Fully Myelinated

Friday July 11, 2008

Waterboarding Christopher Hitchens actually volunteered himself to be waterboarded and then write about it for Vaity Fair. You can watch the rather disturbing video here and read about it here. No matter how much the Bush administration wants to call it "harsh interrogation," it is torture, plain and simple. Waterboarding is not "simulated drowning," rather it is drowning that stops before it kills the victim. Here is some of Hitchens' firsthand description:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

It disgusts me that many Americans, and worse, our leaders would like to define American morality downward-- "but the terrorists behead people." So long as we look to terrorists for our moral and ethical principles, we might as well hang it up as a nation.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 11 2008, 03:29:10 PM EDT ) Permalink

Thursday July 10, 2008

A graphical history of names I came across a super-cool website today. I've long been intrigued by statistics on baby names, since, oh, at least 1999 or so. The Social Security Administration has long maintained a webpage with interesting data (and much enhanced since I used it in our baby name searching in 1999). Today, I discovered the NameVoyager at the baby name wizard. Type in a name and the site graphically traces the popularity of the name since the 1990's. I couldn't resist playing around with all sorts of names. For example, you can see the recent increase in the popularity of Old Testament names (e.g., Noah, Joshua, even Ezekiel). Or the dramatic decline of names-- Bertha was actually a top 10 name in the 1890's, but it is not even in the top 1000 now. Or discover that Jessica-- the #1 name in the 1980's-- seems to have been a fad and is in a rather steep decline, unlike Ashley, another popular 80's name holding on much better. I could go on. Have some fun with it yourself. Or, just consider me a hopeless loser who needs to get to work.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 10 2008, 02:11:38 PM EDT ) Permalink

Why are conservatives happier-- the answer

A while back I wrote about the findings that conservatives seem to be happier than liberals and offered a little speculation on the matter. One of the (many) reasons that John Jost is a better social scientist than me is that he actually went out and found the answer. From the recently published paper, "Why are Conservatives Happier than Liberals?"

Napier, Jaime L., and John T. Jost. 2008. Why are conservatives happier than liberals? Psychological Science 19, 6 (June): 565-572.

Abstract: In this research, we drew on system-justification theory and the notion that conservative ideology serves a palliative function to explain why conservatives are happier than liberals. Specifically, in three studies using nationally representative data from the United States and nine additional countries, we found that right-wing (vs. left-wing) orientation is indeed associated with greater subjective well-being and that the relation between political orientation and subjective well-being is mediated by the rationalization of inequality. In our third study, we found that increasing economic inequality (as measured by the Gini index) from 1974 to 2004 has exacerbated the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives, apparently because conservatives (more than liberals) possess an ideological buffer against the negative hedonic effects of economic inequality.

One way of looking at this is that liberals are less happy because they are bothered by others' unhappiness; conservatives, not so much. Of course, there's something to be said for an ideological buffer to make you happy. One of my favorite findings from psychology is that depressed people actually have a more accurate view of themselves then persons who are not depressed.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 10 2008, 01:12:24 PM EDT ) Permalink

The economic impact of "sounding Black" Via Freakonomics author, Steven Levitt:

Fascinating new research by my University of Chicago colleague, Jeffrey Grogger, compares the wages of people who “sound black” when they talk to those who do not.

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)

How does Grogger know who “sounds black?” As part of a large longitudinal study called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, follow-up validation interviews were conducted over the phone and recorded.

Grogger was able to take these phone interviews, purge them of any identifying information, and then ask people to try to identify the voices as to whether the speaker was black or white. The listeners were pretty good at distinguishing race through voices: 98 percent of the time they got the gender of the speaker right, 84 percent of white speakers were correctly identified as white, and 77 percent of black speakers were correctly identified as black.

Grogger asked multiple listeners to rate each voice and assigned the voice either to a distinctly white or black category (if the listeners all tended to agree on the race), or an indistinct category if there was disagreement.

Then he put this measure of whether a voice sounded black into a regression (the standard statistical tool that economists use for estimating things), and came up with the finding that blacks who “sound black” earn almost 10 percent less, even after taking into account other factors that could influence earnings. One piece of interesting good news is that blacks who do not “sound black” earn essentially the same as whites.

Apparently, there was a negative impact for Southern accents as well, but the measures were less precise as that was not the focus of the study.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 10 2008, 09:50:42 AM EDT ) Permalink

Wednesday July 09, 2008

McCain is a disgrace on Social Security John McCain's most recent comments on Social Security are absolutely breathtaking in their stupidity. He's admitted he doesn't really know much about economic policy, but this is ridiculous.

Asked by a young woman if she is likely to receive Social Security benefits someday, McCain said it was unlikely "unless we fix it."

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today," he said. "And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

Matt Yglesias:

Of course in their day, present-day retirees were working and their tax dollars were paying folks who were retired back then. And in exchange for that service when they were workers, today's retirees get to enjoy a secure retirement. Yes, on my dime. And in exchange I expect that when I retire, ensuing generations will be there for me. I call it generations looking after each other, so that those who built the present with labors in the past get to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor. The federal government calls it Social Security. John McCain calls it a disgrace.

