Jim Miller on Politics

Cathy Seipp says that real life polygamists "all seem dumpy, pasty-faced and on the dole".  That's because Seipp is judging them by the specimens she sees on talk shows.

But let's consider some more famous polygamists.  I have my differences with Osama bin Laden, but I would not consider him "dumpy or "pasty-faced", and I don't think he he has ever been "on the dole".  I have other differences with Hugh Hefner, but I would not say he is "dumpy" or "pasty-faced", and he hasn't been on the dole for quite some time, if he ever was.  On the other hand, I think it is fair to call Kim Jong-il "dumpy", and perhaps "pasty-faced", though "on the dole" doesn't quite capture his exploitation of North Korea.

(Osama bin Laden is officially a polygamist, but is it fair to call Hefner and Kim polygamists?   Sure.  They may not have legal sanctions for their plural marriages, but then neither do the talk show polygamists.  In fact, one could argue that Hefner's "companions" are actually worse off than they would be if they were formally married, even if illegally.  Oddly, many in the entertainment world tolerate Hefner and his harem, though I would guess most would be outraged if he were actually to marry all seven.)

Sharp Decline In Measles:  Here's the BBC story.

The number of people dying of measles across the world has fallen by almost half, the latest figures show.

The World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund revealed deaths fell from 871,000 in 1999 to 454,000 in 2004.

The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, which had been hardest hit by the disease, where cases and deaths dropped by 60%.

Which is taken largely from this press release.   Which is claiming credit for work actually done by the Measles Initiative.  Regardless of who deserves the credit (and whether those numbers are completely accurate), this is a wonderful development.  (And it is a positive development for the United States, since it will reduce the the number of measles cases we import.)

(Bill Gates may deserve a significant amount of credit for this decline in measles.  His foundation is providing some of the money, and I seem to recall him advocating just this kind of practical, measurable help for Africa.

Anti-vaccine extremists may have delayed this effort.  There was a great controversy in Britain over the possibility that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine caused autism.  There are always a few who will oppose any vaccinations, but a single faulty paper linking MMR vaccinations and autism made this controversy much larger than usual.  The paper was published in Lancet, a journal that has had a few problems recently.)

Be Just A Little Bit More Evil:  Apparently, Google is now blocking searches that find a site which satirizes Marxism, the People's Cube.  Here's their post on the blocking.

At some point, quite recently, our popular site "The People's Cube" (ThePeoplesCube.com) was purged from Google search results.  MSN, Yahoo and other search engines still have it — but Google has erased/blocked any link to the site in its database.  One can still find links to us from other sites — but not even one from Google to ThePeoplesCube.com.
. . .
We can only think of three reasons for this:

1. Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
2. Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
3. A left-leaning Google employee who's got access to the database was suffering a nervous breakdown over the mockery of Marxism on our site, and so he or she dastardly removed/blocked The People's Cube, hoping to "improve" the public discourse by silencing the competition.

Number 3 seems the most likely to me.  Be interesting to see Google's reply.

When Google made its deal with Communist China, I suggested they change their slogan from "Don't be evil" to Be Just A Little Bit Evil".  You can find more suggestions for Google's new slogan at Mazurland, and some new Google logos at Michelle Malkin.

(Google is also, I learned from Little Green Footballs, providing web space for Osama bin Laden fan clubs.  It is hard to see how Google, or the public, gains from that.)

Google, or someone who works for Google, says there is a fourth reason: the person who runs the site is a spammer.  You can see the debate at the original People's Cube post, or in the latest comments to this Little Green Footballs post.

It's Sunday:  Wonder if Senator John Kerry attended church today?   Actually, I don't wonder about that.  But I do wonder if Kerry has attended church even once since the end of the 2004 campaign.  His rushing from church to church during that campaign was, I thought, both distasteful and counterproductive.  He would have done better, I think, not to pretend to religious beliefs that he obviously does not have.  (One big piece of evidence for that conclusion:  When he released his tax returns, you could see that he had made no significant contributions to the Catholic church for years, though he continues to be a member.)  I think most believers would think more of a man who showed them some respect by not pretending to be one of them.

Science Bits, beginning with some experiments you can do at home.

• Want to study lava?  Start by making some fudge.  Here's the recipe.   And if studying geology by playing with food appeals to you, here are some more recipes.


• When Vesuvius buried Pompei, that was just an encore.  The volcano had erupted far more violently 4,000 years ago, which, as the researchers say, is not reassuring for the millions who now live in the area.


