Tag Archives: humans

Marriage Is Declining Because Men Are Pigs

by debbiemurch611 Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Monthly, Anne Kim muses on the spectacular decline in marriage over the past few decades:

The seeming decline of marriage includes one major caveat: educated elites. When it comes to marriage, divorce, and single motherhood, the 1950s never ended for college-educated Americans, and for college-educated women in particular….The share of young college-graduate white women who were married in 2010 was a little over 70 percent—almost exactly the same as it was in 1950.

….It’s also seemingly only Americans with four-year degrees or better who appear immune to the broader cultural and social forces eroding marriage. In 1950, white women with “some college,” such as an associate’s degree, were actually more likely to be married than their better-educated sisters. Today, it’s the opposite. Though women with a high school diploma or less have seen the sharpest drop in marriage rates, the decline has been almost as severe—and ongoing—for women just one short rung down the education ladder, regardless of race.

Why has marriage declined in America? Here’s my dorm room bull theory: it’s because men are pigs.

I know, I know: #NotAllMen blah blah blah. That said, let’s expand this a bit. Basically, an awful lot of men are—and always have been—volatile and unreliable. They drink, they get abusive, and they do stupid stuff. They’re bad with money, they don’t help with the kids, and they don’t help around the house. They demand subservience. They demand sex. And even on the one dimension they’re supposedly good for—being breadwinners—they frequently tend to screw up and get fired.

In other words, marriage has been a bad deal for women pretty much forever. But they’ve been forced into it by cultural mores and economic imperatives, and that’s the only reason it’s been nearly universal in the past.

Nothing has changed much about that. It’s still a bad deal for most women, but cultural mores and economic imperatives have changed, and that means more women can afford to do what’s right for themselves and stay unmarried these days.

But there’s one exception to this: the college educated. Well-educated men are fairly reliable; they have good earning power; they generally aren’t abusive; and they’ve been willing—slowly but steadily—to change their habits and help out with kids and housework. For college-educated women, then, marriage is a relatively good deal. For everyone else, not so much.

And that’s why marriage is declining among all groups except the college educated. For an awful lot of women, it’s just a lousy deal. They’re tired of putting up with all the crap they get from men, and so they’re opting out. They’ll opt back in when men start to pull their own weight. There’s no telling when that’s going to start happening.

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Marriage Is Declining Because Men Are Pigs

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Trump Protesters Don’t Have Much Public Support

by AlbertHeap570 Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I suggested that a key question about the protests at Trump rallies was who the public blamed for the violence. Well, Vox conducted a survey recently asking exactly that, and it turns out that Trump is winning that contest too. Overall, respondents thought that protesters were responsible for the violence in Chicago by a margin of 54-28 percent.

That’s a pretty big margin. The crosstabs show that the biggest differences are by partisan leaning and age: Romney voters and senior citizens overwhelming think the protesters were responsible. Obama voters and the young think protesters weren’t responsible—though not by huge margins. Interestingly, responses were about the same between blue-collar and white-collar workers; between all education and income levels; and between workers and the unemployed. There was no regional variation at all, nor was there any difference between tea partiers and mainstream Republicans.

Bottom line: Only committed partisans and (barely) young voters are taking the protesters’ side on this. Seems like maybe they need a new strategy..

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Trump Protesters Don’t Have Much Public Support

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Donald Trump’s Greatest Hits With the WaPo Editorial Board

by KrisRowexbbf Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve had Donald Trump’s interview with the Washington Post editorial board open in a tab for several days now, and I suppose I should either close it or do something with it. The key takeaway from this exercise in freestyle presidential rapping is just how incoherent Trump was. “It literally makes Sarah Palin seem like an intellectual,” a friend remarked. But that’s hard to capture unless you bite the bullet and read the whole thing. Instead, here are a few greatest hits. And now the tab gets closed. Enjoy.

