Yes! Yes! Yes!

I saw this on MSNBC, where there were giving Nelson a tough time for running such a sexually explicit ad during the family hour. The next segment provided tips for baby boomers hoping to improve their sex lives.

Link

Core Bellman constituencies will probably be interested in this post over at eripsa's blog.

And now for something completely different...Michigan politics

We've got three ballot issues here in Michigan this year. Prop 5, if passed, would mandate that education funding rise with inflation. It's pretty clearly going to fail. Prop 3, if passed, would either ban or reinstate the ban or eliminate the ban on hunting what are called 'morning doves' but are actually white pigeons. And then there's Prop 2.

Prop 2, if passed (and I'm betting on it passing), would ban all forms of affirmative action in the state of Michigan. Here's a completely accurate paragraph from the New York Times:

“If voters think about it as being about race, black and white, support goes up,” said Ed Sarpolus, vice president of EPIC-MRA, a polling firm in Lansing. “So the opponents are trying to show that it’s not just race, that it would hurt women, hurt Michigan’s economy, and they’re having some success with that.” |link|

Sometimes it seems like everybody opposes Prop 2 -- the governor, her Republican challenger, the Dems, the Chamber of Commerce -- except for the citizens of Michigan, four out of five of whom are white.

For myself, I'm really torn on the issue of how opponents ought to talk about Prop 2. On the one hand, winning matters and the best chance to win now requires playing down the fact that affirmative action programs benefit racial minorities. On the other hand, winning matters and if opponents of Prop 2 lose this campaign without challenging the electorate to think critically -- and honestly -- about race, then they'll have missed their best chance to push the conversation about race into a new frame.

...and now I think I've pretty much convinced mysel that Prop 2 opponents ought to talk about race. Here's the thing. The core of the argument against affirmative action programs is the claim that race doesn't matter in America. That claim happens to be false, but when supporters of affirmative action avoid talking about race, they themselves make it seem as if it were true. I mean, if we can have a debate about affirmative action without mentioning race, how could it possibly be true that we ever need to think about it?

Ruining a life from around the globe

No Foreign Press

A friend on the Council of Ministers told me one of my blog essays, Iraq Without a Gun, was translated into Kurdish and published in Erbil's daily newspaper. This was news to me. (The concept of intellectual copyright has not made its way to the Middle East yet.)

In that essay I mentioned the lying cheating bastard Mr. Araz who picked me up from the airport. His company wanted to charge me 350 dollars a day for a driver and translator, about twice the going rate. And to make sure I hired a driver every day he told me it was dangerous to go anywhere by myself.

It isn't dangerous in the Kurdish autonomous region. More people are killed from violence in Oregon, where the crime rate is low, than in Northern Iraq. But Mr. Araz played up it up for all it was worth, hoping I would pay extortionist rates to stay safe. (Needless to say, he did not get the job and I was not kidnapped or killed.)

I had no idea when I wrote that piece that it would be translated into Kurdish and published in Mr. Araz's hometown. I had no idea I would instrumental in ruining him, that I would publicly "shame" him in his conservative Muslim society that prides itself on hospitality and friendship with Americans. But that's exactly what I learned had happened.

Somehow, I don't think Totten would go to, say, St. Louis, and later write something harsh about a local without figuring on the locals actually reading it. It's odd that he thought nobody in Kurdistan would read his comments, especially since he has friends and associates there. I don't know if this is a natural mistake for world travelers to make, but it sure seems like a dumb one.

Also consider this. I suspect that foreign correspondents are no less likely than their domestic brothers and sisters to gonzo up a story now and again to sell articles and, furthermore, they are far more insulated from the consequences. If Mr. Araz--whose life was apparently ruined by Totten's article--was slandered by the piece, what is his recourse?

(I don't think that Michael Totten's account of Mr. Araz is false or exaggerated, and his post reads to me as somewhat contrite about the unanticipated outcome. But we all know that some journalists have less attachment to the truth than others.)

Clock radio update

In comments to this post, Midkiff wrote:

Can't you just return the radio? Best Buy has a 30 day return policy. I think it is more damning that you were just gonna throw it away.

Which is right, except that I was never actually planning on throwing the radio away. My plan was to suffer and whine. It turns out, though, that tolerating a substandard alarm clock is more difficult than I had supposed. So now I have a lot of clock parts and no clock.

Here's a philosophical question for you: Is half of an LED display properly described as part of a clock? A clock part?

Laying down the law from state to state

Caught a few seconds of the Castro video on CNN and was happy to see that Fidel rocks the Adidas:


By the by, the photo above is from an August 18 news story (here) because I'm not clever enough to search Google for recent news images. I swear to you though that Castro is wearing Adidas in the new photos as well -- the big difference is that in the new photos Castro's sportswear is monogrammed. Classy!

