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Saul Bellow Was 30 Years Ahead of Me

by BillBarrios7348 Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a fascinating little August tidbit, via Jeet Heer on Twitter. It’s an excerpt from The Dean’s December, by Saul Bellow, published in 1981. Albert Corde, an academic, is talking to a scientist (obviously modeled on the seminal lead researcher Clair Patterson) about the “real explanation of what goes on in the slums”:

“And the explanation? What is the real explanation?”

“Millions of tons of intractable lead residues poisoning the children of the poor. They’re the most exposed….Crime and social disorganization in inner city populations can all be traced to the effects of lead. It comes down to the nerves, to brain damage.”

….Direct material causes? Of course. Who could deny them? But what was odd was that no other causes were conceived of. “So it’s lead, nothing but old lead?” he said.

“I would ask you to study the evidence.”

And that was what Corde now began to do, reading through stapled documents, examining graphs….What was the message?….A truly accurate method of detecting tiny amounts of lead led to the discovery that the cycle of lead in the earth had been strongly perturbed. The conclusion: Chronic lead insult now affects all mankind….Mental disturbances resulting from lead poison are reflected in terrorism, barbarism, crime, cultural degradation.

….Tetraethyl fumes alone could do it—engine exhaust—and infants eating flaking lead paint in the slums became criminal morons.

What’s interesting is the mention of crime. Lead was a well-known neurotoxin by 1981, strongly implicated in educational problems and loss of IQ. So it’s no big surprise that it might pop up as a prop in a novel. But nobody was yet linking it to the rise of violent crime. That would wait for another 20 years. And a truly credible case for the link between lead and crime wouldn’t appear for yet another decade, when the necessary data became available and technology had advanced enough to produce convincing brain studies. Neither of those was available in the 1980s.

Nonetheless, the germ of the idea was there. In a way, that’s not surprising: I’ve always felt that, given what we know about what lead does to the childhood brain, its link to violent crime should never have been hard to accept. It would actually be surprising if childhood lead exposure didn’t have an effect on violent crime.

Anyway, that’s it. Your literary connection of the day to one of my favorite topics.

Continued here: 

Saul Bellow Was 30 Years Ahead of Me

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

by IsabellASV Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Roberts has a long post at Vox about tech nerds and their disdain for politics. He highlights one particular tech nerd who describes both major parties as “a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things,” and jumps off from there:

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

The first, which is extremely common in the nerd community, is a distaste for government and politics….a sense that government is big, bloated, slow-moving, and inefficient, that politicians are dimwits and panderers, and that real progress comes from private innovation, not government mandates. None of which is facially unreasonable.

The second is the conception of politics as a contest of two mirror-image political philosophies, with mirror-image extremes and a common center, which is where sensible, independent-minded people congregate.

There’s about 4,400 more words than this, so click the link if you want to immerse yourself.

But I have a little different take on all this. The truth is that politics and tech are the same thing: inventing a product that appeals to people and then marketing the hell out of it. Back in the dark ages, this was a little more obvious. Steve Wozniak invented, Steve Jobs sold. It was so common for tech companies to be started by two people, one engineer and one salesman, that it was practically a cliche.

The modern tech community has lost a bit of that. Oh, they all chatter about social media and going viral and so forth. As long as the marketing is actually just some excuse for talking about cool new tech, they’re happy to immerse themselves in it. But actually selling their product? Meh. The truly great ideas rise to the top without any of that Mad Men crap. Anyway, the marketing department will handle the dull routine of advertising and….well, whatever it is they do.

Politics, by contrast, leans the other way. Inventing new stuff helps, but the real art is in selling your ideas to the public and convincing your fellow politicians to back you. It’s all messy and annoying, especially if you’re not very socially adept, but it’s the way human beings get things done.

Well, it’s one of the ways. Because Roberts only tells half the story. As much as most tech nerds disdain the messy humanness of politics, it’s equally true that most politicians disdain the eye-rolling naivete of tech nerds. You wanna get something done, kid? Watch the master at work.

In politics, you have the wonks and the hacks—and it’s the hacks who rule. In tech, you have the nerds and the salesmen—and it’s the nerds who rule. There are always exceptions, but that’s the general shape of the river.

