surely be that he and his wife agreed to be on this show. I, who treasure my privacy, often wonder at people's motivations in doing so. There is money involved, so for some at least, it would have to be the money ... but I can't see that motivation for him. Instead, I can only think it might be a determination to display to the world the inherent rightness of a particular way of life, so powerful a rightness that it must necessarily convince others who experience it ... who equally come on this show to demonstrate their own superiority of lifestyle.

If this is accurate, perhaps the only remaining question is whether this is only another example of "Hey Mom! Hey World! Look at ME!" or whether this is intended as yet another form of evangelism. To even begin to answer that question, ask first who the participants see as the focus of their efforts: the swapped spouse and family, or the television audience?

Google's new Latitude is a product which, in many ways, is behind the times. After all, GPS systems have been doing a similar function for years: and where was the objection then? For the majority of people, convenience has long trumped privacy concerns. As a friend of mine succinctly puts it, "I will worry about it if I ever commit a crime".

(-- which always reminds me of the classic definition of conservatives and liberals: that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been jailed. Not to mention that with all these technological crutches, what happens to our innate and learned sense of direction?)

But in one key way, Google has done the unthinkable. It has stated directly that the primary purpose of its new product is to track people -- other people. GPS could always do that. It just never said it.

Of course there will be a market. Employers may wish to start including cellphones as part of the employment package: which is, after all, the next logical step from monitoring employee keystrokes and Internet use. Parents will wish to monitor children. Teens will grow up with it (as they now grow up with cellphones and text messaging), and come to see this as the norm.

Some, of course, will seek to abuse this technology. Technological stalking is nothing new. For now, Google allows it to be taken to a new level: but again, only because they are open about the purpose of their product. The potential was already there.

Others may choose individually to opt in or opt out, depending on the balance between curiosity about others and tolerance for their personal privacy: but individual choice here is a dying luxury.

Can the subdermal locator microchip be far behind?

Despite slow sales that only barely sold out Super Bowl advertising, and that during the week of the Super Bowl itself (and we don't know at what price incentive the last two spots were sold), the Ashley Madison commercial was not among them. Having an affair is not yet against the law, nor is helping and abetting such an affair -- yet apparently we still must not acknowledge that fact on national television, and national television dare not profit from it (directly).

Never mind the minor point that, during the opening scenes of a full-fledged depression, Ashley Madison appears to be one of the few companies easily able to absorb the astronomical cost of such a commercial. Obviously the business is thriving -- as is its counterpart and complement, Alibi Network -- which suggests in turn that obviously a need is being met.

Equally obviously, the word of mouth, free mass media, and blogosphere publicity garnered by the commercial's having been rejected is much more valuable as airing the commercial would have been.

Yet whatever the monetary cost, whatever the background truth, the rejection does allow us to retain our determined image of our own society for just a little longer. Who can put a price on that?

There has been a sudden influx of television shows about self-discovery -- but not in the old 1960s sense. Rather, the protagonist of these shows recognises that somehow life has not gone as expected, that the expectations and dreams and hopes of previous years have somehow been derailed. That insight is usually not a long time coming. The protagonist had already known they had become stuck in a hamster wheel. Sometimes they have known it for years. The ways of dealing are various: but the vast majority of them seem to involve disconnecting from societal expectations -- indeed, from any expectations, even of self. Life then may be monotonous or matter-of-fact or uncaring or even deeply unhappy, but it is no longer demanding of self.

And so it stays: until a force from beyond kicks them in the teeth. It may be a talking animal figurine which says what needs to be heard (Wonderfalls). It may be a therapist with the power to open doors to your own past (Being Erica). It may even be having died, and only then being forced to learn truly how to live (Dead Like Me). One way or another, the spin cycle is kicked off its axle, and these protagonists begin to face who they are, what made them who they are, and above all the fact that as of here and now, the responsibility for how they live their lives rests entirely upon their own willingness to face life.

In every one of these television shows, the protagonist is female.

So I started searching for a male equivalent to these shows -- and did not find one. The closest any show with a male protagonist came to these issues was the odd sitcom's half-mocking toe-test of "male bonding": and the attitudes in those were not close at all. Above all, the male protagonist shows -- and even many of the family sitcoms -- now suggest stasis in life as a simple matter of fact: this is what you do, this is who you are, this is who you will always be. Almost invariably, this approach made the male equivalent to any hint of self-examination and self-awareness into: "This is life, sucks to be you."

