Author: Brian

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naught lawn

The Oak Park Outlaw
… she gardens her front yard
… city sends citation
… war ensues

The scofflaw, Julie Bass,
Rejected trees and grass,
And took to life of crime
With parsley, sage and thyme.

Her crime is avant garde:
The beds in her front yard
Contain illegal greens,
Like peppers, peas and beans.

Thank God the planner saw
Within the public law,
A means to prosecute
Before she planted fruit.

The plaintiff, Kevin R.,
The Oak Park planning czar,
Will see the line is toed
By pointing to the code.

But folks can misconstrue
What’s ‘suitable’ to do,
So Kevin has deferred
To ‘common’ as his word.

And what is more unique
Than cucumber or leek,
When planted in a bed
Where grass should grow instead.

Uncommon as they are
Outside a mason jar,
She’ll need to clear her yard
Of broccoli and chard.

Then justice will prevail,
And Oak Park can exhale,
Devoid of squash and kale,
With Julie safe in jail.

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truth isn’t out

By Joe Keohane:

Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong.”

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wrong about wolves

Oops. We’ve been wrong about wolves.
Wrong about dogs too says John Bradshaw via Salon: How we came to misunderstand dogs.

Throw out the choke chain and shush those dog whisperers.

But it’s fascinating to learn that the influential studies about wolves — which have so heavily influenced how we treat dogs — were seriously flawed.

In the earliest studies of wolves, going right back to the late 19th century, they put wolves together in zoos. I think, for its time, the science was perfectly valid, but they did construct these wolf packs assuming that wolves you put together in a zoo would form a society which was typical of wolves. And then it emerged — really, didn’t emerge until the 1990s, when it became possible to really keep an eye on wild wolf packs with developments like GPS — that families should behave completely differently to groups of animals that are not family.

It’s basically the conception, now, that the wolf is an animal that breeds [a lot like] many other social species, birds and all sorts of things, not just mammals. The young, when they grow up, have essentially two choices. One is to stay and help their parents raise the next generation, the next litter. The other one is to leave. Staying behind is genetically very good because they share genes with their parents. When those conditions are good, it’s a sensible strategy to stay around for a couple of years. Help your parents, learn a bit more, and then go off on your own. And that’s essentially the way that the wolf biologists now conceive wolf societies. Family-based units. Also, voluntary. I think the key point is it is voluntary.

The young, the so-called subordinate or submissive animals, are not there because they’re being compelled to stay by their parents, by a diet of aggression. They’re there voluntarily and, in fact, have to almost ask their parents if it’s OK to stay every now and again. Because, of course, they are competing for food and so on. So it’s turned the whole idea of wolf society on its head.

And you believe positive reinforcement is always the way to go for dogs in all situations?

With all the research we’ve done — I’ve worked a lot with the military, and with dogs used in places like prisons to sniff out narcotics, I’ve worked with people who train dogs for obedience competitions, and with people who train guide dogs — most of them now use positive reinforcement. The research, there’s not very much of it, but the research that’s been done all points in the direction of the dog is much more reliable if it’s been trained with reward, whether it’s been trained to help a blind person around or whether it’s been trained to attack terrorists. The dog that goes into that because it’s fearful of its handler is less effective, and particularly less predictable, than the dog that’s been trained that biting somebody’s arm is fun, which is how they do it. So, I’ve obviously not been privy to every single bit of training that the military have ever done, but most of what I’ve seen has been very much focused on positive reinforcement, and seems to be very effective.

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we secrete delusion

Perhaps there is a journey about ourselves here:

“How our brains secrete religious and superstitious belief.”

Yes. Michael Shermer uses the word ‘secrete‘.

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies.

How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths.

Religions and superstitions may stem from the brain’s ability to spot patterns and intent…

…

And as Frank Schaeffer notices, “The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world’s greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.

“The delusion is this: ‘We’re chosen, special and enlightened, and only we have The Truth’.

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porn molecules

philtrum says: July 5, 2011 at 8:11 pm

Naomi Wolf always had a tendency to histrionics, but she’s gone totally off the deep end in the past 10-15 years.

I recall that in “The Porn Myth” she rhapsodized about how beautiful and empowered ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives must feel because their husbands don’t even get to see other women’s hair, or something like that. (Women living under the Taliban must have the hottest sex lives of all!)

Oddly enough, she was unsympathetic, to the point of misogyny, about the women who claimed Julian Assange had assaulted them. Like Phyllis Chesler, she’s really stopped doing anything resembling principled feminism and is now exclusively working out her own demons.

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mall cattle

American Fez:

Personally, I am glad that the middle-class is being ground into economic dust.

They are the bovine majority after all, who invented leisurewear, vote for politicians, and sign petitions to prevent others from doing things that they don’t understand.

It is incredible that anyone as mean-spirited and as greedy as the middle classes can point an accusing finger to even the most avaricious of tycoons.

We are all accessories to economic crimes, of course, but only they plead innocence.

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these are not winners

Lucy Kellaway reporting at the BBC:

I’ve amassed a treasure trove of data that overwhelmingly supports a long-held pet theory of mine.

The three worst traits of chief executives are a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-knowledge and a quite extraordinary willingness to give themselves the benefit of the doubt.

When it comes to describing their dark sides, 58 out of 60 leaders felt bound by the same rule – any weakness is perfectly admissible, so long as it is really a strength.

They almost all cite impatience, perfectionism and being too demanding – all of which turn out to be things that it’s rather good for a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) to be.

What is particularly interesting about this mass outpouring of faux weaknesses is that there is no difference between men and women, and no difference between Americans and Europeans.

All are as bad as each other.

