Holy Hagel!

Not blogging much, sorry. Might get a chance to write down my take on the SOTU. Or maybe not.

But don't miss this speech by Chuck Hagel. He's got fire in his belly. Holy shit.

(via Jeremy)

AEI and NASA?

One of my guilty pleasures is reading the libertarian coffeeshop: Hit n Run. This post over there talks about different edcation standards for different level students. I was paying attention until I saw this: (emphasis mine)

This is obviously politically untenable, but I wonder how much the market corrects for the relative intelligence of young people right now. Below-average people can go to college, but their records are not passed on to NASA or AEI fellowship programs. They are courted by different industries; the army, for example, spends more time spelunking for recruits from State University than they do from Yale.

I don't know about you, but when essayists start comparing AEI fellows to rocket scientists, I start to question their judgement.

Educator in chief?

I'm going to pretend I didn't read this.

New White House Counsel

Via TPM (sidebar), here's the scoop on the new White House Counsel, Fred F Fielding.

Fielding was persuaded to leave his lucrative position as a senior partner in the Washington law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding with "an appeal to patriotism" and an assurance that he would not just be the President's lawyer but would be deeply involved in Congressional strategy and negotiations, the official said.

These negotiations will be something like... how about you convince the Pres to sign our Democratic legislation instead of vetoing it, and we'll forget to subpoena people for illegal wire-tapping? I could be wrong, but I think the Democrats are going to trade Bush back all the skeletons in his closet one by one in order to push their liberal agenda. Me, I'd rather see accountability and transparency than blackmailing a lame duck into an effective majority.

"The key for the Administration is going to be drawing the lines on these boundaries of executive privilege and access to documents and congressional oversight — drawing the lines around the really important issues and trying to be a little more flexible on the others," said a former colleague of Fielding. "They're not going to fold, because Fielding is a very serious, hard-nosed person, and he's a tough negotiator. But they're also going not to take a totally stonewall position. That doesn't mean they're going to cave in. What it means is they're going to negotiate and focus on the things that they're truly protecting and that are truly important."

So....what do you think the administration is going to focus on protecting? And what will they give away to protect it? So much to negotiate, and the president has a bucketful of liabilities. It's a bad time to be a conservative.

I wish I were decimated by taxes...

This is a public service announcement to everyone who uses the word "decimate".

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

De-ci-mate: Latin for... one tenth (deci-), to kill (-mate) .
To kill 1/10th.

It should not be used as it was by Washington Post columnist William A Arkin describing Iraq:

In other words, short of decimating the insurgents and the militias and the terrorists in an all-out renewed war, which isn't going to happen, what has already happened has left behind an image and a legacy that withdrawal won't make worse.

I imagine we've decimated the terrorists a few times over, but it takes a half dozen decimations to even get a majority.

Nor should it be used as by this McGill Professor

I’ve always thought of some of what academics do as “playing at” being of a higher social class than we are. Major field-wide conferences [cough]NCA![/cough]are held at hotels so expensive that they decimate university travel budgets.

I could be wrong, but I think he's complaining that the hotel cuts into a lot more than 10% of the travel budget (or he goes to too many conferences!).

So what makes a professional writer (and his editor) and a college professor all flub it up?

Decimate has come to be such a loaded word because its use by the Romans was punitive and barbaric. When a legion failed to perform they could be decimated, in which they would draw straws and the 9/10ths of the "winners" would be forced to bludgeon every 10th member to death. I can only imagine that was a pretty horrible occurance, and much of that horror persists in the word to this day.

Opposites attract? You sure have a purdy immune system

It's generally a bad idea to get scientific input from Wikipedia, so I'll pass this on as an utterly uncorroborated disturbing thought. MHC is the major histocompatability complex that does immunological things (like organ rejection).

It has been suggested that MHC plays a role in the selection of potential mates. MHC genes make molecules that enable the immune system to recognise invaders; generally, the more diverse the MHC genes of the parents, the stronger the immune system of the offspring. It would obviously be beneficial, therefore, to have evolved systems of recognizing individuals with different MHC genes and preferentially selecting them to breed with.

Yamazaki et al. (1976) showed this to be the case for male mice, who show such a preference for females of different MHC.

In a 1995 experiment, a group of female college students smelled t-shirts that had been worn by male students for two nights, without deodorant, cologne or scented soaps. Overwhelmingly, the women preferred the odors of men with dissimilar MHCs to their own. However, their preference was reversed if they were taking oral contraceptives. [3] The hypothesis is that MHCs affect mate choice and that oral contraceptives can interfere with this.

This experiment has yet to be satisfactorily replicated and as such is still an issue of much contention.

That was too amusing not to pass along. Call me very skeptical. Still, the idea of women having different preferences on and off the pill has an amusing danger to it. Also, I hope those poor girls were compensated well for sniffing the stinky clothes.

Speaker Pelosi

Today is the closest a woman's ever come to being President (3rd in succession).

Also Harriet Miers resigned today as White House Counsel. The same day a new Congress comes in with an oversight agenda, the President's personal counsel leaves?

(Hmmm...
Nah.
Well... I guess we'll see. )

Philadelphia Peace Movement: Jan 2007

I wonder what the average age was in the recent peace protest? Not exactly spring chickens...I bet most of them have protested wars before. I guess hawks don't have to worry about the protest babe theory.

Busy holidays

With all the fun I forgot to blog.
Actually I don't have much to say, Ford, Saddam, and James Brown died.
There's a new war between Ethiopia and Somalia.

So to tide people over until I have something worth saying, here's a detailed explaination of the game theory of leaving the toilet seat up. It describes the feminist position (ie "seat stays down") thusly:

Consequences of strategy M:
In strategy M the seat is always left down. When John performs operation #1 he lifts the seat before the operation and lowers it after the operation. The respective average cost of toilet seat transfer operations is:

John: 2pC
Marsha: 0

In these strategy Marsha bears no cost; all of the incremental costs are borne by John. John objects.

As I understand it though, the issue isn't really the work of flipping the seat.

The real issue for men is they're busy shaking, flushing, and zipping...that and we don't care. It's not like men protest when the seat is down.

The real issue for women is those who are used to the seat being down sometimes forget to look where they sit.* The risk of falling into the toilet is enough to warrant an argument even when the effort of flipping a seat is not.

So in essence, the costs are reversed. The incremental risk of falling in the can is almost uniquely borne by women (for some reason men just don't have that problem...at least not sober). True, in the absence of men, women could just leave the toilet seat down forever and never worry about it. But I'm not too sympathetic to the case that someone is too oblivious to watch where they put their ass. In fact, anyone who tells me they're likely to fall in the toilet if I leave the seat up is begging me to give it a try.

*Special disclaimer: These insights were gleaned from female college roomates and high school friends...the fiance has yet to opine on the matter. Fair warning though babe: if you do fall in, I'm gonna laugh my ass off.