Which led me directly to such shows as Clerks, Office Space, and the earlier Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Here, the only answer to job stasis and life stasis is sarcasm, petty and not so petty theft, and low-grade, meaningless sabotage. Even the acclaimed and skillfully written Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is little more than a disguised "stoner comedy" (thanks for that term, Beth!): where one of the guys repeatedly finds things that look profound on the surface of it (but lacks any will to pursue the observation), and the other doesn't do too much more than go, "Woah." Above all, in a stoner comedy -- and increasingly in those tragicomedies which reflect life -- it seems easier to drift with fate than to buck the tide: and if you are male, that is also where it stops.

Thus where the female protagonist shows have been flashing a strong message of taking personal responsibility for one's own circumstances and one's own choices, even knowing that most things outside oneself and one's own attitude will always be outside one's control, the messages of the male protagonist shows are just the opposite: tiny boat, large ocean, why bother?

It would be easy to assume that these two sharply differing approaches are due simply to differing expectations made of the two genders. Yet closer examination of current shows reveals about the same percentage of male bachelors as female "bachelorettes", with similar job levels and similar environments -- with the single exception that the voice of the disappointed family is much stronger for the women than for the men. At the same time, we find a curious trend in real-life university admissions: whereby female applicants are now so much more qualified on average than male applicants that many universities (including all the Ivy League) have established different qualifying standards for men and women. These are necessary lest the university end up with more than 60% women, and thereby be labelled a "woman's university".

It makes an ironic and possibly relevant note that had Bart Simpson's "underachiever and proud of it" been allowed to grow up, he would now be almost exactly the same age as these "trapped" protagonists, both male and female.

We always knew that the brilliant satire of The Simpsons was becoming no such thing to its increasingly young audience. Now, it seems we are reaping the earliest fruits -- not of its satire, but of our own laziness in monitoring what our children watched and absorbed and took at face value, unquestioning.

Guidelines for psychological experimentation on human subjects have been significantly tightened since the 1970s.

Enter reality television: and once again all the stops are off. It may be television, it may be signed-consent-form entertainment; but the human interactions are real ... and so will be the consequences.

I have the feeling that most reading this blog expect me to comment in some way on Barack Obama's inauguration this day. Yet I have nothing to say. I have already written on how I feel about the historical aspect and its spin, I have already written on campaign dynamics. Beyond that I have nothing to say until I see substance, not rhetoric; and even then there will be nothing that is mine to say about domestic policy. Words are cheap, no matter who says them.

About myself, I have learned that apparently I have acquired an immunity to charisma. I don't know when, or how, or why.

So I end here by reposting the link to Wired's take on the Large Hadron Collider, to which I have added what might or might not be a last comment, on the off-chance that anyone is still reading that comment thread with an open mind.

In all that long, long thread of comments, the basic polarity has not changed in the slightest: maybe 50% blind, evangelical faith in science, maybe 40% equally blind, evangelical faith in the Bible (usually set in opposition), neither side willing to test its core assumptions, each side condemning the other as having no clue what they are talking about ... and the remaining 10% having nothing inherently against either science or religion, but wondering why any risk toward this end is necessary.

Although, just maybe, I might finally have an answer to that. We are sentient beings, capable of learning about our world, capable also of determining how to interact with our world. In the course of our learning, we are presented with a series of choices, many of which involve different levels of risk, all of which set foundations and precedents for further choices. At any point we can choose to proceed on our current path, or we can choose to set different priorities.

The sum of how we choose is also the sum of who we are as a species. In every way we have chosen our own identity -- as we will have chosen our own future, whatever it should turn out to be. Let none speak of not having known, or of powerlessness. In this day and age, ignorance is willful ignorance; and powerlessness equally willful.

What we end up with, we deserve.

Daniel Paul Tammet, born Daniel Corney, has an extraordinary ability with languages and numbers. In independent testing, he has learned a basic fluency in the Icelandic language in a single week, a challenge which ended with a television interview on Icelandic television.

He has also been diagnosed autistic, specifically a high-functioning version of Asperger syndrome, accompanied by epilepsy and synaestesia. Like so many diagnoses in mental health, this one seems to have been an empirical fitting of symptom to syndrome: find a match which works well enough, and then don't look any further.

