Thursday, January 8. 2009
Via Small Dead Archeopteryxes (http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/010430.html) - pardon today's continuing linkage problem which is driving our News Junkie nuts - comes this question:
If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?
One quote from the linked site, South Dakota Politics (http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/south_dakota_politics/2009/01/sociology-is-al.html), which reveals these folks to be paleo-Marxists at heart:
In fact, a lot of sociologists are as offended by Darwin as your average Creationist.
Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.
Capitalism does not exist, says Bruce Walker at American Thinker. One quote:
What we call "Capitalism" actually encompasses something much grander and much broader. Wealth is not simply financial wealth and man is much greater than homo economus, a creature governed solely by economic factors. Except for neurotic personalities, like the fictional Midas or Scrooge, people work, invest and strive for success in the marketplace of all human interactions.
As Walker notes, in free-market, "capitalist" societies, non-neurotic people pursue many goals besides or other than accumulating money. Indeed, for the vast majority of folks, money is just a tool for pursuing other personal goals, of which the main one is rightly independence and security.
Still having linking problems. This from Insty:
IF ONLY BUSH HAD BEEN SUCH A RAMPANT FREE-MARKETEER: “Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation. . . . Rather than a failure of capitalism, the housing meltdown shows what’s likely to happen when government grants special privileges to favored private entities that facilitate bad actors and lousy practices.”
America is the world master of marketing and advertising. (We owe something to the great advertiser David Ogilvie for that.) From For the Greater Goods, in The American:
The latest Interbrand listing of the most valuable global brands reveals 8 American brands in the top 10 and 52 in the top 100, more than twice the expected numbers based on America’s cut of roughly a quarter of the world economy. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party or trade union.
Read the whole thing to learn how it happened.
Fitz Hugh Lane, aka Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) is considered to be sort-of a member of the so-called Hudson River School of painters (a label slapped on these folks by later art historians). Lane is known as a "luminist," for obvious reasons.
This is Becalmed Off Halfway Rock (Casco, ME), 1860:
This is Boston Harbor (1856):
Wednesday, January 7. 2009
Homeland Security's records of your travel. Creepy.
Take two aspirin and call your Congressman in the morning
Vicar: Crucifix too scarey. What? Sacrificial love?
Record snows. Where's the warming we've been waiting for?
Rebuilding the GOP, one internet user at a time. But we aren't Repubs - we're Conservatives.
Readers know that I am a collector of formal fallacies. I keep them on the mantle, well-dusted and polished. "Saving the Hypothesis" doesn't strike me as a formal, Aristotelian fallacy, but it surely is a common thing for folks to struggle to salvage a notion in which they are emotionally invested, regardless of new data. We all do that sometimes unless we catch ourselves BSing ourselves.
Larry Anderson at American Thinker proposed this fallacy in relation to the Global Warming Climate Change whatever topic. One quote:
I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change." It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:
"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."
"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.
"The planet is getting colder. They have the data. And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"
I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.
"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "
"But they have the data and they have computers!"
"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.
The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.
The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.
Readers know that we at Maggie's are ardent conservationists and some like Bird Dog are fair amateur naturalists, but we are neither pagan greenies nor Gaia worshippers - and we have no problem with forest fires. The link last night to two pieces about the Spotted Owl brought to mind Alston Chase's 1996 In A Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Myths of Nature.
Here's a 1996 review of the book from Reason:
 Ten years ago, in his book Playing God in Yellowstone, Alston Chase took on two supposed shining lights in American life: the National Park Service and the environmental movement. Chase showed how the Park Service, captured by an environmental religion that fetishized its vision of nature, was passively allowing exploding elk populations to destroy important parts of Yellowstone National Park. The same misplaced religious zeal threatened the future of the park's grizzly bear population as well.
In a Dark Wood has Chase returning to these themes in a new setting: the spotted owl controversy in the Pacific Northwest. Here again, in an excess of religious enthusiasm, the environmental movement is wreaking havoc. Tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of mills representing significant portions of the Pacific Northwest timber industry have been wiped out, and the federal government has lost $20 billion in future timber revenues - money that will have to be recovered from taxpayer pockets. Equally important for Chase, the ultimate outcome is likely to be bad for the environment as well.
