Christmas Wishes

As we finish out the year, let's keep an eye on icasualties.org, which tracks coalition military fatalities in Iraq. Through this morning, there have been 17 military fatalities this month, with 11 of those due to hostile action. If this trend continues through the end of the month, December will have the lowest fatality rate of any month since the invasion.

We should all take a few minutes to thank, if only in our hearts, the 4204 coalition soldiers, sailors and marines who have fallen in the liberation of Iraq, those who were seriously wounded and their families. Those of us who are able to do so, and particularly those of us who have supported the war from the beginning, might want to consider making our thanks somewhat more tangible. Here is one list of charities that will make efficient use of donations.

Have You Ever Noticed

That it's hard to find staples at Staples because everything is labeled "STAPLES?"

Winning Is Losing

Welcome to the 'Don't Divorce Me Club' (Kyung Lah, CNN, 12/24/07)

In the corner of a small Japanese restaurant, a dozen dark suited businessmen gathered at a large table.

A Japanese couple walk through a park filled with cherry blossoms in Tokyo.

Smoke hovered over the dinner and beer disappeared as quickly as it was poured.

At first glance, it looked like a typical Friday night post-work scene played out all over Tokyo's taverns.

But then your eyes stop on a poster-sized sign propped up next to one of the middle-aged men. It reads:

Three Golden Rules of Love:

• Thank you (say it without hesitation)

• I am sorry (say it without fear)

• I love you (say it without embarrassment)

All the men at the table stood up. Equally spaced out and still wearing their stiff black suits, they chanted in unison, "I can't win! I won't win! I don't want to win!"

Of course, losing is also losing, but at least this way you can say that you lost intentionally.

Merry Christmas

To those of you who believe in that sort of thing (which, oddly, includes most of you who claim to believe in nothing at all of the sort). For you, our traditional Christmas Carol:

We three Dunnoist bloggers are;
On Christmas we sit at the bar,
Gin and tonic, so ironic,
Rubbishing Jehovah.

Refrain:

O stars of gases, fusion displays,
Stars, a source of gamma rays,
Nowhere leading, us unheeding,
Wholly natural displays.

Born a primate on Africa’s veldt
Born a monkey without a pelt,
Despite endeavor, die forever,
Even in the Bible belt.

Refrain

Received wisdom I decry,
My own reason I live by.
Prayer and praising, just navel gazing,
Better to worship π.

Refrain

Religions are all the same to me,
Just an excuse for bigotry,
Hating, lying, killing, dying,
Blinding the bourgeoisie.

Refrain

Glorious now behold Us rise;
From the muck we’ve made us wise.
Alleluia, Alleluia,
We deserve the Nobel Prize.

Refrain.

Movie Views

We went to see I Am Legend today. It's well worth seeing albeit unrelievedly bleak; the bleakest mainstream Hollywood movie I've ever seen. It's even religious.

But it's also the first movie I know of that takes the position that what the world really needs is 6 billion fewer humans, more or less. There is, at the end, in the background a perfect Gaian touch that will unite religious and environmental zealots in wishful sighs.

Crimes and Cover-Ups

Ever since Watergate, we've been told that "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up," meaning that we could forgive the President breaking into the Democratic campaign headquarters, or Monica Lewinski, if only he hadn't lied about it. Everyone's heard this advice, hardly anyone follows it.

Right now, though, we're being treated to a particularly interesting controlled experiment testing this theory. Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds both took anabolic steroids in violation of law and the rules of baseball. Giambi more or less confessed and came clean. He was voted the come-back player of the year two seasons ago and continues to pursue a lucrative baseball career.

Barry Bonds is screwed.

So at least in this instance, this advice turns out to be good. It's better to confess than to cover-up. It might work particularly well in this case. "Confessing" was embarrassing for Giambi, but he wasn't in any danger of going to jail and not in serious danger of incurring severe penalties from baseball. Lying to grand jury, on the other hand, is very bad if you get caught. Even if Bonds isn't convicted, we'd have to say that he's in worse shape than Giambi.

Why don't people follow this advice. Maybe their stupid or evil. But I think that they're just loss averse. Loss aversion is one way in which people are, in the economic sense of the term, irrational: we are risk averse to gains but risk preferring when it comes to losses. If you ask people whether they'd rather have $500 outright or a 50% shot at $1010, most people will just take the $500. We're risk averse. On the other hand, if you ask people whether they would rather just pay $500 or take a 50% shot at paying $1010, most people will take the bet. We're loss averse and our loss aversion outweighs our risk aversion. (Cognoscenti will recognize the work of Kahneman & Tversky in this hypothetical.)

