Robert Cribb in the Toronto Star.

You’re at a café with the woman in your life when your eyes move inexorably toward another woman walking by.

In one-fifth of a second, before the conscious mind has had a chance to react, the male brain has rendered judgment on whether the oncoming stranger is sexually hot.

If the ruling is favourable, physical manifestations are immediate.

Pupils dilate, heart rate spikes, testosterone surges and the eyes assume a vacant stare — sure signs that the “man trance” has set in.

For genetically preprogrammed men, the offence is as involuntary and natural as breathing, says brain researcher, neuropsychiatrist and author Louann Brizendine, whose book, The Male Brain, mounts a unique defence for such male indiscretions.

We are more visual, more driven to sexual pursuit and more predisposed to cheat than women, she writes.

The sexual pursuit area in the male brain is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain “consuming him with sexual fantasies about female body parts,” she concludes.

Consider the implications.

This amounts to conclusive physiological justification for the male practice of staring at female breasts.

“It’s a reflex that’s built into the brain circuits,” she said in an interview. “At its core biological basis, it’s unfair to criticize men for that initial unconscious circuitry.”

Radio host and lecturer, Dennis Prager, has a weekly male-female hour on his talk show. He also has Prager University on Youtube. Here’s a sample.

Lead generating for online daters. Whew.

He’s never needy — always charming and a little flirtatious. He keeps his missives short and usually includes a question or a subtle challenge. He’s witty, a touch aloof and not overly complimentary.

And when he gets the woman, it’s not his heart that flutters. It’s his bank account.

Hartshorn is a hired gun, ghostwriting correspondence on behalf of single men unwilling, too busy or too inept to do it themselves. His online dating is done on commission for Virtual Dating Assistants, one of the first full-scale Internet-dating outsourcing companies. For $600, Virtual Dating Assistants guarantees clients two dates a month; the “executive service” package promises five dates a month for $1,200.

“I get paid for each woman who writes back positively,” explains the modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac. “It’s very analogous to sales . . . like a cold-caller or a telemarketer.”

A telemarketer who toils anonymously in pursuit of love for the lonely. Darkly romantic, no?

No. “I don’t care that much if it becomes a date or not,” Hartshorn admits. His job is “lead generation” only. Sealing the deal is up to the company’s “closers.”

And going out on actual dates? That, unfortunately, the men have to do all by themselves. And the women never need know who hooked them.

Conspiracies are rare. Group-think abides because it’s part of human nature.

No secret cabal generates liberal media bias. The media are liberal because they are populated with liberals who’ve never seriously examined their core beliefs.

Heather MacDonald once noted that, “the default condition in America is liberal. You have to think your way out of it.”

Newsrooms are diverse according to race, gender, handicap and sexual orientation. But they are homogeneous in political orientation. In a nation that is more or less split 50-50 conservative-liberal, this is astonishing and divisive.

Lane Wallace writes in The Atlantic about The Bias of Veteran Journalists

Not that everyone in the field is perfect, unbiased, or even a good reporter. And not that I haven’t ever encountered an editor who really, really wanted a story to say “X” as opposed to “Y.” I remember one editor who complained that a story I’d done about NASA test pilots didn’t make them sound like the wild cowboys he imagined they were. (Unfortunately–or fortunately–the truth about test pilots is, they’re not cowboys. They’re precision engineers and very calculated risk-mitigators, hitting test cards with calm, methodical accuracy. The risk isn’t in their attitude. It’s in the inherent hazards of testing new technology under real conditions for the first time.)

But within those caveats, I’ve always maintained that the majority of professional print journalists, anyway, try very, very hard to get the story right. But recently, I had an experience that gave me a new perspective on the issue.

Lane Wallace’s article is a fine one, if a bit too narrowly focused. Also I’m not sure there is some majority belief out there that press bias, or news media bias, necessarily needs to be a conscious or purposeful act. In fact, on the political level, the points made in Wallace’s article fit perfectly within the charge that “liberal bias” is, by in large, not someone purposely jiggering the facts, but something much more insidious, something that is the result of liberals (plead guilty, but back in my twenties) not recognizing their own bias because they simply assume their thinking represents the modern enlightened way of looking at things, or, in terms of this article, thinking they “already know” the story, that they are already “experts” by way of this enlightened orientation.

My favorite example is journalists who refer to politicians and, especially, to judges as having “grown in office.” In other words, such officials have become more enlightened, which always means they have moved farther to the left. If conservative numbers dominated the press (I’m a “political independent” and of course would still be biased, although I would try like heck to be the least possible), you would no doubt have some of this, but since liberal ideology is more sympathetic to the perfectibility of humans and the government’s ability to shape and bring about that perfectibility, their bias is more active, just as liberals are the ones more likely to do the late-night committee work arguing over the third sub-clause in some faculty position paper, or the like.