On how he would have negotiated with the Iranians:

We should have had our prisoners before the negotiations started. We should have doubled up the sanctions. We should have gone in and said, ‘release our prisoners,’ they would have said ‘no,’ and we would have said, ‘double up the sanctions,’ and within a short period of time we would have had our prisoners back.

On whether there are racial disparities in law enforcement:

I’ve read where there are and I’ve read where there aren’t. I mean, I’ve read both. And, you know, I have no opinion on that.

On racial disparities in incarceration:

That would concern me, Ruth. It would concern me.

On how he’d address racial problems:

There’s a racial division that’s incredible actually in the country….And you know there’s a lack of spirit. I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader — beyond other things, the other things that I’d do — I actually think I’d be a great cheerleader for the country.

On South Korea not paying its fair share of defense costs:

You know, South Korea is very rich. Great industrial country. And yet we’re not reimbursed fairly for what we do. We’re constantly, you know, sending our ships, sending our planes, doing our war games, doing other. We’re reimbursed a fraction of what this is all costing.

I think this is on public record, it’s basically 50 percent of the non-personnel cost is paid by South Korea and Japan.

50 percent?

Yeah.

Why isn’t it 100 percent?

On what he means when he says the Ricketts family in Chicago had “better watch out”:

Well, it means that I’ll start spending on them. I’ll start taking ads telling them all what a rotten job they’re doing with the Chicago Cubs. I mean, they are spending on me. I mean, so am I allowed to say that? I’ll start doing ads about their baseball team. That it’s not properly run or that they haven’t done a good job in the brokerage business lately.

On his hands:

This was Rubio that said, “He has small hands and you know what that means.” Okay? So, he started it….I had fifty people … Is that a correct statement? I mean people were writing, “How are Mr. Trump’s hands?” My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, okay? No, but I did this because everybody was saying to me, “Oh, your hands are very nice. They are normal.” So Rubio, in a debate, said, because he had nothing else to say … now I was hitting him pretty hard. He wanted to do his Don Rickles stuff and it didn’t work out. Obviously, it didn’t work too well. But one of the things he said was “He has small hands and therefore, you know what that means, he has small something else.” You can look it up. I didn’t say it.

….I don’t want people to go around thinking that I have a problem. I’m telling you, Ruth, I had so many people. I would say 25, 30 people would tell me … every time I’d shake people’s hand, “Oh, you have nice hands.” Why shouldn’t I? … I even held up my hands, and said, “Look, take a look at that hand.”…And by saying that, I solved the problem. Nobody questions. Everyone held my hand. I said look. Take a look at that hand.

On using nukes against ISIS:

I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me….

This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?

I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

On intelligence, winning, and the war in Iraq:

Right now, look, you know, I went to a great school, I was a good student and all. I am an intelligent person. My uncle, I would say my uncle was one of the brilliant people. He was at MIT for 35 years. As a great scientist and engineer, actually more than anything else. Dr. John Trump, a great guy.

I’m an intelligent person. I understand what is going on. Right now, I had 17 people who started out. They are almost all gone. If I were going to do that in a different fashion I think I probably wouldn’t be sitting here. You would be interviewing somebody else. But it is hard to act presidential when you are being … I mean, actually I think it is presidential because it is winning. And winning is a pretty good thing for this country because we don’t win any more. And I say it all the time. We do not win any more. This country doesn’t win. We don’t win with trade. We don’t win with … We can’t even beat ISIS.

And by the way, just to answer the rest of that question, I would knock the hell out of ISIS in some form. I would rather not do it with our troops, you understand that. Very important. Because I think saying that is very important because I was against the war in Iraq, although they found a clip talking to Howard Stern, I said, “Well…” It was very unenthusiastic. Before they want in, I was totally against the war. I was against it for years. I actually had a delegation sent from the White House to talk to me because I guess I get a disproportionate amount of publicity. I was just against the war. I thought it would destabilize the Middle East, and it did. But we have to knock out ISIS. We are living like in medieval times. Who ever heard of the heads chopped off?

