Archive for the ‘Mental Irrationality’ Category

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Biofuels Boom Could Fuel Rainforest Destruction, Researcher Warns

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Farmers across the tropics might raze forests to plant biofuel crops, according to new research by Holly Gibbs, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics, chances will be good that we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks,” she warned.

Policies favoring biofuel crop production may inadvertently contribute to, not slow, the process of climate change, Gibbs said. Such an environmental disaster could be “just around the corner without more thoughtful energy policies that consider potential ripple effects on tropical forests,” she added.

Gibbs’ predictions are based on her new study, in which she analyzed detailed satellite images collected between 1980 and 2000. The study is the first to do such a detailed characterization of the pathways of agricultural expansion throughout the entire tropical region. Gibbs hopes that this new knowledge will contribute to making prudent decisions about future biofuel policies and subsidies.

Gibbs presented her findings in Chicago on Feb. 14, during a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The symposium was titled “Biofuels, Tropical Deforestation, and Climate Policy: Key Challenges and Opportunities.”

More… ➡

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Biofuels, Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Food Shortages, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Peak Oil, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

U.S. infrastructure crumbling

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

The nation’s roads, bridges, levees, schools, water supply and other infrastructure are in such bad shape that it would take $2.2 trillion over five years to bring them up to speed. But even that huge chunk of change would only raise their grade from a “D” average to a “B,” according to the latest “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” released today by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

“We’ve been operating on a patch-and-pray system,” says ASCE President D. Wayne Klotz. That is, patch something and pray that it holds up—instead of providing regular improvements for aging facilities.

Like a car, he notes, if you keep skipping oil changes and ignoring the funny clanking noise, it’s going to be a lot more expensive to fix the major problems happen down the proverbial road.  In fact, the current estimate of $2.2 trillion is 70 percent more than the $1.8 trillion the ASCE estimated it would cost to bring the U.S. infrastructure up to par four years ago. And the D grade has remained the same.

“It’s the kind of report card you would have expected on the eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire,” says Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank in New York. “It’s not the kind of grade you want to bring home to Mom.”

Flynn says a major problem is that we take the infrastructure for granted, which makes it difficult to generate awareness until there’s a major event, such as the 2007 fatal bridge collapse in Minneapolis or levee failures during deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“There’s no sex appeal to invest in it, so we don’t,” he says.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Mental Irrationality | No Comments »

Many drug trials never see publication

Friday, February 13th, 2009

Why am I not surprised, when corporations and their unrelenting drive for profits above all else are behind so many medical decisions made in the U.S.A?

– – – – – – –

Results of most drug trials are unreported, inaccessible to clinicians and patients, a new study confirms

 Patients asking their doctors if a new drug is right for them would do well to also ask for supporting evidence. Conclusions about drug safety and effectiveness in reports submitted to the FDA are sometimes changed to favor the drug in the medical literature, a new analysis finds. And nearly a quarter of submitted drug trials were never published at all, researchers report in the Nov. 25 PLoS Medicine.

Information published in journals is the most accessible to health care professionals and also drives marketing of new drugs. The new study suggests that this information is incomplete and biased, says health policy expert Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study.

An-Wen Chan, who wrote an accompanying commentary but was not involved with the work, says he does not think health care providers will be surprised to learn of suppression and inaccurate reporting of new drug information.

“These new findings confirm our previous suspicions that this is happening on a much broader systemic level. It shows that information is unavailable to those who really need it the most — the clinicians and the researchers,” says Chan, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “If we take the view that research on humans is ethical, is allowed based on an assumption of public good, then all clinical trial information should be publicly available.”

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

The End – of Wall Streets Boom

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

– I’ve written before on how blessed I feel to have the friends I have.   Good intelligent sincere people.   And we are each blessed as we, for a moment, are allowed to see the world through each other’s eyes.   We share and we listen and we are each enriched by our exchanges.     I feel especially fortunate to have the friends I do because they enrich me immensely.

– One of my friends sent me a link to the following story which I read this morning.   He has a degree from Oxford in Economics and after a good deal of thought about the state of our world, he and his family have moved from Europe to rural New Zealand.

– Read the story and I think you’ll see why a lot of us are thinking there’s little hope for humanity’s current attempt at building a global civilization.

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The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

When I sat down to write my account of the experience in 1989—Liar’s Poker, it was called—it was in the spirit of a young man who thought he was getting out while the getting was good. I was merely scribbling down a message on my way out and stuffing it into a bottle for those who would pass through these parts in the far distant future.

Unless some insider got all of this down on paper, I figured, no future human would believe that it happened.