Synaestesia seems a useful catch-all, so far as it goes. We might want to remember that it describes the symptom of understanding one type of sensory perception as another, and not the reason. For example, a person with synaestesia might experience music as colour, as in the apocryphal drug-induced "I can see the music". In Daniel's case, this diagnosis is used to cover Daniel's perception of numbers as having tangible shape/form/feel/landscape and thus very different associative connotation from the standard teachings which assume that numbers are abstract symbology without emotive association. Conventional synaestesia does not act in such a fashion, although artistic and spiritual metaphor and symbolism often does.

Other things too do not fit. Asperger syndrome children tend to express earlier than Daniel did. They usually show a tightly focused interest to the exclusion of much else. Frustration is quickly expressed through whatever means the child has at hand, be it screaming or self-biting. Daniel is also part of a family of nine children, and autism is rare where there are more than two or three siblings.

I am not alone in seeing this. From the Wikipedia talk page:

I'm autistic and have autistic friends and he certainly doesn't exibit any symptoms that I've seen.

More and more, "high functioning" seems less like a diagnosis qualifier and more like an attempted wedging of a square peg into a round hole.

The key points of diagnosis seem to have been:

• a strong tendency toward being a loner
• an inability to recognise individual faces
• a single seizure when he was young
• a screaming fussiness as a baby, which could only be calmed by being swung in a blanket
• being male (most autistics and the vast majority of Asperger's children are male)
• and, of course, the ability with numbers (although not the way of perceiving them: that was not known at the time).

From what I have seen of him, he seems also to demonstrate a happiness which seems alien to most autistic children. (Even the higher-functioning autistic children and adults usually seem at best relieved rather than truly happy: when a long-delayed communicative success finally translates into agreement ... and how many of us would not agree with them?) He is extremely adept at translating not only languages we recognise as languages, but also his own personal mathematical landscape into language that can be recognised by the researchers. He might have been a loner as a child, but his ability to communicate strange concepts in terms another might understand is better than ours.

Yet it is communication -- inability to communicate, due to an inability to imagine the other person's perspective -- that is usually the clincher in any autistic diagnosis.

Let's revisit the other points:

• a strong tendency toward being a loner

He also describes a profound sense of loneliness during the same time. Yet neither of these is unique to autism, and both of these are commonly found within children considered "normal" (whatever that is). I was a loner myself, growing up and now: and if I was ever lonely, I don't remember it. I do know that I had become completely secure within my own company and my own decisions by kindergarten. (Bluntly, the other children's interests bored me. They were learning about the letter "a", I had been reading for nearly three years.) For that matter, I sometimes wonder whether autistic children really are truly lonely, or are simply taught through operant conditioning to associate their condition with the term called loneliness.

• an inability to recognise individual faces

Two of us together happened to hear this: and then we looked at each other, the other knowing me, and laughed. That other knows well to get my attention on the street by stepping directly into my path (and yet not absent-minded: strong environmental awareness, just not paying recognition-attention to individuals, don't ever ask me to give a description of a person). Our society sets much store by this, and I can say from experience that life can get very ... interesting ... when you don't recognise your chess partner of a year as your next neighbour during your physics lectures. I don't recognise faces without a great deal of effort and many work-around tricks. I think it is simply that I don't usually focus on people's faces. In fact I don't much look at things. But let the person speak: and I will know them at once.

I don't know why I am so non-visual. I am not even certain that I really am: according to others I notice small things in a given environment that pass completely unnoticed by them -- but I recognise famous actors and actresses not at all, until they speak, and then no costume can conceal them from me. I can identify facial features, but for the most part I don't find them relevant: only their expressions. Considering it now, I wonder if it is not a by-product of my having acquired and then forgotten my correctional lenses so often in Grade 2. I used to go up to the board, memorise one or more lines of whatever was written there, and then go back to my desk and write them down. I did notice that Daniel too wears correctional lenses, as do nearly 80% of modern western populations.

As I have described it, even clinical psychology would not name my inability to recognise faces a handicap, rather just a quirk, another on the wide range of normal ways to experience the physical and social world: unless I were to present it as a symptom, and perhaps one among many symptoms, and then it would be difficult indeed to see it otherwise. Once a label is applied, it is almost impossible to remove it. That subject was opened by psychologists who wanted to discover whether, having been voluntarily admitted into a psychiatric facility with a specific symptom (a voice saying "thud"), the staff would ever discover that they were not in fact mentally ill. After two weeks all but one of the researchers were released: all, without exception, with a diagnosis of "schizophrenia, in remission".