• Speaking of volcanos, Yellowstone continues to perk away.  The latest changes there probably don't foretell a giant eruption, but the volcano is so incredibly dangerous that we should keep a close watch on it.


• The earthquake that caused the tsunami on December 26, 2004 broke the rules, making some scientists think that some supposedly safe areas may actually be in danger from similar giant earthquakes.


• But if you want see a truly gigantic catastrophe, check out this picture of four galaxies colliding.  Pretty, isn't it?  Though if some theories are correct, we are seeing the death of billions of intelligent aliens.


• The cover of Time magazine has still another picture of Kennewick man.  But, if Kennewick man was related to the Ainu of Japan, as some scientists think, then you will notice that Time's artist left something out.  Or else Gillette was manufacturing razors far earlier than I would have thought.


• Is bubble fusion real?  There are doubts.


• Get ready for warmer and more exciting weather; the next sunspot cycle is predicted to be a strong one.  It's amusing, but not paradoxical, to think that we can predict weather on the sun better than weather on the earth.  It's a bigger, but simpler system.  (Here's some background on sunspots, if you need a review.)


• If you plan to raise mice for fun and profit, the best kind to raise are defective mice.  Those with just the right genetic defects can sell for as much as $100,000.


• Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  The discovery of a rodent belonging to a group thought to be extinct for 11 million years, gives us another example to support that generalization.


• Can coffee cause heart attacks?  If you are a "slow caffeine metabolizer", perhaps.  Alas, there is currently no easy way to tell slow from fast metabolizers.


• Evidence of life in a Martian rock?  The question is still open, and the scientific debate on it has not always been civil.


• Water geysers on Saturn's moon, Enceladus, which means that it just might have life, of a very simple kind.  And the Cassini spacecraft that detected the geysers also detected carbon dioxide and methane.


• No black holes?  Instead, what seem to be black holes may really be "dark energy stars", or so some theorists have proposed.


• Is space travel near the speed of light possible?  Physicist Franklin Felber thinks so, and he has predicted that we will have such starships before the end of this century.


• "Quantum computer solves problem, without running." I don't claim to be able to explain that, or much else in the weird world of quantum mechanics, but it appears to be true.

And ending with the completely baffling.

The High Costs Of Mass Transit:  In this New York Times article on economist Edward Glaeser, there was, besides the main discussion of how leftists may have driven up house prices, this powerful critique of designing cities for mass transit, instead of automobiles:

[Glaeser] also notes that cars per capita in 1990 is among the best indicators of how well a city has fared over the past 15 years.  The more cars, the better — a conclusion that seems perfectly logical to Glaeser.  Car-based cities enable residents to buy cheaper, bigger houses.  And commuters in car-based cities tend to get to work faster than commuters in cities that rely on public transit.  (The average car commute is about 24 minutes; on public transportation, it is around 48 minutes.)  While many of his academic peers were looking at, and denigrating, how the majority of Americans have chosen to live, Glaeser (though no fan of the aesthetics of sprawl himself) didn't think an economist should allow taste to affect judgment.  "You shouldn't go around thinking that all these people are just jackasses for deciding to drive an automobile," he says.

Let's summarize:  Cities that force commuters to rely on mass transit instead of cars impose high costs on the commuters in two ways.  First, the commuters have to either pay more for the same housing, or accept less housing.  Second, the commuters have to spend twice as much time in their daily commutes.  If commuters value their time at an average of 15 dollars an hour, then the extra 48 minutes for the two commutes each day in effect costs those who ride mass transit 12 dollars each day.  The additional housing costs and the time lost are pretty heavy taxes to pay, just so limousine liberals can watch others ride buses and trains.

(Here's my previous post on the article, where I discussed his argument that regulations have driven up housing costs.)

Daniel Schorr Confesses To A Felony:  Specifically, leaking classified information.

The issue of invoking the Espionage Act of 1917 against journalists is not new.  In 1976, the Justice Department considered whether I should be indicted under that statute for revealing some classified information contained in a House Committee report.  In the end, I was told, the department dropped the idea when the CIA expressed fear that further classified information might be disclosed in a trial.

Schorr does not discuss whether his leak might have harmed the nation, though I would not be surprised to learn that it did.

