Wednesday, May 22. 2013
Memory is famously faulty. Just as politicians and journalists attempt to create stories and "narratives" out of data points, all humans do the same. Often, our conscious memory stories are designed to support our positive self-regard, to rationalize, blame, find excuses, and so forth. Temperamentally melancholy people tend to do the opposite and are often more honest with themselves.
Psychiatrists and Psychoanalysts know how to listen stories and information as "memory data" with all of the selection, distortion, factual accounts, mental constructions, etc. which are part of memory. We are trained to listen as if watching a movie. Since we are not judges or juries, "truth" is not necessarily our pursuit although we can be quick to call "bullshit" when needed because people lie and manipulate too. We are not truth-relativists, but our focus is elsewhere.
One of the fascinating things about Psychoanalysis is to see how memory narratives change during the process.
Even recent memories are subject to distortion: Trust your memory? Maybe you shouldn't.
From the article:
All elitisms run the risk of inbreeding and sterility. The real benefit of a perceived equality among citizens, as driven by the rough and tumble of economic competition, is not only that it expands the wealth pie but also continuously changes the diners at the table. That means that some at the head table may never have the proper politically correct manners, but that is the price of vitality. The problem with socialism and its near cousins is that it places the selection of winners and losers (even if called “industrial policy”) in the hands of the status quo, who quite naturally will put their friends and family first in line.
 As you've no doubt heard, the threat of Natural Global Colding is already showing signs of occurring, like it snowing in May in the midwest — in the middle of a drought, no less — and now the Oklahoma tornadoes being extra-violent because of the extra-cold wind sheer. The following Newsweek article was written before the current rage of twisters, so the author was, indeed, prescient in what he says about them and how, unlike global warming, global colding actually will cause tornadoes and hurricanes to increase in both number and intensity, as his numbers verify.
Pic: This week's issue of Time also covers the subject in depth
There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns may have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten years from now.
The evidence is support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.
Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states.
...
Trend: To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.
Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about 7 degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. The scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
So that's about as sobering as it gets, folks. Ten years really isn't a very long time.
I originally spotted this alarming article on a very cool AGW site called Real Science.
The original article is here.
Newsweek.
April 28.
1975.
 My photo: student detritus in dorm hallway after the kids have decamped in their parents' vehicles.
The Average Salary of a Military Helicopter Pilot
I'd pay them to do it
Sperry Topsiders: Made in Maine
Nearly 19 feet! Longest Burmese python captured in Florida
Remarkable footage of the big tornado
Wallace Stegner is a wonderful wordsmith
Homeownership, Unemployment and Economic Growth: Looking at the Trends
Yale gets on board with MOOCS
Obama and Elizabeth Warren Feed the College Beast
Cost of Coverage – The Real Measure of Health Reform Impact
Rand Paul Stands Up Against Government Greed
Blue State CT: State Revenue Surge A Bad Reason To Spend More
Unions break ranks on ObamaCare
Top IRS official will invoke the Fifth Amendment in congressional hearing about tea party targeting program
Time for a team huddle: Lefty bloggers/journos head to the White House
Why is the White House Having a Secret Meeting with a Bevy of Lefty Columnists?
Strangled By Red Tape
The Arab collapse - Middle East a vulture’s feast
Driscoll's Quote of the Day:
Here’s the hard thing Republicans have to do if they don’t want this crisis to go to waste: they have to ignore their id, the temptation of the sugar high of partisan point-scoring. They must willfully set aside Obama’s presence in the fray, leaving the short term personalized attacks on the table, and go after the much bigger prize. Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is. Making this about him is a short term boost to the pleasure center of the conservative brain. Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.
Russia: Playing a Losing Hand like a Winner
Commencement Weekend, and those darn Mennonites hog all the best parking spots in front of the pubs. People tell me they are Amish, others say these people are Mennonites. Same idea.
These people believe our ordinary lives are foolish, vain, Godless, and empty. I can't swear that they are wrong, but they are just ordinary people too.
Tuesday, May 21. 2013
That's the view of Dr. Alan Frances, and I tend to agree. However, I never liked the DSM 4 either.
Psychiatry's New Diagnostic Manual: "Don't Buy It. Don't Use It. Don't Teach
It."
Related, from Dr. McHugh: DSM-5: A Manual Run Amok - It's time for psychiatry to drop its field guide and try to
learn about mental ills
Nobody in my family, or any of my friends' families, is graduating from college this year. I have a few high schools graduations to attend, but another month before that occurs.
Yet it is the commencement season. I was cruising the web recently and stumbled on two commentaries which I thought were excellent. One was a commencement speech redone as a 10 minute video. The other was from NPR which published snippets of graduation advice from economists. Both are linked here.
This video was based on a commencement speech from Kenyon College, several years ago. (my apologies, the original link was removed by the author's trust due to copyright issues, but the version I linked to does still work).
The letter to graduates (with link to original) is below the fold.
Continue reading "Commencement"
A Revealing Look at a State Flagship - Paying for the Party confirms many of your worst fears about big state universities
 Dear Maggie's Valued Female Reader™:
I have tremendously good news.
It must be awful constantly being treated as a second-class citizen in a male-dominated society. We all know about the inequalities in the job market, corporate structure and politics, but it's exceptionally cruel when even something as simple as sports needs an official Act of Congress (Title IX) just so a college can have a girls softball team.
