Her self-honesty is perhaps most evident in her writings on identity. A deep plunge into the core of one’s being is always scary prospect. Who knows what ugliness (or grace) might be found? Who knows what hurts have been buried out of sight and what joys have gone underappreciated? (Luckily,) she shows a good bit more courage than I do, and invites us to take a look with her.

Strangely enough, even though her blog rarely touches on religion (and she is, in fact, areligious herself), whenever I read it, I can’t help but reflect on my own beliefs. Perhaps trudging through the failings of (im)polite society reminds me that I am to be salty. That I am to bring light. And picking through the pieces of my life makes me ever more thankful that my identity ultimately lies in the fact that I am Christ’s.

Her insights and writings are well worth the read. (Even if they don’t inspire you to religion.)

I didn’t know how to categorize this first link, so I’ll just let it stand alone above the cut.

• Jens Galschiot’s Survival of the Fattest
  

  There’s an inscription: “I’m sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”

World

• How the US can help the greens in Iran (FP)
• Afghanistan Metrics: Make sure you’re measuring what you need to measure, not just what you think you need to measure. (FP, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)
  

  “Any input metric.” Megadittoes. This was another thing that used to drive me nuts in Iraq, listening to Americans boast about money spent, projects initiated, patrols conducted, and such. “These indicators tell us what we are doing, but not the effect we are having.” Rather, he advocates, look at outcomes, and especially the effect on the population. How to measure those will be the subject of our next installment on this insightful essay.

• Advanced Persistent Threats: More on the Google hacking case. (Wired)
  

  “The scope of this is much larger than anybody has every conveyed,” says Kevin Mandia, CEO and president of Virginia-based computer security and forensic firm Mandiant. “There [are] not 50 companies compromised. There are thousands of companies compromised. Actively, right now.”

• China’s Military and Cyberwarfare (Fallows)
• The moderate muslims are winning. (Zakaria)
• Mullah Baradar, second-in-command of the Taliban, captured. Great! (economist)
  

  The development suggests a serious blow has been struck against the Afghan insurgents. It may also indicate a shift in co-operation between American and Pakistani intelligence services, perhaps reflecting a change in policy by the government in Islamabad.

• Mullah Baradar, second-in-command of the Taliban, captured. Great? (NYT)
  

  “He was the only person intent on or willing for peace negotiations,” said Hajji Agha Lalai, former head of the government-led reconciliation process in the city of Kandahar, who has dealt with members of the Taliban leadership council for several years.

• Who is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar? (FT)
• Inside the hunt for IED’s in Afghanistan (GlobalPost)
• Inside Somalia. 19 years. Still hurting. (GlobalPost)

US Policy and Politics

• Some statistics on teaching effectiveness and pay
• A Chinese take on the Quadrennial Defense Review
  

  Several years ago, I met with the Deputy Director of the Policy Planning staff of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I asked him what he was working on — and what China’s grand strategy was.

  His reply: “We are trying to figure out how to keep you Americans distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.”

  It’s pretty memorable when one can joke and be truthful at the same time.

• Innovating education reform (Time)
• Wall St. elders recognize follies of the youth. (NYT)
  

  While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.

  Mr. Volcker, 82, signed up the support of nearly a dozen peers whose average age is north of 70 and whose pedigrees on Wall Street and in banking are impeccable.

• State capitals (Harrisburg) trying to declare bankruptcy is probably not a good thing
• The individual coverage health insurance market is unsustainable
  

  Anthem Blue Cross of California announced that its individual market premiums would rise by as much as 39 percent in the coming months.
  …
  Anthem of Connecticut requested an increase of 24 percent last year, which was rejected by the state. Anthem in Maine had an 18.5-percent premium increase rejected by the state last year as being “excessive and unfairly discriminatory” – but is now requesting a 23-percent increase this year. In 2009, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan requested approval for premium increases of 56 percent for plans sold on the individual market. Regency Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon requested a 20-percent premium increase. UnitedHealth, Tufts, and Blue Cross requested 13- to 16-percent rate increases in Rhode Island. And rates for some individual health plans in Washington increased by up to 40 percent until
  Washington State imposed stiffer premium regulations.

• What the $787b stimulus bill really bought the US. (Klein)
  

  One point, in particular, kept coming up: If you divide the bill’s spending by the bill’s job creation, it doesn’t look that good. “What is $800 Billion divided by 2.5 Million jobs?” Wrote one reader. “I think it’s $320,000 per job! Is that a good deal for me, the buyer/taxpayer?”

