The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Nancy Lebovitz:

Here's a spin-off discussion about Go Home, Lone Ranger. Werewolves and mass production of silver bullets, mostly.

Virginia Postrel on Glamour. This goes nicely with the Kinkaid memo.

This American Life has a ghosts and poisoning story.

A sestina about Marvin the Martian.

This is from an NPR story a while ago about Russian emigres getting Russian-style math tutoring for their kids. It was said that American schools kind of dab at math ideas, and then come back to them the next year, while the Russian style is to make sure ideas are understood before going on. I'm not sure that's correct about the US, but it did sort of seem to resonate with my memories. On the other hand, I was in school some decades ago, which means both that my vague memories of how I was taught math might be wrong and that current practice might be different.

In any case, I do think that a major cause of the financial crisis is a lot of people who didn't believe that understanding things is important and/or didn't believe they could manage to do it, and I'm wondering if part of this was that math comprehension wasn't adequately encouraged.

Decades ago, I talked with someone who believed that money was getting taken from a poor school district and given to a better off one. The idea sounded plausible because I can be very cynical, but does anyone have evidence of such happening? Is there a chance that it's pervasive?

Decades ago, I talked with someone who believed that money was getting taken from a poor school district and given to a better off one. The idea sounded plausible because I can be very cynical, but does anyone have evidence of such happening? Is there a chance that it's pervasive?

Major article about the culture of deliberate ignorance that created the current financial mess.

So far as fried chicken is concerned, it's kind of amazing that eating it can be an insult considering that McDonald's built an empire on selling fried chicken to everyone.

However, I'm haunted by "Words don't have meanings. People have meanings." I'm not sure that it's true, but it's got that ring of plausibility.

Eating fried chicken (with or without watermelon) is an insult because of the tone. The whole thing gets complicated when an insult has been used for so long that it becomes a matter of habit with no active malice for some people, but in this case, the stigma certainly isn't dead.

Getting real trials for the prisoners in Gitmo is just a start. For me, the pony for Christmas is setting up policies against torture with a good enforcement system.

And for the Machiavelli fans, try Paul McAuley's Pasquale's Angel-- an alternate history with the industrial revolution in Renaissance Italy and Machiavelli as a reporter.

There was a comedian on NPR a while ago who said he was hoping Palin would be vice-president. His motto was "America second".

Seriously, if we get a good administration, there will be jokes, but I don't think the laughs will be as big. I can live with that.

#79 ::: albatross:

Thanks. That's a bunch of good points.

A pragmatic reading would suggest that if the believers are being encouraged to wake up at 3AM to engage in spiritual warfare, they'll be sleep-deprived and more gullible.

Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America is probably relevant. It's about traditional (back to the Puritans) and current American magic.

#144 ::: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers):

"Virtual money" is pretty good-- I've been calling it fairy gold, but at least the fairies didn't make us pay real gold for dried leaves.

However, I don't think the physicists were the problem, and I suspect you were joking.

I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad a while ago, and the underlying point of the book was that anyone who does useful work for a living is a chump. Nothing wrong with doing useful work, mind you, but you should be getting your money by finding some way to shuffle the risk off on someone else. Real estate was mentioned as a good way to do that, but I don't remember if other investments came up.

It doesn't take a physicist to think of that sort of thing. I wouldn't mind knowing whether the folks who invented the more exotic new investments all studied at the same universities, and possibly with the same teachers.

And, like some folks upthread, I'd like to see stats on how proportions of the loans shake out between poor people getting modest houses, decently-off people getting houses they clearly couldn't afford, and people getting house after house to flip them in a rising market. Those categories would *not* cover all the foreclosures-- there were also people who got a reasonable-sized house, and were skunked by unemployment, medical expenses, or the drop in housing prices.

I don't know if this counts, but I'm haunted by a woman who I heard on NPR or the BBC. She was in foreclosure because her mortgage went up $200/month. And she was absolutely convinced that she had a house she could afford, not realizing that anything moderately large going wrong for her could have cost $200/month.

A spooky little thing....NPR just had a story about a woman who was foreclosed and committed suicide. She'd never lived anywhere else. She inherited the house from her parents. After some bad financial decisions, and (I think) medical problems, she was renting the house. Then her landlord got foreclosed. There was no indication of why he was in that situation, but the announcer went on to mention people who bought more house than they could afford. I think it's a reflex.

Here's something I've heard from a couple of independent sources but have no evidence for or against otherwise. The idea is that the financial elite is pathological because it's a meritocracy. The competition for the top spots is so intense that they're full of people who've been trained to focus on nothing but winning the next contest.

Bollywood McCain-Palin.

More spam. Why this thread?

#55 ::: Allan Beatty:

A split between pro- and anti- Palin Republicans sounds plausible to me. Aren't parties likely to form around people at least as much as ideas?

I don't think free market Republicans are likely to end up in the Libertarian Party. The LP has such a history of ineffectiveness that it seems more sensible to start a new party, but I'm just guessing on this.

If the fix is in for the R's to steal the election, wouldn't they seem happier and calmer?

I take Graydon's point of view to be that the US is doomed, not that it's the devil incarnate.

I've been surprised enough times lately that I don't have that sort of faith in my ability to predict. I do think the US has an substantial set of institutional tools for resisting tyranny and people who are devoted to using them. I don't know if it will be enough, nor if some sufficient cultural change will happen, nor if that change has to include capital punishment to be sufficient.

Graydon, do you have a time span in mind for self-induced disaster to hit the US, and ideas about how that disaster would affect the rest of the world?

I live in Philadelphia. Thanks for cheering me up.

Other than that, I don't think the Bradley effect is going to be a big player. Obama hasn't just been getting white people saying they'll vote for him in polls, he's been getting a lot of enthusiastic support.

More fiction: gay marriage is definitely an "in the future they do things differently" detail from Kornbluth.

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