ShrinkWrapped

The FDA Will Kill Us All

Have I mentioned lately how much I detest the bureaucrats at the FDA? [HT: Instapundit]

FDA Stops Stem Cells in USA

A Cultural Overview, Irony Included

Once again I think I have among the smartest and most creative commenters in the blogosphere; yesterday's comments were enlightening, though no one has been able to solve the problem posed beyond the idea of avoiding government schools.  There was one additional comment to my post worth noting; Thomas Sowell was kind enough to offer a response to an implicit question I did not specifically ask but for which I'll take credit anyway:

Cheering Immaturity

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood but actual performance-- whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere-- involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society.

...

One of the biggest fallacies of our time is the notion that, if all groups are not proportionally represented in institutions, professions or income levels, that shows something wrong with society. The very possibility that people make their own choices, and that those choices have consequences-- for themselves and for others-- is ignored. Society is the universal scapegoat.

If "luck" is involved, it is the luck to be born into families and communities whose values and choices turn out to be productive for themselves and for others who benefit from the skills they acquire. Observers who blame tests or other criteria for the demographic imbalances which are the rule-- not the exception-- around the world, are blaming whatever conveys differences for creating those differences.

They blame the messenger who brings bad news.

If test scores are not the same for people from different backgrounds, that is no proof that there is something wrong with the tests. Tests do not exist to show what your potential was when you entered the world but to measure what you have actually accomplished since then, as a guide to what you are likely to continue to do in the future. Tests convey a difference that tests did not create. But the messenger gets blamed for the bad news.

All right, he was not responding to my blog post, but I will simply chalk this coincidence up to the old maxim that great minds think alike (even though they manifestly do not most of the time.)

Other questions behind the news:

Richard Cohen wonders if anti-Semitism is becoming so respectable as to be unremarkable:

Unforgivable Silence

I always read The Economist magazine. I like many things about it, but I particularly cherish its book reviews. They are cogent and snappily written, and often deal with books that I don't find reviewed elsewhere. An example is a forthcoming biography of one of contemporary Islam's most important thinkers, Sayyid Qutb. The book gets a good review. It's more than I can say for The Economist itself.

Qutb was hanged in 1966 by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser after the customary torture. He had been the intellectual leader of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood and a man of copious literary output. One of his efforts was called "Our Struggle with the Jews." It is a work of unabashed, breathtakingly stupid anti-Semitism, one of the reasons The New York Review of Books recently characterized Qutb's views "as extreme as Hitler's." About all this, The Economist is oddly, ominously and unforgivably silent.

This is both puzzling and troublesome. After all, it's not as if Qutb was some minor figure. He is, as the sub-head on The Economist review says, "the father of Islamic fundamentalism," and it is impossible to read anything about him that does not attest to his immense contemporary importance. Nor was Qutb's anti-Semitism some sort of juvenile madness, expressed in the hormonal certainty of youth and later recanted as both certainty and hairline receded. It was, instead, the creation of his middle age and was published in the early 1950s. In other words, his essay is a post-Holocaust work, written in full knowledge of what anti-Semitism had just accomplished. The mass murder of Europe's Jews didn't give him the slightest pause. Qutb was undaunted.

The Economist is a reasonable magazine but when it comes to Israel and the Jews they seem to have become imbued with the kinds of (formerly) gentile anti-Semitism that only infrequently emerges into overt Jew hatred in the once Great Britain.  The British have a long pedigree of anti-Semitism, with the first anti-Semitic pogroms occurring in the 1100's, less than 200 years after Jews first arrived in England when their numbers were in the 2000-3000 range.  They expelled the Jews in 1290, essentially legalized their presence int he mid-1800's (after a brief try in the 1700's) and after the Holocaust prevented Jews from getting into Palestine, armed the Arabs while embargoing the Jews, and generally made clear their preference for a world with less Jews rather than more.  It is fair to say that the Brits, as much as I might like and admire our spiritual forefathers, just don't much like the Jews.  That is OK, lots of people don't much like Jews, but for the Economist to elide Qutb's Jew hatred, which is now the central feature of much of what passes for Islamic thought these days, is inexcusable.