Conservatives tend to believe more in original sin, Biblical variety or not, so do not feel as compelled to hurry history along on its merry near-inevitable path to ever greater enlightenment (or as realists or conservatives might say, toward the next bloody catastrophic attempt at Utopia). This gap between Utopia and reality probably accounts for a lot of the legendary “press cynicism.” Rather than learning that the world does not match the map in his (or her) head, and trying to build upon that profound discovery, such a reporter can comfortably wrap himself in his own younger beliefs and posture that he has found out that the world, and, alas, even he himself, does not live up to his sterling expectations. How ruggedly romantic. Which probably helps when trying to buy someone a drink, but not when trying to improve up0n one’s own reporting.

In 1985, humorist Garrison Keillor wrote a satirical essay about Shy Rights. Here’s a taste:

Discrimination against the shy is our country’s number one disgrace in my own personal opinion. Millions of men and women are denied equal employment, educational and recreational opportunities, and rewarding personal relationships simply because of their shyness. These injustices are nearly impossible to identify, not only because the shy person will not speak up when discriminated against, but also because the shy person almost always anticipates being denied these rights and doesn’t ask for them in the first place. (In fact, most shys will politely decline a right when it is offered to them.)

Most shy lawyers agree that shys can never obtain justice under our current adversary system of law. The Sixth Amendment, for example, which gives the accused the right to confront his accusers, is anti-shy on the face of it. It effectively denies shy persons the right to accuse anyone of anything.

One solution might be to shift the burden of proof to the defendant in case the plaintiff chooses to remain silent. Or we could create a special secondclass citizenship that would take away some rights, such as free speech, bearing arms, and running for public office, in exchange for some other rights that we need more. In any case, we need some sort of fairly totally new concept of law if we shys are ever going to enjoy equality, if indeed that is the sort of thing we could ever enjoy.

Now, there is research on the subject.

People who are shy or introverted may actually process their world differently than others, leading to differences in how they respond to stimuli, according to Stony Brook researchers and collaborators in China.

About twenty percent of people are born with this “highly sensitive” trait, which may also manifest itself as inhibitedness, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are “slow to warm up” in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts.

While such traits are relatively familiar because they are easy to observe, the researchers, have found evidence that for those with this innate trait, the actual underlying difference is in the brain’s attention to details. The study was conducted by Jadzia Jagiellowicz, Xiaomeng Xu, Arthur Aron, and Elaine Aron at Stony Brook University, along with Guikang Cao and Tingyong Feng of Southwest University, China and Xuchu Weng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. This research, designed to validate the fundamental role of deeper processing of information, was published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (also available online with the date March 4, 2010).

George Will:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, like many liberals, seems afflicted by Sixties Nostalgia Syndrome, a longing for the high drama and moral clarity of the civil rights era. Speaking this month in Alabama at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march, Duncan vowed to unleash on public schools legions of lawyers wielding Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They supposedly will rectify what he considers civil rights violations, such as too many white students in high school Advanced Placement classes.

Duncan said that “the civil rights struggle” has become “more complex since the days of Selma.” He seems not to understand that today’s complexities of equity are complex because they are not about “rights.” He says his rights enforcers — 600 of them, with a $103 million budget — will “remedy discrimination,” such as students being “treated unequally” by policies that have what is called a “disparate impact” on certain groups. For example, Duncan asks: “How can we assure that low-income Latino and African-American students get the same access to a college-prep curriculum, AP classes and college as other students?” But “access” obscures the problem.

The Supreme Court has held that Title VI bans “disparate treatment,” meaning intentional discrimination such as denying access to minorities, not policies that have a “disparate impact” on minorities. No policy denies minority or low-income students “access” to AP classes.

The pertinent lesson of the 1960s is the futility of casting today’s problems of social class, as Duncan does, in the anachronistic categories of the civil rights era. In 1966, the seismic Coleman Report concluded: “Schools are remarkably similar in the way they relate to the achievement of their pupils when the socioeconomic background of the students is taken into account.” (Emphasis added.)

Plainly put, the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance — qualities of the families from which the students come. Subsequent research suggests that about 90 percent of the differences among the proficiency of schools can be explained by five factors: days absent from school, hours spent watching television, pages read for homework, the quantity and quality of reading matter in the home — and the presence of two parents in the home.

If Duncan is looking for the high SAT scores that correlate with, and often are consequences of, AP courses, he should look for schools where educated parents are intensely involved with their children. The best predictor of SAT scores is family income, which generally correlates with family structure — two parents in the home. Family structure is pertinent to the 9/91 factor — between their births and their 19th birthdays, children spend 9 percent of their time in school and 91 percent elsewhere. For many children, elsewhere is not an intact family.