As in Yellowstone, Chase finds a false understanding of nature at the heart of the problem. Environmentalists are driven to recover the Garden of Eden - the forest conditions of the Pacific Northwest before Columbus. The spotted owl crusade, as Chase follows its course, becomes a spiritual quest having little to do with forests and owls and much to do with finding personal salvation. . .
Thus, environmentalists willfully avert their eyes from the fact that forest fires swept across the Pacific Northwest with great regularity until their suppression in the 20th century.. . . .
Another case of willful ignorance on the part of environmentalists affected the controversy. The northern spotted owl probably never should have been listed as a threatened species in the first place. Virtually nothing was known about the owl until the 1970s. By the mid-1980s, as environmental groups were deciding that the owl would be the chosen instrument for shutting down federal timber harvesting in the region, there were only a handful of academic studies on the owl. The federal courts then prematurely forced the Interior Department to list the spotted owl under the Endangered Species Act, just as the scientific data were starting to accumulate. When this research finally became available after the owl listing in 1990, estimates of owl numbers soared - from 3,000 to 12,000 and heading still higher. Contrary to the assumption behind the listing, it increasingly appears that spotted owls do well in young forest stands and may even require them.
To be sure, the owl was never the real object. Environmentalists from the beginning sought preservation of the full forest ecology - the "ancient cathedrals," as they conceived these areas. Once again, though, actual science proved uncooperative. "Ecological management" depends on the idea that a forest or other natural system moves through a succession of transitional stages to reach a final equilibrium or "climax" stage. Europeans had supposedly disrupted this happy equilibrium, but the methods of ecosystem management would now restore it.
The ecological vision of succession and climax, offering a (thin) scientific veneer for the environmental gospel, did in fact have wide scientific acceptance until the 1970s. By the 1990s, however, any ideas of an inherent tendency toward stability in nature had been replaced by an evolutionary biology of chaos and unpredictability. As environmental historian Donald Worster commented in 1993, "The climax notion is dead, the ecosystem has receded in usefulness....Nature should be regarded as a landscape of patches, big and little, changing continually through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations."
For environmentalists, however, coming to terms with this new understanding would have been the equivalent of conceding the Garden of Eden had never existed. Not surprisingly, the environmental movement has treated the science about the same way the Catholic Church reacted centuries ago to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. Indeed, Al Gore, Bruce Babbitt, and other environmental crusaders of the Clinton administration have enshrined ecological management as the official philosophy of the federal government, even as most scientists now say it has no valid foundation.
In a Dark Wood reads like a good novel. Chase sketches the personalities of key participants in the spotted owl drama, often pausing to give a short life history. The book is filled with interesting details and has a strong plot. Indeed, Chase is not immune from some of the same tendencies he criticizes in environmentalists. The spotted owl story is gradually revealed as yet another fierce struggle between good and evil. For Chase, the devil is the idea of the ecosystem and biocentrism, which is corrupting environmentalists - who are basically good people - and leading them into the destructive excesses of contemporary religious warfare.
But there are other ways to interpret the events in the Pacific Northwest. Timber companies with large private lands have thrived, even as competitors dependent on federal land have been eliminated. The spotted owl has proven a remarkably effective anti-competitive device. On the environmental side, there is a constant need to raise large sums of money to pay for fancy buildings and professional staff. Organizational imperatives therefore demand a continuing stream of polarizing conflicts with national publicity to stimulate the faithful's contributions. This is not religion; it is just good business practice.
Nor should one be surprised to find that the environmental gospel may serve other purposes besides inspiring devotion. Indeed, this faith has provided a religious sanction for the takeover of the federal forests of the Pacific Northwest by the new urban and professional groups moving into the region in such large numbers. The conflict became all the more bloody because of the very fact of public ownership of these lands. Politics, not market trading, would have to be the determining factor in deciding the future uses of the lands.
