Rush Limbaugh’s obsession with buttocks

Gabriel Winant lays out a strong case at Salon.com: Rush Limbaugh just can't stop talking about butts.

Critics say that Rush Limbaugh likes to talk out of his ass. But that's only half the story: Rush can't stop talking about butt, either. It's too bad that Sigmund Freud's long dead, because Rush is the old shrink's dream patient, with an obvious diagnosis: Limbaugh has an anal fixation.

Based on Winant's long list of evidence, it does make you wonder whether Rush needs to go see a therapist to figure out why it is that this "family values" guy has now divorced three women. Maybe we've got yet another classic case of reaction formation on our hands, and that would certainly explain a lot of Limbaugh's hostility.

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Why did some of the children wait for the second marshmallow? It’s not a matter of sheer willpower.

The marshmallow study run by psychologist Walter Mischel is a classic. In the late 1960s, the researcher Dave hundreds of four-year-olds, one by one, the chance to either eat one marshmallow right away, or to wait for a while, whereupon they would be allowed to eat two marshmallows when the experimenter returned to the room. Most of the children could not wait for the experimenter to return, even though that happened only 15 minutes later. Mischel's study is the focus of an article called "Don't," in the May 18, 2009 edition of the New Yorker. The incredible thing about the children who waited is that they did dramatically better in their lives as adults than the children who couldn't wait. The children who couldn't wait:

Got lower SAT scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The children who could wait 15 minutes had an SAT score that was, on average, 210 points higher than that of the kids who can wait only 30 seconds.

But there's more: "Low-delaying adults have a significantly higher body-mass index and are more likely to have had problems with drugs . . ." I commented more about this fascinating study here. The obvious question was whether the 30% of the children who had the ability to wait for the second marshmallow were simply exercising willpower or self-control. Mischel's follow-up work indicates that it's not a matter of sheer willpower.

The crucial skill was the "strategic allocation of attention." Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow--the "hot stimulus"-- the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide and seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from Sesame Street." Their desire wasn't defeated--it was merely forgotten. If you are thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you're going to eat it,"Mischel says. "The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

The reason that the successful children were able to wait reminded me of work by Jonathan Haidt, who suggested (in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis) that human beings consist of two parts. The most powerful part is a huge elephant consisting of appetite cravings and emotions ridden by a "lawyer." The appetites and emotions are simply too powerful to control by sheer willpower. One of the best tools for the "lawyer" has, then, is to distract the elephant. "Just say no" just doesn't work very well or very long. What does seem to work, however, is to divert and distract the attention of the elephant. The same technique that was employed by the successful children, many of whom became extremely successful adults.

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Frank Rich: It’s time to dig up Bush’s buried bodies

Frank Rich has just written an article pointing to a wide variety of Bush Administration scandals about to be revealed. He urges President Obama to let the information flow because there is a momentum to the process and it is, in fact, inevitable. The strangest one, in my opinion, is Donald Rumsfeld's private bible quote laden newsletter. Strange and revealing, though not at all surprising. Rumsfeld's newsletter, entitled Worldwide Intelligence Update, was:

[A] highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”

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Proper Prayer Position for Practicing Postulants

Do not be deceived that the science of prayer underutilizes the modern tools of charts and graphs and pursues the metrics of metaphysics in less than thorough regard for the contemporary demand for logical breakdown of the very physics of divine petition. One need only look here to begin to glimpse the dedication to the Popular Mechanics model of spiritual presentation. In many ways, this reminds me of The Third Eye, with its fake Tibetan flowcharts and associational metaphysics. At the turn of the 20th Century there were many groups organized around the notion that spirituality was merely a forgotten science and that if the methodology of enlightenment could be found (in tradition Victorian faith-in-science manner) then we could all stop buzzing about churches and indulging fuzzyheaded scattershot traditional religions as a means of elevating ourselves to higher planes. The Victorians loved diagrams. Rather like patent applications, really, and that wedded them to invention and progress. So it only made sense to tackle this whole question of the afterlife and souls and such by the same sort of techniques---if one could reduce a question to a blueprint, as it were, one could get quickly to the center of the matter. Now we have the phsyiology of proper prayer. If nothing else, this could be good for one's posture---except for the constant bending forward, which could exacerbate a stooped shoulder aspect and aggravate osteoporosis... Well, I suppose there are drawbacks to everything. Enlightenment at the cost of a straight spine. Better, I suppose, than a renewed interest in self flagellation and scourging.

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On Truth and Power

Recently on Dangerous Intersection, an article was posted about the problem of Power in relation to truth. I wrote a response and decided to post it here, at more length, as a short essay on the (occasionally etymological) problem of Truth. When people start talking about what is true or not, they tend to use the word like a Swiss Army knife. It means what they want it to mean when they point at something. Truth is a slippery term and has many facets. Usually, in casual conversation, when people say something is true, they're usually talking something being factual. Truth and fact are conjoined in many, possibly most, instances, but are not the same things. The "truth" of a "fact" can often be a matter of interpretation, making conversation occasionally problematic. The problem is in the variability of the term "truth"---like many such words, we stretch it to include things which are related but not the same. There is Truth and then there is Fact. 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact. It may, if analyzed sufficiently, yield a fundamental "truth" about the universe, but in an of itself it is only a fact. When someone comes along and insists, through power (an assertion of will), that 2 + 2 = 5, the "truth" being challenged is not in the addition but in the relation of the assertion to reality and the intent of the power in question. The arithmetic becomes irrelevant. Truth then is in the relationship being asserted and the response to it. The one doing the asserting and the one who must respond to the assertion. Similarly, in examples of law, we get into difficulty in discussions over morality. Take for instance civil rights era court decisions, where there is a conflation of ethics and morality. They are connected, certainly, but they are not the same thing. Ethics deal with the proper channels of response within a stated system---in which case, Plessy vs Fergusson could be seen as ethical given the criteria upon which it was based. But not moral, given a larger criteria based on valuations of human worth. To establish that larger criterion, overturning one system in favor of another, would require a redefintion of "ethical" into "unethical", changing the norm, for instance in Brown vs The Board of Education. The "truth" of either decision is a moving target, albeit one based on a priori concepts of human value as applied through ethical systems that adapt.

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