What does interest Schorr is the possibility that some journalists, who have been committing similar felonies, may not be as lucky as he was.  And they may not, as Gabriel Schoenfeld explained in this Commentary article.   Here are the two parts of his long discussion that I found most compelling:

One might go further.  What the New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism.  If information about the NSA program had been quietly conveyed to an al-Qaeda operative on a microdot, or on paper with invisible ink, there can be no doubt that the episode would have been treated by the government as a cut-and-dried case of espionage.  Publishing it for the world to read, the Times has accomplished the same end while at the same time congratulating itself for bravely defending the First Amendment and thereby protecting us—from, presumably, ourselves.
. . .
The real question that an intrepid prosecutor in the Justice Department should be asking is whether, in the aftermath of September 11, we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not

If Schoenfeld is correct is his description of the espionage laws — and I think he is — the legal case against the New York Times and other news organizations may be murky.  But the moral case for prosecuting them is crystal clear.  (And, though I suppose that Daniel Schorr is protected by the statute of limitations, I wouldn't mind federal prosecutors taking another look at his crimes, too.)

Michael Ramirez celebrates the 8-0 defeat of the law schools with today's cartoon.

Terrorist Or Innocent Victim?  Con Coughlin looks at the case of Moazzam Begg.

The well-spoken and articulate Begg said he was nothing more than an innocent teacher in Afghanistan, who was illegally abducted and cruelly tortured by the American military, both in Afghanistan and later at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.
. . .
But Begg's account is starkly at odds with the signed statement he gave to FBI agents while held in Afghanistan after his capture in February 2002, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by The Daily Telegraph.  In the statement, which US officials insist was not obtained under duress, Begg admits to having attended three separate al-Qa'eda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan where he learnt to fire AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and use primitive explosive devices.

I'd bet on terrorist, since Begg's current story sounds implausible in many ways.  But it will be believed by many.

Coughlin is more streetwise than the New York Times, which is convinced that, just because a prisoner in Guantanamo protests his innocence, he must be innocent.  It may shock the New York Times, but I understand that it is not uncommon for prisoners, even those who are not terrorists, to claim innocence falsely.  Really.   What has interested me — though it does not concern the New York Times — is that a number of terrorists who we released from Guantanamo were caught fighting us again.  That suggests to me that our standards for holding them are too lenient, not too strict.

And the Times fails to understand that the fault for our imprisoning some innocent men is mainly the terrorists'.  If our enemies refuse to wear uniforms and fight in a regular way, they bring suffering to innocents, precisely because we can not identify the fighters.  That is why the rules of war are so different for those who fight with uniforms, and those who do not.

(This is not to say that I am certain that Guantanamo has been managed perfectly.  Scott Burgess put it about right when he wrote:

I for one have mixed feelings about the place.  While I certainly don't object to holding combatant prisoners of a conflict for the duration of that conflict, I can accept the possibility that some unnecessarily unsavoury practices may have occurred there (although I would not be surprised to learn that this was the most humane "POW" camp ever established).  While I would feel comfortable in wagering that the large majority of detainees were in fact acting as, or aiding, Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters, I can also accept the possibility that a few of them are innocent.

I don't treat as gospel administration statements on the matter simply because I'm ideologically aligned with it as far as global terror is concerned.  In other words, I view the situation as a complicated one, and I'm happy to consider descriptions and arguments on both sides of the question.

As any rational person should do.

The New York Times makes much of one prisoner being, so he says, a chicken farmer.  The newspaper has apparently forgotten this very famous chicken farmer from an earlier conflict.  Being a chicken farmer does not, in itself, demonstrate a man's innocence.)

Not All Education Research Is Bad:  In this post, I noted that much education research is poorly done and that the quality appears to have declined in recent years.  But not all education research is bad, and some of the best has greatly influenced my thinking about the possibilities for reform, and the best ways to achieve it.  For example, in my youth there was considerable dispute over comparative achievement in different nations.  Those who compared American high school students with European high school students found that our students weren't learning as much.  Defenders of American schools replied that the Europeans only educated a minority of students, while we educated many more, and so one should expect lower levels of achievement here.

That excuse was destroyed when researchers began to do comparative studies of Japanese schools.   Like American schools, they tried to educate everyone, but their students learned as much or more than the European students.

Some of the researchers who made those comparisons have tried very hard to transmit their findings to the public, without, as far as I can tell, much success.  One of the better efforts at explaining what we might learn from the Japanese (and East Asians generally) is Stevenson and Stigler's The Learning Gap.   The authors tried hard to make their findings accessible to every educated adult, and I think that they succeeded, though I may not be the best judge of such things.  Their research compared American schools to Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese schools; in discussing their findings, I'll just say Asian to avoid awkwardness.  (I believe that many of their findings would also be true for Korean students, though their research did not include Korea.)