  That would be a very bad deal for you, the buyer/taxpayer. But it’s also not the deal you got. The stimulus was meant to create jobs. But it was not a job-creation bill. For instance: Unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits are very important forms of relief for the suddenly unemployed, and they stimulate the economy because the unemployed have more money to spend, and that even creates some jobs. But the correct evaluation is not how many jobs are created by unemployment insurance, but what sort of relief that insurance provides to the unemployed and what sort of stimulus it delivers to the economy.

• Stop with the “selling insurance across state lines will solve all our problems” rhetoric (Klein)
  

  Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state’s regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn’t give the insurers the freedom they want, it’ll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.

  This is exactly what happened in the credit card industry, which is regulated in accordance with conservative wishes. In 1980, Bill Janklow, the governor of South Dakota, made a deal with Citibank: If Citibank would move its credit card business to South Dakota, the governor would literally let Citibank write South Dakota’s credit card regulations. You can read Janklow’s recollections of the pact here.

• The stimulus: Is it working? (NYT)
  

  Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs.

• Feds want warrantless tracking of cell phones.
• Things that the US government needs to do by April: (CGG)
  

  1. Jobs bill
  2. Deficit Reduction Commission
  3. Already expired:
  1. Estate Tax, currently repealed, but jumping to 2001 law in 2011
  2. 71 other expired tax provisions, including the R&D tax credit.
  4. About to expire:
  1. Highway authorization
  2. flood insurance
  3. postponement of the 21% cut in Medicare physician reimbursement rates
  5. Defense supplemental to fund the Iraq and Afghanistan wars
  6. Budget resolution
  7. Confirm non-controversial judges and other presidential appointees on “hold” for reasons having nothing to do with their qualifications.

• The “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” Report from the DOJ is out. (289 pg PDF) James Fallows followup.
  

  My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey’s Hiroshima was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The OPR report is essentially this era’s Hiroshima. As Hersey’s book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name — “our” meaning the citizens of the United States.

  If you want to argue that “whatever” happened in the “war on terror” was necessary because of the magnitude and novelty of the threat, then you had better be willing to face what the “whatever” entailed. Which is what this report brings out. And if you believe — as I do, and have argued through the years — that what happened included excessive, abusive, lawless, immoral, and self-defeating acts done wrongly in the name of American “security,” then this is a basic text as well.

Society

• Getting a PhD in the humanities is not all that its cracked up to be.
• Interesting: “Gay” polls better than “Homosexual” (cbs)
  
• Plagiarism? Or re-Mixing?
• A confidential informant gone wrong (NPR)
• 10 ideas from the TED conference (CNN)
• The impacts of Title IX
• Heroin moves to middle America (LATimes)
• Suburban homelessness rises
• Barbie: Computer engineer?
  

  This is actually wonderful. Barbie’s had 124 careers since 1959, ranging from Stewardess to Paratrooper. Today she gets her 125th: computer engineer. You can tell she’s smart ’cause she’s got glasses, and reads nothing but binary.

• The new (jobs market) normal
  

  The “new normal” for employment doesn’t work for anyone except employers and career coaches who sell platitudes about how the recession is an opportunity for resourceful people, says CIO.com’s careers editor Meridith Levinson. That’s why they both want us to accept depressed salaries and bigger workloads as the new status quo.

• A Profile of Roger Ebert
• How something gets on the menu of McDonald’s
  

  It turns out there’s a chef at the beginning of that pipeline — a cook who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and who once ran the gracious kitchens at the Four Seasons Resort and Club outside Dallas. The Southwest Salad, the Angus burgers, the Snack Wrap — they all emerged from the food laboratory of Daniel Coudreaut, 44, whose business card reads DIRECTOR OF CULINARY INNOVATION, MENU MANAGEMENT but who likes to go by Chef Dan.

• The Food Environment Atlas (USDA, interactive) (Blog post)
• Some mindblowing income statistics of the wealthy (WSJ)
  

  To make the top 400, a taxpayer had to have income of more than $138.8 million. As a group, the top 400 reported $137.9 billion in income, and paid $22.9 billion in federal income taxes.
  …
  The 400 best-off taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 16.6%, lower than in any year since the IRS began making the reports in 1992.

• On the other side of the income spectrum… (Yglesias)
  

  That means that the top 400 households together earned $138 billion in 2007. By contrast, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey the 24 million households who comprise the bottom fifth of the income distribution together hauled in about $247 billion.

• Unemployment rate for various education levels
  
• Who uses a payphone? (NYT)
• Gallup poll interactive maps
• How the current joblessness will impact America’s future
• Michelle Obama vs Childhood Obesity. Let’s Move campaign website
• NYC, on the cutting edge of public dietary health. Or invasive government control of what you eat. First fat, now salt.
• The implications of the proliferation of viral war footage.
  

