Category: Quick Hits

In response to undercover videos from animal welfare groups depicting cruelty to and torture of animals in large scale farms and food processing facilities, state legislatures are passing tough new laws to crack down on individuals and employers who abuse animals.

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Ha! No, just kidding, they're passing laws making it illegal to record video of factory farms, slaughterhouses, and processors, or to apply for a job with any of those without disclosing involvement in animal rights groups. These efforts are remarkably similar to last year's effort to pass laws (most notably in Illinois) criminalizing video recording of on-duty police.

In both instances the argument that, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about!" is conspicuous in its absence.

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I guess that applies only to the rights of individuals, not of corporations (which are people, right?) and police (who demonstrably are not).

While Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone unarguably had a bigger cultural impact, Fear by Barry Glassner is the best non-academic book written by an academic in the last several decades. Partially inspired by the moral panics of the 1980s (satanic ritual abuse; it's everywhere!) he argues that despite living in the safest society in recorded history, American exist in a culture of perpetual fear. Some of these fears are mountains made out of anthills; how big of a threat were "bath salts" or the Swine Flu, really? In other cases we're simply afraid of the wrong things – driving is infinitely more dangerous than flying, yet few people are afraid of the former.

If we asked Americans whether nuclear or fossil-fuel power generation is more dangerous, I have little doubt that the former would win in a landslide. And why not. Three Mile Island! Chernobyl! Fukushima! The three oil spills in the United States in the past week – to say nothing of the many equally catastrophic oil-related disasters over the years, including the Exxon Valdez, Ixtoc-1, Deepwater Horizon, and more – attract barely a fraction of the attention of nuclear disasters. And that says nothing of the long-term, subtle damage caused by fossil fuels like air pollution, environmental degradation, and water contamination. Say "toxic waste" and people think of nuclear power, not Love Canal.

We're not afraid of any of that despite the fact that it represents a real threat. Extracting, producing, and burning fossil fuels is an orgy of pollution and exposure to carcinogens. That all lacks the zing of the nuclear boogeyman, though.
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Radiation, not air pollution, made Godzilla and thousands of other mutant monsters. You can build movie, novel, and video game plots around radioactive beasts and nuclear explosions. It doesn't work for fossil fuels, does it?
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Fallout wouldn't be much of a game if the central plot point was an oil spill ("Here! Quick, pour some Dawn on this oil-coated seabird! I SAID HURRY, GODDAMMIT.")

With things that are actually dangerous – fossil fuels or driving, for example – we excuse away any hints of fear. Global warming isn't real. Oil spills don't happen very often. Pollution isn't as bad as treehuggers say. I'm a safe driver. My car has eight airbags. This would make more sense if we did not simultaneously invent nonsense to be terrified about. Maybe in a bizarre way it actually makes us feel more secure. If we convince ourselves that nuclear power or flying or SARS are your biggest threats, those things are all pretty easy to avoid. With our arbitrary and irrational list of dangers kept at a safe distance (because they either don't exist or are incredibly rare) we feel blissfully secure while we go about our lives and do a great number of things that are far more dangerous.

If you're not convinced, how much opposition was there to the building of an oil pipeline through now-oily Mayflower, Arkansas?
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Would they have been a bit more agitated if the proposal was to build a nuclear waste repository or a power plant instead?
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This kind of contradiction is the natural product of a society that combines a constant state of fear with overwhelming ignorance.

Over the years I've gotten the impression from the comments (particularly on audience participation-type posts) that a good number of regular readers work in what I'll inadequately and generically call "tech" – IT, electrical engineering, programming, and the like.

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Having zero experience in your field I need to rely on your guidance here, even though it may be anecdotal.

There are some points of debate on which I do not know the facts and therefore have no confidence in my opinion, yet one side of the argument so strongly reeks of bullshit that I become certain that I am right. And every time I hear someone argue that we need to let in more foreign workers on H1B visas to do Tech Stuff because there are not enough American workers who can do it, without seeing any data my immediate reaction is to call BS. "There are not enough Americans with the necessary skills" sounds to me like "There are not enough American workers willing to live five to an apartment and do this job for $22,000/year."

It's not as though American universities have a shortage of people in the STEM fields, and the quality of American education in these areas is supported by the fact that foreign – Russian, Indian, Chinese, etc. – students come to the US in droves to get college degrees. If people travel halfway around the world to go to Stanford and Harvard and Michigan and Georgia Tech, I find it really hard to believe that those universities produce Highly Skilled non-U.