Kevin Drum:

This is nuts. McCain is talking as if he just figured out that this is how Social Security works and he's scandalized by it. Needless to say, though, this is the way virtually every retirement system in the world works, and it works fine. What's more, if Social Security really does turn out to have a shortfall in future years, it's easily fixed by a very modest combination of higher taxes and reduced benefits — exactly the bipartisan, reach-across-the-aisle solution forged in 1983 that McCain is constantly praising (and that he voted for as a freshman congressman).

In short, this comment shows McCain to be either a) disgracefully stupid, or b) disgracefully dishonest. I don't think there is a c), so take your pick.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 09 2008, 08:12:19 PM EDT ) Permalink

Jesse would approve As we've been hearing so much lately about how Jesse Helms would always stand for what he believes in no matter the personal cost, perhaps he would appreciate this story:

RALEIGH - L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.

"Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week," Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 09 2008, 12:16:52 PM EDT ) Permalink

Tuesday July 08, 2008

33% of Americans think God is schizophrenic I just finished reading an absolutely terrific book, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel. Kugel summarizes modern biblical scholarship on the entire Old Testament. Kugel explains the books of the bible within the original contexts in which they were created, and most importantly, explicitly lays out the very different assumptions upon which the Bible has been understood through most of its history (e.g., God does not contradict himself, The Bible is full of hidden meanings that belie the stated meaning, etc.). We learn that modern scholars have found that the language of the Covenant between God and Israel is remarkably similar to pre-existing covenants between early Middle-Eastern rulers and their vassal states. Likewise, we find how the odd story of Jacob and Esau can be explained by relations between the tribes thought to have descended from these brothers. What was most interesting to me was the aspects of the Old Testament already staring me in the face that I-- like most people-- had simply been oblivious to. The God of Genesis, the God who gives the Ten Commandments is quite clearly conceived of as fixed in a particular time and place. He moves around. He is neither omniscient of omnipresent. Yet, later conceptions within the Bible and our current Jewish and Christian conceptions certainly hold God to be omni-present and all-knowing.

Among the other aspects of the bible that believers are used to overlooking is the fact that the Old Testament is simply rife with contradictions that really cannot be logically explained (not that many have not tried). The Bible says the passover meal should be roasted, only to say that it should be boiled a few sentences later. All sorts of biblical stories are told in multiple versions (including the creation of the world, and the Ten Commandments), that are simply not reconcilable. If, like me (and most mainline Protestants and Catholics), you take the Bible to be important for its larger messages and are not too upset by the quite obvious role of the humans involved in creating it, that's not really a problem. However, to believe that the Bible is the "literal word of God" is basically to believe that God is essentially schizophrenic and suffers from a multiple-personality disorder. Nonetheless, the Pew foundations recently released their latest "Religious Landscape" survey which finds that a third of all Americans, 59% of Evangelicals, and about 23% of mainline Protestants and Catholics agree that "the Bible is the literal word of God" (emphasis mine). I was disappointed, though not surprised, that nearly a quarter of all Catholics hold this intellectually untenable view that has never been supported by the Catholic church itself. On some level I had known that a literal interpretation of the bible was ahistorical and dumb, but now that I have learned so much about the Old Testament, I know that it is really dumb.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 08 2008, 11:12:23 AM EDT ) Permalink

Monday July 07, 2008

Homosexuality and Olympic sprinters I must admit to being taken aback for a split second last week when I saw a sports page headline along the lines of "Gay wins 100m." "What's his sexuality got to do with it, I thought, before realizing it was the winner's last name. With that in mind, I found this quite hillarious:

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don?t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association?s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word ?gay? with the word ?homosexual? in any of the AP stories they run ? leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed ?Tyson Homosexual?:

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 07:59:15 PM EDT ) Permalink

Jesse I've read so much interesting commentary on Jesse Helms in the few days since his death. Hard to pick my favorites to go with, but I'll try a couple. First, let's just be clear, however nice he may have been to people he liked, the man was an unrepentant bigot. Period. By all accounts he was a pioneer in using race-baiting as a successful political strategy, and to whatever degree he "mellowed" he remained an unrepentant bigot till the end. It is a stain on my home state of North Carolina that it repeatedly elected him to the Senate. TNR's Jonathan Chait seems to have the most succinct summation on Helms' legacy and the awfully disturbing praise for him from Republican quarters:

The New York Times obituary of Jesse Helms had the temerity to note that he "opposed civil rights." National Review's John Miller objects:

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.

Hilzoy has a lot of detail about Helms' "particular vision" of civil rights. Among other things, Helms was an avowed believer in black intellectual inferiority, an hysterical opponent of interracial marriage, called the 1964 Civil Rights Act "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress," and said of civil rights demonstrators, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights." Helms' "vision" of civil rights for African-Americans was that there should be none.

The mainstream conservative position on civil rights is that the equal rights of the early civil rights movement were good, but things started to go wrong with the imposition of affirmative action. It's a flawed though not illegitimate view. But Helms wasn't a champion of color-blindness who objected to quotas. He was an out-and-out white supremacist.