  In the viral video realm, amateur Iraq war footage ranks just behind pornography, celebrities’ drunken exploits, and shark attacks. Do these videos represent what Sontag called our “right to view,” or are they a porn medium made from leftovers of a world filming its self-destruction?

Science and Technology

• The final space shuttle launch (Endeavour)
  
• Geomapping Facebook networks
  
• New hospital gowns: improving patients’ dignity, if even by a notch or two.
• Robots in action on the manufacturing floor. (Videos)
• CO2 – bad for global warming AND for ocean acidification (TNR)
• Why does time seem to get faster as you get older? (npr)
  

  Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory.

• Love, sex, and critical thinking / creativity (SciAm)
• The difference between adult and baby brain wirings
  

  “Children and adults are different forms of Homo sapiens,” writes Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby, a tour through the recent findings of cognitive science about the minds of young children. For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.

• Why the industrial revolution was British

Olympics

• Figure skating routines: from concept to reality
• Don’t know your 1260 Double McTwist from your Frontside 540 Stalefish mute grab? Neither do I. Snowboard Halfpipe Trick List (Videos)
• Shen/Zhao was the fairy tale, but the Pang/Tong free skate was absolutely gorgeous.

Photos and Fun

• New aerial photographs of 9/11 (NPR)
• National Wildlife Foundation Photo Contest
• Know your Sesame Streeters
• Obama forced to feign interest in mundane things (photos, humor)
• Green screens are _everywhere_
  
• Apologize: Founding Fathers remix.
  
• Can’t be with a loved one? Send a Hug-E-Gram!
  
• Women, like men, age like a fine wine. Until they hit 39. (okcupid)
  

  The graph below shows a similar trend, until a poignant drop at the end.
  
  Either something very sad happens to a woman at 40, or something incredibly awesome happens at 39. Hard to tell. And I also want to say, guys, that just because a woman is older, she’s not necessarily on the fast-track to marriage:

So, without further delay (in reverse chronological order):

Mac: Nice links, as always. How do you manage to read so much? (crossposted from facebook)
>>Thanks! I’m glad you enjoy them. I actually don’t “manage” my reading too well, since it tends to come at the expense of the rest of my life…but that’s a topic for another post.

Livia @ Livia Blackburne: Thanks for the plug. Proud to be the best (err, only) writing blog you know
>>No problem! You occupy a very special place in my blogroll. (That is, until one of my other grad-student-by-day/writer-by-night friends gets a blog as well)

Livia: I like these roundups. Can you release them more often? It’s alot of links to get through in one sitting.
>>I tried this time. I really did. Sometimes it’s hard to find time to post, so the links just start piling up…

Jen @ Tiny Urban Kitchen: This looks great! And your post was fun to read. Glad you and wyu had a good time. As for your photos, all you need is a little bit of post-processing (increase exposure & correct white balance) and they might actually look pretty good.
>>Wow, thanks! Coming from you, that means _a_lot_. Maybe next time I’ll try a recipe food post.

mmh: why are you not looking forward to anything in 2010? c’mon….
>>I was looking forward to things in 2010. It was just a lot easier to come up with 0 things than 10 things =b.

mmh: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! I hope you’re celebrating today & not reading a million articles. (btw, there’s a ‘read more’ thing in wordpress that looks like this: )
>>Thanks. Uh…gosh…I don’t remember what I did on my birthday. (And no, my lack of memory is not alcohol related.)

Lillerz: Well on the bright side, at least you’re graduating.
>>eh…not yet. one. more. year. Speaking of which, do I get to call you Doctor yet?

becks: Brilliant links – your blog’s a treasure trove of good stuffs.
>>ty. We aim to please.

mmh: thanks bro! you forgot to mention that the band is awesome & the video is the best mariah carey cover you have ever heard! ever! ^_^
>>np. Everyone, Last Year’s Model is awesome, and this is the best Mariah Carey cover EVAR. rawr. And in case you didn’t watch the video, shame on you. Here it is again.

flav: Sounds good to me!
>>Glad it sounds good. Does it sound accurate?