And in the political fray the new recreational groups were not unique in their willingness to fight with whatever tools they could grab. If bad science and clothing themselves in the garb of religious righteousness were what it would take to get control over federal forests, so be it. The spotted owl struggle, in short, was a product not only of a misconceived theology but also of a flawed institutional framework of public land ownership, one which tended to foment conflict and to bring out the worst in those involved.
We view the Greenie movement as political, with little seriousness about real conservation issues. The owl was a tactical tool for the urbanite sentimentalists. They are all about political tactics, and there is no Teddy Roosevelt in them.
It's a "best essay" because it is thought-provoking. The Claremont Institute has reposted Charles Kesler's 2005 The Crisis of American Identity in memory of Harvard's Samuel Huntington. One quote:
Huntington outlines two sources of national identity, a set of universal principles that (he argues) cannot serve to define a particular society; and a culture that can, but that is under withering attack from within and without. His account of culture is peculiar, narrowly focused on the English language and Anglo-Protestant religious traits, among which he counts "Christianity; religious commitment;…and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a 'city on a hill.'" Leave aside the fact that John Winthrop hardly thought that he and his fellow Puritans were creating "heaven on earth." Is Huntington calling for the revival of all those regulations that sustained Winthrop's merely earthly city, including the strictures memorably detailed in The Scarlet Letter? Obviously not, but when fishing in the murky waters of Anglo-Protestant values, it is hard to tell what antediluvian monsters might emerge. If his object is to revive, or to call for the revival of, this culture, how will he distinguish its worthy from its unworthy parts?
another:
Modern liberalism, beginning in the Progressive era, has done its best to strip natural rights and the Constitution out of the American creed. By emptying it of its proper moral content, thinkers and politicians like Woodrow Wilson prepared the creed to be filled by subsequent generations, who could pour their contemporary values into it and thus keep it in tune with the times. The "living constitution," as the new view of things came to be called, transformed the creed, once based on timeless or universal principles, into an evolving doctrine; turned it, in effect, into culture, which could be adjusted and reinterpreted in accordance with history's imperatives. Alternatively, one could say that 20th-century liberals turned their open-ended form of culturalism into a new American creed, the multicultural creed, which they have few scruples now about imposing on republican America, diversity be damned.
To his credit, Huntington abhors this development. Unfortunately, his Anglo-Protestant culturalism, like any merely cultural conservatism, is no match for its liberal opponents. He persists in thinking of liberals as devotees of the old American creed who push its universal principles too far, who rely on reason to the exclusion of a strong national culture. When they abjured individualism and natural rights decades ago, however, liberals broke with that creed, and did so proudly. When they abandoned nature as the ground of right, liberals broke as well with reason, understood as a natural capacity for seeking truth, in favor of reason as a servant of culture, history, fate, power, and finally nothingness. In short, Huntington fails to grasp that latter-day liberals attack American culture because they reject the American creed, around which that culture has formed and developed from the very beginning.
Tuesday, January 6. 2009
Owl Wars in the Pacific Northwest. Some want to kill the Barred Owls. However, the two species are essentially different races of the same big bird. I thought they decided to reduce their fossil fuel consumption anyway. So what's the problem? Bush designates more vast marine sanctuaries. Thanks, W. Politics, Chicago-style Half of economists believe the New Deal worsened the Depression From Nyquist on Strategic Reality 101: I believe there is a societal motive behind our culture’s marginalization of “enmity,” and it should be discussed; but first let us give an example of enmity’s marginalization. As America has been targeted by Islamic forces, America’s political establishment refuses to see Islam as an enemy. In fact, today’s Western culture adroitly fends off the notion that traditional Islam signifies universal submission to the will of Allah. Regardless of the fact that nominal Muslims readily coexist with Westerners, the teachings of Islam are unequivocal. The only reason Europe is not under Islamic law today, is because Europe’s military power surpassed that of Islam in the sixteenth century. This point is lost on nearly everyone, and shows the extent to which enmity has been marginalized in the West.
God wants to be the one in whom "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).