I thought I was writing a period piece about the 1980s in America. Not for a moment did I suspect that the financial 1980s would last two full decades longer or that the difference in degree between Wall Street and ordinary life would swell into a difference in kind. I expected readers of the future to be outraged that back in 1986, the C.E.O. of Salomon Brothers, John Gutfreund, was paid $3.1 million; I expected them to gape in horror when I reported that one of our traders, Howie Rubin, had moved to Merrill Lynch, where he lost $250 million; I assumed they’d be shocked to learn that a Wall Street C.E.O. had only the vaguest idea of the risks his traders were running. What I didn’t expect was that any future reader would look on my experience and say, “How quaint.”

I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

More… ➡

– Research thanks to Robin S.

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Mental Irrationality, New Zealand, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

Thinking about a thousand-year depression

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

– An excellent piece from The Automatic Earth; a Blog I’ve just started following.

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Cyclical terms like “recession” and “depression” are looking less appropriate by the day. It’s like calling the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance a “depression”.

I know the our situation is vastly different from the state of the world in Roman times, but the idea that we could be on the brink of a fundamental reset of civilization is intriguing, to say the least.

I’ve been convinced for several years that we are looking at the convergence of a set of wicked interlocking global problems — ecological problems (climate chaos, the death of the oceans, fresh water shortages etc.), energy shortages due to fossil fuel depletion, and overpopulation with the resulting pressure on the global food supply. This convergence is happening under the umbrella of the current global financial collapse that constrains our ability to respond to any of these problems individually, let alone any further problems that might emerge from interactions between them.

This unfortunate collision makes the future of our civilization very murky indeed. Writers like James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, Carolyn Baker and Sharon Astyk (along with people like Stoneleigh and Ilargi at The Automatic Earth) have been warning about the possibility of a generalized, unrecoverable collapse of modern civilization for a while now. They have generally been derided by the mainstream as millennialist prophets of doom — driven more by their own subconscious fears and dark desires, their research full of confirmation bias.

The events unfolding around us now, however, cast their optimistic mainstream critics in a somewhat different light. None of them — even the Roubinis and Krugmans – have fully appreciated the severity of the world’s financial predicament. Their comforting bromides (and even their more pessimistic utterances) have been overwhelmed by events on a weekly basis. It has become clear that for all their careful analysis of trunks and tails, nobody truly understood the shape of the entire elephant.

This evident failure of comprehension brings their entire analysis into disrepute. And that should make us ask – if they failed to comprehend the underpinnings of a calamity in their own domain, what does that say about the possibility that they also failed to understand the dangers being trumpeted by the doomers they have derided?

After all, we are seeing the same outcome in the climate crisis as in the financial one – the trends are uniformly negative, and are unfolding much faster than the professionals in either field predicted. There are new signs from world bodies like the International Energy Agency that the same situation is developing with respect to the world’s oil supply – the more pessimistic members of the Peak Oil crowd appear to be heading for vindication.

So, following a “major, rapid contraction” (aka collapse), could our civilization end up staying on the mat, unable to rise from the ashes of our former glory? That’s unknowable of course, but hardly inconceivable. Several factors give that speculation some foundation.

The first confounding factor is the spectre of irreversible climate change. That could irreparably damage the world’s food production capacity through shifts in rainfall and the reduction of snow and glacial cover that supplies much of the world’s fresh water for agriculture.

The second factor is the permanent depletion of the compact, high-density, transportable energy supply represented by fossil fuels. We’re putting a lot of effort into developing electrical alternatives, of course. There are two major challenges in the way, though. The first is the relative infancy of the industry, and the fact that it will require both capital and fossil fuels to enable its continued growth. The second longer term problem is that the use of electricity requires a higher level of technology in the infrastructure needed to manufacture, distribute, store and convert it into work. This may not seem like much of a a problem today, but if our global industrial civilization goes into a decline, growing parts of the world may find the maintenance of such infrastructure increasingly difficult.

A third factor that may get in the way of recovery is the depletion of easily-recoverable resources such as metals. The decline in the average quality of various ores being mined today is well documented, and is likely to continue. While recycling can recover much of the metal currently discarded as waste, recycling facilities capable of producing enough output to feed our civilization’s needs do not yet exist. They would face the same hurdles as the build-out of electrical supplies I described above.

You might think that such a situation will take so long to develop that we will be able to address the situation before it gets quite that dire.

One consideration that works against that hope is that human beings are not, for all their cleverness, fully rational creatures. Research has shown that most of our “rational” decisions are made at a deeply unconscious level, to be dressed up with rational justifications only upon their emergence into the conscious mind some time later. The truth of this proposition can be seen all around us in the competition between environmental remediation and economic imperatives, in the obstruction of alternative energy development, in our repeated creation of financial bubbles — in all the myriad ways in which we as a society work tirelessly against our own best interests as individuals and as a species.

