Obama’s birth certificate “dispute,” redux

Many conservatives are still yapping that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. when an official Hawaiian birth certificate and a Hawaiian newspaper birth announcement clearly prove otherwise. The believers are ignoring evidence that disproves their claim, and bonding over what is thus an absurd claim. Maybe they'll be soon start building a new church dedicated to their article of faith that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. I do wonder whether we are seeing the mechanism by which religions are born? Check out the video below for some especially surreal moments by some desperate fringe conservatives who are clearly annoying the hell out of conservatives that still have their brains engaged. Rick Sanchez calls it right. And check out the need to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Creepy. I really don't get it. Is there buried racism at work?

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National traffic safety agency (NHTSA) causes thousands to die by hiding safety data

From a bureaucrat's perspective, it's just much easier to hide inconvenient information. That doesn't make it right to hide important information. Not at all. Heads should roll for the recently disclosed cover-up by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. People died on the highway because of this cover-up, and not just a few people. Back in 2003, federal government researchers estimated that 955 people died and 240,000 accidents occurred in 2002 due to cell phone use. Extrapolate those numbers out to 2009 and we can reasonably assume that 5,000 people needlessly died in highway wrecks because the government didn't release this shocking cell phone usage data and issue a stern warning that people shouldn't talk on cell phones while they drive, because it's as bad as driving while drunk. This cover-up by the U.S. government means that more people died because of the government's corrupt ways than the number of people who died in the 9/11 attacks. Shouldn't we declare "war" on safety officials who cause people to die by intentionally withholding safety information? I would have a commission get to the bottom of this to find out who made this piss poor decision to withhold the date. All the people involved should (but won't) spend many years in prison for manslaughter. And let's connect the dots. Why would Congress get mad because of the release of this accurate data? Let's see . . . maybe it's because the telecoms, who contribute massive amounts of money to Congress, would see their profits cut if their customers could run up cell phone minutes while driving. Could that be it? Note: The telephone utilities pour more than $40M annually into lobbying Congress and many millions more into political contributions. These politicians and government employees apparently forget who they work for. Here's a hint: their top priority should not be the telecoms and other monied contributors. They work for us. If they would have asked themselves this simple question ("Who do I really work for?"), maybe they would have felt compelled to release important safety data, which could have saved thousands of lives. This recent disclosure is unbelievable and very very sad. The NYT reports:

The former head of the highway safety agency said he was urged to withhold the research to avoid antagonizing members of Congress who had warned the agency to stick to its mission of gathering safety data but not to lobby states. Critics say that rationale and the failure of the Transportation Department, which oversees the highway agency, to more vigorously pursue distracted driving has cost lives and allowed to blossom a culture of behind-the-wheel multitasking. “We’re looking at a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety.

Continue ReadingNational traffic safety agency (NHTSA) causes thousands to die by hiding safety data

Fat Tire’s first prize: an obsolete bike. The rationality of costly signaling.

Fat Tire Beer is holding a contest, and first prize is an old-fashioned bicycle. It is a cumbersome and heavy one-speed bike that lacks most of the useful features found on modern bicycles. What does it have going for it? Nothing much worth my while. I buy my bicycles for performance, features and functionality, not looks. Others would say that the Fat Tire bicycle has an unique style worth coveting. I know a woman who recently paid a large amount of money for a "retro" bicycle much like the one in the photo. She bragged about her bicycle only in terms of what it looked like, and seemed to get irritated when I asked her whether she would miss some of the useful features found in most modern bicycles, features such as multiple gears, high-tech gear-shifting, feather-light frame, and front or rear suspension. It appears that Fat Tire Beer is looking for customers like the woman I just described, people who are obsessed with the looks of a bicycle rather than its functionality. I recently posted on Geoffrey Miller's terrific new book, Spent. At page 97, Miller discusses the "signaling value" of many modern products. Miller points out that modern corporations work hard to avoid competition based upon objective features that can be compared. Fat Tire Beer, for example, did not choose to offer a modern bicycle that could easily be compared to the many other bicycles currently being sold. Instead, the company chose to offer an old-fashioned bike that would signal a certain trait for the owner and his/her friends/acquaintances. Modern corporations

Use advertising to create signaling systems--psychological links between brands and the aspirational traits that consumers would like to display. Although these signaling links must be commonly understood by the consumer's socially relevant peer group, they need not involve the actual product at all. The typical Vogue magazine ad shows just two things: a brand name and an attractive person . . . there is a hidden rationality at work--the rationality of costly signaling. What matters in most advertising is the learned association between the consumer's aspirational traits and the company's trademarked brand name--the fountainhead of all profitability.
Therefore, don't waste your time trying to figure out what obsolete styles of bicycles have to do with beer. The bicycle featured on the label of Fat Tire Beer has nothing to do with the taste or quality of the liquid in the bottle. Rather, buying Fat Tire Beer is an opportunity for a consumer to display to others that the consumer can afford a premium beer. The bicycle on the label gives consumers a further opportunity to suggest that tradition is more important than functionality. Those who buy Fat Tire Beer let the beer do their talking for them: "I'm a person who values tradition over functionality." That's my guess. I wouldn't accept that cumbersome and sparsely-featured contest bicycle even if someone offered it to me for free, because I know less-costly, less wasteful and more effective ways of convincing others that I often value tradition. It involves hard work and no gimmicks. It requires that you willingly put your life under a microscope, that you repeatedly show rather than tell, and that you show your values in ways other than through conspicuous consumption.