Michigan politics

Prior to 2006, the record for spending (combined) on the governor's race in Michigan was $38 million. Here are the figures through October 20 this year:

• DeVos-R             $39.3 Million

  
  

• Granholm-D          $11.6 Million

If anything, DeVos has stepped up his media spending in the last week, so you can bet that his spending number will go up at least another $15 million.^[1]

Where does DeVos get all this money? Good question:

Granholm had more cash on hand -- $4 million to DeVos' $1.9 million -- but DeVos can continue to tap into his personal wealth. Since the end of August, he contributed $18.5 million of his own money into the race, bringing his total personal spending on his campaign to nearly $35 million. |source|

Granholm, somehow, has a significant lead in the polls.
----------
1 For what it's worth, last night's local news reported that DeVos had now spent $59 million. It's not worth much though, because they also reported that the previous combined total spending was $18 million, and that figure is demonstrably false.

Why Lou Dobbs gets it Wrong on Immigration

The immigration issue has been a frequent topic of discussion here at the Bellman, from discussing "nativist paroxysms of the Republican base" to proposals for making green cards to guest workers more easily or amnesty programs for illegal immigrants.

Lou Dobbs just wrote a book and has been doing the talk show circuit. One of his big issues is immigration, but I think he gets it badly wrong and I'm curious what other Bellmaniacs think.

For instance, Dobbs wrote for CNN:

"I've said from the beginning that we can't reform immigration laws until we control immigration, and we can't control immigration unless we control our borders and our ports. Constructing the border fence certainly is a good beginning to our efforts to control our borders, but let's be honest about the legislation: It isn't nearly enough, and far more must be done. A congressional victory lap isn't in order for funding only half of a 700-mile fence along a nearly 2,000-mile border." |CNN|

I think Dobbs is making a couple of arguments here. He's been repeating these arguments elsewhere, but I think the above quote is a succinct statement of his view.

He seems to argue that we need to reform our immigration policy, but the prerequisit e for an improved immigration policy is something approaching total control of the immigration across our southern border.

This strikes me as a naïve argument and bad public policy.

It's naïve because in the real world we almost never have the luxury of having total control over a problem and then deciding how we want to regulate it. Some problems are long standing and it seems unlikely that we'll ever be able to control them entirely. I'm thinking of issues other than immigration such as drug abuse, mental illness, poverty, sexism, racism, and resistance to the metric system. Should we wait until we've total control over these issues before improving our laws? Then I think the laws would never be improved.

Law enforcement policies almost never entirely eradicate problems, you don't judge them that way. The best we can hope for by switching law enforcement tactics is to get a comparative advantage¹, moving us slightly closer to our desired public policy goal.

It's bad public policy because Dobbs ignores the underlying cause of Mexican immigration: the lack of jobs in Mexico. Our southern border is the only place in the world where a 3rd world country shares a border with a 1st world country according to Charles Bowden's article in Mother Jones.

The way to resolve the immigration problem is to improve the Mexican economy, not to build some stupid fence.

The whole idea that any fence (regardless of funding and congressional support) would stop illegal immigration is absurd. Immigrants will still cross the border in planes, trucks, trains, or simply tunnel under the border.
______

¹ I use comparative advantage in the sense it is used in policy debate |See the Debate Outreach Glossary's entry|, not the term as it is used in economics.|See Globalise Resistance's Glossary|

Clarification

Thanks to a charming documentary aired last night by the Discovery Channel, I think that I can parse this:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday that Vice President Dick Cheney was not talking about a torture technique known as "water boarding" when he said dunking terrorism suspects in water during questioning was a "no-brainer."
|CNN via This Modern World|

You see, if your interrogation technique were to involve, say, attaching electrodes to the genitalia of the subject^[1], then it would behoove you to first dunk the subject in water for maximum conductivity. Simple.

Do I get a no-prize?
----------
1 Or is it 'object'?

Something like anarchism in the UK

All of our lives would be emptier without Big Bill Saletan. Today, he links to this NY Times article about a movement in the UK to, get this, destroy roadside cameras tasked with catching speeding motorists.

Here's the best bit from the article:

In a recent case, 28-year-old Craig Moore, an engineer from South Yorkshire, ran into trouble when, in the words of a spokesman for the Greater Manchester Police, “instead of just accepting that he had been caught traveling above the speed limit, Moore decided to blow the camera apart.”

Using thermite, a pyrotechnic substance often used in underwater welding, Mr. Moore succeeded in wrecking the camera, but its hard drive survived — along with videotape of his van driving toward it and then driving away, as the picture dissolved in a cloud of fiery sparks. He was sentenced to four months in jail.

