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Showing posts from November, 2010

Quote of the day

"And, indeed, as recently as 1988 one could have witnessed moderate Democrat Joe Lieberman successfully challenging incumbent liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker with the support of, among others, William F Buckley, Jr. "But it turns out that Lieberman vs Weicker was something of a dying gasp of a political order that was rendered obsolete by the civil rights revolution. Twenty years later we find ourselves several congresses into a brave new world in which every single Democratic Party legislator is to the left of every single Republican Party legislator. In terms of partisan politics, in other words, we’ve become a normal country. But as Linz observed, the “normal” outcome for a country with our political institutions and ideologically sorted parties is constitutional crisis and a collapse into dictatorship. "So far it hasn’t happened here. The 1998-99 effort to impeach Bill Clinton was sufficiently unpopular that moderate Republicans wouldn’t vote for it. A

GTOT

I'm back!  This training at Pretoria was the general training of trainers, shortened to GTOT in accordance with Peace Corps' acronym fetish (similar to bureaucracies everywhere, I reckon).  The next group of South African volunteers are coming in late January, so they gathered everyone involved to figure out how it's going to work.  There were four PCVs, a few staff, and about 20 language trainers.  We spent the greater part of the time reworking all the sessions they had laid out, making sure they fit into the lesson format that Peace Corps has adopted.  Here are the characteristics they wanted to be sure could be identified in every instance: 1) Performer 2) Performance 3) Standard 4) Condition Performer is who is doing the learning, the performance is where the learning takes place, the condition is when, and the standard is how learning is measured. In my opinion, it's a cumbersome and unnecessarily vague format, but that's not what really tripped us up.

Collected links

1. A professional essayists who writes for cheating students gives his story . 2. A sweet map of America with all kinds of stats . 3. Give me Four Loko or give me death . 4. Before you read the next link, read up on ketosis . 5. Apparently, ketosis can prevent some kinds of seizures .

Thanksgiving

Turkey day turned out to be quite the experience.  I was originally going to be accompanied by another volunteer to the house of the psychologist for the US embassy, but she was unable to make it, so it was just me representing Peace Corps.  There were expats there from Switzerland, France, England, India, Finland, Pakistan, and the US.  They had me stand up in front of everyone and give an impromptu explanation of the history of Thanksgiving.  (I figure if you graduate from college and you can't at least BS reasonably well, you ought to ask for your money back.) I let loose what charm I could muster up, and the evening seemed to go pretty well, though I was often lost amongst the French-speaking bunch.  That's not their fault though, and otherwise the people were excellent and the food delicious.  Now I've got a new friend in Waterkloof (the wealthy section of Pretoria) in case of emergency.

It's a small world

I'm still here at this training in Pretoria, which is going well enough all things considered.  They told us originally that we'd be going out to dinner at the ambassador's house here, but it turns out that there were too many of us for that, so some got shunted off to other American families around town.  Still, great to be getting a free dinner. It turns out that one of the other volunteers here is also a river-running type who has worked around the Southwest for a long time, on the San Juan and others.  Just yesterday my sister called me, and I mentioned this person, and it turns out they worked at the same company and were good friends.  Quite the staggering coincidence, eh? I'll be heading back to my site around Saturday or Sunday, and regularly scheduled blogging will resume then.

Question of the day

Noah's been in rare form over at his place.  See here , here , and here for a series on a sangoma celebration.  The question: how many conquistador helmets full of local hooch (called Umqombothi) does it take to kill a woolly mammoth?  Answer: 33 and 1/3 !

Collected links

1. This study purports to be evidence of seeing the future .  Color me unconvinced. 2. The speech accent archive . 3. Roger Ebert on lonely people . 4. The unsung heroes of human development .  They are mostly Muslim countries.  Apparently empowering women is more effective than democratization. 5. Radley Balko on the unjust imprisonment of Brian Aitken . Count me on the side of the NRA on this one.

Rain!

A few days back we finally got a decent downpour. It was heavenly. The earth drank it up—it's been so dry here they've got the public works folks out cutting brush to save water.

Blog news

I'm going to a training in Pretoria—we're getting ready for the upcoming SA23 and I'm one of five (!) people selected to be part of training.  It should be fun, but posting might be a little light for next week or so.  We'll see if I can find a computer in Pretoria somewheres.