Jess @ On Race, Privilege, and Medicine: I sooo appreciate this post. And I so appreciate you. I, too, often ponder this idea of “neighbor” though I suppose without christianity to guide me I use the word “community” instead. The repercussions of our individual actions on neighbors that we have never met. How to live with that. How to make other people recognize how connected we all really are…

sometimes i wonder if we’ve all just gotten too far ahead of ourselves. There’s this economist, Schumacher, who believes that humans weren’t wired or built to really comprehend things larger than our own physical neighborhoods. The effects of globalization have been/are so devastating in some ways because it doesn’t come naturally to humans to think on such a big scale. In a nutshell, it’s hard for humans to care about people they’ve never met, so maybe we shouldn’t have the power to effect people we haven’t met.

i guess that’s a more pessimistic take on your optimistic spin.

whoops
>>I see your pessimism and raise you a bitter dose of reality. It’s not just “hard for humans to care about people they’ve never met”, we’re terrible at caring for the person down the street. Also that “power to effect people we haven’t met” is pretty pernicious. Removing it might come at the expense of bringing down modern society.

mmh: yay! wordpress is so much better, really… & if you’re uploading lots of photos, there’s a picasa plugin & the flickr slideshow looks pretty nice too.
>>Yeah…photos…oh wait, here’s one!

Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 12.28.09

I was going to pen a relationship manifesto for Valentine’s Day, but I realized that I a) don’t have enough material for a manifesto, and b) would prefer for any future significant other to learn about my thoughts regarding romance and relationships through our time together and not from a blog post. That said, I do have a bunch of off-the-cuff observations that I’m willing to share.

In slightly more important holiday news, Happy Chinese New Year of the Tiger! =D

——

Back when I was in undergrad, I promised to myself that if I were still single in my mid-late 20’s, I would not turn into one of those young adults that constantly bemoaned their singleness. I think that I’ve avoided that fate so far, but I’m a little bit more sympathetic towards them now.
—
Some of you may remember the very first Valentine’s Day post. I’d like to think that I’ve come a long way since then, but probably not really,
—
I used to cringe whenever my friends offered to me up. It’s still kind of awkward, but I appreciate the vote of confidence.
—
I’m not picky, I just have a high activation energy for interest recognition. (As opposed to a low activation energy for interest disqualification.)
—
I’ve said it before, but I have the coolest 2n wheel friends.
—
There are many great benefits to being single. Most people forget to appreciate them.
—
I don’t think I’m cut out to be single for life, but if that’s the way things turn out, God has been, still is, and forever will be all that I need and more than enough.
—
If you wait too long, the one you’re waiting for will be gone.
—
Yes, you can have platonic friendships with members of the opposite gender.
—
I don’t understand how people build long-distance romantic relationships from nothing, but it happens.
—
Creating an online dating profile takes time. Time that I evidently spend combing the internet news instead.
—
I used to joke that I wanted to be dating someone before jeneric got married. I now joke that I want to be dating someone before they have a child. I think that gives me at least of 1.5 years. Time to get to work. Or stop joking.

Follow the liveblogs @
TheLede (NYT)
The Guardian
NIAC (National Iranian American Council)

Livia Blackburne: A Brain Scientist’s Take on Creative Writing

Livia runs the best (ok, only) writing blog that I follow.

I know, I know, I already gave Livia a plug a few weeks back, but that was for her Haiti donation matching pledge. (There were a total of 32 donors, btw. Shoutouts to guhster, stefunny, kang, moonchacha, Q, caleb, anon, and everyone else who donated and didn’t leave a name for me to recognize =b)

Livia is neuroscientist graduate student by day and a budding YA fantasy writer by night. For those of you who are writers, Livia presents a neuroscientist’s take on the art of crafting fiction. For those of you who aren’t writers, her blog still offers some interesting insights into writing process.

And for those of you who dream about being writers, Livia is proof that yes, the corpus callosum does exist, and you can bridge the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

NU Swing Dance ft. Lesley Byers and the Jazz Cats
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Louis Room, Norris University Center (1999 Campus Dr, Evanston)
7pm Beginner Lesson, 8pm-11pm dance.
$5 w/ Wildcard, $7 w/o
All are welcome! (Yes, that means singles and couples =b)

Politics

• Bipartisanship at its finest (Fallows)
  

  I got this note from someone with many decades’ experience in national politics, about a discussion between two Congressmen over details of the stimulus bill:

  “GOP member: ‘I’d like this in the bill.’

  “Dem member response: ‘If we put it in, will you vote for the bill?’

  “GOP member: ‘You know I can’t vote for the bill.’

  “Dem member: ‘Then why should we put it in the bill?’

  “I witnessed this myself.”

 

 

• Obama’s quiet political reforms
  

  Yet there is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for–but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions.

• Murray Hill Incorporated for Congress!
  
• Congress. Who spoke and about what. (interactive)
• Words fail me: 2010 DailyKos / Research2000 poll of self-identified republicans. (raw data)
  
• US Senate voting blocs via network analysis (slideshow)
• American (political) idiots
  

  “These figures highlight a massive failure of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats among the nation’s political elite,” Scott Rasmussen wrote in the analysis. “Given the amount of political chatter about the budget in recent years, it is almost beyond comprehension that neither party has seen fit to highlight the basics so that the American people can make reasoned choices on the fundamental issues before them.”