(Today, we know that 4% and perhaps as much as 10% of the population experiences hearing voices at some point in their lives, most commonly linked with a traumatic experience, without ever experiencing anything else that we would call schizophrenia. Most such experiences are startling, and some can turn out to become extremely positive. At least, we know this ... in theory.)

• a single seizure when he was young
• a screaming fussiness as a baby, which could only be calmed by being swung in a blanket

I combine these two for a reason. The context in which I learned about the existence of Daniel Tammet also included other cases where haemorrhagic strokes somehow triggered compulsive artistic expression, completely overturning the previous way of seeing the world. It even has a name ("artistic compulsive disorder"), although the only thing that name accomplishes is to give symptoms a name, similar to "irritable bowel syndrome". It does not in any way imply understanding.

One thing every person who had survived such a stroke mentioned in common: they were hideously painful. Additionally, in many cases, the stroke itself was preceded by bad and blinding headaches, weeks or months of them, in some cases. One thing every parent knows: a very young child in pain will scream and fuss. The child won't usually understand, or be able to express that pain in any other way. They only know pain, and maybe one thing that eases it a little.

My mother had smallpox as a child. (Yes, that smallpox.) I grew up knowing what smallpox scars looked like. I learned that the sores are very painful. She described to me how her parents had found only one way to ease the pain a little: by placing her into a blanket and swinging her gently back and forth.

• being male (most autistics and the vast majority of Asperger's children are male)

Slightly under 50% of the world's population is also male.

• and, of course, the ability with numbers (although not the way of perceiving them: that was not known at the time).

After many years of trying to figure out Daniel's odd abilities, researchers finally figured out that he somehow perceives what to the rest of us are abstract numbers (which happen to be symbolised by a particular shape and size) as distinct shapes, with distinct sizes and emotional connotations, each part of a flowing landscape. The visual world around him becomes a constant expression of these numbers. When Daniel came to New York City, he described how he perceived how he perceived the skyscrapers as looming 9's. In fact, researchers have been able to significantly disrupt his mathematical ability simply by presenting him with numbers that happen to be opposite in size to his template (and one of them comments on that Talk page about just that).

So let's try looking at it from the opposite direction. If his diagnosers had known first how Daniel has perceived numbers for as long as he can remember -- and then took into account the incapacitating schizophrenia suffered by his father, known to have genetic links: which diagnosis they would have come up with then?

And would even that one be accurate?

Daniel is said to have been born into an atheist family. However, as a teenager he began exploring Judaism, then converted to Islam at 15, then converted again to Buddhism at 21, and then to Taoism, and then (for now finally) to Christianity. These were not casual conversions. He actively pursued each belief structure, and often was also active within the local community of that belief structure. This is not just casual religious "shopping".

Science has given Daniel's condition a number of labels. At the same time, science has utterly failed to find a real explanation for Daniel's way of perceiving the world.

However, the Judaic and Arabic languages are cored in one possibility: the same letters which make up the linguistic symbols which describe the world are also numbers. In the mystic traditions, this truth is an expression of God: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. (And from this derives a large part of modern western numerology.) What normal teenager, knowing himself to see the world differently from those around him, would not seek for a reason?

From "Dead Like Me" -

Once upon a time, there was a traveller on horseback who finds himself facing a swamp, and he doesn't know whether to go around or try to wade through. The traveller asks a local boy: "Tell me, local boy. Does the swamp have a hard bottom?"

And the boy tells him that it does.

So the traveller guides his horse into the swamp, and they begin to sink deeper and deeper into the muck. He shouts to the boy: "I thought you said it has a hard bottom!"

And the boy says: "It does, Mr. Traveller. You're just not there yet."

We are seeing a nice recovery in commodity prices, specifically crude oil which has bounced nicely over the past week or so due to the turmoil in Gaza, so the commodity backdrop has been a bit of a positive.
- George Davis, chief technical analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Markets care not. To them, the only relevance of human suffering is its effect on the perception of scarcity.

Hamas has been democratically elected to lead the government of Gaza; but from day 1 its reputation has been against it, and every sign of compromise has gone unseen. Instead, the western world shut its doors to credit and even to common diplomacy, and turned a blind eye when Israel stopped the transfer payments from the ports. The high concrete wall has been called protection by one side and jail by the other. Its success in providing increased protection is debatable. It seems to have somewhat more success at concentrating and shutting away the people of the territory from their livelihoods, their rightful income, and from any semblance of a normal life.