Moreover, it would be one thing if conservatives celebrated the things they liked about Helms' life while disavowing his bigotry. But their unalloyed celebration of Helms is a staggering indictment of movement conservatism's views on race.

As mentioned by Chait, Hilzoy does a phenomenal job cataloging many of Helms' most odious statements and beliefs. A couple of my favorites:

"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”

And, what I think is most disturbing (as Chait mentions) in the response to Helms' death is the unqualified praise Helms is receiving from Republican quarters. Hilzoy catalogs that as well in the same post. For example, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, "Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in." Of course, one of those causes was keeping the Black man down. It would be nice to see a little more honest reporting in just what these "conservative principles" Helms stood for really were.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 02:34:21 PM EDT ) Permalink

Back in the saddle "Update your blog" demand my readers (okay, just one of them). Thanks for the push, LS, normal blogging duties to resume imminently. Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 02:24:48 PM EDT ) Permalink

Tuesday June 24, 2008

Oil drilling With gas prices what they are, there's been a lot of news lately about possible drilling in ANWR and expanding off-shore oil drilling. Of course, what is usually not mentioned is just how incredibly marginal the impact of this will actually be on energy prices. The government's own Energy Information Administration estimates that when ANWR would be fully on-line-- a couple decades from now-- we could expect a drop in the price of oil by a whopping $.75 per barrel (courtesy, Kevin Drum). Would that even save us $.01 a gallon? The simple truth is, oil is a global commodity in a global marketplace and nothing the US ever does is going to be more than a drop in the bucket. All else being equal, presumably more oil is better, but let's not kid ourselves about the actual benefits.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 05:24:19 PM EDT ) Permalink

The more you look the more corruption you find in the Bush administration. In what should be not the least bit surprising to anybody even half paying attention to politics:

Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs, sometimes rejecting otherwise qualified candidates because of their ties to Democrats, internal auditors said in a report issued this morning.

Not at all surprisingly, two Bush political appointees are responsible...

Two members of the screening committee in 2006, Esther Slater McDonald, an adviser to the associate attorney general, and Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, considered political and ideological factors when rejecting candidates "and thereby committed misconduct," the investigators said.

McDonald allegedly wrote "disparaging" remarks about job seekers' liberal ties on their applications, and Elston allegedly failed to take action when the problems were brought to his attention by another concerned member of the hiring panel, according to the report.

On the bright side for President Bush, when people look back years from now on his administration, the fiasco that is the Iraq War will surely largely overshadow the 19th century level of corruption he has brought to the executive branch. This from the man who campaigned on restoring "honor and integrity" to the White House.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 03:11:12 PM EDT ) Permalink

More on China's cement production Last week I reproduced a really cool graph created by my friend, political scientist extraordinaire, Kyle Saunders. Turns out, I wasn't the only one who thought this was really cool and a lot of blogs that people actually read linked to this as well. Consequently, Kyle has now achieved the ultimate goal of all political scientists-- he was on NPR's "All Things Considered" this weekend discussing the impact of China's cement production on global warming. What's pretty funny about this is that Kyle didn't actually know anything at all about the topic till Monday of last week, but thanks to a cool chart, he's NPR's go-to guy. Nonetheless, he gives a pretty interesting interview on the topic (and actually really sounds like he knows what he's talking about) if you are curious.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 01:07:24 PM EDT ) Permalink

Monday June 23, 2008

McCain's economic disinterest As I've mentioned before, I think the fact that this is a really bad Republican year will defeat John McCain as much as anything. The fact that he's utterly clueless on the economy and cares even less sure is not going to help him either. Kevin Drum reports McCain's and Obama's comments from a recent Forbes interview:

What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?

Obama: If we don't get a handle on our energy policy, it is possible that the kinds of trends we've seen over the last year will just continue. Demand is clearly outstripping supply. It's not a problem we can drill our way out of. It can be a drag on our economy for a very long time unless we take steps to innovate and invest in the research and development that's required to find alternative fuels. I think it's very important for the federal government to have a role in that process.

McCain: Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences.

As Kevin puts it:

Two things are remarkable here. First, that McCain genuinely seems to believe that Islamic extremism poses not just a threat, but a threat to the very existence of the West. This is science fiction territory. Second, that he apparently can't come up with any better answer to Fortune's question about economic threats. Not energy, not high taxes, not runaway entitlement growth, not healthcare, not globalization, not any of a dozen plausible answers that would have gone down fine with his base. Instead, "His eyes are narrowed. Nine seconds of silence, ten seconds, 11." And then he came up with Islamic extremism.

I think this clearly shows McCain's general disinterest in the economy-- far and away the number one issue for voters right now. The press is giving him a complete free ride on this stuff right now, but at some point he's going to say something this useless when it matters.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 23 2008, 05:45:34 PM EDT ) Permalink

Friday June 20, 2008

Pregnancy pact Bill Boettcher has demanded that I blog this bizarre news story. From time.com:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

Noted without further useless comment from me.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 20 2008, 11:37:43 AM EDT ) Permalink