The START treaty

Republicans, specifically Jon Kyl, are threatening not to pass the START arms control treaty.  Larison has been pounding this issue for a long time, but Josh Marshall has probably the best primer I've seen thus far.  Have you heard this? Russia still has a massive strategic nuclear arsenal with pretty much the exclusive goal of being able to devastate the United States and kill pretty much all of us. For 15 years we had pretty robust right to inspect their arsenal many times a year, make sure they only had as many as they were allowed under our treaties and actually get up on the delivery missiles themselves and look at the payloads? Now we don't. In fact, we haven't since December 5th of last year. At first that wasn't that big a deal. Not much can happen in a few weeks or few months. But now it's been almost a year. So all that trust but verify stuff Ronald Reagan was so into? Well, now we can't verify. And for as much as you're worried about some Musli

I did a good deed today

Lest anyone accuse me of being a complete waste of Peace Corps money, for the defense I present the following.  With God as my witness, for Uncle Sam and freedom and democracy, for peace and love and harmony and low trade barriers, today I rescued a baby goat with her head caught in a rusty tin can. Kinda funny, but pitiful. I was walking back along the riverbed from the neighboring village, where I have been helping with a world map project for the past couple days, blasting some Opeth on my headphones.  The poor thing was totally helpless, and tried to run when I approached but didn't know which way to go so I caught her easily.  The issue was her little horns—maybe an inch long—had gotten wedged under the lip of the can, which was bent into an oval shape.  (God knows what enticed the thing to stick its head in the can in the first place.)  At first I couldn't get both of the horns out.  The goat was panicky and panting hoarsely into the can, and kept trying to escape.  A

RIP Gerald H Nelson

My step-grandfather passed away last night. He had been ill for awhile and it was his time. He had had medical issues for a long time, but in the end it was probably good that he went as quickly as he eventually did. It could have easily been one of those deaths that drag on brutally for weeks or months. What I think of now is his cabin in Mexico where he lived for the last several years with my grandma. He bought the place for a song back in the 60s and my family been visiting there since I was a little kid. Somewhere there are pictures, taken in that cabin, of a five-year-old Ryan flying through the air onto a pile of beanbag chairs. I remember also one time riding around in the back of his restored 1944 Willys Jeep (equipped with hand-routed sand tires), sitting on the same beanbags, forgetting to hold on while Grandpa took off from a stop sign, and thus tumbling astonished out onto the sand behind. I wasn't hurt, and luckily the Jeep is not particularly fast, so I wasn

Finished!

Today my Grade 4, 5, and 6 classes took their final exams for maths.  This means I am done teaching in South Africa.  (Imagine me being jubilant right now.)  What better way to celebrate than the Onion : The U.S. Department of Education released a comprehensive, nationwide evaluation of American schools Monday indicating that attempts to teach absolutely anything to these little shits is just a huge waste of everybody's time... "When I first started teaching, I would see the smiling faces in my classroom and get excited about nurturing their young minds," said Melanie Whitman, 35, a first-grade teacher quoted in the report. "Now I can't look up from my desk without wanting to puke at the sight of all those little psychopaths." Secretary Duncan said the study is the first to provide detailed evidence in support of the theory that third-grader Scott Kriesel is a complete fuck-up and perhaps even the living incarnation of Satan.

Nelson Mandela was a secret neuroscientist

I'm really enjoying the NYT philosophy blog, The Stone .  The latest post by Robert Sapolsky is about the way the patchwork, ad hoc nature of evolution makes the brain mix up metaphors and reality: Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study , Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not hav

Awkward movies

I just watched Superbad for the first time, and while I thought it was decent, and pretty funny in the final analysis, it was hard work to get through.  I struggle with awkward and embarrassing movies, especially of the Judd Apatow formula: completely charmless, pathetic male protagonists that bumble through the movie making complete asses out of themselves.  Or, at least, a movie like that has to be leavened with a great deal of silliness for me to be able to enjoy it (like the police sub-plot in Superbad ).  I thought Talladega Nights struck a good balance in this regard. I'm not sure exactly why it is I have such a reaction to such movies, but it's an extraordinarily powerful one.  It's a visceral physical discomfort.  If the movie is sufficiently awkward, I literally cannot watch.  I had to turn off Old School .  The idea behind that kind of humor seems to be a kind of release from fear—watching someone else humiliate himself as a celebration of freedom from such hu

Collected links

1. TNC on the problem with cops in America. 2. Could the world go back on the gold standard? 3. Krugman on how we're heading for a lost decade. 4. Steve Waldman has a great post on how people like Krugman shouldn't cede the moral high ground, ever. 5. James Fallows on clean coal in the Atlantic .   Let's hope the Chinese can figure it out, because America sure won't.

Sunset

From awhile back.