Barred from a major source of the Palestinian Territory's income, it did not take long for the Hamas government to run out of money. For a brief time, Palestinian government officials were carrying cash funds across the border in briefcases, donated by Arab neighbours. These few cash transfers seemed like a lot of money, but even these millions were barely enough to keep the territory functioning.

As in so many other countries where the normal functioning of government is hobbled by outside interests, it was not enough to curb those elements within Hamas which still sought military demonstrations and violent solutions. How could it be? Even in the most stable and best-functioning governments, a few extremists will always find cause to resort to violent methods: and the Palestinian Territory has never had that kind of stability.

So violent incidents continued -- by both sides, for extremists exist among the ultra-conservatives of Israel as well, and the forced evacuation from Gaza has never sat well. Personal harassment and worse than harassment was just common enough to continue to be continually feared. The occasional bombs exploded. The occasional rockets landed. Families were disrupted, people were injured and some died on both sides, although never at the levels of the previous intifadas.

Embroiled in their own political battles and economic crisis, the western media never noticed.

Maybe that was why Israel chose this time to act. There was no question that Israel would take action. Israel has always taken action, even where such action has required the invasion and occupation of a neighbouring country: and whether acknowledged or not, the accepted ratio of retribution is 10+ Palestinian deaths per every Israeli death. (Both sides having engaged in guerrilla tactics at different times, neither side places much value in the civilian/military distinction.) At the same time, Israel's domestic window of opportunity had been rapidly narrowing before the February 10 election, and a likely change of leadership sharply away from compromise and coexistence.

In addition, for some time the tide of world opinion had been gradually tilting against Israeli policy, and with Barack Obama's election the country stood in danger of losing their only steadfast international ally. As the inauguration date neared, the window of opportunity was rapidly narrowing. Still, Israeli military response had not been in the world headlines for months, even years in some places: and out of sight is out of mind.

Yet Hamas began as a guerrilla organisation, and it has never forgotten those roots. If its central structure is forced against the wall, even those elements which had sought compromise and stable government remember how to fight back.

The markets note only that the turmoil has restored the price of oil from a sickly $39 USD a barrel to a nice recovery of over $48; and petrocurrencies around the world are breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Rabbi Eliezer argued with his fellow sages over a point of law. He knew he was right, but his fellow sages refused to accept it. He brought forward all the proof he could find, but they would not accept it from him.

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let this carob tree prove it." At once the carob tree was torn one hundred cubits from its place. Yet his fellow sages said to him, "No proof can be brought from a carob tree."

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let this stream of water prove it." At once the stream began to flow backward. Yet his fellow sages said to him, "No proof can be brought from water."

Then he said to them, "If the law agree with me, let the walls of this house of study prove it." At once the walls of the house of study leaned over, as though they were about to fall; but Rabbi Joshua cried out, saying, "Is it a concern of yours if learned men argue with one another about the law?" So out of respect for him the walls did not fall, but neither did they straighten, and to this day they stand leaning over.

Rabbi Eliezer still knew he was right, so he said to his fellow sages, "If the law agree with me, let heaven itself prove it." At once a Divine Voice spoke:

Why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer? In all matters the law agrees with him.

But Rabbi Joshua stood up and said, "It is not in heaven." The Torah has been given to mankind, and now it lives and must be interpreted in the hearts of men.

And God laughed: "My children have defeated Me!" My children have taken responsibility for their own interpretations. My children have grown up.

After serious & cautious consideration, your contract of courteous mutual respect has been renewed for the New Year 2009.

May peace break into your house, and may thieves come to steal your debts.
May the pockets of your jeans become magnets for $100 bills.
May the problems you had forget your home address.
May most of your tears be those of joy.

May you never forget how to dance.