Government can do next to nothing about family structure, which is why it is pointless for Duncan to suggest that “access” is why “the door to college still does not swing open evenly for everyone.” It will not so swing as long as 71.6 percent of African American children and 51.3 percent of Latino children are born to unmarried women. The political class flinches from talking about those numbers, preferring to take refuge behind talk about “rights.” But those numbers go far to explain numbers that Duncan does cite: White high school graduates are twice as likely as black or Latino graduates to have taken AP calculus classes. The political system cannot candidly discuss, let alone cope with, the reasons why, for example, there are few if any high-performing inner-city school systems.

From CNN:

Police have arrested a South Korean couple whose toddler starved to death while they were raising a virtual child online, authorities said.

The couple fed their 3-month-old daughter once a day between marathon stretches in a local Internet cafe, where they were raising a virtual child in the fantasy role-playing game Prius Online, police told local reporters Friday.

Prius Online is a 3-D game in which players nurture an online companion, Anima, a young girl with mysterious powers who grows and increases her skills as the game progresses.

Dear CNN: a 3-month-old is an infant, not a toddler.

David Brooks:

Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.

In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.

Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.

No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.

Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.

But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.

Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.

As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.

No doubt some Leftist will decide the new wealth created by this mix of good government policy, education and entrepreneurial spirit was somehow stolen from the less fortunate.

A repost from Maggie’s Farm

Probably yes.

While I am quite pleased and content with my own (first) marriage, when I talk with unhappy people, which I do all day, I am often reminded that the nuclear family is a very recent invention, that the notion of romantic love is also recent, that arranged marriages and marriages of convenience or necessity were the norms of the past, and that humans are not “naturally” monogamous – whatever I might mean by “naturally”.

When you put the nuclear family together with dreams of enduring romantic love, it’s a set-up for disappointment. The nuclear family, unlike the extended family (or the tribe), is isolating and does not provide a broad base of support in life. Intense romantic love, unlike plain old-fashioned strong attraction and desire, is a regressed state of mind - some shrinks half-jokingly call it a form of insanity. Not that it isn’t great fun, but it gives way to reality in time, although the best marriages can rekindle the old feeling from time to time.

One thing that is probably not talked about enough is how many marriages are not founded in “true love,” but instead are founded on loneliness, desire for companionship, desire for babies, desire for security, fear of becoming an old maid, friendship, desire for a social foundation, etc. This is not a bad thing, but I sometimes wonder whether the contrived and ridiculously costly fairy-tale trappings of the typical American wedding is designed to obscure those facts. Young folks these days often talk about having “friends with benefits” while they await true love, without realizing that “friends with benefits” can be one description of one kind of satisfying marriage.

But to get back on track here, yes, I believe that we tend to wish that a marriage could meet all of our emotional and physical needs. Shrinks term that a regressive, ie childish, wish – not just because it is unrealistic, but also because if emphasizes the “meeting my needs”  aspect of a relationship rather than emphasizing ”how can I try to give these people (wife, kids)  a good life”.

read on.

I had a friend in Denver who, at age 40, suffered a stroke that paralyzed half his body for a day or two. Then he was perfectly fine.

Even during the worst of it he didn’t succumb to worry or despair. It was what it was. (His wife saw it differently.)

About a month later, his car crapped out and needed serious repairs. That upset him.

This came to mind reading Tom Bunzel’s post about his blood pressure and his laptop.

On Saturday afternoon while picking up a prescription, the pharmacist told me that my doctor had asked to be called for a follow up. Before leaving I decided to check my blood pressure on the automatic machine, only to find the reading stratospheric and scary.

I walked around the store sorting it out, and realized that I had let the machine read the pressure through my sweatshirt. Surely that explained the high reading since I’d been normal for some time.

Without the sweatshirt I was lower, but still elevated. I took a few more readings, each one a bit lower, and decided it was heading down to the normal level and that I was okay.

The next morning, just before leaving for breakfast to meet a friend, I opened my laptop to check my nonexistent Sunday email, and found the screen completely white. I took a deep breath, turned it off and turned it back on, and it stayed completely dark; the hard drive light went on for a seconds and then stopped. This happened three times. I left for breakfast considering the consequences of losing my hard drive – data was backed up to my desktop but lot of stuff, like recent email in Outlook, would fall through the cracks.

Read on.

LA Daily News:

Cecilia Cassini of Encino is a fashionista with a famous designer’s name, the style and attitude to go with haute couture — and she’s all of 10 years old and in the fifth grade.

She also has a big mane of beautiful hair and the cuteness that could make any young girl aspire to the life of a model. Instead she wants to design and sew their clothes.