Finally, I am not a historian, nor do I pose as one on the internet, but I have a sense that the fall of many great civilizations were heralded or accompanied by a descent into decadence by their ruling class and eventually by the masses.  Our mass culture has been there for quite some time and the "Just Do It" ethos includes the full flowering of all sexual behavior.  Stanley Crouch (the best named curmudgeon in the media) wonders if we are heading for a fall:

Sexual freedom: use with caution

Last week the daughter of a film and television star kicked up a bit of attention when the release of her first pornographic film was announced. Her father, who will remain nameless, has made a good career for himself over the last three decades and has played everything from a young soldier in the Vietnam War to a Boston cop investigating a murder and has done good work on stage as a Supreme Court justice.

In simple terms, he not only did it his way, he did it the right way. The same cannot be said of his daughter, 19, who has made clear in interviews that her role in a porno is intended to put her on the express, not local, to stardom.

We might think this sort of thing is peculiar to our time, but the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles supposedly said to a friend that he could lose a theater competition if one of his opponents had women take off their tops, which always guaranteed a victory. While that anecdote may be apocryphal, it shows how easily people can be manipulated through blatant sexuality.

The daughter of the famous actor knows this. She argues that she might get a career boost with the porno, using as evidence the case of starlet Kim Kardashian, (above) whose sex tape led to a reality show, a multimillion-dollar business of fashion products, along with a reality series for her sisters (the sublimely insipid "Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami"). She could've also mentioned that Paris Hilton became a true counterfeit celebrity when a tape surfaced of the wealthy heiress drunkenly fornicating.

If we ever had enough of a sense of shame to hold people back from publicly demeaning themselves, that sense of propriety has largely disappeared since World War II. Now, for all our social advances, we find ourselves on a march to an illusory liberation from all those imaginary lines of human division: color, sex, religion, politics.

I must admit I have no idea who Stanley Crouch is talking about (but welcome suggestions; I suppose I could always ask the Viking, who is very plugged into what passes for our current mass culture, if none of my readers know either.)   Nonetheless, the tendency of our culture to devolve often seems like it is accelerating; we have hit bottom so many times that it is impossible to predict where we will go next.  One solid prediction I can make with some confidence is that we will keep digging.

So, we have the problem of equality of outcomes derided by Thomas Sowell, Richard Cohen troubled by the Economist's insouciance in relation to Jew hatred, and Stanley Crouch worrying about the level of decadence flowering in our culture,, which leads to the obvious question:  Is the end finally near this time?

A Question for Our Times

Both Liberals and Conservatives deeply believe in evolution and in the importance of nurture on development, yet both sides have positions that are internally inconsistent and both emphasize different elements in the mix.  Despite their differences they do agree on some basics.

For example, Liberals believe that such attributes as sexual orientation, political orientation, and athletic ability are determined by genetics while intelligence, future orientation, and economic success are determined primarily by experience, early and otherwise.  Further, they believe that there are essentially no genetic differences between races or sexes.

Conservatives believe many of the same things though many believe that sexual orientation, in particular, is the result of malleable reactions to experience.  Further, they accept as givens that races have different strengths and weaknesses (not including intelligence) and that men and women are inherently different.

Where both Liberals and Conservatives agree is on the unique position of intelligence, which is either held to be a meaningless construct or unresponsive to genetics.  In reality, most policy makers simply ignore the impact of intelligence and cognitive ability on success (measured in any way you wish.)  This leads to my question of the day:

Since both left and right do not accept the impact of genetics on IQ, how might we approach educational policy in ways which maximize the abilities (inherent and acquired) of our younger generation?  Our current approach, to dumb down the curriculum and testing in order to produce an illusion of equality and competence, merely depresses the potential of all.  In other words, if our society is to maximize its human computational potential (ie, maximize our problem solving abilities) are there ways to do this while maintaining the basic stance about intelligence and cognitive abilities?

If anyone has any good ideas that are actually possible (perhaps some ways to enable mass home schooling) I would love to hear.

NB: Instapundit links to two articles today worth consideration.

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

The Times They Are a-Changin'  was the quintessential protest song from the 1960s.  The lyrics are pointed and timely.  The second stanza (below) directs "writers and critics" to pay attention to the changes taking place all around them.  The third stanza directs Congressmen and Senators to get out of the way.  It is a remarkable aspect of history that, while it might be true that it doesn't repeat, it does rhyme (with apologies to Mark Twain.)

In the 1960s the Counter-culture, with a large overlap with the Left, was the center of "revolutionary" energy and ideas.  We were young, naive, fully believed all of the glowing and overblown things we had heard about ourselves almost from birth, were imbued with (and burdened by) a surfeit of narcissist grandiosity, and thought we were the first generation that had discovered injustice and would be the generation to cure the world of evil.  Our hubris was absurd in its extent and we largely escaped the consequences of our selfishness.