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way back when

Scott Rosenberg at Salon:

Then Facebook started to get massive. And consultants and authors started giving us advice about how to use Facebook to brand ourselves. And marketing people began advocating that we use Facebook to sell stuff and, in fact, sell ourselves.

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shades of dominance

Dave Winer:

When IBM hit the wall, it was with a revolution they called the Micro-Channel Architecture. It was touted as a way to take back the PC industry from the cloners. But it was also a way to reign in the power of Microsoft, who was IBM’s upstart. Didn’t work, it only cemented Microsoft’s position, though it took Microsoft a few years to realize it.

With Microsoft it was the great call to arms in late 1994, when Bill Gates rallied his team and told each of them to maneuver their battleships and aircraft carriers into position. He thought he had met his own Microsoft (he had been waiting for it) and its name was Netscape. Not realizing that the problem wasn’t Netscape, it was a sea-change in the tech business analogous to the one that IBM had failed to overcome. His upstart was the web, not Netscape.

Now it’s Google’s turn.

 

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ponder ponder ponder

If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world. If you have money in the bank, your wallet and some spare change, you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthy. If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the one million people who will not survive this week. If you never experienced the danger of battle, the agony of imprisonment or torture, or the horrible pangs of starvation, you are luckier than 500 million people alive and suffering. If you can read this message, you are more fortunate than 3 billion people in the world who cannot read it at all.

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the shale gas hustlers

It’s not good to hope that natural gas will adequately buttress oil:

The reason for this is that, unlike oil and coal, natural gas is usually carried (after cleaning to remove water oil and any other contaminants) through a pipeline that often runs (via additional pumps) directly to the customer. They, in turn, don’t usually store it, but burn it as needed, drawing the supply straight from the pipe. The problem that this gives the marginal producer is that the gas in the line must be at a certain pressure if it is to move down that pipe to the customer, and then come out of the nozzles at sufficient flow to be useful. That pressure has to be achieved, at the well once the natural pressure of the gas in the well has fallen over time and production, with a compressor, which cost money to install, run and maintain. At a certain point in the well life the gas being produced falls below the point at which it becomes economic to pay for that compressor (which is only a part of the total costs that an operating well will incur). It may even be (at the rates of decline being seen in many current wells) that the decline is so swift that as soon as the natural pressure falls below that needed for the pipeline, that the well closes and a compressor is never economical. In these cases the well life may well only be three or four years, rather than the fifty of the company model.

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misconceptions and realities

Who doesn’t pay taxes?

snippet:

As they say on the right, a poor man never hired anybody.

Therefore, taxing the rich hurts everyone else.

The contrary idea: job-holders actually create rich people.

 

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the burning question

Umair Haque:

Authentic prosperity isn’t about stockpiling chits and bits that you can — if you’re lucky — sell to the next guy before the house of cards collapses in on itself. It’s watching the people you love grow and flourish, making the dreams you’ve dared to nurture and safeguard come roaring to life, and, above all, living a life that matters long after you’re gone. That’s the stuff not merely of shareholder ‘value’ — but of authentic, enduring, human worth. Hence, I’d gently suggest: the economic sparkplug missing from our so-called prosperity won’t be invented in Silicon Valley, manufactured in Shenzhen, hawked by Madison Avenue or Wall Street, or ordained by Washington. It will be found in the pursuit of wisdom, grace, humility, courage, and great achievement. It’s the hard work of investing in the people you love, the dreams you have, and living a life that matters.

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refeudalized

“Can science and the truth withstand the merchants of poison?”

Al Gore rips TV networks:

“Thomas Paine could walk out of his front door in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks of his home.

“Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station, or to the headquarters of nearby Comcast – the dominant television provider in America – and tried to deliver his new ideas to the American people, he would be laughed off the premises.

“The public square that used to be a commons has been refeudalized, and the gatekeepers charge large rents for the privilege of communicating to the American people over the only medium that really affects their thinking.

“Citizens are now referred to more commonly as ‘consumers’ or ‘the audience’.”

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don’t ask don’t tell

Sgt. Maj. Barrett has a long military resume, including combat service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he doesn’t need a microphone to get his point across.

And to drive the point home, he produced a pocket copy of the Constitution.

“Get over it,” he said. “We’re magnificent, we’re going to continue to be. … Let’s just move on, treat everybody with firmness, fairness, dignity, compassion and respect. Let’s be Marines.”

 

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noise is not a future

In the meantime, Gregor Macdonald…

It frankly doesn’t matter that some states, or even the United States, created non-farm jobs since the lows of 2009. The US economy is a large system that employed over 146 million at its peak last decade.

Now, having added nearly 30 million to its population over the past 10 years, the US employs 6-7 million fewer people than in 2005.

The implications for the operating costs of this system, from Social Security to Defense Spending are obvious. Thus, it’s a failure of analysis—an inability to comprehend scale—that leads people to conclude good news, or even bad news, from the month to month data.

Indeed, calling a +30,000 jobs number on the national level a ‘disaster’ has as little meaning as calling a +150,000 jobs number ‘good news’.

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shame shame shame

The professor wrote a book, ‘Why Leaders Lie‘.  

We’re nuts if we don’t know.

This book is many citations of whopping lies throughout history. Of course this is a good book.

Slate says it’s ‘willful falsification’. When character refuses worth, says me.

Leaders lie to their own people more than they do to foreign audiences, says Professor Mearsheimer. He’s taught at the University of Chicago for 28 years. His video interview on C-Span is fun. He adds color, insight, charm. He’s convincing.

Sociopaths lie. Leaders lie. Detestable.

We know far too little about leaders.

We are damaged by our ignorance.