THEN	NOW
Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. - Irving Fisher, PhD Economics, 18 October, 1929	Home sales are coming down from the mountain peak, but they will level out at a high plateau - a plateau that is higher than previous peaks in the housing cycle. - David Lereah, Chief Economist, NAR, August 2005
There will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity. - Myron E. Forbes, President, Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company, 12 January, 1928	It's impossible for prices to go down this year. - Gary Watts, Spokesman Orange Country Association of Realtors, December 2005
I cannot help but raise a dissenting voice to statements that we are living in a fool's paradise, and that prosperity in this country must necessarily diminish and recede in the near future. - E.H.H. Simmons, President, New York Stock Exchange, 12 January, 1928	If you own your own home free and clear, people will often refer to you as a fool. All that money sitting there, doing nothing. - Anthony Hsieh, CEO Lending Tree, August 2005
"Unless we are to have a panic -- which no one seriously believes -- stocks have hit bottom. - R.W. McNeal, financial analyst, 1929	I think the bloom is off the rose, but there is no doom and gloom. - Alan Nevin, Chief Economist, California Building Industry Association, August 2005
[G]ood stocks are cheap at these prices. - Goodbody and Company market letter quoted in The New York Times, 29 October, 1929 Buying of sound, seasoned issues now will not be regretted. - E.A. Pearce market newsletter This is the time to buy stocks. - R. W. McNeel, market analyst both quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, 30 October, 1929 For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright. - Irving Fisher, early 1930	Housing is still the best investment, without question. - Stan Sieron, President, Illinois Association of Realtors, early 2006 We always know that when stock markets go up, people end up buying a lot of things that are overpriced and when stock markets go down, people end up passing on a lot of things that are underpriced. I think there are probably some gains to be made in the stock market. - Stephen Harper, Prime Minister, Canada, 8 October, 2008
This crash is not going to have much effect on business. - Arthur Reynolds, Chairman, Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago, 24 October, 1929	We may see a blip up in foreclosures and delinquencies. - Leslie Appleton-Young, Chief Economist, California Association of Realtors
In most of the cities and towns of this country, this Wall Street panic will have no effect. - Paul Block, President, Block newspaper chain, editorial, 15 November, 1929	I'm so mad at my neighbor. I bought my new home here in Ashburn last summer and plan to sell it next year (after holding two years to avoid taxes) to make a nice return on my investment. The problem is my neighbor is trying to sell his house (very similar to mine) right now and he keeps lowering his asking price. Each time he lowers his price, I see my potential profits next year getting squashed. Doesn't he realize he's hurting the comps for all of his neighbors by doing this? I don't think he is acting very "neighborly" by doing this. I want to say something to him and tell him he should stop putting his interests ahead of his neighbors. It's people like him who are ruining the market for the rest of us. If he would just refuse to lower his price, we could maintain our comps and everyone would benefit. What can I do to stop him? - Question during a real estate chat held by the Washington Post, 2006
I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence. - Herbert Hoover, President, United States, December 1929 While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed through the worst -- and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. - Herbert Hoover, 1 May, 1930	We are really on track for a soft landing. There are no balloons popping. - David Lereah, August 2005 I'm calling it a soft landing: a return to what is considered to be more normal market conditions. - Leslie Appleton-Young, Chief Economist, California Association of Realtors, 2006
The end of the decline of the Stock Market will probably not be long, only a few more days at most." - Irving Fisher, professor of economics, Yale, 14 November, 1929	I'd say this is another very important signal that the economic soft patch we were all worried about is pretty much confined to March. - David Seiders, Chief Economist, National Association of Home Builders
The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern ... American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity. - Julius Barnes, head of Hoover's National Business Survey Conference, 16 March, 1930	What the market is doing is going through a correction, which it really needed. It's getting down to where it's reasonable. - Ted Martinez, representative, National Homebuilders Association, December 2005
"... despite its severity, we believe that the slump in stock prices will prove an intermediate movement and not the precursor of a business depression ... - HES, 2 November, 1929	We're now in the "middle innings" of the current economic expansion, and the next economic recession is not yet in sight. - David Seiders, Chief Economist, National Association of Home Builders, January 2006
[A] serious depression seems improbable" - HES, 10 November, 1929	The idea that we're going to see a collapse in the housing market seems to me improbable. - John Snow, Secretary of the Treasury, 2006
... there are indications that the severest phase of the recession is over ... - HES, 18 January, 1930 ... the outlook continues favorable ... - HES, 29 March, 1930 ... the outlook is favorable ... - HES, 19 April, 1930 ... by May or June the spring recovery forecast in our letters of last December and November should clearly be apparent ... - HES, 17 May, 1930 ... irregular and conflicting movements of business should soon give way to a sustained recovery ... - HES, 28 June, 1930 ... the present depression has about spent its force ... - HES, 30 August, 1930 We are now near the end of the declining phase of the depression. - HES, 15 November, 1930 Stabilization at [present] levels is clearly possible. - HES, 31 October, 1931	[H]ousing activity will remain healthy for some time to come. - David Lereah, 28 October, 2005

Eid in the United States: Official Holiday For First Time

WASHINGTON (AP) The Muslims of the United States, a scant minority in this overwhelmingly Christian country, quietly celebrated Eid al-Adha on Monday, December 8, with a present from the government, which declared it an official holiday for the first time.