S. Citizen graduates but insufficiently skilled U.S. Citizen graduates. That makes…no sense. None.

I'm certainly not on some xenophobic soapbox here, upon which I am fighting to keep the foreign hordes away from our precious jobs.
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However, the basic argument parroted by the lobbyist tool CNN asked to write that column is illogical and implausible. He bandies about words like "innovation" as if the reason tech companies hire from Pakistan and China is that all of the world's best minds are there. It sounds a lot more like the industry's interest is in expanding the quasi-indentured servitude system that is the H1B program, which imports cheap foreign workers and works them like the rented mules that, contractually speaking, they are.

I know that most people suck at logic, statistics, and a bunch of other things without which they are easy marks for bad arguments and misleading numbers. It would be nice, however, if major media outlets and publications had at least a basic grasp of how to interpret data like non-morons.

In "Ladies Last", National Geographic presents a map of the gender gap in life expectancy in the United States. Interesting and interactive map. Well done. And here's the analysis:

How long do you have? It depends on gender and geography. In the U.S., women live longer—81 years on average, 76 for men—but a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reveals a troubling trend. Though men's life spans have increased by 4.6 years since 1989, women have gained only 2.7 years, perhaps because a larger percentage of women have lacked adequate treatment for high blood pressure and cholesterol. "This is a wake-up call," says study co-author Ali Mokdad.

Wait, what? That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen Rick Perry.

To recap, female life expectancy has increased to 81 while men lag behind at 76, but we should be alarmed that women only gained 2.7 years to 4.6 for men since 1989. So the only thing that has decreased is the female advantage in life expectancy.

While they used to outlive men by eight years, now it's only five. Absolute life expectancy for both genders has grown.

Using the magic of inductive reasoning, there appear to be some fairly obvious explanations.

1. In 1989, most of the WWII age cohort was alive and made up a substantial portion of the total population. Now many of them have died and subsequent generations – ones in which 500,000 men did not die young due to war – have outnumbered them. In 1940, women outlived men by 1 year. By 1989 that had grown to nearly 8 years.

HMMM.

2. There has been a staggering decline since 1989 in highly dangerous, male-dominated, and historically common types of work. Coal mining and logging come to mind immediately, given how the gap has shrunken precipitously in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia on the interactive map. Not only are those industries in decline, but productivity and mechanization allow fewer people to do more work.

3. There are mountains of evidence that American men are far more reluctant to get medical attention than women, making them easy victims for otherwise preventable or treatable problems.

4. Men are far more likely to die from "unnatural" causes like violence, road accidents, and suicide than women.

5. Math. Life expectancy is roughly bounded at the high end. In other words, it can't just increase infinitely and the marginal cost of increasing it once we reach the 80s is quite high. Imagine that I run the 100m in 15 seconds but you run it in 10.

If we both work our asses off for a year, I'll probably improve to 12.5 seconds, while you'll be lucky to trim down to 9.9 seconds. By starting out closer to the theoretical upper limit of how fast a human can run, of course you're going to show less of a "gain" compared to someone who is lagging far behind.

But faced with all of these really, really obvious potential explanations and data that shows women still outlive men by a sizable margin, the writer (and the author of the damn study) conclude that the best explanation is women getting too few prescriptions for Lipitor.

Cool.

Just a quick news item for today.
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As the U.S. military deploys an increasing number of surveillance drones in the Mideast, Iran is stepping up efforts to shoot them down. According to The Aviationist:

(T)he last close encounter was unsuccessful because the fighter jets scrambled to intercept the unarmed U.S. drone were discouraged from accomplishing the mission: at least one of the two F-4 Phantom jets came to about 16 miles from the UAV but broke off pursuit after they were broadcast a warning message by two American (F-22) planes escorting the Predator.

If you're keeping score at home, that's an American drone trying spying on Iran being chased by American jets we sold to Iran in the 1970s until they were scared away by the new, obscenely expensive jets we developed to make the old jets obsolete after they proliferated.
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Why do we want to spy on Iran? Because of the Iranian nuclear program that was started when American built them a reactor back in the 1950s under Atoms for Peace (Pakistan too!)

You know. The usual.

I have to put myself on Injured Reserve for the evening; I worked for about 12 hours on Sunday (woo!

Spring Breaaaaaaaak!) and my eyes cannot handle the additional hour it would take to make a proper post. You will have to do most of the heavy lifting today.

A friend of mine went to Steubenville this weekend to see the verdict (I don't think terms like "verdict" and "guilty" apply to juvenile court, but for simplicity's sake we should feel free to use them).

I suspect that she went prepared to flip out over the two accused boys being let off with a slap on the wrist.
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Shockingly, they appear to have received an actual punishment. Foremost, even more serious than the time they will spend incarcerated, is that they are registered sex offenders for life.
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Good. For reference, people who do not wish to be registered sex offenders can follow the easy step of not committing sex crimes.

How screwed up is it that the verdict still surprised a lot of us, given that there was an absolute mountain of evidence against them?