 General hospitals are increasingly relying on "hospitalists" to care for inpatients, freeing up office practitioner's time for their (steadily less lucrative) outpatient practices.
I have yet to be a hospital inpatient except for childbirth, but I think that, if and when I am, I'd like to see the face of my own Doc daily.
This is a new model for medical practice. More time-efficient? Probably. Less comforting? Probably. Overall, better or not? I cannot say.
Internists, and what few GPs still exist, are having a tough go of it these days: Medicare, which is the bulk of their work, compensates them now at a rate lower than a plumber or electrician in Boston.
A quote from Krauthammer, on The Necessity of Israel: For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
Man, am I busy and frazzled at work now that the holiday season is over. My posting will be frazzled too.
Remembering a Maggie's favorite President: Vermont's Silent Cal (fixed)
Remembering Edward Aloysius Murphy
I read books at night and go online during the day during little breaks from work. Is exploring the internet reading? I dunno. Some say it's different from reading books. One quote from Christine Rosen on reading in The New Atlantis:  As he tried to train himself to screen-read—and mastering such reading does require new skills—Bell made an important observation, one often overlooked in the debate over digital texts: the computer screen was not intended to replace the book. Screen reading allows you to read in a “strategic, targeted manner,” searching for particular pieces of information, he notes. And although this style of reading is admittedly empowering, Bell cautions, “You are the master, not some dead author. And that is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master”; you should be the student. “Surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns,” he observes.
How strategic and targeted are we when we read on the screen? In a commissioned report published by the British Library in January 2008 (the cover of which features a rather alarming picture of a young boy with a maniacal expression staring at a screen image of Darth Vader), researchers found that everyone, teachers and students alike, “exhibits a bouncing/flicking behavior, which sees them searching horizontally rather than vertically....Users are promiscuous, diverse, and volatile.” As for the kind of reading the study participants were doing online, it was qualitatively different from traditional literacy. “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of ?reading’ are emerging as users ?power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages, and abstracts going for quick wins.” As the report’s authors concluded, with a baffling ingenuousness, “It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” That is precisely what Jakob Nielsen, a former software engineer and a widely respected expert on Web page usability, found in his research on screen reading. Rather than reading deliberately, when we scan the screen in search of content our eyes follow an F-shaped pattern, quickly darting across text in search of the central nugget of information we seek. “?Reading’ is not even the right word” to describe this activity, Nielsen pointedly says.
Could be true. We must all have ADD or are thinking about sex all the time, and are only able to learn if we're "really interested in it." Reading and studying are entirely different activities: one is more passive, one more active, as I see it.
Maggie's turns three this winter. Well, more or less three. We actually opened up shop in 2005, but it was more of a practice run for about a year without stats or any visibility. That's the way these intertube thingys go - unless you're a prominent tabloid celeb already like Theo Spark or Caroline Kennedy or Jules Crittenden or Lindsay Lohan or Neoneoneo.
Fact is, we still haven't figured out how to master this blog thing, and we are happily confused about our identity. Erik Erikson would consider us "unresolved," no doubt. Are we a diary? A Kindergarten Show-and-Tell? A Punditorium? A Link Blog?
Well, we call ourselves "eclectic" and and just leave it at that. We post whatever we feel like, and whatever we stumble upon in our lives which we think needs or deserves whatever cyberspace we can offer it. (That's an awkward sentence. We specialize in those, at times. And in incomplete sentences and also in run-on sentences. We always have to dash off to feed the chickens, plow a field, or butcher an ox.)
As we have said at least once a year, readers are our only reward. In our minds, commenters even more so, but we know most people have neither the time nor the inclination.
We seem to be almost doubling our readership each year. By our internal stats (not Sitemeter) we are running around 200,000 visits/month now. (Hits mean nothing other than intertube presence, but they're around 4.5 million per month.) Sitemeter, our Webmeister tells us, isn't very accurate but is useful as a relative measure for comparison purposes. The numbers of "unique readers" is our key metric - and our readers are indeed unique.