But perhaps the biggest reminder of your lowly status is that even your clothes are regulated. Wear this, don't wear that. Do you see men going through any such restrictions? Of course not. Your being told what to wear based on your gender is the moral equivalent of being told which bathroom you can use based on the color of your skin.
And the great progressive city of New York has decided to address this hideous injustice, once and for all.
No longer will you be castigated and restricted and confined merely because of your gender. No longer will you be forced to wear the shackles that the male-dominated society has placed upon you.
Because of the grand farsightedness of the great city of New York, you no longer have to wear the shackles at all.
Topless Women in Public Not Breaking the Law, Says NYPD
See, guys?
Progressivism isn't always bad.
 Cool reconstruction of von Richthofen's death
Fixed - how to sell a boat to the guys
Harvard students denounce academic freedom
Israel’s Other Enemy: The Blue Social Model
Climate slowdown means extreme rates of warming 'not as likely'
But they insist that someday it will be terrible...maybe.
Loneliness and social isolation are bad
That's news? But is it cause, or effect?
The danger of asking a gal for a date, on campus:
The Obama administration seems to be doing its level best to convince the American people that a large and powerful federal government is a threat to liberty. From IRS zealots blatantly using their powers against political enemies to prosecutors overreaching in attacks on journalists to deranged bureaucrats attacking fundamental standards of fairness on campus, the federal government is daily demonstrating the danger of giving it too many missions.
Three FoxNews Reporters Spied on by DoJ
It keeps getting worser and worser
A Do-Nothing Congress Won’t Surprise These Beltway Insiders
Good.
The White House’s shifting IRS account
PJM EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama
Andy Borowitz writes satirical columns for The New Yorker, His point of view is reliably liberal. But...
BACKGROUNDER: Palestinian Arab and Jewish Refugees
The game of chicken over Syria with dangerous consequences
Seen in a Holiday Inn Express parking lot in Ohio. I chatted with the Californian owner. It's a Ford F450 van, heavily customized. The extra-large gas tank is bomb-proof, and tons of other specials including the suspension. The inside is a camper. His wife likes to camp off road in the Sierras and they drive up mountains, through rivers, and over boulders.
He claims 12-15 mpg. He has driven it cross-country twice, just for fun. He refused to tell me whether he had a firearm somewhere in there. It would be stupid not to.
Monday, May 20. 2013
Here's one of them. More here.
This is what has been going on: Orwell, Huxley and the Emerging Totalitarianism:
Several aspects of modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and Huxley. Orwell’s idea of “New Speak,” for example, the deliberate remoulding and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The political purpose of “New Speak” is to control the thinking of the populace – not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain “offensive” words – such as “cross” – have been eliminated from public use. Thus for example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed “Charing T Station” – after Henry Ford’s Model T automobile.
The American federal government has gone crazy, and power-mad. VDH: It Can Happen Here:
Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful—until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.
I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him...
Got home too late last nite to accumulate the usual stack or to peruse all the links sent to my inbox. Mechanical flight delays. Isn't air travel fun? Try amusing yourself sometime for 8 hours in the Columbus airport while remaining sober in a cigar-free zone with nothing but fat women to look at and no laptop. Like jail. Got frisked, too. The rest of my family drove home quicker than I flew home to Yankeeland.
I have always hated swimming pools, but here's another reason.
What will really happen when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts?
Not too bad really.
Fluoride Fight Cracks Portland's Left
It's not from The Onion
EU bureaucrats clearly have too little to do and too much time on their hands
The challenge for bureaucrats everywhere is to justify their existence and their jobs and their pensions by creating rules for others.
"I recall one university president who, when asked if he had read The Bell Curve, said that not only had he not read the book, but he would not even think about reading it."
IRS To Pro-Life Groups: You Know You’re Gonna Have To Give Up This Whole Protest Thing, Right?
Obama admits he’s a socialist - What his ‘Bulworth’ fantasy reveals
IRS scandal a reminder of how I learned about The Chicago Way
What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology
Fund: Three Signs There’s a Cover-Up - “Mistakes were made….I don’t recall” and other surefire clues.
Art Laffer: Obama scandals are phenomenal for stocks
Lovely flat farmland north of Columbus, this weekend. A little further north, the land becomes pleasantly rolling in a way which is reminiscent of New England. Corn ("maize" to you in Yorba Euroland) is just beginning to sprout. It is no wonder that ambitious New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers fled here in the early 1800s for the good farmland. 90% of Americans were in the agricultural industry at the time and they were not stupid about money. It was not about aesthetics: subsistence farming sucks. People desire profit. Farms are outdoor solar factories.
I'll post some more of my Ohio pics later. I took almost 50, which is a lot for me in 3 days.
Sunday, May 19. 2013
 We discussed salt last week. Here's The Bogus Public Health Attack on Sugar
Sugar in soda pop is no more fattening than any other carb, eg fruit, bread, milk, fruit juices like apple juice and orange juice. Nevertheless, it's not a "public health" issue, it's an individual choice issue. I like that light brown granulated sugar in my coffee.
It's brown, so it must be healthier, right?
More bad news about American higher ed: Overqualified and underprepared
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