• Jon Stewart v. Bill O’ Reilly (FoxNews)
• Remember the post about how the government was broken? Now comes Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) putting a blanket hold on everyone. (TPM) (Definition: hold)
• An intriguing filibuster reform proposal
  

  1. Make them vote. Cloture is invoked with a vote by three-fifths of the Senate’s membership — the magical 60 votes now necessary for the Senate to do anything. That is why it does not matter whether Sen. Brown votes; anything short of 60 in favor of cloture is a failure.

  That is ridiculous. Filibustering Senators are the ones trying to prevent the Senate from voting. It would make more sense to require them, after some hours of debate, to assemble 41 votes to continue, rather than the other way around. Our compromise is to allow three-fifths of Senators present and voting to invoke cloture, making votes against just as important as votes in favor.

  2. Make voting easier. By itself, Step One would change little since attendance is generally high for cloture votes. That is because those votes follow elaborate buildup. Fairness requires that it be as easy to try to end filibusters as it is to start them.
  …
  3. Reduce debate times. Once invoked, cloture allows another 30 hours of debate before a vote occurs. Because the legislative process involves a series of steps, Senators can delay a bill by weeks by forcing multiple cloture votes on a single bill.

• Americans: politically childish (Slate)
  

  At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.

• Dare to brainstorm: an alternative to state representation in the senate
  

  But what if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?

  Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

• Profile of US Attorney General Eric Holder (TAP)
• Palin emails released
• Sarah Palin’s speech to the Tea Party (transcript)
  

Policy

• Commentary on the “Race to the Top” Education Reform Program
• On the 2011 Presidential Budget (CBPP)
• 2001 Budget Interactive Graphic (NYT)
• How each US agency is affected by the budget
• US budget forecasting: like trying to tell the future. Oh wait, it is trying to tell the future. (inforgraphic)
• How the budget crunch is affecting Colorado Springs
  

  This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

  More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops – dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

• Disproving the efficient markets theory (haha)
  

  An old joke. Two economists are walking down the street. One says: “Hey, there’s a dollar bill on the floor.” The other says: “Impossible. If it were real, someone would have picked it up by now.”

• Reducing the budget sounds great in theory, sucks in reality.
  

  Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), for example, lashed out at Obama for “the same old big government budget that will spend too much, borrow too much, and tax too much.” He said: “I’m feeling a lot like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.”

  But at the same time, Bond issued a statement criticizing Obama’s proposed cuts in the military’s C-17 aircraft program — cuts that happen to affect thousands of jobs in Missouri.

  “Despite the need for the proven, on-time, and on-budget workhorse, the President once again wants to shut down our nation’s only large airlift line in production,” Bond said in a statement.

• Impact of taxes on the economy (Baseline)
  

  If there’s one thing I’d like people to take away, it’s that any theoretical economic argument that can be stated in a sentence is as likely to be untrue as true in the real world, no matter how clever or intuitive it is.

• Unemployment: It’s going to be ugly for a long time… (Delong)
  
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen on DADT
  

  Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.

• Killed by lobbyists: Whatever happened to the soda tax?
  

  Some commentary from MoJo

  For comparison, that’s nearly as much as the entire aerospace industry spends on lobbying for the entire defense budget each year. It’s five times more than the sugar lobby itself spends lobbying on all sugar-related issues each year. It’s about as much as organized labor spends on all lobbying activities for everything.

  That’s the kind of muscle that the business community can bring to bear when it cares to. As much as the entire annual lobbying budget of organized labor or the aerospace industry, all for one single piece of legislation that never really had a ton of support in the first place. That’s a lot of leverage.

• Agriculture subsidies, still unassailable
• Wall Street fights back, gives money to Republicans (NYT)
  

  But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
  …
  “The expectation in Washington is that ‘We can kick you around, and you are still going to give us money,’ ” said a top official at a major Wall Street firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of alienating the White House. “We are not going to play that game anymore.”

  That official’s view of how politics should be run is so pathetic it’d be funny…if it weren’t for the fact that everyone thinks the same way.

• Bernie Sanders (I-VT): 10 million solar roofs, 10 million gallons of solar hot water act
  

  Sanders’ bill would authorize rebates which, along with other incentives, would cover up to half the cost of the 10 million solar power systems and 200,000 water heating systems. Non-profit groups and state and local governments also would be eligible.