In case you missed it, CNN was pretty broken up about those poor boys and the verdict against them. While I doubt any of us want to have the rest of our lives defined by the worst decision we made at age 16, the media might bother to remember that the "real victim" is the victim and the brazenness of everyone involved in committing this crime is shocking enough to preclude sympathy.

Occasionally I have thoughts that qualify me as a terrible person, yet usually I am wise enough not to put them in writing.
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Today is not one of those times.

Just to remind veteran readers and inform new ones, there is no one more stridently opposed to American militarism than I am. With the possible exception of that old hippie lady at your farmer's market who sells bell peppers as a cover for her massive marijuana grow operation and who only wears things emblazoned with the peace sign.

I have about two years' worth of posts pre-, during, and post-Iraq War about what a monumentally bad idea the whole endeavor was, and I like defense spending as much as the average Cardinal likes getting phone calls from attorneys representing a former altar boy from the 1970s.

That said, can we just blow up North Korea already? Please? I know. I know I'm a terrible person. If it makes it any better, I have no overarching political, strategic, or ideological motivation. They're really annoying and I just want them to go away.

For the past 15 years (since the nation recovered just enough from its 1994 famine to entertain pretensions of a nuclear program) the United States, Japan, China, South Korea, and other nations have devoted billions of dollars, man-hours, and intellectual resources to the saber-rattling of a country so backward that Mongolians make fun of their infrastructure. It would be something to take quite seriously from a country that is not a living punchline – Russia, for example. It is not something that is worth taking seriously from a country whose vaunted military boasts the very latest in domestically-produced knockoffs of 1950s Soviet military technology. It's as if a child dressed up as an adult, walked into a board meeting, and started barking out orders. You'd do little more than giggle at this; how annoyed would you be if everyone else in the room decided to take the toddler seriously?

Nuclear weapons or not, that analogy holds. They don't even have enough fuel to get their Korean War-era MiG-19s off the ground. Why would anyone take them seriously? Can somebody please just say, "OK, let's go!" the next time they threaten war? It will be over in about 12 hours. Really. Not a Rumsfeld 12 hours. The U.S., South Korea, Japan, or any number of other nations could turn that entire backward, malnourished, fuel-starved piss hole of a country into a flat field of smoldering glass in less than a day.
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If they are a legitimate threat, end it. If they're not, let's stop wasting time and money in the DMZ pretending that some sort of military balance exists between one of the world's largest, fastest-growing industrialized economies and country that doesn't have electricity.

I don't hate you, North Korea. I'm just bored with you. You're not even an entertaining version. You're like a mosquito – not significant enough to present any actual danger, but just consequential enough to be consistently annoying. Neighboring countries have to be pretty sick of playing this game by now, wherein every time the Great Leader needs to solidify his power base the world's militaries have to respond to the tune of a few billion dollars. Petulant children are only cute for a minute or two.

And that is me being a terrible person.

The iconic political image of the post-Reagan era, for my money, is the 2003 Schwarzenegger campaign (in the California gubernatorial recall election) using "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister as its theme song. To see Arnold and his fellow Orange County millionaires on stage stiffly pumping their fists to a dated song about the terrible unfairness of it all was…rich. It requires the kind of total lack of self-awareness usually found only in ancillary characters in slasher movies.

If there's one thing I honestly, legitimately do not understand about politics, it's how so many well-off conservatives have managed to convince themselves that they are the victims of an unfair society.

They are the luxuriously oppressed, the forgotten, long-suffering minority that has everything that money can buy. The urge to grab these people, shake them, and scream "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR LIFE? WHAT DO YOU NOT HAVE? HOW ARE YOUR NEEDS GOING UNFULFILLED?

" is overwhelming. With right-wingers I know well, I have actually done this on more than one occasion. The amount of delusion necessary to allow someone to sit in front of a 70" TV in a giant house with two luxury cars in the garage and complain about the unfairness of it all is incomprehensible.

Recently I sat in a classroom (observing silently, neither teaching nor participating) while a group of about 20 freshmen in an honors class took turns complaining about the terrible unfairness of the concept of taxing an inheritance (the topic of the day was Edmund Burke). This segued into some broader griping about taxation – the entire concept is "wrong" and immoral because, like, what right does the government have to take MY money?

Tropes about punishing success were trodden out for their moment in the sun. And I'm watching this, half terrified and half bemused, thinking: Here is a bunch of kids at a $40,000/year private university on mom and dad's dime, to say nothing of the cars, $2000 Macbooks, "Study" Abroad trips, Greek system dues, and other expensive things with which they have been sent off to college, whining their hearts out about how thoroughly our society screws the rich. I know that college freshmen are not well-known for having a lot of perspective on anything except themselves, but it still surprises me to see such a total lack of self-awareness on display from what are supposed to be the best students in the whole crop. That anyone could have so many advantages that he or she did nothing whatsoever to earn yet still think that the deck is stacked against them is difficult to condone.