“I have known that I wanted to be a fashion designer from the second I was born,” said Cecilia, who today will have her own trunk show at a Sherman Oaks boutique and display more than 200 one-of-a-kind items that she has personally designed and sewn — all with the environment in mind.

Prodigies come in all flavors. The whole story is worth a read.

Baseball fans saw Matt Holliday drop a routine fly ball that would have ended the game and given his Cardinals a victory over the Dodgers.

Instead, the Dodgers rallied from one run down and two outs to load the bases and win the game.

In a 162-game season, Holliday had committed only one error.

Holliday is a great player. Which shows that anyone can screw up and at the worst time.

In sports, a loss stings but isn’t fatal. For those piloting airplanes or trains, human error can become human tragedy.

Not to mention doctors.

Atul Gawande, a third generation doctor and surgeon, has written on the subject of medical mistakes and malpractice. Here in the New Yorker, he offers insights rarely found in the media.

No more worry about losing your virginity. With this product, you can have your first night back anytime. Insert this artificial hymen into your vagina carefully.

It will expand a little and make you feel tight. When your lover penetrate, it will ooze out a liquid that look like blood not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans, you will pass through undetectable. Its easy to use, clinically proven non-toxic to human and has no side effects, no pain to use and no allergic reaction.

Apparently, it’s a big seller in Muslim countries.

It’s a lot cheaper, not to mention less embarassing, than the surgeries often performed for this purpose.  (It’s one image in this post from yesterday.)

It’s no secret that men are more likely than women to jump into the sack. But a new study adds some twists to the rules of such casual sex.

The research suggests men are far less choosy about the attractiveness of a potential one-night stand. For women to be tempted into considering casual sex, the guy better be a hottie.

These results, based not on real-life encounters but rather on interviews, match with past research showing that men lower their standards when it comes to one-night stands. And it turns out, from the new study, women raise their standards.

As a people photographer, I use Photoshop to make my subjects look better. That includes diminishing skin blemishes, opening eyes, brightening eye highlights, reducing wrinkles, taking off pounds, etc.  I try to do subtly, so that no one will notice.

I’ve spent a lot time with people watching them react to their photographs and have observed:

• Seeing your photograph is disconcerting because 99.9% of the time you see a mirror image of yourself. Very few faces are perfectly symmetrical, so your photograph will appear backwards, making it seem “off.” It’s like hearing your voice from a tape recording that sounds strange because, unlike others, you also hear yourself via bone conduction not just your ears.
• In person, we apprehend faces as a whole, not a sum of features. With a photo, we dissect every flaw. So photos will usually disappoint.
• Most women are not happy with their looks. I did one photoshoot of nurses and every single one began by saying, “I’m not photogenic.” A few of them were quite pretty.
• Many men won’t even bother to review the shoot and say, “Just pick one.” Other men can be more picky that women.
• Even beautiful people can look ugly if they are lit badly or shot from a bad angle.

How much Photoshop retouching is proper was the subject of two recent articles. The LA Times Image section — which features unrealistic glamor photos, by the way– has a good story with before and after images.

But this quote jumped out.

“If you met Faith Hill in person,” [Scott] Kelby says, “you would think she’s absolutely beautiful. And when you take her picture, you will see every flaw that you never saw in person. Those flaws not only become visible, but magnified. . . .

“If I were talking to someone, I’d look at their eyes, not at the blemish on the side of their face. But as soon as you open up that photo on a 30-inch monitor, you’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, where did that come from?’ “

Very true.

Now we travel to Jolly Ole England, where the liberals want to pass laws against unrealistic photo retouching.

Airbrushing should be banned in advertisements aimed at children to tackle “body image pressure”, say the Liberal Democrats.

Altering photos to make them look better means children are subjected to “completely unattainable images”, said front-bencher Jo Swinson.

The party also wants cosmetic surgery adverts to give their success rates.

The Advertising Standards Authority said they received only a “small handful” of complaints on the issue.

The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third largest political party, have put forward measures aimed at protecting women and girls from pressure about their weight, and to promote healthy living.

Female friendly

Ms Swinson said airbrushing should be banned in advertising aimed at the under 16s and should be clearly flagged up in adverts aimed at adults.

The party also says body image and “media literacy” should be taught in schools and more sports activities offered to stop teenage girls dropping out of exercise.

Here’s jaw dropper, the Orwellian double-speak:

“Liberal Democrats believe in the freedom of companies to advertise but we also believe in the freedom of young people to develop their self-esteem and to be as comfortable as possible with their bodies.

“They shouldn’t constantly feel the need to measure up to a very narrow range of digitally manipulated shapes and sizes.”

Catching up on my New Yorker reading, I found this Malcolm Gladwell piece from May about how underdogs can win.

Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet.

Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end.

Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

This article is about much more than basketball.

Dennis McCarthy in the LA Daily News:

All eyes are on the elderly gentleman on lane 8 as he takes three tiny steps toward the foul line, stops short, bends slightly at the knees, and drops the eight-pound bowling ball about six inches above the floor.

THUD! The ball starts rolling slowly down the right hand side of the lane, flirts with the gutter, then curves gently left to hit the pocket square.

Not hard enough to send the pins flying. More like a little slap on the back, a gentle breeze from the air conditioning.

The pins fall, in slow, slow motion, except for one teetering five pin that wobbles but refuses to drop.

Ted Muller turns and walks slowly back to the ball return. He dries his throwing hand over the air blower and stares down the lane with murder in his eyes. How dare that pin not fall!

Ten seconds later, the five pin is history. Lying on its side, dead. A few dozen bowlers in the alley applaud. Muller smiles and chalks up his spare.

He sits down on the curved bench waiting his next turn with the look of a man without a care in the world.

Why not? The ex-head gardener at Disney Studios in Burbank is turning 105 next month and almost bowling his age. His average is 99. His high game this year, 130.

“Remarkable guy,” says fellow league bowler Tom Petrique, watching Muller bowl in the senior league at Pickwick Bowl on Thursday morning. “If I’m in a bowling alley when I’m 105, it’s because someone brought my ashes in.”

Read on.

Tim Cavanaugh in Reason:

Lose what little faith you still have in your fellow Americans with the new Mortgage Metrics Report. For the first time, the quarterly report [pdf] from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision includes information on redefault rates for modified mortgage loans.

That is, lenders are increasingly offering supposedly distressed borrowers substantial reductions in principal and interest payments. (See page 25 to see how rapidly these modifications are becoming much more charitable to the borrowers.) Redefault data track how many of these renegotiated loans end up back in trouble. There’s a wide variety in types and degrees of trouble — everything from 30 days’ tardiness on payments to completed foreclosures.

But one pattern emerges when you add up all the redefaults per quarter and compare them to the total number of loan modifications: When you take deadbeats and give them a free opportunity to get out of contractual obligations they willingly signed before God and country, a fairly reliable majority of them — and often a fillibuster-proof 60+ percent — end up deadbeating again.

In general, the more loans you modify, the higher the percentage of redefaults: In the first quarter of 2008, 68,001 loans were modified, and 40,206, or 59 percent, of those have ended up 30 days late again, or worse. In the first quarter of 2009, 185,156 loan mods were done, and of those, 120,067, or 64 percent, ended up in trouble. (Check my math: to get a total-in-trouble number I’m adding up “30-59 days Delinquent,” “60 or More Days Delinquent,” “In Process of Foreclosure,” and “Completed Foreclosure.” To be sporting, I’m leaving “Short Sale or Deed-in-Lieu of Foreclosure” out.)

If there’s any good news in this, it may be that while the total number of loan modifications is skyrocketing, the percentage of redefaults is increasing sporadically relative to total loan mods, rather than growing in a straight line. So in the fourth quarter of 2008, for example, only 46.9 percent of modified loans ended up back in trouble.

But even that isn’t really encouraging, because some of the “trouble” categories were artificially depressed in that period (through, for example, statewide foreclosure moratoriums in effect in some of the most deadbeat-rich areas). Also, the terms of loan mods are getting much more generous: Where last year banks tended to offer only small gestures like maturity-lengthening or a slightly better interest rate, now they’re offering to reduce principal, pay all closing costs for new mortgages etc.

So if these borrowers really are honest citizens who just need help getting back on their feet, the percentage of redefaulting loans should be going down, not up. That’s not the case, because they are not honest citizens. They’re deadbeats, and it’s time to stop pretending they can be anything else.

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

Sub-prime mortgages, financial collapse, MPs expenses: these and other recent scandals are more than mere passing events. They have left Parliament and the market, the twin foundations of the free society, in disarray.

What has been lost is trust — our trust in those we chose to look after our affairs — and trust is the basis of society. If we are to recover it, we must ask some deep questions.

Thus far we have had a festival of blame, and there have been some sacrificial victims. But our great faiths teach the principle of collective responsibility. In that spirit we should ask what has gone wrong in society as a whole?

I believe we have lost our traditional sense of morality. I do not mean that we are less moral than our grandparents. We care about things they hardly thought about: world poverty, inequality, global warming and the loss of biodiversity. We are more tolerant than they were.

But note this: the things we care about are vast, distant, global, remote. They are problems that require the co-ordinated action of millions, perhaps billions of people. The difference we as individuals can make to any one of them is minimal. That does not mean they are not important: they are. But they are issues of politics, not of morality in the conventional sense.