Even worse, events have recently shown a terrifying ability to outstrip our expectations, in both speed and severity. We may not have nearly as much time left as we think. A lack of time coupled with an inability to respond rationally (or even to accept the evidence of our eyes) does not bode well for the future of this civilization.

It’s conceivable that our current civilization will never regain its feet after this storm has burst upon us. We will endure as a species no matter what happens, of course, and it’s even probable that we will rise to new heights. It’s also quite possible that the rebirth of this Phoenix will take a long, long time and that those new heights will be unrecognizable to someone raised in today’s world of 401(k)’s, Credit Default Swaps, automobiles and gigantic concrete cities.

– To the original: ➡

– Research thanks to Kael for this.

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Deforestation, Desertification, Extinctions, Financial melt-down, Food Shortages, Fundamentalism, Mental Irrationality, Ocean Acidification, Pandemics, Peak Oil, Pollution, Rising Ocean Levels, Social Breakdown, Terrorism, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages, Weather deterioration | 2 Comments »

On Gay Marriage

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

– I’ve been blessed during most of my adult life in having gay friends. Their strong presence in my life has helped to desensitize me to that nascent homophobia that was an inevitable part of my growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood in the 50’s and 60’s.

– Their attractions towards members of their own sex and their practices in the bedroom may be different than mine, but I simply don’t care. They respect my practices and feelings just as I do theirs. How else in an enlightened world should it be?

– Some of us (both gays and straights) have discussed this topic a lot in recent weeks with a special emphasis on California’s recent vote on Proposition 8.

– Undeniably, prejudices still run deep here in our American society. But, progress is being made – albeit, over decades. Women’s rights have improved much as has racial equality though there is still a ways to go on both. But, thus far, gay rights have been trailing behind.

– These situations are generally deplored in polite civic conversations and essays but silently condoned in far too many private hearts. I, for one, think we should each speak our minds on these things publicly and let those who are timid and on the fence, as to what they believe, see that there are many of us willing to speak up.

– As a white heterosexual male, I don’t, as they say, have a dog in this fight. But that’s all the more reason to speak up. We should not, in good conscious, leave the work of struggling for social improvement to those who are oppressed.

– So, dear readers, be clear then. I support full equality for women, all racial groups and for gays. It may not be the world we live in today, God help us, but it is what the better world of the future should look like.

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Our Mutual Joy

– from Newsweek Magazine – Dec 6, 2008

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

Let’s try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. “It is better to marry than to burn with passion,” says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country’s pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: “The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition.”

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else’s —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. “Marriage” in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God’s will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

More… ➡

– Research thanks to John P.

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Posted in Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Philosophical, Religion - The Wrong Way | 1 Comment »

The Crisis & What to Do About It

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

George Soros– About two years ago, I read The Age of Fallibility by George Soros ➡ & ➡ and I was very impressed.  He has long had an alternative and persuasive view of how markets work.   Either he’s been very lucky, or there’s a lot of truth to his analysis.   The man has become a billionaire by walking his own talk.

– I, like many of you, have read endless ‘explanations’ of what’s gone wrong with the U.S. and the world’s financial markets.   Some have been plausible, some silly and some impenetrable.  But none has impressed me more than what follows here.

– Here’s George Soro’s  explanation of what’s happened and what should be done about it.   I’ve got two specific quibbles about it, which I will leave to the end of this post.  But, overall, it is the best thing I’ve seen on the ongoing financial crisis.

– Enjoy.

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1.

The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like OPEC raising the price of oil or a particular country or financial institution defaulting. The crisis was generated by the financial system itself. This fact—that the defect was inherent in the system —contradicts the prevailing theory, which holds that financial markets tend toward equilibrium and that deviations from the equilibrium either occur in a random manner or are caused by some sudden external event to which markets have difficulty adjusting. The severity and amplitude of the crisis provides convincing evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with this prevailing theory and with the approach to market regulation that has gone with it. To understand what has happened, and what should be done to avoid such a catastrophic crisis in the future, will require a new way of thinking about how markets work.

Consider how the crisis has unfolded over the past eighteen months. The proximate cause is to be found in the housing bubble or more exactly in the excesses of the subprime mortgage market. The longer a double-digit rise in house prices lasted, the more lax the lending practices became. In the end, people could borrow 100 percent of inflated house prices with no money down. Insiders referred to subprime loans as ninja loans—no income, no job, no questions asked.

