WSJ op-ed page - They can't be *this* stoopid, can they?

I mean, if they can say this

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard

without stopping for - oh - an attosecond and saying "Hmmm. Lets see. The other senator from Massachusetts would be who??"
I mean, a fairly obvious retort would be that they also voted for a War Hero, who lost to two draft dodgers, right?

Ye gods, but do they ever want to make me puke...

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Soo done with the *average* American

It seems to me that we care more about what we *think* the average American is, than what he actually is. Actually, wait a moment - as best as I know, he is actually she (50.7%), which goes to show you - whenever they interview 'Joe six-pack', its bullshit. It should be Jane six-pack (or is that Jane Two Cantaloupe? Which would be Wrong. Ok, Jane six-pack, 'cos she could have a six-pack too? But this is America, the Land Of The Hopelessly Obese, which means it is actually Really Big Jane).

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, back to Kung Fu Monkey and Farms.

There are four times as many Americans living in urban than rural areas. There are four times as many people sucking back coffee in New York city alone than make a living farming. According to the Burea of Labor, there are just as many people employed in Architecture and Engineering as farming, hell, 3 million people working in Computer and Mathematical jobs. But when one of these "What does America think about culture" pieces comes on, do I ever see a mid-30's software engineer onscreen bitching about having to download BitTorrents of "The IT Crowd"? Fuck and no.

We tend to be wizards at mythologizing, and one of our most persistent recent myth is middle america. We probably don't know that it pretty much doesnt exist, except as a subsidiary of Archer Daniel Midlands, but even if we *did*, we'd still pretend that it existed - it helps us rationalize whatever the heck it is that we are trying to rationalize

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The wisdom of the masses?

From the NY Times,

huge numbers of Americans think Congress is beholden to special interests

Now, I'll be the first person in line to state that one can never - ever - underestimate the intelligence of the american public, but hey, sometime there *is* wisdom in the masses :-)

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Keep the gummint out of my life, except for protecting me from *those* people

Scott Payne has a succinct description of the the cognitive dissonance that is modern conservatism.

My projects aside, I think this fundamental lack of trust presents, as I mentioned, a real dilemma for conservatives. Conservatives are supposed to be the advocates of liberty and the watchdogs of tyranny, they rail against the excesses and intrusions of government in all it’s myriad forms. And yet, articulations like Erik’s often break down into beliefs like: keep the government out of my life, except when it comes to those people, if government is supposed to do anything it is to keep me safe from those people! And, of course, the number of ways in which the actions of those people, the mob, the masses, intrude on one’s life are never ending, so the number of ways in which government must be utilized as the means by which the untrustworthiness of those people is mitigated grows in a proportional fashion.

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Mmmmm. Watermelon Beer...

http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2010/02/hell_or_high_wa.php

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Regression to the Mean

A fairly lengthy interview with Daniel Kahneman, with my favourite part here

I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, "On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don't tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case." This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. We measured the distances from the target and could see that those who had done best the first time had mostly deteriorated on their second try, and vice versa. But I knew that this demonstration would not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency

Which only goes to reenforce my belief that we are - incurably - hardwired to not understand regression to the mean.

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Samuel Bowles

A remarkable writeup on Sam Bowles.
"Who" you say?
For those who think that Milton Friedman was the alpha and omega of Macroeconomics, it bears perusal (and yeah, there *was* a guy named Keynes before him, despite everything you may have heard of from the followers of The Great God Fama...

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What if ... directed the Super Bowl

And boy does this ever capture the overwhelming pretentiousness that is today's Wes Anderson...

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