Barry Bonds, faced with the choice between certain embarrassment immediately or a relatively small chance of severe legal penalties in the future, chose the latter. He's loss averse.

Nothing For Me.

I Know I've Been Busy...

Fears of al-Qaida link as blasts kill up to 67 (Ian Black, The Guardian, 12/10/07)

Two car bomb blasts, one a suicide bombing, killed dozens of people in Algiers yesterday, fuelling fears of a north Africa-wide al-Qaida front targeting national and international interests.

The near simultaneous attacks at the end of the morning rush hour were believed to be Algeria's deadliest, with as many as 67 people killed.

...But I'm surprised I missed our invasion of Algeria.

As Long As It's Not For Your Children

Want to Go 'Green'? Stay Married: Divorced Households Have Negative Impact on Environment, Study Finds (Ashley Phillips, ABC News, 12/3/07)

Environmentalists who are thinking of getting a divorce may want to reconsider, a new study at Michigan State University finds.

Households in which a divorce occurs have a greater negative impact on the environment in terms of efficient use of resources than the households of married couples, according to research that will be published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The reason is simple — it's all about efficiency, says Jianguo Liu, lead author of the study who has the Rachel Carson chair in ecological sustainability at the university's department of fisheries and wildlife.

We've known for a while that children of divorce do worse on a host of measures than children whose parents don't divorce. What do people determined to divorce do about that fact? They lie to themselves about it: they just want me to be happy. This always raises the question, have these people ever met a child? Anyway, people are just perverse enough to choose divorce in spite of their own children but avoid divorce "for the children." Soon the Greens start lobbying to get rid of no-fault divorce?

There was, of course, the woman in the news recently for having chosen sterilization "for the children." Apparently she needn't have bothered; two or three can live as (carbon) cheaply as one. And if the one's Al Gore, it's apparently two or three hundred.

Darwin Disproved?

I've been amused by the complete lack of discussion, in all the usual places, of this experiment. To summarize, in 2004, geneticists found some fairly long stretches of DNA that are identical among humans, rats and mice. This means that these genes have not been subject to any viable copying errors or mutations over millions of years. Since as far as we know all genes are equally subject to change, that would seem to indicate that these genes do something rather important such that any change is selected out. Because genes that important must to something interesting, scientists excised them out of some lab mice to see what they would get. What they got was, so far as they could tell, perfectly normal mice. The ultraconserved genes don't seem to do anything at all.

To put it in a nutshell, if this is right than the theory of natural selection has to be wrong. One experiment is obviously not enough to bring us to that conclusion and yet we might want to get ready for the possibility that one of the pillars of modern thought is about to come crashing down.

But Can They Duplicate That Sweet, Sweet Guilty Aftertaste?

Seattle soda-maker promises ham flavor will be kosher (AP)

Jones Soda Co., the Seattle-based purveyor of offbeat fizzy water, said Friday that it was shelving its traditional seasonal flavors of turkey and gravy this year to produce limited-edition theme packs for Christmas and Hanukkah.

The Christmas pack will feature such flavors as Sugar Plum, Christmas Tree, Egg Nog and Christmas Ham. The Hanukkah pack will have Jelly Doughnut, Apple Sauce, Chocolate Coins and Latkes sodas.

"As always, both packs are kosher and contain zero caffeine," a Jones news release noted.

The rules for land animals are simple: Jews can eat them if they have a completely split hoof and chew their cud. Pigs have split hooves but don't chew their cuds. Jews being Jews, we're already arguing about whether a pig genetically engineered to chew its cud would be kosher.

Shakespeare and Relgion

The poet's basic Christianity is very beautifully expressed in Measure for Measure, where the genuinely saintly Isabella reminds Angelo, the self-righteous Pillar of Society, of the divine scheme of redemption and of the ethical consequences which ought to flow from its acceptance as an article of faith-ought to flow but, alas, generally do not flow!

Alas, alas!
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgement, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new-made.

These lines, I would say, express very clearly the essence of Shakespeare's Christianity. But the essence of Christianity can assume a wide variety of denominational forms. The Reverend Richard Davies, a clergyman who flourished toward the end of the seventeenth century, declared categorically that Shakespeare had "died a papist." There is no corroborative evidence of this, and it seems on the face of it unlikely; but almost anything is possible, especially on a death-bed. What is certain is that Shakespeare did not live a papist; for, if he had, he would have found himself in chronic and serious trouble with the law, and vehemently suspected of treason.... (The casuists of the Roman curia had let it be known that the assassination of the heretic Queen Elizabeth would not be a sin; on the contrary, it would be registered in the murderer's credit column as a merit.) There is, therefore, every reason to suppose that Shakespeare lived a member of the Church of England. However, the theology which finds expression in his plays is by no means consistently Protestant. Purgatory has no place in the Protestant world-picture, but in Hamlet and in Measure for Measure the existence of Purgatory is taken for granted.