The excesses became evident after house prices peaked in 2006 and subprime mortgage lenders began declaring bankruptcy around March 2007. The problems reached crisis proportions in August 2007. The Federal Reserve and other financial authorities had believed that the subprime crisis was an isolated phenomenon that might cause losses of around $100 billion. Instead, the crisis spread with amazing rapidity to other markets. Some highly leveraged hedge funds collapsed and some lightly regulated financial institutions, notably the largest mortgage originator in the US, Countrywide Financial, had to be acquired by other institutions in order to survive.

Confidence in the creditworthiness of many financial institutions was shaken and interbank lending was disrupted. In quick succession, a variety of esoteric credit markets—ranging from collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to auction-rated municipal bonds—broke down one after another. After periods of relative calm and partial recovery, crisis episodes recurred in January 2008, precipitated by a rogue trader at Société Générale; in March, associated with the demise of Bear Stearns; and then in July, when IndyMac Bank, the largest savings bank in the Los Angeles area, went into receivership, becoming the fourth-largest bank failure in US history. The deepest fall of all came in September, caused by the disorderly bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in which holders of commercial paper—for example, short-term, unsecured promissory notes—issued by Lehman lost their money.

Then the inconceivable occurred: the financial system actually melted down. A large money market fund that had invested in commercial paper issued by Lehman Brothers “broke the buck,” i.e., its asset value fell below the dollar amount deposited, breaking an implicit promise that deposits in such funds are totally safe and liquid. This started a run on money market funds and the funds stopped buying commercial paper. Since they were the largest buyers, the commercial paper market ceased to function. The issuers of commercial paper were forced to draw down their credit lines, bringing interbank lending to a standstill. Credit spreads—i.e., the risk premium over and above the riskless rate of interest—widened to unprecedented levels and eventually the stock market was also overwhelmed by panic. All this happened in the space of a week.

– More… ➡

 – Research credit – my apologies.   One of my friends sent me this and I’ve managed to forget who it was.

– Quibble #1:  The old saw that for a carpenter, the answer  to every problem involves a hammer comes to mind when you read Soros.   Oh, his analysis is penetrating and relevant, no doubt.  He see everything through a financial lens which is particularly appropriate when he’s discussing the current crisis. But, I know from reading The Age of Fallibility, in which he discusses larger issues like history, politics and the environment, that he sees all of these, as well, through that same lens.   That it is a lens he wields well, is not in doubt.   That it is the best lens through which to analyze everything is.

Quibble #2:  In his piece, above, he discusses the need for a new type of regulation to prevent bubbles.  What he doesn’t address is that if part of the world’s financial markets implement such regulation and others do not, then there will be an incentive for those willing and wanting to take more risk in hopes of larger profits to migrate towards the less regulated markets.   This seems to me, inevitable.   And, as it progresses, the regulated markets will have to respond by lessening regulation if they want to stay competitive.   And the entire cycle will begin again with everyone racing down the same slippery slope.   A functional global agreement on regulation could prevent this and provide a fair and level playing field for all.   But the human urge to push to the front of the line and cheat in various ways will, forever, be a challenge even if such a global and functional agreement can be reached – and I’m not at all sure that it can.

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Financial melt-down, Mental Irrationality, The Perfect Storm | 3 Comments »

Half the Sky: How China’s Gender Imbalance Threatens Its Future

Friday, November 14th, 2008

– Just read an excellent article written by Mara Hvistendahl for The Virginia Quarterly Review.  

– It is all about the gender imbalance that is currently so endemic in China and many of the Asian countries.   In some places, the gender ratio has gotten to 153 males to 100 females and the consequences down the road of such imbalances are serious.   I highly recommend this article.

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When Wu Pingzhang took his wife to Nanjing so she might give him a boy, things were looking up. Development had finally trickled down to Suining, his forgotten corner of China. Landlocked and four hours from the nearest major city, in the hardscrabble Huai Valley, Suining was once the second poorest county in Jiangsu province. Now, farmers were finding work in Shanghai and the wealthy cities around it—constructing skyscrapers, laboring in China’s overnight factories, changing the diapers of nouveau riche babies. They were sending back money en masse, thousands of wire transfers all directed to Suining’s Agricultural Bank, and returning home with bags of cash. Once back, they bought apartments in new buildings and furnished them with appliances they had little experience operating. As an air conditioner repairman with two cell phones he kept on day and night, Wu Pingzhang was among the first to profit.

