We the Banks

I caught this insanity at Democracy Now:

The next chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama has been quoted saying lawmakers and regulators should "serve" Wall Street. Speaking to the Birmingham News, Bauchus said, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." Shortly before the midterm elections that propelled him into the committee chairmanship, Bachus urged a gathering of financial industry lobbyists to donate heavily to Republicans in response to the Democrats’ overhaul of financial regulation.

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Send people to college for Christmas

Once again, American is dropping loads of cash on trinkets and gadgets, supposedly to celebrate the birth of Jesus. That contorted thought process is a separate topic from what I really want to discuss here. In this post I'd like to recommend that you give your friends or family members an incredibly valuable gift of knowledge in lieu of trinkets and gadgets. Because your loved ones don't need any more knickknacks, so them to college instead. I am 1/4 through a college course that I am "taking" in my own home at night (while I ride an exercise cycle--it was 5 degrees yesterday in St. Louis). I'm taking "Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality, 2nd Edition." This course is taught by Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, and I must say that he is one incredibly capable teacher. The course cost me only $70 while on a special sale two weeks ago, and it included four video DVD's. For an extra $25 I was sent a detailed course outline and a written transcript of the entire 24-lecture course. Sapolsky, who is both brilliant and entertaining, has made it possible for me to push to a new, much more rigorous and memorable, level of understanding of neuroscience. Nothing like multi-modal learning, rather than sticking solely to books. I'd highly recommend Sapolsky's course, which I recently purchased from The Great Courses Company. Here's the pitch (I'm not being paid for this): Buy a gift certificate from The Great Courses Company (AKA "The Teaching Company") to send your loved ones to college this Christmas. They can choose from among hundreds of courses taught by highly decorated college professors. Courses seem to range from $35 to $200 (don't be frightened away by the ridiculous "list prices." Just click the course and see the real price, and keep in mind that various courses are featured at much lower prices periodically). The gift-recipient can choose from courses in many fields, including science, art, history and literature. Then after they finish taking their studies, of course, ask if you can borrow it.

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Jonathan Haidt: What the Tea Partiers really want is karma

Jonathan Haidt is convinced he understands the thing that spurs on Tea Partiers: karma. He argued his position in an October 16, 2010 article appearing in the Wall Street Journal. Haidt based his conclusion on various surveys designed to tease out the differences and similarities among different types of voters. Those surveys show that American voters across the board love “liberty.” This is a problem for progressives because it doesn't distinguish them from Tea Partiers. We struggle to distinguish Tea Partiers in other ways, then, claiming that they are more racist, greedier or more gullible. Jonathan Haidt is not convinced.

[Karma is] the Sanskrit word for deed or action, and the law of karma says that for every action, there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction. Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering. No divine intervention is required; it's just a law of the universe, like gravity.
The idea of karma comports with a common human desire that moral bank accounts should be balanced. In the eyes of Tea Partiers, this desire to see a balancing of moral bank accounts is sharply frustrated by government policies that allow bad deeds (e.g., the failure to work hard) to go unpunished. The main problem is that social safety nets get in the way of karma. In the language of evolutionary psychology, Tea Partiers have highly sensitive cheater detectors. They believe that most welfare programs reduce incentives for working getting married, especially among the poor. Another example raised by Haidt is that birth control and abortion separate "irresponsible" sex from its natural consequences (babies). Another example concerns liberal approaches to criminal justice, which allow too many criminals to get away with crime. [caption id="attachment_15561" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by edayi at dreamstime.com (with permission)"][/caption] Tea Partiers "want to live in a country in which hard work and personal responsibility payoff and laziness, cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin.” Haidt contrasts Tea Partiers to liberals, who don't like the idea of karma, because it allows "differences in talent and effort to result in unequal outcomes.” Haidt also points out a fault line that underlies conservative politics. Tea Partiers starkly part ways with libertarian and pro-business conservatives, such as those run by Dick Armey, who support bailouts of big banks. "Now jump ahead to today's ongoing financial and economic crisis. Those guilty of corruption and irresponsibility have escaped the consequences of their wrongdoing, rescued first by President Bush and then by President. Obama. Bailouts and bonuses sent unimaginable sums of the taxpayers money to the very people who brought calamity upon the rest of us where is punishment for the wicked?" Further complicating things, Libertarians and pro-business types are more similar to liberals than to Tea Partiers on the three "binding foundations" (of Haidt's five foundations of morality): group loyalty, respect for authority and spiritual sanctity. And see here for more on Haidt's five moral foundations. Haidt did not discuss social Darwinism in his article, but it seems to be the elephant in the room. It's one thing to say in the abstract (as Tea Partiers say) that we need to let the chips fall where they might, but what do you do about the tragedies? Nothing? Tea Partiers tend to be evasive about what they should do about homeless people and sick people who don’t have insurance. Tea Party rhetoric suggests (wrong-headedly in my opinion) that everything always comes out for the best in the end, without intervention of government. Everything will be as it should thanks to free market fundamentalism. That is what we are hearing from a mostly older bunch of folks who are happily benefitting from social security and Medicare while ranting about government programs. I think that Jonathan Haidt has made a good point regarding Tea Party pursuit of karma, but I think that the full picture also requires the recognition of Tea Party hard-heartedness and hypocrisy.