Busted leg reax

Jenneffer provides an update : Pain management was one of the two most difficult parts of my hospitalization. There were times i felt like Frida, waking from nightmares, screaming in pain, only to be stilled by in injection of strong analgesic. Never have i seen my body tremble so violently from a negative experience. The other terrible part was being alone. I never imagined i would come to need and enjoy the company of others, until this past 15 months of experiences in the peace corps. Especially in such a difficuly time, as being hospitalized, having surgery, and enduring so much pain. Say some prayers to the deity of your choice that she gets better soon (I choose the FSM ). One good thing about crutches is you get massively improved upper-body strength in a hurry.

Quantitative easing

Since additional fiscal stimulus is out of the question, Fed Chairman Bernanke is planning another round of monetary policy action.  It's rather weak tea, but basically they're going to try and push up the inflation rate a bit by buying a huge mess of treasury bonds.  It's the functional equivalent of printing some money.  I think this is an area where people's intuitions (printing money bad! strong dollar good!) can lead them astray.  The usual suspects are howling about "debasing the dollar," but Karl Smith gives a great explanation of why we need this sort of thing, in the context of arguing that Bernanke is not doing enough: Virtually all economists agree that disinflation and deflation are caused by a shortage of dollars in the economy. The majority agree that such deflation is accompanied by a rise in unemployment. If inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, then deflation is too few dollars chasing too few goods. As a side effect some of t

Armistice Day

Since I'm not in the US, that's what I'm calling it.  I just finished the Teaching Company 's lecture series on WWI, and it seems to me the psychic state of the Western world after that mass of horror was much more healthy than the triumphalist attitude that persists after WWII.  Here is "Back," by Wilfred Gibson. They ask me where I've been, And what I've done and seen. But what can I reply Who know it wasn't I, But someone just like me, Who went across the sea And with my head and hands Killed men in foreign lands... Though I must bear the blame, Because he bore my name. (h/t): Sullivan .

Donkey cart accident

Donkey carts are ubiquitous in village life. They're like the jalopies of South Africa. Nearly everyone's got one (or three), they're rickety, and the kids beat the everlovin tar out of the things. Some of the donkeys in the traces are treated with relative kindness (usually by older men who seem to know how to train animals), but far too often I see people, usually younger boys, literally flaying the hide off their beasts. They seem to get the idea that if one is driving a cart, one must be constantly flogging: standing up, brandishing the whip in a sweeping circle, leaning into each stroke. I've seen boys drive their carts into the ditch, forcing their friends to get out and lead the donkeys backwards, still maintaining the constant whipping. The other day walking across the bridge I saw one such boy coasting down the hill to the bridge at a good clip. One of his donkeys—on the right in the picture—either stumbled or came out of the harness and was run over

Can you feel God, ctd

Sullivan has been posting readers' emails on an interesting back and forth between moderate Christians and agnostics.  Count me with this reader: I am an agnostic who does not feel my life one bit less richer because of it.  I acknowledge mystery in the world.  In fact, I see the world at times as a beautiful, mysterious, dreamlike place.  I constantly ask myself what this all means.  However, I know that no one, including myself, has the answer.  I hope there is an afterlife.  I hope that it is a place of love considering all of the suffering that goes on in this world.  But religions created by men cannot tell us these things.  In the meantime, I'm satisfied with the meaning of life as given to us by Kurt Vonnegut: We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. Like most philosophical or theological concepts, agnosticism has many different sub-types, but what it is not is simply saying "I'm not sure" to religious questions. Lay

Department of WTF, foreskin bureau

Deep breath.  *shiver*  Ok, I'm ready.  I find this unspeakably horrifying: There is a market in baby foreskins : Because of this, they’re not tossed out with the rest of the medical waste after a birth. Instead, hospitals sell them to companies and institutions for a wide variety of uses. Companies will pay thousands of dollars for a single foreskin. Some of the strangest purposes they’re put to: Cosmetics: Foreskins are used to make high-end skin creams. The skin products contain fibroblasts grown on the foreskin and harvested from it. One foreskin can be used for decades to produce fancy face cream like the SkinMedica products hawked on Oprah. Emphasis mine. Sweet mother Mary. I guess they're also used for skin grafts, but still.

Collected links

1. Aaron Carrol breaks down why US healthcare is so expensive in excruciating detail . 2. Mao was a really, really bad person . 3. What was the hipster ? 4. The reason why no voting system can be perfectly fair in all ways: Arrow's impossibility theorem . 5. More on the ethics of voting . 6. Best books of 2010 from Publisher's Weekly . 7. What will happen to Lake Powell?

