Prometheus 6

I have found the greater part of adulthood involved watching people you care for get old or sick, and die. And the down side of being in a large family is having so many people to mourn.

The promised bloviation may wait for a while. 

Via Marginal Revolution, where, of course, it turned into a discussion of how Black folks don't deserve reparations for slavery. Beware the 60 page pdf on the other side of the link.

The Righteous and Reasonable Ambition to Become a Landholder:
What Would have Happened if Former Slaves
had Received Land after the Civil War? *
Melinda Miller
Department of Economics
University of Michigan
November 19, 2007

Abstract:
Although over 140 years have passed since slaves were emancipated in the United States, African-Americans continue to lag behind the general population in terms of earnings and wealth. Both Reconstruction era policy makers and modern scholars have argued that racial inequality could have been reduced or eliminated if plans to allocate each freed slave family “forty acres and a mule” had been implemented following the Civil War. In this paper, I develop an empirical strategy that exploits a plausibly exogenous variation in policies of the Cherokee Nation and the southern United States to identify the impact of free land on the economic outcomes of former slaves. The Cherokee Nation, located in what is now the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, permitted the enslavement of people of African descent. After joining the Confederacy in 1861, the Cherokee Nation was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain. To examine this unique population of former slaves, I have digitized the entirety of the 1860 Cherokee Nation Slave Schedules and a 60 percent sample of the 1880 Cherokee Census. I find the racial gap in land ownership, farm size, and investment in long-term capital projects is smaller in the Cherokee Nation than in the southern United States. The advantages Cherokee freedmen experience in these areas translate into smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South. Additionally, the Cherokee freedmen had higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen. These results together suggest that access to free land had a considerable and positive benefit on former slaves.

Huckabee's plan excites a lot of people, especially those too young to remember countless other tax-reform dreams that failed to get anywhere.

Huckabee vs.income taxes? It's no contest
Clarence Page
December 16, 2007

Mike Huckabee wants to put my pal Harry out of business.

Harry does my taxes. Huckabee wants to make tax preparers obsolete by getting rid of the federal income tax. He'll get rid of the IRS too, if he can.

On that issue, the Arkansas governor belongs to a mighty large club. Few Republican presidential candidates ever went broke calling for tax cuts. Some, like Gov. Huck, just take it to a further extreme.

Now that he is surging in the polls, people are beginning to take seriously what he has to say. It turns out, despite all of the attention that the former Baptist minister's religious beliefs, social conscience and friendly teddy-bear personality have received, his war on the income tax is a major reason for his surge.

David Mikkelson of Snopes.com said such hoaxes succeed when they seem to confirm something people are already inclined to believe, such as a prejudice, political viewpoint, or religious belief.

A hoax also needs to be presented "in a framework that has the appearance of credibility," he said in an email.

The "ancient giant" has both elements, according to Mikkelson.

"It appeals to both a religious and a secular vision of the world as different and more fantastic than mere science would lead us to believe," he said.

"Proof," Mikkelson added, "comes in the form of a fairly convincing image." ...

The image's creator—an illustrator from Canada who goes by the screen name IronKite—told National Geographic News via email that he had had nothing to do with the subsequent hoax.

He added that he wants to remain anonymous because some forums that debated whether the giant was genuine or not "were turning their entire argument into a religious one." It was argued, for instance, that the Saudi Arabian find was entirely consistent with the teachings of the Koran.

"This was about the same time that death threats and cash bounties were being issued against cartoonists and other industry professionals for doing things like depicting the Prophet Mohammed," IronKite wrote.... 

"Skeleton of Giant" Is Internet Photo Hoax
James Owen
for National Geographic News
December 14, 2007

The National Geographic Society has not discovered ancient giant humans, despite rampant reports and pictures.

The hoax began with a doctored photo and later found a receptive online audience—thanks perhaps to the image's unintended religious connotations.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson criticized the protesters in an interview aired Friday, saying many of them have never lived in public housing.

"It's amazing how people have little respect for low-income people in the sense that they want them to go back into that drug, crime-infested environment where they don't live," Jackson told WWL-TV in New Orleans.

Razing of New Orleans housing halted
By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
Fri Dec 14, 5:26 PM ET

Demolition of three public housing complexes, slated to start this weekend, was halted Friday amid complaints about the scarcity of housing for the poor after Hurricane Katrina.

The Housing Authority of New Orleans, which is run by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, agreed to postpone the start of demolition pending a hearing Thursday before City Council. Opponents of the tear-down plan had filed a lawsuit contending that the council's consent was required by the city charter.

Bush Secret Shredding Soars

Behold, the Bush Administration in chart form: Federal spending on paper shredding has increased more than 600 percent since George W. Bush took office. This chart, generated by usaspending.gov, the U.S. government's brand spanking new database of federal expenditures, shows spending on "contracts for paper shredding services" going back to 2000. Click here for the full, heartbreaking breakdown. In 2000, the feds spent $452,807 to make unpleasant truths go away; by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting. Pretty much says it all.

Sen. Biden has said if he doesn't finish in the top three, he's outta there.

He will not finish in the top three.

He should not pass quietly into the night, though. He is deeply sane in his foreign policy approach. And every time he said something that annoyed me, his explanation made sense. It is unfortunate that he had to explain...

Net judgment: good guy, and of great utility. And I hope he likes the taste of his feet.

Come on...

Let's be fair when we talk about experience. Speaking of which, I think Eric Hauser's approach here is sensible.

An Ask.com query:

Who is prometheus's allies,friends,or partners in crime?

It just doesn't strike me like they're asking about my first incarnation...plus the one they found don't really like me but so much.