• 6 Republican ideas already in the health care bill (Klein)
• Interview w/ Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto (Salon)
• Rep Paul Ryan’s healthcare proposal (Klein)
  

  That’s not mere press release braggadocio. CBO agrees. Under the CBO’s likeliest long-term scenario, deficits are at 42 percent of GDP in 2080. Under Ryan’s proposal, we’re seeing surpluses of 5 percent of GDP by that time.

  But Ryan’s budget — and the details of its CBO score — is also an object lesson in why so few politicians are willing to answer the question “but how will you save all that money?”

  As you all know by now, the long-term budget deficit is largely driven by health-care costs. To move us to surpluses, Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs. And beyond health care, Social Security gets guaranteed, private accounts that CBO says will actually cost more than the present arrangement, further underscoring how ancillary the program is to our budget problem.

• Interview w/ Rep Paul Ryan (R), of the aforementioned budget and healthcare proposal (Klein)
• Eric Holder and the trial of Kalik Sheikh Mohammed
  

  “Values matter in this fight,” he said. “We need to give those who might follow these mad men a good sense of what America is, and what America can be. We are militarily strong, but we are morally stronger.”

Society

• Affirmative action, gender-gap style
  

  In recent years, several college leaders have admitted that their institutions give a boost to male applicants to maintain gender balance on campus. Most students of either sex, they point out, prefer such balance. If Vassar accepted equal percentages of each sex, women would outnumber men by more than 2 to 1.

• Interview with Bill Watterson
• Embedded in the Green Berets (CBS – 60 min)
• Who’s in a union?
  
• 5 Credit Card usage myths (WaPo)
• 7 myths of the American Revolution (Smithsonian)
• Yes, if you make over $250,000, you are rich
• Community planning: the free market does not exist in a vacuum (Yglesias)
  

  I think this captures the slightly pathological incoherence of our discourse around these issues. It’s true that if we keep policy on auto-pilot that we’ll get endless reproduction of car-dependent sprawl. But that’s not the same as saying that car-dependent sprawl is the result of “market forces” that are “left to their own devices.” Rather, the issue is “tax codes, zoning, community boards” and a system of “financing” in which the government (through the FHA, Fannie Freddie, etc.) is deeply involved.

• Poems of the Homeless
  

  Homeless, that’s that they call us
  They say we have no home
  Because we live out on the streets
  And choose to drift and roam.
  ~Cassie Sahler, 20

• College gender ratio imbalance: Are women getting smarter, men getting dumber, or is there some secret female cloning facility somewhere?
• Men, also not doing so well in the workforce. Women, keep up the good work.
• Why aren’t there more recognized female authors?
  

  Here’s the deal: men, without thinking, will almost without fail select men. And women, without thinking, will too often select men. It’s a known fact that among children, girls will happily read stories with male protagonists, but boys refuse to read stories with female protagonists. J.K. Rowling was aware of this: if Harry Potter had been Harriet Potter, none of us would know about her.

• A day in the life of a Haiti Relief Worker
• School lunch a day project
• Free Range Kids
• Waterboarding claim retracted (FP)
  

  Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

  “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
  …
  Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

  “What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

  “I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

World

• Chinese Braille. I suppose it’s logical that it existed, but who knew?
• Kinshasa Symphony Trailer (photos)
  
• Arab society’s crunch points
  

  I want highlight four particular crunch points. I call them crunch points because they are areas where Arab society often tries to have it both ways but in my view will sooner or later be forced to make a decisive choice one way or the other. I’ll summarise them under the headings of knowledge, equal rights, secularism and citizenship.

• The Afghanistan power structure
  
• Good news on the Iraq elections: Sunni candidates reinstated (for now)
• New words from Moussavi
  

  “The majority of people believed in the beginning of the revolution that the roots of dictatorship and despotism were abolished,” he said. “I was one of them, but now I don’t have the same beliefs. You can still find the elements and roots that lead to dictatorship.”

• British Man eats Dog (NYT)
  

  I’m with these indignant protesters. I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

• Antibiotic resistant bacteria increasing in China
  

  “There is a real risk that globally we will return to a pre-antibiotic era of medicine, where we face a situation where a number of medical treatment options would no longer be there. What happens in China matters for the rest of the world.”
  …
  Particular alarm has been raised by resistance rates of MRSA in Chinese hospitals, which has more than doubled from 30 per cent to 70 per cent, according to Professor Xiao Yonghong of the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology at Beijing University.
  …
  “The guidelines are not being followed effectively,” added Professor Xiao, “over just the last five years, for example, our studies show the rate antibiotic-resistant E.coli has quadrupled from 10 per cent to 40 per cent.”

• The world can’t cooperate on global warming, so how about an oncoming asteroid?
  