I spent the hour channeling Dave Chappelle and thinking, "Should I be choking somebody?" In hindsight, I probably should have. There are some kinds of ignorance that can't be dislodged with words.

Having somehow survived the harrowing twin ordeals of the Debt Ceiling and the Fiscal Cliff, it is with stoic hearts that we stare down the gaping maw of the Sequester.

Now that we've been down the "OMG there's a deadline and this is such a crisis!" road a few times the script feels pretty uninspired – the cable news coverage (with clocks counting backward menacingly), the grandstanding legislators, the screaming lobbyists, the grave punditry, and the USA Today-style graphics, all leading up to a last minute "compromise" that will be lauded by all and sundry. It seems like the Great Sequestration Showdown of '13 just hasn't gripped the viewing public with the same intensity as previous installments of this drama. Or perhaps that's just me editorially projecting my own staggering lack of interest in seeing yet another iteration of this tired dog-and-pony show.
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This makes me feel guilty, as I know this is important. Not only am I supposed to find this interesting, I am also responsible for convincing young tuition-paying people that it is interesting. The problem is…it isn't. This is a pattern; a new normal of Republican brinksmanship in which the party shouts "Do as I say or I'll shoot!" while pressing a gun to its own temple. Despite the Tea Party-led chants ("Pull the trigger! Pull the trigger!") they will chicken out at the last second.
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The Democrats, given what they have become, will give them half of what they want anyway, because Bipartisanship and Good Faith and Cookies. And we will end up with more bad policy, another bill designed to shower money on people who are important while also making Tough Choices and cutting spending to show that we are Serious People. Being neither all one thing nor all the other, it will accomplish nothing.

And not an hour will pass until we are warned in ominous tones of the date of the next looming showdown, hopefully coinciding with the Memorial Day summer blockbuster release schedule.

Be still, my heart.

Two vignettes:

1. Florida Atlantic University sold the naming rights to its football stadium. This is not particularly noteworthy these days. I wrote many, many years ago that it was only a matter of time until the NCAA copied professional sports and went down that road. It is a bit unusual, however, for a university to sell naming rights to a private prison corporation. The company donated $6,000,000 to the FAU athletic department for the privilege. I have to disagree with the tone of the NYT piece, which emphasizes the everything-is-for-sale environment on campuses these days. While that is certainly true, it's more pertinent to ask why these multimillionaire alumni are so eager to throw money at the football team rather than the university itself. As for the Times' point, many people find me strangely untroubled by the proliferation of corporate sponsoring, advertising, and naming on campuses. It's a zen thing; we've been moving in this direction for 30 years as a society and I've already made peace with the fact that eventually we're going to be reading or playing commercials at the beginning of each class. It's inevitable.

2. Auburn University has announced an absolute monstrosity of a "Recreation and Wellness Center" to begin construction this year. It features, among other things, a "five story fitness tower" and:

50-foot rock climbing wall with an auto-belaying system, four bordering caves for lateral climbing, a a 20-foot wet rock climbing wall in the 20,000 gallon leisure activity pool, a 45-person hot tub in the shape of a tiger paw and a third of a mile indoor track with a corkscrew formation and 10 feet of altitude.

In the past decade universities have started an arms race of non-academic amenities to entice students to campus in a very competitive recruitment environment. They're constantly jockeying to have the most opulent dorms, the most mall-like food courts, and the most Outrageous leisure activities. Gyms are a natural place for the university to be ostentatious, as it's always part of the campus tour for mom, dad, and a 17 year old with no interest in things like degree options, gen ed programs, and student-faculty ratios. In the early 2000s the fad was climbing walls; everybody had to acquire and show off a fucking climbing wall. So Auburn did took the next logical step and built, like, five climbing walls, a double-decker suspended running track, a giant "leisure activity" (read: not for swimming) pool, and a 45 person, tiger-paw-shaped hot tub that is bound to have the most disease-ridden water in Alabama – no small feat – within days of entering into service.

I understand why universities do this. It makes sense. But in an age of declining budgets, rising tuition, stagnant salaries (except for the administrators, of course), and watered down higher education, it's sad that we're competing for students by building them amusement parks, essentially. Yes, kids go to college in part (or wholly) to have fun, but good lord, do we have to be so explicit about it? College kids will manage to have Fun regardless; it would be nice if we didn't have to build, quite literally, big shiny playgrounds full of toys for them. Oh, but woe to the campus that doesn't follow Auburn's lead.

Next thing you know, we'll be offering them free spring break trips to Cancun, alcohol and Valtrex included.