But guess what? The most successful nerds have always been the ones who are also willing to figure out what makes people tick. And the most successful politicians have been the ones who are willing to marry themselves to policy solutions that fit their time and place. That doesn’t mean that nerds have to slap backs (Bill Gates never did) or that successful politicians have to immerse themselves in white papers (Ronald Reagan never did), but wonks and hacks and nerds and salesmen all need each other. The political hacks and the tech nerds need to get together and get messy. And more important: they have to genuinely respect each other. When that happens, you have a very, very powerful combination. So get to work.

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Nerds and Hacks Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose Except Your Chains.

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TGIAS: Finally, August Is Almost Over

by SangLpktxijhxag Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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August is almost over. Huzzah! Kids are back in school, the weather will soon turn balmy, and we only have to pay attention to Donald Trump for a few more days. In September we’ll have more important stuff to obsess over. Right?

Well, we can hope. In the meantime, Dan Drezner has a question:

For this entire calendar year, I’ve heard how the current crop of GOP presidential candidates “showcases the party’s deep bench of talent”….And, to be fair, this seemed to be a fair analysis. There are no fewer than nine sitting and former governors of big states in the field….And yet, after all the declarations, we’re at a political moment when Trump is clobbering all of these talented politicians in the polls — and doing so by honing the lessons he learned from reality television.

….So here’s my question: What does it say about the deep GOP bench that none of them have managed to outperform a guy who has no comparative political advantage except celebrity and a willingness to insult anyone who crosses his path?

I’ve had the same thought myself. Nor is this a partisan question: the Democrats have such a weak bench this year that there’s literally only one truly plausible candidate in the entire field. And this isn’t because Hillary Clinton is so widely beloved: there’s just no one else around who seems to have the usual bona fides to run for president. Hell, even the sitting vice president, usually a shoo-in to run, has a public persona that’s a little too goofy to make him a strong candidate.

In other words, there are hardly any decent candidates in the entire country. What the hell is going on?

But Drezner actually prompts another question that’s been rattling around in my brain: Is there anyone out there who could be the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump? There was some inane blather earlier this month comparing him to Bernie Sanders, but that was always pretty preposterous. Sanders is a serious, longtime politician. He may be too extreme for you, but he’s not a buffoon.

More specifically: Is it even possible that someone like Trump—no political experience, buffoonish, populist, boorish—could ever make a big impact in a Democratic primary? It’s never happened before, but then, it’s never happened quite this way in the Republican primary either. It makes me wonder. What if Trump had held on to his lifelong liberal beliefs instead of “evolving” so he could compete as a Republican? What would be the fate of a liberal Donald Trump? Would a big chunk of the liberal base embrace him?

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TGIAS: Finally, August Is Almost Over

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

by KerrieMcCabe Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via someone on the right (I don’t remember who, sorry) I learned of a minor tempest over at Vox.com. One of their editors asked a Swedish philosopher, Torbjorn Tannsjo, to write a piece defending the “repugnant conclusion,” which Tannsjo describes thusly:

My argument is simple. Most people live lives that are, on net, happy. For them to never exist, then, would be to deny them that happiness. And because I think we have a moral duty to maximize the amount of happiness in the world, that means that we all have an obligation to make the world as populated as can be.

There are a number of caveats in the piece, but that’s basically it. Vox ended up rejecting it, partly because they decided not to launch a planned new section for “unusual, provocative arguments,” and partly because they were squeamish about the implications of a piece which argued that “birth control and abortion are, under most circumstances, immoral.”

Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, was appalled:

If you solicit a piece from a philosopher, knowing what their work is about (as was clearly the case here), you have an obligation to publish it, subject to reasonable editing. What you can’t do, if you are an even remotely serious operation (and not an echo chamber), is reject it because someone not paying attention might think the argument supports a conclusion they find icky.

I’ll confess to some puzzlement about this affair. Leiter is right that Vox editors must have known exactly what Tannsjo was going to write. That was clear from the start. So why did they get cold feet after seeing the finished product? On the other hand, Leiter is dead wrong that any publication has an obligation to publish every piece it solicits.1 That doesn’t pass the laugh test, whether the writer is a philosopher or not. Stuff gets rejected all the time for a million different reasons, potential offensiveness among them.