I am thy father's spirit, says the Ghost to Hamlet,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin'd to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul;
freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start
from their spheres....

In Measure for Measure, Claudio gives utterance to the same fears. Death is terrible not only in its physical aspects, but also and above all because of the awful menace of Purgatory.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling! 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a. paradise
To what we fear of death.

In King Lear, the poet presents us with another world-picture that is neither Catholic nor Protestant. Purgatory exists, but not hereafter. Purgatory is here and now.

I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead..........

Whatever else he may have been, Shakespeare was not a precursor of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Indeed, during the years of his artistic maturity-the years that witnessed the production of Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and King Lear, he would seem to have passed through a spiritual crisis that made any facile kind of positive thinking or positive feeling impossible.

-- Aldous Huxley

The National Pixie Counsel Strikes Back

Of all the dumb things people I disagree with say -- obviously, an innumerable list -- this may be the agonizing nails on the chalkboard worst:

Fighting Talk [John Derbyshire]

David: Is it really correct to call Ron Paul an "anti-war" candidate? He's not against war, which is what "anti-war" means; nor even against this Iraq war, which is what we all suppose it means in today's context. He just thinks that the U.S.A. ought not go to war without a declaration of war from Congress. Which is, after all, what the Constitution says.

Here's what the Constitution actually says:

Article I, Section 8: The Congress shall have power ... To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.

It does not say that "Congress shall have the power to invoke the powers of our dark Lord by enacting the ritual words of power 'The United States hereby declares war.'" Congress has authorized every war we've been it; it has recognized it, funded it, passed resolutions about it and threatened to walk away from it. It has declared war in every sense but the ritual (other than in five specific cases). When the Framers wanted officials to use a particular form of words, they said so; what they wanted from the war powers clause was to make clear that Congress must agree to our waging a war. When Congress makes clear it does agree, by, say, authorizing the use of force in advance of the war, it is silly and childish to suggest that it hasn't done what the Constitution requires.

Total Number Of Natural Resources Exhausted During All Of Recorded History?

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered metal-rich sedimentary deposits in a New Hampshire lake that grow faster than any other deposits found in the United States. Understanding the environmental conditions that aid in the creation of the structures, which contain copper, iron and other heavy metals, could be helpful in discovering new metal sources.

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That's Two

The American Prospect argues for abolishing the Air Force, an argument that the Secret Blog has also made. Hard to imagine this juggernaut being stopped....

If we wanted to do something about global warming, we would.

We are committing the fallacy of composition when we argue from the premise that every man can decide how he will act to the conclusion that the human race can decide how it will act (for example, with regard to the rate of increase of population or the choice between war and peace).... This, or a similar fallacy, is committed whenever we assume, without adequate reason, that we can speak about groups in the same ways in which we can speak about their members, that we can spedak of a nation having a will or interests.... Of course, it may be possible to do this; there may be predicates applicable (in the same sense) to a group and to his members, but this cannot be assumed without evidence. It may also be possible to introduce a different but useful sense in which a predicate normally applied to individuals may be applied to a group; but if so, the new sense must be explained.

J.L. Mackie, "Fallacie," p. 173, as quoted in Hardin, Collective Action (1982), p.1.

To Bedevil Naive Darwinists?

Purpose of appendix believed found (AP, 10/6/07)

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut.

That's the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week.

"Purpose," huh? Nobody here but us teleologists.

Trees, Meet Forest.

Student takes his C to federal court: Judge dismisses suit against UMass (Jonathan Saltzman, Boston Globe, 10/4/07)

Marquis, a 51-year-old paralegal seeking bachelor's degrees in legal studies and sociology, filed a 15-count lawsuit in US District Court in Springfield in January after a teaching assistant graded a political philosophy class on a curve and turned Marquis's A-minus into a C. Marquis contends that the university violated his civil rights and contractual rights and intentionally inflicted "emotional distress."

Marquis - who salts his comments with "strike that" - acknowledged he was alarmed the C might lower his grade point average and make him less attractive to a law school.

But suing over a grade doesn't make you less attractive to law schools?

Have You Ever Taken A Series Of Logical Steps

Secessionists meeting in Tennessee (Bill Poovey, AP, 10/3/07)

Separated by hundreds of miles and divergent political philosophies, the Middlebury Institute and the League of the South are hosting a two-day Secessionist Convention starting Wednesday in Chattanooga.

... only to end up in Transylvania?

Every Oppressed Minority Gets One, Eh.

The Center For The Study of Canada, dedicated to the growing field of Canadian Studies.