Here are some of their more striking findings:

• Asian countries have plain schools with fewer facilities and many fewer staff members than American schools.  Many of the Asian schools, just a decade ago, looked much like our schools of a half century ago, plain and functional.


• Asian classes are considerably larger than American classes.


• Asian teachers are, relatively, better paid than American teachers and have considerably higher academic achievement.


• Asian teachers have more in-school time for preparation and often do it in a room set aside for all the teachers.  They have many opportunities, both formal and informal, to share ideas for presenting material.


• Asian schools used simpler and plainer textbooks than American schools.


• Asian teachers used better teaching methods for arithmetic than American teachers.  For example, they generally began teaching a concept with a concrete example and then worked from that to the abstract, rather than the other way around.


• Asian schools accept failure as a normal part of the learning process.  Stigler and Stevenson tell of a Japanese boy who could not draw a three-dimensional cube.  So the teacher asked him to try to draw it on the blackboard and then asked the class if his drawing was correct.  They said no, and the boy went on trying, taking most of the class period with his effort.  He was not disturbed by his struggle, accepting his errors as a natural part of learning, and nothing to be ashamed of.  And when he finally got the drawing right, the class applauded.


• By fifth grade, the American students made less progress in reading than the Asian students, though language differences make measuring this more difficult than measuring than measuring differences in arithmetic.  The American students were "overrepresented among both the best and the worst readers", though the researchers were not sure why. (p. 46)


• American students began school knowing about as much arithmetic as the Chinese students, but less than Japanese students.  By fifth grade, they were far behind both.

Many things commonly believed about Asian students and their parents are not true.  Asian parents actually put less pressure on their children to succeed early in life and in grade school.  But they do provide more support.  The Asian students do fewer chores, and are much more likely to have desks of their own.

Asian and American parents have different beliefs about the achievement of their kids and about what determines achievement.  The Asian parents (whose children are doing better) are much less likely to think that their children are doing well.  American parents (whose children are doing poorly) are much more likely to think that their children are doing well.  Asian parents generally believe that effort determines academic success; American parents generally believe that native talent determines academic success.

It is findings such as these that have convinced me that our students can learn far more than they do — without spending a lot more money.  For example, we might consider, as Stevenson and Stigler suggest, moving to larger classes, something I have favored for some time.  That would allow us to pay teachers more, hire teachers with stronger academic qualifications, and give teachers more time for class preparation.

Finally, I should say that there is much in this research that will discomfit critics of our public schools.  The Asian schools are, by our standards, extremely centralized.  And, at least in the past, the Japanese teacher's union was extraordinarily powerful.  The Asian schools have achieved more using organizations and methods that are of very little interest to most American school reformers.

I began by saying that this research had strongly affected my thinking.  It is why, for instance, that I think that Americans with normal intelligence can learn algebra and more, if taught in the right way.  The Asians do it; so can we.  And it is why I think that the attitudes of our parents must change if we are to match our competitors in academic achievement, especially in mathematics.

(I was stimulated to write this post by this article, and the reactions to it here, here, and here.

There's another fascinating comparative book, Preschool in Three Cultures, which describes three preschools in Japan, China, and the United States.  I can't say I took any great lessons for our schools from it, but the descriptions of the schools were full of surprises.   For instance, one Japanese teacher deliberately took her class out to play after a rain so that they could get all muddy.  (As someone who was a kid once myself, I can appreciate that.)  And the Japanese teachers were much less likely to interfere in fights and other mischief, thinking them a normal part of childhood at that age.)

Worth A Listen:  Citizen Smash went to an event hosted by the UC-San Diego College Democrats and recorded what he calls "Three Minutes Hate".   Even more interesting, to me at least, is his "bonus track", from a former US diplomat, Ann Wright, who thinks we should try harder to understand Osama bin Laden's legitimate grievances.

(One of Smash's commenters linked to this sympathetic interview with Wright, in which she claims that, when she resigned from the Foreign Service, she received more than 400 emails from people in the State Department supporting her.  If she is telling the truth, that goes a long way to explaining why the State Department has often done such a poor job in executing Bush's foreign policy.

By the way, this kind of citizen journalism is an excellent way for bloggers to fill in the gaps left by the "mainstream" media, who are too politically correct to cover such stories.  We need more such efforts, and I hope to do a few of them myself.)