But security worries overshadowed the day for many. Overall security in the United States has improved markedly in the past year, but the shooting of a woman and her two daughters and the fatal shooting of an FBI agent were gruesome reminders that serious problems remain.

In his khutbah on Monday, the imam of Washington's main Sunni mosque praised the establishment of Eid as an official holiday as a step toward easing tensions.

"I thank the government for giving chances to all to serve each other for the general benefit, and I thank it too for making this day an official holiday where we pray to God to make us trust each other as brothers," he said at the Eid service before several dozen worshippers.

The Archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, attended the service flanked by Washington DC police in a gesture of cooperation with Muslims.

"I thank the visitors here and ask them to share happiness and love with their brothers on Eid; by this they will build a glorious United States," the imam said.

"We came here to bring a message of love, respect and gratitude to our Muslim brothers and to share happiness with them as we have shared sadness with them during the cruel targeting they came under," Wuerl said in an interview with Fox News. "We will do our best for equality between people and a good life for all, whatever their religious, sectarian and ethnic background."

The Muslims of the United States, estimated to number only a few hundred thousand of the country's 360 million people, have often been the target of verbal attacks by Christian extremists in the United States, and are commonly subjected to increased security harassment at airport checkpoints.

For one woman, who left her home at the other end of the country a year ago after anti-Muslim threats spread during the beginning of the real estate crisis, this Eid was a day of bitterness. "There's not enough money, no house, no stability to prepare for Eid," said the 55-year-old woman who now occupies a one-room apartment in Washington.

But for another woman who was evicted after she no longer qualified for her mortgage, there was a bit of cheer thanks to money sent from abroad by her brother.

"We got a whole lamb for the Eid dinner. It is a symbol we love," she said.

"The United States is bleeding and we have to heal the wounds with united hands," the imam of her local mosque said at the Eid khutbah.


... so, how do you think they feel about it?

May the coming season of festivities bring joy and gladness to your hearts.

To those who are in blizzards, may the snow let up; to those in ice storms, the power return; to those in bitter cold, a ray of warm sunlight shine in. May the travel be safe, and the family well.

May the next year continue to bring food and drink, a warm (or cool) place to sleep, a roof over your head, and the perspective to appreciate these things.

All the best, for this year and years to come.

In recent months, a fair number of political officials have been choosing to give back some or all of their salaries. City councils have voted to reduce their salaries by 5 percent. Kentucky governor Steve Beshear is giving back 10% of his salary, along with several of his top officials. The Portugal bank governor has admitted his salary has dropped. In Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador premier Danny Williams has been donating his entire salary to charity since he was first elected: and he has turned his province from a have-not to a have for the first time since it joined Confederation. (It replaces Ontario, which is currently undergoing therapy.)

The United States House of Congress voted itself a pay increase, right on schedule.

I wrote earlier about the culture of entitlement that pervades top positions ... but they are not alone. Ever since the degree of Big Three desperation was made clear beyond a doubt, the UAW and CAW have been determined to excise themselves entirely from all responsibility. The fault is that of the global downturn, and of loss of consumer confidence resulting in sharp drops in purchases of big ticket items, such as vehicles. This is true, but only partly true.

From the UAW's webpage, "a typical UAW-represented skilled trades worker at GM earned $32.32 per hour of straight-time labor." This is well above the average for skilled trades workers, including those at non Big Three factories. In fact, significantly above-average wages have been the norm for the Big Three ever since Henry Ford started up his assembly line. They even lasted through the Great Depression ... but now we have a globalised economy, and the rules have changed.

In a news interview, one person who was about to be laid off at that particular Big Three factory was understandably upset: "I have three car payments to make!"

... You have three cars?

I mentioned the same clip, word for word, to other people without comment or shift in tone, and always I got the same reaction: "You have three cars?"

Once again, the lifestyle of an entitled convenience has become so firmly entrenched that there is no longer any sense that this is not typical, or even that this should not continue to be so in every respect. Entitlement is not when a working person expects to be able to receive a living wage that allows a roof over one's head, food in one's stomach, and the basic medical care that allows the person to continue to work. Entitlement is the assumption that a lifetime of above-average conveniences and perks ought to remain so.