But here’s the part I really don’t get: Why on earth would anyone take Tannsjo’s argument seriously in the first place? The entire thing hinges on the premise that we all have a moral duty to maximize the absolute amount of felt happiness in the universe. If you don’t believe that, there’s nothing left of his essay.

But virtually no one does believe that. And since Tannsjo never even tries to justify his premise, that makes his entire piece kind of pointless. It would have taken me about five minutes to reject it.

I dunno. Too many modern philosophers seem to revel in taking broadly uncontroversial sentiments—in this case, that we have an obligation to future generations—and then spinning out supposedly shocking conclusions that might hold if (a) you literally care only about this one thing, and (b) you take it to its absurd, ultimate limit.2 But aside from dorm room bull sessions, why bother? That just isn’t the human condition. We care about lots of things; they often conflict; and we always have to end up balancing them in some acceptable way. Nothing in the real world ever gets taken to its ultimate logical conclusion all by itself.

I suppose this kind of thing might be interesting in the same way that any abstract logic puzzle is interesting, but it’s not hard to see why most people would just consider it tedious blather. If this is at all representative of what Vox got when it started looking around for unusual, provocative arguments, I don’t blame them for deep sixing the whole idea.

1Depending on the publication and the type of article, they might owe you a kill fee for the work you put into it. But that’s all.

2Well, that and ever more baroque versions of the trolley problem.

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

by LelaSandoval Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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The AP’s Ken Dilanian reports on the use of email in the State Department:

The transmission of now-classified information across Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email is consistent with a State Department culture in which diplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two administrations, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

….In five emails that date to Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration, large chunks are censored on the grounds that they contain classified national security or foreign government information….In a December 2006 email, diplomat John J. Hillmeyer appears to have pasted the text of a confidential cable from Beijing about China’s dealings with Iran and other sensitive matters.

….Such slippage of classified information into regular email is “very common, actually,” said Leslie McAdoo, a lawyer who frequently represents government officials and contractors in disputes over security clearances and classified information.

What makes Clinton’s case different is that she exclusively sent and received emails through a home server in lieu of the State Department’s unclassified email system. Neither would have been secure from hackers or foreign intelligence agencies, so it would be equally problematic whether classified information was carried over the government system or a private server, experts say. In fact, the State Department’s unclassified email system has been penetrated by hackers believed linked to Russian intelligence.

….Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said State Department officials were permitted at the time to use personal email accounts for official business, and that the department was aware of Clinton’s private server….There is no indication that any information in Clinton emails was marked classified at the time it was sent.

Whatevs. Let’s spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of congressional committee time investigating this anyway. Maybe we’ll finally find that Whitewater confession we’ve been looking for so long.

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Hillary’s Email: Still No There There

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Sigh. Yet Another Thing to Freak Out About.

by MonikaPenrod Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mutant super lice? WTF? I blame liberal moral decay.

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Sigh. Yet Another Thing to Freak Out About.

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Breaking News: Kids Don’t Like to Eat Vegetables

by AdelePlatz Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Excellent news! We have new research on whether kids like to eat vegetables:

The Agriculture Department rolled out new requirements in the 2012 school year that mandated that children who were taking part in the federal lunch program choose either a fruit or vegetable with their meals.

….”The basic question we wanted to explore was: does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable actually correspond with consumption. The answer was clearly no,” Amin, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

This will come as a surprise to exactly zero parents. You can (usually) make your kids eat vegetables if you refuse to let them leave the table until they do, but that’s what it takes. Ask my mother if you don’t believe me.1

I’m not actually making fun of the researchers here. Sometimes seemingly obvious things turn out to be untrue. The only way to find out for sure is to check. And in fact, the study actually did produce interesting results:

Because they were forced to do it, children took fruits and vegetables — 29 percent more in fact. But their consumption of fruits and vegetables actually went down 13 percent after the mandate took effect and, worse, they were throwing away a distressing 56 percent more than before. The waste each child (or tray) was producing went from a quarter of a cup to more than a 39 percent of a cup each meal. In many cases, the researchers wrote, “children did not even taste the fruits and vegetables they chose at lunch.”