According to a survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based wealth-research firm, the average "price" that men and women demand to marry for money these days is $1.5 million.

The survey polled 1,134 people nationwide with incomes ranging between $30,000 to $60,000 (squarely in the median range for nationwide incomes). The survey asked: "How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?"

Fully two-thirds of women and half of the men said they were "very" or "extremely" willing to marry for money. The answers varied by age: Women in their 30s were the most likely to say they would marry for money (74%) while men in their 20s were the least likely (41%).

"I'm a little shocked at the numbers," says Pamela Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who has studied marriage and money. "It's kind of against the notion of love and soul mates and the main motivations to marry in our culture."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said the population of Universe is zero, because the Universe is infinite but not all planets have life. So to find the average density of life in the Universe, you divide the number of planets with life by infinity, which answer is so close to zero as makes no difference.

Yeah, I know. But in that spirit...

According to the US Census Bureau°, 0.193% of US residents have the first name 'Earl' and fewer than 0.001% have the surname 'Dunovant'. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there are 0 'Earl Dunovant's.

[Link fixed!]

I'm always impressed by insolence.

Since turning against Saddam, many Iraqis have lost interest in the Palestinians -- and some have turned hostile toward them. Immediately after the war, for instance, Palestinians who had been given low-rent apartments under Saddam were evicted by landlords seeking to take back their property, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. More generally, Iraqis have shown their anger about the special treatment Palestinians received.

Warmth Between Iraqis and Palestinians Gives Way to Animosity and Resentment
By SARMAD ALI
December 12, 2007

Much love has been lost between Iraqis and Arabs in general -- and Iraqi and Palestinians in particular – since the U.S. invasion. As soon as Saddam was gone, the affinity and amiability between Iraqis and Palestinians, a hallmark of decades of Baath Party rule, began to fade. The mutual warmth, friends and others say, sometimes turned into hostility.

In the wake of Thursday's approval of Murdoch's $5 billion takeover of Dow Jones, the Journal's publisher, the News Corporation is spending more than $2 million to place the ad tomorrow in newspapers in the United States, Britain, Australia, and Asia. The ad will run in the Journal, Murdoch's New York Post, and The New York Times - Murdoch's stated archrival.

How sad.

Let's see, what would I have missed (because I will not do anything to put more money in Murdoch's pocket or more trash in the public debate) if this deal had closed a week ago.

CDC: Suicides Among Middle-Aged Spikes
By MIKE STOBBE
AP Medical Writer
9:49 PM CST, December 13, 2007

ATLANTA

The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S. residents ages 45 through 54 -- far outpacing increases among younger adults, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in that age group. That's the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982.

Experts said they don't know why the suicide rates are rising so dramatically in that age group, but believe it is an unrecognized tragedy.

The sister has every right to support Sen. Clinton. Her reasoning is sad, though.

So I sends them to this noisy cannon.

Senator Clinton did the right thing by apologizing before I had a chance to write about it. I'd have talked about her like she as a cross of the bad sides of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, with a little Huckabee graft collection on the side.

But this was exactly the sort of reflexive attack whilte folks have to learn not to make at all.

Perhaps this, then, is why children will repeat the actions of adults, even to the detriment of their problem-solving abilities: that the real problems for our species are so far away. They are so mediated by culture. The problem of procuring a mate, for instance, is, except in the most extreme cases, solved by first learning a language. And for this a child must imitate adults in every absurd grammatical, syntactical, and spelling inefficiency we are heir to. This requires tremendous suspension of disbelief, and tremendous good faith. It also is good for explaining how we are able to do so many staggeringly amazing, staggeringly stupid things.

10,000 Years of Human Civilization Explained by One Study
The Anti-Scientist on December 10, 2007 5:30 AM

Yeah, this isn't The Onion, bro, this is a real science news source. I actually might be almost serious:

A Yale study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that children imitate the actions of adults who have proven to be untrustworthy, even to the point of excluding obvious solutions to problems.

The effect, called 'over-imitation,' is so powerful that chimpanzees will often solve a given problem more quickly than will a child under its influence. 

You like space science? C'mon, if you got any kid left in you at all, you know you like space science and dinosaurs.

I got no dinosaurs. But I got HubbleSite, and it's a beautiful thing.

Hint: If you check the video stuff, like Dark Energy, F11 in Firefox toggles kiosk mode.

Homeschooler elected to chair state board of education

Kristin Maguire of Clemson was elected today to be the leader of the state Board of Education in 2009.

Maguire, who teaches her four daughters at home, was nominated from the floor during the panel’s regularly scheduled monthly meeting. The 17-member school board historically votes each December to pick a “chair-elect” a year in advance of when the term is scheduled to begin.

No other state school board in the nation is headed by a person who is a home-school educator, according to National Association of State Boards of Education.

Maguire, 39, defeated Fred F. “Trip” DuBard III’s in a voice vote. DuBard, a businessman who devotes his time raising money for non-profit education foundations, was the preference of a nominating committee. DuBard’s three children attend public schools in Florence.

Civil rights group: Israel has reached new heights of racism
By Yuval Yoaz and Jack Khoury, Haaretz Correspondents

Evidence of extremism in mosques 'fabricated'
Martin Hodgson
Thursday December 13, 2007

Guardian

A rightwing thinktank which claimed to have uncovered extremist literature on sale at dozens of British mosques was last night accused of basing a report on fabricated evidence.

The report by Policy Exchange alleged that books condoning violent jihad and encouraging hatred of Christians, Jews and gays were being sold in a quarter of the 100 mosques visited.

But BBC2's Newsnight said examination of receipts provided by the researchers to verify their purchases showed some had been written by the same person - even though they purported to come from different mosques.