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Donald Trump’s Greatest Hits With the WaPo Editorial Board

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Paul Ryan Says He Regrets Calling the Poor “Takers.” That Isn’t Enough.

by AnnisZus52255331 Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is Speaker Paul Ryan today in an address to a group of House interns:

Instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations….We don’t resort to scaring you, we dare to inspire you….We question each other’s ideas—vigorously—but we don’t question each other’s motives….People with different ideas are not traitors. They are not our enemies. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our fellow citizens.

….I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell you I have always met this standard. There was a time when I would talk about a difference between “makers” and “takers” in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits. But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong….So I stopped thinking about it that way—and talking about it that way.

The obvious pushback is that while Ryan may have stopped talking about “makers and takers,” his policies are exactly the same as they’ve always been. After all that time spent listening, he changed his rhetoric but apparently none of his substantive views.

Which is true enough. If all Ryan is doing is telling a bunch of interns that they can get more done if they watch their language and hide their true intentions, then there’s nothing much to applaud here. At the same time, it’s still good to say this stuff out loud, regardless of how sincere it is. Not many people do anymore. Now, how about doing it again in front of a more important audience and with a few explicit references to Donald Trump thrown in?

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Paul Ryan Says He Regrets Calling the Poor “Takers.” That Isn’t Enough.

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Republican Frontrunners All Favor Treating Muslims Like Drug Gangs

by RevaHendrick Posted on March 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz took a lot of flak yesterday for his proposal to “patrol and secure” Muslim neighborhoods, so he decided to explain it further last night:

“It is standard law enforcement — it is good law enforcement to focus on where threats are emanating from, and anywhere where there is a locus of radicalization, where there is an expanding presence of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz told reporters on Tuesday evening in Manhattan. “We need law enforcement resources directed there, national security resources directed there.”

….Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), compared Cruz’s proposition to “the dark days of the 1930s” in Europe and “the interment of Japanese-Americans” in the 1940s, calling it “a very frightening image.”

Cruz repudiated the comparison at the press conference, saying: “I understand that there are those who seek political advantage and try to raise a scary specter.” He instead compared it to ridding neighborhoods of gang activity and law enforcement’s efforts “to take them off the street.”

And what did Donald Trump think of all this? He supports Cruz’s plan “100 percent.” Naturally.

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Republican Frontrunners All Favor Treating Muslims Like Drug Gangs

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Three Cheers For a Contested Convention

by AnaBruxner Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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I guess a contested Republican convention has now made a full circle1 from “Spare me” to “I always said that”:

In multiple television interviews Sunday, Reince Priebus, chairman of the RNC, raised the prospect of a protracted convention fight with multiple rounds of voting needed to determine the winner. “We’re preparing for that possibility,” Mr. Priebus said on ABC. That marks a shift from earlier this month, when Mr. Priebus told a gathering of conservatives that a contested convention was “highly, highly unlikely.”

Sounds like fun. Seriously. Just think of all the free publicity this gives the Republican Party.

1Half circle?

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Three Cheers For a Contested Convention

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Humans evolve to grow hideous mustaches to filter China’s air pollution in new ad

by AngelitHigbee Posted on February 25, 2016

Humans evolve to grow hideous mustaches to filter China’s air pollution in new ad

By on 25 Feb 2016commentsShare

If only evolution was this simple.

In the smog-filled cities of China, a nonprofit has dreamed up the wildest defense against air pollution yet: the “hairy nose,” an imaginary evolutionary adaptation that involves, well, exactly what it sounds like.

“Survivors of the pollution age,” announces the video produced by WildAid, accept the “putrid, choking fog” and adapt to live with it: by growing long nostril mustaches that filter out the dirty air particles.