Mostly I'm just amused by the whole thing, but it does raise some interesting questions about our relationship to technology. I guess it's fairly obvious why people would be more likely to act out against a camera than a cop, but why is it that being policed by a machine sparks such anger? All I know for sure is that I'm infinitely more likely to kick a soda machine that rips me off than a counterperson who gives me the wrong change.

I suppose that the answer has something to do with the fact that a machine won't listen to reason. The thing is, it hasn't been my experience that cops listen to reason. Maybe it's just that cops look like the sorts of things that listen to reason.

Anyway, for more pics of broken speed cameras, and advice on how to destroy offending cams, check out this site. And don't forget to play their camera spotting game.

butyraceous

[from Latin 'butyrum', butter]

adj.
Resembling butter in appearance, consistency, or chemical properties.

What can't Mother Goose do?

File this under neat things I don't know much about. Here's the background for the excerpt below. Scott 'aren't you the Dilbert dude?' Adams suffered from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a rare neural condition in which speech is impaired because (the hypothesis goes) the part of the brain responsible for controlling speech shuts down, with the result that attempts at speech misfire, causing spasms of the vocal chords. The really odd thing about the condition is that those affected can still use their voices for things other than speech. For example, Adams retained his public speaking voice and, like many who suffer from the condition, was able to sing.

Got it? Ok, now check this out:

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Not 100%, but close, like a car starting up on a cold winter night. And so I talked that night. A lot. And all the next day. A few times I felt my voice slipping away, so I repeated the nursery rhyme and tuned it back in. By the following night my voice was almost completely normal. |The Dilbert Blog|

Did I mention that the condition is supposed to be permanent?

I don't really know what to say about the notion of 'remapping', and I suppose that misdiagnosis is always a possibility, but I have to say that Adams' plan of therapy makes a lot of sense. I guess the lesson here is that everyone benefits when engineers get sick.

The bubble, it is bursting

I've been hearing anecdotal reports from home-buying friends and friends of friends, but now there's data:

New home prices took their biggest hit in more than 35 years in September, the government said Thursday, the latest sign that builders are struggling to unload a glut of unsold homes as the nation's real estate market cools.

The lower prices may have worked, as the annual pace of new home sales climbed 5.3 percent to 1.08 million last month, according to the Census Bureau report. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a reading of 1.05 million, which would have been flat with the initial August reading.

But the median price of a new home tumbled 9.7 percent from a year earlier to $217,100. It was the sharpest drop since December 1970, when prices posted an 11.2 percent decline, and was the fourth largest year-over-year decline on record. |CNN|

Now I guess we get to see if all those dire predictions about the effects of this were on the money. Personally, I love a surprise.

Thoughts on Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige"

First, a short review: This is a good film, which in some ways improves upon the flawed novel by Christopher Priest. It's a trick film, so if you haven't read the book or seen the film, don't click past the jump!



* When Angier (Hugh Jackman) first meets Nikolai Tesla (David freakin' Bowie), Tesla demonstrates a trick in which a light bulb is powered from, apparently, nothing. The real Tesla did this trick all the time, and nobody actually knows how he did it. We do know how he lit up all the light bulbs sticking out of the ground, however, which was also a real feat by the real Tesla. He filled the entire planet with electricity!

* When Angier is using the drunk actor as a double, there's a funny scene in which Bordon (pretending that he doesn't know the actor is the double), points out that once a double is incorporated into the trick, the double has absolute power over the magician. Midkiff pointed out that once we find out what Bordon's trick actually entails, this speaks to the types of pressures they have put on each other just to keep this secret alive.

* There is a scene in which Bordon and Bordon are trying to figure out how to out-do Angier's final trick. Unlike most of the clever misdirection in the film, this seems forced. Given the nature of Bordon's trick, he could easily match or exceed Angier's "50 meters in a second!"

* It's interesting that it never occurs to Angier to let one or more of his doubles live. With just one use of the machine (and with, therefore, no murder suicide, um, death) Angier could have replicated Bordon's trick using Bordon's method as many times as he liked. Perhaps if he had known about Bordon's double at that point in the narrative, it might have occurred to him. But he might have rejected the idea out of hand: He didn't want to share applause with his actor double, so he probably did not want to share his life with himself. Actually, it's probably just as well that this didn't go to Harold Ramis territory.

For all the Agelistas knocking on doors right now

Shorter Michael Rosen: We must not allow the nazi pope to turn Wisconsin into another Bangladesh!

megagaltastic

[American neologism, first attested on 'the show with zefrank', October 19, 2006]

adj
Characterized as having an extensive vocabulary.

Pimp my tiger

via egg.