 [We also thought we were the first generation to discover sex and free love but that is apparently a discovery made anew by each generation.]

What is so deliciously ironic is that those who were once in the forefront of "revolution" have now  become the ruling class, the very people who have lost touch with the zeitgeist!  They are bewildered by the changes taking place, the tidal wave threatening to begin to overwhelm them in November.  They have forgotten how to swim in the rising waters and are flailing about, trying to stay afloat.  Soon, they will sink like a stone.  There is revolution in the air, the old authorities no longer convince, and a new group of people are becoming wise to their time to return Power to the People!  


Bob Dylan- Times They Are A-Changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Stupid Political Tricks: Republican Version

I don't like opportunists and people willing to sell out the principles they profess to have in order to curry favor with people.  Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is most annoying when he is most sanctimonious.  He has now done the political version of a Greg Louganis double back flip dive:

Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne elucidates:

Is the GOP shedding a birthright?

Particularly depressing is that the idea of repealing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" was given momentum by one of the nation's most reasonable conservatives.

"People come here to have babies," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). "They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons."

For some reason I am not surprised that the liberals' second favorite (or is that second most reasonable?) conservative has joined in:

Just as dispiriting: Sen. John McCain, another once-brave champion of immigration reform, has tried to duck the issue. McCain, facing an Arizona Republican primary challenge on Aug. 24, has said he supports "the concept of holding hearings" on the meaning of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause.

First of all, this has nothing to do with immigration and securing our borders.  It is pure political pandering, hoping that the electorate is too dim to recognize how they are being played for fools.  Second, there is no chance of a repeal of the 14th amendment (which is a bit of a red herring in any event) occurring any time soon, meaning within the next decade.  Such a change in our Constitution would require a tremendous amount of preparatory work and the support of a large majority of our population.  It is not going to happen unless there are remarkable shifts in the electorate.

Both Democrats and Republicans have failed us in the last 10 years.  They have failed on securing our borders and bringing order and rudimentary fairness (not to mention American interests) to the immigration mess; they have failed to bring our fiscal house in order; they have failed to articulate and define the major struggles of our generation between freedom and tyranny. 

It is likely that in November we will be left with a divided government.  Paralysis is certainly preferable to the further damaging of our country's institutions and erosion of our freedoms that are part of a one party government, but will also leave us poorly able to respond to emerging problems.  I suppose that is the best we can hope for at this point.

The 9/11 Cordoba Mosque Controversy

I have not weighed in on the controversial plans to build a Mosque overlooking the site of the 9/11 attack, but there are important psychological elements at work in this controversy. 

First, a slight digression:  Last week my friend Steve sent me an e-mail which contained a series of pictures of new bridges either built or being built in China.  The bridges were amazing structures, the product of engineering expertise and imagination that was quiet impressive.  The Hangzhou River Bridge was particularly impressive: 

These are pictures of an unidentified bridge:
 

These bridges are not only amazing engineering feats but reflections of a confident, vigorous society, willing to take risks and build monuments.

[End digression]

The "Cordoba" Mosque is either a reference to a period in European history when Islam was tolerant and there was peaceful co-existence between Christianity and Islam in Europe, or a sign of Islamic triumphalism celebrating the greatest extent of Islamic penetration of Europe up until now.  I do know that sensitive people do not purposely propose to build monuments that offend a significant proportion of their neighbors; whether those who are offended are narrow minded or super-sensitive, too limited to share the elevated sensibilities of our Mayor and others, is a difficult question.  Perhaps the opponents are being overly sensitive.  If so, why does that mean we should ignore their sensitivities; after all, isn't the very basis of PC and its offspring, such as hate speech laws, the idea that the sensitivities of "victims" should always trump other considerations?  My slight efforts at irony should not disguise the fact that a Mosque, run by an Imam who reportedly has ties to radical Islamists, is offensive to many Americans who remember 9/11.  An Islamic group determined to improve relations with their neighbors would certainly be wise to find a less disturbing location for their religious and cultural facility. 

The location of the Mosque and the persistence of its leaders despite the distress its location has evoked in its neighbors suggests that they may not be acting in good faith.  (David Harsanyi has an excellent perspective on the problem: How Is This Tolerance?)

However one conceptualizes the controversy, what saddens me the most is the recognition that it is highly likely that the Cordoba Mosque (the financing of which is so far hidden) will be built well before the 9/11 Freedom Tower.  We are acting as if we are a tired, insecure, risk averse, and fading society; I firmly believe we can rebound, but that must wait for leadership we do not currently have.