The meaning behind the video is a lot more serious — health problems correlated to air pollution are alarmingly high in China. By one count, pollution-related deaths are up to 1.6 million a year — 17 percent of China’s mortality rate. Air pollution can help cause illnesses like heart attacks, lung cancer, strokes, and asthma. As WildAid points out, this doesn’t come as a surprise to people living there: A survey conducted by the organization showed that over 90 percent of Chinese people are concerned about air pollution.

Though the issue is a deadly serious one, the video isn’t. Sometimes, a dog with a mustache is just what the environmental movement needs.

Vimeo/WildAid

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Why Is General Relativity So Damn Hard to Understand?

by GastonCasanova Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby is reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, which he calls “a pleasure to read.” Except for one thing: Isaacson’s description of the theory of relativity is incomprehensible. For example:

The passage shown below comes from Isaacson’s Chapter One.

The general theory of relativity…can be described by using another thought experiment. Picture what it would be like to roll a bowling ball onto the two-dimensional surface of a trampoline. Then roll some billiard balls. They move toward the bowling ball not because it exerts some mysterious attraction but because of the way it curves the trampoline fabric. Now imagine this happening in the four-dimensional fabric of space and time.

We’d have to call that passage bafflegab. No one has the slightest idea what Isaacson means when he refers to “the four-dimensional fabric of space and time.” We all can picture that trampoline—but none of us knows how to imagine that “four-dimensional fabric!” Nor does Isaacson give us the tools to do so, or notice that he has failed.

Somerby is complaining about a big problem here. But it’s not Isaacson’s fault. Or even the fault of science writers in general. It’s a defect in the universe itself.

As it turns out, explaining the “fabric” of spacetime isn’t hard. Yes, it’s four-dimensional. But all this means is that you define it using four numbers. If you described me via my age, weight, height, and IQ, that would be a “four-dimensional” representation of Kevin Drum. It’s not a big deal.

Now suppose you want to describe an event. You need to specify where it happened and when it happened. Take, for example, the airplane crashing into World Trade Center 1. It happened at 40.71º latitude, -74.01º longitude, and 6,371 kilometers (relative to the center of the earth) at 13:46:30 GMT on 11 September 2001 (relative to the common era calendar). As an event in spacetime it’s represented by an ordered 4-tuple:

There are other events that happened at the same time in other places (me saying “oh shit” in California); at the same place in other times (breaking ground on WTC 1 in 1966); and entirely different times and places (the Battle of Gettysburg). If you collect every possible location of an event ever—that is, every combination of four numbers specifying times and places in the universe—that’s all of spacetime. Physicists are likely to call it a manifold or a Minkowski space. For laymen, fabric is fine.

This is all pretty simple. You might not know the mathematics for dealing with arrays of four numbers at a time, but it’s well developed. And if you combine that with a few other concepts—like the idea that the speed of light is always constant—you’ll eventually end up with the theory of gravitational attraction that’s called general relativity.

Unfortunately, “eventually” is a long way away. I can teach you to add and subtract, and “eventually” that will lead you to the theories of financial derivatives that we lovingly called rocket science when they were helping the economy implode in 2008. I can teach you the color wheel and eventually you might become the next Rembrandt. I can teach you to read and eventually you might tackle Kant or Wittgenstein.

So what’s a science writer to do? General relativity is a set of mathematical equations. Plug in the numbers and it turns out to predict the way gravity works with astonishing precision. But can someone who doesn’t understand the math picture in their head what those equations “mean”? Well, what does a Rembrandt mean to a blind person? What do derivatives mean to someone who doesn’t understand the Black-Scholes model? What does Kant mean to someone who’s never studied philosophy? You can do your best to find some kind of analogy that kinda sorta gets these ideas across, but none of them will ever be simultaneously comprehensible and truly accurate to a layman.