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A gene for artistic interpretation and 2001’s odyssey

I have four sons, in two sets – 23, 20 and 13, 11. One cool benefit of this “arrangement” is that I can re-watch movies I like for reasons other than I just want to: Hey! They haven’t seen Tron, let’s watch that! (of course they have, that’s just a for instance.) Some are movies my wife and I both like, some are movies that only I like (Goonies is a good example.) Some will still have to wait – Terminator, Conan, Die Hard, etc. – we believe most of the ratings are for good reason. But I can wait. Last night I introduced my younger two to “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It’s still a great movie after 42 years. I was not surprised when my youngest said he didn’t understand it. I explained about the (SPOILER ALERT! In case someone hasn’t seen it and may want to someday, skip to the next paragraph) extraterrestrial influence nudging evolution and then about the TMA-1 monolith signaling humankind’s advancement to sufficient level to discover the monolith on the moon. In a rare moment of parental thoughtfulness, I refrained from commenting on the third and fourth segments. You see, I happen to think that all of the interpretation and analysis of the ending are a bunch of hogwash. Kubrick was deliberate in his tedious treatment of what I thought was a very thin script, plodding without dialogue, enhancing the pre-Vader breathing of Bowman, flashing pretty colors with the intent to impress a much greater than human intellect and meaning at work. (Ooops. Forgot to alert. Not really) Flashback: in the sixth grade, my class read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and we discussed as a group the “meaning” of the book. I put that last word in quotes, because as you might guess, I found no meaning. My first out loud responses to the thoughts being bandied were along the lines, “Where does he [author Richard Bach] say that?” But I got squashed by the group and the teacher, and kept quiet after that. I started thinking something was wrong with me for not being able to “see” the “meaning” behind the work. Some years later, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t me; they were the ones making up that crap about positive thinking and human potential. It really was just a simple, very simple children’s story with no deeper meaning. (I bought a copy last year on the Half Price Books $1 shelf just to see if I had changed. Still not impressed.) Several many years later, I came to the conclusion that it was both me and them. Well....me. I can't be sure about them. My wife is an artist. And she understands people. I understand people from a perspective of leadership and that works well in my life. She really understands people. (Good thing she’s the mother of my children, because if it were just me, they’d be emotional lepers!) We’d get into “discussions” over books and films on what the director (or author) was trying to convey. I, in my obstinate cynicism, used to dismiss with prejudice what she had to say, because after all, they are telling a story, not expounding a deep philosophical commentary on the human condition, because that’s a load of hokum anyway. Yeah. I couldn’t be more wrong, right? Besides, just because I dismissed it didn’t mean she dismissed it. Anyway, there have been more than one occasions where I might have had negative comments on films. I usually learn a lot during the subsequent analysis. Andrea has told me in many certain terms, “here, the director was trying to …” Once, I rented the DVD and played the director’s commentary. At all the scenes she pointed out in our earlier discussion, the director said something like, “in this scene, I was trying to …” … same as what she said. It's like a magic trick. I stopped trying to figure it out. But she’s usually right. And that applies to art and sculpture as well as film and print. I just don’t get it. I don’t see why Jane Austen is a great author. Hemingway? Fitzgerald or Faulkner? Nope. Not buying it. Oh, they did things I don’t do – write, get published, etc. But how are they any better than Stephen King (not a fan, by the way)? I also feel that if something can't stand on face value without apologetics, then it shouldn't be lauded. How is one interpretation more right than another? Yeah. I know. Different discussion altogether. But with film, print and art, it's me. Sans interpretation gene. Now, given that my sons are mostly artistic, I think that understanding people the way Mom does is more valuable than the way I do, because what I do can be taught (even though some people come by it naturally) at any time. I think that much like learning other languages, if the appropriate synapses are not used early enough, then they atrophy and that makes learning those skills that much harder later, if possible at all. I think some synapses are more like stem synapses (I'll take credit for coining that phrase if it hasn't been used yet) in that they can serve any function. And some are specialized. Just a theory. Not a scientific theory, but more of a Holmesian theory. So my sons need to understand how authors and artists may (or may not) have intended meanings beneath the superficial. I think they've got the gene that I don't. And back to “2001”. I found a few sites - here, here, and here, and an interesting flash presentation at Kubrick2001.com that offer explanations and I’m showing them to my son so that he might understand. This one talks about a scene near the end of part III (before HAL: "What are you doing, Dave?") as "one of the most exciting, suspenseful sequences in all of movie history." See, I don't get that. I like the movie for the science and technological vision in the context of 1968. But, I’m given to understand that there might be more to it than that. Apparently. So here are two questions for the home audience: 1) Anybody else out there sort of like me? Don’t usually see much alternative meaning in {art, film, literature} where other people do? Don’t be shy. Oh, that is not to say we don’t appreciate art, movies, literature; just that the “meaning” is not apparent. Gee. Kind of quiet here in Kubrick's space... 2) If you’ve seen the movie, what are your thoughts on it? I’ll pass on to my son, so that he can see what other people think, and maybe I’ll learn something too.

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