Peace Corps in South Africa vs. Nicaragua, part II

For this post, I'm going to take a look at the subjective experience of the culture of each country. My friend in Nicaragua describes her experience as deeply humbling. She says, "my host grandmother gets up at 3:00 in the morning to start making tortillas and cooking beans, serves my host brother breakfast at 4:30 before he goes off to work in a sweatshop, then does laundry and cleans, then makes me lunch when I get done sitting on my butt receiving class, then continues working until bedtime." Her host brother has a computer science degree, but works twelve hours a day sewing shirts and is damn happy to have any job at all. He will still attempt to pay for taxis and things for my friend even though he is the only one supporting a family of five. It's not all good—apparently in one of the heavily Sandinista areas a bunch of men attempted to kill a PCV awhile back just because she was American. But overall the Nicas, she concludes, are basically decent, surprisi

Laws and social disapproval

Speaking of the war on drugs, Yglesias (ironically enough), pivoting off a post on the economics of prostitution, lays out a fundamental difference between the technocratic- and the moral-minded: ...a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution . Indeed, people seem generally quite unconcerned about whether prostitution is occurring someplace out of sight and out of mind. But they want to reserve the right to strongly disapprove of both the prostitution and especially the prostitutes. You can analogize a person who engaged in a form of sexual or commercial conduct of which you disapprove by referring to that person as a “whore.” It’s an insult. Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. In conversations with conservatives about the war on drugs, the debate often runs aground on precisely this territory. A drug

I painted my roof

Before: After: This was a pretty amateurish effort on my part. I didn't sand down the rust very much—well, cutting through the rust might have just worn new holes in my roof—I broke my brush halfway through and had to finish clutching the raw bristles like a Lascaux caveman, and I foolishly didn't start at the far edge and painted myself into a corner. Still, all things considered, the roof is significantly whiter than when I started.  More importantly, it is so far a lot cooler inside than yesterday.  By this time during the average day the roof metal would be so hot on the underside you could almost hear the sizzle touching it with your finger.  Now it's barely warm to the touch.  I reckon it will still be pretty hot during the late afternoon as the wall bricks absorb sunlight, but I think overall it's going to make things much better in my little shack. I bought five liters of paint, which cost R250 and turned out to be way too much.  I still have about two-th

Liberals and pot

One area where I part company with the likes of Yglesias, Mark Kleiman, and (apparently) Josh Marshall, is their unfortunate paternalistic tendencies.  It must be said that this kind of view is fairly common amongst the liberal intelligentsia, and is something I find really irritating.  It's wishy-washy, it's incoherent, and it's very often passive-aggressive.  Marshall provides the latest example : More generally though, I just don't know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it's that I'm getting into my 40s. And maybe I'm a hypocrite. I of course know people who smoke grass. And I don't have any problem with it. Decriminalized? Yes, I think probably so. But that's not the same as legalization. It's very different actually. And let me be clear that I think our drug laws are catastrophic. They create endemic violence first in our major cities and now along the borders and it's led to generations of Americans rotting in pris

Peace Corps links

1. Casandra has what sounds like a near-heat stroke . 2. Hillary Clinton in was just in Cambodia . 3. Noah gets back in the blogging game with his trademark humor. 4. One bloc east has a riveting series of posts on being a returned Peace Corps volunteer with a law degree, no job, and few prospects.  I liked this line: "I guess the larger question is what does it say about my self-esteem that I assume that every woman who approaches me now that I’m home is a prostitute?" 5. Aaron over in Azerbaijan has some excellent news: free coffee for PCV's !  Apparently they will deliver almost anywhere in the world.

Peace Corps in South Africa vs. Nicaragua, part I

The view above Cape Town One of my good friends was just admitted to Peace Corps and deployed to Nicaragua.  It has been extremely interesting to compare my experience with hers, to see where they are similar and where they are different.  For this first post, I'll concentrate on the two versions of Peace Corps in each country.  The overall impression I am receiving is that the Nicaraguan program is basically what I was expecting before I came here.  Of course, everyone tries to get rid of their expectations about how it will be living with a host family, what the culture and language are like, and so forth, but I perhaps foolishly kept a few expectations that I assumed were baked into the cake of Peace Corps, so to speak. The first big one is I thought it would be hard .  The most common catchphrase I remember hearing about this experience was "It's the toughest job you'll ever love."  Well, it's not tough and I don't love it.  Don't get me wrong

Sunset

One of the good things about summer coming again is that the spectacular sunsets are back.  This was from a couple weeks ago.  Beams like an etched glass sky.

