Arnold Says F-U to the Assembly

(via Medium) Is this a coincidence? Check out the first letter of each line.

Public Option Opt-Out

(via VH1) The word is that Harry Reid may have 60 votes to pass a health care bill that includes a public plan with an optional opt-out for states. If Reid pulls this off he'll jump up a ton of spots in my mind. Nate Silver has the reasons why this would be a great policy and political win.

Modern Man: The WORST EVER

(via Snead303) Check out this report from Reuters:

Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.

Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.

Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.

These and other eye-catching claims are detailed in a book by Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister entitled "Manthropology" and provocatively sub-titled "The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male."

McAllister sets out his stall in the opening sentence of the prologue.

"If you're reading this then you -- or the male you have bought it for -- are the worst man in history.

"No ifs, no buts -- the worst man, period...As a class we are in fact the sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet."

Delving into a wide range of source material McAllister finds evidence he believes proves that modern man is inferior to his predecessors in, among other fields, the basic Olympic athletics disciplines of running and jumping.

His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six men chasing prey.

Rule of Unintended Consequences

Charles Duhigg has an excellent series in the NYT called "Toxic Waters" - a 3 part series on the unintended consequences of environmental legislation. Cleaner air means dirtier water, regulating CAFOs means dirtier water, coal mines mean dirtier water, and greener lawns means dirtier water.

Not Done Yet

Jon Cohn provides his Top 10 list of things that still need improvement as the health care bill moves on.

Thanks But No Thanks

(via VH1) TNR thinks that letting Olympia Snowe vote "yes" in committee was a mistake - it gives her too much control over the rest of the process - whereas she probably would have voted for (or at least not blocked) the final bill anyway!

Toons

The Poverty Cycle and Obesity

I found this really interesting - Ezra Klein talking about the persistent relationship betweent obesity and unhealthiness and poverty.

Coates agrees [about the many daily "pleasures" available to the middle class]. His 20s were a rough period. And aside from the support of his family, "I have two words for you -- Breyer's and Entenmann's. It sounds disgusting when I write it. But that little a'la mode pick-me-up made things a little more bearable."

This reminds me of Charles Karelis's "The Persistence of Poverty." The basic argument is that the wealthy misunderstand the mental state of the poor, which leads them to make conceptual errors when creating policies to address poverty, or, in this case, obesity. Think of a bee sting, he advises. If you have a single bee sting, you'll go buy some salve to take away the pain. Now imagine three bee stings, a sprained ankle, a burn, a cut, a crick in your neck, a sore throat, and arthritis. Does the bee sting matter anymore?

Karelis argues that this is more the situation of someone in poverty. Obesity is bad, but it may be just one of many bad things. Overdue bills. A horrible part-time job. Endless commuting time on the bus. A mother with diabetes. A child running with the wrong crowd. A leaking roof. In that scenario, slowly reversing your weight gain might be a good idea, but it hardly makes a dent in the overall crumminess of the conditions. It won't replace pain with pleasure. So you do things that are surer to replace pain with pleasure, like have a delicious, filling, satisfying, salty, fatty meal. That may make your overall situation more unpleasant, but then, making that situation pleasant didn't seem like an option in the first place.

This, he would say, is fundamentally different than the situation of someone who is fundamentally happy with his life but thinks he should lose 30 pounds. For that person, those 30 pounds are the main thing standing between him and perceived happiness. It's one bee sting instead of a dozen ailments. The condition seems manageable, and so it gets managed. Conversely, if the aggregate condition does not seem manageable, people are less likely to manage any individual part, because it will not bring obvious reward -- life will still be pressuring and difficult. The things that will bring obvious reward, however, often make the underlying situation worse -- think spending, overeating and drinking. But then, that's why they call poverty a cycle, and obesity fits there, too.

The Next Glenn Beck: Alex Jones

TNR profiles a right-wing (full circle lefty) wacko from Texas named Alex Jones in the context of how the fringe conservatives are now very much a part of main-stream conservatism.

Until recently, Jones’s search for mainstream allies has been less than fruitful. During the Bush years, when the conservative movement acknowledged Jones at all, it was to mock and revile him. In March 2006, Sean Hannity ridiculed Charlie Sheen for spinning September 11 conspiracy theories on Jones’s show. In May 2007, Michelle Malkin argued that Ron Paul’s associations with Jones and the 9/11 Truth movement should disqualify him from participating in GOP primary debates. Last year, Bill O’Reilly ran outtakes from Jones’s interview with fellow Truther Willie Nelson on a segment about "the dumbest things that have been said in the past three months."

But, since Obama’s election, the ridicule has died down. On March 15, Jones released a documentary called The Obama Deception, which has been widely advertised in conservative media and viewed more than four million times on YouTube. The Obama Deception is basically a more detailed version of the dystopian scenario promoted night after night on Beck. Arguing that Obama is the front man for an oligarchy working to create a planetary totalitarian state, it is like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stripped of any reference to Jews.

Larry Summers and the Financial Crisis

Ryan Lizza profiles Larry Summers and the White House economic team in this week's New Yorker. It's long....so plan ahead.

UPDATE: Here's a good point from Yglesias on how Obama ended up enacting policies that were too timid by Romer et. al's standards because the economic advisors were policy wonks, and they offered proposals that were politically impossible.

Tax and Spend for the General Welfare

(via Snead 303) Erwin Chemerinsky has an op-ed in the LAT about how health care reform is constitutional. It's mostly a "duh" argument (but that won't stop opponents of mud-slinging). I mostly wanted to link it because Erwin is famous - conlaw his book is famous - and he is the most boring lecturer ever. ("Little two!")

Out of Chaos Comes Order

NYT reports on an interesting study in the journal of Psychological Science on how feelings of disorientation or absurdity can throw the brain off - and encourage the brain to look for patterns (meaning) in life - and therefore lead to enhanced creativity.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

Keep Meddling in Afghanistan

(via Ezra) Andrew Sullivan has a good article in the Sunday Times make the point that there's no reason to choose between the McCrystal/Biden poles at a time when the strategic situation in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan is most uncertain. The best route is to continue a middle, meddling, path. He quotes Marc Lynch on this:

“Why choose between escalation or withdrawal at exactly the time when the political picture is at its least clear? Why not maintain a lousy Afghan government which doesn’t quite fall, keep the Taliban on the ropes without defeating it, cut deals where we can and try to figure out a strategy to deal with the Pakistan part, which all the smart set agrees is the real issue these days? Why not focus on applying the improved counterinsurgency tactics with available resources right now instead of focusing on more troops? If the American core objective in Afghanistan is to prevent its re-emergence as an Al-Qaeda safe haven, or to prevent the Taliban from taking Kabul, those seem to be manageable at lower troop levels.”