When it comes to personal behaviour we have now come to believe that there is no right and wrong. Instead, there are choices. The market facilitates those choices. The State handles the consequences, picking up the pieces when they go wrong.

The idea that there may be things we would like to do and can afford to do but which we should not do, because they are dishonourable and a betrayal of trust, has come to seem outmoded.

Michael Jackson’s death sparks bus brawl.

A fight broke out on a Florida bus when news of Michael Jackson’s death sparked debate over whether he should be remembered as a great musical talent, and one passenger was charged with assault, police said on Friday.

The bus was moving through the city of North Lauderdale on Thursday when passenger James Kiernan received a text message about Jackson’s death on his cell phone, and he read it aloud on the bus, the Broward County Sheriff’s Department said.

The unidentified bus driver opined that “Michael Jackson should have been in jail long ago,” prompting Kiernan, 60, to retort that “the world just lost a great musical talent,” the police report said.

It said the last remark enraged another passenger, Henry Wideman, who started a swearing match with Kiernan, then pulled out a knife and chased Kiernan down the aisle with it.

Collete Douglas Home:

Susan Boyle’s story is a parable of our age. She is a singer of enormous talent, who cared for her widowed mother until she died two years ago. Susan’s is a combination of ability and virtue that deserves congratulation.

So how come she was treated as a laughing stock when she walked on stage for the opening heat of Britain’s Got Talent 2009 on Saturday night?

The moment the reality show’s audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she’d reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn’t had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why?

Britain’s Got Talent isn’t a beauty pageant. It isn’t a youth opportunity scheme. It is surely about discovering untapped and unrecognised raw talent from all sections of society.

And Susan Boyle has talent to burn. Such is the beauty of her voice that she had barely sung the opening bars when the applause started. She rounded off to a standing ovation and – in her naivety – began walking off the stage and had to be recalled.

Susan, now a bankable discovery, was then roundly patronised by such mega-talents as Amanda Holden and the aforementioned Morgan, who told her: “Everyone laughed at you but no-one is laughing now. I’m reeling with shock.” Holden added: “It’s the biggest wake-up call ever.”

Again, why?

The answer is that only the pretty are expected to achieve. Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect. If, like Susan (and like millions more), you are plump, middle-aged and too poor or too unworldly to follow fashion or have a good hairdresser, you are a non-person.

I dread to think of how Susan would have left the stage if her voice had been less than exceptional. She would have been humiliated in front of 11 million viewers. It’s the equivalent of being put in the stocks in front of the nation instead of the village. It used to be a punishment handed out to criminals. Now it is the fate of anyone without obvious sexual allure who dares seek opportunity.

This small, brave soul took her courage in her hands to pitch at her one hope of having her singing talent recognised, and was greeted with a communal sneer. Courage could so easily have failed her.

Yet why shouldn’t she sound wonderful? Not every great singer looks like Katherine Jenkins. Edith Piaf would never have been chosen to strut a catwalk. Nor would Nina Simone, nor Ella Fitzgerald. As for Pavarotti But then ridicule is nothing new in Susan Boyle’s life. She is a veteran of abuse. She was starved of oxygen at birth and has learning difficulties as a result. At school she was slow and had frizzy hair. She was bullied, mostly verbally. She told one newspaper that her classmates’ jibes left behind the kind of scars that don’t heal.

Read it all. And let’s not forget, American elected our current president because he looked and sounded good on TV.

A few years ago I was developing a training CD for the LA Sheriff’s department along with their AV team.

With each visit, I’d hear a fresh complaint about “Susie,” a fractious, bungling incompetent. When I asked why they didn’t just fire her, they explained that HR policy made firing people nearly impossible.

Then one day I arrived to find everyone smiling. “We got rid of Susie!” Fired? I asked. “No, we got her promoted. Now she’s someone else’s problem.”

This came to mind with:

The Peter Principle, about to be reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, was a best seller when it was first published. A satiric treatise on workplace incompetence, it touched a nerve with readers because it was so funny. And so true.

Much like the film Office Space, NBC’s The Office, and Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strips, this book by Laurence J. Peter (a former teacher) and Raymond Hull (a playwright) captured the twisted logic of workplaces—tapping into how ridiculous they feel to insiders. It gleefully emitted a cloud of jargon monoxide and absurd advice as it reached its famous main conclusion: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

This is true in both the public and private sectors. But incompetents are more easily fired in the private sector because they make their employers less competitive, and it costs them.

In government there is no competition. Which is why, all things being equal, giving the government a monopoly on anything is a bad idea. You get more Susies.

Kay Hymowitz in City Journal:

Earlier this year, I published an article in City Journal called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.” The piece elicited a roaring flood of mailed and blogged responses, mostly from young men who didn’t much care for its title (a reference to Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land) or its thesis: that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes.