The election

It's evening in America. Obviously this was a huge loss for the Democrats, and not a very surprising one either.  Political scientists have been telling us for years that the economy is by far the most reliable predictor of election results, and lo and behold with a lousy economy the ruling party lost big time.  The one big disappointment is that my home representative is now ur-schmuck Scott Tipton, a guy I actually know reasonably well (I went to high school with his kids).  I'm rather amazed that the GOP managed to not win the Senate—a couple months ago it looked pretty much in the bag, especially with Harry Reid down a bazillion points and Mike Castle a lock in Delaware.  We've got incompetent teabagger nutcases Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell to thank for that. Broadly speaking, I think this could be a good opportunity for Democrats to position for the next election.  If they can not fall into a cringing ball as usual and try to give a good showing again

"We were victimized by predatory borrowers"

I don't think I've ever seen a more perfect line encapsulating the bankster attitude.

Immigration policy and the "brain drain"

Terrence Chan, a professional poker player from Canada, calls it quits on the USA after an infuriating experience with the DHS: I was pretty pissed to be turned away. I was enraged, really; no other way to put it. The officer told me (as he was sending me on the road back into Canada) that I was welcome to try again with my documentation but if I were attempt to try to another port of entry that I would be arrested. I grabbed my passport and snarled that I wasn't likely to come back again, ever. A few hours later though, I cooled down. I had this plan, and I wanted to see it through. So I had my dad send me all my papers from Hong Kong -- my properties, bank statements, even water and electric bills. I collected as much stuff as I had on hand in Canada with the same. I did my research online and was told by a dozen people that if I had all my shit in order there was "no way" I'd be denied a second time. I even allowed myself to be confident that this time, they

Why are Americans so short?

I am between 5' 7'' and 5' 8'', which depending on the study puts me 2-3 inches shorter than even the American average.  But Americans as a whole are now about the shortest people in the industrialized world.  NPR had an interesting piece on this (h/t John Messie ): Through most of American history, we’ve been the tallest population on the planet. Americans were two inches taller than the Englishmen they fought in the Revolutionary War, thanks to abundant food and a healthy rural life, far from the disease-ridden cities of Europe. But we’re no longer at the top. Northern Europeans are now the world’s tallest people, led by the Dutch. The average Dutch man is 6 feet tall, while the average American man maxes out at 5-foot-9. Good health care and good nutrition during pregnancy and early childhood are two reasons why the Dutch have grown so tall, Komlos says. In addition, the Dutch guarantee equal access to critical resources like prenatal care. That’s not t

My life in numbers

Cooper Knowlton had a funny idea I'm going to shamelessly steal. Months in South Africa: 15 Months left in South Africa: 10 Books read: ~100 Books I’m currently reading: 5 Blog posts written: 561 People helped/successfully taught: 0 Friends in my village: 0 Bowls of Morvite eaten: 1000's  Times I’ve been asked if I want a South African wife: ~10 Times I've been asked for money: Avogadro's number Amount of money Peace Corps pays me each day: ~$11 Amount of money I spend each day: ~$5 Days of rain since last May: 0 Number of students in my Grade 8 class: 12 Number of mosquito bites that I have ever gotten in the village: 0 Number of miles I’ve run in the last two weeks: 40 Number of legs I have seen broken: 1 Number of miles from my village to Kuruman: 62 Hours it took to travel that distance (by taxi) yesterday: 3 1/2

Department of WTF: bad luck tumble bureau

This weekend in Kuruman I was walking arm-in-arm with my friend here when she tripped on a small curb and fell to one knee.  It was an exceedingly minor fall, not even all the way to the ground as she caught herself on my arm.  Yet through some lousy confluence of planets she broke her tibia just below the knee.  Me and some other strapping young lads were carrying her around all weekend; at this point she's in Pretoria for surgery.  Here's hoping her recovery is brief and painless. UPDATE: See here for her own story.  Lack of calcium seems like it could be a factor.  I hope my daily bowl of cereal is helping me in that respect—I remember the orthodontist who did my wisdom teeth said I had about hardest bone he'd ever had to bust out with a chisel.  I've never broken a bone in any case, and so far it doesn't seem like a great experience.

Deadweight loss

Yglesias explains the concept in the context of downloaded music: What about the case of unauthorized downloading of music files. Consider Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” . This tune costs $1.29 on iTunes. At that price, some people will buy it. Others will refuse. You might refuse because you hate Katy Perry and hate the idea of owning one of her songs. But say you’re not a hater. You’re just a skeptic and a cheapskate. You’d gladly pay a dime for the song were that an option, and since the marginal cost of distribution is basically zero it would be profitable to sell you the song for a dime. But it’s not an option, since the overal profit-maximizing price is $1.29. And say there are a million people like you out there. That adds up to $100,000 in deadweight loss—the value of the transactions blocked by copyright protection. Of course in the real world many of those million people will just download a copy of the song for free. Some would like you to believe that this is an action