  WASHINGTON, DC – One weighty decision that the world will need to make in 2010 is whether to support an idea raised by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, to launch an unmanned mission to redirect a large asteroid that might collide with Earth after 2030.
  …
  According to NASA, if Apophis hit the Earth, it could release more than 100,000 times the energy of the Tunguska event. Thousands of square kilometers could vaporize in the blast, but the whole Earth would suffer from the loss of sunlight and other effects of the dust released into the atmosphere. This danger explains why a Russian analyst has called Apophis a “space terrorist.”

Science

• The one-cubic foot biodiversity project
• Amazon River dam project moving forward.
• ATM Mounted Card Skimmers – be aware! (part 1)
• Autism-Vaccine Link paper retracted
• Gary Kasparov on Chess
  

  What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

• Who knew that the DoD funded the liberal arts?
• Trying your luck with ChatRoulette
  

  The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind.

• Science Channel Refuses to Dumb Down Science any Further: Punkin’ Chunkin’ (theonion)
• What happened to Microsoft’s innovation culture?
• Solar eclipse composite photo
• DARPAlabs: Immortal Synthetic Organisms
  

  The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

• Copenhagen: What the countries pledged (grist)

Photos

• Treasure trove of old school celebrity photos
• Travel during the Spring Festival in China (Photos)
• Powers of 10, flashstyle: Do you know what a Yottameter is?
• 6 Ninja Turtle concepts that didn’t make the cut.
• Architecture (photos)
• Snowstorm timelapse.
  

To set the stage, the year is 2380. Wormhole gateway technology has led to the colonization of hundreds of interstellar worlds. Biotechnology has also greatly altered society, allowing for bio-electrical implants, implantable memory recorders, and perhaps most importantly, rejuvenation and relife procedures. (They are exactly what they sound like). Society is stable, and our contacts with aliens have been benign. One day, two stars suddenly wink out of existence. Dyson Alpha and Beta. No lead-up, no supernova, nothing. Humans, being the insatiably curious species we are, send out a space ship to investigate. The first in hundreds of years. As you might deduce from the title of the book, what humankind finds there is not pretty.

The plot is perhaps not the most inventive of all time, but what makes Pandora’s Star impressive is it scope. Hamilton weaves together what feels like a dozen distinct threads into a central plot (evidently this is common to all his epics). Sure, it makes things complicated, but on the other hand, the multiple settings allow the reader to really be immersed in the world, neigh galaxy, that Hamilton has constructed. Instead of just reading about Wilson Kime jet-setting around in his FTL-spaceship, you get the sense that the unfolding events are of galactic consequence, and that yes, Virginia, mankind is truly in danger. (To make an unfair comparison, and pick on Ms. Rowling again, if Voldemort killed Harry Potter, did you really fear for the fate of the wizarding and human worlds? That said, I did enjoy HP. Really!)

To be honest, getting into the book is a bit of a chore. For the first two hundred pages or so, you’re constantly bombarded with new characters, new places, and new insights into the 24th century society. But if you keep reading. Eventually names will start to recur, places become familiar, and plotlines coalesce. Is it worth it? There’s still another book to go, but it’s been a fun ride so far.

Politics

• Political corruption or political gratitude? Or just politics? (Rauch)
  

  Consider Rep. Patricia Porker, a member of the Ways and Means Committee. She is running for re-election.

  Consider, next, Marvin Moneybags. He is a wealthy individual with interests before Ways and Means.

  Now consider two scenarios.

  1) Porker calls up Moneybags and says, “Say, Marvin. I need about $300,000 to run campaign ads, but I’m not allowed to take donations that big. I know you’d hate to see anything happen to those tax credits I’ve helped you with. Just a thought: Go spend $300,000 on ads supporting my candidacy. You won’t regret it.”
  …
  2) Moneybags is a friend and an enthusiastic supporter of Porker’s. Acting on his own, without consulting Porker, he spends $300,000 on “Vote for Porker!” ads.
  …
  Why is Scenario 1 illegal and Scenario 2 legal?

 

 

• Obama, Year 1 (TNR)
  

  A Democratic politician recently told me that the best way to get Obama to do what you want is to tell him that it’s the unpopular, difficult, but responsible thing.

• Independents, fewer than you think.
• GOP: “These are not the fiscal conservatives you are looking for” *waves hand in front of face* (Bartlett)

Healthcare

• Reconcilation: A primer
• If air travel were like healthcare. (Rauch)
  
• New study: Calorie counts work.
• On the efficacy of workplace wellness programs
• The healthcare information gap

Economy

• Mankiw on inflation worries.
  

  IS galloping inflation around the corner? Without doubt, the United States is exhibiting some of the classic precursors to out-of-control inflation. But a deeper look suggests that the story is not so simple.