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Month |
Unique visitors |
Number of visits |
Pages |
Hits |
Bandwidth |
Jan 2008 |
60848 |
142368 |
586149 |
2427842 |
142.09 GB |
Feb 2008 |
62451 |
147909 |
631575 |
2670829 |
162.42 GB |
Mar 2008 |
134283 |
246126 |
907413 |
3803540 |
200.05 GB |
Apr 2008 |
76613 |
163489 |
647320 |
3052496 |
135.23 GB |
May 2008 |
76803 |
168226 |
646977 |
3332789 |
125.27 GB |
Jun 2008 |
70265 |
154672 |
603236 |
2932034 |
125.92 GB |
Jul 2008 |
82531 |
165326 |
626042 |
3519587 |
136.64 GB |
Aug 2008 |
62195 |
144603 |
530996 |
3244934 |
116.10 GB |
Sep 2008 |
74637 |
165917 |
579300 |
3418257 |
153.49 GB |
Oct 2008 |
84790 |
182258 |
659336 |
3916942 |
150.38 GB |
Nov 2008 |
96213 |
205477 |
1070776 |
4281475 |
149.94 GB |
Dec 2008 |
79422 |
195826 |
1140073 |
4479493 |
137.32 GB |
Total |
961051 |
2082197 |
8629193 |
41080218 |
1734.84 GB |
Why do readership numbers matter to us? Vanity, I guess, and simple attention-seeking. (The real secret, shameful truth is that we enjoy doing this, and that we learn from doing it.)
So that's the annual Maggie's update. If you like us, do us a favor and send us around to folks who might enjoy reading us. We aren't famous - yet.
The price is right.
And, while we're on the subject, a big thanks to Chris Southern Consulting, the Vermont born-and-bred blogmeister who makes this site possible and who solves all the glitches and problems with good cheer. If you need website work, give him a shout.
Pelosi opens war against House Repubs. Gateway. Besides the thuggishness, it's a bad idea for many reasons. Related, VDH via NRO on Who will police the police?: If it was true that when the Republicans enjoyed majorities in the House and Senate and ran the White House, there was no one to object when they overspent, grew the government, and ran up the debt, who now will police the Democratic police in matters of corruption? Rep. Rangel oversees (on Ways and Means) U.S. tax policy, but is himself a tax offender, among other, far greater charges and allegations about his behavior and character. Sen. Dodd simply cannot tell the truth about his cut-rate, quid pro quo mortgage deals. His actions and the Barney Frank-Franklin Raines exchange are metaphors for the entire subprime mortgage crisis. It would take a genealogist to sort out all the tribal ties, inside pay-offs, and pay-for-play deals involved in the selling of Obama's Senate seat; meanwhile, we await the tapes of Jesse Jackson Jr., Rahm Emanuel, and co. Al Franken simply relied on Minnesota Democratic officials to keep counting until they came up with the right result. On matters of nepotism, entitlement, and insider favoritism, Democratic egalitarians will probably anoint Caroline Kennedy as senator from New York. Bill Richardson didn't even try to pull off being secretary of commerce. Nowhere is there anyone on the Democratic side to decry the culture of corruption as in the days of Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens.
Crickets chirping, as they used to say.
I took this photo in Oct, 2002. That's a bay on Lake W, about a mile across. The bay is only around 30" deep, which is why the diving ducks love it. 
Monday, January 5. 2009
 Broadway for 20 bucks.
Hope and Change! 600,000 new government jobs. Heck, we all work for the gummint half the year already. Keep a civil tongue in your head for the next 365 days Obama's New Deal. Bad as the Old New Deal? The Gramsci Award du Jour: Bill Ayers Chavez' secret fan club Sea Ice back to 1979. The earth is cooling, but it doesn't fit the narrative. The funny business, in Minnesota. Related: Stop, thief cries Dick Morris Harry Reid's "worst President," and what he's done The gang rape of a Lesbian you never heard about A blog whose time has come: Democracy in Venezuela Will Neo-Conservatism die for Compassionate Conservatism's Sins?
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