It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men.

Here’s Jeff from Middleburg, Florida: “I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” Jeff, meet another of my respondents, Alex: “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” Care for one more? This is from Dean in California: “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.” You can find the same themes posted throughout websites like AmericanWomenSuck, NoMarriage, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and Eternal Bachelor (“Give modern women the husband they deserve. None”).

The reason for all this anger, I submit, is that the dating and mating scene is in chaos. SYMs of the postfeminist era are moving around in a Babel of miscues, cross-purposes, and half-conscious, contradictory female expectations that are alternately proudly egalitarian and coyly traditional. And because middle-class men and women are putting off marriage well into their twenties and thirties as they pursue Ph.D.s, J.D.s, or their first $50,000 salaries, the opportunities for heartbreak and humiliation are legion. Under these harsh conditions, young men are looking for a new framework for understanding what (or, as they might put it, WTF) women want. So far, their answer is unlikely to satisfy anyone—either women or, in the long run, themselves.

Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide. By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

For the past 20 years, Tom Leppard, known as the Leopard Man of Skye, has lived in a remote bothy under a roof made from plastic sheeting.The cabin, on a stretch of shoreline near Kyleakin, had no electricity or furniture and he had to canoe three miles for his weekly shopping.Mr Leppard, 73, said: “I’m getting too old for that kind of life.”

The London-born pensioner said he was slowly adjusting to his new life in Broadford, on Skye.

“It’s certainly very strange being surrounded by four walls and a roof but I’ll get used to it,” he said.

“I’m getting bits of furniture together all the time and I’m getting used to sleeping in a bed at night – it’s certainly more comfortable than I’m used to and electricity is very convenient.”

Mr Leppard, who spent £5,500 covering his body in leopard-like spots, was the world’s most tattooed man – a crown he held until recently.

In his crumbling previous home, he cooked on a gas stove and slept on a bed made from blocks of polystyrene and foam.

He said: “I had to canoe to Kyle once a week for shopping and it was getting too hard for me – I was one big wave away from disaster. It’s a pretty nasty stretch of water.”

The photograph is by Drew Gardner, who did a series of eccentrics and obscure Guinness World Record holders such as the biggest Barbie collection, fastest pumpkin carver, tiniest waste, etc.

Check out his work.

We humans are a quirky bunch, especially when it comes to compassion.

Last month, the National Geographic Channel aired an hour-long show about the Battle at Kruger. Many have seen the gripping Youtube video in which a young wildebeast is separated from the herd, attacked by lions, then attacked by a crocodile. You feel terrible for this poor animal and then something miraculous happens: the herd returns, scares off the lions and the little guy survives.

Happy ending. We all feel good. Then we celebrate with a burger or steak.

Compassion for other humans is equally quirky. If American Idol shows us suffering children in Africa, we feel compelled to donate money to help. If we see a parent beating a child — not spanking, but beating — most of us would be compelled to intervene.

If we lived next door to a family where the children and mother never stepped outdoors and we heard screams at night, we’d feel compelled to call the police. And yet we can sit back and watch massive pain inflicted on hundreds of thousands and do nothing. Remember Rwanda’s 800,000 dead?

Robert Mugabe has taken a prosperous nation and ruined it, killing many tens of thousands of his own people and displacing millions. Zimbabwe was once the kind of African nation that all the Western aid is intended to foster. It is now nearly dead — all from the evil of one man. If we’re compelled (some say morally responsible) to help poor nations, why aren’t we equally compelled to prevent a rich one from becoming poor?

Saddam’s Iraq was a nightmare for Iraqis. His sons ran rape rooms for kicks. Children were tortured in front of their parents. Families were ordered to pay for the bullets used to kill their fathers and sons. Hundreds of thousands were murdered and bulldozed into shallow graves. This went on for decades. 25 million Iraqis internalized Saddam’s terror, and are only now beginning to heal.

But only in the mid-’90s, when economic sanctions squeezed Iraq, did the West evince any sympathy for everyday Iraqis — and that was after Saddam hired a PR firm to generate said sympathy. Which he then parlayed into Oil for Food, a scam that generated billions for Saddam and enabled him to continue his tyranny.

Despite all that’s happened in Iraq, you’d think we’d be able to take some satisfaction in knowing that unlike, Hitler or Pol Pot, Saddam was desposed, arrested, tried and executed. Yet I see little of that. In fact, many supposedly humanist progressives claim that Iraq was better off with Saddam.

Many of these same folks sport “Save Darfur” bumper stickers. The New Republic recently called for military intervention in Burma. It’s just another example of how conveniently compassion can be summoned or stifled to suit ourselves.