Liu Mei, his wife, was renowned for her cooking, and as his wallet swelled so did their bellies. By the time her belly grew for a different reason, Wu Pingzhang had enough money to rent a spacious room in town, away from his ancestral village, in a cluster of slapdash cement-block buildings, above a portrait studio called Flying on the Wind. To brighten the room, the studio lent him an airbrushed canvas backdrop—a floor-to-ceiling vista of clean white windows opening onto a glittering blue sky—and he arranged his own appliances, bought from customers secondhand, in front of the backdrop like a set in a play: a Wanbao refrigerator, a Midea microwave, a PANDA color television. The centerpiece was an upright air conditioner that stretched from the cement floor to near the ceiling. Wu even had enough to afford a frivolous indulgence, a collection of Cultural Revolution-era Mao pins he kept sheathed in a red velour case. He felt entitled to an heir.

More… ➡

– Hat tip to CFR.Org for alerting me to this article

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Kirby on gay marriage: It’s official – I don’t care

Sunday, November 9th, 2008

– Ha, this is an excerpt from the October 26th, 2008, piece by The Salt Lake Tribune’s columnist, Robert Kirby. 

– Funny stuff indeed, since he’s writing from the heart of Mormon country and they, in their Christian purity, have declared gay marriage to be anathema.  

– Go Kirby!    Maybe you’ll wake them up (though I doubt it).

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

A couple of years ago, I wrote a column in which I announced my official position on gay marriage. Basically, I don’t care.

Not only do I not care if gays get married, it is none of my business. As a flaming heterosexual, it’s a full-time job for me just to keep my thoughts clean in church. I don’t have the energy to fret about somebody else’s libido.

The column must have resurfaced on the Internet. I’m getting mail again telling me what a failure I am as a Mormon because I’m not solidly behind Proposition 8. As I understand it, the California ballot item would prevent the domestication of homosexuals. Or something like that.

[snip – here were a number of appeals for him to change his mind]

Hard as it is to counter such brilliant logic, my position hasn’t changed. The only serious concern I have about gays getting married is that they’ll register someplace pricey.

The church is serious about the sanctity of marriage. I get that. But aren’t more potentially “dangerous” marriages already being performed out there?

For example, I hear in church all the time about marriage being ordained of God. But I also hear about how the glory of God is intelligence.

Shouldn’t it be against the law for stupid people to get married? What’s more harmful to society – two well-dressed men getting married and settling down, or two idiots tying the knot and cranking out any number of additional idiots?

You should have to pass a harder test to get married than the one we currently have. Essentially, there are but two questions: “How old are you?” and “Is that your sister?” Hell, you could pass this test just by guessing. 

More… ➡

– research thanks to PHK

Posted in Mental Irrationality, Personal, Philosophical | 1 Comment »

Does Your Personality Influence Who You Vote For?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

Does your personality influence who you vote for? The short answer is yes, according to John Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire. As Americans go to the polls in record numbers to vote for the next U.S. president, some voters will crave social stability and others will crave social change. Liberals and conservatives divide according to these personality preferences.

“Our votes are an expression not only of which candidates are best – the Republicans, Democrats, or those candidates of another party – but also of our own way of perceiving and thinking about the world and what is good or bad about it. Our personal perceptions and thoughts in this area (and others) have been shaped over time within our personalities,” Mayer says.

Personality is interior and private, with no direct access to the outside world (everything is filtered through the senses: one’s eyes, ears, touch, etc.). For that reason, each person creates a mental world that represents the real one to a greater or lesser degree. Mental models guide each person and how he or she perceives the world, including those social features he or she they prefers or abhors.

Certain personality characteristics generally influence whether a person is a liberal or a conservative.

Liberals:

  • View social inequities and preferred groups as unjust and requiring reform.
  • Prefer atheists, tattoos, foreign films and poetry.
  • Endorse gay unions, welfare, universal health care, feminism and environmentalism.
  • Exhibit creativity, which entails the capacity to see solutions to problems, and empathy toward others.
  • Tolerate complexity and ambiguity.
  • Are influenced by their work as judges, social workers, professors and other careers for which an appreciation of opposing points of view is required.

Conservatives:

  • Willing to defend current social inequities and preferred groups as justifiable or necessary.
  • Prefer prayer, religious people and SUVs.
  • Endorse the U.S. government, the military, the state they live in, big corporations and most Americans.
  • Are more likely to be a first-born, who identify more with their parents, predisposing them to a greater investment in authority and a preference for conservatism.
  • Have a fear of death, reflecting an enhanced need for security.
  • Are conscientious – the ability to exert personal self-control to the effect of meeting one’s own and others’ demands, and maintaining personal coherence.
  • Need simplicity, clarity and certainty

More… ➡

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