I said earlier that this was a defect in the universe. Here’s the defect: the universe is hard! Humans have a hard time understanding it if they aren’t willing to study diligently. (And sometimes even if they are.) There’s really no way around this. In the case of science, there’s no law that says the universe has to work in ways that the overclocked ape h. sapiens can make intuitive or visual sense of. You can read an article in Discover and get a glimpse. A really talented writer can give you a slightly better glimpse. If you get a PhD in physics you’ll get an even better glimpse. You’ll start to grasp simultaneity, light cones, stress-energy tensors, geodesics, world lines, Riemannian geometries, and frame dragging. But will you ever truly understand? Will you ever truly be able to picture it? Probably not. You might eventually be able to manipulate the algebra deftly, but at a visceral level our brains evolved to understand spear throwing and baby raising, not differential equations or tensor analysis. Welcome to the universe, you allegedly sentient being, you.

Tomorrow: In part 2, I explain general relativity so you can understand it. No joke. It’s not that hard at all! Though I admit that I’m going to cheat.

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Why Is General Relativity So Damn Hard to Understand?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 8 January 2016

by StantonVerdon Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The holidays just fly by, don’t they? At least, that’s what we all say after they’re over. This time, though, the inconvenient timing of Christmas means that you never saw the furballs in action on Christmas morning. As usual, the presents we bought them were dirt cheap, but they nonetheless enjoyed them far more than the humans did. The picture below is relatively early in the morning, when the cat presents were still in tolerably good shape. An hour later it was just a mountain of scraps.

By the way, Hopper here is the reason we didn’t have a Christmas tree this year. It would have been a disaster. Maybe next year.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 8 January 2016

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Earth has way more trees than we thought, but not nearly as many as it used to

by LacyHostetler Posted on September 3, 2015

Earth has way more trees than we thought, but not nearly as many as it used to

By on 3 Sep 2015 3:15 pmcommentsShare

As of yesterday, we now know (roughly) how many trees there are on Earth — about 3.04 TRILLION! If that seems like a lot or a little or if you actually have no idea how many trees you thought were on Earth, consider this: Scientists used to think that the number was around 400 BILLION. And if they’re that far off on tree count, imagine how wrong they are about climate change! Kidding, kidding. Relax, everyone.

The previous estimate was so low because it was based solely on satellite images from space. The new and improved estimate combines satellite data with more than 429,775 on-ground measurements, the AP reports. Why would someone suddenly take the time to count how many trees were on Earth, you ask? Funny story:

According to the AP, this all started when a group of kids decided to plant 1 billion trees in order to combat climate change. They asked Thomas Crowther of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies if doing so would actually make a difference, and Crowther was like, “Huh … I don’t know. How many trees are there on Earth, anyway?”

Fast forward two years, and Crowther and his colleagues have published a study in Nature reporting the new estimate (watch the cool video above for more on their research).

That there are so many CO2-capturing trees on this devastatingly polluted space sphere may sound like good news, but things look a little less rosy when you consider what Earth used to look like. Here’s more from the AP:

“These things really dominate our planet,” Crowther said. “They are the most prominent organisms on our planet and there are 3 trillion of them.”

But Earth used to be covered with far more trees. Using computer models, Crowther and colleagues estimated that before human civilization Earth had about 5.6 trillion trees. So the number of trees on Earth has been chopped nearly in half.

Crowther mostly blames people. His study found that 15 billion trees are cut down each year by people, with another 5 billion trees replanted. That’s a net loss of 10 billion trees a year. At that rate, all of Earth’s trees will be gone in about 300 years.

“Humans are diminishing that huge population on such a global scale,” Crowther said.

Nearly 1.4 trillion of Earth’s trees are in tropical and subtropical forests, but that’s also where the rate of forest loss is the highest, the study found.

On the plus side, at least now Crowther can finally go back to those earnest youngsters and say: “No, children — your efforts will not make a difference. Life is full of disappointments that way.” And those almost-activists can go on to become the apathetic teens their hormones so desperately want them to be.

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Lots of trees to hug: Study counts 3 trillion trees on Earth

, The Associated Press.

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