Yep: when kids were required to plonk fruits and vegetables onto their trays, average consumption went down from 0.51 cups to 0.45 cups. Apparently sticking it to the man becomes more attractive when kids are forced to do something.

In any case, the researchers kept a brave face, suggesting that eventually the mandates would work. We just need “other strategies” to get kids to like eating vegetables:

Because children prefer FVs in the form of 100% fruit juice or mixed dishes, such as pizza or lasagna, one should consider additional factors, such as the types of whole FVs offered and how the cafeteria staff prepares them. Cutting up vegetables and serving them with dip and slicing fruit, such as oranges and apples, can positively influence students’ FV selection and consumption by making FVs more accessible and appealing.

I dunno. Cutting up veggies and serving them with dip decidedly doesn’t make them taste anything like pizza or lasagna. I speak from decades of pizza-eating experience here. Anyway, parents have been trying to get their kids to eat their vegetables for thousands of years, and so far progress has been poor. I’m not sure what the answer is. Shock collars? DNA splicing? GMO veggies that taste like candy bars?

1Yeah, yeah, some kids actually like vegetables. Little bootlickers.

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Breaking News: Kids Don’t Like to Eat Vegetables

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All of Our Negotiating Partners Think the Iran Deal Is Just Fine

by MargheritaHeine Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports that the Iran deal is just a big yawn in Europe:

The matter is settled, according to Camille Grand, director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris and an expert on nuclear nonproliferation. “In Europe, you don’t have a constituency against the deal,” he said. “In France, I can’t think of a single politician or member of the expert community who has spoken against it, including some of us who were critical during the negotiations.”

Mr. Grand said the final agreement was better than he had expected. “I was surprised by the depth and the quality of the deal,” he said. “The hawks are satisfied, and the doves don’t have an argument.”

No arguments? I got your arguments right here. 24 days! Self-inspections! $150 billion! Death to America! Neville Chamberlain!

If the Europeans have no arguments against the deal, they aren’t even trying. They should try calling the Republican Party for a set of serious, detailed, and principled talking points.

Link – 

All of Our Negotiating Partners Think the Iran Deal Is Just Fine

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Jeb Bush Gives Away the Game on "Anchor Babies"

by JennyLumpkins Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush wants us all to chill out about his use of the term “anchor babies”:

What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed. Frankly it’s more related to Asian people coming into our country, having children, and….taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship.

Um….no. Bush initially used the term in a radio interview with Bill Bennett. The conversation was entirely about Donald Trump’s immigration plan, securing our southern border, and dealing with our third-largest trading partner. In other words, it was all about Mexico. Bush was very definitely not talking about Asians.

And if he was, there’s already a perfectly good term to use: birth tourism. It’s well known, well documented, and clearly a growing phenomenon. There’s no need to describe it using a term that many people find offensive, since there’s already one available.

Basically, Bush is tap dancing here. But he’s also doing us a favor. In my tedious discussion of “anchor babies” on Saturday, I concluded that its offensiveness depended on whether it was an actual problem in the first place. Bush is pretty much conceding that it’s not—at least as it refers to illegal immigration from Mexico. But if it’s rare or nonexistent, then you’re imputing offensive behavior to immigrant mothers for something they don’t do. And that does indeed make it offensive.

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Jeb Bush Gives Away the Game on "Anchor Babies"

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It’s Now Open Season on China

by GitaOov11667597 Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the midst of Trumpmania, it’s good to see that some things never change. Here is Scott Walker today:

Americans are struggling to cope with the fall in today’s markets driven in part by China’s slowing economy and the fact that they actively manipulate their economy….massive cyberattacks….militarization of the South China Sea….economy….persecution of Christians….There’s serious work to be done rather than pomp and circumstance. We need to see some backbone from President Obama on U.S.-China relations.

China bashing is the little black dress of presidential campaigns: always appropriate, always in style.

Of course, Donald “China is killing us!” Trump got there before Walker. And more than that: he not only bashed China, but was able to claim that he’d been warning of this all along. If only we’d sent Carl Icahn over there from the start, things would be OK today.

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It’s Now Open Season on China

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