• Greg Mankiw on the Bank Tax
  

  In general, I am skeptical of narrow-based taxes, as they feed a particularly nasty kind of politics, where the majority gangs up on a minority. And I am turned off by the populist rhetoric coming from the administration, which suggests the issue pits Wall Street fat cats against ordinary Americans. Nonetheless, on the economic merits, there may be a case for the bank tax.

• Does Wall St need morality? (MoJo)
  

  Sometimes, the financial companies (and other corporations) say that it is not up to them to make the decisions about what is right and wrong. It is up to government. So long as the government hasn’t banned the activity, a bank has every obligation to its shareholders to provide financial support for any activity from which it can obtain a good return.
  …
  But consider, too, that the business community spends large amounts of money trying to create legislation that allows it to engage in nefarious practices.

• Building a better stimulus
• The not free-market defenders.
  

  In the years leading up to the crisis, the proliferation of fine print, complex products, and hidden costs and dangers – and the push against government regulations over them – exemplified the larger pattern. While touting complexity as a form of innovation and railing against every attempt at government interference, supposedly pro-market forces used that complexity to clog the gears of free market machinery and to reduce competition and maximize profit.

• Zombie Economics: Ideas that just won’t go away. (bookdraft) (blog)
  

  In the 21st century, economics should focus:

  * More on realism, less on rigor
  * More on equity, less on efficiency
  * More on humility, less on hubris

• Interview w/ Bruce Katz, Director of Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
• Modern macroeconomics is on the Wrong Track: Problems and potential areas of improvement

Legal

• A new article on an old news story: the Guantamo suicides
  

  Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment.
  …
  According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

• Supreme Court: Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission Roundup
• The actual opinion
• NPR1
  

  TOTENBERG: It means that as long as they [unions and corporations] do it independently – and in the modern era, all you have to do is copy pretty much what the candidate is doing and follow it. As long as they do it independently, they can spend whatever they want.

• SCOTUSBlog
• NPR2
• Glenn Greenwald
• Dungeons and Dragons: harmless nerdy past time? Or reason for recidivism?
  

  Dungeons & Dragons could “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,” prison officials said in court. That could make it more difficult to rehabilitate prisoners and could endanger public safety, they said.

World

• What is a Neglected Tropical Disease? Well, it’s a good thing you asked…
  

  Most people in richer countries equate tropical disease with the big three—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria—and funding agencies allocate aid accordingly. Yet a group of conditions known collectively as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has an even more widespread impact. They may not often kill, but they debilitate by causing severe anemia, malnutrition, delays in intellectual and cognitive development, and blindness. They can lead to horrific limb and genital disfigurement and skin deformities and increase the risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS and suffering complications during pregnancy.

• Haiti Logistics
• What does China censor?

Society

• Martin Luther King’s Last Speech:
  
• Life at the laundromat (nyt)
• The school lunch a day project
• Charity giving infographic
• Study: Not all kids are computer whizzes (NPR)
• Interview w/ Sec. of Education Arne Duncan (Nat’l Journal)
• We get so caught up on the problems of the world that sometimes we forget that people are out there working on them: Living Proof Project (Gates Foundation)
• Wealth Inequality in the US

Science

• Science in American Society (Mooney)
  

  For instance, just 13 percent of the public now claims to follow science and technology news “very closely,” and this number has been on a downward trend for the past decade, ending with the current low. So while Americans may profess great admiratio

• The google v China rundown (Ars Technica)
• What would earth look like with Saturns rings?
  
• Skyscrapers of the future
• How nerds think about dance
  

  Lovatt says that he has entered uncharted territory with his research. “There are many people who work with things like dance therapy, but there is currently no one who is studying the psychological aspects of dancing using an experimental approach,” he says.

• The death of silence
  

  In 1983 he found 21 places in Washington state with noise-free intervals of 15 minutes or more. By 2007 there were three.

• Laser stabilized fusion: So we’ve got a black hole generator in Europe and a miniature sun at Lawrence-Livermore. Sweet!

Photos

• What the world will be like in 2010 (children’s book from 1972)
• Mark Jenkins Installation Street Art (Photos)
• The Middle Class in Africa (Photos)
• More “normal life” photos from Africa
• More photos from photos)

Funny

• Sociology via Google Autocomplete: What men and women worry about.
• How to optimize your online dating profile pic: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures (OkCupid)
• Relationship advice for men, from women. (Infographic)
• How to write an inflammatory blog post
• How to report the news
  
• If Olbermann can jump from ESPN to MSNBC, surely Obama can make the leap to the play-by-play booth.
  
• This kid dances better than you.