Understanding Our New Healthcare Overlords

Earlier today I noted that our new Healthcare Overlords may not know what they are doing.  Sadly, I underestimated the magnitude of the problem.

Courtesy of Ed Morrissey, this chart may be the best case scenario:

Last week, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) had the staff of the Joint Economic Committee work on a flowchart of ObamaCare that has made the rounds of the blogosphere, thanks to its impossibly complicated representation:

Ed Morrissey calls this ObamaCare: The Infinite Bureaucracy Act

What We "Know" May Kill Us

It is very likely that the vast majority of "facts" that you think you know are wrong. 

Now, let me be clear.  There is a large established body of knowledge in the hard sciences and mathematics that are almost certainly true and accurate reflections of the underlying reality in which we are enmeshed.  However, once we depart from the realm of hard science and math, we are at sea, assuming we know where we are and barely aware of the assumptions upon which we sail. 

Yesterday I linked to an article describing the limits of our knowledge in the social sciences, What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know.  

Today OneSTDV reports on an elegant search that supports the notion that Science has become more authoritarian recently:

Evidence for Bias in the Scientific Establishment

Well, the American Enterprise Institute, home of HBD luminary Charles Murray, has compiled a good bit of data to this end. They note the increasingly authoritarian tone of recent scientific scholarship, a phenomenon I've mused on in the above posts.

Our theory is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by pressure groups who want the government to force people to change their behavior.

To investigate their hypothesis, the authors searched Lexis Nexis for authoritarian phrases like "science says we must" and "science tells us we must". I'm slightly surprised that the increase only started in the early 90's and not before.

It is a frequently made observation that often when people know the least they are most sure of what they insist they know.  Ronald Reagan made the trenchant comment that "It isn't that Liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so."  Liberals may be more prone these days to appeal to authority than Conservatives (see Global Warming, for example) but the aphorism is really more general than Reagan suggested.

As we surrender our freedom to choose our own healthcare to bureaucrats who will determine which treatments, at one particular moment of static time, are most beneficial and cost effective (just as Medicine is finally maturing into a discipline that will be increasingly capable of offering individualized treatments) we should keep in mind that our own Physiology is exceptionally complex and the same interventions that night help you might harm me. 

The Department of Agriculture is preparing, and Michele Obama promises to push, new Dietary Guidelines, despite the fact that the Guidelines most Americans have been following for the last thirty years (low fat, decreased meat and dairy, high carbs, first up with trans fats, then down with trans fats) have been accompanied by an epidemic of Type II Diabetes and obesity.  Correlation does not imply causation but neither should it be ignored.  It is undeniable that we have very little concrete data on long term effects of dietary manipulations; we should be extremely modest about proposals that attempt to direct (or force) Americans to eat certain foods that our "betters" think we should eat.  (Please take note, Mayor Bloomberg.)   A more modest technocracy would be a bit more humble about their recommendations, but then we would not have the need for quite so many of them.

It might even be that our current approach to exercise is counter-productive.  [HT: OneSTDV]

What we don't know about our Physiology dwarfs what we do know, though the next decade promises to revolutionize our understanding of how our bodies work.  It should be an exciting time if the do-gooders don't kill us first by doing too much "good."

August

Its August and Psychbloggers, continuing the tradition started by Sigmund Freud, take off the entire month.  However, since blogging is a non-traditional media, and we live in post-modern times in which tradition is reviled, I will find a compromise between the need to blog and the desire to take time off...in other words, blogging will be light during the month.

In my recent brief forays into the world of supersaturated information, I have come across some interesting notes:

The Middle Class is doomed:

So long, middle class

The crisis of middle-class America

Luckily, terrorists can't shoot straight:

Rocket, Likely Aimed at Israel, Kills One in Jordan

I'm pretty sure the UN will start hearings immediately on who could have supplied the weapons and who might have fired them; watch for a condemnation of Egypt any day now for its enabling of terror from within its borders.

This should be read if only for the sub-title:

What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know

Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.

John Opie explains...

Understanding State and Local Government Debt...

David Foster explains (deconstructs?):

Is “Liberal Guilt” a Myth?

There is a book in there David, a rather important book, at that.  I hope you have the time and energy to write it.

Finally, because August is difficult enough on the front pages, sit back, take a deep breath (because it is hard to breathe when you are laughing) and watch:

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Jimmy Kimmel from Between Two Ferns