I have written against bailouts so many times that it should not be surprising I would write against this one also: but I could not help but notice that the Senate sticking point on this one, and its eventual death knell, was the utter refusal of the union to compromise in the slightest ... and then I could not help but remember the al Italia strike, and the Sabrina strike, and the number of European national airlines that have permanently vanished from the skies due to economic difficulty.

And so, once again, we revisit the tragedy of the commons. Why not seize the opportunity for everything one can get, and let all the rest go hang?

What happened was awful. My regret is that we didn't know how troubled this person was. If I had gone back in time and known what she was going through, I wish we could have spent time trying to help her, but we genuinely didn't know.
- Simon Cowell

And what difference should that have made? One human being to another: is that not worth a little respect by itself?

Simon Cowell has long made an American Idol living by mocking any contestant who falls short of a professional level of performance. Nor does he do it in any constructive way, to help them improve their abilities. Rather, he descends habitually to ad hominem attacks such as those he heaped upon Paula Goodspeed, when along with the other judges he not only laughed at her audition, but also mocked her braces. (And for him, that is mild.)

This kind of behaviour is precisely what has made him the most popular of the American Idol judges.

One of those contestents is known to have committed suicide afterward. Based entirely on this action, she is judged as being "troubled". Yet Cowell's own actions bring him a huge salary, so society judges him not only a success, but a bar to which to aspire.

Merry Christmas.

So the United States Treasury has bitten the bullet and slashed the interest rate, not by half as most expected, but all the way down to 0.25%. For all intents and purposes, any lower and the Treasury would be paying money to the banks for them to borrow money ... and with the bank bailout having been pre-approved, that is not as bizarre a notion as it once might have been.

Those banks which were not in desperate shape before, were it obvious or occult, can now consider themselves in pretty good shape. After all, their level of risk is already fixed, and now they know that there is a federal bailout in place to cover future waves of foreclosures.

What they don't have is any incentive whatsoever to take on additional risk. At this point and this level, the prime rate between banks matters no longer at all. The only thing that matters is the willingness of lending institutions to take on new credit risks at any interest rate. To say that there is almost no trust here is to say that there is almost no water in the Gobi desert. No wonder the cuts in the prime are not being translated down to consumer levels.

Our modern economy absolutely relies on fluid credit for continued flow and continued solvency at every level, from the highest to the lowest. No matter how liquid our finances, no matter how solid our credit history: we have suddenly all become high risk. Until that perception changes, there is no reason for banks to significantly lower their consumer lending rates.

Given high job losses and threat of job losses, given high interest rates, the natural consumer response is not to borrow if at all possible ... and then watch the retail economy collapse! and the jobs it supported, vanish!

But the low Treasury rate is already having another effect. Investment is draining away from the United States, seeking more lucrative markets: and the USD is collapsing along with them. The lower dollar would be highly useful to export industry, but the level of the trade deficit should indicate just how much basic level manufacture had been outsourced during the globalisation decade. It might have been useful to the automotive industry, had American models ever managed to penetrate foreign markets. It is popular to blame tariffs for this, but tariffs have nothing to do with image. After all, European models managed it just fine, and they were faced with exactly the same tariffs.

The United States can't do anything short-term about the level of foreign debt except pay it down, and with the low USD it will now cost even more to pay it down. The United States can't do anything about its trade deficit until and unless its citizens learn how to live within their own oil self-sufficiency. Barack Obama's promises notwithstanding, it can't do anything short-term about disengaging itself from the Iraq war, with all that is involved there. Even if complete will existed from this point in time onward, it would take at least six months to a year just to set up the structures needed to disengage. As one example, far from the hardest: how much cargo room do you think it would take for 150,000 troops and their personal gear to be transported halfway across the world? How many airplanes and safe runways are available?

What the federal government can do is to step more deeply into the lending and saving business, not by buying out or bailing out other banks, but by offering these services directly to the consumer at the rates the banks are refusing to give.

What it cannot do is to educate its citizens. For a very long time now, we have lived in the assumption that credit was a natural extension of our income. Now that bill has come due -- during the holidays, when else? -- and dealing with that bottom line is temporarily strangling our ability to do anything but deal with it. Once we get past the crunch point, however: will we remember that a bill is going to come due?