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Our insane drug war, revisited

Mother Jones has hammered our drug war with undeniable facts . . . well, undeniable unless you are a government official in charge of the "drug war." In fact, as authors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery advise us, the entire history of the U.S. "war on drugs" is actually a governmental war on truth.

[T]he drug war has never been about facts—about, dare we say, soberly weighing which policies might alleviate suffering, save taxpayers money, rob the cartels of revenue. Instead, we've been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, and counterfactual claims of success. (To wit: Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who've seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.) What would a fact-based drug policy look like? It would put considerably more money into treatment, the method proven to best reduce use. It would likely leave in place the prohibition on "hard" drugs, but make enforcement fair . . . And it would likely decriminalize but tightly regulate marijuana, which study after study shows is less dangerous or addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, has undeniable medicinal properties, and isn't a gateway drug to anything harder than Doritos.

If you want to see a bunch of demoralized people wasting time, park yourself at your local drug court and watch a judge slapping faux sentences on marijuana users and small-time peddlers. Everyone involved knows that the system is a joke--a money sucking time-wasting absurd joke that ruins lives, because every so often someone gets ripped from his or her family, thrown into prison for years. The crime (just to remind you) is that these users wanted to feel pleasure. And sometimes its more absurd: the criminal wanted to escape stress or anxiety and he didn't have a fancy health insurance policy that would allow a doctor to hand him legal pills that do the same thing. And maybe he didn't want to legally rot out his liver with alcohol, which is the other way of getting a similar high. As I've made clear many times, I am not promoting drug use of any kind. I just had serious surgery and I could have loaded up on narcotics that were made available to me, but I didn't because I don't want that or need that. I'm a lucky person in that regard. I am not interested in altering my mind through chemicals. I am trying to convince my daughters that they should strive for clean drug-free living. But I am aware that many people want or need relief from stressful lives (or from their own misfiring brains) or maybe they want the option to simply chill out. I certainly don't want to stand in their way any more than I would tell a patient to not take those pills prescribed by her doctor. It's time to stop spending billions of tax dollars on a drug war that doesn't stop drug use and only ramps up violence, destabilizes governments and steals critical services from taxpayers. The drug war is highly immoral, but we won't be able to fix the situation until we have the courage to have an honest conversation. Related posts:

The most harmful thing about marijuana is jail (reporting on the opinion of a conservative judge).

The Economist's argument to stop the war on drugs. (includes the mind-scrambling statistic that the U.S. spend $40 B each year trying to stop the use of illegal drugs).

Johann Hari's argument that It's time to stop the drug war. (more shocking statistics)

It isn't dangerous to use marijuana. (Really, no more dangerous than Doritos)

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Sex in heaven – Part II

A co-worker raised a thorny issue today. Assume that there is actually a heaven and that if you are good, you get to go there after you die. Assume, further, that your spouse dies first, and you thus get to be re-united with your spouse in heaven. Now that would be one hell of a joyous reunion, right? You both actually died and now you find each other up there! But not so fast . . . What happens to widows and widowers who have remarried? If all of the relevant parties were good, we're going to have this uncomfortable situation: Joe goes to heaven and he sees his first wife Edna asking him to join her on the cloud on the left, while Betty, his second wife, is asking him to join her on the cloud on the right. What should he do? I thought that the whole reason that you could re-married is because your first spouse was dead. But that tidy earthly situation would unravel in heaven. It could get really complicated in heaven if there were sex in heaven, but there apparently isn't. I once heard a Christian radio-show preacher having an extended conversation with an earnest caller about this exact topic (I wrote about this conversation in 2006--it was one of the first posts at DI). The radio-preacher assured that man that there was no such thing as sex in heaven, but don't worry, because the joys of heaven would be "better than sex." The caller was upset. He insisted that he wanted to have sex in heaven--even if there was also something "better than sex." If body-less people still have emotions and passions, I would expect considerable turmoil in heaven. Even couples who had been happily married for 50 years might have their patience tested after sitting together on the same cloud for several million years. What if she decides that she wants to go visit some other guy on some other cloud, legitimately claiming: "I know that it's utterly perfect up here in heaven, but we've already discussed everything that we could possibly discuss. I know everything about you; you know everything about me. I'm tired of having that thing that's better than sex, even though we have it 3 times per week, which is more than most couples in heaven." Is there marriage counseling in heaven? A heavenly divorce court? What about popcorn? Just because you don't have a traditional human body up there, wouldn't you still crave popcorn? Consider this case of dead Mary, who now lives in heaven:

Mary [speaking to her dead doctor, who works as a physician in heaven): "I crave popcorn" Mary's doctor: "You have phantom taste buds syndrome. You just think you crave popcorn. You don't really crave it, and that's a good thing, because popcorn would fall right through your ethereal hands. But don't worry. We have things that are better than popcorn up here.
Assume, too, that the guy who wanted sex in heaven finally dies and makes it to heaven. After a few restless nights, though, he complains to the heaven doctor: "I'm horny." Heaven doctor: "No, you only think you are horny. You have phantom penis syndrome. I'll end with a quote by George Bernard Shaw:

Heaven: a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

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