On Mother’s day I was cutting roses from the garden when I found a featherless, baby mockingbird on the ground covered with ants, alive and struggling. I brushed off the ants and considered stomping it to end its misery. But I couldn’t.

Thus began a rescue attempt that involved putting it out where the parents would find it (they did) and digging worms to feed it.  The little bird gained strength and hopped over to a shady spot. My daughter and I felt pretty good about our rescue. Until a short while later I heard her scream, “Hey, stop!” and charge out the door. A crow had spotted the bird, swooped down and took him for a meal.

Those poor worms.

Tigerhawk:

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it “Iowa’s Katrina.” Here is a gallery of aerial photographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far.

Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

The difference is not in the severity of the flood, but in the people who confront the flood.

So I guess HBO won’t be sending Spike Lee to do a documentary.

One paradox of modern American life is people live better than ever, yet feel put out. It’s as if the Beverly Hills brat syndrome is contagious.

Dennis Prager, who devotes one radio hour weekly to the subject of happiness, observed how happy some of the poorest people in India seem to be. One answer to the paradox is that marketers work to convince us that things make us happy, which they don’t. Things make us comfortable, but never happy.

Some of the gloomiest words come from Democrats. To hear them, you’d think every city has breadlines and broken men. For example, last November, Alec Baldwin wrote this on the Huffington Post:

 This country is coming apart. And people are in a lot of pain about that. Eight years of these lunatics raping everything they see has been exhausting. Americans are exhausted. Our system is breaking down, slowly, and people are, when they get honest about it, frightened about what that means, short and long term.

Recently, David Letterman said something similar. Tom Brokaw, sitting in the guest chair, set him straight, rattling off facts about the state of the nation in 1968. Now, that was a rough year. But compared with, say, 1938, it was still nothing to gripe about.

In the WSJ, Gregg Easterbrook wrote “Life Is Good, So Why Do We Feel So Bad?”

The Democratic National Committee recently ran an ad blasting John McCain for saying the country is “better off” than in 2000. Yet, arguably, except as regards the Iraq war, Mr. McCain’s statement is true. In turn, Mr. McCain is blasting Barack Obama for suggesting that international tensions are not as bad as they’ve been made to seem. Yet, arguably, Mr. Obama is right.

And arguably, we’re better off because of the Iraq war — but that’s another argument.

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16 previous years were close to inflation-free; living standards are the highest they have ever been, including living standards for the middle class and for the poor.

All forms of pollution other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease and stroke incidence are declining; crime is in a long-term cycle of significant decline; education levels are at all-time highs.

Sure, gas prices are up, the dollar is weak and credit is tight – but these are complaints at the margin of a mainly healthy society.

Cheers, right?

Yet the mood of public discourse is four-alarm panic. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll showed “Americans’ views on the economy and the general state of the country have hit an all-time low,” with 81% saying the nation is on the “wrong track” – the worst-ever number for this barometer. Some 78% told pollsters the U.S. is worse off today than five years ago, the highest percentage to say this since the CBS News/New York Times survey began tracking the question in 1986. Watch any news channel, listen to any political debate, read any pundit. The consensus is we’re headed to hell in a handbasket.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania in April, Hillary Clinton said “We need to go back to the prosperity of the 1990s,” a comment that drew loud, enthusiastic applause. Converted to today’s dollars, per-capita income in the Keystone State is 23% higher than in 1990. People may think Pennsylvania was more prosperous in the past, but the state is better off today. The same can be said for most (needless to say, not all) parts of the country and most demographics. Most are, right now, the best-off they have ever been.

Democrats and Big Baloney don’t want Americans to think happy thoughts in an election year. “Change” is never a priority for those who think they’re doing okay. Just for fun, track the number of times you read “rough economic times” or some equivalent in the media. You’ll even find gloomy sentiments in the food section.

Thus it was in 1992, when Bill Clinton ran for his first term. After years of steady economic growth, America was in a shallow, 8-month-long recession. Democrats and the media repeated “worst economy since the Great Depression” enough times that enough people believed it. (Although Clinton still only got 43% of the popular vote.) By election day, the economy was already on a tear, with 4.8% GDP growth.

The relentlessly negative impressions of American life presented by the media, including the entertainment media, explain something otherwise puzzling that shows up in psychological data.

When asked about the country’s economy, schools, health care or community spirit, Americans tell pollsters the situation is dreadful. But when asked about their own jobs, schools, doctors and communities, people tell pollsters the situation is good. Our impressions of ourselves and our neighbors come from personal experience. Our impressions of the nation as a whole come from the media and from political blather, which both exaggerate the negative.

So tune out, turn off and drop the frown.

All of these sound good, but #1 especially so.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.